Letters from the Dead

19th-century image (Cape Fear Museum Collection)

Since I've been home from Georgia, I've been trying to keep my Civil War mojo going, and while I haven't read as much as I'd like (does anyone ever?), I have carved out some time to do primary research. It's a great way for me to keep feeling connected to the past.

For the last month of so, I've been avoiding the Museum on Mondays, spending my days at UNCW's special collections, looking at their Civil War materials.

I've been reading Civil War soldiers' letters home. And I've found them to be a startlingly moving combination of mundane and just plain weird. I wasn't really expecting that I would find them so touching.

As a historian, I spend a lot of time buried in the past, thinking about long-dead people.

Unknown woman (Cape Fear Museum Collection)

It's a part of being in the profession.

Still, sometimes the dead speak to you more directly. It was more than 10 years ago now, yet I can almost taste the memory of sitting in the National Archives building in downtown Washington DC, sniffling as I read about a woman who died one December 2nd during World War I.

National Archives Image

The woman, who was a widow with children, was killed by a train as she walked along its tracks. I remember feeling sorry for the locomotive engineer who was just doing his job, and accidentally ended someone's life. Surely he must have felt awful. I remember the brittle, crisp paper of the official typed report. It seemed so detached from death; so bureaucratic. I wondered how the woman's children felt. I wondered when the ripples of this woman's death might calm. I wondered who else missed her, and if anyone loved her.

You might be wondering why I remember all this about this random document. And the answer is deceptively simple. She shares a death day with my own mother.

My mother Anne, 1959

Even at the time I knew I was embarrassing myself in a room full of dusty documents and strangers, crying over a long-dead woman who I'd never met, in the National Archives' fanciest reading room, because her death tangentially touched the fabric of my own life.

My then-intact family, 1970s

I am a big softy. So I really shouldn't be that surprised that these documents move me.

Richard Martin Van Buren Reaves, about 1861 (Cape Fear Museum collection)

And yet I find that I am surprised.

As I've started thinking more about the Civil War, it's really hitting home that, even though I deal in the lives of the dead on a daily basis, my regular brand of history doesn't usually deal so directly in death.

Typically, I haven't spent time reading letters from people who are worried they might die. It leaves an oddly tangible pall over the experience.

There's a melancholy patina that spreads over everything when you start thinking about these often-sad, often-lonely young men who gave their lives to support a side in the nation's bloodiest conflict.

And there are just so many dead to think about. It's unfathomable in some ways. It's no wonder we're drawn to the individual letters and stories -- they give you details to hold onto, in a way that statistics cannot.

The first set of letters I read were written by a man, a boy really, who died before he was 20.

Confederate soldier John J. Wilson (1844-1863) made me laugh. Almost every time he wrote to his family, he started his letter with some version of "I write you a few lines informing you that I am well and present and hope this will [find] you enjoying good health. I have nothing interesting to write at present...." (October 13, 1862).

Perhaps it's just me, but it seemed as though Wilson was apologizing for putting pen to paper, as if even writing home might be seen as to self-aggrandizing. I thought it was pretty funny. Why bother to write if you're going to apologize for doing it?

At the same time, after his protestations that he had nothing to say were out of the way, I felt there was often a lot of interest in his letters. He wrote home about deserters, about being "very soar [sore] from marching" about building entrenchments around Wilmington.

And then, as time went by, he turned maudlin, and started expressing his loneliness: "I should like to see you very much mother." (April 15, 1863).

And then young John died, even as the war and its needs continued on around him.

Dead confederate, April 1865 (New York Public Library Collection)

There's something heartbreaking to read the letter where a Mr. W.R. Bell is balancing needing to get "Johnny Wilson's" gun back, and at the same time expressing sympathy to the family. Bell wrote to a third party on August 6, 1863, "I was very sorry to hear of John's death he was a good boy and made a splendid soldier but it was the will of god and must be so."

And here's where life and history feel like they are tangentially crossing again. As a mother of one small son who could conceivably be conscripted into a war one day, I can't stop thinking about how awful all the death must have been for those left to deal with it, and how difficult it must have been to know what to do and what to say in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.

And so, although I don't normally cry in the archives, I feel sure there will be a lot more crying over long-dead men, women, and children before this project is through.

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Flying Weeks

The seminar is over. Four weeks have flown by.

In our last week, we went on a tour of Savannah. We started at the very large Confederate edifice in Forsyth Park.

We examined the ways the past was displayed on Savannah's city streets.

I especially "enjoyed" that you can't see this sign, which announced this building was the Union Army Headquarters in 1865.

