“Kevin Bacon Tintype,” Image copyright Victoria Will, Sundance Film Festival, 2015.
In December of 2015, Philly.com’s staff writer Jeff Gammage caught on to a photography trend taking the urban hipster world by storm: the revival of 1860s tintypes. Tintype pictures of average people, well-known folk singers, and even Kevin Bacon from cutting edge dark rooms are fetching high prices. Gammage referred to this art form, practiced by Newport Folk Festival photographer Giles Clement, as “the steampunk of photography.” Steampunk fans re-envision the Victorian past and blend it with modern technology, out of a combined sense of nostalgia for a fictive, smoky-lensed nineteenth-century and a fascination with real antiques. The steampunk movement is often intentionally more fanciful and creative than steeped in history. So why, we might ask, is the medium associated with Civil War battlefield photographers Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner now evolving into a fascinating Gen. Y art movement?
“Unidentified Soldier in Union Mounted Infantry Uniform with Daughter and Wife,” Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Lijenquist Collection, 2015.
Most Civil War enthusiasts are familiar with the tintype, a nineteenth-century photo technique that captures an image on a metal plate. The method was developed by Adolphe-Alexandre Martin in 1853 as a successor to the ambrotype and daguerreotype and used the same wet-plate collodion process to create an image through light exposure. This great video from the Smithsonian explains how a tintype was designed during the 1850s-1880s. The subject sat for a few minutes, and the entire process took approximately fifteen to complete. Tintype photography was quick and inexpensive, which led to its rise in popularity. Tintypes fell out of style with the evolution of newer, quicker photography techniques…or so the past generation of photographers thought.
Contemporary tintype photo shoots are nothing new. Civil War reenactors and Steampunk fans have been sitting for their own portraits for decades as a way to recreate the past. The difference this time, according to Gammage, is that tintypes are appealing to a larger audience of artists, musicians, and people simply curious about the process of taking a non-instant photograph. In our hipster age of “slow food” and the return of handcrafted products, modern tintype enthusiasts seek imperfect, yet skillfully crafted images, looking for an art form that is timeless and requires patience to develop. We have all seen pictures of dower-looking Victorians and wondered what it would be like to sit in one pose for several minutes to take a photo. Why not experience it ourselves?
“Portrait by Giles Clement,” Image copyright Giles Clement, 2014.
A small group of photographers is leading this vintage charge; these include Clement, John Coffer, a traveling photographer who hosts students at his Camp Tintype each summer; Victoria Will, who shot celebrities like Bacon at the Sundance Film Festival; and Rob Gibson, who made my own tintype photo (shown below) in Gettysburg a few years ago. Others have also been bitten by the 160 year-old bug, and unlike those old-timey boardwalk photography studios that add sepia tones to digital photos in an attempt to manufacture age, these artists are the real deal. Most use authentic nineteenth-century cameras to shoot their subjects.
But what is the main force behind this new interest in this Victorian-era Polaroid? First and foremost, unlike our digital-age photos, which can be reproduced and retouched with Photoshop, tintypes are only made once. What you see is what you get. The process requires specialization. While anyone can use Instagram filters to beautify images, few know how to take and develop a physical photo, and an even smaller number of photographers are capable of doing so using technology from the mid-1800s. The artistry of the tintype process appeals to our sense of nostalgia. In a world in which images appear and disappear in a second, the tintype allows people to return to an era when photographs were novel and lasting. Taking a tintype connects us with the past in a way that feels grounding, like listening to a favorite song from high school. Like reenacting, sitting for a tintype allows you to feel connected to those who did so more than a century ago. It feels authentic.
Kerry Erlanger is a writer and amateur historian whose main goal is to live in a very old house. She can be found on Twitter @hellokerry, live tweeting an embarrassing amount of television shows.
At some point, a stereotypically boring Social Studies teacher probably made you read The Red Badge of Courage, Across Five Aprils, or Rifles for Watie. There’s nothing wrong with these books. They tell compelling stories through teenage eyes that give very accurate accounts of various Civil War experiences. I have used them in my own classroom. But these novels are, for lack of a better term, old. That doesn’t make them unnecessary—far from it. It’s just a fact that begs this question: what are the modern equivalents of these time-honored classics? What themes are more recent works exploring, and how do the stories reflect contemporary notions of the Civil War?
To answer that, I’ve reviewed a handful of Middle Grade and Young Adult Civil War books from the last ten or so years ranging in topic and presentation. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but a light survey that caught my eye as an 8th Grade History teacher and YA author who spends considerable time teaching the event and writing for the target audience.
This middle grade novel retells the true and horrible story of “The Weeping Time”, the largest slave auction ever held in American history on March 2 and 3 of 1859. The play format gives the reader a front-row seat to the emotions and motivations of each principal character: the indebted plantation owner, Pierce Butler, who mourns the loss of his property—just not enough to keep them; his two daughters, who witness the horror with varied responses; and most notably the young house slave Emma, Lester’s hero, who has no idea that she will appear on the auction block.
Lester creatively peppers the novel with time-hopping interludes that show each character’s future self reflecting back on that horrible day—how it scarred and changed them. Though gut wrenching and vivid, Lester doesn’t leave us in tears: Emma escapes to Philadelphia and eventually onto Canada. True, her husband later dies while fighting in the Civil War, but Emma has her own children, and ends the novel poetically sharing her life story with her granddaughter, over tea. Still, sorrow remains the constant theme of this book, specifically divine sorrow: the torrential rain of that March day was, as Emma’s father says, “God’s tears”.
Myers, Walter Dean. Riot. New York: Egmont USA, 2009.
Similarly unique in presentation—this time a fast-moving screenplay—Riot retells New York’s bloody draft riots of 1863 through the eyes of fifteen-year-old, biracial Claire Johnson. The daughter of Innkeepers John (black) and Ellen Johnson (Irish), Myers sets Claire’s search for identity cleverly against the backdrop of a city foaming with racial tension. Angered that Lincoln’s conscription unevenly targets them, poor Irish lash out at the wealthy who can afford the $300 substitution fee and African Americans who are taking their jobs. Battle-weary soldiers from Gettysburg arrive to maintain order and end up suppressing the riots with particular brutality. So what does all this mean for Claire, who has a black father but looks as Irish as her mother?
This longing to transcend biracial identity drives the novel. “I don’t see why you have to be a black person or a white person,” Clair tells her mother. “Why can’t you just be a person?” Later, Claire questions the notion of race entirely. “I didn’t choose to be black…I just wanted to be a human being. I just wanted to be whoever I saw in the mirror, without a race or a place in life. What is so wrong with that?” By using Claire as a lens to view the draft riots, Myers forces the reader to question race then and now. Coupled with the rapid pace, honest racial dialogue, and more then a few harrowing chases down New York City alleyways, Riot is poised to capture and challenge young readers.
Fact: young adults don’t love nonfiction (nerdy honors kids not included). But when the English Department at my school added Chasing Lincoln’s Killer to their curriculum, our eighth graders took to it. Abridged from Swanson’s bestselling adult version, The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killers, young readers will have no trouble keeping up with the fast, thriller-esque work that chronicles Lincoln’s tragic end and the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. I’m not saying they’re going to be dying for it, but by and large they don’t hate it—a big win for teachers.
