Category: Field Dispatches

Sustaining Motivations and the General Officer: Robert E. Lee and the Death of John Augustine Washington III

Sustaining Motivations and the General Officer: Robert E. Lee and the Death of John Augustine Washington III

By | | Comments 2 comments

Today we share our first post from new correspondent Barton A. Myers, who will be writing on soldiers, veterans, and military history broadly defined. Myers is Class of 1960 Professor of Ethics and History and Associate Professor of Civil War History at Washington and Lee University and the author of the awarding winning Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861-1865 (LSU Press, 2009), Rebels Against the Confederacy: North Carolina’s Unionists (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and co-editor with Brian D. McKnight of The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War (LSU Press, 2017).

In his now classic work For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, historian James M. McPherson utilized the framework of initial, sustaining, and combat motivations to probe the letters and diaries of hundreds of Civil War soldiers, Union and Confederate, to determine what they fought for between 1861 and 1865. McPherson borrowed an important scholarly framework from John Lynn, the great French Revolution military historian, to help readers better understand the common soldier’s three phases of motivation. Today, we have an incredibly rich scholarship on the motivations and thinking of the enlisted or common soldier, from Bell Irvin Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb and The Life of Billy Yank to Peter Carmichael’s deeply penetrating work The War for the Common Soldier.

Yet, surprisingly, one of the areas where the scholarship remains limited in this discussion of soldiers’ motives (beyond the illiterate African American soldiers of the Union Army, irregular soldiers of both sides, and Native American warriors in the west and far west) is in closely examining the sustaining and combat motivations of general officers after they enlisted. Searching their private letters offers a different window into what fueled the regular, conventional battlefield’s raging violence. Further, a comparative study of general officers’ sustaining motivations would be fascinating for either Northern or Southern armies.[1]

What if we consider that the motives that kept a general officer fighting in the field were often, even while couched in ideological language, driven more and more by the even more visceral reasons of the moment, including the death of a fellow comrade? Where does that take our scholarly debate over the meaning of the general’s experience or the causation/escalation of Civil War violence in a more holistic sense? When generals are driven by both rational calculation and emotional reasons, how does it impact their waging of civil war? It is a question worth contemplating on an individual and collective basis as we consider the escalation and deescalation of wartime violence across the United States and the Confederacy.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Consider this one moment from the life of General Robert E. Lee, whose own initial motivations have been well examined by scholars from Douglas Southhall Freeman and Elizabeth Brown Pryor to Allen Guelzo and Emory Thomas, coming to divergent conclusions about Lee’s reasons for resignation from the U.S. Army, personal secession in support of Virginia, and his ultimate support of the Confederacy, a slaveholders’ rebellion.

A remarkable series of letters housed in the Special Collections library at Washington and Lee University point toward other personal motives fueling the general officer on military campaign. In September 1861 during the Cheat Mountain Campaign in present day West Virginia, General Robert E. Lee lost one of his closest friends to Union bullets. His tentmate, the lineal descendant of George Washington, Washington’s great-grand-nephew, and the last private owner of Mount Vernon, John Augustine Washington III, was killed while on a scouting mission. John Augustine was also Lee’s distant relative via his marriage to Mary Anna Randolph Custis. Though not a military man, Washington became aide-de-camp to Lee and a Lt. Colonel in the Confederate Army, when he zealously signed on to support Virginia’s secession and the cause of Confederate independence. Douglas Southall Freeman described him as “a gentleman of the highest type and a true aristocrat.” The controversial circumstances surrounding his death fueled some of the anger over it, since it was not clear who among the Union army soldiers was responsible for killing him.[2]

Scouting was a dangerous and liminal military activity. John Augustine Washington lost his life seeking intelligence on the Union army’s position. He almost certainly never saw the face of the person who fired the fatal volley. The concern that the fight had not been fair was a common feeling among the friends and relatives of those men who lost their lives when a concealed detachment took the life of a beloved soldier.

John Augustine Washington III. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association Collection.

On September 14, 1861, Lee wrote: “Before they were aware they were fired upon by a concealed party who fired about 40 shots at four men. He [Washington] was the only person struck and fell dead from his horse.” Washington “met his death by the fire from the enemy’s picket.” Three balls struck Robert E. Lee’s son William Henry Fitzhugh Lee’s horse during the incident as well. After expounding the specific circumstances of his friend’s death, Lee described what the loss meant to him personally. “His death is a grevious [sic] affliction to me, but what must it be to his bereaved children and distressed relatives,” Lee lamented. “The Country has met with a great loss in his death. Our enemies have stamped their attack upon our rights with additional infamy by killing the lineal descendant and representative of him who under the guidance of Almighty God established them and by his virtues render our republic immortal. I enclose a note for his daughter. May God have mercy on them all.” This death, and the near death of his own son in the same incident, had made Lee’s war not just an abstract political question, but a personal war.[3]

Fascinatingly, Lee carried another letter, the final letter Washington ever wrote, with him for the remainder of the war. Ostensibly this was to give it to his daughter, but the letter could have been easily carried by an aide to the young woman earlier. Lee kept this memento arguably because it was a reminder of what the war cost him and his family and what the Union army had done to him personally.[4] So close was Lee with the family of John A. Washington III that in 1868 his daughter Louisa inquired as to Robert E. Lee’s preference on the text for the grave marker of her late father. Lee explained that he preferred simple descriptions and language on the monument. Lee suggested the inscription: “It is honorable and glorious to die for our Country.” But, he also cautioned that “In the present state of affairs it would not be well I think to state more particularly his devotion and sacrifice to his State.”[5]

At least for a period, Lee’s sustaining motives were fueled by avenging the death of an obviously beloved friend and family member. Clearly, the death of his prominent friend lingered with Lee, as he kept the final letter of his friend with him in the command tent among his personal papers during the entire war. Loss of a soldier under confusion or shrouded circumstances inflamed the anger of both Union and Confederate commanders. This was especially true when alleged bushwhackers might have been the culprits. In this case, it was likely a picket line that the party stumbled upon. The suddenness of losing a friend in such a way could shake even the carefully comported like R.E. Lee. As scholars examine the individual motives of officers and enlisted soldiers on campaign during the Civil War, using the wider lens of compounded personal loss to understand the conditions of the battlefield is another question that is worth raising consistently.

 

[1] James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943); Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952); Peter S. Carmichael, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

[2] R.E. Lee to Edward Turner, September 14, 1861, “Robert E. Lee letters on death of John Augustine Washington III and follow-up letters to Louisa A. Washington,” Manuscript Collections, James G. Leyburn Library Special Collections and Archives, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia (hereafter WLU); Douglas Southall Freeman, R.E. Lee (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), 1:489, 530, 541, 554-555, 568-569, 574, 639-640.

[3] Ibid.

[4] R. E. Lee to Louisa Washington, August 31, 1865(?), “Robert E. Lee letters on death of John Augustine Washington III and follow-up letters to Louisa A. Washington,” WLU.

[5] R. E. Lee to Louisa Washington, December 11, 1868, “Robert E. Lee letters on death of John Augustine Washington III and follow-up letters to Louisa A. Washington,” WLU.

 

Barton A. Myers

Barton A. Myers is Class of 1960 Professor of Ethics and History and Associate Professor of Civil War History at Washington and Lee University and the author of the awarding winning _Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861-1865_ (LSU Press, 2009), _Rebels Against the Confederacy: North Carolina’s Unionists_ (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014), and co-editor with Brian D. McKnight of _The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War_ (LSU Press, 2017).

Secession and Slavery in Great Britain II: John Lothrop Motley and the Causes of the Civil War in The Times of London

Secession and Slavery in Great Britain II: John Lothrop Motley and the Causes of the Civil War in The Times of London

By | | Comments 1 comment

To read Part I of my analysis of this debate, click here. Part I discusses two articles by Cassius Clay, an antislavery Kentuckian and U.S. Minister to the Russian court, and Edwin DeLeon, a secessionist and former U.S. minister to Egypt.

British neutrality inspired Clay and DeLeon to present their section’s reasoning to gain British support. Sandwiched between their articles on Thursday and Friday, May 23 and 24, 1861, was a third letter by well-known historian John Lothrop Motley, the future minister of the Lincoln administration to Vienna. Like Clay and DeLeon, Motley geared his appeal to the British people and based it on his many connections in British society, so Motley’s voice should have carried much weight. Motley also hoped he could change British policy with regard to the United States. However, a number of Motley’s arguments were designed for the United States, where his editorial was eventually published in pamphlet form, and he overlooked serious British concerns with regard to the Lincoln administration’s policies. Motley’s letter illustrates how focusing on upper-class opinions could undermine arguments, and even more, the importance of understanding the desire for official statements instead of opinions by private individuals. Nevertheless, Motley’s arguments highlight the issues of importance in May 1861 for the British.

Focused on legality, Motley started with a distinction between the de facto and de jure situations in the United States. De facto secession had occurred; the conflict in North America had become a war, and the United States would survive or die as the “great Republic.” However, de jure secession was illegal, according to Motley. He described the insult to the national flag at Fort Sumter and expressed fear that the same fate could happen in Washington. Motley laid out a lengthy and complicated legal argument against secession, making clear that the United States was “not a Confederation, not a compact of Sovereign States, not a copartnership, it [was] a Commonwealth” with a constitution that acted as fundamental and organic law. The United States had abandoned the state of chaos with the Constitution, an argument designed for readers in the United States and not Great Britain.[1]

John Lothrop Motley by John Sartain, engraver, and Trow and Co Leavitt, 1861. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Dismissing the Articles of Confederation period where the country was a “league of petty sovereigns,” Motley noted that the Constitution “was ordained and established” by a power superior to the states: the people. He ridiculed the idea of state sovereignty as a constitutional right. Continuing to deride state power, Motley stressed that “the name of no state is mentioned in the” Constitution; rather, the states “receive commands.” He reinvigorated his point later in the letter by stressing that the president “knows nothing of states;” rather “he deals with individuals.” The power of states did not exceed those of the federal government and secession was not a state’s right. While British readers were familiar with states’ rights arguments, they likely had a mixed reaction to majority rule and democracy.

