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The Atlantic on Gettysburg’s Cyclorama

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As I mentioned yesterday, The Atlantic Monthly is knocking the sesquicentennial celebrations out of the park. This piece on the Gettysburg Cyclorama is fantastic, and is making me greatly regret declining a ticket on both my trips to the park.

Four hundred feet long. Fifty feet high. It was art on an astonishing scale. All four versions were housed in massive, purpose-built rotundas. In Boston, for example, visitors walked through a grand crenelated archway, paid for their tickets, and proceeded along a dark winding passage toward the viewing platform. They ascended a winding staircase to another time and place. “The impression upon the beholder as he steps upon this platform,” one reviewer wrote, “is one of mingled astonishment and awe.”

July 3, 1863. The Battle of Gettysburg rages on for a third day. From just behind Cemetery Ridge, visitors watched Pickett’s Charge crash against the Union lines. There, in the distance! General Lee and his staff. Much closer, an artillery caisson explodes. All around, soldiers crouch, charge, level rifles, bare bayonets, fight, die.

A dozen different twists heightened the illusion. Drapes hung over the platform from the ceiling, limiting and directing the view and leaving the viewers shrouded in shadows. The indirect lighting shone most brightly on the top of the canvas, illuminating the sky in brilliant blue. The canvas bowed outward by a foot in the middle, receding as it approached the ground and horizon. Tinsel lent a convincing gleam to the bayonets and buckles in the painting.

What most astonished observers, though, was the diorama, which began near the edge of the platform and ended at the painting, 45 feet away. Hundreds of cartloads of earth were covered in sod and studded with vegetation, then topped with the detritus of the battlefield. Shoes, canteens, fences, walls, corpses: near the canvas, these props were cunningly arranged to blend seamlessly into the painting. Two wooden poles, painted on the canvas, met a third leaned against it to form a tripod. A dirt road ran out into the diorama. A stretcher borne by two men, one painted and the other formed of boards, had its poles inserted through holes in the painting. “So perfect is the illusion,” as the Boston Advertiser voiced the common sentiment, “that it is impossible to tell where reality ends and the painting begins.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/the-great-illusion-of-gettysburg/238870/

Sherman Behaving Badly

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It’s always disheartening to read reports of your favourite generals and presidents saying horrible things on the subject of race, but given the times, there’s a distasteful story for just about every personality in the war, North and South. Today, it’s Sherman:

Blinded by his implacable racism, Sherman could see no worthwhile moral or legal debate to be had over slavery. History had forced this institution on the South, Sherman thought, and its continued prosperity depended on embracing it. “Theoretical notions of humanity and religion,” he flatly declared, “cannot shake the commercial fact that their labor is of great value and cannot be dispensed with.” Further, Sherman believed that slavery benefited both races. In 1854 he assured his brother that blacks thrived in the Southern heat and later told David F. Boyd, one of his professors at the Louisiana military academy and eventual friend, that he considered slavery in the South “the mildest and best regulated system of slavery in the world, now or heretofore.”

Still, slavery did trouble Sherman in one way: He grew increasingly worried that the political fight over it would threaten the stability of the Union. However, while he occasionally singled out Southerners for overreacting to antislavery sentiment — once writing that they “pretend to think that the northern people have nothing to do but steal niggers and preach sedition” — Sherman overall displayed a clear sympathy for their side in the growing schism. He was emphatic in an 1859 letter to his wife that the South should make its own decisions regarding slavery and then “receive its reward or doom.” Sherman thus anticipated Jefferson Davis’ famous plea of two years later that the South simply be left alone.

One of the things I love about Sherman was his pragmatism. He disagreed with the root cause of the war, but once the South went in for treason, he embraced the waging of it wholeheartedly. Ironic then, by his quote above of letting the South decide its own doom, that he wound up as the angel that avenged its choice.

Alexander Gardner

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The Washington Post and the New York Times are doing some excellent work, commemorating the sesquicentennial with regular blog updates and articles. (Particularly the WaPo, which – unlike the Times – makes these available for free.) I’m trying not to piggyback too much on their reportage, but this piece on Alexander Gardner is a great introduction to (arguably) the war’s greatest photographer.

In 1869, Gardner asked Congress to purchase his photographs, describing them as national treasures, according to Katz’s history. Congress was not interested.

When Gardner died 13 years later, his estate consisted of, among other things, books, and furniture, but, apparently, no photographic material.

Some of his priceless negatives may have been sold as scrap glass, according to Katz’s study. Many were acquired by collectors, and in 1884 again offered for sale to the government. The government still was not interested.

