I hope that all of you have had a chance to read my article on Confederate military executions in the current issue of Civil War Times. It should be on the newsstands for a few more weeks, but you can also read it online. I’ve been quite pleased with the response thus far. I am also pleased to report that my essay on understanding the battle of the Crater as a slave rebellion will be published in a future issue of the magazine. Working with Dana Shoaf and the rest of the staff was an absolute pleasure and I look forward to doing it again. You may remember that this essay started as a blog post in June 2009, which received quite a bit of attention. Civil War Times is a perfect place for this particular piece. It’s an aspect of the battle that receives very little attention and I love the fact that it will be read by a popular audience. I am really excited about this one. Writing this essay has allowed me to think much more deeply about a number of issues related to the battle itself as well as the postwar process of remembrance and commemoration. The essay now serves as the core of the first chapter of my Crater manuscript.
This year is proving to be very good for me in the area of publications. I’ve got a few other projects that should be out this year in addition to the two Civil War Times articles. The final volume of the Virginia at War series edited by William C. Davis and James I. Robertson (University of Kentucky Press) should be right around the corner. Back in 2008 I wrote a chapter on the demobilization of the Army of Northern Virginia. In August my talk from the 2008 meeting of the Society for Civil War Historians, which explored how I use Ken Burns in my classroom will be published in the journal, The History Teacher. Finally, I am hoping to hear more about the status of Gary Gallagher’s final volume in the Military Campaigns of the Civil War series at UNC Press. It looks like this final volume will cover the Petersburg Campaign through Appomattox and may end up being quite a large book. Last I heard my essay on how Confederate soldiers remembered the battle of the Crater was to be included, but these things can change given the amount of time that has lapsed.
Tagged as:
Crater,
Petersburg,
USCTs
In my ongoing series of posts concerning the public presentations by Earl Ijames about “colored Confederates” I have consistently emphasized the importance of publishing in peer-reviewed journals. I maintain that only through the careful scrutiny of our ideas and conclusions are we able to better judge the veracity of the research and the difficult process of interpretation and analysis. The peer review process functions as a quality control mechanism and allows historians to critique the work of others from the safety of anonymity. Most academic journals and university presses have some kind of system of oversight in place and I have experienced it firsthand on a number of occasions, both from the writer’s side as well as from the reviewer’s side as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (2008-2010). If there is one area of Civil War history that desperately needs oversight it is “black Confederate” studies.
Since describing it and emphasizing why it is so important is difficult to do I thought it might be helpful to provide you with an example. I first experienced this process back in 2004 while attending graduate school at the University of Richmond. Even before I started the program I had an interest in William Mahone and the Readjuster Movement and had hoped that I would have a chance to explore his public career in a research seminar course and perhaps as a thesis topic. I eventually wrote an essay on Mahone and went on to expand my focus to include the battle of the Crater as a thesis topic. My adviser suggested that I submit the Mahone essay to the VMHB for consideration, which I did. I had published a few essays, magazine articles, and book reviews, but this was my first attempt at a peer-reviewed publication so I didn’t really know what to expect. Within about 6 months I received an email that included a letter from the journal editor and three anonymous reviews of my essay. The editor indicated that while the reviewers believed there was some merit to the essay and thesis they would be unable to publish as is. He suggested that I review the comments and revise the piece. I have to say that it took me a few days to pick my ego up off the floor and get back to work, but I did. I took just about every suggestion offered and within about 9 months I had a revised essay. What I learned was invaluable, both about the process of writing a serious work of history as well as my topic. I learned that thinking through complex questions is a group activity. There must be room for honest and sometimes blunt feedback. The result is that I have a much better grasp of Mahone and his postwar years because I benefited from the critique of three professional historians who are experts in some aspect of post-Civil War Virginia politics.
I am happy to say that my revised essay was accepted for publication by the VMHB [vol. 113, no. 4 (2005)] and even went on to win the Rachal Prize for best essay in 2005. Given that it’s been close to 5 years since its publication I feel comfortable sharing one of the three reviews. This is one of the nicer reviews.
