Randall Stephens

In 2013 the University of North Carolina Press published David T. Gleeson's The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America.  It is  a sprawling study that is already receiving high praise from historians and journalists.  In the Boston Globe Michael Kenney writes "As his analysis unfolds, there is much that will surprise, perhaps even unsettle, Boston readers familiar with the abolitionists, the Massachusetts 54th, and the summertime encampments of reenactors. Gleeson looks at the role of Irish-Americans in the Southern debate over slavery, in the Confederate Army, on the homefront, and in the aftermath of the defeat." Over at the Irish Times Myles Dungan seems to agree. "Gleeson goes well beyond the merely anecdotal," says Dungan.   Gleeson conveys "a sense of what it was to be an Irish immigrant in the southern states that formed the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865."

David Gleeson is no stranger to the subject.  He has been writing and teaching on 19th century history, the South, and the Civil War for many years now.  A reader in history at Northumbria University he is the editor of The Irish in the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press, 2010) and the author of The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

In the interview embedded below, I speak with David about researching and writing The Green and the Grey.  David also talks about the role of memory in the post Civil War South and discusses the ways that his work fits into the wider field of southern and Civil War history.

Steven Cromack

Contrary to popular belief, Jackie Robinson was not the first black man to play major league baseball. That title belongs to Moses Fleetwood Walker, who lived and played nearly eighty years before
Robinson. Walker’s story is fascinating not only because of his baseball stardom, but also because an all white jury acquitted him of first-degree murder in 1891.

Historians do not know much about his early years. Moses Fleetwood Walker was born in Ohio. A minister’s son, he entered Oberlin College and planned to become a lawyer. While at school, however, it became clear that his passion lay elsewhere. Instead of going to class, Walker played baseball, and in 1883 he landed a spot in the minor leagues as a catcher with newly formed Toledo Blue Stockings. As a player, he impressed the press and the fans. Sporting Life, the nation’s largest sport publication at the time, wrote on September 15, 1883: “Walker, the colored catcher of the Toledos, is a favorite wherever he goes. He does brilliant work in a modest, unassuming way.” In 1884 Toledo joined the major competitor to the National League, the American Association. As a result, Walker earned his title as the first black player in the major leagues.

Unfortunately for Walker, tension between his teammates, unrelenting jeers from fans, and an injury led to his release. He bounced around the minors for a while, eventually ending his career in Syracuse. In 1891, upon leaving a bar in that city one afternoon, Walker encountered a group of white men, one of whom threw a rock at him, while the rest surrounded him. In a panic, Walker stabbed the closest man. He was indicted for first-degree murder. Amazingly, the all white jury found him not guilty.

Walker spent the rest of his life writing a treatise advocating the return of black Americans to Africa. He died of pneumonia in 1924 and until 1996 lay in an unmarked grave. America was not ready for Walker. C. Vann Woodward wrote in his Strange Career of Jim Crow that America in the 1880s was: "The twilight zone that lies between living memory and written history . . . . It was a time of experiment, testing, and uncertainty—quite different from the time of repression and rigid uniformity that was to come toward the end of the century. Alternatives were still open and real choices had to be made."

Instead of embracing integration, baseball’s managers drew the color line and Walker was forgotten. It was not until the 1980s when historians uncovered Walker’s story. For further reading, see David Zang’s Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball’s First Black Major Leaguer.

Mimi Cowan

In yesterday’s post I gave you the basics of Chicago’s 1871 Great Conflagration, as they called it, and how Mrs. O’Leary became everyone’s favorite scapegoat. I also promised you a story about what French socialists, women with Molotov cocktails, Mrs. O’Leary, and the creation of modern Chicago all have in common.

So here’s where the story starts: as I flipped through a series of old images of Mrs. O’Leary, I realized that she looked different in every picture.
That’s because Mrs. O’Leary hid from the press; she didn’t want anyone to sketch her likeness in the papers. As a result, illustrators were free to depict her in anyway they chose. But if these aren’t accurate representations of Mrs. O’Leary, what were the models for these images?

Turns out that these depictions of Mrs. O’Leary bear a striking resemblance to images of the pétroleuses of the 1871 French Commune.