Relying on a host of eyewitness accounts and other primary sources, Swanson weaves together the alternating narratives of Lincoln, his cabinet, Booth, and the co-conspirators. Little-known players also appear: actress Laura Keene, who cradled the dying president in the theatre box; Sergeant Robinson, the male nurse who heroically fought off Lewis Powell thus saving Secretary Seward’s life; photographer Mathew Brady, who captured the crime scene; and Thomas Jones, Confederate Secret Service operative who ferried Booth across the Potomac. While the plot loses some tension relatively early after Booth shoots Lincoln, Swanson takes the reader on a heart-pounding chase through the Maryland and Virginia countryside that culminates in Booth’s own death. Filled with era drawings, newspapers, maps, and a superb array of photographs, Chasing Lincoln’s Killer is YA nonfiction at its finest.
Seriously, Disturbingly Dark
Hunt, Laird. Kind One. Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House Press, 2012.
This novel takes you to a dark place and (almost) leaves you there. Told primarily from the perspective of Ginny, a fourteen-year-old girl who marries the abusive, slave owning Linus Lancaster, Kind One examines rape, torture, complicity, and redemption on a pre-Civil War Kentucky farm insidiously named “Paradise.” Linus Lancaster is the archetypal slave-owning monster: tall, muscular, hard-drinking, and complete master of his pig-farming domain. His particular brand of sadism mirrors the slaughtering of the pigs he keeps: “Linus Lancaster liked us all to take a turn at the killing…those of us who ate the most ought to kill the most [he said]. That was me and Linus Lancaster.” For six years Linus has his way with Ginny until he becomes bored of her and begins “visiting” nightly his two teenage slaves, Cleome and Zinnia (who may also be his daughters, Hunt isn’t entirely clear on this). Driven by jealousy or disgust or both, the battered Ginny begins assaulting the girls she once treated like daughters; here Hunt is clear: abuse begets abuse. But when Linus is murdered (no spoilers), the girls turn on Ginny with vindictive sadism, leading to Hunt’s other motif: savagery begets savagery.
Hunt interweaves the brutal narrative with Ginny as an old woman, hinting that forgiveness—despite all the horrible things she’s done and endured—isn’t out of reach. And he tells the story’s (thankfully) redemptive end through the eyes of those around Ginny during and after those awful years, a captivating technique that alleviates pressure and stimulates curiosity. Though stunningly written, I won’t be book talking this to my middle schoolers; objectively speaking, however, Hunt has crafted a haunting look at a demented set of circumstances that took place on many a farm in the Civil War era.
A New Take on Divided Loyalty
I planned this as my guilty pleasure read, but as the pages turned it became something richer—something deeper and more nuanced. Set during a smartly narrow window at the war’s opening year, the story centers on seventeen-year-old Violet Dancey who finds herself running the family farm after her brother is killed at Fort Donelson and her father goes off to fight. Instead of the war itself driving the novel—an exhausted and often alienating feature of YA Civil War books—several unique conflicts propel the plot. New family arrives, including an insufferable stepsister and a cunning, blockade-running cousin; Violet befriends the slaves of a local doctor rumored to practice ‘hoodoo’; and most prominently, Violet discovers a wounded Union officer deep in the woods being kept alive by someone whose motives aren’t immediately clear.
And it’s that secret relationship which forces Violet to confront the inconsistences of her world. The soldier she’s caring for—the soldier she is falling in love with—fought at Fort Donelson; he’s the enemy, maybe the one who fired the bullet that killed her brother, prompting Violet to question her loyalty to the Cause. He also forces her to finally deal with her own nagging suspicion that owning another human is wrong. “…your ‘property’ is men, women and children,” the lieutenant tells her, a truth Violet knows but struggles to calibrate.
Fitting, then, that it’s the family slave, Laney—Violet’s only true friend in the book—who poignantly diagnoses this struggle to love someone you’re taught to hate: “Everything’s different when you get to know folks.” By making this “getting to know folks” the driving theme of the book, Nickerson anchors the narrative in wartime relationships and the difficult task of boundary breaking which young adults will find compelling.
For nine years Matthew Landis has attempted to slay boredom wherever it lurks in his 8th grade Social Studies classroom at Tamanend Middle School. An alum of Villanova's Graduate History program (2013), he recently clawed his way into publishing by signing book deals for his Young Adult debut, THE JUDAS SOCIETY (Sky Pony, 2017) and his Middle Grade debut, PRIVATE OLIVER PRICHARD (Dial/Penguin Random House, 2018). He hopes one day to achieve whatever level of literary success allows him to summer in Cape Town with his wife and daughter and go on safari pretty much whenever they want. You can read more about his books at www.matthew-landis.com, email him at author.matthewlandis@gmail.com, and follow him on Twitter @Matthew_Landis.
In the 1872 narrative, The Underground Rail Road, William Still stated that he owed “it to the cause of Freedom, and to the Fugitives and their posterity” to bring the activities of the Underground to “the public in the most truthful manner…to show what efforts were made and what success was gained for Freedom.” Still believed that in order to fully honor those freed by the Underground Railroad, it was essential to impart the historical memory of slavery and resistance to contemporary readers. WGN’s Underground looks to continue Still’s important work by adapting his self-emancipation narrative for a twenty-first century audience.Underground, which debuted on March 9th, airs Wednesdays at 10pm and is part of a 10-episode first season.
“The Cast of Underground,” Image courtesy of WGN, 2016.
Underground offers viewers a nuanced cast of characters and at its center, Macon Plantation’s black community. In one compelling scene, Noah (Aldis Hodge), an enslaved blacksmith trusted with travel beyond the plantation, but also subject to his enslaver and the black overseer, Cato (Alano Miller), tells Rosalee, the Macon family’s house servant, (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) that “we all pretending in some way.” This formulation alerts viewers to the inner-life of the network of complex individuals that forms the core of this community. The series attempts to portray the emotional lives of enslaved people, beyond days punctuated by labor and other forms of violence. Underground also looks to expose how slavery’s gender and labor differentiation affected the lives of enslaved people. Although the plan of escape seems to be male centered, enslaved women are powerfully portrayed in the series when, in the first episode, wife and mother Pearly Mae (Adina Porter) is shown to be the holder of the word of freedom, not Moses (Mykelti Williamson), the enslaved community’s preacher.
“Mykelti Williamson as Moses and Adina Porter as Pearly Mae in Underground,” Image courtesy of WGN, 2016.
Importantly, Underground portrays slavery as a system sustained by physical, mental, legal, and economic oppression that controlled the daily lives of African Americans and stood at the very center of the politics and economy of the nation. The first episode’s action takes place on the Macon Plantation just as the Supreme Court is considering the fate of Dred Scott, his wife, and two young daughters. William Still’s character demonstrates the crucial role of black abolitionists in the battle against systemic oppression. He not only rallies against harsh policies governing the fate of African Americans like Scott, but he also tries to convince the white anti-slavery lawyer, John Hawkes (Marc Blucas), to join his efforts and pushes Hawkes to advocate for the enslaved through more direct action. Hawkes continues to wrestle with how to advocate for the end of slavery without breaking the law and debates with his wife over whether he can do so by managing his slave-owner brother’s Senate campaign. August Pullman (Christopher Meloni), a white man who appears first as a conductor on the underground, delivers the episode’s first plot twist when he turns out to be a slave catcher—part of what Julie Winch dubbed the “other underground railroad.” Pullman’s earlier discussion of the future with the runaway woman he turns in, therefore, appears to be not so much about a world free of slavery but about the security of his family. This storyline highlights not only the physical and legal dangers of fugitive life but also the precarious economic and social positions of non-planter southern whites and the work many did to uphold the slave system.
“Aldis Hodge as Noah and Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Rosalee in Underground,” Image courtesy of WGN, 2016.
