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.

[Here we repost a piece on the history of Thanksgiving that originally appeared on Thursday November 25, 2010]  
Heather Cox Richardson

Anyone who cares about the history of Thanksgiving generally knows that the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags shared a feast in fall 1621, and that early American leaders periodically declared days of thanksgiving when settlers were supposed to give their thanks for continued life and—with luck—prosperity.

The following year, ahead of the many expected state proclamations, President Lincoln declared a national day of Thanksgiving. He issued his proclamation on July 15, and the relief in the document was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.

The President invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

Heather Cox Richardson

On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln spoke at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg. When the battered armies limped out of Pennsylvania after July’s brutal fight, they left behind them more than 7000 corpses in a town with fewer than 2500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, getting the dead soldiers into the ground quickly was imperative. A local lawyer urged

Lincoln at Gettysburg, about three hours before he gave his address.

Washington to establish a national cemetery in the town, where the soldiers could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and the lawyer planned an elaborate dedication ceremony. The organizers invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. They asked prominent orator Edward Everett to deliver the keynote address. And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Lincoln to make a few remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.

About 15,000 people gathered in Gettysburg for the ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln got up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.

President Lincoln reminded the American people what they were fighting for. He transformed into poetry the nation’s founding principles. While slave owners stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their slaves—Lincoln insisted that American stood for equality before the law. Dating the nation from the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution, he insisted that America was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln’s argument was about far more than race. In his youth, Lincoln and his friends, poor men all, had seen fabulously wealthy slaveholders gain control over the government. They had shaped legislation that permitted them to make more and more money, and which took away opportunities for men just starting out. Increasingly, wealthy men insisted that their economic system, which had enabled them to amass fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one, for most men were dull drudges who must be led by their betters. There was no point in letting them have the tools to rise, for giving them opportunities would only divert the resources rich men would use better. When slave owners overturned longstanding laws to enable them to move their economic system into the West, Lincoln believed the very fate of the nation was at stake. “[W]e are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether . . . any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

In the late 1850s Lincoln quit his law practice and threw his lot with the Republicans, a new political party that promised to keep the American government from falling under the control of rich men. Regular people must control the government, he thought, for only they would guarantee that laws would continue to enable every man to rise. Nothing was more important, the president told his listeners at Gettysburg, than continuing to fight so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Most northerners blessed Lincoln’s speech, but opponents howled at the idea that America stood for equality. Surely “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood,” were not equal to white people, Lincoln’s own vice-president would later rant. Others echoed the slave owners who warned that, unless the rich controlled government, it would confiscate wealth. Poor men would want tax dollars used for schools and hospitals, and the bulk of tax money would come from wealthier members of society.

Nonetheless, Lincoln’s position was clear. “[W]e can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground,” he noted. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” For Lincoln, the lesson of Gettysburg was for those left behind. “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Why does the Gettysburg Address still matter? With it, President Lincoln rededicated the nation to the principle of human equality, and to a government that reflected that equality by advancing the economic interests of all Americans. Now, as then, most Americans back Lincoln’s vision. And now, as then, there are those who oppose those principles for both racial and economic reasons.

Now, as then, we must grapple with the same questions Americans did in 1863: What does America stand for?

It is no fluke that Fun. used Civil War imagery in this brilliant video, or that it has had more than 86 million hits:



What do we stand for?

Heather Cox Richardson

Last week the U.S. Navy began the process of salvaging the CSS Georgia. There were two Confederate ships that bore this name. One was a raider; this one was an ironclad battery moored before Savannah to protect the city. Confederates scuttled it in a channel of the Savannah River in

View from Fort Jackson of the buoy marking the wreck of the CSS Georgia.

December 1864 to keep it out of the hands of General Sherman’s advancing troops. Next year, 150 years after it went down, it will come back into daylight.

Although the CSS Georgia was placed on the National Historic Register in 1987, it had no great military significance. It might have slowed down the taking of Savannah; too slow to maneuver, it might not have. Indeed, in its twenty months of operations, the CSS Georgia never fired a shot. It shows up only rarely in records: there are no existing plans for its construction. We don’t even know how big it was; sources say anything from 150 to 250 feet long. It is barely mentioned in most histories of the Civil War. So why should anyone not deeply interested in the—admittedly very interesting—world of underwater archaeology care about this naval salvage operation?