When the 1893 cache was discovered, a Post reporter visited Gardner’s son, Lawrence, a Washington insurance executive, who said the old negatives were probably his father’s.

After that, their fate is uncertain…

The Smithsonian said it has a few photos — apparently Gardner’s — for which there is no provenance.

And William Stapp, former curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, said some Gardner negatives have “just vanished.”

I hope against hope that someone has boxes upon boxes of glass plate negatives stashed away, unknowingly, in an attic or storeroom. The Ken Burns series related the fact that most photographers went broke after the war, and sold their negatives to gardeners for use in greenhouses. It’s depressing to imagine how many striking or important images of the war were lost to ultraviolet rays and humidity.

Oh, and kudos to the writer (or webmaster) of this piece for including hyperlinks to each photo referenced. The only disappointment is that they didn’t link to full-size photos; there’s no zoom function to see details such as these:

Off to the side, one young soldier stares back at the camera with a look of anguish in his eyes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/alexander-gardner-the-mysteries-of-the-civil-wars-photographic-giant/2011/12/12/gIQAptHhDP_print.html

“Fancy Girls”

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More insights into the horrors of slavery, and more incidences of slaveowners’ distaste for the traders with whom they trucked. The more I read about Southern “civilization” (or “monstrous system”, as Mrs. Chesnut put it), the gladder I am that Sherman swept it away with such force.

(Unrelated aside: Who knew Lexington, KY had such a huge population of slaves? I always assumed the equal- or greater-than ratios of blacks to whites were reserved for cotton heavy South Carolina and Mississippi, but I suppose certain centres were the exception, rather than the rule?)

Smith said that, more than any slave-trading city except New Orleans, Lexington was known for its “fancy girls” — light-skinned, mixed-race young women who were sold into sexual slavery. The best-known dealer was Lewis Robards, who kept his “choice stock” in parlors above his Short Street office.

Not all of these deals were conducted behind closed doors. The most infamous case involved a beautiful young woman named Eliza — said to be just 1⁄64 black — who was sold at Cheapside in May 1843 to satisfy the debts of her deceased master and father.

Abolitionist accounts of the sale tell of a hard-hearted auctioneer who exposed Eliza’s breasts and thighs to encourage bidders, much to the horror of the assembled crowd.

http://www.kentucky.com/2012/01/31/2050313/tom-eblen-without-the-civil-war.html

The Telegraph: A Series of Wires

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Another fine Disunion piece, this one on the importance of the telegraph in disseminating war news to the nation. There is plenty of documentation of Lincoln’s time spent in the Telegraph Office, but I hadn’t realised the genesis nor the explanation for this habit. We have McClellan to thank for the many anecdotes relayed (ahem – little telegraph joke there) by the office’s staff. I’ve listed two more Library “holdings” below as examples.

Perhaps the most consequential adoption of the telegraph was in journalism. In the late 1840s, the establishment of the New York Associated Press made it possible for member newspapers to share the costs of the new technology in order to gather news. By the early 1850s, content from the A.P. comprised at least two columns of every major daily newspaper, and many readers considered this “telegraphic news” to be the most compelling and urgent part of the paper.

By 1860 the A.P. was distributing its news not just in New York but around the country, and this practice began to transform the very meaning of news. Local papers now had the capacity to report national events to their readers in a timely manner, so that “the news” gradually came to connote not just events, but events happening at almost that very moment. Prior to the telegraph, the distribution of news was regulated by the speed of the mail, but now news was potentially both instantaneous and simultaneous.

The immediacy of the news fed a public frenzy for the latest information. Circulation of New York papers rose by more than 40 percent during the war, and in other areas of the nation by as much as 63 percent. During a major battle, editors could expect to sell up to five times as many copies of their papers. While newspaper reporting remained highly competitive throughout the war, the A.P. came to dominate wire news, and this also served the interests of the Administration. The A.P. had regular access to the president and the War Department, and was given exclusive bulletins and announcements to disseminate to the papers. In exchange, the A.P. gave the administration a way to reach the public in a manner that could be carefully controlled and rapidly disseminated.

The Disunion article can be found here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/news-of-the-wired/?ref=opinion%2F%3Fsmid%3Dfb-disunion

The free books are:
Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, by David Homer Bates – http://www.archive.org/details/lincolnintelegr01bategoog. This one is promising! A quick search for “Tad” (there was a great anecdote about Tad Lincoln and a bottle of the Telegraph Office’s ink) reveals a fair number of hits, and there are some facsimiles of Lincoln’s handwritten messages in the HTML version.