In the wake of recent films like 12 Years a Slave, there has been debate over slavery’s portrayal in popular culture. Critics have pressed the industry and audiences to defend decisions to repeatedly show and watch African American actors enduring the pain and brutality of enslavement. Others argue that the true horror of slavery has yet to be dealt with in all its complexity. Mychal Denzel Smith, for instance, makes the case for more “slavery films,” claiming that “no slavery narrative exists” in American culture because “we would rather pretend we know all there is to know about slavery and move on.” Popular narratives that have circulated since the nineteenth century have so often been historically inaccurate and also socially dangerous, flattening out and covering over the real history of American slavery. By placing enslaved and free black people at the center of resistance to slavery, and making all characters—both black and white—complicated and fully human, Underground has the potential to help viewers understand slavery as a system that shaped so many aspects of the world in which we continue to live. As such, the series has the potential to depict the experiences of those who labored to be free in all of their complexity. That work is still very necessary.
Julia Bernier is a PhD candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts--Amherst. She can be reached at juliab@afroam.umass.edu.
On March 14, 1846, Abraham Jones, a coroner in Edgefield County, South Carolina, filed a report concerning the death of a female slave named Rose. According to the coroner, five days earlier a man named Robert Moore visited the home of Michael Long, a slaveholder who claimed Rose as his property. Long led Robert Moore to his meat house, where Moore saw Rose’s limp body, chained around the neck with her hands bound. Explaining that Rose’s death was “something there very strange,” Long nonetheless admitted that he had tied up the woman, secured the chain around her neck with a padlock, suspended her in the meat house, and returned ninety minutes later to find her dead. Abraham Jones marked Rose’s death a homicide in his coroner’s report, although Moore’s crime likely would remain unpunished. Jones recorded other such deaths over the years, leaving a grim archive of slavery’s violence. This shocking and tragic story and other forensic accounts can be accessed via the new digital history archive, CSI:Dixie.
Rose’s story is one of almost fifteen hundred coroners’ reports from nineteenth century South Carolina accessible via CSI:Dixie. This brand new site is the work of historian Stephen Berry, who began the project after stumbling upon these records and realizing their historical value and emotional potency. Jones’s report strikes the reader with not just the egregiousness of Rose’s murder, but the cold composure with which her attacker Michael Long justified his actions. The evidence in these cases is detailed, the responses are lyrically written, and the website’s format is accessible and user-friendly. This site seamlessly unites digital history with emotional history, using its layout to tell poignant and sorrowful stories. The records catalogued on the site are a testament to how digital history can help users explore the emotional worlds of periods and people in the past. Reading the coroners’ reports on CSI: Dixie one is struck by the emotional detachment that sustained American slavery. This reader was left with a feeling of empathy for those who survived the institution and those who recorded its human costs.
Image of The State vs. the Dead Body of Rose Archival Records, CSI:Dixie, eHistory, 2014.
When you arrive at CSI:Dixie, notice the images from nineteenth century burial places that first appear. These images are emotional themselves, imparting feelings of fear, loneliness, and loss. Contemporary pictures help to connect twenty-first century audiences with nineteenth century stories. At the top of the screen, the directory takes its names from different Biblical books, Genesis, Exodus, Revelation, to name a few. Berry carefully described why he chose these titles to organize his project, and his reasoning is fascinating. More importantly, these titles evoke religious reactions, another tool via which the site connects its audience to nineteenth century sensibilities. But the visceral reactions the archive generates are more a product of the stories themselves. The layout provides the atmosphere through which the audience can react to Rose’s murder, and the inner-workings of slaveholding culture in antebellum South Carolina.
Digital history is likely to provoke vigorous debate as historians continue to map the field. Connecting with an audience should remain an important part of that ongoing conversation. CSI:Dixie is a terrific example of how big data, record keeping, and the monotonous work of archiving can be communicated to the public with respect, empathy, and sentiment.
Rose’s murder opens a window through which users can view the nineteenth century South. Berry uncovered hundreds of stories, meticulously recorded by antebellum coroners. Abraham Jones, who ruled Rose’s death as a homicide—despite laws protecting Michael Long from the charge–continued to work for Edgefield County for at least another two decades, filing reports concerning deaths caused by murder, accident, and neglect. Three years after Rose’s murder crossed his desk, Jones recorded the details of another homicide victim, Michael Long, shot through the head with a double barrel shot gun, perhaps by “a negro man Kitts,” an associate of Long’s slave, Ellis. CSI:Dixie offers users an insider’s view of the violence of slavery, in which masters killed slaves with impunity and sometimes slaves struck back.
Blake is a graduate student at Villanova University and is interested in early American history and public history. In addition to his coursework and assistantship, he works as a tour guide for the Encampment Store at Valley Forge National Historical Park in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at bmcgread@villanova.edu.
“Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele in Civil War Reenactment Sketch,” Image courtesy of Comedy Central, 2012.
Americans are increasingly forgetful of the fact that the Civil War was about slavery. Atlanta’s 2010 Sesquicentennial kicked off with a celebration of secession, sponsored by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Only a few days ago, Mississippi’s governor declared April “Confederate Heritage Month.” Fortunately, opposing voices from the realm of pop culture have recently emerged to challenge this historical negligence. Brilliant comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s 2012 “Civil War Reenactment” sketch pinpoints the ways in which the “Confederate heritage” movement erroneously divides slavery from the Civil War, with negative consequences for twenty-first century race relations.
The Key and Peele series appeared on Comedy Central from 2012 to 2015. In 2015, the show was nominated “Favorite Sketch Comedy TV Show” by the People’s Choice Awards. Though the series no longer runs, full episodes may be found on Comedy Central’s website and clips are available on Vimeo. Key and Peele is a very useful classroom tool for high school and college students, who will appreciate its humor as educators inform them about the causes and consequences of the Civil War.
The focal point of “Civil War Reenactment” is highly familiar to historians acquainted with public perceptions of the American Civil War. A stern Civil War reenactor posing as a Confederate officer rallies his troops to protect the Southern way of life, which he describes as “pure” and “beautiful.” The opening moments invoke the corny grandiosity of Lost Cause stereotypes in popular films like Gods and Generals or Gettysburg as soldiers kneel dramatically by the Southern flag. Much to the general’s dismay, his speech is suddenly interrupted by Key and Peele, who portray stereotypical obedient slaves and send the Confederate general into awkward flights of anachronism as he tries to dismiss the comedians’ presence at the “serious” reenactment.
This comedic portrayal of American attitudes about slavery and the Civil War contrasts deeply with other recent programs which realistically demonstrate the institution’s brutality. Graphic depictions of slavery in films such as Twelve Years a Slave portray its horrors without whitewashing history. However, disturbingly large segments of the population look at this form of popular culture as revisionism, championing the views put forward by the Confederate reenactor in Key and Peele’s skit.
When you separate the Civil War from slavery, can you create an accurate picture of American history? This question drives the disagreement between recent dramatic treatments of slavery and a view of the Civil War which ignores the institution altogether. Comedy like Key and Peele’s skit may be able to succeed in ways that drama thus far has not. Its effect comes not from a clear, horrific depiction of slavery, but from illuminating the absurdity of its absence. In the romantic vision held by the skit’s reenactment leader, and those like him in twenty-first century United States, the Confederacy fought for states’ rights and for personal liberty only as long as that freedom benefited white males. But when Key and Peele cleverly and comically expose the reenactor’s racism, they again join the Confederate cause with race and slavery.
“Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele in Auction Block Sketch,” Image courtesy of Comedy Central, 2012.
