TY - JOUR
AU - Whittenburg, James, P.
AB - At least forty-five women and girls, almost all of them under the age of sixteen and some as young as ten, died on March 13, 1863, in an explosion at the Confederate States Laboratories on Brown’s Island in the James River at Richmond where they had labored to produce cartridges for the Army of Northern Virginia. Many of the dead were daughters of poor immigrant families. Confederate authorities buried most of them in unmarked paupers’ graves. In 2001 the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Children of the Confederacy placed a marker to the memory of those young female casualties of war in Richmond’s Oakwood Cemetery (1). Although nothing survives from the laboratories, Civil War photographs provide a sense of the place (2) (Figure 1). At both the cemetery and on the island, imagination is the key to comprehending this horrifying result of the inexorable push to mobilize every element of the population in support of the Confederate war effort. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide On March 13, 1863, an explosion at the Confederate State Laboratories on Brown’s Island in Richmond, Virginia killed at least forty-five women who were then buried in unmarked graves. Alexander Gardner took two photographs of the ruins of Virginia State Arsenal at Richmond in April 1865. The wooden frame buildings of the Confederate State Laboratories on Brown's Island are visible in the background. This photograph and the historical marker dedicated to the explosion's victims placed in Richmond's Oakwood Cemetery by the Daughthers of the Confederacy are the two visual remnants of the disaster. Historic sites offer rich opportunities for students to learn about both well-known and hidden histories of Civil War mobilization. (Courtesy of Library of Congress) Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide On March 13, 1863, an explosion at the Confederate State Laboratories on Brown’s Island in Richmond, Virginia killed at least forty-five women who were then buried in unmarked graves. Alexander Gardner took two photographs of the ruins of Virginia State Arsenal at Richmond in April 1865. The wooden frame buildings of the Confederate State Laboratories on Brown's Island are visible in the background. This photograph and the historical marker dedicated to the explosion's victims placed in Richmond's Oakwood Cemetery by the Daughthers of the Confederacy are the two visual remnants of the disaster. Historic sites offer rich opportunities for students to learn about both well-known and hidden histories of Civil War mobilization. (Courtesy of Library of Congress) This essay probes possibilities for using historic sites to teach about the mobilization of people like the girls who died in the Brown’s Island disaster. These sites include battlefields west of the Mississippi that offer opportunities for highlighting Confederate success in mobilizing Native Americans as soldiers. Battlefields and monuments are also excellent venues for underscoring Union success in mobilizing African Americans as United States Colored Troops. Remnants of large-scale fortifications can serve as evidence of the importance of black laborers to the strategy of both sides and a walking tour of modern downtown Richmond can help explore a key example of the ultimate failure of the Confederate government to mobilize white women in support of the war. Civil War cemeteries are means of visualizing the scale on which both the Union and the Confederacy mustered white men into huge armies. Finally, both cemeteries and monuments can remind us that, even in the immediate aftermath of the war, elite white Confederate women mobilized themselves in the service of the “Lost Cause.” The Purpose-driven Field Trip These possibilities are merely examples of using historic sites to tell bits and pieces of the mobilization story. If nothing else, they illustrate that the selection of specific historic sites would depend greatly upon location. Even so, certain considerations should be common to the employment of any historic place as a teaching tool. Perhaps the most important general principle is this: have a point. A field trip without a purpose quickly becomes tourism instead of an intellectual exercise. Once the instructor is clear about the purpose of the site visit, the choice of appropriate readings and other supporting material such as photographs or maps will fall into place. It is important as well to communicate to the students the objective of the field trip. Otherwise, they are likely to be at a loss to make sense of what they find in the field. Above all, instructors must encourage students to see themselves as explorers in the lost world of the past. They will never wholly recreate the past, of course, but if they prepare thoroughly and engage with the things they encounter, they can recover slivers. That is the reason to make field trips. Otherwise, it is better to study the Civil War in a classroom. When considering any Civil War topic, student imagination seems always to run first to battlefields; and indeed, it was onto the battlefield that both