Civil War Archives - Page 2 of 4

The Littlefield Lectures 2018: Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction (Day 1)

On February 26-27 2018, The History Department at the University of Texas at Austin was pleased to welcome Dr. Manisha Sinha, Professor and James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, as the featured speaker for the Littlefield Lecture Series.

Watch Professor Sinha’s first lecture on Not Even Past, titled “Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction:”

Dr. Manisha Sinha was born in India and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty and received the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award in Recognition of Outstanding Graduate Teaching and Advising from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught for over twenty years.

Her recent book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, winner of the 2017 Frederick Douglass Prize, is a groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War.

Her first book, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, was a Finalist for both the Avery O. Craven Award for Best Book on the Civil War Era, Organization of American Historians, and the George C. Rogers Award for Best Book on South Carolina History. It was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015.

Dr. Sinha’s research interests lie in United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is a member of the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library, co-editor of the “Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900,” series of the University of Georgia Press, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Civil War Era. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, CNN, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post, and been interviewed by The Times of London, The Boston Globe, and Slate.

In 2014, she appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. She was an adviser and on-screen expert for the Emmy nominated PBS documentary, The Abolitionists (2013), part of the NEH funded Created Equal film series. In 2017, she was named one of Top Twenty Five Women in Higher Education by the magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. Professor Sinha is currently working on her new book on abolition and the making of Radical Reconstruction.

The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin

The monument at Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park (via Wikimedia Commons)

by Jesse Ritner

School children across the United States learn that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin. For seven weeks this past summer I worked at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Hodgenville, Kentucky, where that cabin (as legend has it) is encased in a stone monument. Imposingly large when viewed from the bottom of its 56 steps, the monument is almost claustrophobic inside. Designed by John Russel Pope, the early twentieth-century’s titan of neo-classical monuments and government buildings, the monument only has one room, about the size of a large living-room. The entire log cabin fits inside, reinforcing the difference between the monument built in Lincoln’s honor and his humble origins. The Grecian inspired edifice was built between 1909 and 1911, atop the knoll where legend (and some deeds with Thomas Lincoln’s name) lead us to believe Abraham Lincoln was born. The now largely forgotten monument was once national news. Over 100,000 Americans donated money to build the publicly funded temple. The cornerstone was laid by none other than President Theodore Roosevelt and, two years later, it was dedicated by President William Howard Taft, himself a member of the Lincoln Farm Association, which led the fundraising effort.

The intended lesson of the Lincoln Birthplace Memorial is clear. Those who begin in rags, can rise to riches. Those men who save the nation will, for their services, have their less than impressive childhood homes enshrined in granite and neo-classical architecture, thereby tying them for eternity to the everlasting fight for freedom and democracy that can be traced all the way from ancient Athens to today’s rolling hills of Kentucky. Yet, the monument and the cabin inside teach us much more than an overwrought story about the American dream; instead, it serves as a piece of history in of itself.

The cabin inside the monument’s granite walls never housed the Lincoln family. It was constructed in 1895 by entrepreneur Alfred Dennett and his agent, James Bigham, from logs found in a log cabin near the sinking spring where records suggest Lincoln was born. In 1897, the fabricated cabin was toured around the country, where it was matched with another ersatz birthplace cabin – that of none other than Confederate President Jefferson Davis. As the caravan of cabins continued around the United States, it finally landed on Coney Island. There, due to poor organization while shipping, parts of each cabin became mixed so they were simply joined together creating a single Lincoln-Davis Birthplace Cabin. According to James W. Loewen, author of Lies across America, when this cabin, now combining logs from the separate counterfeit cabins of the enemies of the Civil War, was sent back to Kentucky in 1906, it was represented as Lincoln’s “original” birthplace cabin. While the National Park Service does acknowledge that the cabin is not the original, but instead is “symbolic” (the quotation marks are theirs, not mine), it is largely silent on the actual origins of the cabin.

The symbolic cabin enshrined in the monument at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park (via Wikimedia Commons)

In today’s conversations about Confederate statues, few are discussing the relationship between Confederate and Union memorials dating from the early twentieth century, both of which quite consciously use matching metaphors to affect their viewers. In Kentucky, monuments such as Lincoln’s birthplace offer insight into the way historical narratives created by turn of the century endeavors in public history by both Union and Confederate supporters are often intertwined, despite the heated rhetoric and violence that results from these supposedly competing historical narratives today.

The Park Service’s silence calls to question why we need the monument in the first place and why we, as taxpayers, should support its preservation. As a remembrance of President Lincoln, the monument and park are markedly outdated. Far removed from population centers, the monument is largely forgotten. On the other hand, the story of the cabin now enshrined in its “Temple of Fame,” as Theodore Roosevelt dubbed the granite structure, gives real insight into the way Americans, both Confederate sympathizers and Union patriots, collectively built historical narratives about the Civil War in the late nineteenth century. Both Presidents Davis and Lincoln were born in Kentucky and, at the turn of the century, their rags to riches stories were not seen as inherently independent of each other, but were instead part of a single American narrative that both Southerners and Northerners could claim as their birthright.