In emphasizing the absurdity of the Confederate reenactor’s beliefs, Key and Peele attempt to show just how ridiculous it is to view the Civil War without slavery. “Civil War Reenactment” can be coupled with the same episode’s “Auction Block” skit, in which slavery is reexamined through a similarly raw, comedic lens. In this sketch, the only thing worse than being sold as slaves was not being sold– or labeled as unwanted “goods”. Key and Peele begin to complain when they are not sold, and the white auctioneer chides them for being “superficial” and “bigoted” and halts the auctions–another scathing commentary on the ridiculousness of white supremacy. For many viewers, producers, and institutions, race and slavery are off-limits and deemed far too uncomfortable to be addressed. Is comedy the key to bridging the gap between “higher” culture and a lack of historical understanding? If it starts the conversation and opens a dialogue about slavery and the Civil War, then why can’t it be?
Dr. William Blair, History Professor at Penn State University, is the founding editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Muster asked Dr. Blair about the journal, Civil War memory, and Daniel Day-Lewis. Thanks to Michael Johnson, a PhD student at George Washington University, for conducting this interview.
You were the editor of Civil War History for ten years before founding and editing The Journal of the Civil War Era. Did you have a vision for JCWE that differed from CWH?
Actually, the vision did not vary that much. I was very proud of what we accomplished during my ten years with Kent State University Press. The editorial team and publisher stayed faithful to the idea that the journal embraced what used to be called “The Middle Period,” of nineteenth-century U.S. history. We eventually dropped the subtitle that contained that term from the journal’s cover and masthead because it had passed out of the lexicon of the profession. But the journal under John T. Hubbell always focused on more than four years of warfare.
Several things came together, however, at the ten-year mark of my tenure. I began to have a sense that I had done all that I could do and I feared I was getting stale. Second was the notion that I still wasn’t pulling everyone into the journal whom I believed belonged there. I can’t tell you how many times I heard authors tell me that they didn’t see their work as a Civil War study when, in fact, I did. Or at least as I have conceived of the Era. Third, I learned that the University of North Carolina Press was interested in starting a journal for this period of history. Coupled with the resources we had accumulated through the Richards Civil War Era Center, events had come together to create the possibility of a new journal. We put “Era” in the title and came out of the gate with the strong message that we desired to reach out to colleagues who did not realize they were doing the kind of work that we thought should be within our pages.
To me, the most important sentence in our vision statement was this: “The journal offers a unique space where scholars across the many subfields that animate nineteenth-century history can enter into conversation with each other.” My colleague, Tony Kaye who served as an Associate Editor, helped me craft that sentence and it became my mantra. I owe Tony a lot for assisting me in finding the journal’s voice.
During your five years as editor of JCWE, did you notice any trends in Civil War era scholarship that you found particularly surprising or intriguing?
Actually there were a number of things. I had put energy into founding the JCWE because I had this sense that an area that had once been a leader for new questions and methodologies was no longer viewed as a center of what was captivating the profession. When I was in graduate school, studies of slavery and abolition, for instance, offered some of the most provocative debates for scholarship, as did issues of national identity in the Civil War. The study of collective memory arguably gained some of its greatest traction in the Civil War era, especially through work on the Lost Cause. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed as if the bottom dropped out and the Civil War era had lost its luster as a place where excitement was happening.
Fortunately, I found out that I wasn’t totally right in my perception. For instance, one of the areas that I had thought had passed by Civil War era studies by was transnationalism. When we launched the journal, we were fortunate to have Douglas R. Egerton publish a review essay on the Civil War in a global perspective. This seemed to be an area that needed encouragement so we hoped to open up a dialogue here. My biggest surprise came in the number of articles that subsequently came into us that dealt with either the global dimensions of the conflict or trans-national issues. Scholars obviously either had been thinking about this or working on various aspects of this methodology and the journal provided a welcome home at just the right time to capture this new work. We even ran an entire special issue on “New Approaches to Internationalizing the History of the Civil War Era” in June 2012 and had an extended forum in March 2015 on teaching international aspects of the war. And there were many, many more pieces that demonstrated the efficacy of placing the war and the era within a broader context.
There were also surprises in the reverse. It has been difficult to consistently publish good work in both military and political/constitutional history. We have had some great pieces, including a special issue on military history in December 2014 that created interest. But both areas have shown the impact of a decline in training in these areas within the academy. As I say this, I don’t mean to disparage the fine work that’s being done and I realize that some of this assessment may lie in what the beholder determines to be military or political history. I’ve only become aware that by publishing what some call “war and society” may not be satisfying to scholars hoping for operational or other forms of military history. On another subject, we’ve had a more difficult time recruiting work in the area of antebellum history. Again, we’ve published some fine pieces, but we do not see a consistent pattern of submissions here. I hope that will change.
As for the future, I started to see new developments that showed considerable promise but have remained in formation. Probably the first of these concerns the Civil War and the West. A number of scholars have begun to explore connections between the Civil War East and the West beyond the Mississippi. I’m not sure that we have cemented these connections yet but I see potentially worthwhile pieces coming down the pike. We’ll be trying to help the cause with a special issue guest edited by Ari Kelman in December 2016. Additionally, I have become more aware of the possibilities of looking at the Civil War era from a hemispheric perspective. This would bring Canada into the picture with the U.S. and Mexico, showing stresses that were shared and not shared. A conference the Richards Center co-sponsored with the University of Calgary last summer began to explore these possibilities and we’re hopeful to show some of the pieces in a future issue of the journal. I do think there are some new historiographies emerging that will push us in new directions.
What do you think were the biggest takeaways from the Sesquicentennial? Why has the Civil War maintained such a popular place, not only in academic scholarship, but in public culture and memory?
The biggest takeway for me was the difference in the attitudes concerning slavery and the coming of the war. During the Centennial, few public commemorations admitted this and there was very little discussion about African American contributions to the war. The Centennial, in fact, opened with a controversy over segregation in Charleston, SC. Black people tried with little success to spark national commemoration of emancipation. But in 2011, national media made sure that the 150th anniversary acknowledged the role of slavery in the coming of the conflict. I had the ability to show my class on the Civil War Today a clip from Stephen Colbert, who ridiculed the people who tried to claim otherwise. And I know of re-enactments of events involving black soldiers. So in one sense, it was heartening to see the change in attitudes.
But I suppose I’m not as optimistic in response to the question about the Civil War maintaining a strong popular place for the public. That’s true to an extent, but it seems to me to be an increasingly graying population that continues to show the greatest interest. I do see young people on battlefields, and Civil War courses remain popular at Penn State, but something feels different now. Once the sesquicentennial of Gettysburg passed, it was harder to see concerted efforts to sustain discussion of the war and its consequences. Virginia was an exception, with the University of Virginia as a leader. And there probably were other pockets of commemorations that I’m not aware of. But there was no national commission, and attempts to highlight the 150th anniversary in Pennsylvania enjoyed mixed success, losing steam as budgetary support dwindled. Still, it could be my own personal perception; and it could be a wrong one. I truly hope so.
But I am confident in saying that I’m likely to be disappointed in the lack of interest in celebrating the anniversary of Reconstruction. There are people out there who are trying hard not to let this moment pass: National Park Service personnel especially in the Sea Islands and historians like Greg Downs and Kate Masur who are pulling together a future issue in the journal on the subject. And next year’s Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College looks like it will do a terrific service in educating the public on this important part of history. But I think it will be slow going to get public enthusiasm and the national media behind commemorations of Reconstruction. Once again, I hope I’m wrong. But if I’m right, that will be a shame, because while the Civil War saved the nation, Reconstruction made the nation.
You have written about the politics and divisiveness of Civil War memory, particularly in its immediate aftermath. Recently, debates have sprung up about the nature of that memory, particularly in the form of the continued use of the Confederate flag and Southern monuments to Confederate leaders. What is your take on these debates and efforts to reshape the Civil War memorial landscape?