[click to continue…]
Tagged as:
black Confederates,
William Mahone
I am pleased to announce that I will once again be participating in the annual Civil War seminar sponsored by The George Tyler Moore Center at Shepherd University. In the summer of 2007 [here and here/photos] I took part in the center’s conference on Civil War Memory. It was a wonderful experience and I couldn’t be happier to be joining Mark Snell and the rest of the staff this summer in Petersburg, Virginia. This is the first year that the conference will take place away from its home base on the campus of Shepherd University. The conference is being co-sponsored by Pamplin Park. This year’s theme is, “Petersburg: In the Trenches with the Common Soldier” and it includes a first-rate line-up of scholars and two days of touring the various sites and battlefields in the Petersburg area. Will Greene will be conducting all of the tours and lectures will be presented by Earl Hess, Christopher Stowe, Dennis Brandt, and Walter Powell. I am looking forward to the chance to finally meet Earl Hess. In many ways he is responsible for my interest in Petersburg and the Crater specifically. Back in 2003 I collected a broad range of archival materials for what became Prof. Hess’s third volume in his series on earthworks. That material on Petersburg proved to be extremely helpful in shaping my own work on memory and the battle of the Crater.
My own lecture is titled, “Mahone’s Brigade and the Defense of Petersburg.” While this talk is based on my extensive research of Mahone’s brigade at the Crater, I hope to present a broader picture of the unit throughout the summer and fall of 1864. Over the past five years I’ve read scores of letters and diaries from these men and this will give me a chance to try out some ideas that fall outside the purview of my Crater project. The exploration of the connection between the battlefield and home front is nothing new to historians, but often the discussion comes across as overly abstract. The Petersburg Campaign, however, is one of the few moments during the Civil War where the battlefield and home front were indistinguishable. For the men of Mahone’s Brigade Petersburg and the surrounding area was literally their home. I am convinced that their close contact with a civilian population shaped the way these men responded to the presence of black Union soldiers at the Crater. How else did close proximity to civilians and family shape the outlook of these men on the war? Stay tuned.
Tagged as:
Crater,
Petersburg
Thanks to Brooks Simpson and Ken Noe for participation in my most recent post on black Confederates. Their thorough comments in response to a reader who put forward what he believed to be evidence for black Confederate soldiers is a clinic on how to engage in serious historical analysis. I can’t tell you what it means to me to have such respected professional historians as regular readers of this blog. You would also do well to check out Ta-Nehisi Coates’s most recent post on the subject as well as the clever thought experiment over at Vast Public Indifference.
At one point in the discussion today Ken Noe offered the following:
I recently completed a project that required me to read the letters and diaries of 320 CS soldiers. They wrote a lot about slavery, slave labor in camp, their opposition to emancipation, and their mixed feelings about the 1865 Confederate Congressional debates over arming blacks. But not a one of them–not one–described black men fighting beside them as armed soldiers for the Confederacy. What I’d need are a lot of letters that did describe that. I’d also need evidence that the 1865 Confederate slavery debates never took place after all, because why debate the issue if black men were already soldiers in Confederate service? Finally, some official mention from the Confederate government before 1865 would help.
Before proceeding I want to mention that the project that Ken speaks of will be published shortly by the University of North Carolina Press and it promises to be a very interesting study. All of Ken’s questions are relevant, but I was particularly struck by his emphasis on the lack of references to black Confederates from the men in his sample. One would think that at some point a Confederate solider would acknowledge the presence of black soldiers rather than servants, teamsters, cooks, etc. I don’t know one historian who has come across such a letter, though I assume that a few did serve or were able to pass as white soldiers. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
black Confederates,
Crater,
Petersburg,
USCTs
Georgia Civil War Commission Chairman John Culpepper has announced which battles will be reenacted as part of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. The decision was made by 75 representatives from around the country. The major battles endorsed by the convention are 2011-Manassas (Va.) Shiloh (Tenn.); 2012-Second Manassas (Va.) Vicksburg (Miss.); 2013-Chickamauga (Ga.) Gettysburg (Pa.); 2014-The Wilderness (Va.) Atlanta; 2015-Bentonville (N.C.) Appomatox (Va.). I have no idea who the people and organizations involved speak for.
Looks like a nice balance between Union and Confederate victories as well as the inclusion of one siege. The only problem, as I see it, is the failure to include an engagement that will highlight the service of United States Colored Troops. I’ve only been to a few reenactments in my life, but to be honest, they all look the same to me. How about reenacting a battle that gets at the heart of what the Civil War was about?
Tagged as:
Civil War Centennial,
Civil War Sesquicentennial,
Reenactors