sides projected the enormous power they derived from mobilization. The Civil War Sites Advisory Commission (CWSAC) website lists 384 battle sites in 25 states and the District of Columbia (3). This is not to suggest that classes everywhere have equal access to battlefields, but only to note that instructors need not look east of the Mississippi River to find one. Indeed, battlefields west of the Mississippi afford an opportunity to contrast Union and Confederate efforts to mobilize Native Americans. There was no true Union attempt to mobilize Native Americans. Instead, there was implacable hostility, even toward the pro-Union followers of Chief Opothleyoholo who fought Confederate forces at three of the seven Oklahoma battlefields on the CWSAC list as they fled to Kansas in 1861 (4). Meanwhile, Confederate attempts at mobilizing Native Americans in Oklahoma proved very successful. Chief Stand Watie, for example, led a regiment of pro-Confederate Native Americans in several large battles, including Prairie Grove and Pea Ridge, both in Arkansas in 1862 (5). Prairie Grove Battlefield is now an Arkansas state park while Pea Ridge Battlefield is a National Military Park (6). USCTs in the Civil War In July 1863, Stand Watie’s Confederates lost a battle at Cabin Creek, Oklahoma to a Union force that included the First Kansas Colored Infantry, part of approximately 189,000 African American men who served as Union soldiers and sailors (7). United States Colored Troops, or “USCTs,” fought on many fronts, from the trans-Mississippi to Virginia. Preservation and presentation at those battlefields vary widely, but the National Park Service, in particular, does a wonderful job of making battlefields accessible. Battles, however, are not the only option for teaching the mobilization of African Americans into the Union armed forces. The 1902 African American Civil War Memorial stands in a section of Norfolk’s West Point Cemetery reserved for USCT burials. A  figure added atop that monument in 1920 represents William Carney of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment (Figure 2). Born into slavery in Norfolk, Carney received the Medal of Honor for his role in the doomed attempt to take Fort Wagner, South Carolina in 1863. The celebrated movie, Glory (1989), tells the story of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, and viewing the film prior to visiting the memorial makes a powerful statement about USCTs. There are monuments to USCTs in other places, including the 1897 Boston memorial to the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts that has become a cultural icon since the debut of Glory. Whether in Massachusetts, Virginia, or Oklahoma, a visit to a USCT monument or battlefield helps students to comprehend the North’s success at mobilizing the South’s own enslaved population against their masters (8). Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Due to the efforts of James E. Fuller, a former slave and veteran of the First U.S. Colored Cavalry, the first monument to black Civil War soldiers in Virginia stands at Norfolk’s West Point Cemetery. Above the cornerstone rises a likeness of Norfolk native William Carney, a former slave as well, who served with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment. Such monuments are valuable devices to teach students about Northern success in mobilizing African American troops. (Photographer unknown; Courtesy of http://www.Waymarking.com/) Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Due to the efforts of James E. Fuller, a former slave and veteran of the First U.S. Colored Cavalry, the first monument to black Civil War soldiers in Virginia stands at Norfolk’s West Point Cemetery. Above the cornerstone rises a likeness of Norfolk native William Carney, a former slave as well, who served with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment. Such monuments are valuable devices to teach students about Northern success in mobilizing African American troops. (Photographer unknown; Courtesy of http://www.Waymarking.com/) Reading the Emancipation Proclamation at a USCT site can be instructive for students. In only a few paragraphs, President Abraham Lincoln succeeded in refocusing the war on slavery, opening the ranks of the Union armed forces to African American volunteers, and striking a blow at the South’s use of slave labor in any capacity. Still, African Americans did not wait for the Union to embrace the destruction of slavery as a war aim. In the words of Robert Engs, “THE SLAVES FREED THEMSELVES” (9). Frank Baker, James Townsend, and Shepard Mallory did just that in 1861. Among thousands of enslaved people forced into Confederate labor battalions during the Civil War, these three men seized a boat near Norfolk and sailed across Hampton Roads seeking asylum at Union-held Fortress Monroe near Hampton. When a Confederate officer demanded their return under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law, Union General Benjamin Butler refused on the grounds that they had become “contraband of war” because their labor directly contributed to the Confederate capacity to wage