A postcard of Lincoln’s Birthplace Memorial, ca. 1930-1945 (via Boston Public Library)

The cabin today, with no mention of the monument’s convoluted history, ignores the partially fabricated histories that brought both to power, and brought these Kentucky brothers symbolically back together, even after a long, violent, and devastating war. But, the monument, despite the faults inherent in its creation, also holds valuable potential as a piece of public history that can truly engage with the way in which historical narratives are created and why monuments are built, rather than simply reinforcing centuries old attempts at public education and nation building. It suggests historical precedents to the Republican Party simultaneously claiming heritage as the party of Lincoln, while supporting the maintenance of Confederate monuments and minimizing or even erasing the history of slavery and its role in the bloody Civil War. And it shows that in towns like Hodgenville, where Confederate flags fly freely next to memorials to Lincoln, the apparent conflict in historical memory is not new, but is part of a conscious narrative built in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and continuing today.

The current dialog revolving around Confederate memorials is far more complicated than many analyses acknowledge. Considering the current unrest regarding Civil War monuments, it is necessary for us to examine the influence of all sides on the historical narratives they choose to create. Remedying the wrongs that statues of people such as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee represent is harder than simply taking prominent statues down. As a nation we must reassess the way we have remembered the entire history of the Civil War and we must reexamine the ways past generations remembered as well, regardless of whether the historical figures in question are currently viewed as villains or heroes.

IHS Panel: The Confederate Statues at UT

What do statues commemorating Confederate leaders mean? Why has the university decided to remove such statues? And why has the issue been so controversial? On Thursday, August 31 2017, speakers from the University of Texas, the Texas State Historical Association, and the Briscoe Center for American History came together to address these questions and more.

Featured speakers included:

Walter L. Buenger
Chief Historian, Texas State Historical Association; Summerlee Foundation Chair in Texas History, and Barbara White Stuart Centennial Professor in Texas History | The University of Texas at Austin

Peniel E. Joseph
Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy; Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs; and Professor of History | The University of Texas at Austin

Ben Wright
Associate Director for Communication at the Briscoe Center for American History and curator of “From Commemoration to Education: Pompeo Coppini’s Statue of Jefferson Davis” | The University of Texas at Austin

with

Jacqueline Jones, Moderator
Professor and Chair of the Department of History; Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History; and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History | The University of Texas at Austin

This event was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies.

Connected content:

Mark Sheaves on slavery and its legacy in the USA
Leslie Harris and Daina Ramey Berry on history and memory in Savannah
Jacqueline Jones discusses Civil War Savannah

The Works of Steven Hahn

By Jacqueline Jones

This week on February 15 and 16, the Littlefield Lecture Series in the Department of History presents Dr. Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize Winning Historian and Professor of History at New York University. (Details on the lectures below).

Here, Prof. Jacqueline Jones, Chair of The Department of History and regular contributor to Not Even Past, offers a short review essay of Dr Hahn’s major works.

In all his works, Steven Hahn, Professor of History at New York University, seeks to challenge, or at least de-center, prevailing historical narratives especially for the period 1830 to 1920 or so. The results are invariably provocative and fresh.

His first book, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (1983) took us away from the great planters of the South, and examined small, non-slaveholding farmers. Before the Civil War, these family farmers were self-sufficient, growing corn, instead of cotton, and relying on the spinning and weaving skills of their wives and daughters. The war caused severe damage to these homesteads and, in order to repair and rebuild, farmers had to secure loans from local banks and other credit institutions. To get these loans, they had to promise to grow cotton, which could be sold reliably in foreign and domestic markets. Bad harvests meant that increasing numbers of these small farm owners lost their property to the bank, causing tremendous resentment and paving the way for the Populist Party of the 1890s.

His second book, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2005) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Merle Curti Prize in Social History, and was also a finalist for both the Lincoln and Frederick Douglass Prize. In this book, Hahn seeks to account for black political organization before and after the Civil War, looking not to the cities or to the North, but to the rural South. Here he finds resistance to slavery before the war and a variety of proto-political organizations after the war. These include extended kin networks, the Republican Party, emigrationist schemes (to go out West or to Africa), and, in the 1920s Garveyism, a movement for black empowerment and pride organized Marcus Garvey. Hahn locates the sources of these organizations in families, churches, and workplaces, and suggests that during Reconstruction and after, black men and women offered up an expansive view of American citizenship—one that highlighted the role of work, family, and schools in defining equality for all citizens. The result of this organizational activity was a nation within a nation—that is, a sense of heighted black collective consciousness–that paved the way for the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century and beyond.

