The contradictions in notions of liberty could not be more graphically presented. The intention is not to turn a great man into a villain but rather to examine just how those contradictions expressed themselves. Jefferson called slavery an “abominable crime,” we are told, but also felt unable to extricate himself from what he called its “deplorable entanglement.”
Far from turning Jefferson into a villain, the exhibit suggests that Jefferson did what he could to promote family among his enslaved laborers. Even though marriage was technically illegal, among his slaves “enduring unions were the norm.” If there was cruelty, it was the “overseers who overstepped,” not Jefferson. And there’s even the argument that Jefferson may be to thank for the admirable qualities of his slaves’ descendants. An oral history project begun in 1993 found that many of them became community leaders.
This suggests that there was something distinctive about this community, but also that Jefferson’s own ideals must have had an impact, surviving even the debilitating and humiliating institution of slavery.
There is room, I think, for pushback on these claims. Were the overseers really the only source of cruelty at Monticello? Did Jefferson really find it impossible to free his slaves? Were all the slaves at Monticello treated as well as those who were, quite literally, his family (e.g., the Hemingses)? See this lecture by the historian Henry Wiencek, who has a book on this very subject due later in the year.
Wherever you stand, all of this makes for a fascinating discussion, and Monticello is to be congratulated for initiating it.
Yesterday the encyclopedia staff road-tripped it to Richmond, where we gathered with our friends at the Library of Virginia to inaugurate a new era for Encyclopedia Virginia and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. We are now officially partners with the Library in this ambitious encyclopedia project of ours and, in particular, have become the digital publisher of the Library’s ongoing, multi-volume Dictionary of Virginia Biography, one of the most authoritative resources on Virginia history ever published.
Lyon Gardiner Tyler may have anticipated this partnership when he published, in 1915, his now-out-of-date Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography. And I realize this is a shameless digression, but did you know that Tyler was the son of the Virginia-born United States president John Tyler (1790–1862), and that the elder Tyler fathered the younger Tyler when he was 63, and that the younger Tyler fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. when he was 71 and then fathered Harrison Ruffin Tyler four years later when he was 75?! Both men are still alive today—which means that President Tyler’s grandsons are still living. Go figure.
Anyway. You may have noticed that the Library of Virginia’s logo has now been added to our home page. You also may have noticed that the Daniel Bryan entry we linked to yesterday was the product of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, as was the excellent Fields Cook entry mentioned here and the Anthony Burns entry mentioned here. We’re thrilled to feature their content and to call the Library of Virginia and the DVB partners.
The upshot? Encyclopedia Virginia + Dictionary of Virginia Biography = Better and More Accessible Virginia History Than Ever!
IMAGE:Front:Rob Vaughan, president, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities; Sandra G. Treadway, Librarian of Virginia; Back:Matthew Gibson, Managing Editor, Encyclopedia Virginia; Peter Hedlund, Programmer, EV; Caitlin Newman, Assistant Editor, EV; Brendan Wolfe, Associate Editor, EV; Greg Kimball, Director of Publications and Educational Services, Library of Virginia; Donna Lucey, Media Editor, EV
On this day 150 years ago, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln issued the remarkable General War Order No. 1, which called for a coordinated land and naval attack on Confederate forces no later than by February 22. A supplemental order designated Joseph E. Johnston‘s forces at Manassas as the target. Why was this remarkable? Because Lincoln, although commander-in-chief, had little or no military experience and yet found himself dictating strategy to his West Point–certified generals. (This is the sort of thing we still argue about, by the way. The current front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination believes that President Obama should do more to “follow the recommendation of the generals.”)
So how did it all turn out for Lincoln? Long story short, Johnston retreated, and Union general George B. McClellan—whom Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton had accused of enjoying “champagne and oysters on the Potomac”*—eventually sailed his army down the Chesapeake and marched it up the Virginia Peninsula, attacking Johnston but from the opposite direction as Lincoln originally intended. The point of the order, though, was to get McClellan moving, and in that regard it worked.
If you’re interested, you can actually find the text of Lincoln’s order in this monograph copy of The Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln (vol. 7, part 1, 1905; Nicolay and Hay, eds.):
What’s more interesting, perhaps, than the order itself, is the interpretation provided by the editors (one of whom, John Hay, was Lincoln’s secretary). Footnote 1, there at the bottom of page 89, reads as follows:
This is the first instance of Lincoln using his power as commander-in-chief of the army. Up to now he had been diffident about exercising such authority, but finding those who were supposed military experts, accomplishing nothing, he, himself, studied the war situation night and day, read a number of strategical works, pored over reports and held long conferences with eminent officers. His taking hold of the army infused new hope throughout the North.