I walked up the building's steps to snap a picture of the whole sign from where you could see it, and when I actually read it when I got home, you can see the authors were more interested in suggesting the U.S. army's occupation of the house may have damaged the family's property than in helping readers understand when or why Savannah fell to U.S. forces.

So, the pro-Confederate content of the sign blew my "hiding pro-Union history through vegetative overgrowth" conspiracy theory out the window!

Anyway, we wandered through the beautiful and hot city streets,

looking at markers old and new,

past beautiful houses where enslaved people once worked,

surrounded by all sorts of architectural elements that make Savannah seem so delightful.

We ended at a riverfront statue, dedicated to African Americans in the region.

The marker's text, written by Maya Angelou, caused a lot of controversy. The inscription says:

We were stolen, sold and bought together from the African continent. We got on the slave ships together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships together in each other's excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown overboard together. Today we are standing up together, with faith and even some joy.

That last line was, apparently, added to soften the quote's morbid sentiments. Even with that line, however, you can understand why there might be a reaction. How many tourists want to think about the horrors of slavery and its legacies on a day when there is the smell of pralines in the air and the river is home to fake sidesteamers?

Still, I'm glad that it is there, even if one not terribly historically enlightening monument can't really compensate for the city's generations of reflexive Confederate memorializing.

As I got ready to leave, I kept thinking about how the publicly displayed history of Savannah, like the publicly displayed history of so many southern places, seems so disjointed.

Antebellum Savannah had a large African American population, many of whom sought their freedom when they could, and yet right next to the African American monument on the riverfront, which tries to speak to slavery's role in shaping the lives of African Americans, is a marker which completely discounts their experiences and even their existence.

Perhaps what is most appalling about this particular sign is that it is a recent addition to the waterfront, and yet it is as if all the work that people have done to write more inclusive and all-encompassing history for the last four decades never happened.

The South is still all pro-Confederacy, all White, and all anti-Sherman according this sign, funded by the Georgia Department of Transportation and the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration.

As I leave Savannah behind, and go home to the Carolinas, I wonder, with all the competing ideologies, agencies, interest groups, and understandings, will the 150th anniversary of Emancipation and the Civil War add to the country's understanding of the past?

Will we knock down old signs/interpretations and/or put up new ones?

Can we stop fighting the Civil War? Do we want to?

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Three Weeks Have Gone By.....

And North Carolina has finally seceded from the Union!

I had such grandiose plans for my time in Savannah.

I was going to read the Wilmington Journal from 1860-1865, do all the readings for the seminar (and more). I was going to write a research plan to guide me as I move forward with thinking about for the antebellum and Civil War in the Cape Fear.

Oh, how naive I was!

Time has flown. We've read 600-800 pages of stuff a week, talked about the readings, listened to guest speakers' takes on the war era, and gone on field trips in the hot sun.

The group has also done a lot of outside-the-seminar talking: about the Civil War, slavery, Savannah, about where to go to dinner, and about the crummy state of the current economy.

Family and friends have visited, so I haven't been at it 24/7, and I've done a bunch of touristy things, like taking the obligatory photo at Forsyth Park, and going to Bonaventure Cemetery.

Plus, I have spent a little time at one particularly delightful Savannah watering hole.

And so, here I am, with one week left, at it is only May 1861.

It seems fitting, though, when I really think about it. The Civil War literature is huge, the topic is multifaceted, and to do it justice I really do need to spend some serious time on it.

So, although there will still be miles to go before I sleep when I leave here, I'm excited by all the ideas I've got circling in my head. It will be interesting to see where the next months of research and reading take me when I get home to Wilmington.

Just to give you a flavour, in case you are interested, here's the Wilmington Journal 's take on an event in January 1861. Now remember, North Carolina is still in the Union, and the state does not secede until May 1861.

Still, when the residents of Brunswick county occupied Fort Caswell in anticipation of the state's secession, the paper supported taking control of a federally owned piece of property. It declared:

Of course there are differences of opinion about the prudence of this movement. Perhaps it is premature. We could have wished that nothing had been done in advance of the action of the State, but still we must believe that our fellow-citizens in Brunswick acted from a belief in the propriety and necessity of the their taking such action as they have taken. Perhaps it would save complications for the Governor to order the militia of the State to hold and take care of this property so as to guard against any further irregular or unauthorized movements. We simply make the suggestion and trust that some more experienced head will figure it out. We must not let our fellow-citizens come to trouble, or stand aloof from them now, for if we do, the time may come that when men are wanted and called for, none will come lest they should not be sustained.