First of all, I think much of this is healthy and indicative of a change in who can shape public interpretations of history. We would not have had these discussions twenty years ago—at least not effectively. The Confederate flag is an easy one for me. It should come down. It does not belong on a public building supported by tax dollars. And it went up in South Carolina during a period of resistance to desegregation. It was past time to take it down. Another easy decision for me is to take down public monuments to Nathan Bedford Forrest. He has three strikes against him: important antebellum slave trader, massacre of black people at Fort Pillow, and one of the founders of the KKK. Praise for his military exploits, which actually were quite modest in the grand scheme of things, does not overcome these detriments.
“Heywood Shepherd Monument at Harpers Ferry.” Image courtesy of the West Virginia State Archives.
But should we take down all monuments to the Confederacy? In general, I suppose I’m in favor of adding rather than subtracting. Monument Avenue in Richmond, for instance, saw the addition of a statue to Arthur Ashe—an action that made quite a beneficial commentary. Richmond in general has done a good job by creating a Slave Trail commemoration and erecting a Reconciliation Statue that linked the city with Liverpool and West Africa, which were important cornerstones of the African slave trade. It was unveiled in 2007 with a commitment to honesty, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Richmond residents also are restoring a jail that held slaves for sale. At Harpers Ferry, a monument put up in the 1930s celebrates faithful slaves in a rather bizarre way. The Park Service has added a wayside sign explaining the context and I’ve used that monument as a teaching moment for students about the creation of amnesia about the past. In other words, I think it’s better to make an honest confession about the past and what the Confederacy stood for as we find ways to remember the stories that few white people had wanted to tell for so long. And we need to keep finding ways to embody these stories in new public statuary and commemorations.
In your years of archival research, what is the most interesting document or story/anecdote you have uncovered?
William A. Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
This is easy for me. I have a document that I found in the archives of the Virginia Historical Society while researching Cities of the Dead. It is the closest thing to a smoking gun that I’ve personally seen. It’s a letter written by Charles Blackford to a political crony that talks about the strategy for the 1889 state elections. Virginia had recently beaten back the Readjuster Movement, which was a white-black coalition that had effected progressive changes. Blackford declared: “I am glad that the issue is square upon the color line. It is the only one by which we can win.” He added: “The negroes must understand that we will give them perfect equality before the law, and treat them with justness and fairness and liberality, but that they are not fit to rule us, and that we will die before they shall do so. The election must be carried peaceable if we can, but by force if necessary.” Then he showed Democratic elites calculating how to break the white-black coalition that had fueled the Readjuster Movement. “You cannot keep the lower class of white men in line unless they distinctly understand that they are to make their selection between the negro on the oneside [sic] and the white race on the other. Once get that clearly before the people as an issue and we are safe, otherwise the tariff and other matters which are perfectly immaterial in comparison, will beat us.”
I have rarely seen such naked plotting and clear-eyed strategy that exposes the means that fueled the maintenance of white supremacy. Sometimes students wonder: are we as scholars pushing it too hard to mention the calculation behind eventual segregation, rather than portraying racism as a visceral response rather than an intellectual one? It was both. The letter is a chilling reminder that political struggles continued beyond the so-called ending of Reconstruction in 1877, and black people remained active and effective in certain pockets of the South. They were a concern for the white power structure. Blackford and his cronies didn’t need to use the race card if they thought they had the election won. Codified segregation came because Democrats thought they needed it and they crafted the strategy to make it happen. And if we don’t remember this, we demean the struggles of African Americans who did not go quietly into that horrible night.
Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd. Image courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Productions, 2012.
Who was the best Abraham Lincoln: Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln), or Will Ferrell (Drunk History)?
I don’t have much of a basis for comparison. I haven’t seen the vampire hunter film. I have seen snippets of Drunk History and while I enjoyed the comedy a lot I don’t see Will Ferrell as much of a Lincoln. Daniel Day-Lewis wins my vote. I thought the movie was very good and especially liked the hard-edged politics that were featured. I also appreciated the scenes between Lincoln and Mary Todd, which had the feel of a real married couple. The parts to me that were over the top were the opening scene in which Lincoln talks with the black soldiers and the cabinet meeting in which he proclaims himself a president clothed in immense power. The first scene was obviously a convention for storytelling and bringing the public up to speed. The second just didn’t sound like Lincoln. But for the most part I thought the portrayal was believable. Like many of my colleagues I wished the director would have ended the film with Lincoln walking down the corridor of the White House on his way to Ford’s Theater. We know what happened at the play.
William A. Blair is the Acting Head for the Department of History, Walter L. and Helen P. Ferree Professor of Middle American History, and Director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University. He is the author of Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and most recently, With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
“War chisels your soul with fear and bitterness into something dark and strange. Hard to find your way back in so much darkness, from so much pain” – Inman (Act II, Scene X)
On Friday night, February 5, 2016, Cold Mountain made its Philadelphia debut at the Academy of Music. The historic theatre was an appropriate setting for the operatic adaptation of Charles Frazier’s 1997 National Book Award novel of the same name. Cold Mountain, which follows the unconventional love story of Ada Monroe and W.P. Inman throughout the Civil War, explores themes of broken homes, broken bodies, and broken souls. Needless to say, the destruction and despair wrought by the Civil War was on full display.
Staged by Opera Philadelphia, Cold Mountain was developed as part of the American Repertoire Program, which promotes the creation of contemporary American opera. Like Philip Glass’s Appomattox, this adaptation of Cold Mountain does not claim historical accuracy, but it is part of a renewed popular interest in the history the era. Just as Hollywood has begun to give the history of slavery serious attention (see: 12 Years A Slave and Nate Parker’s forthcoming, The Birth of A Nation), it seems fair to say that the Civil War is having a moment in the fine arts. While this is undoubtedly good news for scholars and buffs, some may worry if enhanced public visibility will come at the expense of historical accuracy.
Cold Mountain offers a dark portrait of the Southern home front. Opera Philadelphia’s exemplary setting and lighting designs beautifully captured the harsh nature of life at Cold Mountain. In fact, the Confederacy looks more like London following the Blitz than rural North Carolina. Marked by asymmetrical pieces of wood, coal pits, and dozens of gunshots, the staging effectively evokes the sense of despair felt by the characters. Instead of Lost Cause visions of stalwart Confederate patriots, we see a South inhabited by deserters, hungry women and children, and a vicious Home Guard.
A final farewell before Inman goes off to war. Image courtesy of Opera Philadelphia.
There are serious ideas at work in Cold Mountain. The struggles of Ada and Inman beg questions, such as what does it mean to go to war and how does one cope with loss? Cold Mountain can’t fully answer these questions, but it opens an intriguing window into war’s physical and mental destruction. In fact, there is a tragic, Shakespearian quality to Cold Mountain; in that, death is inescapable. Even though the tone of Cold Mountain can be sullen, librettist Gene Scheer offers moments of levity. A personal favorite is when an unsavory preacher and traveling companion of Inman named Veasey notes, “I might move on to Texas…All you need to start a life in Texas is guns.”
As history, Cold Mountain yields mixed results. Cold Mountain includes intriguing depictions of strong, independent female characters. Ruby Thewes, a mountain woman, teaches Ada how to survive on her own. In return, Ada teaches Ruby how to read and allows her to live on her father’s farm. The two form a partnership that allows them to avoid starvation and harassment from the villainous, Home Guard leader, Teague. When Inman returns at the end of Act II, Ruby tells Ada that, “we can do without him [Inman]. You might think we can’t, but we can. We’re just starting…There’s not a thing we can’t do ourselves.” Ruby’s independence is a far cry from Stephanie McCurry’s real-life soldiers’ wives, who demanded attention because of their dependence on men. Ultimately, fate decides that Ada must move on without Inman.