At the same time, complicating his impact in Great Britain, Motley upheld the right to revolution and the people’s obligation to rebel against oppression. He referenced Daniel Webster, who granted the right to secession as a revolutionary act but denounced the right to secede under the Constitution. According to Motley, Webster called it “an absurdity, for it supposes resistance to government under the authority of government itself; it supposes dismemberment without violating the principles of Union; . . . it supposes the total overthrow of government without revolution.” Unfortunately, Motley presented a confused response to secession. He ridiculed Southern states’ claims to a right of secession as revolution, but simultaneously called it revolution. British readers, including those concerned with recent events in 1848, might not look as favorably on the right to revolution as the New England patrician.[2]

Aware of his British audience, Motley expanded on Clay’s Scotland-England analogy. He too argued that Scotland could not secede from England. Nevertheless, he hypothesized that if Scotland seceded, seized British property and public treasure, organized an army, requested foreign recognition, and preyed on British commerce with pirates protected by the Scottish flag, would Great Britain not protect its nation’s honor? While this appeal provided a more elaborate set of similarities to the secession crisis in the United States, Motley likely fared little better than Clay.[3]

In contrast to Clay and DeLeon, Motley paid close attention to the Morrill Tariff, which significantly angered British free traders. The Morrill Tariff, passed by Congress in February 1861, doubled import duties. British politicians, especially those who stood for free trade, looked with concern at this change. John Bright and Richard Cobden, who were two of the most loyal supporters of the Union, were outraged by the new tariff.[4] Motley called the Morrill Tariff “absurd” and noted that secession had nothing to do with the tariff since the South had seceded under “the moderate tariff of 1857.” He believed that protective tariffs were unnecessary since U.S. manufacturers could prevail in the domestic market over European products. He assured British readers that modifications would soon lower the Morrill Tariff, maybe as soon as the emergency Congressional session in July, but he did not indicate how, since Republicans had solidified their majority in Congress.[5] Motley understood potential negative impacts of the Morrill Tariff, but his attempt to minimize its implications provided little solace for British free-trade thinkers.

Title page of the pamphlet version of Motley’s letters.

To convince British readers about the benefits of supporting the United States, Motley needed an appealing subject, such as British fears of Southern slavery’s expansion. He argued that a united Confederacy would turn into a “new and expensive military empire.” To raise revenue and protect an infant industry, the Southern Confederacy would charge high tariffs. Building on British fears, Motley asserted that the Confederacy might create a cotton-based Gulf empire and reestablish the African slave trade, a reminder of the many southern-sponsored filibusters. Unfortunately, Motley did not fully develop this idea, failing to strike a moral chord with the British without defying Lincoln’s domestic policy.[6]

Like Lincoln, Motley largely avoided slavery, but he argued that Southerners had seceded to prevent an attack on their lifestyle and their human property. Aware of British assumptions that slaveholders represented an aristocracy, Motley called them “a privileged oligarchy.”. Motley noted that the federal government had enacted a fugitive slave law and land purchases in the last two decades added slave territory. After insisting that the small number of abolitionists rendered the debate harmless, Motley clarified that the Republican Party’s platform only opposed slavery’s expansion into new territories, not slavery itself. For Motley, there was no compromise if slavery was extended; “compromise will no longer be offered by peace conventions, in which slavery is to be made national.”[7] Trade and slavery appealed to the British but were only a side note in Motley’s letter.

Like Clay and DeLeon, Motley explained to his British audience the causes behind secession and the war. Being well acquainted with member of the British upper strata, Motley should have been well aware of their assumption and views about the United States. However, overall, his argument was geared just as much toward a U.S. audience as a British audience. Avoiding the issue of slavery, just like the Lincoln administration, only helped to confuse British political leaders and increase their desire to await events, even turning some toward the Confederacy. Motley’s contribution during the early stages of the struggle illustrates, just as Clay and DeLeon’s did, the importance of public diplomacy. It also urges historians to be cautious since the well-connected Motley did not have the desired impact, forcing us to carefully consider both the impact of U.S. opinion makers and British attitudes about the United States.

 

 

[1] John L. Motley, The Causes of the American Civil War: A Letter to the London Times (London: Cox and Wyman, 1861), 5-7.

[2] Ibid., 13-14.

[3] Ibid., 17-19.

[4] Richard J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 21; Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century 1815-1915: A Study of Empire and Expansion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 21, 30-31, 109-110.

[5] Motley, Causes of the American Civil War, 20-21.

[6] Ibid., 27-28.

[7] Ibid., 29.

Niels Eichhorn

holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Arkansas and has taught history courses at Middle Georgia State University and Central Georgia Technical College. He has published Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019) and Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently working with Duncan Campbell on The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism. He has published articles on Civil War diplomacy in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History. You can find more information on his personal website, and he can be contacted at eichhorn.niels@gmail.com.

The Contours of Settler Colonialism in Civil War Pension Files

The Contours of Settler Colonialism in Civil War Pension Files

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Today we share our first post from our new correspondent, Dr. Michelle Cassidy, an assistant professor of history at Central Michigan University. Her current research emphasizes the importance of American Indian military service to discussions of race and citizenship during the Civil War era. Drop a note in the comments below and welcome her to the Muster team!

Private Peter South was part of Company K of the First Michigan Sharpshooters, known by contemporaries as “the Indian Company.”[1] In June of 1864, Confederate soldiers captured South near Petersburg, Virginia. Six months later, South died due to scurvy while a prisoner at Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia. His mother, Lucy Kamiskwasigay, applied for a pension soon after her son’s death. Other Anishinaabe (Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi) individuals tried to help Kamiskwasigay receive a pension.[2] For example, in May of 1868, Joseph Wakazoo testified in support of his late comrade’s mother: “Her son Peter, had he lived and discharged a son’s part, would have supported her in old age, but he gave his life to his country….” Wakazoo pleaded on behalf of Kamiskwasigay: “All her property—except a piece of land granted to her by the Indian Department, + which she has no right to sell, or means to improve—would not sell for over fifty dollars, and that amount would not pay her debt, contracted on the sure belief that the United States Gov. would redeem its pledge by granting her, in common with others, a pension.”[3]

Wakazoo made many claims on the government in his brief deposition. He appealed, like many veterans, to the government’s “pledge” to support Union soldiers and their families. By mentioning Kamiskwasigay’s allotment—”a piece of land granted to her by the Indian Department”—he also noted her Indian identity and status. Wakazoo emphasized that this Anishinaabe mother should “get her just due” from the government.[4] Kamiskwasigay was awarded a pension in 1869.[5]

Caption: Kamiskwasigay lived about two miles from the south shore of Little Traverse Bay, near Bear River (Petoskey, Michigan). Henry Francis Walling, ed., Atlas of the state of Michigan: including statistics and descriptions of its topography, hydrography, climate, natural and civil history, railways, educational institutions, material resources, etc. (Detroit, MI: R.M. & S.T. Tackabury, 1873), 51. Courtesy of Michigan County Histories and Atlases.

The pension claim of Private South’s mother tells a familiar story, illuminating how a network of South’s former comrades and community members worked to help his mother receive a pension for a dependent parent. Kamiskwasigay’s pension application also tells a story of Indigenous soldiers and their families that is not as familiar to Civil War audiences, especially undergraduate students. Peter South was one of the approximately twenty-thousand American Indians who served in Union and Confederate forces during the Civil War.[6]

The experiences of Indigenous veterans and their families demonstrate intersections between the Civil War and settler colonialism in a way that is accessible to students. Susannah Ural, in her March 2019 Muster post, notes that student research on the experiences of Civil War veterans and their families helps students gain a better understanding of complex topics and issues.[7] I encourage students to consider the concept of settler colonialism. While colonialism is often characterized by the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, settler colonialism requires the removal of Indigenous people in order for settlers to permanently occupy the land. The logic of settler colonialism in the nineteenth century demanded that American Indians disappear through physical removal or cultural and political assimilation.[8] My students discuss how settler colonialism applies to the history of the nineteenth-century United States and how to use it as an analytical framework for understanding primary sources.[9]

The narratives found in American Indian pension files help deconstruct the concept of settler colonialism while encouraging students to think about what settler colonialism actually meant for American Indians—individuals, families, communities, and tribes. Depositions in support of Kamiskwasigay’s pension application hint at the results of treaties. The Treaty with the Ottawa and Chippewa, negotiated in Detroit in 1855, reserved tracts of land for the Anishinaabek and detailed a process for the allotment of Indigenous land into eighty- and forty-acre lots.[10] From the perspective of the federal and the state governments, allotment in the 1855 treaty, like the large-scale allotment of Indigenous land in the later Dawes Act, was meant to encourage American Indians, especially men, to become individual, landholding farmers. The idea behind allotment was to discourage and restrict seasonal subsistence strategies based on a combination of hunting, fishing, gathering, and agriculture. In the logic of settler colonialism, transforming the Anishinaabek into individual landholding farmers would mean the Anishinaabek required less land, which opened the possibility that Anishinaabe land could be sold by these individual landholders in the future. Wakazoo’s 1868 testimony suggests that Kamiskwasigay had an allotment connected to the 1855 treaty. American Indian pension files underscore that some Civil War veterans and their families were dealing with multiple branches of the Department of the Interior—both the Bureau of Pensions and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Description of a mother’s pension application, 1862. Courtesy of the National Archives.

Kamiskwasigay’s story demonstrates the effects of both the Civil War and settler colonialism on her life—the loss of her son and her ability to support herself related to disputes over reserved land, the allotment process, and land title. Individual stories help students gain a better understanding of settler colonialism during the Civil War era. Through the pension application process, American Indians appealed to the federal government for resources based on their identities as veterans (or veterans’ family members), while at the same time working to remain on or near parts of their homelands.

