The month on Civil War and Reconstruction social media started a little slow, maybe everyone was caught up with Fourth of July barbeques, but things quickly heated up during the second week of July and the month finished strong. Here is some of the best work that appeared in July.
Blogs
Damian Shiels is a well-known scholar of the American Civil War, renowned for his books and blog on Irish in the American Civil War. He is now working on the Civil War Bluejacket Project with David Gleeson, which explores “the lives of ordinary Civil War sailors.” Damian has created a terrific infographic exploring the ethnicity, immigration background, and race of the crew of the USS Louisville. As with many vessels in the navy, a majority of the ship’s crew were either immigrants or African Americans. The crew came from thirteen different countries and among the Black sailors a majority had been enslaved. This is an exciting new endeavor.
The Journal of the Civil War blog Muster was very active in July. Tom Barber and Jeff Crawford had an article on the removal of the Colfax Massacre “historical” marker in Louisiana. The 1951 marker hailed the killing of “150 negroes” as the end of “carpetbag misrule.” Prior to the 1960s, the three white men killed in the outrage were described in local monumentation as martyrs to the reestablishment of “white supremacy” in the state. The authors describe their own involvement in the campaign to remove the marker. While they were successful, they note that there is still no marker truthfully describing what happened in Colfax 148 years ago.
Also at Muster, Ann L. Tucker, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Georgia, writes on the current “teachable moment” for Reconstruction. The attack on the Capitol, the impeachments of Donald Trump, the Black Lives Matter movement, and interest in Juneteenth and the Tulsa massacre have led to increased student interest in the central issues of Reconstruction. Tucker writes from North Georgia that “many students arrive in history classrooms having been taught or having absorbed the idea that Reconstruction was a harmful era of punitive destruction of the South. Implicit in this Lost Cause vision of Reconstruction is the idea that Reconstruction was designed to punish white southerners for secession and the Civil War, and that that punishment was unwarranted, unreasonable, and even cruel.” To help students gain a better understanding, Tucker asks them to imagine Reconstruction in an international context. She asks how other countries dealt with the punishment of “rebels” in places like France and Germany during the mid-19th Century (typically they were imprisoned, with some leaders being exiled or executed). She also asks the students to consider what “forgiveness” of the Confederates might have looked like. I won’t give the whole story away, but even those who don’t teach high school or college students will find this article intriguing.
Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. is a scholar of the USCT and their families. He has a very good article on Muster that looks at the USCT in Texas at the time of the first Juneteenth.
Finally, at the same blogging site, Nick Sacco has a great article on Julia Dent Grant’s Personal Memoirs as a plantation narrative. Sacco is a well-regarded public historian and an expert on the Grant family. Julia’ family owned a number of slaves and she was brought up in a slave-owning social milieu. While the Memoirs have some valuable information, Sacco warns that the “Personal Memoirs are clearly a romanticized apologia for slavery that must be taken with a grain of salt by scholars and public historians interpreting her life…”
Carlos Mutis offers some stories of Latinx soldiers at Emerging Civil War. The same site has an interesting piece on Union General John Logan by intern Hannah Roesch. Logan went from pre-war Democrat to advocate for Black voting rights and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Lloyd Klein has a couple of good articles at Emerging Civil War on the economic policies of the Federals and Confederates. Jefferson Davis, in spite of his long experience in government, did a poor job of using his economy as a tool of war. In fact, his economic policies helped bring the Confederacy to an end. Klein looks at the Confederate decision to block the export of cotton in 1861, the first indication that the Southern leadership had a blackmailer’s view of economics, as well as the government’s inability to keep even the most basic staples on the market. Klein’s article on the Federal economy examines Lincoln’s ability to finance the war through unprecedented measures.
High school history teacher Keith Harris considers the use of the so-called “WPA Slave Narratives” in the high school classroom. At one time the use of the narratives, collected six decades after the Civil War during the Depression, was discouraged. Harris writes, “Historians have long noted how we might approach these narratives with at least some degree of caution. As such, it’s important to address a number of things in the classroom. Something that often comes up when I first introduce primary documents (in the 9th grade…) is that the kids tend to take them entirely at face value. After all – these are historical actors who experienced the history first-hand. But once we discuss bias and perspective and all that they begin to look for context and motive and any number of influential variables and analyze accordingly.” He goes on to provide insights into using the stories.
Zac Cowsert is a scholar of the Overland Campaign. He examines the bloody move of Grant from Fredericksburg to Petersburg in 1864 through the eyes of Walter Taylor, Robert E. Lee’s aide.
Al Mackey looks at the current attacks on the teaching of history in states around the country. Al is a teacher and he looks several times each month at the efforts to distort the history of the United States in the teaching of high school history.
An awful lot of college students interested in history want to become park rangers. The Blog My Year of Living Rangerously has some advice. Number 1 question rangers get asked is “Where is the bathroom?”