The historian Ethan S. Rafuse—an eight-time EV contributor—points out that when Lincoln issued his order, McClellan had been quite ill, and that the president was, for better or for worse, attempting to fill the leadership void. Problem was, once he got back on his feet, McClellan found that the president wasn’t quite willing to step off.
Our entry on McClellan complicates the situation a bit more by suggesting that Lincoln was acting under intense pressure from the newly formed Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. The secretary of war, meanwhile, was a Republican and in league with the Democrat McClellan’s enemies in Congress. So politics, not simply strategy, was at work here, and anyway when Lincoln did finally force McClellan to give up his oysters, the details of his orders still managed to provoke endless testimony before that same Joint Committee.
The whole deal was not pretty, in other words, and probably didn’t “infuse new hope throughout the North.” But it does lead to a number of interesting questions:
Was Lincoln right to get so heavily involved in his general’s business? Was he even a good military commander? Drew Gilpin Faust, in a review of James M. McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief (2008), suggests that Lincoln was legitimately hamstrung by slow-moving generals like McClellan, while another review concludes that “Lincoln was a more sophisticated military strategist than his professional generals.”
While some folks—and I believe this blogger in particular—want to push back on that notion, most accept the premise of this New York Times contributor, who asks: “How did Lincoln, a lawyer by training with no military background to speak of—get the nature of the conflict so right, and his seasoned generals get it so wrong?”
On this day in 1820, a poet and first-time politician named Daniel Bryan cast the only vote against the Senate of Virginia’s bill of support for the Missouri Compromise. He then did something even more remarkable for a Virginian of his day: he delivered a long and impassioned speech against slavery. Here’s a description from the historian Eva Sheppard Wolf:
A lone antislavery voice stood against the majority in the Virginia Senate and refused to endorse the Virginia resolution on the Missouri question. Presaging Virginia’s own sectional strife, it was a westerner, state senator Daniel Bryan, of the Valley county of Rockingham, who ignored the constitutional arguments and attacked slavery on the basis of the American “political creed.” Bryan reverted to the rhetoric of an earlier era. He quoted the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed that the “law of nature gives no right to one man to sell another.” If the Constitution admitted slavery, it was only because the task of trying to forge a union in the wake of a destructive war had created an “unconquerable necessity … [that] compelled the Convention of 1787 to incorporate with the constitution those articles which pertain to slavery.” Bryan ended with a flourish, trying to sway his fellow Virginians by reminding them of their Revolutionary heritage. If Virginia were to endorse the extension of human bondage, “then let her drag from this magnificent dome—and conceal in its darkest vault—secure from contempt and mockery—the forgotten statue of her Washington! and then let her pile the vacant enclosure with manacles, scourges, and all implements of torture—the appropriate badges of slavery!”
Bryan’s speech was courageous by any standard, and it was reprinted in full over two issues of the Richmond Enquirer. As Wolf writes, however, “Virginians seem to have ignored Bryan’s remarks and offered no rejoinder.”
To read the speech yourself, download the Enquirer from February 15, 1820 [pdf] and from February 17 [pdf]. In both issues, the speech can be found on page 4.
PS: For no good reason, I suppose, I’m reminded of this classic moment from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), when the Messiah, played by the late Graham Chapman, is trying to convince his followers that they are all individuals. (Senator Bryan—the poet, of course—must be the lone dissenter.)
IMAGE:Slave Auction, Virginia by Lefevre J. Cranstone (Virginia Historical Society)
On this day in 1554, Sir Thomas Wyatt led a revolt to protest Queen Mary’s intended marriage to Philip II of Spain (ewwww, a Catholic) and, while he was at it, to put Princess Elizabeth on the throne. Elizabeth denied knowledge of Wyatt’s plans, but the queen ordered her to the Tower of London anyway.
I really love the old Masterpiece Theatre miniseries Elizabeth R (1971), and in the clip above, the princess—played to perfection by Glenda Jackson—faints when she learns her fate; then, upon seeing the spiked heads at the Tower entrance, she loses her cookies.
Elizabeth was freed after three months, but according to the biographer Alison Weir, she thought this “the most traumatic event of her youth; in a speech to Parliament, she recalled, ‘I stood in danger of my life; my sister was so incensed against me.’ She never ceased to render thanks to God for her deliverance, and often spoke of it as a miracle.”