By including stories like Lucy Kamiskwasigay’s in discussions of Civil War veterans and their families, we gain a better understanding of the ramifications of the Civil War for multiple groups of people. The pension process, seen from the perspective of American Indian veterans, demonstrates a need to consider the effects of settler colonialism. In general, veterans complained of skeptical bureaucrats who orchestrated invasive questions and medical exams during the application process, especially if a special examiner was sent to question neighbors and the pension applicant.[11] For Indigenous veterans, invasive questioning seemed threatening due to multiple circumstances. In reports concerning two Company K veterans, for instance, the special examiner noted that many of the Anishinaabek he tried to interview refused ”to talk to a stranger because they have been so persistently and shamefully defrauded by the whites that they think any time a white stranger enters into conversation with them it is for the purpose of gaining information that will bring them trouble or deprive them of their property in future.”[12] Pension examinations coincided with Anishinaabe struggles to gain clear title to their lands, as well as land fraud committed by speculators who obtained deeds through deception. The Anishinaabek were wary of strangers, questions, and paperwork. Their wariness, compared to their white comrades, had an additional layer determined by their Anishinaabe identities and dealings with white government officials.

Pension cases that introduce students to the post-war experiences of American Indian veterans are also important to consider in comparison to other veterans’ experiences. Considering African American and American Indian pension files in juxtaposition can help students understand how constructed racial hierarchies and nineteenth-century conceptions of “savagery” and “civilization” affected veterans’ experiences and the pension application process. Furthermore, pension files are replete with stories of white settlers. Considering American Indian veterans next to their Euro-American counterparts, and reading pension files through the analytical framework of settler colonialism, helps students understand Euro-American pension files in new ways. In addition, Lucy Kamiskwasigay’s pension application is a reminder that, while the majority of Indigenous peoples lived west of the Mississippi River after the Civil War, there were also Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi who were negotiating settler colonial policies.

 

[1] “The Michigan Sharpshooters,” Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, September 5, 1864, 4.

[2] Louis Miskoguon, September 1, 1865, in Civil War Pension File of Lucy Kamiskwasigay (mother of Peter South), RG 15, National Archives, Washington D.C., and Compiled Service Record of Peter South, Civil War, Company K, First Michigan Sharpshooters, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, RG 94, National Archives.

[3] Joseph Wakazoo and Aug. Otawa [Augustus Ottawa], May 15, 1868, in Civil War Pension File of Lucy Kamiskwasigay, NARA.

[4] Joseph Wakazoo and Aug. Otawa, May 15, 1868, in Civil War Pension File of Lucy Kamiskwasigay, NARA.

[5] Pension File of Lucy Kamiskwasigay. Kamiskwasigay is also discussed in Michelle Cassidy, “‘Both the Honor and the Profit’: Anishinaabe Warriors, Soldiers, and Veterans from Pontiac’s War through the Civil War,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2016), 285-286.

[6] Laurence M. Hauptman, “Introduction,” in American Indians and the Civil War, ed. Robert K. Sutton and John A. Latschar (Fort Washington, PA: Eastern National, 2013), 11.

[7] Susannah Ural, “Teaching the American Civil War through the Experiences of Civil War Veterans,” Muster, March 26, 2019, accessed June 17, 2019, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2019/03/teaching-the-american-civil-war-through-the-experiences-of-civil-war-veterans/.

[8] For definitions of settler colonialism, see, for example, Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4-6; Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, and Legacies (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 2-4, and Nancy Shoemaker, “A Typology of Colonialism,” Perspectives of History (October 2015), 29-30.

[9] For more teaching ideas related to settler colonialism and the Civil War, see Cate Denial, “A Different View of the U.S. Civil War” Cate Denial Blog, May 23, 2019, accessed June 17, 2019, https://catherinedenial.org/blog/uncategorized/a-different-view-of-the-u-s-civil-war/.

[10] Treaty with the Ottawa and Chippewa, 1855, in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties vol. II, ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 725-731.

[11] Brian Matthew Jordan, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2014), 151-169.

[12] Special Examiner R.P. Fletcher to the Commissioner of Pensions, May 1887, Civil War Pension File of Leon Otashquabono, NARA.

Michelle Cassidy

Michelle Cassidy is assistant professor of history at Central Michigan University. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan in 2016. Her current project emphasizes the importance of American Indian military service to discussions of race and citizenship during the Civil War era. She has presented her research at numerous conferences and has published an article in the Michigan Historical Review.

Secession and Slavery in Great Britain: Cassius Clay and Edwin DeLeon debate in The Times of London

Secession and Slavery in Great Britain: Cassius Clay and Edwin DeLeon debate in The Times of London

By | | Comments 1 comment

On May 13, 1861, Queen Victoria announced Great Britain’s neutrality in the Civil War, which raised Southern hopes of recognition and Northern fears of the same. The Queen’s proclamation and public reaction to the outbreak of hostilities were the result of long-standing assumptions about the sectional division in the United States.[1] Aware of British attitudes about the political system, slavery and abolition, and the geographic differences in the United States, private individuals determined to explain to British readers the causes of the rebellion, attract British sympathy and support, and hopefully alter the course of the war in their section’s favor.

One week after the announcement of British neutrality, in London’s newspaper The Times, northern and southern writers debated the reasons for secession and war and laid out arguments for why Great Britain should support their section. On Monday, May 20, 1861, The Times published a letter by the anti-slavery Kentuckian and new U.S. Minister to the Russian court, Cassius M. Clay, and on Saturday, May 25, 1861, Edwin DeLeon, a secessionist and former U.S. minister to Egypt, provided a southern counterargument. Clay and DeLeon eloquently defended their respective sections with arguments designed for a British audience and to solicit British support. They utilized arguments to fit their audience’s expectations and perceptions. These two installments of the debate in The Times (a future post will deal with the third one by John L. Motley) illustrate how public diplomacy played out in the British newspapers as individuals from the two belligerents tried to win European support.

Cassius Clay. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In the first letter, Clay addressed the causes of secession, explaining that the Union fought for its national integrity and the principle of liberty. He wrote that “the so-called ‘Confederate States of America’ rebel against us—against our nationality and against all the principles of its structure.”[2] According to Clay, secession violently split the nation into separate independent entities and was treason. Based on the Constitution, Clay dismissed the Southern claim to state sovereignty. He reminded his readers that the Constitution had taken independence away from the states and bestowed sovereignty in the people. He directly tackled states’ rights in order to undermine secessionist arguments and address British assumptions about the United States.

Aware of British perceptions of the sectional tensions in the United States, Clay contended that the Southern states could “no more ‘secede’ from the Union than Scotland or Ireland can secede from England.” Despite potential shortfalls, Clay’s analogy was a well-intended device to illustrate the conflict’s dilemma to the British public. Even more, Clay felt the need to remind the British public about the southern slaveholding aristocracy.

Shifting to slavery as an issue, Clay accused slaveholder of a “despotic rule” aimed at subjugating the “white races of all nations.” Slaveholders favored restricting the freedom of speech and press to protect their own interests and used the “terrorism of ‘Lynch law’” to accomplish their goals. In addition, Clay argued that slaveholders saw only one solution to the conflict between capital and labor, and that was for capital to own labor, an implicit appeal to the British working classes.

However, Clay was not only interested in explaining causation; he wanted to obtain British support and asked “Where should British honour place her in this contest?” He reminded his readers that the North was Great Britain’s honest friend as the two protected democracy, Great Britain in Europe and the Union in North America. Furthermore, he wondered whether Confederate independence would indicate that Great Britain was wrong about abolishing slavery, getting to the very heart of Britain’s moral foreign policy. Finally, Clay reminded readers that the United States was Great Britain best customer, downplaying the impact of the highly controversial, recently passed Morrill Tariff.

In his effort to gain British support, Clay not only appealed to public sentiment, but he also unnecessarily threatened the possibility of a future war if Great Britain did not support the Union. Clay explained that the Union would easily subdue but not subjugate the revolting states. With 20 million “homogeneous people” against the South’s 8,907,894 whites and about 4 million slaves, Clay assumed the war would be over after one year. He warned at the end of his letter, pointing to the rapid growth in population, correctly estimating that it would reach 100 million in the next fifty years, “Is England so secure in the future against home revolt or foreign ambition as to venture, now in our need, to plant the seeds of revenge in all our future!” He concluded that Great Britain would be wise to join forces with its natural ally, the North. Clay presented an argument based on his personal experiences and commonly held opinions; however, he geared his arguments toward a British audience to appeal to their understanding of the United States in order to gain support.

Edwin DeLeon in Thomas Cooper DeLeon, Belles, Beaux, and Brains of the 60’s (New York G. W. Dillingham Company, 1909), 411.

Countering the Kentuckian’s argument, DeLeon laid out his own case using his understanding of British opinions. First, DeLeon accused Clay of drawing “upon his imagination for his facts and figures,”[3] claiming that another three states (the border states) would soon join the eleven seceded states. In contrast to Clay, De Leon claimed that the seceded states contain a homogeneous population without a large Unionist element. Even more, the firing on Fort Sumter had increased southern resilience. He played directly into British assumptions that ethnic cohesion existed in the southern section of the country.

Aware of Clay’s England-Scotland analogy, DeLeon dismissively called it “absurd.” In contrast to the hypothetical departure of Scotland, sovereign states had seceded from a federal union. DeLeon corrected that the people in the Southern states “through States’ Conventions specially called for the purpose, have initiated and adopted the ordinances of secession” just like states had ratified the constitution originally. DeLeon’s legal defense of secession illustrated a nuanced understanding of U.S. history and appeal to British audiences.

Angry with Clay turning against his native home, DeLeon wrote, “Mr. Clay should know that we regard as ‘doubly traitors’ those who, born and bred on Southern soil, not only desert but defame their Southern brethren, in arms against a worse than Austrian despotism.” With that, the Southern internal debate had crossed the Atlantic and was verbally continued in The Times.

DeLeon probably knew that such accusations would not help him convince his European audience; therefore, he needed to remind the British about their hatred for U.S. expansionism. Using Clay’s language, DeLeon argued that such words would fit “the taste of North-western stump speakers.” However, it would not do with people in Great Britain as it would cause them “to smile at such a specimen of ‘Spread Eagle-ism,’” which was a direct reference to expansionism. By stressing both Clay’s vulgarity and expansionism, DeLeon raised concerns about the future of British imperial and commercial interests.