war. He promptly put them to work as laborers for the Union army. By war’s end, perhaps ten thousand men, women, and children had followed the example of Baker, Townsend, and Mallory by escaping to freedom at Fortress Monroe. Thousands more escaped to the Union army elsewhere (10). Two essays entitled “Who Freed the Slaves?” often provoke intense student debate on that issue during field trips to Fort Monroe. In one, James McPherson makes the case for Abraham Lincoln as the agent of slavery’s destruction. In the other, Barbara Fields takes Bob Engs’s position that the slaves seized freedom for themselves. However useful these essays may be as a means of getting at the heart of the matter, and however compelling the saga of Baker, Townsend, and Mallory, Fort Monroe itself is not essential. McPherson and Fields mention Butler’s actions there only in passing (11). Examples of what enslaved workers were capable of doing are the best illustrations of why the labor of African American noncombatants was so valuable to both sides. Noncombatant and Civilian Mobilization Redoubt Number One anchors the right flank of the Williamsburg Line, a series of Confederate fortifications constructed with slave labor at the outset of the war. Soil from a ditch eight feet deep formed walls seven feet high (12). Students looking down from the top of the wall to the bottom of the ditch readily understand the meaning of “contraband of war” as applied to slave labor. Anyone who has access to earthworks might use them to get this point across, but the remnants of any large nineteenth-century construction project such as a canal or levee could serve. The 1989 documentary, Digging for Slaves: The Excavation of American Slave Sites, also makes the point effectively as archaeologist Leland Ferguson leads viewers past slave-constructed levees in the South Carolina rice country, noting that, taken together, these massive earthworks compare in volume to the pyramids of ancient Egypt (13). Contrabands and USCTs notwithstanding, the South did mobilize massive amounts of slave labor for military, industrial, and agricultural purposes. It was far less successful at mobilizing its white women. As Drew Gilpin Faust argues in her 1990 essay, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” the South desperately needed the services of women for a wide variety of activities that ranged from manufacturing munitions to the management of slaves on plantations. Initially successful in persuading women to join the war effort by creating a narrative of noble female sacrifice, the Confederacy failed to retain that support because the government ignored even the most basic of home front needs (14). In the most striking example of that failure, as many as one thousand working-class women angered by severe food shortages converged on the Virginia state capitol building in the spring of 1863. Unable to obtain redress from Governor John Letcher, the protesters sacked stores in the business district, confronted Letcher for a second time on a city street, threatened President Jefferson Davis on another street nearby, and dispersed only when the city militia arrived on the scene. The Richmond business district burned in 1865, but most of the road grid remains and the capital building still stands. Enhanced by images and newspaper accounts, a detailed 1984 article by Michael Chesson makes it possible to follow the path of the rioters as they pleaded their case to Letcher at the Equestrian Statue of George Washington on the capitol grounds, then rampaged through the business district. Attempting to locate the spots where the women confronted Davis and Letcher, in particular, becomes a class adventure (15) (Figure 3). Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide In the spring of 1863, frustrated by food shortages on the Southern home front, more than one thousand Richmond-area women gathered under the Equestrian Statue of George Washington on Virginia’s capitol ground, shown here, seeking aid from Gov. John Letcher, who turned them away. Protestors then moved to Richmond’s business district, raided stores, and even menaced President Davis. A “food riot” walking tour of Richmond can help students understand the depth of challenges faced by Confederate war mobilizers. (Courtesy of Library of Congress) Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide In the spring of 1863, frustrated by food shortages on the Southern home front, more than one thousand Richmond-area women gathered under the Equestrian Statue of George Washington on Virginia’s capitol ground, shown here, seeking aid from Gov. John Letcher, who turned them away. Protestors then moved to Richmond’s business district, raided stores, and even menaced President Davis. A “food riot” walking tour of Richmond can help students understand the depth of challenges faced by Confederate war mobilizers. (Courtesy of Library of Congress) Calculating with Civil War Cemeteries If the Confederacy was unsuccessful in mobilizing white women, it was astonishingly successful at mobilizing white men. So, too, did the Union succeed at a very high level in bringing men under