The first field trip: Ebenezer Creek

We went on a trip on the river yesterday.

It was hot and humid (as you can tell by the sheen on my face).

Every time I go somewhere outside in the South in the summer, I wonder, what the hell were the people who settled here thinking?

They were often British -- I imagine them with their English or Celtic pallor -- so they weren't exactly used to heat and humidity.

Although, when you think of it, many settlers in Southeastern North Carolina did come from either South Carolina, or Barbados, so perhaps they'd gotten used to to the flies and mosquitoes and the still weight of the air by the time they settled the Cape Fear.

Still, the southern landscape really announces "you are not in England anymore."

The cypress trees, with their wonderfully gnarly twisted trunks lurch out of creeks and rivers. The longleaf pines tower over you, and shed humongous pine cones, and long needles, nothing like the demure firs of Northern Europe.

Our trip up river from Savannah was full of swamp, heat, marsh, flies, alligators, trees, vines, and sweat.

But we weren't going so we could imagine what it was like to come here, we were going to see a particular spot, along the quiet banks of Ebenezer Creek.

At this innocuous site, U.S. army general, the ironically-named Jefferson Davis, made a decision that led to the deaths of large numbers of ex-slaves who were following the army.

Earlier this year, the Georgia Historical Society put up a roadside marker, explaining what happened at Ebenezer Creek. I'm sure the wording of the historic marker that the Georgia Historical Society put up was vetted, and fussed over, so I thought I'd let it speak for itself:

One mile north, on December 9, 1864, during the American Civil War, U.S. Gen. Jeff. C. Davis crossed Ebenezer Creek with his 14th Army Corps as it advanced toward Savannah during Gen. William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea. Davis hastily removed the pontoon bridges over the creek, and hundreds of freed slaves following his army drowned trying to swim the swollen waters to escape the pursuing Confederates. Following a public outcry, Sec. of War Edwin Stanton met with Sherman and local black leaders in Savannah on January 12, 1865. Four days later, President Lincoln approved Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, confiscating over 400,000 acres of coastal property and redistributing it to former slaves in 40-acre tracts.

Landscapes are like artifacts: they don't speak for themeselves. This creek's waters did not shout "history happened here." In fact, we chugged past the site the first time we reached it, and had to double back to find it.

Yet, when you think about what it must have been like to be faced with a decision -- jump in a swollen creek knowing you can't swim, or wait for the Confederates to kill you or reenslave you, the tannin-stained creek's waters speak to you in a whole new light.

It's not surprising that one of the soldiers who was there that day, a Colonel Charles D. Kerr of the 126th Illinois Cavalry, reputedly said "I sat upon my horse then and witnessed a scene the like of which I pray my eyes may never see again....with cries of anguish and despair, men, women and children rushed by hundreds into the turbid stream and many were drowned before our eyes."

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Sitting in Savannah

I left Wilmington yesterday, and traveled to Savannah.

Getting off the plane, even the air felt different, subtly more humid, perhaps more Southern? Not in the airport, of course, since (apart from the changing t-shirt selection), most airports seem pretty much the same. Although I would like someone to write a dissertation about why Southern airports seem to think rocking chairs are the universal signifier of "southerness." But that's an aside.

Anyway, as I looked out the window of the cab, the sky, the trees, the water out the window, the buildings, the squares, told me that I wasn't in Wilmington any more.

The night before I left home to come here, my husband and I were drinking wine, talking about the next month, and what I'd be doing. I'm a little nervous about how it is all going to pan out...how the days will go, and what is expected of us as seminar participants. I know I have to read at least one book and a bunch of articles each week for the next four weeks. And I can see how the seminar was constructed, since they weeks are divided into "The Cause", "Choosing Sides" "Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Reconciliation," and "The Civil War in History and Memory." Still, until we get into it, I know I don't really know how its going to unfold.

I do know now, however, what my "office" for the next month looks like:

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Marching off to seminar

My small son made me this nametag so that I can, to paraphrase him, wear it in Savannah so people will know my name and want to talk to me. He's concerned about me leaving him to go on my NEH fellowship and he's worried (in an oddly precise & frenetic five year old way) that I won't have anyone to talk to. Talking is the thing he loves to do most. It's not the thing that I love to do most; still I get where he's coming from, because I'm experiencing anxiety about leaving. I'm a little more "journey proud" each day.

We all probably have some kind of way that we prepare to go on trips. It's peculiar to be going through those preparations as I'm reading books about soldiers marching off to war.