After dismissing slavery as a cause of secession and denying the North’s right to subdue the South, DeLeon arose long-standing British fears of popular revolution, especially the French Revolution. Reminding the British of the French Revolution and the upheaval and despotism it caused, DeLeon drew a parallel to the events in the United States:

The old watchword of the Jacobins in France’s darkest day of blood and tears, ‘Fraternité, ou la mort’ (‘Be my brother, or I will kill you!’), is now the rallying cry of the ‘free North,’ not of the South, who stands with drawn sword beside her own altars, is that a watchword to enlist the sympathies or stir the pulses of free-born Englishmen when a new reign of terror is sought to be inaugurated, once more under the desecrated name of liberty, over the smiling and happy homes of the sunny South?

Playing on the fear of a reign of terror may have helped DeLeon scare British readers who preferred stability over chaos. Having dismissed all of Clay’s arguments, DeLeon contended that the British government should extend recognition to the Confederate States.

The discussion between Clay and DeLeon in The Times in May 1861 provided British readers an insight into the emerging conflict in the United States. However, the two authors geared their arguments to address British assumptions about the United States, including sectional division, slavery, and politics. Besides explaining the reasons for the conflict in a way understandable to their British audience, Clay and DeLeon used their letters to also ask for support. Both authors engaged in public diplomacy, but made an effort to understand British assumptions and shroud their appeal in understandable language. They failed to recognize Britain’s uncertainty about the causes of the conflict based on the official statements coming from Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. The two letters offer a glimpse into the importance of understanding both the unofficial diplomatic efforts by private individuals and the need to understand British public opinions about the United States, to understand why Britain remained neutral throughout the conflict.

Part II of this post has now been published here.

 

[1] Peter Connor, American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832-1863 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017).

[2] Cassius M. Clay, “To the Editor of the Times,” Times (London), May 20, 1861.

[3] Edwin De Leon, “The Civil War in America,” Times (London), May 25, 1861.

Niels Eichhorn

holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Arkansas and has taught history courses at Middle Georgia State University and Central Georgia Technical College. He has published Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019) and Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently working with Duncan Campbell on The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism. He has published articles on Civil War diplomacy in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History. You can find more information on his personal website, and he can be contacted at eichhorn.niels@gmail.com.

A Historian for Troubled Times: James Parton, Andrew Jackson, and the Secession Winter

A Historian for Troubled Times: James Parton, Andrew Jackson, and the Secession Winter

By | | Comments 2 comments

The cry echoed throughout the crisis which followed Abraham Lincoln’s election: “Oh, for an hour of Jackson!” It crossed party and even sectional lines, linking dyed-in-the-wool Democrats to rock-ribbed Republicans, and indignant northerners to anxious southern dissenters. As they scorned lame-duck James Buchanan and awaited his untested successor, many Unionists recalled Andrew Jackson’s unbending defense of federal authority during the Nullification Crisis (1832-1833) and pined for his return.[1]

Appeals to Jackson came from all quarters, as diverse Americans claimed Old Hickory as their own.[2] Buchanan cited Jackson’s example in his December 3, 1860, message to Congress, in which he denied that states could secede and then insisted that the federal government could not stop them.[3] Frustrated by Buchanan’s timidity, northern Democrats swore that Jackson would have nipped secession in the bud. “O! that we had such a man as Jackson at the helm of state,” one lamented to Stephen A. Douglas. “Then the dangerous rock of secession would have been foreseen afar off–and completely avoided.”[4] Republicans also lauded Jackson, notwithstanding his partisan affiliation, and urged Lincoln to take a Jacksonian stand against secession.[5] Lincoln heeded their advice, studying Jackson’s anti-Nullification proclamation of December 1832, and promising an anxious visitor that he would not “yield an inch” in the coming showdown.[6]

These sentiments required little prompting. Jackson loomed in living memory long after his passing in 1845, not least because Democrats celebrated his victory at the Battle of New Orleans every January. The parallels between Nullification and secession, moreover, were obvious to critics who blamed both problems on South Carolina planters’ determination to rule the country or ruin it. A closer look at invocations of Jackson, however, suggests that contemporary scholarship primed Americans to find Jacksonian precedents for their own tumultuous times. The first professional biography of Jackson serendipitously appeared in print amid the escalating crisis of 1860, providing readers and pundits with a historical lens through which to view current events. Historians, take note: a well-written and well-timed piece of scholarship can influence popular opinion.

Frontispiece to James Parton, Triumphs of Enterprise, Ingenuity, and Public Spirit (New York: Virtue & Yorston, 1872). Born in England and raised primarily in the United States, James Parton was among the leading biographers of the mid-nineteenth century.

Life of Andrew Jackson, published in three volumes by Mason Brothers of New York City in 1859 and 1860, was written by James Parton. Born in England in 1822, Parton moved to the United States in 1827, a year before Jackson’s election to the presidency. Parton’s endeavors ranged widely, from teaching to editing, but he made his mark as a pioneering biographer. His lives of Horace Greeley and Aaron Burr appeared in the mid-1850s to widespread acclaim, and he would later publish books on Benjamin Butler, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Voltaire. He is best known, however, for his three hefty tomes on Andrew Jackson. Parton commenced the project in 1857, scouring bookstores and libraries for several years before embarking on a long tour of Washington, D.C., and the South in 1859, during which he interviewed Francis P. Blair, Roger Taney, and others who had been close to the seventh president. Working at a remarkable pace, Parton finished the first volume in late 1859 and churned out the second and third the following year.[7]

The sprawling study was widely hailed as a masterpiece. “Seldom has a biography been able to excite a furore,” remarked a Tennessee editor, who appreciated the first volume’s appeal to learned and popular audiences alike. Marveling at Parton’s meticulous research and vivid style, many reviewers quoted the New York Home Journal’s appraisal: “It is as romantic as a mediaeval romance, and yet has the advantage of being true.”[8] Initially, these endorsements came from all corners of the divided country. Readers from Mississippi to New York lauded the first two volumes with equal enthusiasm, and editors nationwide eagerly reprinted extracts recounting colorful episodes of Jackson’s life, including his duel with Charles Dickinson and his triumph at New Orleans.[9]

When the third volume appeared in fall 1860, however, Unionists embraced it as a political weapon. Escalating tension over the presidential contest and secession shaped their reception of the final installment, which covered Jackson’s presidency and included three chapters on Nullification. Parton invited such a reading when he reflected on Jackson’s acceptance of the compromise tariff bill which ended the standoff with South Carolina: “The time may come,” he mused, “when the people of the United States will wish he had vetoed it, and thus brought to an issue, and settled finally, a question which, at some future day, may assume more awkward dimensions, and the country have no Jackson to meet it.”[10] For Unionists, the lesson was clear: another national hero must finish what Old Hickory had started.

Reviewers and advertisers promoted Parton’s work by explicitly connecting it to current events. Writing one week before South Carolina seceded, a Washington editor commended Parton’s coverage of “President Jackson’s war upon the nullifiers,” opining that it provided “much good reading for the present day.”[11] A month later, an English reviewer predicted that recent developments would boost Parton’s readership, since “Andrew Jackson is the only President who has ever had to deal with a crisis” comparable to “that which is now straining the powers of President Buchanan.”[12]

Advertisement from (Washington, D.C.) National Republican, January 25, 1861. With war on the horizon, readers eagerly snapped up tactical manuals and other volumes on military science. Tellingly, booksellers regarded Parton’s Life of Jackson as another likely top seller during the escalating crisis. Courtesy of Chronicling America.

Parton’s account of Jackson’s unbending defense of national unity and federal authority, coupled with his commentary on the issues left unsettled in 1833, armed opinion-makers with potent arguments. Unionists who were tired of Buchanan’s vacillations and hoped that Lincoln would stand firm cited Parton’s analysis of the Nullification crisis. A widely reprinted article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, for instance, quoted Parton at length to show that secession was “incompatible with the fundamental idea and main object of the Constitution.”[13] Scenes from Jackson’s final weeks thrilled Unionists, who readily quoted Jackson’s deathbed declaration that he would have hanged the Nullifiers as “high as Haman” if they had not given way.[14]

It was an advertisement, however, which most pointedly exhibited the value of Parton’s work for Unionists in 1861. That January, booksellers French & Richstein in Washington, D.C. announced that their store at 278 Pennsylvania Avenue carried a number of important “Books for the Times.” Aware that Unionists were girding for war, they had stocked up on Hardee’s Tactics, Jomini’s Art of War, the Military Laws of the United States, and other martial tomes. Listed at the head of this militaristic catalogue was Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson, a must-read for Unionists steeling themselves for a showdown with Carolina hotspurs.

The Civil War soon swelled to such cataclysmic proportions that the Nullification Crisis now appears as a mere prelude. But in the uncertain and anxious days of late 1860 and early 1861, as Americans scrambled to find historical precedents for their turbulent times, James Parton’s study of Andrew Jackson fortified Unionists for the great task that lay before them.

 

[1] James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 249 (quotation); Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 126-129.

[2] Aaron Scott Crawford, “Patriot Slaveholder: Andrew Jackson and the Winter of Secession,” Journal of East Tennessee History 82 (2010): 10-32.

[3] James Buchanan, “Fourth Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union,” American Presidency Project, accessed April 18, 2019, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fourth-annual-message-congress-the-state-the-union.

[4] Mills S. Reeves to Stephen A. Douglas, February 18, 1861, Box 39, Folder 3, in Stephen A. Douglas Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago.

[5] Robert J. Cook, “The Shadow of the Past: Collective Memory and the Coming of the American Civil War,” in Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 82-84.

[6] Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860-1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 256.

[7] Milton E. Flower, James Parton: The Father of Modern Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1951).

[8] “Life of Andrew Jackson,” Clarksville (TN) Chronicle, January 6, 1860.