Hahn’s most recent book, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (2016) offers a fresh overview of U.S. history during this period. Hahn chronicles the growth of a centralized U.S. government that was the agent of both industrial capitalism and expansionism of various kinds. He considers the land grab in Mexico (the War of 1848), the destruction of native tribes in the West during the last third of the nineteenth century, and imperialist designs on Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines in 1898. He argues that these wars of conquest and relentless expansionism had wrenching effects on various groups—not only blacks and Indians, but also New England farmers and others who lost out when the circuits of international trade came to dominate the American economy. He shows how different groups reacted to these developments, fighting back against employers, landowners, and government officials. This book offers a counter-narrative to the conventional view, which highlights “progress” in the form of technological innovations, the growth in foreign immigration, and the spread of the factory system after the Civil War—all supposed to be ingredients in the forging of a “modern” nation.

In all these works, Hahn brings to the fore groups that have not received their due as political and proto-political actors (small family farmers, slaves and freedpeople, Indians, and industrial workers), in order to provide a fuller, more nuanced picture of the development of industrial capitalism and the role of the state in promoting expansionism (in the form of conquest over vulnerable groups) at home and abroad.

The Littlefield Lectures:

Day 1 | Wednesday, February 15

The United States from the Inside Out and the Southside North
4:00 PM | AT&T Center, 1900 University Ave. | Amphiteater 204 on Level M2
liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/events/41026

Day 2 | Thursday, February 16
Reconstruction and the American Political Tradition
4:00 PM | AT&T Center, 1900 University Ave. | Amphiteater 204 on Level M2
liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/events/41028

Directions: http://www.meetattexas.com/page/directions
Parking: http://www.meetattexas.com/page/parking

Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary to attend.

More from Jacqueline Jones on Not Even Past:

History in a “Post-Truth” Era.
On the Myth of Race in America.
On Civil War Savannah.

Longfellow’s Great Liberators: Abraham Lincoln and Dante Alighieri

By Guy Raffa

“We breathe freer. The country will be saved.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s response to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is a timely reminder of how, while they all matter, some presidential elections matter much more than others.

Five years earlier Longfellow was one of many who believed the time for peace had passed with John Brown’s execution for attempting to arm slaves with weapons from the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. “This will be a great day in our history,” he wrote on Dec. 2, 1859, the day of the hanging, “the date of a new Revolution” needed to move the nation farther toward the Constitution’s goal of “a more perfect Union.” Even “Paul Revere’s Ride,” his famous poem on the Revolutionary War, was “less about liberty and Paul Revere, and more about slavery and John Brown,” writes historian Jill Lepore, “a calls to arms, rousing northerners to action.” This rallying cry serendipitously appeared on newsstands on Dec. 20, 1860, the day South Carolina seceded from the Union.

henry_wadsworth_longfellow_by_thomas_buchanan_read_img_4414-1

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (via Wikimedia Commons).

Longfellow had voted early on Nov. 6, 1860 and was overjoyed by the news of Lincoln’s “great victory,” calling it “the redemption of the country.” His diary marks steps toward fulfilling the promise of this victory, from enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863 (“A great day”) and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, formally abolishing slavery, on January 31, 1865 (“the grand event of the century”) to General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865: “So ends the Rebellion of the slave-owners!”

Longfellow had gained notice in abolitionist circles two decades earlier with publication of his Poems on Slavery. He judged his verses “so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast,” but still they triggered a “long and violent tirade” in a South Carolina newspaper and were left out of an 1845 edition of the author’s collected works to avoid offending readers in the south and west.

First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, 1864 (via Wikimedia Commons).

In 1863, New York’s Evening Post cast Longfellow as the nation’s prophet. Crediting the poet’s “discerning eye” for foreseeing “the inevitable result of that institution of American slavery which was the black spot on the escutcheon of our republican government,” the paper lamented that his words had gone “unheeded, until the black spot spread into a cloud of portentous dimensions, and broke over the land in a storm of blood and desolation.”

1863 also saw Longfellow complete a draft of his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Working closely with Dante’s poem helped him cope with the traumatic loss of his beloved wife. On July 9, 1861, Fanny had suffered fatal injuries when her dress caught fire as she melted wax to seal a lock of her daughter’s hair. The translation provided “refuge” from an ordeal “almost too much for any man to bear,” he wrote to a friend.

Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, a detail of a painting by Domenico di Michelino, Florence 1465 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Living with Dante’s vision of the afterlife also gave Longfellow some perspective on the war. On May 8, 1862, soon after translating Paradiso, he reflected, “Of the civil war I say only this. It is not a revolution, but a Catalinian conspiracy. It is Slavery against Freedom; the north against the southern pestilence.” The reality of this moral disease hit home when he visited a local jeweler’s shop. There he saw “a slave’s collar of iron, with an iron tongue as large as a spoon, to go into the mouth.” “Every drop of blood in me quivered,” he wrote, “the world forgets what Slavery really is!”

The war to eradicate slavery by suppressing this “conspiracy” brought its own set of horrors. Longfellow was acutely aware of the high toll of death and mutilation on both sides, the destruction extending far beyond the war zone. “Every shell from the cannon’s mouth bursts not only on the battle-field,” he lamented, “but in faraway homes, North or South, carrying dismay and death. What an infernal thing war is!”