arms. Eventually, 61 percent of all Southern white males aged thirteen to forty-three served in the Confederate forces. For the much larger Northern population the number was 35 percent of all white males in that age bracket (16). To envision even a modest portion of the resulting huge formations that collided on Civil War battlefields would require a cast of thousands. Fortunately, a cast of thousands may be readily available, not at the battlefield itself, but in a cemetery nearby. There are 1,596 marked graves in the Yorktown (Virginia) National Cemetery, almost all containing remains of Union soldiers from the 1862 Peninsula Campaign (17). The flat white markers of uniform size lie in evenly-spaced rows. Using students to mark the corners of a rectangle encompassing five rows of twenty markers each approximates the ground Confederate Sam Watkins’ famous “Co. Aytch” would have required at its full strength of one hundred infantrymen. Ten such companies made up a full-strength regiment, the primary building block of Civil War armies. Extrapolating to formations larger than a regiment becomes a complicated math problem, in part because regiments were almost never at full strength, but also because the South combined more regiments to produce brigades, more brigades to form divisions, and more divisions to make a corps than did the North (18). Having students “do the math,” however, underscores the massive power produced by the mobilization of men into the largest armies ever assembled in North America. If students know only one Civil War battle, it is likely to be Gettysburg. If an instructor tells a class that the Confederates numbered about 75,000 men and also provides an organizational chart for the Southern army, the students can estimate how many cemeteries the size of the one at Yorktown would be necessary to hold the men of Confederate General Louis Armistead's brigade at Gettysburg (perhaps two), George Pickett’s division (at least five), James Longstreet's corps (about sixteen), and Robert E. Lee's entire army (forty-eight). It is equally possible to “run the numbers” for George Meade’s opposing Union army (19). These are sobering, vaguely Malthusian, mathematical exercises. Although a military cemetery lends itself to the project, any cemetery in which the markers are of similar size and placed at regular intervals will suffice. Cemeteries are also excellent places for assessing the mobilization of people into the service of Civil War memory. At Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery there is ample evidence that upper-class white women mobilized immediately after the war to preserve the memory of the “Lost Cause.” Looming over 18,000 Confederate graves in the military section of Hollywood is a granite pyramid 90 feet high (Figure 4). The ladies of the Hollywood Memorial Association commissioned the pyramid as a memorial to Confederate dead in 1866 at a cost of $18,000 when presumably there was little money to be had for such projects. Beginning in 1871, the same organization also raised the funds necessary to have 3,000 Confederate dead from the Battle of Gettysburg reinterred within the shadow of the pyramid (20). Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Located in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, the Confederate Pyramid was designed by Confederate Captain Charles H. Dimmock and built by convict laborers from the nearby state prison in memory of those Confederate soldiers “who stood for God and country.” Towering over eighteen thousand Confederate dead, including close to three thousand casualties of the Battle of Gettysburg reinterred in 1871, Dimmock’s memorial—and the numerous graves that surround it—remind students of the scale and sobering consequences of military mobilization. (Courtesy of photographer Dereck Ralston) Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Located in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, the Confederate Pyramid was designed by Confederate Captain Charles H. Dimmock and built by convict laborers from the nearby state prison in memory of those Confederate soldiers “who stood for God and country.” Towering over eighteen thousand Confederate dead, including close to three thousand casualties of the Battle of Gettysburg reinterred in 1871, Dimmock’s memorial—and the numerous graves that surround it—remind students of the scale and sobering consequences of military mobilization. (Courtesy of photographer Dereck Ralston) Conclusion The mobilization of people during and just after the Civil War is a marvelously inclusive theme because every sort of person anywhere in the country was potentially subject to being enticed or coerced into support for one side or the other. Mobilization both affected the outcome of every battle and reached deep into every recess of both home fronts. One need not visit a cemetery as large as Hollywood to observe evidence of this phenomenon. At the same time that the ladies of the Hollywood Memorial Association commissioned the Confederate pyramid, the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association created the military section