[9] “Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson,” Ripley (MS) Advertiser, February 22, 1860; “Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson,” New York Daily Tribune, January 25, 1860; “General Jackson’s Duel with Dickinson,” Shasta (CA) Courier, April 14, 1860; “Gen. Jackson at New Orleans,” Emporia (KS) News, May 19, 1860.

[10] James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 3 vols. (New York: Mason Brothers, 1859-1860), III, 481-482.

[11] (Washington, DC) Evening Star, December 13, 1860.

[12] “Literature,” The Athenaeum, no. 1734 (January 19, 1861), 75.

[13] Reprinted as “Secession in 1832,” Sunbury (PA) American, December 1, 1860.

[14] “Jackson and the Nullifiers,” (Marysville, CA) Daily National Democrat, January 4, 1861.

Michael E. Woods

Michael E. Woods is Associate Professor of History at University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is the author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (Routledge, 2016) and Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, 2014), which received the 2015 James A. Rawley Award from the Southern Historical Association. His most recent book is entitled Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy (North Carolina, 2020).

The Contested Memories of General Nathaniel Lyon in St. Louis

The Contested Memories of General Nathaniel Lyon in St. Louis

By | | Comments 15 comments

The removal of a Confederate monument from its original dedication spot in Forest Park almost two years ago aroused a great deal of controversy among St. Louis residents. Like the debates taking place in other cities that have Confederate iconography, supporters praised the removal of a monument they considered to be offensive and historically inaccurate. Meanwhile, protestors claimed that the removal constituted an erasure of history. If anything, they saw this action as a precursor to the erasure of other historic figures honored in the city, such as Thomas Jefferson and Charles Lindbergh.[1] What many commentators missed in the discussion, however, was that the “Memorial to the Confederate Dead” was not the first public monument in St. Louis to be removed from its original dedication spot. That distinction belongs to a monument honoring Union General Nathaniel Lyon that was relocated in 1960. Analyzing why this monument aroused so much controversy can lead to important insights not just about Civil War memory in St. Louis, but also the fungible nature of public commemoration.

The Nathaniel Lyon statue is currently located at Lyon Park. Notice that the monument’s text has been removed. Courtesy of the author.

In February 1861, the U.S. Army sent Nathaniel Lyon to St. Louis amid a growing session crisis in the city. Missouri Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson was sympathetic to the Confederacy and tried to find a covert way to take the state out of the Union. Claiming his authority as Governor, Jackson sent a force of Missouri State Militia under the command of Brigadier General Daniel Frost to the federal arsenal at St. Louis. They established an encampment named “Camp Jackson.” Fearing that the State Militia would confiscate the arsenal and take Missouri into the Confederacy, Lyon led a force of U.S. troops to Camp Jackson to arrest Frost and his soldiers. As Frost’s men were led through the streets of St. Louis on their way to be paroled, shots fired out between protestors and Lyon’s troops. Amid the chaos, more than two dozen people died in what has since been called the “Camp Jackson Massacre.” A little over a month later, Lyon and Congressman Frank Blair met with Governor Jackson and former Governor Sterling Price at the popular Planter’s House Hotel to discuss Missouri’s future. Lyon reportedly said during the meeting that “rather than concede to the State of Missouri for one single instant the right to dictate to my Government in any matter however unimportant, I would see you, and you, and you, and every man, woman, and child in the State, dead and buried. This means war.” When Lyon became the first U.S. General to be killed while leading troops at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek on August 10, he became a martyr for the Unionist cause and was seen by supporters as the savior of St. Louis.[2]

Union Civil War veterans in the city who were active in the Grand Army of the Republic began calling for a monument honoring General Lyon in 1927. Over the next two years they raised 15,000 dollars and hired the Swiss-born sculptor Erhardt Siebert to design the monument, which would be located at the original Camp Jackson site at Grand and Pine streets. Siebert, however, faced criticism even before the official unveiling on December 22, 1929. Numerous artists who saw the monument criticized several aspects of the overall design. Lyon’s horse looked small, weak, and sick; Lyon himself appeared to be falling off the monument, and perhaps worst of all, Lyon’s first name was incorrectly spelled as “Nathanial.” Edmund H. Wuerpel, Director of Fine Arts at Washington University—St. Louis, declared that “it would be a kindness to the city and its inhabitants if this latest creation should be withdrawn permanently from the public gaze.” Mayor Victor Miller asserted defensively that nobody was forcing residents to look at the monument. The criticism was so strong, however, that Miller agreed to establish a city art commission to review future proposals for public monuments.[3]

For the next twenty-five years, St. Louis residents debated the merits of keeping what was by all accounts an ugly monument. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch pleaded for a wealthy philanthropist to purchase and remove the monument as an act of kindness to the city. They also sarcastically argued that the space would be better suited to function as a parking lot. When President Franklin Roosevelt suggested in 1942 that some historical monuments should be turned into scrap metal to support the U.S. military effort in World War II, the paper eagerly volunteered the Lyon statue for destruction. The monument remained untouched, but Parks Commissioner Palmer Baumes offered a lukewarm defense of the monument and said he would have allowed for its removal if city leaders had wanted it.[4]

Students at Saint Louis University made the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch when they raised a Confederate flag near the Nathaniel Lyon statue in 1952. Courtesy of Proquest Historical Newspapers.

While many of these critiques centered around the monument’s poor aesthetics, Lyon’s presence as a figure within the St. Louis commemorative landscape was always contested. Residents who were sympathetic to the actions of Jackson and Frost considered Lyon an overzealous fanatic. He was, as one biographer describes it, a “Damn Yankee” who represented the worst dictatorial impulses of the Lincoln administration. Perhaps most notably, a group of students at nearby Saint Louis University (SLU) briefly hung a Confederate flag near the Lyon statue in 1952.[5] And as historian Joan Stack argues, Lyon’s presence in the commemorative landscape of the entire state was already under siege. A painting of Lyon by George Caleb Bingham that hung at the Missouri State Capitol was destroyed by fire in 1911. When a new painting by N.C. Wyeth was unveiled in 1920, it portrayed a distinctly Southern celebration of Confederate victory at Wilson’s Creek, leaving Lyon entirely out of the painting. Stack also points out that Lyon’s “this means war” proclamation has been uncritically accepted by both Missourians and historians as a factual statement, even though the claim was made by Confederate aide Thomas Snead in 1886 and no contemporary documents verifying the statement exist. “The widespread public acceptance of Snead’s quote reflects the extraordinary effectiveness of Southern apologists in recasting Lyon as a war-mongering zealot rather than an assertive patriot,” argues Stack.[6]

The key turning point in the Lyon monument’s future was not popular protest or a terrible world war. Instead, it was the actions of Harriet Frost Fordyce, a wealthy St. Louis philanthropist who also happened to be the youngest child of Confederate General Daniel Frost. An honorary president of the Missouri United Daughters of the Confederacy and a devout Catholic, Fordyce agreed to donate more than one million dollars to help renovate and expand SLU’s campus on the condition that Lyon’s statue be removed from its original dedication spot. SLU, in partnership with the city government, promptly worked to secure legislation authorizing the monument’s relocation to Lyon Park, a small ten-acre site near the Anheuser-Busch headquarters that had been established by Congress in 1869 (the land had been part of the city’s federal arsenal). Four months before dying at the age of 85, Fordyce and the city of St. Louis watched as the Lyon monument was relocated in June 1960. As an added bonus, SLU renamed its main campus the “Frost Campus” in honor of General Frost.[7]

The Nathaniel Lyon statue was removed from its original dedication spot and relocated to Lyon Park in 1960. Courtesy of Proquest Historical Newspapers.

This episode reminds us that while the current debate over Confederate monuments has captured the nation’s attention with an intensity not previously seen, public monuments have always been contested spaces of protest and controversy. With the Lyon monument, almost no one complained that removing the monument was an act of “erasing history.” Instead, protests centered around the need to develop a better system for assessing public art and to think anew about the impermanent nature of public iconography. For example, art critic George McCue argued that city residents took their public monuments for granted, making them essentially “invisible.” He suggested that a process of “periodic critical evaluation” of the relevance and usefulness of public monuments would place them back into the public eye and lead to larger discussions about the city’s values. “We remove old houses that have become eyesores, but we cherish old statues no matter how dubious they are as art, nor how inappropriate as memorials,” he complained.[8]

Post-Dispatch journalist Bill McClellan suggested in 1998 that Lyon’s victory at Camp Jackson was ultimately “transitory.” His monument had become an impediment to urban renewal in the city. SLU needed funds for a new campus and the city government sought to revitalize the surrounding area with new urban housing and amenities. Fordyce’s role as a privileged, wealthy philanthropist allowed SLU to become “the salvation of the midtown area.”[9] In the end, Lyon’s legacy as Civil War General was overwhelmed by dreams of civic “progress” that required a subtle celebration of the city’s Confederate heritage in order to be achieved. General Lyon’s heavily criticized monument ultimately lasted barely thirty years in its original dedication spot, but remains today at Lyon Park in a quiet space rarely seen by most city residents.

 

[1] Yaseem Serhan, “St. Louis to Remove its Confederate Monument,” The Atlantic, June 26, 2017, accessed May 7, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/06/st-louis-to-remove-its-confederate-monument/531720/.

[2] Louis Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001), 78-125; Dennis K. Boman, Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights in Civil War Missouri: Balancing Freedom and Security (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press), 19-35.

[3] “$50,000 Memorial to Gen. Lyon Projected,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 10, 1927; “Gen. Lyon Statue Unveiled, Sponsor Raps its Critics,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 23, 1929; “Urges Removal of Lyon Statue as ‘Unesthetic’,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 16, 1929; “‘If People Don’t Like Lyon Statue, They Needn’t Look at It’, Mayor Says,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 17, 1929; “Art Commission Revived, But Mustn’t Meddle with Lyon Statue,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 18, 1929.

[4] [Untitled Editorial], St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 29, 1930; “That Red Alabaster Adam and Old Gen. Lyon,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 7, 1939; “City Demurs at Scrapping Statue Unless Metal is Vital to Victory,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 9, 1942; “More Sources of Scrap Metal,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 10, 1942.

