Podcast: David Gleeson on the Irish in the Confederacy

Randall Stephens

In 2013 the University of North Carolina Press published David T. Gleeson's The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America.  It is  a sprawling study that is already receiving high praise from historians and journalists.  In the Boston Globe Michael Kenney writes "As his analysis unfolds, there is much that will surprise, perhaps even unsettle, Boston readers familiar with the abolitionists, the Massachusetts 54th, and the summertime encampments of reenactors. Gleeson looks at the role of Irish-Americans in the Southern debate over slavery, in the Confederate Army, on the homefront, and in the aftermath of the defeat." Over at the Irish Times Myles Dungan seems to agree. "Gleeson goes well beyond the merely anecdotal," says Dungan.   Gleeson conveys "a sense of what it was to be an Irish immigrant in the southern states that formed the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865."

David Gleeson is no stranger to the subject.  He has been writing and teaching on 19th century history, the South, and the Civil War for many years now.  A reader in history at Northumbria University he is the editor of The Irish in the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press, 2010) and the author of The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

In the interview embedded below, I speak with David about researching and writing The Green and the Grey.  David also talks about the role of memory in the post Civil War South and discusses the ways that his work fits into the wider field of southern and Civil War history.

Baseball’s Forgotten Experiment

Steven Cromack

Contrary to popular belief, Jackie Robinson was not the first black man to play major league baseball. That title belongs to Moses Fleetwood Walker, who lived and played nearly eighty years before
Robinson. Walker’s story is fascinating not only because of his baseball stardom, but also because an all white jury acquitted him of first-degree murder in 1891.

Historians do not know much about his early years. Moses Fleetwood Walker was born in Ohio. A minister’s son, he entered Oberlin College and planned to become a lawyer. While at school, however, it became clear that his passion lay elsewhere. Instead of going to class, Walker played baseball, and in 1883 he landed a spot in the minor leagues as a catcher with newly formed Toledo Blue Stockings. As a player, he impressed the press and the fans. Sporting Life, the nation’s largest sport publication at the time, wrote on September 15, 1883: “Walker, the colored catcher of the Toledos, is a favorite wherever he goes. He does brilliant work in a modest, unassuming way.” In 1884 Toledo joined the major competitor to the National League, the American Association. As a result, Walker earned his title as the first black player in the major leagues.

The Great Chicago Fire, Part 2

Mimi Cowan

In yesterday’s post I gave you the basics of Chicago’s 1871 Great Conflagration, as they called it, and how Mrs. O’Leary became everyone’s favorite scapegoat. I also promised you a story about what French socialists, women with Molotov cocktails, Mrs. O’Leary, and the creation of modern Chicago all have in common.

So here’s where the story starts: as I flipped through a series of old images of Mrs. O’Leary, I realized that she looked different in every picture.
That’s because Mrs. O’Leary hid from the press; she didn’t want anyone to sketch her likeness in the papers. As a result, illustrators were free to depict her in anyway they chose. But if these aren’t accurate representations of Mrs. O’Leary, what were the models for these images?

Turns out that these depictions of Mrs. O’Leary bear a striking resemblance to images of the pétroleuses of the 1871 French Commune.

In March 1871, the citizens' militia and city council of Paris ran the French national government and army out of the city, and then declared a socialist-style government, referred to as the Commune. After taking back several Paris neighborhoods throughout April and May, the French army began their final attack on the remaining Commune-controlled areas. There were vicious street battles, and fires broke out and burned much of the city.

According to the French press, female radicals, dubbed pétroleuses, had supposedly started many of these fires, using petroleum-filled vessels, sort of like Molotov cocktails. While historians have not found any evidence that pétroleuses actually existed, the contemporary press nonetheless depicted these women as the source of the fires that ravaged the city.

The Great Chicago Fire, Part 1

Mimi Cowan

Yesterday I told my eighty-eight-year-old grandmother I was writing a blog post about the Great Chicago Fire. She replied, "the one the cow started?"

Yup. The one the cow started. Well, actually, no. Everyone and their grandmother have blamed Chicago's biggest disaster on Mrs. O'Leary and her incendiary bovine for the past 142 years, but here's the thing:

The cow didn't do it.

But that got me thinking. Why, almost a century and a half later, is her name often the one thing people know about the fire? I've got some theories so grab a mug of milk, pull up a stool, and keep an eye on that lantern.