Getting back to Elizabeth R, though: the real miracle is Glenda Jackson. True fact: Jackson later won two Academy Awards and served in Parliament. Another true fact: you can purchase on Amazon.com a jigsaw-puzzle image of her getting the front of her head shaved for the part of Elizabeth. Which reminds me of this famous scene from Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth (1998), in which Elizabeth gives up her attempts to marry and, by cutting off all her hair, transforms into the white-faced Virgin Queen:
In reality, she never shaved or even cut her hair short. Later in her life, when someone entered her chambers not knowing she was still in bed recorded the queen’s hair as having been “all about her ears”. In the movie, she is shown wearing a wig in the end, and though the real Elizabeth did wear one later in life, it was worn to hide the thin, sparse hair that was the result of her bout with smallpox.
“The more hairy she is before,” observed one catty Englishman to another, “the more bald she is behind.”
On this day in 1814, Francis Harrison Pierpont was born in what is now West Virginia. Fittingly, he helped to found the state. Eleven years later, George Edward Pickett came into the world already wearing a tailored Confederate uniform, gold spurs, and shoulder-length brown hair. Did he also yell “Charge!”? Probably not.*
On this day in 1863, about a month after the complete debacle that was the Battle of Fredericksburg, Abraham Lincoln decided to replace Ambrose E. Burnside with Joseph Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac. This came a few weeks after two Union generals—John Cochrane and the Virginia-born John Newton—broke protocol and went to Lincoln to (secretly) complain about Burnside. And it came twenty-four hours after Burnside himself met with Lincoln brandishing his yet-unreleased General Orders No. 8, which called for the dismissal of Newton, Cochrane, and Hooker to boot.
Oh the drama.
Anyway, the upshot was the Battle of Chancellorsville, which left Lincoln Hooker-less and back to square one.
* Lame. I know.
IMAGE: Colonel Ambrose Burnside and eight of his officers, 1861 (Library of Congress)
“Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government … No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.” – Tennessee Tea Party activists in a petition before the state legislature
“History is identity. When we erase the painful portions, we lose texture, color and we are reduced. Patriotism, in my eyes, has always been about the strength of seeing those rough spots, of considering your home at its worse, and remaining enthralled, nonetheless. That is how we love our daughters, our husbands, our mothers. That is how we make family.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates
On this day in 1661, the York County Court was gaveled into session, and with all appropriate fuss the presiding judge demanded the immediate arrest of one William Clutton, servant: “It evidently appearing that ye said Clutton hath at several times & places uttered & spoken mutinous & seditious words tending to ye tumultuous and dangerous behaviour of severall servants in Yorke parish.”
The court also ordered the overseer John Parkes to “take speciall care, & have strict, dilligent eye uppon Isaack friend his servant, who appeares of a turbulent & unquiett spiritt.”
Mutiny. Sedition. Tumult. Danger. Turbulence. And unquiet spirits. So what on earth happened?
Well, a few weeks before, on January 6, a servant called Thomas Collins testified that Friend was the sort to complain of “hard usage,” this being a euphemism for the fact that the servants were fed nothing but corn and water with no meat. When the idea of a petition to the king was shot down (who was going to deliver it?),
Issack said that they would get a matter of fforty of them together, & get Armes & he would be the first & have them cry as they went along, ‘who would be for Liberty, and free from bondage,’ & that there would enough come to them & they would goe through the Countrey and kill those that made any opposition, & that they would either be free or dye for it …
Ahh. Mutiny, sedition, tumult, danger, turbulence: check, check, check, check, and check. But who was this fellow Clutton?
According to another witness who also testified on January 6, Clutton, like Friend, was a complainer, always wanting meat, bread, cheese, and “as many cowes for milke as hee himselfe thought good.” Which, according to the overseer John Parkes, set the other servants “to further discontent & murmuring,” the said servants having been “very well sattisfyed till William Clutton came.”
An earlier post responded to some of the most interesting comments on the Washington Post regarding my critique of Virginia’s new fourth-grade history textbook. Again: short version of the argument is that facts are important. But the narrative you construct out of those facts still has to make sense, and in this case it doesn’t.
There was one comment that required a bit more space for my response:
psikeyhackr: Well if we are going to deal with history shouldn’t we try to distinguish between important facts and unimportant facts? Things like who won which battle and when and where the battle occurred are regarded as important. But isn’t the manpower and motivation of the fighters important also?
For instance, what percentage of the White men who fought for the Confederacy did not own slaves? When is that ever mentioned? Suppose 75% of them did not. Then what were they fighting for? To serve the economic interests of people richer than they were? If even half of the non-slave owning White men had refused to fight then how would that have affected the war? Is history having the right facts swept under the rug?
I love this comment because it gets right at the heart of what I’m talking about. Let me be clear, though: these kinds of questions are best suited for students older than fourth grade. But that doesn’t mean that other questions aren’t suited for fourth-graders!