of Hebrew Cemetery on the opposite side of Richmond. It contains the graves of thirty Jewish Confederate soldiers surrounded by a solemn iron fence made up of military symbols (21). It is no great revelation that Jews fought on both sides during the Civil War. Still, taking students to a cemetery such as Hebrew can add a degree of reality to a theme such as mobilization that even the finest classroom-bound experience cannot approximate. Reality of that sort is the classic advantage a carefully-selected historic site can always offer, provided that students understand why they are there and are willing to employ historical imagination to uncover often faint traces of people from the past. 1 " David L. Burton, “Richmond's Great Homefront Disaster: Friday the 13th,” Civil War Times Illustrated 21 (October 1982): 36–41. 2 " Alexander Gardner took two photographs of the ruins of Virginia State Arsenal at Richmond in April 1865. The wooden frame buildings of the Confederate State Laboratories on Brown’s Island are visible in the background. Visit http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003005606/PP. 3 " “Civil War Sites Advisory Commission Report on the Nation’s War Battlefields,” Heritage Preservation Services, http://www.nps.gov/hps/abpp/battles/tvii.htm, hereafter cited as CWSAC. 4 " Edwin C. Bearss, “The Civil War Comes to Indian Territory, 1861: The Flight of Opothleyoholo,” Journal of the West 11 (January 1972): 9–39; Christine Schultz White and Benton R. White, Now the Wolf has Come: The Creek Nation in the Civil War (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 1996); CWSAC. 5 " Kenny Arthur Franks, Stand Watie and the Agony of the Cherokee Nation (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1979), 114–93. 6 " “Prarie Grove Battlefield State Park,” Arkansas State Parks, http://www.arkansasstateparks.com/prairiegrovebattlefield; “Pea Ridge,” National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/peri/index.htm. 7 " Maris A. Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations,” Journal of American History 76 (June 1989): 40; CWSAC. 8 " Cassandra Newby-Alexander, An African American History of the Civil War in Hampton Roads (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2010), 111–12; Daniel A. Nathan, “The Massachusetts 54th on Film: Teaching ‘Glory’,” OAH Magazine of History 16 (Summer 2002): 38–42; Lois Goldreich Marcus, “The ‘Shaw Memorial’ by Augustus Saint-Gaudens: A History Painting in Bronze,” Winterthur Portfolio 14 (Spring 1979): 1–23. 9 " Quoted in James M. McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139 (March 1995): 1. 10 " Robert F. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 17–31; Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2008), 308–10; Barbara J. Fields, “Who Freed the Slaves?” The Civil War: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 178–81. 11 " McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?” 1–10; Fields, “Who Freed the Slaves?” 178–81. 12 " Earl C. Hastings, Jr. and David S. Hastings, A Pitiless Rain: The Battle of Williamsburg, 1862 (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing Company, 1997), 39–47; Carol Kettenburg Dubbs, Defend this Old Town: Williamsburg during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 20. 13 " Digging for Slaves: The Excavation of American Slave Sites, video cassette, directed by Jonathan Dent (London: BBC Enterprises, 1989). 14 " Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1200–1228. 15 " Michael B. Chesson, “Harlots or Heroines? A New Look at the Richmond Bread Riot,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 92 (April 1984): 131–75. 16 " Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?” 40. 17 " “Yorktown National Cemetery,” National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/york/yorktown-national-cemetery.htm. 18 " Sam R. Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment; or, A Side Show of the Big Show (Jackson, Tenn.: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1952); H. C. B. Rogers, The Confederates and Federals at War (Conshohocken, Pa.: Combined Publishing, 1973), 29–32. 19 " “The Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg,” National Parks Service, http://www.nps.gov/gett/historyculture/anv-orderofbattle.htm; CWSAC. 20 " Mary H. Mitchell, Hollywood Cemetery: The History of a Southern Shrine (Richmond, Va.: Library of Virginia, 1999), 64–74, 83–92; William A. Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 77–97; Mark Hughes, Confederate Cemeteries (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 2002), 43. 21 " Myron Berman, Richmond’s Jewry, 1769–1976:Shabbat in Shockoe (Charlottesville, Va: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 200–6, 227, 377n. © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Teaching Civil War Mobilization with Historic Sites
JF - OAH Magazine of History
DO - 10.1093/oahmag/oas012
DA - 2012-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/teaching-civil-war-mobilization-with-historic-sites-MEsZvkNiZO
SP - 43
EP - 47
VL - 26
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -