The Last Confederate General to Lay Down His Arms

Heather Cox Richardson

It is a pet peeve of mine that most people think the Civil War ended at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General U. S. Grant.

It didn’t.

Brigadier General Stand Waite

General Lee surrendered only his own Army of Northern Virginia that day. There were still more than a hundred thousand Confederate soldiers in the field. True, everyone knew that Lee’s surrender marked the beginning of the end. But the last major Confederate army did not quit until May 26, when General Kirby Smith surrendered his Army of the Trans-Mississippi to Major General Edward Canby in Louisiana.

But here’s another little-known fact related to the end of the war that seems to me should be as widely known as the events at Appomattox: The last Confederate general in the field to surrender was Brigadier General Stand Watie, who did not lay down his weapons until June 23, 1865.

Why is this significant? Because Stand Watie was a member of the Cherokee Nation. He commanded the First Indian Brigade of the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi.

It’s a stretch to say that Indians were at the heart of the American Civil War, but it’s not at all a stretch to say that the West was. Eastern Americans from the North and the South fought to control the economic system the nation would impose on the West. Easterners had lived with slavery in their midst since the very beginnings of European settlement on the Atlantic coast; it was only when the slave system threatened to spread across the lands of the old Louisiana Purchase that the inhabitants of the two eastern regions came to blows.

Indian Frontier to 1890 (from Bedford St. Martin's). Click to enlarge.

The West over which the North and South fought was not, of course, uninhabited. The people who had lived there for generations had a profound interest in the national events of 1861-1865, and participated accordingly. Once the easterners had stopped smashing at each other, the Indians continued to be active participants in American events whether they wanted to be or not. Many Plains Indian bands went to war with the U.S. government in the post-Civil War years, but even those that didn’t found themselves tangled in eastern concerns. The question of who would be welcome as a citizen in the rebuilding nation was hotly contested, and in that contest Indians became important players (the Fourteenth Amendment, anyone?).

When Stand Watie took for himself the status of being the last Confederate general to surrender, he claimed the historical significance of the West and of Indians in the American Civil War.

That, it seems to me, is worth noting in the same breath that we use to talk about what happened at Appomattox.

Titanic Obsessions

Heather Cox Richardson

One hundred years ago, in April 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, taking more than 1,500 people with her.

I’ve never been one of those people obsessed with the sinking of the Titanic. When I was a child, my mother carefully pored over the passenger lists and the investigation report and talked of the steerage passengers who died in families; I carefully avoided what seemed to me deadly dull columns of names and numbers. In 1997, when the world wept over the movie about it; I thought Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were so annoying I cheered on the iceberg.

But for all my refusal to engage with Titanic obsessions, I find the images in this video strangely fascinating: http://www.rmstitanic.net/100th-anniversary.html.

They seem to me part art, part tomb.

A Real National Treasure: Rediscovering the Roanoke Colony

Heather Cox Richardson

Ok, I confess to loving the National Treasure movies. I know, I know, they’re stupid, and they completely twist history, and all that, but they are so much fun! Wouldn’t it be great if there really were hidden passages behind Mount Rushmore? Caches of historical treasures buried under modern cities? Old documents that held secret information, revealing the answers to ancient mysteries?

Oh, wait . . .

Perhaps there are, on that last one.

One of America’s great mysteries has been the fate of the Roanoke Colony, England’s first attempt to establish a permanent settlement in the “New World.” In the mid-1580s, Sir Walter Raleigh outfitted a settlement on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina, just inside the Outer Banks (but what was then Virginia, named, of course, for Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen). The first years of the colony under a military governor were disastrous as the governor fought with both local Indians and his own people. The one great success of the venture was its choice of illustrator and mapmaker: John White. His meticulous observations of the coastline and the peoples he encountered are invaluable pictures of the New World as seen by wide-eyed European adventurers.

John White illustration, 1585

The first colony failed, but in 1587, Raleigh tried again to colonize the island, this time putting John White himself in charge of the expedition. (White convinced his daughter Eleanor and her new husband to join the venture. His granddaughter, Virginia Dare, would be the first English child born in America.) White proved a far better illustrator then governor, sparking a battle with the few local Indians who remained friendly. When it appeared the colony could not survive the upcoming winter, White returned to England to plead for supplies.

