Spotlight On: Missouri/Kansas Border War Network

A depiction of Order No. 11.

If you are interested in learning more about the Civil War in the West, there are some podcasts available on iTunes that may be of interest.  The Missouri-Kansas Border War Network is an organization that seeks to educate the public and preserve the history of the border region.  You can see their website for more details, but you’ll have to go to iTunes to download their podcasts.

These podcasts are short (~6-8 minute) interviews with historians and archaeologists who study this period.  The two described below are the only ones that I’ve listened to. Here are more details:

1.  Historian Donald Gilmore, in the interview titled “Order No. 11,” forwards his conclusion that Order No. 11 was not necessarily a reaction to Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863.  I would be interested to hear your take on the last part of the lecture where he talks about slaveholders and their right to keep slave property.

2.  Ann Raab, who is in the archaeology department at the University of Kansas, is interviewed in the podcast titled “Bates County, Missouri, Archaeology Dig.”  Recently Raab conducted an archaeological dig on a plantation in Bates County, Missouri.  Archaeology of the historic period (when written records have been preserved and can work in tandem with archaeological finds) is called “historic archaeology.”

Spotlight On: Civil War Preservation Trust

The Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT) is “America’s largest non-profit organization (501-C3) devoted to the preservation of our nation’s endangered Civil War battlefields. The Trust also promotes educational programs and heritage tourism initiatives to inform the public of the war’s history and the fundamental conflicts that sparked it” (from their “About Us” page).

There are many different resources on their site that help bring Civil War battles into the 21st century.  In additional to historical images and maps, several key battles have animated videos depicting troop movements (here is the one for the Battle of Fredericksburg).  The website provides statistics for each battle, including casualties, the names of commanding officers, etc.  There are also virtual tours of historic battlefields, photos of these sites as they appear today, bibliographies of recommended readings, information on historical markers, and the steps for becoming a member.  Of course, since their primary focus is on preservation, you can also find information on preservation attempts (from their online newsletter called “Dispatches from the Front“).

Spotlight On: Nineteenth Century Photography

If you are doing research in nineteenth-century photographs it can get quite complicated to keep track of the different processes for developing images.  Often images that are listed in archival catalogs online will include references to which process was used, but for a brief description of how that process worked, you will need a resource such as this explanation from the American Photography Museum, or the one I am handing out in class.  If you are really interested in the science behind development, there are also more specialized sites like this one for daguerreotypes.  Two of the images we are analyzing are stereographs, or 3-D images, viewable with a stereoscope (pictured left).

Also, for reference these are the links to the images we are analyzing in class of Union hospitals:

Harewood Hospital, Washington D.C. (1864) — http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003000981/PP/
Field Hospital at Savage Station, Virginia (1862) — http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/lifeandlimb/images/OB1206.jpg
Armory Square Hospital, Washington D. C. — http://teaching.msa.maryland.gov/000001/000000/000158/images/05-0431a.gif 
Winslow Homer, “Our Women in the War” (1864) — http://civilwarinart.org/items/show/98
Winslow Homer, “The Surgeon at Work at the Rear during an Engagement” –
– http://civilwarinart.org/items/show/99
Wounded Union Soldiers from Battle of the Wilderness at Fredericksburg, Virginia (1864) — http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/ww0025s.jpg
U.S. Sanitary Commission at Gettysburg (1863) — http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/ppmsca/33700/33752v.jpg
Hospital Tent at Gettysburg (1863) –
– https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/lifeandlimb/images/OB1210.jpg
Unknown Artist, “The United States General Hospital” (1861) –
– http://civilwarinart.org/items/show/26

Spotlight On: Library Primary Source Databases

If you are interested in learning more about the Civil War, or even doing a thesis project, there are a number of database resources available to UCA students through the library portal (requiring that you sign in with your username and password), providing unique primary sources not available elsewhere on the web.  I’ve listed below the resources most pertinent to our course:

• The American Civil War Online: This is “a diverse collection of searchable databases designed to promote the creative study of all aspects of the Civil War. Equally useful for teaching and research, the resource offers a range of contemporary perspectives on the war and American society. In addition to letters, diaries, posters, photographs, and cartoons, The American Civil War Online includes a wealth of compiled data on soldiers, regiments, and battles.”  It includes databases like “American Civil War: Letters and Diaries,” “The American Civil War Research Database,” and “Images of the Civil War.”
• The New York Times, 1851-2009: This was a leading newspaper in the nineteenth century that ran many articles relevant to the Civil War and sectional crisis.
• Arkansas Newspapers (Historical): This is for on-campus access only.
• American Periodicals Series Online: Periodicals are a general term for magazines and newspapers, and this site includes such publications as William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator.
• North American Women’s Letters and Diaries: This includes thousands of primary sources, including some from the Civil War era.

Spotlight On: Slaves as Commodities

I will periodically post “spotlights” on the website, where I hone in on a historian, a topic we’ve covered in class, or some other subject in more detail.

Several students today brought up the fact that Berlin’s Generations of Captivity could have addressed economics more directly (and more thoroughly). I have two resources I want to provide to address some of those questions. The first is a brief explanation of the “chattel principle,” which deals with the philosophical aspects of the slave trade and ownership of other human beings. The second is some information on the monetary values of enslaved people.

1. One of the cruelest aspects of slavery was the insistence that slaves were commodities, in what Walter Johnson has referred to as “the chattel principle”: the belief that a human being could, because of their legal identity, be evaluated according to the same terms as one would evaluate livestock.[1] Slaves had a simultaneously dual nature as human and as property. This duality opened up opportunities for slave agency and resistance (when owners were forced to recognize the humanity of bondspeople), but it also reinforced white authority by tying economic success and personal wealth to the ownership of human beings (demonstrating the property side of the equation). Slaves’ refusal to act as mere commodities–to assert their own will and test limits–illuminate the elements of negotiation at play. As Johnson has argued, “the contradiction was this: the abstract value that underwrote the southern economy could only be made material in human shape–frail, sentient, and resistant.”[2]

2. The question of slave prices is a complicated one; an enslaved person’s monetary worth was determined by his or her fitness for work, skill set, age, and sex, as well as fluctuations in the local and national economies.This website (by historians who are also trained in statistics), has a useful table at the very bottom that shows prices in what Berlin would call the plantation and revolutionary generations in the Lower South. Slave prices rose as the nineteenth century progressed, so a healthy man in his 20s, living in the 1850s, might be valued at as much as $1,000. This article is a little dated, and it focuses on the Deep South and not the Upper South, but Table 8 on p. 199 shows the prices in four different locations over several decades. If you want a sophisticated economic analysis, I highly recommend a short book chapter by Daina Ramey Berry that analyzes prices in one Georgia county–her work is really great for micro-level analysis.[3]

[1] Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 17, 19.

[2] Johnson, 29.

[3] Daina Ramey Berry, “‘We’m Fus’ Rate Bargain’: Value, Labor, and Price in a Georgia Slave Community,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 55-71. I can scan this for anyone who is interested.