The tunnel that Union soldiers dug to blow a crater under Confederate defenses at Petersburg, Va., is not usually juxtaposed with, say, the Great Wall of China.
But the Battle of the Crater makes the cut in the new PBS series “Ground War,” thanks to a professor who examines the Civil War from the perspective of a physicist.
Charles Ross, dean of Longwood University’s College of Arts and Sciences, had been a Civil War buff as a boy and found his interest renewed when he came to Longwood as a physics professor in 1992.
He began looking at ingenious uses of technology in the Civil War, he said, and “seeing things with a different eye than I did as a kid.”
Our entry on the Civil War battle explains why Ross might be interested in the science of that tunnel:
Lieutenant Colonel Henry C. Pleasants of the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry, in Burnside’s corps, commanded a regiment of anthracite miners from Schuylkill County. One of his men looked out at the Confederate position from his trench and declared, “We could blow that damned fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it.” The army’s professional engineers thought this to be “claptrap and nonsense,” largely because the tunnel would need to be longer than four hundred feet, a distance that would preclude proper ventilation. As such, they refused to lend any assistance or expertise to the project. Pleasants got the go-ahead anyway, and on June 25 his men started digging, using improvised tools.
I received an anonymous comment last night related to our Henry “Box” Brown entry:
The date Henry Brown entered his box was March 29th, not March 23rd as written on this web page.
While one might believe with all credibility that the 29th is the correct date (after all Brown writes in his own narrative that he was shipped on 29 March, 1849 and thus this misstatement is picked up in other discussions and iterations including academic articles), evidence from primary documents contemporary to the escape actually supports the 23rd. In his study, The Unboxing of Henry Brown (pp. 27-38), Jeffrey Ruggles makes a well-documented case for the 23rd as the date that Samuel A. Smith of Richmond shipped Brown to James Miller McKim of Philadelphia. Based on the two men’s correspondence preserved in the McKim papers at Cornell University Library the date becomes clear particularly since McKim wrote letters on March 26 and March 28, 1849 that described the escape–which could not have been described had the escape taken place in the future (i.e. the 29th).
So, why does this matter? Well, getting this fact right won’t rid the world of hunger and it won’t dissipate the volcanic ash cloud over Europe, that is certain; however, as we have said elsewhere in this blog, “Why else have an encyclopedia if not to [try our best to] insure the correct facts?”
In the wake of Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s declaration of Confederate History Month and all the resulting hoopla, Ta-Nehisi Coates considers the memory of Robert E. Lee. In so doing, he quotes a lecture by Elizabeth Brown Pryor that aired on C-SPAN:
It’s wrong to turn [Lee] into this unreal person. And I’ll tell you what I would propose. I think those people who admire him, and I put myself among them, the greatest thing you can do to honor him is love him for who he was. Because if you make him up, if you say he was all these things, you know he never drank a drop of whiskey, he never lost a battle he just ran out of ammunition, he was an abolitionist and so on, then you’re insulting him. You’re saying he wasn’t enough. You’re saying who he was wasn’t enough. And I think who he was is enough. I think he was a very fine man, in many ways, and with some warts, like we all have. But I think the greatest respect you can show him is to admire him for who he really was.
Willa Cather‘s birthplace, a tw0-story log house on Back Creek near Winchester, is for sale.
In 1950, Charles Brill’s parents bought the house, and he spent most of his life on the property. Now Brill is looking for a buyer who can maintain the house—perhaps even a member of Cather’s family.
Brill is committed to selling the home to “someone who is committed to preservation and not tearing it down,” he says. “The land itself has some value, but I would not want to see the old place torn down,” he says. The property was placed on the Virginia Landmarks Register in 1976 and the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
About three years ago, Linda Cather and several other local descendents approached Brill, he says, “to sell it to them for the purpose of preservation.” Therefore, he hasn’t put the house on the real estate market. “They [Cather's descendants] are the only ones I’ve spoken to seriously about selling. Nothing definite has been settled. If anyone appeared with a better offer, I would be agreeable,” Brill says.
Cold War Crisis: The U-2 Incident / January 16–May 30, 2010
On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over the Soviet Union by a surface-to-air missile. Francis Gary Powers—a civilian pilot flying for the Central Intelligence Agency—was unable to activate the self-destruct mechanism and the plane crashed largely intact. News of the event caused Premier Khrushchev to storm out of a summit conference in Paris with President Eisenhower. Because the U-2 was specifically designed for covert surveillance, Powers, a native Virginian, was tried and convicted as a spy and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. In 1962 he was exchanged in Germany for a Soviet agent.
“Head of a Girl, 1905.” Hampton, Virginia. “Girl at elementary school affiliated with the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute.” Gum bichromate print by pioneering fine-art photographer Fred Holland Day (1864-1933), whose work we’ll be seeing more of every Sunday for the next few months.