In March 1871, the citizens' militia and city council of Paris ran the French national government and army out of the city, and then declared a socialist-style government, referred to as the Commune. After taking back several Paris neighborhoods throughout April and May, the French army began their final attack on the remaining Commune-controlled areas. There were vicious street battles, and fires broke out and burned much of the city.

According to the French press, female radicals, dubbed pétroleuses, had supposedly started many of these fires, using petroleum-filled vessels, sort of like Molotov cocktails. While historians have not found any evidence that pétroleuses actually existed, the contemporary press nonetheless depicted these women as the source of the fires that ravaged the city.

Less than two weeks before the fire in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune ran an article detailing the Parisian trial of five supposed pétroleuses. The article claimed that the women were “repulsive in the extreme, being that of the lowest, most depraved class of women . . . their clothes were sordid, their hair undressed, their features coarse, bestial, and sullen” (Chicago Tribune, September 26, 1871).

This description of the pétroleuses could be applied to the images of Mrs. O’Leary. Images of the pétroleuses and of Mrs. O’Leary share the same wrinkled, masculine features; sharp, long noses; and wild, stringy, unkempt hair.

Perhaps the people who drew Mrs. O’Leary depicted her with characteristics of a pétroleuse simply because both were accused of burning their cities down. But I think it’s more than that.

In the early 1870s Chicago’s business elite had begun to worry that their large immigrant working-class population would turn against them and overthrow the city government to establish a Commune, just as they had in Paris only weeks before the Chicago fire.

So when Mrs. O’Leary was presented as a scapegoat for the fire, illustrators were able to use her to express the deepest fears of the businessmen of Chicago: that the large immigrant working-class population might embrace the ideas of dangerous European radicals and destroy the city. The myth of Mrs. O’Leary, then, was not necessarily a condemnation of the real, live Kate O’Leary. It was a warning to Chicagoans about the threat posed by radical working-class immigrants. Beware, these images said, because they’re already among us, destroying our city, just like they did in Paris.

The irony of all this is that the 1871 fire provided a clean slate of sorts and allowed Chicago to develop into a modern industrial powerhouse in the last quarter of the 19th century. Without the opportunity for rebirth provided by the fire, this may not have occurred. In addition to the fire, however, there was one other necessary ingredient for Chicago’s industrial transformation: the presence of a large working-class immigrant population.

Perhaps Mrs. O’Leary, then, did represent what working-class immigrants would do to the city, but the illustrators got it backwards: instead of destroying it, the fire, Mrs. O’Leary, and hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants just like her were, in fact, the future of the city.

So, next time someone blames the 1871 Chicago fire on Kate O’Leary and her fidgety cow, you can let them know that she didn’t do it, but she’ll be happy to take the credit.

Mimi Cowan

Yesterday I told my eighty-eight-year-old grandmother I was writing a blog post about the Great Chicago Fire. She replied, "the one the cow started?"

Yup. The one the cow started. Well, actually, no. Everyone and their grandmother have blamed Chicago's biggest disaster on Mrs. O'Leary and her incendiary bovine for the past 142 years, but here's the thing:

The cow didn't do it.

But that got me thinking. Why, almost a century and a half later, is her name often the one thing people know about the fire? I've got some theories so grab a mug of milk, pull up a stool, and keep an eye on that lantern.

First, a little background: Late on Sunday October 8, 1871, a fire broke out on the west side of Chicago. Legend tells us that Catherine O'Leary placed a lantern behind the hoof of the cow she was milking. The cow kicked and the lantern broke, catching the surrounding hay on fire. Within moments, the entire barn was engulfed in flames.

Whether or not Mrs. O'Leary and her cow were at fault, there was most certainly a fire in or near the O'Leary barn that night. Thanks to an unusually dry summer, a city made of lumber, and a stiff wind, the flames spread too quickly for firefighters to control. By 1:30am the fire had engulfed the city courthouse, almost a mile from the O'Leary home, (and in the process destroying most of the city's records, to the horror of twenty-first century historians. Ahem.). Two hours later, when the city's pumping station burned down, firefighters all but gave up.

The fire raged all day Monday, consuming the downtown and north side. Fortunately, rain arrived early on Tuesday October 10, mostly extinguishing the flames. But also extinguished were the lives of at least 300 people. Additionally, about 100,000 were left homeless (about a third of the city's population), and property worth nearly $200 million dollars (somewhere between $2 and $4 trillion dollars in today's currency) was destroyed.

