Slave quarters Smiths Plantation, Port Royal, South Carolina

In early December I noted the release of the Atlantic’s Civil War 150th anniversary commemoration issue, which can still be purchased on newsstands and through Amazon for your Kindle by the way. This week the magazine’s online version has posted what the editors believe are the fifty most powerful images from the commemorative issue. It is hard to disagree.

(image/Timothy H. O’Sullivan;Civil War Treasures from the New-York Historical Society)

March 1865 Brady letter to Lincoln asking for another sitting

Matthew Brady’s camera  sold at auction for $65,725 on November 30th. Heritage Auctions of Dallas conducted the sale. Brady sold the camera when he filed for bankruptcy in April 1873 and photcopies of the insolvency papers are included in the lot. It is believed to be the camera Brady used to photograph Lincoln during his February 1860 trip to New York City. This camera was also part of the New-York Historical Society’s wonderful “Lincoln and New York” exhibit in 2009-10. I remember seeing it there with my father-in-law just before the N-YHS closed for renovation.

Also included is an original copy of the September 23, 1957 Life magazine, in which Ed Clark uses Brady’s camera–yes, the actual camera–to photograph President Eisenhower and others in period poses. Check it out starting on page 118. An added bonus in this edition of Life from the year of the Little Rock segregation episode is a look into the governor’s mansion of Arkansas’s Orville Faubus. You can’t make this stuff up.

(image courtesy Gwillhickers/Library of Congress)

Midway Plantation

My wife and I watched an extraordinary film last night called Moving Midway.  Midway is a plantation built in 1848 on land bequeathed to the Hinton family of North Carolina decades prior to the American Revolution.  Concerns over urban sprawl led the current owner, Charles Hinton Silver, to a dramatic decision in 2003: he would literally lift the house from its foundation and move it several miles across country to a more secluded spot.  The undertaking is documented by his cousin Godfrey Cheshire, a New York film critic who grew up in a Raleigh and cherishes the memories of his boyhood visits to the place his mother called “out home.”

Cheshire discovered something unexpected halfway through the project—he has over one hundred African American relatives.  Here the film takes a dramatic turn.

Cheshire is aided by Robert Hinton, a professor of Africana Studies who also grew up in Raleigh and whose ancestors were slaves on Midway Plantation.  The two did not meet until the relocation project was underway but share an immediate rapport.  Struggling to make sense of it all Hinton confesses to Cheshire that, “This would be easier if didn’t like you.”  Still, the underlying tension is at times palpable.  Robert and Godfrey do not appear to be themselves related.

Both men struggle with their identity.  Professor Hinton explains that he has always been conflicted between his African American and Southern identities, with the Southern often winning out.  He also recounts that as a young college student in the 1960s he felt more comfortable in the presence of white graduate students than the Black Power crowd he briefly embraced.  Cheshire’s struggles are only beginning, as he explores the implications of the complicated story for himself, his family, the region, and even the nation itself.  He concludes that the only way to see the South today is as a mixed race society.

Moving Midway is many things: a meditation on the meaning of home; an exploration of family; an examination of American history; and even a short course on cinematic history.  (As a film critic Cheshire is well positioned to examine the Moonlight and Magnolias version of the Plantation South offered up by Hollywood during the years of the Studio System.)  Above all it is an example of what some call courage history, the willingness to look closely even at the people and things we love and ask the difficult questions.

I could go on but won’t.  Moving Midway is available on dvd.

Ethnomusicology is a fascinating subject, and nowhere more so than when it comes to the music of African-Americans.  During the New Deal researchers recorded the oral histories and music of former slaves who were by then in their eighties and nineties.  Most famous, of course, was the work of Alan Lomax, who worked with Zora Neale Hurston among others to record and document this soon-to-be-gone-forever piece of American history and folklore.  Graduate student Bob Hester spent a year tracking down the roots of a half dozen slave songs.  The tale goes from South Carolina to Augusta, Georgia with the help of a soldier from Brooklyn.

In preparation for our upcoming trip to Maryland and Pennsylvania I have been catching up on my Frassanito.  Matthew Brady’s reputation has taken a hit in recent years, in large part because we know today that many “Brady” photographs were actually take by his assistants.  This Atlantic piece won’t help.