[5] Christopher Phillips, Damn Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); “Confederate Flag Flies Briefly Atop Main Pole at St. Louis U.,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 26, 1952.

[6] Joan Stack, “The Rise and Fall of General Nathaniel Lyon in the Missouri State Capitol,” Gateway (2013), 60-67. See also Kristen Pawlak, “Major Horace A. Conant and the Planter’s House Hotel Meeting,” Missouri’s Civil War Blog, January 10, 2019, accessed May 7, 2019, https://mocivilwarblog.com/2019/01/10/major-horace-a-conant-and-the-planters-house-hotel-meeting/.

[7] “Missouri Division of UDC Elects Officers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 1, 1957; “Lyon Park Home for Lyon Statue Provided in Bill,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 16, 1959; “Gen. Lyon Statue Spared, Will Be Moved to Lyon Park,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 20, 1959; “Mrs. Fordyce Gives Million to St. Louis U.,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 16, 1959; “Gen. Lyon Rides Again,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 7, 1960.

[8] George McCue, “Our Invisible Public Monuments,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 26, 1959.

[9] Bill McClellan, “Statue of Civil War General Loses Battle to SLU’s Growth,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 29, 1998.

Nick Sacco

NICK SACCO is a public historian and writer based in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds a master’s degree in History with a concentration in Public History from IUPUI (2014). In the past he has worked for the National Council on Public History, the Indiana State House, the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center, and as a teaching assistant in both middle and high school settings. Nick recently had a journal article about Ulysses S. Grant’s relationship with slavery published in the September 2019 issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era. He has written several other journal articles, digital essays, and book reviews for a range of publications, including the Indiana Magazine of History, The Confluence, The Civil War Monitor, Emerging Civil War, History@Work, AASLH, and Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He also blogs regularly about history at his personal website, Exploring the Past. You can contact Nick at PastExplore@gmail.com.

“Jack My Dear,-Where the devil are you?” John Lothrop Motley, Otto von Bismarck, and the Civil War

“Jack My Dear,-Where the devil are you?” John Lothrop Motley, Otto von Bismarck, and the Civil War

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Historians have rarely examined the German States’ reactions to the Civil War. Much has been said about German immigrants fighting in the war, German-American political leaders involved in community and political organization, and the nativist backlash in the United States; however, Central Europe’s perspectives are a blank page in English language scholarship.[1] As the archetypal political schemer of the era, Otto von Bismarck looms large in German politics and misconceptions continue to persist about where Bismarck may have gotten some of his opinions about the Civil War.

Photograph of John Lothrop Motley in the Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

The answers may come through a deeper understanding of the relationship between the U.S. Minister in Vienna, John Lothrop Motley, and his friend from university, Prussian Minister President Otto von Bismarck. In August 1864, a peculiar meeting took place in Vienna between Motley and Bismarck. Bismarck had come to Vienna for the peace negotiations ending the Dano-German War, which started earlier that year over constitutional and royal succession questions in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein and resulted in a resounding military victory for the German allies. Bismarck and Motley enjoyed a trouble-free evening together; however, the self-absorbed Motley walked away with the impression that he had enlightened Bismarck regarding the events in North America. The two men shared a deep bond of personal friendship.

After having started his education at Harvard, Motley transferred to the University of Göttingen in 1831. Göttingen was one of the premier universities in the German states, whose faculty at the time included such respected professors as Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus, physicist Wilhelm Eduard Weber, and theologian and orientalist Heinrich Georg August Ewald. At Göttingen, Motley encountered Bismarck for the first time. The two friends eventually transferred to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin where Bismarck impressed with his drinking and sword-dueling skills, rather than his scholarship.[2] Apparently Motley was so drawn to Bismarck that he made him the main character of his unsuccessful novel, Morton’s Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial, which included an Otto von Rabenmarck.[3] The two friends reconnected every decade as Motley became a respected writer and historian.

In 1861, Motley’s friend Charles Sumner obtained a diplomatic post in Europe for his fellow Bay Stater. The two were lucky. The Lincoln Administration had initially intended to send Anson Burlingame to Vienna. However, the Austrian court had refused the appointment due to ties between Burlingame and the Hungarian rebellion of 1848. With Burlingame finding an abundance of opportunities in his new post at Beijing, Motley assumed the post in Vienna.[4]

In May 1864, Bismarck reached out to Motley, most likely remembering their friendship and revisiting the days of carefree fun. In an informal tone, Bismarck wrote his friend, “Jack My Dear,-Where the devil are you, and do you do that you never write a line to me? I am working from morn to night like a nigger, and you have nothing to do at all-you might as well tip me a line as well as looking on your feet tilted against the wall of God knows what a dreary colour.” Bismarck did not stop with this scolding of his friend to be a more active correspondent. He insisted that Motley should come for a visit to Berlin, proposing “Let politics be hanged and come to see me. I promise that the Union Jack shall wave over our house, and the conversation and the best old hock shall pour damnation upon the rebels.”[5]

Steel engraving of Otto von Bismarck, after a painting by Alonzo Chappel. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

It was a rather peculiar moment for Bismarck to remember his friendship and to express his desire to escape politics with his old college buddy for a few days. Just as Bismarck wrote to Motley, the international community had come together in London for negotiations on how to settle the Dano-German conflict. Motley did not leave his post in Vienna, but the two friends soon had another opportunity to reconnect in person.

During the peace negotiations, the two met and shared a peaceful evening together, allowing Bismarck to escape the political and diplomatic wrangling over the terms of the agreement. Motley recounted the meeting in a letter to his mother, “He thinks it about as possible to transplant what is called parliamentary government into Prussia, as Abraham Lincoln believes in the feasibility of establishing an aristocracy in the United States.”[6] The conflict in the United States of course became part of the conversation.

Motley’s wife dramatically recounted in a letter to their daughter, “Your father gave him [Bismarck], at his request, a brief but graphic sketch of our affairs, the causes of the war and the sole conditions upon which it would terminate, etc., etc. He was listened to with the greatest interest and respect, and Bismarck told him he was very glad to know his opinions which he accepted unequivocally and adopted and should use as his own when occasion required.”[7] The statement by Motley’s wife has created the perception that Motley enlightened Bismarck about the Civil War’s causes and that the Prussian adopted Motley’s views as his own.[8]

It is highly unlikely that a man of Bismarck’s shrewd diplomatic and political caliber would not have understood the causes of the Civil War by 1864. Newspapers in Berlin and all major cities of the German states covered the events in North America on an almost daily basis. The Prussian minister in Washington, Friedrich Freiherr von Gerolt had been in his post since 1844 and could provide Bismarck with remarkable insights. Furthermore, if the friendship between Bismarck and Motley was as deep as the “My Dear Jack” line indicates, then even in distant St. Petersburg, where Bismarck was stationed in 1861, the Prussian would have read Motley’s lengthy editorial in The Times of London explaining the Union cause and righteousness of the U.S. war effort.

As Bismarck was extremely eloquent in crafting his own personal history, often infusing myth and legend, a closer and critical examination of the relations with Central Europe is long overdue. Motley and his family encountered a good friend in Vienna in August 1864 and had a private evening. Bismarck likely humored Motley as he tried to escape ever so briefly the realities of diplomacy. While Motley’s correspondence is extraordinarily rich, one has to be careful as he occasionally overstates his importance. Even more, an over emphasis on Motley or Bismarck in Central Europe’s relations with the belligerents in North America, is problematic and assumes a reality that did not yet exist, such as Prussia’s success in the Wars of German Unification and thus dominance in German affair. The relationship between the two men reminds us of the multifaceted diplomatic relationship with Prussia, Austria, and the other German states, but also how much Bismarck’s Prussia and Motley’s post in Austria soon collided in a civil war similar to the one in the United States.

 

[1] The only significant works are in German. Enno Eimers, Preussen und die USA 1850 bis 1867 (Berlin, Germany: Dunker and Humblot, 2004); Michael Löffler, Preussens und Sachsens Beziehungen zu den USA während des Sezessionskrieges 1860-1865 (Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag, 1999)

[2] J. Gubermann, The Life of John Lothrop Motley (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijohoff, 1973); Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Lothrop Motley: A Memoir (Boston, MA: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1879).

[3] John L. Motley, Morton’s Hope: The Memoirs of a Provincial (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1839).

[4] David L. Anderson, Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861-1898 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 19.

[5] Otto von Bismarck to John Lothrop Motley, May 23, 1864, in The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, ed. George W. Curtis (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889), 2:160.

[6] Motley to his Mother, August 3, 1864, Ibid., 2:170.

[7] Mrs. Motley to Lily Motley, August 1, 1864, in John Lothrop Motley and His Family, ed. Susan Margaret Stackpole Motley, St. John Mildmay, and Herbert Alexander St. John Mildmay (New York: John Lane, 1910), 210, 214.

[8] Graf Otto zu Stolberg-Wernigerode, Germany and the United States of America during the Era of Bismarck, trans. Otto E. Lessing (Reading, PA: Henry Janssen Foundation, 1937), 62.

Niels Eichhorn

holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Arkansas and has taught history courses at Middle Georgia State University and Central Georgia Technical College. He has published Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019) and Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently working with Duncan Campbell on The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism. He has published articles on Civil War diplomacy in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History. You can find more information on his personal website, and he can be contacted at eichhorn.niels@gmail.com.

Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage and the Civil War Centennial

Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage and the Civil War Centennial

By | | Comments 0 Comment

On March 30, 2019, a group of public historians will convene at the National Council on Public History’s Annual Meeting to discuss the interpreter Freeman Tilden’s 1957 publication, Interpreting Our Heritage. My fellow NPS colleague Allison Horrocks and I created this conference panel to discuss Tilden’s ideas in historical context and contemplate the state of interpretation moving forward. We also built a website where readers can learn more by visiting www.interpretingourheritage.com. In the meantime, I’ve been re-reading Tilden and thinking about the influence of Interpreting Our Heritage within the context of the National Park Service’s efforts to commemorate the Civil War Centennial from 1961 to 1965.

