Category Archives: Civil War sesquicentennial

New York’s (Unofficial) Sesquicentennial Commission

31 Thursday Mar 2011

Posted by in Civil War sesquicentennial

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As followers of this blog know Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery is one of the great non-battle-related Civil War sites in the nation.  Over the past decade cemetery officials have done the city, indeed the entire country, a great service by identifying and marking the graves of the thousands of Union and Confederate dead interred there.  Many of these graves, and the stories of those buried in them, would have been lost to history if not for the efforts of cemetery officials and the volunteers who assist them.  Walking the grounds one sees their work.  The cemetery also hosts a number of Civil War (and other) programming.  Now Green-Wood Cemetery will play an even greater role in the war’s commemoration; earlier this week it was named New York City’s official Civil War Headquarters.

The work that Green-Wood and other institutions are doing is more important than ever.  Because of the state’s massive budget deficit, government officials have declined to fund an official New York State Sesquicentennial Commission.  In contrast, Virginia has given $2 million annually for its sesquicentennial commission since 2008.  Given New York’s budget woes, withholding funds makes sense financially.  Nonetheless someone must fill in the breach and, thankfully, many institutions and individuals have.  A cursory look at organizations planning Civil War related programming in New York City over the next fours years include: Green-Wood, the New-York Historical Society, the American Jewish Historical Society in cooperation with Yeshiva University, the public library systems, and of course the National Park Service’s myriad New York agencies.

It is not just the city where events are underway.  For instance, the New York State Military Museum in Saratoga Springs hopes to have a series of exhibits between now and 2015.  There is much to highlight.  New York provided more troops to the war effort, 450,000, than any other state, ten percent of whom never returned.  Many of the leading figures of the era also resided at least for a time in the Empire State, including Walt Whitman, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, George Templeton Strong, Secretary of State William Seward, and Frederick Douglass.  In addition there are sites such as the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Elmira prison, and the factories that churned out much of the materiel for the war effort to remember and hopefully maintain.

All of this is being done without the recognition of a state-sanctioned body.   Thankfully a group of New Yorkers have organized to plan and coordinate these activities statewide.  Even if no funds are forthcoming with luck Albany may give the New York State Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission its official imprimatur.

The naval war

24 Thursday Mar 2011

Posted by in Civil War sesquicentennial, Film, Sound, & Photography

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I spend more time than any man probably should watching old Civil War documentaries on Youtube.  This four part documentary from 1958 focuses on the naval campaigns of the conflict.  What I find interesting in these films is not only the information contained in them but the look, feel, and sound of the documentaries themselves.  They are themselves primary artifacts in that they often tell us as much about their own era as they do the Civil War’s.  Of course some day they will say the same thing about us and the sesquicentennial.

The long four years ahead

03 Thursday Mar 2011

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There is a piece in Time magazine this week about the reenactment of the 1861 Jefferson Davis inaugural held in Montgomery a few weeks ago.  In December we saw something similar in Charleston with the Secession Ball celebrating the Palmetto State’s leaving the Union.  Our nation has changed politically, culturally, and demographically over the past half century, and it’s not surprising that unlike in 1961 the politicians stayed away and the turnout was low.

There’s a tilting at windmills quality to how some people are trying to recognize the sesquicentennial.  Some individuals, especially within certain Southern heritage groups, cannot accept that the Lost Cause interpretation of the war is no longer sufficient and that they have lost their exclusive control of the Civil War narrative.  These groups are in danger of rendering themselves obsolete and indeed are already facing declining enrollment as their current members age and prospective, younger members stay away.  Sadly, it doesn’t have to be this way.

For whatever my opinion is worth I believe there is a middle ground that can be respectful of the sacrifices made by Confederate soldiers and civilians while acknowledging that our country is better off today because the Confederate States of America lost the war.  I submit that maintaining Confederate cemeteries; preserving existing memorials and statuary; digitizing photographs, letters, and diaries; and fund raising to purchase Civil War battlegrounds threatened by urban sprawl are a few ways Southerners could honor their forebears.  Certainly there are other ways unique to local circumstances.  What will not work is closing one’s eyes and pretending that the Civil Rights Movement never happened.

It’s going to be a long four years if reactionary elements keep trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Calling young scholars

18 Friday Feb 2011

Posted by in Civil War sesquicentennial, National Park Service

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Something came through my inbox yesterday that I thought I’d pass along.