Anyway. What makes some facts important and other facts unimportant? As the commenter tells us, it has to do with what you want to learn. And psikeyhackr wants to learn about the motivations of Confederate soldiers. Fine. So s/he asserts a hypothetical fact (75 percent of Confederate soldiers did not own slaves) and then immediately assumes what that fact means: that these soldiers must have served the economic interests of people richer than they. Psikeyhackr then makes the implicit assumption that had they understood their interests, these soldiers might have refused to fight. Finally, the commenter tells us there are “right facts” and that these are being “swept under the rug.”
What I like about this comment is that it demonstrates how little can be done with facts alone. Here, the fact that 75 percent of Confederate soldiers may not have owned slaves tells us little on its own. What gives that statistic meaning is what we do with it, and the commenter does a lot! Of course, not all historians agree with what the commenter has done with that fact, and that’s an important point, too. History is not what’s true, but what we argue is true.
It’s worth saying that psikeyhackr does not actually make an argument here, so much as follow a fact with a number of assertions of what that fact means. That being said, there are other arguments to be made.
Slightly more than one in eight soldiers [in the Army of Northern Virginia] owned slaves, but 37.2 percent either owned slaves or their parents and family with whom they resided did. Four in nine (44.4 percent) lived in slaveholding households, demonstrating a strong connection to the institution of slavery. As a result, these soldiers had an investment in slavery that influenced their decision to fight. An Irish-born private in the 12th Georgia Infantry joked, “A short time ago he bought a negro, he says, to have something to fight for.”
Glatthaar’s argument reminds us, I think, that we should be careful not to assume that we, in 2012, know what a soldier’s motivations must have been, or that we, in 2012, can be sure we know what a soldier’s best interests were better than the soldierdoes. If an entire society was propped up by slavery—as was the South’s—then fighting was perhaps in the interests of more people than simply slave owners. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, too, because we shouldn’t confuse what caused the war (most historians believe it was slavery) with why soldiers fought.
Most important, from the perspective of correcting old and inaccurate assumptions, the Civil War in Virginia was a rich man’s fight. Several recent studies have used quantitative evidence to demonstrate that wealthy men were overrepresented in the armed forces. Contrary to the notion that poor men did all the fighting, both aggregate data and individual sampling reveal that wealthy counties sent more men than poor counties did and that wealthy individuals were found at all levels of the service in greater proportion than within the population.
These same studies have also revealed that slave owners were also overrepresented in the armies. While one school of thought argues that slaveholders used their positions and wealth to avoid service, the evidence from Virginia shows that these men conceptualized the war as a threat to their property and future security and acted to protect both. The necessity of protecting slavery apparently extended beyond even the slaveholders themselves. When considering aggregate enlistment figures for Virginia, the best predictor of whether a county would enlist a high proportion of its men was not slaveholding itself, but the percent of the population enslaved. The more people held as slaves, the higher the enlistment figures. Counties in which more than 50 percent of the population was enslaved had very high enlistment rates, most well over 75 percent.
These kinds of facts, and the arguments that stem from them, complicate psikeyhackr’s original assumptions about the interests and motivations of Confederate soldiers. There are no right facts here, or wrong facts. There are only fair and reasonable arguments. Glatthaar and Sheehan-Dean, as professional historians, make them a bit more thoroughly than psikeyhackr, and with different conclusions, but over time even the professionals’ arguments may be revised or rejected. And the point will still stand: History is not what’s true, but what we argue is true.
IMAGES: Pages 122–123 of Our Virginia: Past and Present (Five Ponds Press); these are the pages (now revised) that started the whole kerfuffle; Gettysburg: Three Confederate Prisoners (Library of Congress)
Last week, Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss reprinted my blog post on the new edition of Virginia’s fourth-grade history textbook. My argument is that even though the new edition has its facts largely in order, that’s not enough. The narrative you construct out of those facts still has to make sense, and in this case, it doesn’t.
There has been no stampede to comment here on the Encyclopedia Virginia blog, but the Post‘s readers had some interesting things to say. I’ll reprint some of their thoughts here with my own responses where appropriate.
AyahDawood: When are they going to deal with the rest of the textbooks in America? Historians write textbooks, and I dare say that nobody is objective. To become an elementary school teacher in Virginia, you must have taken a Virginia History course, and there is absolutely no relevant material in the course for the purpose of teaching because we are not allowed to tell the truth of what we learn to 4th graders for the purposes of being “politically correct.” I think the real problem is that teachers are required to teach complete sugar-coated misconceptions and are not allowed to touch different viewpoints which allow kids to examine theories and form an educated opinion.