Charles Longfellow in Uniform (1st Massachusetts Artillery), March 1863. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

The hell of war weighed heavily on Longfellow’s mind when he finally turned to translating Dante’s Inferno—he saved this first part of the Divine Comedy for last—on March 14, 1863. He began during an especially “sad week”: Charles, his eighteen-year-old son, had left home, unannounced, to join the Army of the Potomac in Washington. Initially attaching himself to an artillery regiment, “Charley” benefited from family connections to receive a commission as second lieutenant in the cavalry. “He is where he wants to be, in the midst of it all,” wrote the worried father. During this first month of Charley’s military service, Longfellow translated a canto of Inferno each day. Amid “many interruptions and anxieties,” he completed all thirty-four cantos by April 16, 1863. Two weeks later Charles Norton, Longfellow’s friend and fellow Dante expert, urged him to hold back publication of the translation until 1865 so it could be presented during Italy’s celebration of the poet’s six-hundredth birthday in Florence.

On December 1, 1863, Longfellow received a telegram from Washington saying his son had been “severely wounded.” He immediately left Cambridge with his younger son Ernest and headed south to find Charley and learn the extent of his injuries. The soldier, who had already survived a bout of the ever-dangerous “camp fever” the previous summer, made another “wonderful escape,” as his relieved father put it. Fighting near the front lines in the Mine Run Campaign, Charley took a Confederate soldier’s bullet in the shoulder. He returned home in one piece and slowly recovered from his wounds, but his fighting days were over.

As the war continued and congress worked to repeal the fugitive slave acts of 1793 and 1850, Longfellow resumed editing his translation in preparation for the Dante anniversary. He admired Charles Sumner’s speech on the proposed amendment to abolish slavery: “So long as a single slave continues anywhere under the flag of the Republic I am unwilling to rest.” Longfellow shared his friend’s relatively expansive view of liberty, observing on April 20, 1864: “Until the black man is put upon the same footing as the white, in the recognition of his rights, we shall not succeed, and what is worse, we shall not deserve success.” The following year Longfellow asked Sumner for assistance in having a privately printed edition of the first volume of his translation delivered to Italy in time for the Dante festivities. In the same letter of February 10, 1865, he thanked the senator for his role in abolishing slavery, proclaiming that “this year will always be the Year of Jubilee in our history.”

Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Inferno took its place among the works by eminent foreigners on display in Florence to honor the poet’s birth. Three days of festivities in 1865 doubled as a celebration of Italy’s independence while the nation awaited the additions of Venice (1866) and Rome (1870) to complete the unification begun in 1859-61. At a banquet for foreign dignitaries, an American speaker drew rousing applause from his Italian hosts and their guests when he toasted the “Re-United States”—a poignant reminder that Italy was taking its first steps as an independent and (mostly) unified nation just as America emerged from the greatest test of its own unity and promise of freedom.

The statue of Dante Alighieri that today stands in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence was unveiled in 1865 during the festival (via Wikimedia Commons).

Dante’s prominence in these parallel national struggles was clear to Longfellow, as it was to the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, the poet H. Cordelia Ray, and other black “freedom readers,” the title of Dennis Looney’s book on the African American reception of Dante and his poem. Longfellow wrote six sonnets on Dante to accompany the commercial publication of his translation of the Divine Comedy in 1867. The final sonnet, composed on March 7, 1866, glorifies Dante as the “star of morning and of liberty,” his message of freedom reaching “all the nations” as his “fame is blown abroad from all the heights.”

“Hideous news.” This was Longfellow’s reaction to Abraham Lincoln’s death on the morning of April 15, 1865, from the bullet fired by John Wilkes Booth the night before at Ford’s Theatre. Star of morning and of liberty: Longfellow’s epithet for Dante would have sounded like a fine description of Abraham Lincoln to millions of Americans who mourned the slain president.

Featured Image: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his study, 1868. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

Sources: “Complete Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”; “Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” ed. Samuel Longfellow; “Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, ed. Andrew Hilen; “Poet’s Warning,” The Evening Post Jan. 20, 1863; Henry Clark Barlow, “The Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante Allighieri in Florence and at Ravenna”; Dennis Looney, “Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy”

For more information on Dante and Longfellow, see the special edition of Dante Studies on this topic (vol. 128 in 2010), edited by Arielle Saiber and Giuseppe Mazzotta.

US Survey Course: Civil War (1861-1865)

During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

Starting Points:

We start with Marc William-Palen’s discussion of the Causes of the Civil War.

Next, we delve into a more detailed case study as Jacqueline Jones explores the Civil War in Savannah.

Charley Binkow explore’s George Mason University’s Virginia Civil War Archive, highlighting the portrayal of the Civil War in Harper’s Weekly, one of the authoritative voices in news, both in the North and the South.

And on 15 Minute History we have: Causes of the U.S. Civil War part 1 and part 2:

In the century and a half since the war’s end, historians, politicians, and laypeople have debated the causes of the U.S. Civil War: what truly led the Union to break up and turn on itself? And, even though it seems like the obvious answer, does a struggle over the future of slavery really explain why the south seceded, and why a protracted military struggle followed? Can any one explanation do so satisfactorily?