Ruby and Ada’s refreshing self-sufficiency is not reflected in the show’s portrait of Lucinda, a runaway slave. Lucinda is arguably the most compelling character in Cold Mountain but she doesn’t appear until scene one…of act two! Because Cold Mountain is loosely chronological, Lucinda’s appearance does not occur until mid-1864, long after slaves began running away, of course, and too late in the plot for her character to be meaningful. Lucinda serves a very limited purpose in the plot. She stumbles upon a wounded, chained Inman and sets him free. I understand the symbolism of an enslaved person freeing the white protagonist but it felt as if Lucinda became nothing more than a prop, useful only to advance the plot.
A reunited Ada and Inman. Image courtesy of Opera Philadelphia.
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Jennifer Higdon, produced an uneven score. While Higdon excels at a number of evocative moments, such as the duet between Inman and Ada that concludes Act I, she fails to consistently capture the visceral emotions of the story. Moments of romance found in the half-point of the show were often framed by disjointed moments of tragedy in Act II. The real emotion behind this opera derives from the performances of Jarrett Ott (Inman), Isabel Leonard (Ada), and Cecelia Hall (Ruby), who offer excellent presentations of deeply scarred characters. Of particular note was Jay Hunter Morris’s brilliant portrayal of Teague. Whenever the chain-smoking Teague entered the stage, I was fully prepared for some form of war crime to occur, especially summary executions of Confederate deserters,. These performances make Cold Mountain well worth the price of admission.
Jay Hunter Morris as Teague. Image courtesy of Opera Philadelphia.
Cold Mountain provokes and challenges, as all good opera should, but Cold Mountain’s somber, historically-driven themes situate it as a large conceptual piece. At times, Cold Mountain reaches intellectual heights and is successful at evoking an emotional response to the pain of the Civil War, but it is difficult to retain this connection for the duration of a nearly three-hour show. Cold Mountain is a fundamentally human story and, like life, it doesn’t always have a happy ending.
Cold Mountain runs at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia from February 5 to February 14. Ticket information can be found at Opera Philadelphia.
In the inaugural Slate Academy, Slate history writer Rebecca Onion, and Slate’s chief political correspondent, Jamelle Bouie offer a podcast series billed as the “college course you wish you’d taken.” Onion’s and Bouie’s course – The History of American Slavery – outlines the development of American slavery by focusing on individual stories of enslaved Africans. By structuring their podcast around nine enslaved people, including Anthony Johnson, Olaudah Equiano, and Charles Deslondes, Onion and Bouie highlight the distinctly human aspects of slavery. In addition, Onion and Bouie consult the foremost experts on American slavery, including Ira Berlin and Eric Foner, to help flesh out the complexities of the institution. The combination of vivid storytelling and academic rigor in The History of American Slavery makes the podcast series a valuable addition to the ever-growing corpus on American slavery.
Onion and Bouie begin with an important discussion about how language is employed in the study of American slavery. Their brief first episode entitled “Syllabus” – possibly a wink towards the renowned syllabus week? – taps into a current debate both inside and outside of the academy about the usage of terms such as “slave” and “enslaved person.” While Onion and Bouie concur that “enslaved person” better suits their purposes, they underscore the importance of closely defining historical terms and how those terms enter into public consciousness.
Similarly, Onion and Bouie are careful to dispel as many myths about American slavery as their nine podcasts allow. In particular, they target the many fallacies surrounding the Underground Railroad, Lost Causers insistence that black Confederate soldiers really did exist, and a disturbingly popular idea that there were degrees of freedom within slavery. Onion and Bouie successfully attack myths about slavery by framing each of these issues around the experience of a single enslaved person. The inclusion of primary documents, particularly slave narratives, offer Onion and Bouie the opportunity to present their audience with visceral cases of what slavery looked like for enslaved persons. One of particular interest was the case of Rose Herrera, who successfully sued for the freedom of her children after they had been moved to Cuba by her former owner.
Despite their focus on stories of individual slaves, Onion and Bouie are careful to deal with issues of exceptionality in slave accounts. By including a supplemental episode entitled “Office Hours” – featuring Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Onion and Bouie track the history of how scholars have used slave accounts and why they remain invaluable sources.
The premise behind the creation of The History of American Slavery is well-intentioned and mostly well-executed. Onion and Bouie synthesize the cutting edge of historical scholarship and package it in an accessible way for a wide audience. The series is clear, jargon-free, and serves as good listening for the morning commute or while at the gym. Not to mention, it’s reasonably priced (a $5 one-month subscription to Slate Plus will get you access to the podcast series as well as additional written content). For these reasons, The History of American Slavery podcast can serve as a valuable tool in a teacher’s toolbox. Undergraduate courses on American slavery would be particularly enhanced by offering this series as a supplement to primary and secondary source material.
This bring us to the question of whether the series was the college course that I wish I’d taken? The short answer is maybe. As a historian training in 19th century American history, I found parts of the series lacking, especially in Onion’s and Bouie’s lack of discussion on the transshipment of enslaved persons from the Caribbean to the American South. However, if I take off my historian’s hat and look at the broad value of the podcast, I think Onion and Bouie are performing an important public service. By ending the series with a symposium, Onion and Bouie ask a simple but pressing question: how can we get Americans to talk honestly about slavery? While there are no easy ways to change American understandings – or lack thereof – of slavery, Onion and Bouie begin a dialogue which can hopefully lead to open and candid discussion.
Jane E. Schultz. Image courtesy of Prof. Schultz and PBS.
For this post, Muster interviewed Dr. Jane E. Schultz, Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis about her experience working with the producers of Mercy Street. We thank her for granting us this interview. Please also note that this interview contains a brief spoiler for Episode Two, “The Haversack”.
What was the extent of your involvement with the creation of Mercy Street?
Lisa Wolfinger, who heads Lone Wolf Media in Portland, Maine, contacted me in February 2014, with the idea for Mercy Street, after having read my books on Civil War hospital work, Women at the Front and This Birth Place of Souls. She asked whether I’d be willing to be a consultant for the drama, even before having shopped the idea around to PBS, because the main character in the series was to be based on Mary Phinney, Baroness von Olnhausen, who became a nurse at Mansion House Hospital in Alexandria in 1862 and about whom I had written. I was glad to do this because for about thirty years I’ve studied the complexities of wartime hospitals and I thought it would be wonderful to bring the issues of wartime medical care and practice to a wider public.
My own tasks on Mercy Street have been to read over all of the scripts and make comments on them about what feels inauthentic to me—whether in the realm of material medical culture or language. As a narrative specialist in a department of English, I want these characters to speak as people in the 19th century would have spoken. When I read a script, I often comment on dialogue that does not ring true for mid 19th-century speech patterns. I have also provided advice about the mis-en-scène: who would have been where in the hospital, what purpose the hotel lobby-cum-hospital would have served, what would have been the role of a Catholic nun in such a setting, where laundry and cooking would have been done, where soldiers would have relieved themselves or bathed if they were ambulatory—this sort of thing. It has been great fun working with Lisa Wolfinger and David Zabel, who are clever, knowledgeable, and hard-working people without pretensions.
Why did the show’s writers and consultants choose to specifically focus on the Mansion House Hotel Hospital?