It’s probably true that “nobody is objective,” but I think that’s okay so long as the point of a textbook isn’t to “tell the truth” but to teach students—yes, even fourth-graders—how to think about history. I think this reader is exactly right in saying that teachers should be “allowed to touch different viewpoints” and students should be allowed “to examine theories and form an educated opinion.” And in order to do that, you have to assume that there are different ways of looking at things, right?
I don’t mean to argue that facts aren’t important, but facts by themselves—absent any larger understanding of what they mean—are like empty calories. We need something more. So teachers need to help students understand how facts fit together and, most importantly, that not everyone puts them together the same way.
sideswiththekids: The author of the manuscript—the historian, if there was one—may very well have given a fuller explanation of all these points. By the time a textbook is printed, it has been through several editors and design artists, and a lot of the original manuscript is reworded because to fit the supposed vocabulary level of the childen (after all, we can’t expect them to learn new words) or to fit on the page. While working as a textbook proofreader, I saw many instances of paragraphs being arbitrarily shortened or even dropped entirely to make room for a particular design element, such as a chapter heading of a certain size. (And I once insisted that someone reword a sentence that “pioneer women were usually confined to camp, cooking or tending the sick.” After the editor and I stopped laughing, we changed it to read “tending the sick or cooking.”)
I think that much of what this reader says is true: editors edit, and authors try to figure out what language is appropriate for fourth-graders, and design people fight to make space for their graphics, etc. But as a critic, my job is to look at what’s there now, not what might have been there in an earlier draft. And I want to emphasize that none of the suggestions I made are precluded by a fourth-grade vocabulary. Anyway, the same reader continues:
It’s especially interesting that the author’s father, a middle school history teacher says, “it’s an enormously difficult subject to teach, perhaps the hardest,” since in many schools a teacher below the high school level is not required to have studied the subject, and even many high schools assign the social studies classes to teachers who consider their main job to be coaching. (After subbing in several different schools, I have noticed that you can usually identify the social studies’ teachers’ rooms. While the Spanish teacher has pictures of Spain or Latin America on the walls, the chemistry teacher has the periodic table, and the English teacher has quote from authors, the history teacher all too often has pictures of athletes on the wall and several trophies on his desk.)
I can’t speak to this particularly, except to say that I agree with my dad. If history were so easy to teach, would we even be having this conversation? If schools don’t recognize that, they should.
pattipeg1: Sadly, we teachers are usually expected to teach the textbook, and some teachers aren’t aware of the intricacies of history (blame their college professors for this). It’s also unfortunate that curriculum standards require that students be exposed to a lot of facts/information, rather than having an opportunity to explore a few particular areas in depth. The teacher who stops to explore a subject, such as the author has done, risks being unable to complete the prescribed curriculum, and may doom his/her students to failure on standardized tests. By demanding so much more, we are providing so much less to our students–more facts, more standardization, less critical thinking and analysis. But this is what the public demands, so we give it to them.
With this reader, I bemoan the emphasis on “more facts, more standardization, less critical thinking and analysis.” But my critique of the textbook was not intended to be a call for teachers to drop everything they’re doing (which is plenty!) and “explore a subject” in greater depth than what their curriculum prescribes. I understand the need to “teach the textbook.” But that’s exactly why I want a better textbook! To understand Jamestown in the way that I have suggested does not require more space and time; it requires that the book’s space be used in smarter ways.
alice-belle: Textbooks have gone downhill since christians have made it their business to control textbook content to present their version of history. Scholarship has been under assault for decades and the future looks bleak.
Just for the record, I’m Christian.
zsisyphusrocks: I agree with the father’s comment about students not know what is going on in their subjects. A fourth-grader is really not going to try very hard to understand any more than what is required to do whatever kind of assessment the teacher is using for the class. He or she is not going to notice inconsistencies in the book, unless he or she is a genius. Rather, the average fourth grader or even high school student is more likely to be skimming the text so they can get to their video games faster.
Of course, I agree that textbooks should be historically factual. But as a teacher, I agree with the father’s assessment of what it’s realistic for students to absorb.
My father should speak for himself, of course, but I don’t think he was saying it was unrealistic for fourth-graders (actually, in his case, middle-schoolers) to absorb the material. I think he was simply saying that it’s an enormous task for a teacher to get students to think in sophisticated ways about history when they are a blank slate, historically speaking. Imagine trying to teach algebra to students who don’t know yet how to add, subtract, or multiply! We take for granted that in math we are always building on certain basic skills. So why not do that in history? If we teach students how to think about history—that it is more than facts but a struggle to judge which facts are reliable and then a struggle to arrange those facts in a meaningful way—then it will matter less that they have no background in, say, the Civil War.