An NPS Park Ranger gives a tour of Spotsylvania Courthouse Battlefield. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

Interpreting Our Heritage came at an important moment for both the NPS and those interested in commemorating the Centennial. The book was published only four years after the NPS undertook a major reorganizational plan that saw the creation of an Interpretation division within the agency. Likewise, plans to commemorate the Centennial at major Civil War battlefields under the NPS’s management were starting to take shape at this time.[1] Interpreting Our Heritage was the first full-length study to examine the theoretical aspects of interpreting natural and cultural resources. The book became mandatory reading for NPS interpretive staff in the 1960s, and it remains an important resource for public historians today. While Tilden was not an expert on the history of the American Civil War, he cited examples from the war numerous times in Interpreting Our Heritage. Examining these references offers slight clues into how interpreters might have approached the task of telling stories about the Civil War to their audiences.

Tilden passionately argued that “information” was not the same as “interpretation.” He criticized previous programming at Civil War battlefields for being too detail-oriented and factual. “In the fifty years following the end of that fratricidal war, there was much emphasis, when the veterans and their children were visiting the scenes of each bloody combat, upon information. It was then a thrill to know, to recall, just where papa’s regiment had stood, by what road an advance or retreat was made,” according to Tilden. Now the time had come for a telling of the “great human story” that went beyond tedious military details. “The battlefield of our great fratricidal American war is not merely a place of strategy and tactics; not a place where regiments moved this way and that like checkers on the board; not merely a spot where something was decided that would lead to another decision.” Tilden preached, in other words, the importance of placing the human experiences of warfare front and center. It made little sense to present interpretations best suited for “a group of Civil War Roundtable enthusiasts” to a general audience experiencing the war’s history for perhaps the first time.[2]

When it came to interpreting historical content, Tilden presented what scholars today would describe as a “reconciliationist” view of the Civil War.[3] The conflict was, in his view, a battle of patriotic Americans fighting for equally valid causes. The meaning of these battles came from the fact that they were “made famous and treasurable by the acts of men and women, where the story is told of courage and self-sacrifice, of dauntless patriotism, of statesmanship and inventive genius.” The Civil War, argued Tilden, had been a tragic conflict between “armed men following their ideals to the valley of the shadow.” Learning stories of courage and patriotism would inspire contemporary Americans to have a stronger pride in their country.[4]

A Commemorative postage stamp from the Civil War Centennial, 1964. Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Tilden also sought to build historical understanding through connections between the past and the personal experiences of everyday people, what scholars today might describe as building a sense of empathy. He asked his readers to put themselves in Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s shoes: “[Arlington] was the scene of the great tragic moment when a man who loved the Union, and the United States army he had served, had to make a decision. Virginia was his mother. What should he do?” Tilden asked. “What, given all those circumstances, would the visitor have done?” He portrayed the Civil War elsewhere as a brothers’ war of divided loyalties. In discussing the Battle of Vicksburg, Tilden recommended using the story of the 11th Missouri Regiment (U.S.) fighting the 3rd Missouri Regiment (CSA) on the battlefield. He flippantly asked, “what difference does it make now, except to the researcher, who commanded these regiments?” The importance was that “some of these Missouri boys, now striving to kill each other, were once fed gingerbread and doughnuts from the same Aunt Nellie’s jar.” The role of NPS interpreters, then, was to make connections through the stories of heroic Confederate and Union soldiers.[5]

Tilden also reinforced a mythic view of westward expansion that eliminated the presence of indigenous people from the historical narrative. He celebrated “the heritage from our fathers” in highlighting the Oregon Trail, a symbol of national expansion that “gives us the thrill that we belong.” Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin—itself a mythic creation—represented “the heroism of western pioneers.” Moreover, Tilden argued that “the fullest appreciation of unspoiled nature is found by those [visitors] who are willing to imitate in some degree the experiences of the pioneers,” a particularly ironic statement since forced Indian removal played a central role in the creation of some of the country’s most popular National Park sites.[6]

Finally, Tilden stressed the importance of finding happiness and beauty at natural and cultural sites, including Civil War battlefields. Interpreters at these sites were “middlemen of happiness” who highlighted the stories of “great men” at battlefields that in his mind were “shrines” to heroism, patriotism, and beauty. Their primary duties in this sense were “first, to create the best possible vantage points from which beauty may be seen and comprehended; and second, to do all that discreetly may be done to establish a mood, or sympathetic atmosphere.” For Tilden, visitors to these sites were, in a somewhat condescending tone, “wonderfully well-mannered and pathetically eager for guidance toward the larger aspects of things that lead toward wisdom.” They came to these sites with personal experiences but were, to a large extent, empty vessels waiting to be filled by knowledgeable interpreters.[7]

Interpreters looking at Tilden’s ideas sixty years later will most likely find them simultaneously insightful and debatable. Tilden’s calls for a better focus on the human side of war and programming that went beyond the mere conveyance of “information” still resonate today. While Tilden probably aimed to keep these stories focused on the (white, male) participants engaged in battle, interpreters today have expanded their narratives to include the stories of women, enslaved African Americans, and Native Americans during the war, both on and off the battlefield.[8] Promoting multiple perspectives in historical narratives has become a centerpiece of good interpretive practice today, and meaningful dialogues between visitors and interpreters are more highly valued today than in Tilden’s time. In any case, it is no longer enough to ask visitors to simply consider General Lee’s perspective, but also the perspectives of those who considered the entire Union their “mother.” It is no longer enough to highlight the divided loyalties of white residents in the border slave states but also the enslaved people whose loyalties were undivided as the Civil War increasingly became a conflict over slavery’s future. The mythic narrative of westward expansion to a vast, empty frontier that Tilden celebrated also seems out of place and inaccurate today.

Likewise, Tilden’s emphasis and on happiness and beauty—outgrowths of his desire for themes of sectional reconciliation and patriotism during the Cold War—is questionable. As NPS historian Edward Roach argues, “many resources that are significant and worthy of commemoration are not beautiful. There was no beauty in the battle of Gettysburg, a noisy, destructive, smelly, bloody mess. The Sand Creek massacre was just that . . . [Visitors] do not have to be in love with the story being told. They merely need to find it worthy of telling, worthy of being understood by more and more people.”[9] Perhaps now more than ever, interpreters at Civil War historic sites need to emphasize the harsh realities of warfare, as viewed from the multiple perspectives of the people who experienced the brutality of the Civil War firsthand. Ultimately Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage is an important resource for interpreters looking to hone their skills, but it is a product of its time. Its ideas must not be held to the status of dogma for those working at Civil War historic sites.

 

[1] Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 35; Robert J. Cook, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).

[2] Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 24, 69.

[3] The term “reconciliationist” was coined by David Blight in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2-5.

[4] Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 69.

[5] Ibid., 13, 15, 42-43.

[6] Ibid., 68, 77; Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

[7] Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 12, 85.

[8] See discussions in James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kevin M. Levin, ed., Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

[9] Edward Roach, “Edward Roach Case Statement,” Interpreting Our Heritage, 2019, accessed February 22, 2019, https://interpretingourheritage.com/case-statements/edward-roach-case-statement/.

Nick Sacco

NICK SACCO is a public historian and writer based in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds a master’s degree in History with a concentration in Public History from IUPUI (2014). In the past he has worked for the National Council on Public History, the Indiana State House, the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center, and as a teaching assistant in both middle and high school settings. Nick recently had a journal article about Ulysses S. Grant’s relationship with slavery published in the September 2019 issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era. He has written several other journal articles, digital essays, and book reviews for a range of publications, including the Indiana Magazine of History, The Confluence, The Civil War Monitor, Emerging Civil War, History@Work, AASLH, and Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He also blogs regularly about history at his personal website, Exploring the Past. You can contact Nick at PastExplore@gmail.com.

“Don’t Forget your Soldier Lovers!” A Story of Civil War Valentines

“Don’t Forget your Soldier Lovers!” A Story of Civil War Valentines

By | | Comments 1 comment

Is materialism ripping out the heart of Valentine’s Day?

Every February, thousands of Americans lament the commercialism of this holiday with critical articles and tweets about modern consumerism. Some blame the pressures of social media on the rise in spending. And it is definitely rising; the National Retail Federation estimates that more than $20 billion will be spent on 2019’s Valentine celebrations. The creativity of advertisers is not to be undersold, of course, as enterprising executives have discovered how to widen the consumer market to include those who are currently unattached. “After the chocolates have been eaten and the flowers wilt, roaches remain thriving and triumphant. Give the gift that’s eternal and name a roach for Valentine’s Day.” That’s right, for fifteen dollars, you can name a roach after your ex and send them a digital certificate from the Bronx Zoo.[1]

Valentine’s Day advertisement in The New York Herald, January 27, 1863. Courtesy of Chronicling America.

Some may be surprised to learn that St. Valentine’s Day, and all its commercialism, was alive and well during the bloodiest war of our nation’s past. Much like today, nineteenth-century advertisers and newspapers relentlessly warned their patrons that the holiday loomed. On February 11, 1864, the Holmes County Farmer newspaper in Ohio read, “We are reminded that Valentine Day is approaching. Tuesday next, the 14th inst., is set aside as the carnival of lovers. It is said the birds choose their mates on that day, and, it being leap year, it is expected all the marriageable girls will select their mates.”[2]

During the war, companies ran a number of Valentine ads that targeted women with loved ones off at battle. “Don’t forget your soldier lovers. Keep their courage up with a rousing Valentine. All prices. Six cents to five dollars each,” advertised Strong’s Valentine Depot in 1862. In 1863, New York City’s American Valentine Company promoted “soldiers’ valentine packets,” “army valentine packets,” and “torch of love packets.” In Washington D.C., Shillington’s likewise advertised packets specifically for soldiers, which “contains two superb sentimental valentines and elegant embossed envelopes; also comic valentines and beautiful valentine cards in fancy envelopes.”[3]

Valentine’s Day advertisement in The Evansville Daily Journal, February 11, 1862. Courtesy of Chronicling America.