The story of the CSS Georgia beautifully illustrates the relentless press of the modern world on even the most deeply held outmoded beliefs.

The CSS Georgia was nicknamed “The Ladies’ Ram” because Savannah women (organized as the Ladies Gunboat Association) raised much of the money to build the ship. They did so because they believed so fervently in their cause: the preservation of a slave system that had been outmoded by the modern world. They gave their all to that cause, and yet by the time the ship was launched in May 1862, the Confederacy was beginning to feel the pinch of shortages. Many of the women who had raised money for the CSS Georgia would lose their husbands and watch their children cry with hunger as the war dragged on.

Only twenty months after the women of Savannah watched the ship they had funded slide down the ways, they would hear it had been scuttled. Then, on December 22, 1864, General Sherman offered their city to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift. Within six months, the modern world would rush in. Sleepy Savannah would turn to heavy industry and the export of naval stores, joining the modern economy. In 1866 a passing ship struck the wreck of the CSS Georgia, prompting officials to mark it with a buoy. Two years later, the Treasury Department hired a contractor to dynamite the ship, gather about 80 tons of iron, and sell it in the building boom. Everyone forgot the CSS Georgia until another vessel dredging the channel for more economic expansion snagged the forgotten wreck in 1968 and tore it apart. More dredging in 1969 1970, 1974, 1982, and 1983 further damaged the site. Also in 1982, a ship dragged the USCGS buoy marking the site downstream, pulling a ten-ton anchor through it. In 1979 diving operations recovered two cannons and other ordnance from the wreck. Investigations in 2003 showed that the ship’s hull was gone. The needs of Savannah’s modern economy tore the CSS Georgia apart.

Now, finally, efforts to expand the port of Savannah for the requirements of the 21st century demand that the ship be moved once and for all.

The story of the CSS Georgia’s salvage is interesting in its own right. But I can’t help thinking of those Georgia women who raised the money to build the ship to support an outmoded way of life. Their dedication to a system that the rest of the world had left behind required tremendous sacrifice. . .and for naught. The modern world ground on, no matter what obstacles they tried to anchor in its way.

Heather Cox Richardson

In honor of the birthday of Margaret Mitchell (November 8, 1900), I’d like to offer the very best thing to come out of Gone With the Wind: Carol Burnett’s classic spoof, entitled “Went With the Wind.” I discovered yesterday that none of my students had heard of this, and Burnett as Scarlett O’Hara in her new dress (at the beginning of Part 2) is one of the all-time greatest moments in comedic history:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Aaron Astor

In 1926 historian E. Merton Coulter described Kentucky during the Civil War as a “crouching lion, stretched east and west . . . the thoroughfare of the continent.” Kentucky served as more than the geographic fulcrum of the Union between slave and free states. It also represented the political heart of the Union, its politicians, most notably Henry Clay, having offered Union-saving compromise measures since 1820. It had long embraced conservative Unionism, a political tradition that understood “conservative” both as a social orientation (allowing for only gradual change to the institution of slavery) and a political relationship (with the Union buttressing the social order).

Militarily, Kentucky was absolutely critical to the Federal war effort, as the Ohio River would have become an international boundary if Kentucky had joined the Confederacy. Further, tens of thousands of Indianans, Illinoisans, and Ohioans traced their roots to Kentucky, including President Lincoln himself. Capturing the delicate but essential position of his native state, Lincoln commented that to “lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” After Fort Sumter, Kentuckians hoped to stay out of the war altogether, declaring the state “neutral” and pledging support for neither belligerent. But when Confederate General Leonidas Polk invaded the southwestern tip of the state in the beginning of September 1861, the legislature immediately declared its support for the Union.