First, a little background: Late on Sunday October 8, 1871, a fire broke out on the west side of Chicago. Legend tells us that Catherine O'Leary placed a lantern behind the hoof of the cow she was milking. The cow kicked and the lantern broke, catching the surrounding hay on fire. Within moments, the entire barn was engulfed in flames.

Accessing History: A “Laboratory” at Gettysburg

Eric Schultz

I was fortunate in early July to attend three days of the 150th commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg, including a number of events sponsored by the Gettysburg Foundation. It was busy, colorful, sometimes somber but always tropical, a good reminder of what conditions were like in July 1863.  The battlefield itself, nearly 6,000 acres and sometimes called the “symbolic center of American history,” is both inspiring and beautiful. 

The 150th commemoration included a retelling
of the battle and featured first-person accounts.

Events included a spectacular retelling of the battle (focused on first-person accounts), and the grand opening of the Seminary Ridge Museum at which visitors could climb its historic cupola to get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and town.

As I attended various gatherings, however, it struck me that Gettysburg was nothing less than a kind of living laboratory for how people access history.

For example, there were lots (and lots) of folks taking tours of the battlefield, often led by certified National Park Service guides.  To walk in the footsteps of soldiers and view the battle lines redefines history in a whole new way for many.  Likewise some of the largest groups could be found on Little Round Top, where Col. Joshua Chamberlain made his famous stand--a tribute not only to Chamberlain and his troops, but to the power of Hollywood and films like Gettysburg, capable of creating historical celebrities. 

The Greatest Migration of All

Eric B. Schultz

Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.  Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from

A Jack Delano photo of migrants
heading north from Florida, 1940.

World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns.

There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.  Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project, scheduled for completion in 2016.

In his monumental What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Daniel Walker Howe describes “one of the greatest migrations in America,” when Andrew Jackson encouraged white squatters from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee to move onto 14 million acres expropriated from the Creeks. By 1819 this flood of humanity had established Mississippi and Alabama. “The Alabama fever rages here with great violence,” one North Carolina farmer moaned, “and has carried off vast numbers of our citizens.” Never, Howe remarks, had so large a territory been settled so rapidly—though the peopling of the Old Northwest Territory was not far behind.

The Chinese Exclusion Act and American Economic Policy

Heather Cox Richardson

On May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed into law theChinese Exclusion Act. This hotly contested law was the first in American history to prevent voluntary immigration to the United States. It was also the formal rejection of one of the founding principles of the Republican Party: that the immigration of workers to the U.S. was fundamental to the country’s strength.

An 1882 cartoon: "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT.
Enlightened American Statesman.--"We must
draw the line somewhere, you know."
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Chinese immigration to America began with the Gold Rush. Its flood tide in 1849 coincided with the economic catastrophe left in China by the Opium Wars, and young Chinese men came to “Gold Mountain” to earn money to feed their families back home. Chinese miners did well financially in California, but quickly came under fire from native-born Americans, who first passed a “Foreign Miners’ Tax” targeting Chinese miners and then tried to prevent Chinese immigrants from testifying in court.

The attempts to create a legal caste system bothered budding Republicans like William Henry Seward and Abraham Lincoln. The idea that men were not equal in America, but rather could be divided by legal status, echoed the beliefs of the southern Democrats that Republicans opposed. When Republicans took over the national government, they stood firm against that theory. They not only ended slavery, but also promoted immigration. Immigrants, their 1864 platform declared: had “added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations,” that immigration “should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.” Immigrants worked hard, made products that created value, and helped to fuel a rising spiral of economic prosperity. Republicans believed that the more immigrants a country attracted, the more its economy would expand.

Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

In the coming week the April 2013 issue of Historically Speaking will be posted to the Project Muse site.  Subscribers can expect it soon in mailboxes.  The issue includes essays on environmental history, ancient religion, teaching, and Harry Truman.It also features interviews with Matthew Bowman on Mormonism in American history, John R. Gillis on seacoasts in history, and turning points of World War I with Ian F.W. Beckett. 

In addition the April issue includes a lively forum on "Scientific Culture in the Modern Era" with intellectual historian Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney).  "One of the most distinctive features of Western culture since the 17th century is the gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones," writes Gaukroger in his lead essay. "A particular image of the role and aims of scientific understanding is tied up in a very fundamental way with the self-image of Western modernity. One striking illustration of this is the way that the West’s sense of what its superiority consisted of shifted seamlessly in the early decades of the 19th century from religion to science. From that time on, but particularly in the second half of the 20th century, this self-understanding has been exported as an essential ingredient in the process of modernization."