Mark Linkous, whose nom de music, as it were, was Sparklehorse, died over the weekend. The Arlington native is remembered in the New York Times:
But disillusioned with the music business, Mr. Linkous returned to Virginia and reinvented his sound as Sparklehorse, a name that he applied to himself as well as his band.
“We were trying so hard to get signed, and I just quit and came back home and just gave up on all those aspirations of being a rock star,” he said in an interview in 1999. “That’s when I started making good music.”
Although Sparklehorse’s music never had wide commercial success, it found respect among critics and other musicians. Rolling Stone called its 1999 album, “Good Morning Spider,” a “homemade tour de force of psychedelic Appalachian folk slop,” and the third Sparklehorse record, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” released in 2001, had guest appearances by Tom Waits and PJ Harvey.
Frances Osborn Robb, a scholar who has worked on the Encyclopedia of Alabama, writes in to correct some information we included with an image of Confederate president Jefferson Davis‘s inauguration.
I read the short information on the color lithograph of Davis’s inauguration. I presently have a book manuscript under review by the University of Alabama Press on the history of photography in Alabama, and I would like to correct the authorship of the original image.
The lithograph is based on a painting by James Massalon made for William C. Howell of Prattville, Alabama. The photographer is not credited, but he was Archibald Crossland McIntyre of Montgomery, who advertised his view and three others on Feb. 19, the day after the event in the Montgomery Messenger. The best surviving print of his photograph is in the Boston Athenaeum. Another is in a family collection in New Hampshire. A copy of the photograph, now in the Alabama Department of Archives and History, was deposited there by the photographer’s niece Toccoa Cozart. McIntyre was not credited with the authorship of this image until 1912, when Dudley H. Miles published the earliest known half-tone of the photograph in the Illustrated History of the Civil War, crediting McIntyre with the original.
Best of luck with the Encyclopedia of Virginia. My husband and I have written several articles for our new Encyclopedia of Alabama, and it seems to be a hit!
Thanks for the information, Frances. Above is the lithograph, with one of the original photographs (courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Alabama) inset.
Just for fun: Go to the New York Times online and punch “George Pickett” into the search engine there. What you’ll find is Encyclopedia Virginia‘s entry on the famous Confederate general. The Times has begun to syndicate our content, beginning with Pickett, in their Times Topic series. The goal for the Timesis to have such articles provide background knowledge and context for links to archived Times articles. The benefit to EV is having the Times imprimatur on content that we already knew was scholarly but accessible and just generally top-notch. Here’s an example of an article that covers the entire Civil War. Or here is William McKinley, an article written by folks at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, after watching one of David Blight’s free online seminars on slavery and the Civil War, wonders about the economics of bondage. In particular, he asks his readers to explain why Southerners believed, before the war, that slavery would die if it weren’t allowed to expand into new U.S. territories.
My basic read is that it’s a supply and demand problem. If slavery can’t expand, and slaves keep reproducing (as they were in the South) you’ll end up with a glut of slaves in a small area, thus causing the price of slaves to fall. I have two questions. 1.) Does my read sound right? 2.) Why would the falling price of slaves be bad for the South? Wouldn’t that be good, in that it would require even less investment in labor?
For a fascinating lesson in economics and history, read through the comments. Here are some highlights:
He must be talking about the price to slaveowners of keeping slaves. If you have a finite plantation that can only grow X plants, then you only need Y able-bodied slaves at any given time. If your slaves keep reproducing and do so at a faster rate than they die, and you can’t sell them to other plantations because they’re no longer needed, then you could definitely reach the point where you were losing money on your farm . . .
. . . When local markets collapsed, slave owners lost wealth and the ability to access capital (by selling a few slaves). Slaves had to be kept at a slight supply shortage to retain value . . .
. . . Is the basic idea that you need to be able to sell slaves to generate cash if, say, you have a bad crop one year? And if slaves are cheap, you can’t really do that? It almost sounds like they were labor and insurance . . .
. . . To some extent, that’s right. Slaves were both labor and capital. That makes modeling the economics extremely difficult.
But the idea is that you spent $x for a slave, but if the resale value was $(x-n), then you lost money on your investment unless the added value of their labor was greater than $n. If the resale value dropped further, faster, then it was impossible to recoup the lost value through labor . . .
. . . A lot of plantations actually made more money selling slaves than they did selling the crops they produced, particularly in the old Confederacy (Virginia and the Carolinas) that were not particularly suited to growing cotton. (Wise old Ben Franklin even suspected that Jefferson’s opposition to the trans-Atlantic slave trade was motivated by a desire to increase the value of the slaves that were already here, thereby enhancing the wealth of the slaveowners). So it was very important to maintain a growing demand for slaves in order to keep their value up . . .
IMAGE:Slaves Waiting for Sale; Richmond, Virginia, 1861 by the English artist Eyre Crowe. Published in Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Menil Foundation, Harvard University Press, 1989), vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 205, fig. 127; original painting is held privately. Reprinted courtesy of www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.