Historian George B Forgie has been researching this question for years. In this two-part podcast, he’ll walk us through five common–and yet unsatisfying–explanations for the most traumatic event in American history.

Recommended Books and Films on the Civil War:

Mark Battjes discusses Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs (Barnes and Noble, 2003)

And, H. W. Brands recommends more reading on Ulysses S. Grant: memoirs, biographies, histories.

Nicholas Roland offers historical perspectives on Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012).

Kristie Flannery reviews Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, by Tony Horwitz (Pantheon, 1999)

Finally, George Forgie recommends seven Civil War Classics.

Texas & The Civil War:

Nicholas Roland explores the experiences of Texans fighting in the battle of Antietam.

Nakia Parker follows the fascinating experiences of the Texans who moved to Brazil after the defeat of the Confederacy.

Two graduate students discuss intriguing Civil War sources found in the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin:

Conflict in the Confederacy: William Williston Heartsill’s diary, by Josh Urich.
The Curious Life of General Jackson’s Horse’s Hair, by Josh Urich
A Texas Ranger and the Letter of the Law, by Nathan Jennings

The Legacy of the Civil War:

Nicholas Roland remembers the Unknown Soldiers of the post-Civil War period buried in Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery and the story of Milton Holland, a mixed race native of Texas who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Civil War battle of Chaffin’s Farm.

And finally, our editor Joan Neuberger compiled some recommended readings on On Flags, Monuments, and Historical Myths

Reconstruction in Austin: The Unknown Soldiers

By Nicholas Roland

Seven marble head stones lie along a chain link fence in the Old Grounds of Austin’s historic Oakwood Cemetery. Their inscriptions read simply “U.S. Soldier.” These graves are Austin’s own unknown soldiers, men whose identities were lost over time and whose existence is mostly forgotten in the bustling twenty-first century Texas capital. They are also some of the last tangible remnants of the United States Army’s occupation of Austin during the Reconstruction years, a period that is often overshadowed by the deadly four year struggle between North and South that preceded it.

The Seven 'Unknown Soldier' Gravestones. — The Seven ‘Unknown Soldier’ Gravestones. Courtesy of the author.

The recent sesquicentennial of the American Civil War occasioned an outpouring of scholarly commentary, public programming, and commemoration. No such effort will be made to recall the drama of Reconstruction, an effort that began while the Confederacy still clung to life and ended in the aftermath of the 1876 presidential election. Historians today see the Civil War and Reconstruction not as discrete events, but as a critical period in a wider nineteenth-century struggle over issues of race, citizenship, individual rights, and the relationship between the state and federal governments and individual Americans.

Scholars debate exactly how much Reconstruction accomplished and whether more radical policies were either desirable or possible, but the long-term impact of Reconstruction legislation, especially the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, is undeniable. On the ground level, the United States Army played a key role in supporting the operations of the Freedmen’s Bureau and in protecting white unionists and the formerly enslaved from the wrath of defeated Confederates. The seven men who lie in Oakwood Cemetery today took part in the struggle of Reconstruction in Texas, a struggle that in many ways was simply a continuation of the American Civil War.

Gravestone of an 'Unknown Soldier'. Courtesy of the author. — Gravestone of an ‘Unknown Soldier’. Courtesy of the author.

Emancipation and Reconstruction arrived in Texas on June 19, 1865 in the form of the Union Army. Within weeks, Union forces entered the state from several directions and proceeded to station troops in the most heavily populated areas. Austin was occupied on July 26, making it the last Confederate state capitol to fall to Union forces. Volunteer units, who made up the vast majority of the Union Army during the war, were the first to garrison Austin. The Second Wisconsin, First Iowa, and Seventh Indiana Cavalry regiments, under the command of General George A. Custer, camped on the northern outskirts of town in the fall of 1865.[1] As early as November 1865 the volunteer forces were being mustered out of the service and in 1866 they were replaced by Regular Army units. Although troops began to be sent to Texas’ western frontier in the fall of 1866, others remained in Austin and other portions of the eastern half of the state to maintain order and combat rampant violence aimed at suppressing the interracial political coalition represented by the fledgling Texas Republican party. The United States Army maintained at least a small garrison in Austin until 1875.[2]

A recently published work on Oakwood Cemetery says that the men who are buried there today were victims of a cholera outbreak that took place among Custer’s troops, who were encamped along Shoal Creek. If they were members of Custer’s cavalry, they were veterans of the Civil War as well as participants in the Reconstruction occupation of Texas. Although newspaper reports from the time do not mention a cholera outbreak, the unit histories of the regiments stationed in Austin reveal that nearly 86 percent of the casualties they sustained during their service were from disease. Along with other casualties, the men are believed to have been buried on the grounds of the historic Neill-Cochran house, which was used as a hospital by the Army from the fall of 1865 until March 1867.[3] In the 1890s most of the bodies along Shoal Creek were supposedly exhumed and reinterred elsewhere, but the seven men were forgotten until a flood exposed their graves some time prior to 1911, at which point they were transferred to Oakwood Cemetery.[4]

The Neill Cochran House located near the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, United States. Photo taken October 2007 by Larry D. Moore. Via Wikipedia.