Globalizing the Nineteenth Century

Joseph L. Yannielli

This is cross-posted from the blog Digital Histories at Yale.

Nineteenth-century Americans viewed themselves through an international lens. Among the most important artifacts of this global consciousness is William Channing Woodbridge’s “Moral and Political Chart of the Inhabited World.” First published in 1821 and reproduced in various shapes and sizes in the decades prior to the Civil War, Woodbridge’s chart was a central and popular component of classroom instruction. I use it in my research and teaching. It forms a key part of my argument about the abolitionist encounter with Africa. And every time I look at it, I see something new or unexpected.

Chart of the Inhabited World:
Exhibiting the Prevailing
Religion, Form Of Government, 1821

Like basketball and jazz, the moral chart is an innovation unique to the United States. The earliest iterations depart from the Eurocentric and Atlantic focus with which modern readers are most familiar. Reflecting the early American obsession with westward expansion, they gaze out over the Pacific Ocean to East Asia and the Polynesian Islands. The chart features a plethora of statistical and critical data. Nations and territories are ranked according to their “Degrees of Civilisation,” form of government, and religion. Darker colored regions are “savage” or “barbarous” while rays of bright light pour out from the Eastern United States and Northern Europe.

Catholics, Protestants, and Sectionalism in Antebellum American: An Interview with W. Jason Wallace

Conducted by Randall Stephens

W. Jason Wallace is a professor of history at Samford University. He is the author of Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (Notre Dame University Press, 2010). I recently caught up with Jason to ask him some questions about his work on Christianity in pre-Civil War America and to discuss some of the

Wall Street, 1847. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

connections between religion, politics, and historical consciousness in the nineteenth century U.S.

Randall Stephens: What makes the era between 1835 and 1860 such a critical period in American religious history?

W. Jason Wallace: Between 1835 and 1860 most aspects of American social, political, and economic life reached something of a ferment.  Religion, and especially Christianity, underwent substantial trials as well.  Religious disestablishment was then, and still is, a young phenomenon in the scope of world history.  Unlike European churches, American churches had to compete in the marketplace of ideas for adherents.  People had choices.  Religious affiliation was not simply a matter of genealogy or geography.  As a result, in Nathan Hatch’s great phrasing, the democratization of the churches began in earnest.  With the First Great Awakening the confessional boundaries established over the course of a century or so after the Reformation slowly lost influence.  The Second Great Awakening all but ended the confessional church tradition in America.  Revivalism combined with broad conceptions of evangelicalism to create new Protestant identities.  By the middle decades of the nineteenth century many Protestant traditions that valued creeds and liturgy found themselves overwhelmed by evangelical sentiment.  Doctrine became less important than the individuals’ personal relationship with God, and behavior and public virtue came to be seen more and more as marks of “genuine” Christianity.  In some ways these theological shifts made evangelicalism valuable to the growing country because it gave sanction to the importance of virtue and morality for national life.  In other words, Christianity provided a code of behavior that could benefit everyone.  But for Christianity to be useful it had to be contained.  If disputes over theology and doctrine spilled into public life then Christianity could become divisive and socially destabilizing.  In part, this is exactly what happened in the debate over slavery. 

Field Trip: A Report from the Bright Side of Fourth-Grade History Education

Chris Beneke

Guided tour at Lowell National Park. 
Photo courtesy of www.nps.gov/lowe

If the experiences of my kids are at all representative, the glum accounts you’ve heard or read about elementary and secondary education in the U.S. have some basis in fact. Public school students move in virtual lock-step with their classmates, get a meager fifteen minutes for recess, and take tests with unsettling regularity. Meanwhile, their hardworking teachers and principals must manage both rigid curriculum standards and large classes.

In light of these oft-repeated concerns, my perspective brightened last week while chaperoning my son’s fourth-grade class trip to the Lowell National Park, the splendid and well-preserved site of the famous textile mills where America’s industrial revolution took off in the 1830s and 1840s. I didn’t come away feeling like a Finnish parent probably feels after accompanying his or her child on a field trip. Still, the experience left me much more optimistic about the trajectory of early history education: the kids arrived well-prepared and the museum’s activities were engaging, hands-on, well-paced, and occasionally revelatory.