A similar, yet much shorter, book is available here: http://www.archive.org/details/glimpseofuniteds00wils – William Bender Wilson’s A Glimpse of the United States Military Telegraph Corps. There are a few, less consequential, personal anecdotes about Lincoln. Still, any time with Lincoln is well spent.

Confederates in Canada

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I caught a passing mention, years ago, that Jubal Early’s memoirs had been written in Toronto, but wasn’t able to follow any trails to more local information. This website was interesting, though, in providing quite a long list of famous Confederates who lived here or in Niagara-on-the-Lake, which seems to have become a kind of Richmond North, post-war.

The war’s end brought General John C. Breckenridge and his family to Toronto first, and then Niagara on the Lake in May 1866. Breckenridge served as vice president of the United States under James Buchanan 1856-1860, was a candidate for president in 1860 on the Southern Democratic ticket, (received nearly 850,000 votes) and a Major General in the Confederate service. He and his family rented a small home on Front Street overlooking Lake Ontario for twelve dollars a month. Immediately opposite the home on the New York bank of the river was Fort Niagara. Breckenridge gazed at the fort often, “with its flag flying to refresh our patriotism.” To him it seemed both a symbol of the Founder’s republic he tried to save, as well as a taunt that threatened arrest should he cross the river.

One who frequently visited the exiled Southerners was Lt. Colonel George T. Denison, commander of the Canadian Governor-General’s Body Guard, another was General Breckenridge’s “beloved old adjutant,” J. Stoddard Johnston of New Orleans. Johnston was the nephew of General Albert Sidney Johnston, and also served as an aid to Generals Bragg and Buckner. General George Pickett was also in Canada, though perhaps living in Toronto. Soon to join the ex-vice president at Niagara on the Lake were Confederate commissioner to England James M. Mason, General’s Jubal Early, John McCausland, Richard Taylor (son of General Zachary Taylor), John Bell Hood, Henry Heth, William Preston; and a host of lesser officers and their families. They often commiserated in the shade at Mason’s home, “discussing military matters and the practice of the soldiers art under the modern conditions inaugurated” by the War Between the States.

There’s even an account of Jefferson Davis coming for an extended visit, and being greeted by a cheering throng on Yonge Street.

Davis’ departure invoked this tribute from The Niagara Mail:

It is a subject of pride to Canadians that they can offer the hospitality of the soil and the shelter of the British flag to so many worthy men who are proscribed and banished from their homes for no crime at all, viz. to assert the right of every people to choose their own form of government.

One assumes the pro-Southern rhetoric can be attributed to the fear of many Canadians (D’Arcy McGee is quoted on this earlier) that the US would use its standing army to get that whole Manifest Destiny thing out of the way, at last.

http://www.cfhi.net/WilmingtonsWartimeCanadianConnection.php

The Reaper Trial

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I mentioned the Reaper Trial briefly yesterday, and this paper (from the small town where the trial took place) featured a summary on it. It featured Lincoln’s first (deeply unpleasant) meeting with Edwin Stanton, and Stanton developing a (deeply unpleasant) opinion of Lincoln which he would, happily, change once he was in the cabinet.

Abraham Lincoln came to Rockford in July of 1855 to prepare for what has come to be called the Great Reaper Trial — perhaps the most significant commercial lawsuit in the city’s history.

It was a David and Goliath battle that pitted a nearly penniless Rockford inventor, John H. Manny, and his local partners, against the industrialist, Cyrus H. McCormick, Chicago’s largest employer. Both men manufactured agricultural reapers, and both held several federal patents, although the basic patent on the McCormick Reaper had expired.

http://www.rrstar.com/opinions/columnists/x1307072564/Lincoln-and-the-Great-Reaper-Trial

Salt Works

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Salt. Not something we think about much today – it’s cheaply bought and always available. But this article explains how it was once a commodity, and the importance of Florida’s salt works to the Confederacy.

During the Civil War, Florida was not only a main supplier of beef cattle to frontline Confederate troops but it was also one of the top producers of salt.

Prior to the invention of refrigerators, salt was used to preserve a variety of meats, such as pork, fish, and of course the beef cattle shipped to the frontline troops…

By 1863, the Union put a strain on the shipment of Florida’s beef cattle, and its raids severely impacted the production of salt, with the larger salt works becoming key targets. With no beef supply or salt to preserve it with, the food line for the Confederate Army was cut.

(This New Port Richey Patch is doing some neat little articles on the war. I’m keeping an eye on them!)

http://newportrichey.patch.com/articles/salt-springs-not-just-natural-beauty

The Atlantic – Still Relevant!