In some cases, this collision of holiday and war was quite jarring. For example, in February 1862, Indiana’s Evansville Daily Journal described Main Street bookstores filled with card displays “large and varied enough to suit the tastes of all.” Immediately beneath this bulletin was a notice to the recently wounded and those in mourning: “Disabled soldiers applying for pensions, and the widow or heirs of soldiers who have been killed, or died in service, should call” began the section, followed by another notice related to “troops moving.” This newspaper column, flowing from one topic to the next, provides powerful insight into the daily experiences of the homefront. Yes, the war was about troop movements. Yes, the war included wounds, death, and pensions. But even as wives worried ceaselessly about the loss of husbands, scanning the papers for news, they also read advertisements and planned for their Valentine’s celebrations. Life did not stop in the midst of war. Neither did holidays. And advertisers knew it.[4]

Soldiers at war also remembered Valentine’s Day. Though they appear less likely to purchase formal Valentine’s stationery, original poetry and letters of love came home in abundance. One particularly special valentine came from Confederate soldier Robert H. King, who created a paper heart with a pen knife for his wife, Louiza. When opened, the seemingly random holes in the paper reveal two people separated from one another, crying.[5]

Robert H. King’s valentine for Louiza. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia.

On November 8, 1861, Robert had written to his wife, “it panes my hart to think of leaven you all” and signed his letter as many soldiers did, with “yours til death.” Ultimately, this would be true, and all Louiza would be left with was this paper heart. Robert died of typhoid fever near Petersburg, Virginia, in April 1863. She kept this valentine until her own death decades later, perhaps believing there is more heart in handmade.[6]

To return to our original question, are our contemporaries correct in their claim that materialism is ripping out the heart of Valentine’s Day? Perhaps not. At least in the nineteenth century, materialism was part of the holiday all along. When Sarah Woif married Sylvanus Emswiller of Shenandoah County on Valentine’s Day 1861, she likely was not thinking about advertisers, but rather, the love associated with the holiday. She certainly was not thinking about the fact that she, too, would become a widow in 1863 when Sylvanus died of pneumonia, fighting with the Second Virginia Infantry. Love, loss, celebration, heartache – they all swirled together in the Civil War. And the newspapers certainly reflected it.[7]

 

[1] Katherine Cullen, “Is love still in the air?” National Retail Federation, January 30, 2019, https://nrf.com/blog/love-still-air; “Name a Roach,” Bronx Zoo, accessed February 10, 2019, https://bronxzoo.com/roach.

[2] Holmes County Farmer, Millersburg, Ohio, February 11, 1864. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84028822/1864-02-11/ed-1/seq-3/.

[3] The New York Herald, February 14, 1862. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/1862-02-14/ed-1/seq-5/; The New York Herald, February 7, 1863. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/1863-02-07/ed-1/seq-8/; The National Republican, Washington, D.C., February 8, 1862. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82014760/1862-02-08/ed-1/seq-3/

[4] The Evansville Daily Journal, Evansville, Indiana, February 11, 1862. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015672/1862-02-11/ed-1/seq-2/.

[5] Robert H. King, Valentine to Louiza A. Williams King of Montgomery County, Virginia, undated, in Robert H. King Papers, 1861-1910, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

[6] There is a photograph of Eliza (c. 1910) within this collection. Her exact date of death is unknown. Robert H. King to Louiza A. Williams, November 8, 1861; ibid.

[7] George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War Database, Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, WV.

Angela Esco Elder

Angela Esco Elder is an assistant professor of history at Converse College. She earned her doctorate at the University of Georgia, and the following year she was the 2016-2017 Virginia Center for Civil War Studies postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Tech. Her research explores gender, emotion, family, and trauma in the Civil War Era South. She is the co-editor of Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln.

Lessons from the Crimean War: The Augusta Arsenal

Lessons from the Crimean War: The Augusta Arsenal

By | | Comments 0 Comment

In 1853 a conflict began that, for the first time since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, pitted most of the great powers of Europe against each other. What initially started as a conflict between the Russian and Ottoman empires quickly escalated to involve the western European maritime powers, Great Britain and France. New technology altered the fighting and forced adjustments to medical care.[1] While military planners quickly forgot most lessons of this Crimean War, turning the conflict into one of the century’s forgotten wars, the struggle had a profound impact on the Civil War. The architectural style and building plan of the Confederate Arsenal at Augusta, Georgia, illustrates a strong resemblance to the new Austrian Arsenal in Vienna, and in the absence of explicit written statement by Confederate authorities, this architectural transnational comparison highlights how Jefferson Davis’s government learned from recent European military experiments to ensure the Confederacy’s survival.[2]

Watercolor by Rudolf Alt of the Museum at the Vienna Arsenal in 1856. Courtesy of the Austrian Military Museum.

Initially, the new military achievements were supposed to benefit the United States. The U.S. government under Franklin Pierce determined to learn from the European conflict by sending officers to observe and report advances in military technology. On April 3, 1855, Major Richard Delafield, commander of New York City’s harbor defenses, received orders to head to Washington and report to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Besides Delafield, the same telegraphic order went to Captain George B. McClellan and Major Alfred Mordecai. Secretary Davis instructed the three men to visit Europe and report on the newest European military developments, including but not limited to uniforms, arms, fortifications, and transportation infrastructure.[3] The three men brought back valuable but frequently ignored information, published in voluminous reports over the next few years.

Blueprint of the arsenal from Richard Delafield, Report on the Art of War in Europe in 1854, 1855, and 1856 (Washington: G.W. Bowman, 1860).

Delafield had orders to inspect European production facilities for weaponry and report on new weapons technology, fortifications, bunkers, and others military advances. Much of his report and information came from the new Vienna arsenal. Besides talking about new cast iron technology and weapons, Delafield focused on the new arsenal building in Vienna. He commented that “no arsenal in Europe will compare with it in extent; none in which there is more unity of design.” He lauded the arsenal, calling it “perfect in all respects.”[4] The report included a detailed blueprint of the new arsenal and detailed descriptions, especially of the military and weapons museum:

Nearest to and parallel with the front is a richly ornamented two-story building of 130 by 30 toises (1 toise is about 1.9m), with projecting wings and center for a museum of ancient armor, arms, trophies, &c., &c., illustrative of the history of this branch of the art of war, with extensive arm racks as a store house for the small arms now being manufactured.[5]

In addition to the detailed report of the structures, Delafield noted that the arsenal could produce about “2,400 stand of arms per week.” He concluded in his report that construction commenced in 1851 and finished in 1856. “The cost is said to have been 7,900,000 florins, including 180,000 florins, the cost of the ground, containing 107 yokes of 1,600 square toises each. . . . The museum is calculated to hold in its wrought-iron racks 211,968 muskets.”[6] While the brief section on the architectural design of the Vienna Arsenal may seem of little importance, Secretary Davis seems to have remembered.

In September 1861, Confederate Chief of Ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, ordered the creation of a new arsenal at Augusta for both the manufacture of weapons and ammunition. Confederate authorities completed construction in early 1862. With the powder works and material in place, the facility was producing a large amount of materiel for the Confederate war effort between 1863 and 1865. The arsenal became a major producer of Confederate ammunition.[7]

Central Avenue, U.S. Arsenal, Augusta, Georgia. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The workshop building at the Augusta Arsenal bears strong resemblance to the Museum of Arms at the Vienna Arsenal. While the Augusta facility was only one story, except for the central and two outer wings, and far less ornate than the Vienna structure, the blueprint of the two buildings was remarkably similar. Unfortunately, available sources do not indicate whether Davis or the Confederate authorities directly relied on the Vienna Arsenal report in the construction of the site in Augusta. However, an architectural comparison indicates the strong similarity between the two sites. The builders in Augusta likely had some knowledge of the Vienna arsenal. This architectural comparison offers another avenue to explore transnational relations and exchanges during the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, despite the often-perceived agrarian and backward status of the Confederacy, the correlation between the two arsenals illustrates that the Confederacy paid attention to international, military achievements to use in their own struggle for survival.

The Crimean War signaled the arrival of modern warfare and offered keen observers an opportunity to learn important lessons.[8] Equipping an army with new weapons required new technology, which in turn required modern production facilities such as the Arsenal in Vienna. It is likely that the Confederacy used material from the Crimean War reports when constructing the Arsenal at Augusta and thus learned important lessons about modern military production facilities. In general, military planners did not embrace the lessons of the Crimean War, but the Augusta Arsenal is a refreshing reminder that transnational lessons were learned.

 

[1] Niels Eichhorn, “A Transnational View of Medicine and Medical Practices During the Civil War,” Muster (blog), The Journal of the Civil War Era, November 13, 2018, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2018/11/a-transnational-view-of-medicine-and-medical-practices-during-the-civil-war/.

[2] I want to thank Park Historian James “Jim” Ogden at the Chattanooga and Chickamauga National Military Park, who in his many public talks made me aware of the possible transnational comparison between the Augusta and Vienna arsenals.

[3] Richard Delafield, Report on the Art of War in Europe in 1854, 1855, and 1856 (Washington: G.W. Bowman, 1860), xiii-xiv. Also see George B. McClellan, Report of Captain George B. McClellan One of the Officers sent to the Seat of War in Europe in 1855 and 1856 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1857); Alfred Mordecai, Military Commission to Europe, in 1855 and 1856 (Washington, DC: George W. Bowman, 1860).

[4] Delafield, Report on the Art of War, 261.

[5] Ibid., 261.

[6] Ibid., 262, 264.

[7] Gordon A. Blaker, “From Powder to Projectile: The Production of Ammunition in Augusta,” in Never for Want of Powder: The Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia, ed. C. L. Bragg, et al. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 132-156.

[8] Reid Holden, The Civil War and the Wars of the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2006).

Niels Eichhorn

holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Arkansas and has taught history courses at Middle Georgia State University and Central Georgia Technical College. He has published Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019) and Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently working with Duncan Campbell on The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism. He has published articles on Civil War diplomacy in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History. You can find more information on his personal website, and he can be contacted at eichhorn.niels@gmail.com.

Recent Muster Posts

Read the Journal Online at Project Muse

Access the journal on Project Muse

Follow us on Twitter