Am I being naive? I admit that possibility.
sideswiththekids: And if a student notices an inconsistency, what then? I frequently spotted factual errors–incontrovertibly wrong names or dates or misspellings–in my elementary textbooks, and was told to ignore them or use the material in the text even though it was wrong.
psikeyhackr: Well if we are going to deal with history shouldn’t we try to distinguish between important facts and unimportant facts? Things like who won which battle and when and where the battle occurred are regarded as important. But isn’t the manpower and motivation of the fighters important also?
For instance, what percentage of the White men who fought for the Confederacy did not own slaves? When is that ever mentioned? Suppose 75% of them did not. Then what were they fighting for? To serve the economic interests of people richer than they were? If even half of the non-slave owning White men had refused to fight then how would that have affected the war? Is history having the right facts swept under the rug?
I love this comment by psikeyhackr because it gets right at the heart of what I’m talking about. Let me be clear, though: these kinds of questions are best suited for students older than fourth grade—but that doesn’t mean that fourth-graders aren’t suited for other questions. Anyway, what makes some facts important and other facts unimportant? As the commenter tells us, it has to do with what you want to learn. And this commenter wants to learn about the motivations of Confederate soldiers. I have a lot more to say about this in a separate post. For now, suffice to say that what this commenter is doing is spinning an argument from a single fact. I don’t happen to agree with that argument, but this is what history should be: not a series of facts, but building blocks out of which narratives and arguments like this are made.
shred11: Well, I think the Injuns WERE good people, n’ the whites WERE bad people. Kinda like Repubs are bad people n’ demos are good people today. See?
It’s hard to know for sure where this commenter is coming from, so let me just say this: my point is not that a textbook mixes up who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. It is simply that history is rarely that clear cut, and that whenever you are making that judgment—that some people were good and some were bad—you are making an argument. You are not citing facts, but telling me what those facts mean.
When adults, students, and yes, even fourth-graders, are unable to understand this, then they are unable to speak intelligently about history.
IMAGES: Pages 36–37 from Our Virginia: Past and Present (Five Ponds Press); Virginia Indians and European men work near a fortified Virginia town in this engraving by Martin Pringe (Virginia Historical Society); Algonquian-speaking Indians at Roanoke cook food in this ca. 1590 engraving by Theodor de Bry after John White (Mariner’s Museum)
On this day in 1847, a man then in his early thirties and living in Richmond sat down to write his autobiography:
Richmond January 23th 1847
from my own observations I have seen and heard many things which I shall never forget and as I wish to see how the world go while I am in it I have come to the conclusion to notice a few of them for my owne benefit in future years …
He recalls being his mother’s “pet” and of once being scalded by a boiling water before casually revealing that “the next thing to be noticed is the manner that I was raised which is very simple as may be suposed as I am of that colore of which it is thought that we are not entitle to much favour being shown us.”
The author, in other words, is black. And a slave. Rather than elaborate, though, he merely says that “the reader may judge in what situation I were placed.”
Fields Cook is frustrating like that, but this is also what makes him interesting. He was not writing for abolitionists in Boston. His narrative—which stretches to about thirty-two manuscript pages and was dropped off at the Library of Congress in 1902—was part of no cause greater than his own personal awakening. As one scholar has suggested, he considered his life as a slave to be incidental, and what towered over all was his religious “quest for salvation.”
Cook went on to live a remarkable life. He purchased his freedom in 1850, became a Baptist minister, and after the Civil War worked on behalf of the rights of freedpeople. He even ran for Congress in 1869 as a Republican, but received just 1 percent of the vote.
IMAGE:“A Barber in Richmond,”London Illustrated News, 1862 (Valentine Richmond History Center). The engraving depicts an African American man shaving a white patron. Black men who owned and operated barber shops also worked as cuppers and leechers. Fields Cook, who was born into slavery, worked as a leech doctor in Richmond before becoming a Baptist minister and a Republican Party leader after the Civil War (caption information from the Library of Virginia).
I love to find an excuse to post artwork on this blog. Yesterday, on the occasion of his birthday, I found a painting of Stonewall Jackson, more or less by accident, and was pleased that the artist himself commented on the post. Today, on the occasion of her birthday, I thought I’d post some lovely images of Virginia photographed by my friend, next-door neighbor, and VABC member Stacey Evans. The images in Trainscapes, as you might imagine, are all taken from moving trains, and while they include fleeting moments of beauty, they’re decidedly unromantic: postcards from real places and from brief moments.