All this at the hands (okay, hooves) of a cow. Except, um, not. Most historians agree that it probably wasn't Mrs. O'Leary and her cow's fault. In fact, the official inquiry into the fire, way back in 1871, found Mrs. O'Leary not guilty. But somehow the myth took off anyway.126 years later, the Chicago City Council again exonerated Mrs. O'Leary and her cow (see Chicago Tribune October 6, 1997). But even today, if people know anything about the Great Conflagration of 1871 in Chicago, they know about Mrs. O'Leary and her cow.

So I started wondering: how did Mrs. O'Leary become the scapegoat and, more importantly, why?

The "how" was pretty easy to find out: on October 18, 1871 an article in the Chicago Times claimed that Mrs. O'Leary was a seventy-something-year-old Irish woman (she was actually in her late thirties or early forties) and that she had lived off handouts from the county poor relief board for most of her life (also false; she helped support her family of seven with a small milk business). When she was denied aid one day, the article explained, Kate O'Leary swore revenge on the city and later enacted this revenge with the careful placement of a lantern.

Despite the fact that just about the only thing that was correct in this article was Mrs. O'Leary's name, it was the root of what turned out to be a lifetime of shame and ostracizing for Kate O'Leary.

I still wanted to know why this myth stuck if it wasn't the truth. Turns out that the answers tell us more about late 19th-century Chicago than they tell us about Kate O'Leary. Tomorrow I'll tell you what French socialists, women with Molotov cocktails, Mrs. O'Leary, and the creation of modern Chicago all have to do with one another.

But here's a spoiler: if I were Kate, I'd take credit for it after all.

As a young kid Ms. Cowan loved history, except Chicago history. And immigration history. And labor history. After spending her twenties working at some of the nation's top opera companies, she changed careers, enrolled in grad school, and discovered her passion for all things historical; especially Chicago, immigration, and labor history. She has been a resident of the City of Big Shoulders for the last four years while researching and writing her (Boston College) doctoral dissertation on Irish and German immigrants in 19th-century Chicago.

Eric Schultz

I was fortunate in early July to attend three days of the 150th commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg, including a number of events sponsored by the Gettysburg Foundation. It was busy, colorful, sometimes somber but always tropical, a good reminder of what conditions were like in July 1863.  The battlefield itself, nearly 6,000 acres and sometimes called the “symbolic center of American history,” is both inspiring and beautiful. 

The 150th commemoration included a retelling of the battle and featured first-person accounts.

Events included a spectacular retelling of the battle (focused on first-person accounts), and the grand opening of the Seminary Ridge Museum at which visitors could climb its historic cupola to get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and town.

As I attended various gatherings, however, it struck me that Gettysburg was nothing less than a kind of living laboratory for how people access history.

For example, there were lots (and lots) of folks taking tours of the battlefield, often led by certified National Park Service guides.  To walk in the footsteps of soldiers and view the battle lines redefines history in a whole new way for many.  Likewise some of the largest groups could be found on Little Round Top, where Col. Joshua Chamberlain made his famous stand--a tribute not only to Chamberlain and his troops, but to the power of Hollywood and films like Gettysburg, capable of creating historical celebrities. 

There were plenty of other visitors taking self-guided tours, some with maps and some with iPods, and some with their noses pressed to air-conditioned windows as they followed along a self-guided auto tour.  There were individuals, couples and families, the latter often gathered around a monument while Dad took pictures and the youngest played surreptitiously on a Gameboy.  (Years later. . . Dad: “Remember when we took that great trip to Gettysburg?” Son: “Um, I think.”)  There’s no telling how many monuments and battlefield scenes were “Instagramed” that weekend, speaking of interesting new ways to access history.

At one event, a young Marine sat next to me.  He’d served three tours in Iraq and was now, in his words, “doing time” as an instructor.  He said he’d driven over from Quantico for the weekend, spent all day on his mountain bike touring the battlefield, went to every event he could attend, and planned to do the same for every 150th Civil War celebration he was able.  He was clearly and enthusiastically engaged in accessing history.