I can only speculate that it’s because of Mansion House’s location: a Southern city adjacent to the U.S. capital, filled with people of color in all social categories: free people, contrabands, slaves; people of Confederate and Union beliefs jostling one another on the streets; soldiers and civilians adding texture to hospital and domestic settings. As an occupied city, Alexandria makes visible the demographic turbulence of a municipality during wartime. The city also serves as a kind of metaphor for the war at large—unfamiliar folk in transience and in unfamiliar roles; all of this activity taking place on a stage that suddenly looked different to residents because of the war in their hometown.
In terms of why just one hospital as the locus of events, a number of interesting people gathered, or were thrown together, at this hospital. The single location—though we will venture a bit further in time—makes it possible to develop characters, which is, of course, the calling card of all period dramas. We want to understand these people and find out what happens to them. And we’re fortunate to have a fair amount of narrative documentation from the people who actually worked at Mansion House. This has made it possible for the writers to create more three-dimensional characters.
What was the historical research process like for this series?
This is not something I’ve discussed with the writers, but I believe that Lisa Wolfinger, in particular, immersed herself in the nursing and medical literature about the era, as well as personal narratives and eyewitness accounts that specifically represented the work done at Mansion House. My own work has been what any historian would do to be helpful. For example, several months ago, I was asked about postal delivery in military hospitals—which was, of course, incredibly important to the denizens of any hospital. I knew from my own research (which is not on postal systems at all) that letters came via train and wagon to hospital installations, but not always on a steady schedule, given the vicissitudes of changing lines (especially in Virginia) and damage to rail lines. There wasn’t any particular person who delivered mail once it got to the hospital: it might have been a nurse, an orderly, or a steward. It had to be somebody literate. Finally, I explored the Library of Congress online catalogue concerning postal delivery in the Civil War and suggested several books to the writers.
I was struck by the opening scenes in the first episode, “The New Nurse,” which show Dorothea Dix interviewing Nurse Mary Phinney. Do you think the producers capture Dorothea Dix’s personality? The tight spot in which she found herself in the all-male terrain of the army medical hospital?
Funny you should ask! In fact, I balked a bit at the Mercy Street characterization of Army Nursing Superintendent Dix when I read the first script. I thought it provided too harsh and punitive a portrait of Dix, who was rather austere but not unkind. As Thomas Brown’s wonderful 1998 biography of Dix suggests, Dix herself was in a tight spot in the military-medical infrastructure and would not have wanted to be judged by her Civil War service. Mansion House’s Surgeon Summers’ calling her “Dragon Dix” is not unrealistic: Dix was called this by many of the young nurses whom she refused to appoint early in the war, while she still had fairly complete authority to appoint sober and mature women to the hospital service. Even then, surgeons resented women showing up at their hospitals—just like Mary Phinney did at Mansion House. They felt invaded and that their own authority had been circumvented because they hadn’t been asked whether they wanted female nurses. Not only were the nurses assigned to new posts sitting ducks from time to time—this is how Mary is represented in Episode One—but the nurses’ emissary, Dix herself, was not respected and often mocked, despite her chops in the world of asylum reform.
Keep in mind that Dix’s predicament was that she could not countenance anything that looked like it would impair the respectability of the office of nursing or the women themselves. So if she got a whiff that a woman was flirtatious or dressed in too becoming a manner, she wasn’t going to venture there. And when it became clear that the war was going to last a long time and that hospitals were going to be jam-packed with the sick and wounded, the Surgeon General wrote an order that effectively truncated her power by allowing any staff surgeon to appoint his own male and female staff. She was no longer the gatekeeper.
Nurses Mary Phinney and Anne Hastings at odds. Photo courtesy of PBS.
In your book, Women at the Front, you describe the experiences of a diverse group of nurses. Does Mercy Street capture that diversity?
Yes, I think it does a pretty good job of this. We see women in a variety of job titles—not just nurses. We see Matron Brannan, a middle-aged working-class Irish immigrant, who keeps the flow of patients moving in and out of the hospital. Matron Brannan would also have been expected to manage and perform cleaning services. We see Isabella, a young nun, helping out in the wards, and we know that plenty of religious orders sent women to this area from nearby convents (like the one in Emmitsburg, Maryland). We see Aurelia Johnson and other African American women who did scullery work, laundry, and food service jobs.
In Mary Phinney, Anne Hastings, and Emma Green, we see elite women with different preparation for their duties. Emma has to fight her parents to be allowed to help out in the hospital. Given her background, she would not have done much, if any, nursing before the war because of her youth, social privilege, and her family’s slave-holding tradition. Anne Hastings, based on Britain’s Anne Reading, had served in the Crimean War, which did not last nearly as long or result in nearly as many deaths as the American Civil War. Still, Anne knew more about nursing than Mary did and felt threatened when Mary appeared at the hospital in the role of head nurse. These kinds of jealousies, between not just nurses but surgeons as well, were quite common and readily apparent in the correspondence of the era.
Mary had not had any official nurse training when Dix appointed her (nurse training programs did not really begin in the U.S. until the 1870s), but she was an educated woman who had domestic nursing experience. Her widowed marital status also served as an inducement to seek hospital work, as a number of well-known widows (Mary Anne Bickerdyke, Jane Hoge, and Phoebe Yates Pember among them) reasoned that they could be useful to the nation(s) in this way. Even though she had nursed her husband in his final illness and was relatively young, Mary Phinney had little idea of what she was getting into when she walked into Mansion House. The “deer-in-the-headlights” look on her face is certainly credible.
Shalita Grant as Aurelia Johnson. Photo courtesy of PBS.
You also show that the Civil War hospital was a dangerous place for women nurses. Does the show capture women’s particular dangers?
Yes, it shows both the physical and psychological dangers of being a young woman in a virtually all-male military zone. Later in the series, we see the sexually predatory conduct of the villainous steward, Silas Bullen and his subterranean staff of “helpers.” Aurelia Johnson, a contraband, is trying to locate her young son from whom she has been forcibly separated, and in her desperation, makes the grave error of looking to Bullen for help. Nurse Mary also has a run-in with Bullen over his neglect of patients’ diet and the graft which she suspects him of. As she enters his basement office, viewers have the visceral feeling that she has entered a lair of doom, and she decides to extricate herself quickly before gaining her point that the patients need better-quality sustenance.
Aside from the sexual dangers of military hospitals, there were very real physical dangers due to poor sanitation and ventilation. The literature reveals several instances of field hospitals and more permanent buildings being consumed by fire. Even the setup of Mansion House Hospital reveals dangers. We see long, steep staircases—very typical 19th-century architecture—which were not easy to negotiate, given the staff’s need to carry bodies, food, medicine, dirty laundry, and refuse up and down all day long. And, of course, the dangers of infection were everywhere present in hospitals before antisepsis was widely understood and practiced. Plenty of staff died in military hospitals of things like typhoid.
Dr. Foster and Nurse Mary conversing by the Staircase. Photo courtesy of PBS.
Foster, Phinney, and Diggs are all army medical establishment outsiders–but they seem to have the patients’ best interests in mind. Is the message of the show that the medical establishment was broken? Needed to be reformed from the outsiders?
I don’t think I’d say that exactly. Instead I’d say that the medical establishment was only still evolving and that many parties would ultimately contribute to medical advancement and better patient care. In 1862, when Mary Phinney arrived at Mansion House, the Union Surgeon General’s Office was still trying to figure out how best to arrange staffing, how to provision hospitals, and how to transport sick or wounded troops from camp and field.