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One of the best in-print observations of the sesquicentennial is by The Atlantic Monthly (altogether fitting, since it was one of the most influential magazines in the 1860s), who’ve assigned blogging duties to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I’ve seen Coates in a few talking-head spots (and, if I recall correctly, a Colbert Report interview) and he’s always fascinating; well-versed in popular culture yet deeply intellectual. Go figure, this sums up his regular column, too.

The most recent is an investigation into Ron Paul’s controversial (read: ridiculous) pro-Southern stance on the war, which he considers to have been unnecessary, claiming compensated emancipation would’ve solved all the problems. Coates approaches the topic as a scientist:

One of the more unfortunate aspects of blogging about the Civil War is that a great deal of time is expended on debunking, as opposed to discovery. Instead of looking at, say, Unionism in Tennessee, or Native American participation in the Confederate Army, we end up revisiting black Confederates again. I’ve tried to avoid this. But history is political and the deployment of comfortable narratives is a constant malady. Moreover, I get something out of these repeated debunkings that I didn’t realize until this weekend. My wife recently noted that is not unusual for scientist to spend as much, or more, time disproving things, as opposed to proving. She added that sometimes in disproving, they actually make a discovery…

The problem debating this sort of thing is the side of dishonesty and intellectual laziness is at an advantage. It will likely take more effort for me to compose this post, then it took for Ron Paul to stand before the Confederate Flag and offer his thin gruel of history. Those attempting to practice history need not only gather facts, but seek out facts that might contradict the facts they like, and then gather more facts of context to see what it all means.

He presents some facts:

We know that states like Mississippi and South Carolina were, in 1860, majority black and thus compensated emancipation in Hammond and Calhoun’s South Carolina would not simply mean the end of this broad aristocracy, but the prospect of a free white populations outnumbered by a free black population. We can thus surmise that it is no coincidence that South Carolina inaugurated the Civil War.

We know that to alleviate fears of black majority, compensated emancipation was usually partnered with a proposal of colonization–that is the removal of African-Americans from slave states to colonies in Africa or the Caribbean. We know that colonization was a polarizing issue in the black community, and by 1860, much of its popular support had collapsed. Thus we know that any contemplation of compensated emancipation must grapple with how several counties, and some states in the South, would react to finding themselves suddenly outnumbered by free black people.

Then asks more questions:

2.) Was a mass payment toward slave-holders even possible? We know that in 1860, slaves were worth $3 billion in 1860 dollars (75 billion in today’s dollars.) Did the American government have access to those sorts of funds? If so, how would they have been garnered?

4.) Assuming compensation, how would Southerners have reacted to a substantial black minority in their midst? What would the labor system have looked like? What would have happened with black male suffrage? How would the white working class reacted to finding itself in competition with blacks?

6.) Why didn’t England have a war over slavery? What were the specific differences between England slave colonies and the Antebellum South?

upon which, in the comments, his readers expound.

I would have to assume on 2, there would never have been enough money to buy the slaves outright, considering both the numbers (4.5 million, if memory serves) and southron intransigence. I can easily envision a situation like Germany’s WW1 reparations, which it just finished paying a couple of years ago (!), where the Union would make payments over time. Imagine the implications of that, with the South changing from Slave Power to perpetual creditor. And if you consider the financial rollercoaster of the late 1800s and the risk of a missed payment, I’m sure any arrangements would include a penalty for default that would have fallen on the freed slaves somehow.

It’s an antidote to the Ron Paul incident, and the recent Jim Crow revival for voting rights, to see an educated black man, at a liberal publication, asking tough questions. Isn’t this every Republican’s worst nightmare?

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2012/01/crowd-sourcing-american-history/251771/

Graffiti House Restoration

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Sweaty hands and a short attention span prevent me from doing this type of painstaking preservation work, but hats off to those who undertake it for us and our future generations.

The Graffiti House at Brandy Station is not unique because soldiers, out of boredom and in an effort to leave their mark, often scribbled on hospital walls. Mills has plied his trade on several of these houses, including one in Woodstock in Shenandoah County.

Mills not only enjoys his work but is often fascinated by what he uncovers.

“I like the personal things, like the note in the other room that it snowed on a particular day,” he says.”

I liked this little aside by the restoration tech:

“Up North we don’t know anything about the war,” he says. After a pause, he adds, “But then our houses weren’t burned and our crops destroyed.”

http://blogs.fredericksburg.com/newsdesk/2012/01/16/uncovering-1860s-graffiti-in-culpeper-an-expert-turns-the-clock-back-to-civil-war/