How a Nation Reports its Grief

Glenn Alan Cheney*

 

Theatre box where Abraham Lincoln was
shot on April 14, 1865. Ford's Theatre,
Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the Library
of Congress.

When I started compiling How a Nation Grieves: Press Accounts of the Death of Lincoln, the Hunt for Booth, andAmerica in Mourning, I had little intention of pulling together a whole book. But I soon realized I was witnessing—not reading about but witnessing—the most traumatic moment in American history. The assassination of Lincoln had shocked North and South alike.

Except for the people at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, the American people witnessed the national trauma through newspapers. Journalism was a little different in those days. Its practitioners were not restricted to today’s dispassionate, professional voice. They were expected to provide details, and they were free to use language to connote the emotions that came with those details.

Birth Control in the First Half of the 19th Century*

Dan Allosso

 

Charles Knowlton believed that his enemies’ big objection to The Fruits of Philosophy, which he published in 1831 and was imprisoned for in 1833, wasn’t so much that it gave people the power to reduce the sizes of their families, but that he had claimed in his “Philosophical Proem” that religion should have nothing to say about the matter.  He was jailed for three months at hard labor, Charles said, “ostensibly, for diffusing scientific knowledge of practical utility; but, really, for giving thee a small pill in connection with it, slyly wrapped up, which thou canst not swallow.”  Other freethinkers, such as Abner Kneeland and Robert Dale Owen, focused on the idea that by giving regular people the ability to limit family sizes, they were instigating a major social change.  By reducing the number of poor wage-workers, they said, families would become better able to demand higher wages and the money they earned would go farther toward giving all children the nourishment and educations they needed.  Most freethinkers agreed that it was important to give everybody the right to choose, and that the social reforms they supported would be advanced by effective family planning.

So was Knowlton’s method effective?  Should he be remembered as an early champion of the idea of choice, or as someone who actually helped people change the sizes of their families in ways that led to social change?  Either way, he was ahead of his time and helped move American society from its Calvinist roots toward the world we live in today, where for most people the choice to have children and how many to have is just assumed to be a private, family decision.

History News of Note: Civil War Letters

This from the Boston Globe, "The Civil War, One Day, One Letter, at a Time," by Kevin Hartnett, January 23, 2013:

To mark the Civil War sesquicentennial, the University of North Carolina's Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library is publishing one piece of Civil War-era correspondence a day, 150 years to the day after it was written.

The commemoration began on April 21, 2011 with a diary entry from April 21, 1861. In a few short paragraphs, Sarah Louis Wadley of Louisiana wrote about the secession of Virginia, the tragic death of a local timber worker (crushed beneath a tree limb), and her gratitude about being removed from the growing conflict:

"truly it is a blessing to be allowed to spend our life in those quiet shades, especially during such troublous times as these, bitter indeed must be that spirit which away from the haunts of men with the never ceasing hymn of the forest swelling, and softening around, is not soothed out of all but the rememberance of sorrow.">>>

Unsafe in Candy Land

Eric Schultz

Recently, while researching material on an entrepreneur who launched her candy business at the turn of the twentieth century, I bumped into a series of newspapers articles that reminded me that the past really is a foreign (and often dangerous) land.

In 1900, America’s candy manufacturers boasted $100 million in invested capital and an annual business in candies and sweets that exceeded that of beer, wine and liquor combined.   A British newspaper declared that Americans “make their sweets as we make our bread, practically for a day’s consumption.”  In the days before the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, this extraordinary demand for all things sweet attracted swindlers, quacks and crooks.

The damage done was fathomless.  I uncovered article after article about children sickened and killed by adulterated candies throughout the 1890s and early 1900s.  Techniques used by manufacturers were often beyond the pale. Some candy was found to contain fusel oil (an ingredient used at the time in lacquer solvents). Other manufacturers cut their honey with glucose, brightened candies with the use of aniline colors (used in the manufacture of the precursors to polyurethane), and added terra cotta (a clay more often used to make bricks) for bulk and color.  In 1900, the Committee on Manufactures of the U.S. Senate found that condensed milk was among the most commonly adulterated products--except for perhaps extracts of fruit and vanilla, so suspect that only one manufacturer was even willing to allow a factory inspection.

Why I Teach Baseball History: A Brief, Self-Serving Manifesto

Chris Beneke

A detail of a print of Union prisoners in a
Confederate camp playing baseball, Salisbury,
N.C., 1863. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Very few people ask me why I teach baseball history. It’s obvious. I love baseball. Lots of students love baseball.