Like most institutional change, Civil War medical advances proceeded slowly and were aided by innovators. It’s true that Foster, Phinney, and Diggs were all outsiders. For that matter, so was William Hammond, who served an important term as the Surgeon General during this time, and was not among the surgical “elect.” But we need also to remember that Phinney and Diggs would have had little power to promote any institutional change, despite their efforts to work behind the scenes in ways that officials would have frowned upon. Even Foster, as a Marylander in a Union hospital, would have had little occasion outside of the hospital to gain any traction, given the hierarchical operating procedures of most military surgeons. In the grand scheme of things, he wouldn’t have had much access to the centers of medical authority. That said, his personal challenges remind us just how complex even one person’s limited experience was in a place like Mansion House. Mercy Street is trying to show the depths of human turbulence that lay beneath the surface of military etiquette.
Neither Green nor Phinney seem willing to extend their sympathy to the enemy. Is the message that women are ill-equipped to be medical professionals or is this a commentary on the limited outlets available for women to express their political opinions?
I don’t believe that it’s either one of those options, notwithstanding that women didn’t, in fact, have so many options for expressing their political views. This was more about military protocol than medical protocol. Practitioners on either side did not generally like to care for soldiers of the opposing side, and you can be sure that such views led to surgeons passively neglecting enemy soldiers from time to time. Surgeons mention in their letters, when it comes up, that they didn’t necessarily like caring for “the enemy,” but they did it because they were ordered to, and they were not accustomed to disobeying orders. There were also surgeons like Jed Foster, who recognized that blood had just one color, and felt that, once fallen and in need of succor, soldiers were entitled to the best care that could be found for them. This is how it worked with nurses and female hospital attendants as well. Some hated the enemy because they daily witnessed the havoc wrought by ammunition; others realized that war was the real enemy, not human bodies on one side or another.
I would wager that about as many women as complained of being obliged to treat the enemy expressed more conciliatory views. Sometimes, in fact, they were angry that they were not permitted to care for enemy soldiers. Several of these invoke religious values, noting that if “mine enemy hunger, then I must feed him,” emphasizing that true Christian morality is not about partisanship but about extending help to all of those who need it, regardless of political proclivities.
With regard to whether Emma’s or Mary’s sectional loyalties unfitted them for medical work, it’s useful to remember that even by mid-war, women were already pursuing work as physicians. Some, like Illinois’ Mary Safford, trained in Europe because American medical schools were not interested in admitting women, and when they did, they did not accommodate women easily. Others, like Esther Hill Hawks of New Hampshire, were hired as nurses despite their medical training. Hawks, the wife of a pharmacist, took care of contrabands and black troops in the Sea Islands under General Rufus Saxton’s watch because it became clear to her that military authorities were little interested in health care arrangements made for African Americans.
Jane E. Schultz is Professor of English at Indiana University Purdue University- Indianapolis and and affiliated with the programs in American Studies and Women’s Studies. Dr. Schultz is the author of two highly acclaimed works about gender in the Civil War. Schultz’s Lincoln prize finalist Women at the Front (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) focused on women relief workers in Civil War hospitals. Schultz edited This Birth Place of Souls (Oxford University Press, 2011), one of the few extant diaries of a Civil War nurse. Dr. Schultz is currently at work on two books, “Lead, Blood, and Ink” about Civil War surgical culture, and “A Match Made in Hospital” about the correspondence and romance between a female hospital worker from Pennsylvania and a surgeon from the Army of the Potomac.
Sources:
Brown, Thomas J. Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Clarke, Frances M. War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Devine, Shauna. Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
Finseth, Ian. “The Civil War Dead: Realism and the Problem of Anonymity.” American Literary History 2, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 535-562.
Hacker, J. David. “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead.” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (December 2011): 307-348. Project Muse.
Hawks, Esther Hill. A Woman Doctor’s Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks’ Diary, Edited by Gerald Schwartz. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.
Humphreys, Margaret. The Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Schultz, Jane E. This Birth Place of Souls: The Civil War Nursing Diary of Harriet Eaton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Schultz, Jane E. Women at the Front: Female Hospital Workers in Civil War America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Mercy Street, Ridley Scott’s, fresh, compelling six-part drama captures the gritty, dangerous experience of medical caregiving during the Civil War. The series debuts January 17th on PBS, immediately following Downton Abbey. Set inside Mansion House Hotel, a makeshift hospital in Alexandria, Virginia in 1862, Mercy Street is narrated from the perspective of two nurses, Boston abolitionist, Mary Phinney (aka Baroness von Olnhausen), and Emma Green, the daughter of the hotel’s owner.
The first episode captures the intense resistance and suspicion female nurses faced when they entered wartime field hospitals. Before taking over operations at Mansion House, Phinney endures a sharp interrogation from Dorothea Dix, Superintendent of Nurses for the U.S., and then faces jeers from the male medical staff. Like Louisa May Alcott in Hospital Sketches, Phinney spends much of her time doing menial cleaning tasks, and like Alcott, Phinney perseveres. This episode’s depictions of nurses’ trials reflects the expertise of the show’s stellar team of historical consultants, including Anya Jabour, Jane E. Schultz, and Shauna Devine.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Mary Phinney and McKinley Belcher as Samuel Diggs, Antony Platt, PBS.
The show’s other main characters complement Phinney and Green, including Dr. Jedediah Foster, a wisecracking proponent of new medical techniques and advocate of the cause of Union salvation rather than abolition and Samuel Diggs, a Philadelphian of color with a mysterious past and brilliant surgical skills. The stories of contraband slaves unfold in the background in a complex interwoven subplot reminiscent of the Crawley family’s servants in Downton Abbey.
Hannah James as Emma Green, Antony Platt, PBS.
Despite well-developed plotlines, some of the characters fall prey to goofy stereotypes. Foster yells “hoopskirt!” and “von Outhousen!”at Green and Phinney, reflecting a grumpy misogyny that seems at times overblown. Green initially floats through scenes with a flower basket and a frilly white dress, resembling a close cousin to Melanie Wilkes, but she is wrestling with the limitations of her position as an elite white woman sitting atop a crumbling society. This tension should be further developed if the show’s writers hope to avoid making Green into another stereotypically shallow Southern belle.
“Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Mary Phinney and Josh Radnor as Jedediah Foster,” Antony Platt, PBS.
In its early stages, the show provides a fascinating look at the war beginning in its second year, before the Union’s Peninsula Campaign and the United States Sanitary Commission began to officially train nurses. Outside Mansion House Hospital, the violence was escalating and society was being radically transformed. Emancipation was yet uncertain, and the Union Army was faltering. It will be entertaining to watch Mercy Street’s characters develop as the war intensifies and to think about the real-life people they represent. Mansion House’s “McDreamy” Dr. Foster’s sharp tongue and medical brinkmanship could cut both ways. How and where did Diggs learn to yield a scalpel? Phinney’s idealism might yet be tested, as was Alcott’s. And Green’s fluffy white dress will surely be soiled–her hands dirtied by the unfolding bloodshed.
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Lester, Julius. 
Myers, Walter Dean. 
Swanson, James L. 
Hunt, Laird. 
Nickerson, Jane. 
On March 14, 1846, Abraham Jones, a coroner in Edgefield County, South Carolina, filed a report concerning the death of a female slave named 
In the inaugural 
Mercy Street, Ridley Scott’s, fresh, compelling six-part drama captures the gritty, dangerous experience of medical caregiving during the Civil War. The series debuts January 17th on PBS, immediately following Downton Abbey. Set inside Mansion House Hotel, a makeshift hospital in Alexandria, Virginia in 1862, Mercy Street is narrated from the perspective of two nurses, Boston abolitionist, Mary Phinney (aka Baroness von Olnhausen), and Emma Green, the daughter of the hotel’s owner.