The National Park Service has a new project aimed at high school students throughout the country.  It’s the National Park Memory Trail.  The hope is to get students, working under the guidance of their teachers and local librarians, involved in the Civil War sesquicentennial.  The Memory Trail is designed to allow students to do real research on their own communities and create digital narratives which will then be posted on the National Park Service website.  Students can research what life was like in their local community in the early months of 1861.  Or, they might explore how the war’s centennial coincided with the Civil Rights Movement.  Finally, they might reflect on their own place in our nation’s history and where this awareness might lead them in the future.  It’s called the Memory Trail because viewers will be able to click on a map of the U.S. and read the narrative of each participating locale.

You may be asking yourself, what did my little town have to do with the American Civil War?

The answer is, probably more than you think.

Over three million soldiers fought in the American Civil War.  Some were city slickers from Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Manhattan’s Bowery; others were rubes from hamlets too tiny to be found on any map.  Then there were the parents, wives, children, sweethearts, and other loved ones left behind to cope as best they could.  The war reached into every household in America, including undoubtedly the town where you live today.

I’ve worked in small museums and libraries throughout the country and can tell you that much of the most interesting scholarship is done at the local level.  There is the genealogists maintaining funeral records of the town’s ancestors in a small office in her own home, the archivist at the local historical society safeguarding (usually on a shoestring) the town’s collection of artifacts, and the librarian conserving old newspaper clippings and one-of-a-kind ephemera in the library’s now seldom used Vertical File.  There is a great deal of material out there to work with.  Photographs, letters, oral histories, maps, postcards, and old advertisements are a few examples of things today’s young researcher might use for her narrative.

To find out more, go here:

Thanks for checking in.

Keith

Lessons Learned

06 Sunday Feb 2011

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As I mentioned in my introductory post, the primary reason I started The Strawfoot is the Civil War sesquicentennial.  I’ve always been fascinated by the American Civil War and am now trying to understand the period in a deeper, more meaningful way.  The 150th anniversary of the conflict seems an opportune time to do this.  Not long ago I read Robert J. Cook’s Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War, 1961-1965.  Cook, a British historian, has written a jargon-free, well-researched account of the events that derailed the Centennial in the early 1960s.  In a nutshell, the organizers of the United States Civil War Centennial Commission found it increasingly difficult to keep the Civil War relevant in the face of the Civil Rights Movement.

President Eisenhower signed the legislation creating the Centennial Commission on September 7, 1957, just two weeks before he sent the 101st Airborne to Arkansas to integrate Little Rock Central High School.  Over the next few years preparation for the Civil War anniversary was virtually an all-white affair.  Many Americans, North and South, wanted to concentrate on the minutiae of uniforms and weaponry; attend reenactments such as the one at First Bull Run in July 1961; and focus on the valor of Johnny Reb and Billy Yank.  With lunch counter sit-ins and other Civil Rights protests becoming more frequent, white Southerners began incorporating the language of the 1850s and 1860s into their “massive resistance” to integration.  They also incorporated the symbols and imagery of the Civil War, most obviously the Confederate battle flag, into their campaign against desegregation.  Under this strain it was inevitable that most Americans would lose interest in celebrating the “pageantry” of the war that took the lives of 620,000 Americans.  And indeed, most Americans did lose interest.  That’s not to say that the Civil War Centennial was a total wash.  Allan Nevins, James I. Robertson Jr., Bruce Catton, and Bell Irvin Wiley, among others, did their best to commemorate the war in a dignified and meaningful manner.  Still, despite some modest successes, results were mixed at best.

This brings me to the sesquicentennial.  Fast forward half a century and we are looking at a totally different picture.  Over the past several decades there has been a sea change in Civil War scholarship.  The rise of African- and Women’s Studies, coupled with the prevalence today of social history over the Great Man theory of scholarship, have given us new ways of looking at our Civil War.  That’s what makes today so fascinating.  Historians, bloggers, National Park Service rangers, and journalists have incorporated these changes into their work and are giving us a more nuanced and thoughtful understanding of our country’s greatest catastrophe.  We see that today every time we walk one our battlefields, visit our museums, log onto the internet, and read the newspapers.  That’s why I’m looking forward to the next four years and seeing what they bring.  It makes me wonder, too, what they’ll say about us when they write the book on the sesquicentennial fifty short years from now.

Thanks for checking in.

Keith