What followed was a troubled partnership between a conservative, pro-slavery Unionist coalition within Kentucky and a Federal political and military engine steadily moving toward emancipation as a central war aim. The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply in Kentucky (since it was not in rebellion), and military officials made special efforts not to alienate the state’s civilian leadership. The breaking point came with black soldier enlistment in 1864, when 57% of black male Kentuckians of military age entered the Union army—the highest percentage, by far, of any slave state. The result was a dual rebellion in Kentucky: white Confederates rejected the “Union” part of conservative Unionism, and the slave population rejected the “conservative” part. By the end of 1865, eight months after Appomattox, Kentucky was the last state (along with Delaware) to maintain slavery, requiring the Thirteenth Amendment to bring the institution to an end. Legions of former conservative Unionists welcomed their ex-Confederate foes back to the state with open arms. And the state quickly developed a belated Confederate identity that would provide a rubric of resistance against Radical Reconstruction.

To understand how Kentucky’s slaves converted a pro-slavery Union that many of their masters supported into an anti-slavery republic, we must consider slave attitudes before 1861. Kentucky slaves who rebelled against the old social order drew upon decades of resistance against a small-scale but tenacious slave system. Networks of fugitive slaves, repeated insurrectionary threats, defiant acts in defense of the slave community and family, and everyday forms of resistance made for a slave population that was politically aware of the stakes of civil war in 1861. Slave actions exacerbated tensions within the Ohio Valley, especially in neighboring free states where the Fugitive Slave Act was never popular. Alas, divisions between anti-slavery Midwesterners and pro-slavery Kentuckians—and between pro-slavery Kentuckians over the best means to support the slave-based social order—led to a complicated form of border state warfare by late 1861. Slaves understood that divisions within the master class created an opportunity for freedom, and they positioned themselves to exploit the opening brought by civil war.

This post draws from Aaron Astor, “The Crouching Lion's Fate: Slave Politics and Conservative Unionism in Kentucky,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 110 (2012): 293-326, which won the 2013 Richard H. Collins Prize from the Kentucky Historical Society.

Lisa Clark Diller

I will admit to having been a re-enactment virgin until the weekend of September 21, 2013.  As readers of this blog are well aware, we are in the midst of all things Civil War in the United States. Chattanooga, Tennessee, is marking its own big battles all this fall. 
Specifically, the engagements at Chickamauga occurred 150 years ago, September 19-20.    As someone whose research reflects a great deal on another civil war (one in England in the 1640s), I have tended to smile blithely through local history enthusiasts’ explanations of the Confederacy, the Union, and the role played by East Tennessee in that conflict.

However, as a teacher of a first year seminar who is always looking for the required “bonding experience” for my students, this year it seemed appropriate to participate in some local history.  I don’t think this was one of the most effectively executed re-enactments (others with more experience have confirmed this opinion).  But the weather was lovely, the setting beautiful, and my students seemed to have a good time.

It made me start thinking about the role of such events as educational opportunities.  What is the purpose of re-enactments of battles for historical education? The re-enactments seem to me to be a bit different than the interpretations offered in museums and on walking tours. Those of you who study public history can perhaps straighten me out on this. I can guess why the people participating might be enjoying themselves. I can see why communities might want to watch them. But when it comes to serving the goals of education—what is going on here?  I am specifically thinking about the “so what?” of history.  I quizzed my students before and after the event regarding what they thought this experience revealed of the “so what?” of historical thinking and skill-building.  Here are some of their comments:

These are not the most nuanced observations, but my own experience is so thin that I’m sure I lost teaching moments over the course of the day.  Perhaps I can blame the poor quality of the event itself. 

Fellow HS blogger Eric Schultz’s experience at Gettysburg was much richer—and his description of all the learning opportunities available to people visiting the park reflect the best of what our National Park Service has to offer.  Since reenactments aren’t allowed in the park itself, and this event took place a good 45-minute drive away from Chickamauga battlefield, the observers here weren’t able to easily take advantage of all the resources the NPS offers.

I am interested in what readers of this blog think is useful about military reenactments in terms of pedagogy or historical thinking.  I realize work has been done on the culture of reenactment itself (see here and here), so I’m not thinking as much of the actual participants.  But how can we use the widespread and deep interest in this phenomenon to teach some of the skills of historical thinking?  How much preparation might our students need ahead of time?  Are there usually interpreters explaining what is happening in terms of military strategy, etc, as the visitors watch the efforts of the reenactors?  What experiences have the rest of you had?