Videos
July 21 was the 160th Anniversary of the First Battle of Bull Run and the Civil War Times did a series of videos from the battlefield with Civil War Times Editor Dana B. Shoaf and well-known Bull Runnings blogger Harry Smeltzer discussing some of the sites. You should go to the magazine’s website or facebook page for the full series, but I have a few of the videos that are especially interesting.
The first looks at one of the earliest monuments of the Civil War, placed by Confederates at the battlefield.
In this video Shoaf and Smeltzer are joined by Manassas National Battlefield Park Superintendent Brandon Bies to discuss two naval howitzers that are now being displayed for the first time at the park. These were not designed to be moved by horses, and so the artillerists themselves had to wheel them the thirty five miles or so from Washington to Bull Run. There is also a discussion on how a new data center may threaten the park.
Reconstruction Era National Park had an interesting facebook video this month. This is a Ranger Chat with Dr. Kelli Cardenas Walsh of Fayetteville State University about an African American family named Leary that she has researched for the last decade. Professor Walsh also discusses her work with the new North Carolina Civil War and Reconstruction History Center.
Facebook Page to Follow
Grant Cottage State Historic Site is one of several Grant “homes” that are preserved around the U.S. The cottage on Mt. McGregor in Wilton, NY is a New York State Historic site. It is the place Grant finished his memoirs and where he died right afterwards. Ben Kemp, operations manager for The Grant Cottage has posted a new series of videos on Grant’s last days called 50 Days on the Mountain. The videos are posted on each day leading up to the death of Grant on July 23, 1885. They look at what happened in Grant’s life each day as reported in the newspapers at the time. A very ambitious project. You can follow the Cottage’s page here. If you search for it on facebook, it is listed as Ulysses S. Grant Cottage National Historic Landmark.
Podcasts
The Battle of Gettysburg Podcast took to the famous cupola of the Lutheran Seminary on the 158th Anniversary of the battle Pete Miele, Executive Director of the Seminary Ridge Museum, to talk about what happened there on July 1, 1863.
Book Reviews
Six Days of Awful Fighting: Cavalry Operations on the Road to Cold Harbor by Eric Wittenberg is reviewed at Civil War Books and Authors. Wittenberg is a respected authority on cavalry operations during the Civil War and his newest work gets a very favorable review. The review ends with the words “Highly recommended.” The book covers the days after the Confederates lost cavalry commander J.E.B. Stuart during the Overland Campaign. According to the review: “There is nothing to complain about when it comes to the technical side of the book as well as its overall presentation. Clear and insightful operational and tactical narrative, deep research, and abundant maps are characteristics of all of Wittenberg’s military history studies, and we certainly encounter those qualities yet again here with Six Days of Awful Fighting‘s excellent battlefield accounts, primary source-filled bibliography, and 25 maps.”
Emerging Civil War has a new series called Commentary from the Book Shelves. Mark Harnitchek has a “commentary” on one of the better Civil War “battle books,” Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” by George Rable. I hope that the quality of the early entries in this series is maintained.
David Dixon reviews the brand new bio Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Social Justice by Bruce Levine. According to Dixon:
Levine’s finely-crafted biography does more than provide a balanced, insightful, and provocative analysis of one of the most important legislators on the Civil War era. It helps us understand the important role of radicals in history. Radical actors like John Brown often provide an emotional spark that, given favorable conditions, can create what Malcolm Gladwell called a “tipping point” event, like the raid at Harpers Ferry. Radical politicians like Stevens can leverage the course of events, particularly in wartime, to secure reforms like abolition that would have been barely conceivable to most mid-nineteenth century Americans in the midst of a booming slavery-based economy.
Voices From the Army of Northern Virginia Part 1 by Gary W. Gallagher is an essay by one of the premier historians of the Civil War on books by soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia. This essay was published in the Civil War Monitor, but it is available on the magazine’s blog for free. Gallagher discusses Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, Walter Taylor’s Four Years with General Lee(1877), General Lee: His Campaigns in Virginia (1908), and Lee’s Adjutant: The Wartime Letters of Colonel Walter Herron Taylor, 1862–1865, and Make Me a Map of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson’s Topographer.
I am always wary of yet another book on Civil War Richmond, at least two have come out just in recent months, but Codie Eash gives Civil War Richmond: The Last Citadel by Jack Trammell and Guy Terrell a hearty recommendation. Richmond was not really that big a deal before the Civil War. Had it not been chosen as the third Confederate Capital it would today be as obscure as Montgomery, Alabama. In the 1860 Census its population of 37,000 was smaller than Troy, New York’s. Of the new book, Eash writes: Blending social, military, and political history, Jack Trammell and Guy Terrell have produced an anomaly and crown jewel among book-length studies of the Confederate capital.
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