The bookstores were full, and, I’m told, did a landmark business in souvenirs and (I hope) books.  There were certainly plenty of people in hotel lobbies, restaurants and under trees reading as they tried to absorb and understand events.  At the same time, souvenirs are ever-important and, for that matter, first cousin to “relic hunting,” a time-honored (if not always honorable) way of accessing history.  Gettysburg’s famous copse of trees, perhaps the most sacred spot place on the battlefield because it represented the “high tide of the Confederacy” where Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s men were finally turned back, had to be fenced in as early as 1887 because so many souvenir hunters were cutting branches to make walking sticks.

A view of the battlefield, including tents of some of the reenactors, from the cupola of the new Seminary Ridge Museum.

Some ways of accessing the history of Gettysburg are clearly unwelcome.  The National Park Service has long held that the battlefield ought to be unblemished so that visitors can use "grounded imagination" to experience the battle.  When businessman Thomas Ottenstein erected a 307-foot galvanized steel viewing tower--“a classroom in the sky”--near the battlefield in 1974, it was enjoyed by many but seen by others as an abomination.  The structure lasted 21 years until the National Park Service seized it under eminent domain and knocked it down with explosive charges.

In Sacred Ground, Edward Tabor Linenthal describes the long, often controversial history of the Gettysburg battlefield as veterans attempted to access their own history.  Beginning in the 1870s, Pennsylvania chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) held reunions at Gettysburg.  With the dismantling of Reconstruction, Union troops were joined by Confederate veterans.  Combined groups tended to emphasize valor on both sides, as veterans like Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles proclaimed at the 25th reunion in 1888, "To-day there are no victors, no vanquished.  As Americans we may all claim a common share . . . in the new America born on this battlefield." 

Not everyone agreed.  Addressing a chapter of the GAR that same year, Bvt. Brig. General J.P.S. Gobin angrily declared that he was "tired of this gush and pretense for the glorification of the veteran simply because he wore a gray uniform with a Southern flag printed on his badge.  That badge meant treason and rebellion in 1861, and what it meant then it means now. . . ."   Others felt that in the rush to reconcile North and South, the plight of blacks and the issue of slavery were lost.

At the fiftieth anniversary of the battle in 1913, enough time had passed that 55,000 Union and Confederate veterans converged on Gettysburg for a four-day celebration.  Festivities included 6,500 tents, 173 kitchens, stores filled with pennants and flags, and a handful of fistfights.  Nonetheless, the event emphasized collective heroism and healing, and featured the ideology of the Lost Cause that had developed in the postwar South.  Capt. Bennett H. Young, commander of the United Confederate Veterans now accessed a kind of combined history by saying, "It was not Southern valor nor Northern valor.  It was, thank God, American valor." There was a famous handshake near the copse of trees when 300 veterans of Pickett and Pettigrew’s charge and defense met.  Four years later Virginia became the first former Confederate state to erect a monument on the battlefield.

At the 75th in 1938, 1,400 Union and 500 Confederate--average age 94--were still hearty enough to gather at Gettysburg for the "Last Reunion of the Blue and the Gray."  But something interesting happened with the passing of the last veterans of the Civil War in the 1940s: A kind of enthusiastic “subculture” arose as a way to continue accessing history.  Civil War Roundtables (discussion groups begun in Chicago), relic hunters and collectors, war-gamers and, of course, reenactors emerged--the latter being among the most controversial.  Dressed in authentic period clothing and intent on recreating the battle experience in every way, reenactors were among the most visible visitors during my time at the Park.  I found General and Mrs. Lee escaping the heat in my hotel lobby, for example.  There were fields of tents spread around the park and soldiers at every turn.

Frankly, reenactment doesn’t seem like much fun to me.  I was hot enough in shorts, and much of the time I saw the troops, clothed in wool, standing at attention in the hot sun.  (Not to mention, I gave up sleeping in pup tents when my son graduated from Cub Scouts.)  And there is certainly a school of thought that abhors reenactors as much as it does galvanized steel “classrooms in the sky.”  Popular Civil War historian Bruce Catton was especially critical of battle enactments which, he said, "require us to reproduce, for the enjoyment of attendant spectators, a tin shadow-picture of something which involved death and agony for the original participants."

Despite the heat, guided tours of the battlefield and monument were in full swing throughout the 150th.