On this day in 1824, Thomas J. Jackson was born in Clarksburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), the third child of Jonathan Jackson and Julia Beckwith Neale Jackson. The future Confederate general signed his name “Thomas J. Jackson” and tradition asserts that his middle name was Jonathan, in honor of his father.
Our entry notes that Jackson grew up to own six slaves and the records do not reflect his having ever criticized the institution. What, I wonder, would he have thought about the fact that I was married in front of his statue n Charlottesville, Virginia, by a female, African American sheriff?
Who knows? As it is, historians have trouble agreeing on whether Jackson was eccentric or completely normal. This is from our entry:
Many considered Jackson a hypochondriac, and his assessment of his own ailments and his pursuit of good health attracted comment. But many of Jackson’s beliefs (regarding the effect of certain foods on his body and his perceived weakness in one limb) and his regimens (hydrotherapy, strict diet, and abstention from reading by artificial light) were not unusual in his day. After Jackson’s death some writers overemphasized his health concerns and exaggerated his mannerisms and habits to create an inaccurate portrait of Jackson as a thorough eccentric. Jackson did strike many people as odd, but those who got to know him well discovered beneath his initial formality and reserve an essentially ordinary man and a pleasant companion.
Whatever the case, he was one of the Confederates’ best generals whose wartime martyrdom contributed to the South’s postwar Lost Cause mythology: but for Jackson’s death, might not the South have won? Yet another question no one can answer.
On this day in 1861, his native Mississippi having seceded, Jefferson Davis bid farewell to the United States Senate. The text of his speech amounts to an apology for states’ rights and secession and includes the declaration that, hey, if Massachusetts had wanted to do it, “I will say to her, Godspeed.” Why would the Bay State have wanted to secede, you ask. Davis was clearly referring to the case of Anthony Burns, a slave who in 1854 had escaped from Virginia to Boston, where he eventually was captured and—amidst great publicity and even some violence—was eventually returned to Virginia according to the dictates of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850).
So Davis is saying that if Massachusetts didn’t like this federal law requiring it to return Virginia’s escaped slaves, then they should have just left. Would have been fine with him. And now that Davis and his fellow Mississippians worried about the Republicans’ intentions to use the power of the federal government against the institution of slavery—or, as Davis says, “to stir up insurrection among our slaves”—then he’s outta there.
Davis admits that “secession belongs to a different class of remedies”—but remedies for what? In both cases for the problem of slavery, of course.
The Daily Mailhas reprinted several photographs of Richard and Mildred Loving taken for Life magazine by Grey Villet while the couple fought in the courts for recognition of their marriage. The United States Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law.
Twenty images show the tenderness and family support enjoyed by Mildred and Richard and their three children, Peggy, Sidney and Donald.
The children, unaware of the struggles their parents face, are captured by Villet as blissfully happy as they play in the fields near their Virginia home or share secrets with their parents on the couch.
Their parents, caught sharing a kiss on their front porch, appear more worry-stricken.
Taking advantage of the same wonderful images, Humanities magazine tells the story of the Lovings—their marriage and their court case. It’s a lovely piece written by the encyclopedia’s very own Donna Lucey:
They were young, they were in love, they got married. Simple. But this was Virginia in 1958 and nothing was simple.
The groom, twenty-four-year-old Richard Loving, was your average Joe—a country guy who loved music and drag racing on weekends. He had a knack for fine-tuning engines and won trophy after trophy for his souped-up cars. With his pale eyes, his blond buzz cut, his powerful physique, his face and arms weathered from the elements, he looked like a farmer—or an army sergeant. He worked in construction doing hard physical labor—laying bricks, building houses. A man of few words, Richard knew one thing and was ready to profess it: He loved his wife, Mildred.
And small wonder. A willowy eighteen-year-old with large, liquid brown eyes and a beatific smile that radiated warmth, Mildred moved with uncommon grace. She was so skinny that she had earned the nickname “Stringbean,” which Richard affectionately shortened to “Bean.” They complemented each other: While he was taciturn, and, in public, might appear even a bit brusque, she was gentle and soft-spoken—and expressed herself directly, from the heart. They seemed the perfect couple but for one small detail: her coffee-colored skin. She was, in the fiercely-protected racial borderland of Virginia, a “colored” woman, which made her off-limits as a marriage partner for Richard in the eyes of the law.