Kevin M. Levin*

[Crossposted from the Civil War Memory blog]

Last week's post on the Civil War Memory blog about the unveiling of three plaques honoringVirginia’s post-Civil War black politicians has me thinking about my old buddy, William Mahone. While Mahone is best remembered as the “Hero of the Crater” his role in launching and leading the state’s most successful third-party political movement has largely been forgotten. In Virginia it was intentionally ignored because what came to be known as the Readjuster Party (1879-83) was bi-racial. The arc from Mahone’s role in preventing a Union breakthrough outside Petersburg that left scores of black Union soldiers massacred on the Crater battlefield to creating an opportunity for the largest number of black Virginians to vote, go to school and serve in positions of local and state government just a few short years later could not be more striking. Could anyone in 1865 anticipate that it would be a former Confederate general who would bring Reconstruction to Virginia?

Is it time to recognize William Mahone publicly in some shape or form? I say yes, if for no other reason than it would help to bring into sharper focus a piece of Virginia’s history that places yesterday’s dedication in its proper context. In other words, post-Civil War Virginia makes absolutely no sense without a reference to Mahone and the Readjuster Party.  It matters, not simply because it’s part of Virginia’s history, but because it has something important to teach us as well. The period following the official years of Reconstruction (1865-1877) did not inevitably lead to Jim Crow. Interracial cooperation was not only possible in the South between 1877 and the turn of the twentieth century but a reality for a few short years in Virginia. Virginia’s Reconstruction was not forced on it by “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” but by legitimate stakeholders, who believed that a brighter future could be forged for both races. Finally, there is something juicy about all of this being introduced by a former Confederate general.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Admittedly, Mahone is not the most likeable person. In fact, in all the years that I researched the man I never caught more than a fleeting glimpse of any emotional life beyond that facial here. (BTW, I still can't picture the man laughing.) We like to be able to empathize with those historical figures we recognize and commemorate. More to the point, I still don’t fully understand why Mahone decided to forge a bi-racial coalition. Was he motivated by lingering bitterness over his railroad going into receivership in the early 1870s – a turn of events that Mahone blamed on Virginia’s Conservative elements. Was Mahone simply thirsty for political power and understood that interracial cooperation offered the best chance of success? Finally, to what extent was he genuinely interested in advancing the cause of the state’s black population? I don’t know, but I suspect that it’s a combination of all three as well as other factors. Mahone was a complicated guy and his motives were not likely pure, but than again, who among our most beloved public servants could make such a claim.

I don’t know what a proper commemoration of Mahone might look like. The city of Petersburg owns Mahone’s postwar home, which now serves as a library and was interestingly enough the scene of a civil rights protest that led to its integration in the 1960s. His boyhood home in Southampton County is owned by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Perhaps some kind of plaque could be unveiled on the capital grounds in Richmond. The form it takes doesn’t really concern me much.

What matters to me is the act of once again taking ownership of a small piece of history that we no longer have a reason to ignore.

Kevin M. Levin is an Instructor of American history at Gann Academy near Boston. He is the author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and is currently writing a book on the history of Confederate camp servants and the myth of the black Confederate soldier. Levin’s essays have appeared online in The New York Times and the Atlantic as well as popular magazines and academic journals. Levin has been blogging at Civil War Memory since November 2005.

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."

The Society of Civil War Historians is soliciting nominations for the Tom Watson Brown Book Prize for books published in 2013.

All genres of scholarship on the causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War are eligible. This includes, but is not exclusive to, monographs, synthetic works presenting original interpretations, and biographies. Works of fiction, poetry, anthologies, and textbooks will not be considered. Jurors will consider nominated works’ scholarly and literary merit as well as the extent to which they make original contributions to our understanding of the period.

Thavolia Glymph, Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, will chair the prize jury. The other members are Alice Fahs, Professor of History and Director of the Humanities Honors Program at the University of California – Irvine, and Kenneth Noe, Alumni Professor and Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc., will serve as a non-voting member of the jury.

Publishers are asked to send nominated books (only those published in 2013 will be considered) directly to the four jurors no later than January 31, 2014. The winner will be announced by August 1, 2014. The award will be presented at the SCWH banquet at the Southern Historical Association meeting, where the winner will deliver a formal address that will be published in a subsequent issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era. 

More information>>>

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.