However, the view is entirely different among reenactors, who staged two large-scale battles during the 150th commemoration.  One participant wrote passionately afterwards, “The horror of the Civil War hit me then, in ways that history books and Ken Burns’ films never had.  I was watching real people, all of them Americans, killing each other.  I knew it wasn’t real, but I also knew that if it had been, I would have fallen on the ground and sobbed.”

It’s pretty hard to say that that’s not accessing history.

235,000 visited Gettysburg during the commemoration; they read, walked, drove, toured, listened, visited museums, bought souvenirs, took thousands of digital pictures, camped, mountain-biked and reenacted, accessing history in all sorts of interesting ways; one new film even uses drones to illustrate the battle. As with most things Gettysburg, however, it may be best to look to Abraham Lincoln for the final word: How we preserve and interpret the battle’s meaning--and by implication, find ways to make and keep it accessible--should be, he said, all part of the "great task remaining before us."

An 1882 cartoon: "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT. Enlightened American Statesman.--"We must draw the line somewhere, you know." Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Joseph L. Yannielli

This is cross-posted from the blog Digital Histories at Yale.

Nineteenth-century Americans viewed themselves through an international lens. Among the most important artifacts of this global consciousness is William Channing Woodbridge’s “Moral and Political Chart of the Inhabited World.” First published in 1821 and reproduced in various shapes and sizes in the decades prior to the Civil War, Woodbridge’s chart was a central and popular component of classroom instruction. I use it in my research and teaching. It forms a key part of my argument about the abolitionist encounter with Africa. And every time I look at it, I see something new or unexpected.

Chart of the Inhabited World: Exhibiting the Prevailing Religion, Form Of Government, 1821

Like basketball and jazz, the moral chart is an innovation unique to the United States. The earliest iterations depart from the Eurocentric and Atlantic focus with which modern readers are most familiar. Reflecting the early American obsession with westward expansion, they gaze out over the Pacific Ocean to East Asia and the Polynesian Islands. The chart features a plethora of statistical and critical data. Nations and territories are ranked according to their “Degrees of Civilisation,” form of government, and religion. Darker colored regions are “savage” or “barbarous” while rays of bright light pour out from the Eastern United States and Northern Europe.

Thematic mapping of this sort was nothing radically new. John Wyld’s “Chart of the World Shewing the Religion, Population and Civilization of Each Country,” published in London in 1815, graded national groups on a progressive scale, from I to V. Wyld gave himself a V and the United States a I, II, and IV. Woodbridge may have been inspired by this example, but he also took it to a new level. Drawing on the climatological charts developed by German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, he used complex shading and mathematical coordinates to give an air of scientific precision. And he placed the United States on a civilized par with Europe. With its sophisticated detail and colorful imagery, it is easy to see why Woodbridge’s image became a runaway success. It is deeply disturbing to compare it to recent NASA maps of the global electrical grid.

Countless men and women stared at similar maps and reports from foreign lands and dreamed and imagined and schemed about their futures. Some experienced dramatic revelations. Visiting friends in 1837, itinerant minister Zilpha Elaw heard the voice of God: “I have a message for her to go with upon the high seas and she will go.” Others were simply bored. Prior to his arrival in Monrovia that same year, medical student David Francis Bacon daydreamed about Africa, “torrid, pestilential, savage, mysterious.” George Thompson, a prisoner in Missouri in the 1840s, read articles from the Union Missionary aloud to his fellow inmates. “We quickly pass from Mendi to Guinea, Gaboon, Natal, Ceylon, Bombay, Madura, Siam, China, Palestine, Turkey, The Islands, the Rocky Mountains, Red Lake,” he wrote in his journal, “from tribe to tribe – from nation to nation – from continent to continent, and round the world we go.”

Woodbridge’s chart and others like it inspired a slew of “moral maps” illustrated by antislavery activists, in which the slave states were usually colored the darkest black. One of the most explicit, published by British ophthalmologist John Bishop Estlin, used blood red to symbolize the “blighting influence” of the South oozing out into the the rest of the country. An 1848 broadside showed slavery poised to swallow the entire hemisphere, from Cuba to Central America to the Pacific Rim. Another used a black arrow to trace the “curse of slavery” from Virginia to war, treason, murder, and hell (which is located in Texas). The most famous of the Woodbridge descendants were the elaborate “free soil” charts and diagrams used in electoral campaigns. Crammed with statistics correlating slaveholding with illiteracy and political tyranny, these charts became crucial organizing tools both before and during the Civil War.