As Drew Gilpin Faust illustrates in This Republic of Suffering, the federal government faced a monumental task in attempting to locate and identify the Union dead in the years following the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1871 303,536 Union dead were relocated to national cemeteries, at a cost of over $4 million. Only 54 percent of the bodies were identified. One of the major obstacles confronting efforts to identify and move the Union dead to national cemeteries was the intransigence of former Confederates, who did not hesitate to remove headboards and otherwise desecrate Union graves. In contrast, African Americans in the South proved to be the best allies of federal investigators who labored to document and care for Union graves.[5] In fact, David W. Blight argues that the first Memorial Day commemoration took place in Charleston, South Carolina in 1865, when formerly enslaved Charlestonians held a memorial service for Union prisoners of war who had died while in captivity at a local race track.[6] The culture of commemoration established by Americans during the Reconstruction years continues in the modern Memorial Day holiday.

Were Austin’s unknown soldiers forgotten due to malice toward occupying US troops? On the one hand, Travis County had voted against secession in the 1861 referendum and many prominent unionists resided in Austin. Custer’s troops camped on land owned by Elisha M. Pease, a pre-war governor and moderate unionist who would serve again as governor under the military government established by the Reconstruction Acts in 1867. The owners of the Neill-Cochran home, S.M. Swenson and John Milton Swisher, were both unionists as well, although Swisher worked for the state of Texas during the war.[7] According to the records of the Texas State Cemetery, part of the cemetery was set aside during Reconstruction for burials of Army personnel, a move that hardly seems to indicate hostility toward the occupying soldiers. Sixty-two Reconstruction-era soldiers were eventually transferred from Austin to the San Antonio National Cemetery in the late nineteenth century.[8] The men buried in Oakwood may have simply been the victims of negligence or error.

On the other hand, although relations between Austinites and the occupying federal soldiers appear to have been generally peaceful, Amelia Barr recorded that the town was “practically in mourning” in the aftermath of Confederate defeat.[9] Libby Custer, who accompanied her husband to Austin, recalled that “it was hard for the citizens who had remained at home to realize that the war was over, and some were unwilling to believe there had ever been an emancipation proclamation. In the northern part of the State they were still buying and selling slaves.”[10] Most white Texans steadfastly opposed the Reconstruction program of advancing racial equality, often violently. In later years “Lost Cause” propaganda and the Dunning school of Reconstruction history would paint the Reconstruction period as a time of corruption, misrule, and tyranny. Ironically, a town that was known for its large unionist population during the secession crisis became dotted with Confederate memorials during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Old Oakwood Cemetery Austin, Texas, United States. Via Wikipedia. — The Old Oakwood Cemetery Austin, Texas, United States. Photo taken January 2007 by Larry D. Moore. Via Wikipedia.

The physical space of Oakwood Cemetery illustrates the workings of Texas historical memory over time. Approximately twenty yards directly north of the unknown soldiers is a large obelisk dedicated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909 to General Tom Green, an officer in the Republic of Texas army and a Confederate general who was killed in action in 1864. Monuments to other individuals are scattered throughout the cemetery, some with Texas Historical Commission markers that tell their stories. In their midst, these seven marble headstones lie adjacent to Navasota Street, unknown and largely forgotten, with nothing to explain their significance to visitors. Although controversies over Confederate statuary and school names draw the most media attention in twenty-first century Austin, the long shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction lingers in the city’s oldest cemetery, at once hidden and in plain sight.

Picture of an obelisk dedicated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909 to General Tom Green, an officer in the Republic of Texas army and a Confederate general who was killed in action in 1864. — Obelisk dedicated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909 to General Tom Green, an officer in the Republic of Texas army and a Confederate general who was killed in action in 1864. Courtesy of the author.

Notes:

[1] Austin Southern Intelligencer, October 26, 1865 and November 9, 1865.

[2] Thomas T. Smith, The Old Army in Texas: A Research Guide to the U.S. Army in Nineteenth-Century Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2000), 54, 104-114.

[3] Kenneth Hafertepe, Abner Cook: Master Builder on the Texas Frontier (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1992), 148.

[4] Save Austin Cemeteries, Austin’s Historic Oakwood Cemetery: Under the Shadow of the Texas Capitol (Austin: Save Austin Cemeteries, 2014), 73; email correspondence with Dale Flatt and Kay Boyd, May 23, 2016; Lorraine Barnes, “Only Stones Remain of US Soldiers,” The Austin Statesman, September 28, 1955; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Regiment_Iowa_Volunteer_Cavalry; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Regiment_Wisconsin_Volunteer_Cavalry; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Regiment_Indiana_Cavalry.

[5] Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 211-238.