This is a fascinating way to justify the actions of people who are breaking the law. And it is written by the editor (I assume) of a paper that often complains about the North's lack of resepct for slaveholders' property rights.

It is also just one of the many articles that have caught my eye over the last three weeks. So, perhaps I should be amazed that I'm even at secession.

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Sapelo

We got up really early on Tuesday, and went to Sapelo Island.

It's a barrier island off the Georgia coast. You get to the island by ferry. It was really a beautiful place.

There's not much there, really:

It has a post office.

And a gorgeous beach

incredible vegetation

and a turkey fountain, with this lovely face on it, that R.J. Reynolds installed for one of his many wives on their Sapelo estate.

But we didn't go to Sapelo because of R. J. Reynolds' house. We went there to see the remnants of the island's longstanding (but shrinking) African American community.

Today, most of Sapelo is owned by the state of Georgia. But in the antebellum period, much of the island was owned by Thomas Spaulding, a large slaveholder. The part of the Island that remains in private hands is a few hundred acres, home to a community called Hog Hammock.

The residents of Hog Hammock are descended from the Spaulding plantation's slaves. The island's population is falling, and it's clear that Hog Hammock's way of life is in jeopardy.

Looking at my photographs, I realise I didn't take any pictures of the houses in, or the residents of, Hog Hammock. It wasn't a conscious decision -- but I wonder if it came from my feeling that we should tread lightly, and try not to be too intrusive, while we were there. Maybe now I'll be less quick to judge those who take pictures of places that erase people from the landscape, since I basically did it myself because I didn't want to seem rude!

Ironically, even though I didn't take her photograph, it's easy to find a picture of Cornelia Walker Bailey. She's written a book about her life. She's even got an entry in the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

Anyway, over lunch, Ms. Bailey spoke about the island's religious practices, about cultural norms, and a little about the end of slavery days.

The thing she said that made me think the most was that she didn't use the word slave owner.

She called the ex-plantation master a slaveholder. For Ms. Bailey, it was important to distinguish between the two, because she said (I paraphrase) that you can't own someones soul.

I surely hope she's right that people always hold onto a spark of autonomy, regardless of their circumstances, but I am pessimistic enough to wonder if she's really right.

Can someone own another person so completely that they don't have any independent thought or action? Or does a light of humanity always shine through?

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Whitewashed Wormsloe?

Wormsloe State Historic Site, about 10 miles South of Savannah, is a fascinating place.

Its graceful long drive leading into the site evokes an "old south" pastorality, even though it was added after the Civil War, in the 1890s.

The site is a splendid place to visit.

The tree lined path is impressive to behold. Even more delightfully, once you are off into the paths, the landscape changes.

Every step you take, there's a rustle as a frog or a skink or something else jumps away from your approach. There are pines, palms, and all sorts of lush vegetation.

The fallen and dead trees add to the atmosphere.

And when you stand near the marsh you can hear it gurgling and talking to itself, like a content baby. It's almost as if the water is singing.

Plus, there are ruins of an old tabby fort, right near the water, giving you a tangible item through which you can take a leap into imagining the past. You can imagine watching the ships, sloops, barks, and flatboats going by.

We started outdoors. We walked, looked, and listened. And we had a fabulous, if very sweaty, time.

And then we went to the visitor center.

I can't tell you how much I wish I hadn't suggested going and looking at the exhibits. Or to be more accurate, I think I wish I had not asked the staff for more information about slavery on the site.

The staff member I asked started off by telling me there wasn't slavery in Georgia.

Whhaaaa?????

To try to put myself in the employee's shoes, I think the guy didn't really focus on what I was asking. His vision of Wormsloe was of a fort in the 1730s (and in the first decades of the colony's existence slavery was illegal), so he answered for that time frame.

And I was asking about Wormsloe in the 19th century.

And so, after a bit of to and fro, during which I pointed out that George legalized slavery in the colonial period, he finally admitted that there were 12 slaves at Wormsloe.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the conversation kind of went downhill from there.

I won't go into all the details, but to give you a flavor of the conversation...I was told that all the big plantations in the state were in Northwestern Georgia! I don't know a lot about Georgia's geography, but they picked the wrong couple of weeks to mess with me. During our first week, as we went up the Savannah River, Todd pointed out a bunch of old rice plantation, where hundreds of slaves would have labored.

And, this week, I've been reading the fabulous Saving Savannah, by Jacqueline Jones. She tells us that in 1850, Savannah was a city of 15,312 people, 7,000 of whom were slaves. I'd say that makes the region a center of slavery.