The most unusual map I unearthed in the course of my research reversed the logic of the typical moral chart by shining a bright light on the African continent. Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1842 and reprinted many times thereafter, this map reveals the movement’s Afrocentric global vision. Europe and North America recede into darkness as Africa takes center

From The Rights of Man (1843)

stage. The United States, flanked by the term SLAVERY, is almost falling off the map at the edge of the world. Most editions coupled this image with a moral map of the U.S. South, which colored the slaveholding states, and even the waterways surrounding them, as darkly savage, the lowest of the low on the Woodbridge scale. The juxtaposition of these two images significantly complicates historians’ assumptions about Africa as “the dark continent.” Although we now know that the human race, language, culture, and civilization all began in Africa, such views were not uncommon in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Contemporary ideas about African cultures were complex and often mixed condescension with respect. Most surprising of all, I know of no historian who has given sustained attention to this map. With the exception of outstanding books by Martin Brückner and Susan Schulten, I know of few historians who have engaged the legacies of William Woodbridge’s various moral charts.

The past five or ten years have witnessed an explosion of scholarship on the global dimensions of American history and the birth of a new field, sometimes referred to as “The United States in the World.” Nineteenth-century history is very much a part of this trend, but progress has been slow and uneven. The nineteenth century was America’s nationalist century, with the Civil War serving as its fulcrum in both classrooms and books. Perhaps understandably, there is a tendency to look inward during times of national crisis. Yet as I and others have argued, nationalism – and racism, and sexism, and classism, and other related isms – are a fundamentally international process. Woodbridge’s Moral and Political Chart is the perfect example. Simultaneously nationalist and international, it depicts the United States embedded in a world of turmoil and change. Two recent conferences in South Carolina and Germany are evidence of a rising momentum that seeks to re-situate the U.S. Civil War era as part of a much broader global conflict. But a great deal of work remains to be done.

To get a sense of where the field is heading, its strengths as well as its weaknesses, it is necessary to map the terrain. To my knowledge, no one has attempted an organized and comprehensive database of the rapidly growing literature on the international dimensions of nineteenth-century American history. So, not too long ago, I launched a Zotero library to see what could be done. Based on the bibliography for my dissertation, it is decidedly biased and impressionistic. Aside from brilliant entries by Gerald Horne and Robert Rosenstone, the Pacific World and Asia are underrepresented. The same could be said for Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Since the nineteenth-century, like all historical periods, is essentially an ideological construction, I have been flexible with the dates. I think anything from the early national period (circa 1783) through the entry into World War I (circa 1917) should be fair game. Although he is not chiefly concerned with the United States, this roughly corresponds to the limits set a decade ago by C. A. Bayly. I also subdivided the material based on publication medium (book, chapter, article, dissertation, etc.). This system can and probably should be refined in the future to allow sorting by geographic focus and time frame.

Zotero is admired by researchers and teachers alike. Over the past seven years, it has evolved a robust set of features, including the ability to collaborate on group projects. The Zotpress plugin, which generates custom citations for blog posts, is another really neat feature. As a content management system, it still has its flaws. The web interface can be sluggish for lower bandwidth users, and compared to Drupal or Omeka, the member roles and permissions are downright archaic. If an admin wants a user to be able to create content but not edit or delete other users’ content, for example, there is no real solution. Admins are able to close membership, so that users must request an invitation to join the group. This allows tight control over the content community. But it arguably kills a good deal of the spontaneity and anonymity that energizes the most successful crowdsourcing experiments. At the same time, the Zotero API and its various branches are fully open source and customizable, so I really can’t complain.

The biggest problem is the randomness of the semantic web. Primarily a browser plugin, Zotero allows users to surf to a site, book, or journal article and add that item to their bibliography with a single click. Sites do not always have the best metadata, however, so manual fixes are usually required. Several of the books I added from Google Books had an incorrect publication date. Others had very little or no descriptive data at all. Without delving into complicated debates about GRDDL or Dublin Core, I will just say that a catalog is only as good as its metadata. None of this has anything to do with Zotero, of course, which still gives the 3×5 index card a run for its money.