[6] David W. Blight, “Forgetting Why We Remember,” May 29, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/opinion/30blight.html?version=meter+at+1&module=meter-Links&pgtype=article&contentId=&mediaId=&referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.davidwblight.com%2Fpublic-history%2F2015%2F5%2F26%2Frestoring-memoriam-to-memorial-day&priority=true&action=click&contentCollection=meter-links-click

[7] http://www.nchmuseum.org/about/; https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsw20; https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsw14; https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fpe08.

[8] Email from Jason Walker, May 25, 2016.

[9] Quote in David C. Humphrey, “A ‘Very Muddy and Conflicting’ View: The Civil War as Seen from Austin, Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly (Jan. 1991): 412.

[10] Elizabeth B. Custer, Tenting on the Plains, Or, General Custer in Kansas and Texas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 138.

On Flags, Monuments, and Historical Myths

In response to student demand and in the wake of decisions made elsewhere in the southern U.S. to remove Confederate flags, UT-Austin President Greg Fenves appointed a Task Force to consider the removal of monuments to Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders that occupy a central site on the UT-Austin Campus.

A graffiti-covered Confederate statue on the quad on the campus at UT Austin

Understanding history and separating historical analysis from historical myth is essential for any society. One of the many disturbing aspects of Dylann Roof’s murder of nine African Americans on June 17, is his justification of White supremacy on historical grounds. And one of the signs that we could be doing a better job as historians is the CNN poll that shows the majority of White Americans see the Confederate flag as a “symbol of southern pride” rather than a “symbol of racism.”

Over the next few weeks, Not Even Past will offer readers historical sources, readings, and commentary on these events. Last week, Mark Sheaves collected past articles devoted to the history of slavery and its legacy in the US and provided us with an annotated list.

Today we offer the historical analysis and commentary from journalists and historians primarily writing online. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more reading and news from the Task Force. (We will add to the list as relevant articles appear.)

First, “Causes Lost But Not Forgotten: George Washington Littlefield, Jefferson Davis and Confederate Memories at the University of Texas at Austin,” an article by Alexander Mendoza about the controversies that have dogged the statues since their inception.

“Monuments to Confederacy have their own History at Texas Capitol,” by Lauren McGaughy

Memorial plaque of the Children of the Confederacy Creed erected by the Texas Division of the Children of the Confederacy

Many southerners claim that Confederate flags and monuments are reflections of southern “heritage,” not racism. On the Nursing Clio blog, Sarah Handley-Cousins discusses the uses of heritage as a concept and a badge, “Heritage is Not History: Historians, Charleston, and the Confederate Flag.”

A 2011 Pew Research Center survey that showed that more people believe the Civil War was fought over states’ rights rather than over slavery.

In “Why Do People Believe Myths about the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments Are Wrong,” James W. Loewin addresses some of the ways southerners rewrote Civil War history in Texas and elsewhere.

To document the centrality of slavery to the reasons southern states went to war, Ta Nehisi-Coates wrote “What This Cruel War was Over,” arguing that “the meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it.”

(And in case you haven’t read Nehisi-Coates’ searing history of relentless White efforts to prevent Blacks from obtaining economic security, here it is: The Case for Reparations.)

Finally, Bruce Chadwick on one of the most pernicious, and successful, purveyors of myths about “the southern way of life,” D.W Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation, 100 years old this year.

Added July 8-9, 2015:

On discussing the commemoration of the confederacy with students:
David C. Williard, “I don’t want my students to simply choose sides in a polemic between heritage and hate.”

It’s complicated. Not very, but a little.
Richard Fausset, “‘Complicated’ Support for Confederate Flag in White South.”

Added July 14, 2015
Many people argue that removing monuments is erasing history:
Alfred L. Brophy, “Why Northerners should Support Confederate Monuments“

Personal Memoirs, by Ulysses S. Grant (2003)

April 2015 marks the sesquicentennial of the end of the U.S. Civil War. As we look back on that momentous event in U.S. history, we should take time to reconsider one of the war’s most important figures, Ulysses S. Grant. Most famous as a general, Grant’s life spans an important part of U.S. history. Moreover, Grant’s prose is clear and evocative, proving him to be a great writer,and the author of one of the finest examples of the military memoir.

Grant had resolved not to write his memoirs. However, nearing the end of his life, and with his family’s financial security in doubt, Grant put forth a tremendous effort to tell the story of his military service. The writing does not suffer from Grant’s apparent haste. Instead, the words spill forth from the page and propel the reader through a brief description of his early life, his education at West Point, and his service in the war with Mexico. Grant then embarks on a gripping account of the Civil War from his own perspective.

The Battle of Jackson, fought on May 14, 1863, was part of the Vicksburg Campaign. Via Wikimedia Commons. — The Battle of Jackson, fought on May 14, 1863, was part of the Vicksburg Campaign.