IMAGES: Top: The Lovings share a kiss in April 1965, King and Queen County; middle: the Loving children, Peggy, Sidney, and Donald, in April 1965, King and Queen County; bottom: Richard Loving, their daughter Peggy, Mildred’s sister Garnet, and Richard’s mother Lola, on the porch of Mildred’s mother’s house, April 1965, Caroline County
On this day in 1809, Edgar Poe was born in Boston, to traveling actors David Poe Jr. (a Baltimore, Maryland, native) and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins (an emigrant from England). The “Allan” came later, after Mr. and Mrs. Poe had died and young Edgar became the foster son of John and Frances Allan.
One of the great things about Poe and his memory—aside from “The Cask of Amontillado” or the Raven Society or the awesomely creepy art his face has inspired—is that no one argues over whether he was a “true Southerner” or whether he was or was not like Stalin. (He definitely was not, according to this book, which claims a sympathy between Shostakovich and Poe: “This is the tragedy of conscience!”)
The other great thing about Poe was the so-called Poe Toaster, who visited his grave on this day every year. Apparently, he is no more:
The tributes of an anonymous man, who leaves three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at Poe’s original grave on the writer’s birthday, are thought to date to least the 1940s. While three impersonators appeared this time, the real “Poe Toaster” did not, [Poe House and Museum Curator Jeff] Jerome said.
Last week’s post on the problems with the new, more factually accurate edition of Virginia’s fourth-grade history textbook, Our Virginia, is creating some discussion. George Mason professor Zachary Schrag has commented, asking what leeway textbook authors have to stray beyond the state standards, while the Washington Post‘s education blogger, Valerie Strauss, has generously reprinted the post in full. Georgetown law professor Rebecca Tushnet even cited the post for its fair-use of images. Now let us know what you think.
On this day in 1806 or 1807, Robert Edward Lee was born at Stratford in Westmoreland County, the youngest son of Henry Lee III and Ann Hill Carter Lee. We have already indicated this week the ways in which Lee’s legacy has been long and troubled. The journalist and blogger James Fallows piles on, posting this letter from a United States Army officer:
Y’know, when I was growing up the “Solid South” was still a Democratic stronghold. The whole region seems to bitch whomever depends on it. But somebody ought to do a sociology Ph.D. on the love the US Army has for the Confederacy.
I drove in this morning behind a huge dualie with a rear windshield lovingly painted with a waving Confederate battle flag and an ornate “CSA” lettered across it. Makes me want to throttle someone. I remember the visiting officers’ quarters at Fort Sam Houston had a painting of General Lee and his fellows riding home from war — I’d look at it and think, yeah, they just shot a bunch of _us_. It’s creepy, but there’s an awful lot of Confederate stuff on and around military bases.
For that matter, there are bases named for Confederates: Fort Lee, of course, and Fort Bragg, and Fort Hood … But Lee’s legacy is more complicated than that, as our yet-to-be-published Lee in Memory entry makes clear:
During his own life, Lee modeled himself after the courtly and self-controlled George Washington and cultivated a sense of himself as a character in a drama and a prisoner of fate. After his death, Lee was less likely to be branded a traitor; instead, he became a symbol of the Lost Cause interpretation of the war, transformed into a crucial agent of sectional reconciliation. The Civil War, according to the Lost Cause, was not about slavery but about states’ rights and, ultimately, the honor and bravery of white soldiers on both sides. In this regard, Lee served the needs not just of the Confederacy or of the South, but of all America. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s encouraged historians to engage a broader social and political canvas when writing about Lee, and this has led some scholars to challenge traditional conclusions about Lee’s significance and meaning. Like Washington, Lee is the seminal figure in a transformational moment, but of a different sort. He is the symbol of a vision that failed, and yet also the redeemer of a cause that has lived a long and often tragic afterlife.
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Thirty-two years later, the future Virginia governor Lawrence Douglas Wilder was born in the segregated Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond. His paternal grandparents had been enslaved in Goochland County. The seventh of eight children, Wilder was named for the African American writers Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frederick Douglass. His father, Robert, was an insurance salesman, and the younger Wilder recalled a childhood of “gentle poverty.” His mother, Beulah, encouraged his education by making him learn a new word every day from a crossword puzzle. His aunt, meanwhile, held formal teas where all the children were expected to perform. Wilder later said he learned at these events how to speak in front of crowds.
IMAGES:Left: On March 28, 1981, Wilder addresses a crowd of abot 200 during a rally held to show support for efforts to find the murderer of at least 20 black children in Atlanta. With him at the rally in Capitol Square in Richmond was the Rev. Robert G. Murray, vice president of the Richmond Committee of Black Clergy (Richmond Times-Dispatch); right: Hotchkiss poses with his wife, Sara Ann, and his daughters, Nellie and Anne, in an 1870 albumen silver carte-de-visite (Virginia Historical Society)