Although I admit I am not a heavy user, Zotero struck me as the ideal platform for an historiographical potluck. My Nineteenth-Century U.S. History in International Perspective group is now live. Anyone can view the library, and anyone who signs on as a member can add and edit information (I just ask that members not delete others’ content or make major changes without consulting the group). As of right now, I have not added any substantive notes to the source material. But it might be neat to do this and compile the database as an annotated bibliography. I will try to update the library as I’m able. At the very least, it will be an interesting experiment. A large part of the battle for history is just knowing what material is out there.

Conducted by Randall Stephens

W. Jason Wallace is a professor of history at Samford University. He is the author of Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (Notre Dame University Press, 2010). I recently caught up with Jason to ask him some questions about his work on Christianity in pre-Civil War America and to discuss some of the

Wall Street, 1847. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

connections between religion, politics, and historical consciousness in the nineteenth century U.S.

Randall Stephens: What makes the era between 1835 and 1860 such a critical period in American religious history?

W. Jason Wallace: Between 1835 and 1860 most aspects of American social, political, and economic life reached something of a ferment.  Religion, and especially Christianity, underwent substantial trials as well.  Religious disestablishment was then, and still is, a young phenomenon in the scope of world history.  Unlike European churches, American churches had to compete in the marketplace of ideas for adherents.  People had choices.  Religious affiliation was not simply a matter of genealogy or geography.  As a result, in Nathan Hatch’s great phrasing, the democratization of the churches began in earnest.  With the First Great Awakening the confessional boundaries established over the course of a century or so after the Reformation slowly lost influence.  The Second Great Awakening all but ended the confessional church tradition in America.  Revivalism combined with broad conceptions of evangelicalism to create new Protestant identities.  By the middle decades of the nineteenth century many Protestant traditions that valued creeds and liturgy found themselves overwhelmed by evangelical sentiment.  Doctrine became less important than the individuals’ personal relationship with God, and behavior and public virtue came to be seen more and more as marks of “genuine” Christianity.  In some ways these theological shifts made evangelicalism valuable to the growing country because it gave sanction to the importance of virtue and morality for national life.  In other words, Christianity provided a code of behavior that could benefit everyone.  But for Christianity to be useful it had to be contained.  If disputes over theology and doctrine spilled into public life then Christianity could become divisive and socially destabilizing.  In part, this is exactly what happened in the debate over slavery. 

Stephens: What accounts for the close connection between anti-slavery and anti-Catholicism?

Wallace: Economics, immigration, social pressures, and theological disagreements all contributed to the close connection between anti-slavery and anti-Catholicism.  In the nineteenth century the intellectual centers of American evangelicalism were in the large emerging industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest.  Here also is where we find strong pockets of Whigs as well as growing numbers of abolitionists and Irish Catholic immigrants.  One could say that the northern cities had all the right conditions for the “perfect religious and political storm” against Catholicism and slavery.

Between 1835 and 1860 the alleged tyrannies of slavery and Catholicism became a unifying idea for

A nativist newspaper from the antebellum period. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

northern Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists.   All oppressive hierarchies, religious or secular, were depicted as the enemies of American values.

Stephens: Could you say a little bit about the sources you used in your study?

Wallace: Most of my primary sources were sermons, articles in popular religious periodicals, correspondence, newspapers, and theological essays found in academic journals. Primary Catholic sources were a bit tougher to find than Protestant ones.  There were some letters, but most Catholic sources came from rejoinders against Protestant accusations, Catholic periodicals, theological essays, and polemical pieces defending the compatibility between Catholicism and Americanism.  Without a doubt the journal was the blog of the nineteenth century. 

Stephens: You note that in many ways northern Protestants in the antebellum era were divided over questions about doctrine and politics. How did those divisions shape the struggle leading up to war?