It is a perspective that differs from many military histories of the war. Grant served in the West during the early years of the conflict. There are no Bull Runs or Antietams here. Instead, Grant gives the reader an inside account of the siege of Vicksburg, a battle of tremendous importance to the Union’s ultimate victory, which is often obscured because it ended on the same day as that more famous battle in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Grant’s account also showcases his genius for war. Like his illustrious predecessor as war-hero-turned-president, George Washington, some military historians deride Grant as a poor tactical general, especially in comparison to his contemporary, Robert E. Lee. While this critique is accurate, insofar as Grant lost many battles, it ignores the far more important object of the general, which is to win the war. On this point, Grant has few equals. And how Grant won the war is most obvious in his description of what he calls the “Grand Campaign” of 1864-1865.

Grant recognized that between 1861 and 1863 the Union had not used its superior strength well, allowing the Confederate armies to survive. To correct this, Grant devised a coordinated series of movements and battles by the Union armies to defeat the Confederacy and end the war. The inclusion of the letters and telegrams that Grant sent to his commanders in the field.makes his description of the campaign and its planning evocative and revealing. These are brilliant: they are concise and precisely convey Grant’s intent for each action.

Grant’s memoirs also offer insights into the war beyond its military conduct. Throughout, he presents glimpses of the hardships imposed on the population of the Confederate states by the war that raged on their soil. He is aware of his culpability for this suffering, and, at times, made an effort to alleviate it. He also gives the reader his impressions of other figures, such as Lee, General William T. Sherman, and Abraham Lincoln. These are no doubt colored by the passage of years, but they are also blunt, yet nuanced.

The Peacemakers depicts Sherman, Grant, Lincoln, and Porter aboard the River Queen on March 27th & March 28th, 1865. White House copy of the lost 1868 painting. — The Peacemakers by George P.A. Healey depicts Sherman, Grant, Lincoln, and Porter aboard the River Queen on March 27th & March 28th, 1865. This is the White House copy of the lost 1868 painting.

Grant’s discussion of his relationship with Lincoln is fascinating. Much has been written decrying the interference of presidents in military operations, especially with regard to Vietnam. Grant’s memoirs offer a completely different viewpoint. He describes the many instances when he received direct communications from Lincoln about fighting the war, most of which were unsolicited. Rather than condemning these as interference, Grant shows that he understood his subordinate relationship to the president, and thus he vigorously obeyed the president’s orders.

Finally, Grant embodies the complicated feelings that the conflict aroused. He poignantly expresses the conflicting emotions he experienced during the negotiations with Lee for the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. He relates that, when the two commanders met near Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865, he was unsure of Lee’s feelings, but his own had passed from jubilation about the pending end of the war to sadness and depression. Grant did not want to rejoice over the surrender of his valiant foe, who had battled for his cause, “though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

Student Showcase – The Book that Started this Great War: Opening Eyes to Oppression One Page at a Time

Haley Miller
Waco High School
Individual Performance
Senior Division

Read Haley’s Process Paper

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was far more than just a novel–it was a dramatic literary attack on the immorality of slave holding. Over 300,000 Americans bought a copy in 1852 alone, making it one of the most widely-read abolitionist texts in American history.

In order to explain the abolitionist message of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Haley Miller decided to assume the dramatic role of Harriet Beecher Stowe and let her tell the tale. Haley talked about the inspiration behind this unique project and the process of performing as one of America’s most famous writers.

First edition printing of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 1952 (Wikipedia) — First edition printing of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 1952 (Wikipedia)

Last year in my U.S. History class, I learned about Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a major event in the Abolitionist Movement. It shocked me that Lincoln described its author as “the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war!” I decided to read the novel over the summer to understand its impact on slavery. It truly touched me the same way it touched earlier readers upon its initial release.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852 (Gurney & Sons - Bowdoin College Museum of Art) — Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852 (Gurney & Sons – Bowdoin College Museum of Art)

I chose the individual performance category because I have enjoyed my past experiences in living history. The book’s author seemed to me the best person to tell its story. As I created my script, I decided to emphasize Stowe’s events that urged her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the reaction of the public to the bestselling novel of the nineteenth century. My performance is set in the parlor of Stowe’s home on the 40^th anniversary of the book’s publishing, as if Stowe were responding to questions from reporters. Many of the statements I incorporated are from her letters. Since Stowe’s actions were motivated by her Christian beliefs, I used many biblical references to explain her thoughts.

A slave trading business in Atlanta, 1864 (Wikipedia)

The publishing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fits the theme, “Rights and Responsibilities in History,” because it equated slaves with whites and spoke out against the Southern system of labor. Stowe explained that, as the Lord’s children, blacks deserve to have united families and to be treated as humans. Stowe believed that God was speaking through her with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and that it was her Christian responsibility to expose the cruelty of the South. After reading the novel, many felt an obligation to join the Abolitionist Movement to save “Uncle Toms” throughout the United States and to give slaves the right to avoid oppression. It called Christians to put morals over monetary values because, as Galatians 3:28 states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin reaffirmed what our founding fathers wrote, that all men are created equal.

Catch up on Texas History Day:

The harsh world of migrant work during the Great Depression

The history behind one of New Orleans’s most iconic neighborhoods

And the story of Douglas MacArthur, right down to his corn cob pipe