Anyway, the "inside" Worsmloe experience left a really bad taste in my mouth. And I keep wondering, does the state of Georgia really want its history to be whitewashed by its historic site's employees? Or was this guy just an abberation? I really hope he was just enthusiastic but misinformed.

Even if his view isn't the state sanctioned view, it does lead me to wonder why it seems so hard for historic sites to discuss slavery.

What do we gain by pretending that slavery wasn't integral to the fabric of 18th and 19th century America?

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Fort Pulaski

We went to Fort Pulaski on Wednesday.

Although I'm not really a fort/battlefield type of person, it was a pretty thought-provoking experience.

One of a series of coastal fortifications along the country's coast, Fort Pulaski is a combination of medevial and mid-19th century modern.

It has a moat,

heavy wooden and iron doors (all the harder to chop down, my dear),

and an interior grill behind the big wooden doors.

You really do feel like you are entering into an American castle.

Except it's made of brick — two types, they like to tell you on the tour — and I think you can tell it's a 19th-century building just by looking at it, although I can't explain why.

The guide gave us a great tour.

He explained a lot about the fort's construction, and his explanations made me want know more about the workers who built these structures for the army. Fort Pulaski was built by a combination of free and slave labor, and I wondered how the officer in charge organized those labor relations, and what it was like to live out in a swamp building a fort from the mud up.

Still, although the design of the fort is interesting, and it was clearly an engineering feat, by the time this "castle" saw action, its design no longer held off the enemy.

New weaponry, most particularly rifled cannon, which are much more accurate than earlier smooth bore weapons, spelled the demise of the brick fort in general, and this one in particular.

And so, during the Civil War, U.S. troops on Tybee Island fired thousands of shells at the fort over the course of 30 hours in April 1862, and the Confederates surrendered. The brick fort was already obsolete, even though it had only been completed in the late 1840s. Instead, forts such as the Cape Fear's Fort Fisher became the state-of-the-art during the Civil War.

U.S. Library of Congress, Timothy H. O'Sullivan

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Week One: "The Cause"

Week one is over, and we're moving into week two. So I thought I'd take a moment and reflect on the readings/thrust of the seminar so far.

The staff of the Georgia Historical Society put together the seminar, and you can tell that they are a group of people who deal with the "Lost Cause" mentality on a fairly regular basis.

GHS staff leading the charge...

During the first week, we read a book on Civil War soldiers' motivations for fighting, and some readings that explored the way that the war has become a "cause" for folks since it ended. It was interesting to think about what contemporaries thought of the conflict at the time, even as we examined what people bring to the table now.

Grave marker, Georgia

The Civil War is alive and well in the south, in the monuments that enshrine it, in the language that people use to discuss people from different regions, and in the hearts of many.

Fort Fisher Memorial, North Carolina

It's an axiom, and yet it does seem true that people who live outside of the ex-Confederacy only become Yankees when they cross into an ex-Confederate state. I have spent most of my U.S. life south of the Mason Dixon line, but I had never heard someone call anyone a Yankee until I moved to Wilmington, one of the supposed bastions of ex-Confederate North Carolina.

There's a huge disjunction between how professional historians think about the war, and how the public thinks about the conflict. It's hard not to get discouraged by that gaping chasm.

Even a brief look at the sources suggests that despite all today's talk about state's rights as somehow being distinct from the issue of slavery, people at the time knew what the war was about.

North Carolina's Governor John Ellis pointed to slavery as the big divisive issue in November 1860:

The great body of the people of the northern and southern states entertain diametrically opposite opinions upon the subject of African slavery. The former, that it is a social and political evila nd a sin; the latter that it is a system of labor eminently well adapted to our cliamte and soil, right and proper within itself, and that so far from being a sin, its establishemnt among us is on of the providences of God for civilizing and christianizing that benighted race.

Despite many statements along these lines, we're still hard pressed to convince certain constituences that slavery was a primary cause of the war.

I wish we could all collectively move past this argument, though. Civil War stories are so much more interesting (at least to me) if we include complexities, contingencies, and contradictions. Northerners were fighting a war against slavery, and were often racists. There were unionists in the south who argued against secession, yet many of them did so because they though the union would maintain the slave system. Both south and north evoked the American Revolution as "evidence" that they were on the right side.

Yet as long as, when we talk about the south, we are really only talking about white male southerners, we'll continue to ignore most of the people who lived in the south, and continue to have the same tired arguments, where no one listens, and no one learns anything new.

So, although I feel like I'm channeling Carrie Bradshaw (without the manolo blahniks), I have to ask:

If we make up our minds without opening our minds, are we doomed to repeat the past?

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