But let me offer another explanation, something out of left field: baseball history is also a really effective way of teaching American history.

Before you sport non-enthusiasts get too worked up, let me dispense with the usual caveats. College-level baseball history students shouldn’t memorize how many American League pennants the Yankees won during the 1950s (8) or the last time the Chicago Cubs were major league champions (1908). It’s unnecessary for them to recall that Ted Williams batted .406 in 1941 or that George Foster led the major leagues with 52 home runs in 1977. They could also receive a fine education in baseball history without knowing that Don Larson pitched the only perfect post-season game in 1956 or that Bob Gibson struck out 17 batters in the opening game of the 1968 World Series.

Teaching Emancipation

Aaron Astor

With the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and the ongoing popularity of the Lincoln movie, which focuses on passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives, it seems as relevant as ever to talk about how we teach emancipation to undergraduates today.  When I broach the subject in my 19th Century US History course I begin by asking the class a simple question:

Who freed the slaves?

The answers are predictable. First is usually “Lincoln.” And then “the Union Army,” followed by “Congress” and/or “the 13th Amendment.”  A particularly astute student will say, “the slaves freed themselves.” 

The answer, I quickly tell them, is that all of these things are true. But as quickly becomes apparent, I tend to emphasize the latter interpretation—self-emancipation—over the others.   After all, scholarship on emancipation in the last 30 years has focused more and more on the myriad ways in which slaves undermined the bonds of mastery, broke for Union lines at places like Fortress Monroe, attained contraband status in Union army camps, served in the Federal army as soldiers, and made a revolutionary bid for freedom and citizenship in a unique moment when the white power structure was rent by civil war.   I have contributed to that scholarly trend myself with my work on the border states of Kentucky and Missouri, where the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply, and slave agency—by male and female alike—proved especially critical in the emancipation process.

The Kansas Gold Rush

Dan Allosso

Map of Kansas and Nebraska Territories, 1854

Kansas! For most East and West-coasters, it’s one of those flyover states.  Even for Midwesterners like me, it’s most frequently remembered as a long flat stretch of driving, on the way to someplace else.  With apologies to Kansans, for many other Americans Kansas is either a band from the 70s (“Point of Know Return,” remember? “Dust in the Wind”?), the gray place Dorothy lived before being swept into Technicolor Oz, or the scene of an early, bloody civil war that helped push the nation over the brink between the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and statehood in 1861.

So I was surprised today, when I discovered in a January, 1859 Ranney Letter that “more than two hundred persons in this county” in southern Michigan were planning to go to Kansas in search of gold the following summer.  It hadn’t occurred to me–maybe because I’m familiar with the flat, drive-through Kansas you can see on current maps–that the Nebraska and Kansas Territories extended to the Rocky Mountains and contained quite a bit of what is now Colorado and Wyoming, as well as a big section of the northern foothills (including the Black Hills) that in 1861 would become the Dakota Territory.

The Last Confederate General to Lay Down His Arms

Heather Cox Richardson

It is a pet peeve of mine that most people think the Civil War ended at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General U. S. Grant.

It didn’t.

Brigadier General Stand Waite

General Lee surrendered only his own Army of Northern Virginia that day. There were still more than a hundred thousand Confederate soldiers in the field. True, everyone knew that Lee’s surrender marked the beginning of the end. But the last major Confederate army did not quit until May 26, when General Kirby Smith surrendered his Army of the Trans-Mississippi to Major General Edward Canby in Louisiana.

But here’s another little-known fact related to the end of the war that seems to me should be as widely known as the events at Appomattox: The last Confederate general in the field to surrender was Brigadier General Stand Watie, who did not lay down his weapons until June 23, 1865.

Why is this significant? Because Stand Watie was a member of the Cherokee Nation. He commanded the First Indian Brigade of the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi.

It’s a stretch to say that Indians were at the heart of the American Civil War, but it’s not at all a stretch to say that the West was. Eastern Americans from the North and the South fought to control the economic system the nation would impose on the West. Easterners had lived with slavery in their midst since the very beginnings of European settlement on the Atlantic coast; it was only when the slave system threatened to spread across the lands of the old Louisiana Purchase that the inhabitants of the two eastern regions came to blows.

Witness to Lincoln’s Assassination

Heather Cox Richardson 

What is there to say except, “Wow.”