Wallace: I did not find any indication of a monolithic northern evangelical “mind,” but there is evidence that American evangelicals in general, and northern evangelicals in particular, tended to value shared social commitments more than theological precision.  Over the course of the mid-nineteenth century the Protestant theological divisions of the past came to matter less than how Christianity translated into social and political questions.  Evangelicals, however, faced a serious problem when they began to disagree about what constituted legitimate social concerns.  Nowhere was this problem more pronounced than with the slavery question. Where theology could be either ignored or debated without real public consequence, politics could not.  Antebellum politics betrayed the appearance of unity evangelicals so desperately desired.  Both northern and southern evangelicals held fast to the notion that there was in fact a relationship between Protestant Christianity and good government.  This relationship, though never explicitly defined, divided millions of evangelicals when the slavery question could no longer be ignored.  Northern evangelicals believed slavery to be as incompatible with American values as Catholicism, and they launched a semi-coordinated campaign against both Catholics and slaveholders in sermons, speeches, and journal articles.  A consequence of this campaign was that slaveholders, like Catholics, shared the position of the northern evangelical ideological “other”—the outsider who had to be assimilated or reconstructed.  While southern theologians retreated into a myopic defense of the peculiar institution, Northern evangelicals increasingly allowed their understanding of the church to be defined by the American experiment.

Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, May 1851.

Three excellent studies that came out just before or just after my book that further the connections between doctrine and politics (and I wish I had had more time to absorb into my work) are Mark Noll’s, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Harry Stout’s, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, and George Rable’s God’s Almost Chosen People.

Stephens: You spend some time writing about how believers engaged the past or constructed a usable past.  Could you tell us a little about how views of the past were politicized?

Wallace: Most people want a useable past regardless of their religious beliefs or where they called home.  Look at the great stories by writers as different in time and place as William Faulkner and Philip Roth.  Both develop fascinating characters whose pasts contribute to self-awareness.  There is something universal in this quest.  In this regard, I don’t think antebellum evangelicals are very different from other people or groups.  What is somewhat unique is the way they used the past and what they emphasized.  Northern evangelical leaders recognized a threat in the articulate and intellectually talented American Catholic hierarchy.  Yet, they also understood the hierarchy had roots in Europe, and they were convinced that Rome was in some way behind all of Europe’s political problems.  Both current events in Europe as well as Europe’s pre-Reformation history loomed large in the northern evangelical imagination.  Specifically, the idea of the Middle Ages as dark, corrupt, and tyrannical provided the perfect foil against which northern evangelicals could articulate their optimism about political liberalism.  They insisted that intellectual and moral slavery were the twin legacies of the Middle Ages, and that under their benevolent Christian influence “mental” slavery must end in Europe as surely as physical slavery would in America.

Stephens: Historians like Charles Irons, Donald Mathews, and Christine Heyrman have studied southern evangelicals’ relationship to slavery in various ways.  Would you say something about how you approached the discussion of southern evangelicalism, slavery, and Catholicism?

Wallace: The scholars you mention are certainly important.  To that list I would add Anne C. Loveland, Mitchell Snay, Eugene Genovese, and Michael O’Brien.  While each subject has been well-covered independent of one another, I found little that treated them together.  Southern evangelicals were conservative in temperament, yet they shared with northern evangelicals the belief that the United States should be identified with Protestant values.  In the main, they overwhelmingly rejected revisions to received Christian doctrine, but they did not entirely reject the idea that

Slave Market, by unknown artist, 1850s-60s.

Protestantism should play an important role in shaping the character of the nation. With the crises of secession and war, southern evangelicals were as resolute as northern evangelicals that their understanding of Christianity provide a moral template for republicanism.  An important point I tried to make in the book is that although southern evangelicals never abandoned the leveling theological principles of Protestantism, they nevertheless distanced themselves from the northern evangelical notion that Protestantism could perfect democracy.   As a result, southern evangelicals found themselves touting hierarchical and elitist political and social arrangements while at the same time they defended the priesthood of the believer, private conscience, and the perspicuity of Scripture.  In short, southern evangelicals worked hard, very hard, to justify a conservative social vision of caste, aristocracy, and natural inequality while at the same time holding on to Protestant religious presuppositions that championed none of these things.  By recasting their political theology in terms that supported slavery, southern evangelicals confirmed what northern evangelicals had been arguing for years—slaveholders were a threat to their nationalist aims precisely because they offered a competing vision of what a Christian republic might look like.  In this sense, southern evangelicals found themselves in a predicament remarkably similar to a group with whom they would otherwise have very little in common, American Catholics.