I've been reading Chandra Manning's book about white Union, white Confederate, and African American Union soldiers. It's a lovely book: well-written, and interesting. I especially like how it uses soldiers' contemporaneous words to put slavery squarely in the center of the Civil War. I began with Manning because it's required for the first week of the seminar. At the same time, though, I'm reading Drew Gilpin Faust's Mothers of Invention, which looks at the war through the eyes of white southern elite women. These were women who were left home to manage plantations and slaves, after spending their lives learning to be ladies — something that didn't help them when the men left and they were left in charge. I don't have a lot of sympathy for these women on one level — they were slaveholder after all, and slavery revolts me — but I do think we need to see the past through the eyes of the participants in order to better understand it.

Going to Savannah for a month is really nothing like the experiences of a person going off to battle. My family will be safe at home, with food on the table; I will be staying at a nice hotel in downtown Savannah. No one will go hungry. Barring an accident, no one will die. We know that I'll be home by July.

Yet, preparing to leave home does make me wonder about the more mundane questions soldiers likely asked themselves: what will being in the army be like? Will I get along with my fellow soldiers? What will happen to my family when I am gone? How will we all be changed by this separation?

Running around like a headless chicken...

I've always liked sayings. One of my favourite phrases when I was a kid was "running around like a headless chicken." I believe it was my dad who explained what it meant. Apparently, when you cut a chicken's head off, sometimes its body keeps going. (And in one instance, going and going!) In any event, even if chickens' bodies do not run around after their heads have been removed, the phrase is used to mean frantically bouncing around from one thing to the next.

That's a feeling any researcher is familiar with. Obviously, you need to have — and use — your head to do history. Still, at the beginning of a project, you bounce around on the outskirts of a subject, careening from book to book, jumping from source to source, lurching from thought to thought, trying to find a way into the subject.

I'm sure the answer to the where to start question is different for every historian. One of the things I like to do at the beginning of a project is read the newspaper. Whether it's focused on local events or on "loftier" matters, reading the paper lets me start to feel the rhythms of the language of the day, the cadence of some of the words that people have left behind. And that helps me feel as if I'm getting oriented to the tenor of the times.

So off and on for the past week or so, in between reading my assigned seminar readings, I've been reading Cape Fear Museum's small stash of Wilmington's 1850s newspapers. The paper at the time was only four pages long. And those four pages are mostly concerned with local matters: they are filled with local advertisements, like the one below, from the Wilmington Journal of May 16, 1856.


You also can read lists of ships coming into and out of port, prices for commodities like tar, rosin, and lumber. And there are other ads, like these where one person is looking for a "teacher of undoubted moral character" to provide a classical education for the family's children, and another is offering a $50 reward for the return of a slave who has run away from him.

History doesn't always record the names of slaves. When there are records, a slave often only possesses a first name. Yet in this ad, one slave uses a plethora of names: two surnames, and three first names. As I read about Mr. Hayes/Smith, I wondered if the fact that both his surnames are different from his current owner meant he was owned by someone else before Bonham bought him. I wondered if he used aliases because he'd run away before. I wondered if he took a number of names as a way to resist his master's power over him. I wondered if he had a family he left behind and that's why he was "lurking" in the region. But mostly I keep wondering if, in the face of a deck that was stacked so high against him, Duncan/Maurice Hayes/Joe Smith managed to truly escape from slavery. I find myself wishing that I knew more about his history and life and hoping that he made it out from under the yoke of bondage.

It's at times like these, when a source creates more questions than it answers, that it strikes me that I've spent a lot of my professional life trying to do something that I know is actually impossible. We can't really understand the past. We can learn about events, and we can sometimes get insights into people's inner lives through diaries or letters. We can see patterns using statistics. But we'll never truly know what it was like to live through the 19th century.

And so, although I love thinking about the traces of the past that we can see around us: in the landscape, in the artifacts in our homes and cultural institutions, and through the primary sources that remain, I also know I'll be spending a lot of time over the next few months feeling kinship with headless chickens.

In with the old, onto the new

Welcome to my blog!

On April 1, 2010, Cape Fear Museum opened our new exhibition, Cape Fear Stories: Land of the Longleaf Pine.

For me, the opening was the culmination of the first five years of my work at the Museum. Doing research into the history of Native Americans in the region, and into the Naval Stores business in the 18th century was really fascinating for me. My background is in 20th century U.S. history (I wrote my dissertation on women who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad durign World War I), so it was challenging to delve into a world filled with potsherds, pipkins, firkins, and pieces of eight.

In a great piece of synchronicity, on the very same day the exhibition opened, I got an email from Georgia, letting me know that I'd won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship that allows me to attend a seminar The American Civil War at 150: New Approaches"

In this blog, I'm going to write about preparing to go to Savannah, and my experiences of my month-long immersion in the history of the Civil War.