But bad luck continued to plague the colony. White returned to England just in time for the 1588 attack of the Spanish Armada on England. To defend her country, Queen Elizabeth prohibited any ships from leaving it, especially those whose only goal was to aid a few far-off adventurers.
It was not until 1590 that White could get back to Roanoke. When he arrived, he found the colony long abandoned. The only sign of what had happened to the settlers was the word “CROATOAN” carved on a post.

Or so we have understood. Until now.

From the report: "Examination of patches on a map of
the E coast of America by John White."

In 2007, the North Carolina Museum of History put on an exhibit that explored the fate of the Lost Colony. To that effort, the British Museum lent a number of John White’s illustrations. Crucially, their loan included a map. Members of the First Colony Foundation—a group dedicated to finding traces of the Roanoke colonists—noticed that White’s map had two patches. While patching illustrations was the seventeenth century’s version of Wite-Out, one of the map’s patches appeared to show a faint trace of something beneath it other than an error. The First Colony scholars convinced the British Museum to explore what might lie under the patches on the White map.

In early May, the British Museum announced their findings. And what findings they were! Using modern imaging techniques, they discovered that one of the patches covered a slightly different version of the coastline, and appears simply to have been used to correct an error. Under the second, though, lay a drawing of a dramatically altered ship, as well as the markings of a fort at the confluence of two rivers.

When he was back in England, White had vaguely suggested that the colonists had been intending to move inland when he left in 1587, and Jamestown settlers had heard rumors from Indians that there were Englishmen on upper Albemarle Sound. This new discovery lends heavy weight to those hints.

Is this where the Roanoke settlers ended up? Did White hide their location when he designed the map to protect the colonists from the Spanish?

The map raises new questions, but far more focused ones than the devastatingly broad “What might have happened to the Roanoke setters?” These are questions that, with the help of archaeologists, can be answered. It’s exciting to step this much closer to an answer about one of America’s great mysteries.

Now if only someone would tell us where Jimmy Hoffa is buried . . .

San Francisco, the 1906 Earthquake, and the Progressive Era

Heather Cox Richardson

Recently, workers in San Francisco unearthed the ruins of the old city hall, destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

That event has always fascinated me—not just the destruction caused by the quake itself, but the sense it has always given me that San Francisco in 1906 was a perfect example of Progressive Era America. Some of the worst destruction was caused not by the shaking earth, but by the fires that broke out in the cracked gas lines. As much as 90% of the damage in San Francisco has been attributed to the fires. The thought of the flames roaring up the streets of the city is one of those events that makes history human . . . and in this case, horrific.


Here, it seems to me, is a perfect image of both the potential of the Progressive Era to improve people’s lives—in this case, with gas lighting—and the deadly danger of that potential.

San Francisco has become for me the quintessential Progressive Era city for another reason, too. In 1905, a photographer attached a camera to a trolley car traveling along Market Street. The result was a nine-minute recording of urban life before the reforms of the Progressive Era. There are no stop signs, no traffic lights. Children are playing in the streets and running in front of the cars. People are walking, horses are pulling carts, and automobiles are in a free-for-all on undivided roads. It makes you realize how many of the world we take for granted today was, in fact, a product of the efforts of reformers to draw up some rules to make the modern world safer.

This film teaches really well (there are versions with music available on youtube, too).

It’s chilling to realize that most of the people in the film, going about their errands on busy Market Street in 1905, awoke to horrifying shaking at 5:12 AM on April 18, 1906, watched the City Hall crumble, and ran from the billowing flames.

Witness to Lincoln’s Assassination

Heather Cox Richardson 

What is there to say except, “Wow.” 

Contemporary Images of the Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show

Heather Cox Richardson

I have recently tumbled over two youtube videos that show provocative images of the Indian performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. These videos compile images from the collections of the Library of Congress.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show is well

known. It was William F. Cody’s venture to cash in on the rodeos that were popular across the West. He launched the Wild West Show in 1883, promising to bring the “real” West to customers back east. He showed cowboys and stagecoach robberies and battles between soldiers and Indians, promising to eastern audiences that they were seeing the reality of life in the late nineteenth-century American West.

Historians have torn Buffalo Bill’s claim to shreds, pointing out how carefully Cody crafted the performances to illustrate his own beliefs about the meaning of America and the West. But, “true” or not, the show was a roaring success. In 1887, Cody boasted: “I kick worse than any quartermaster’s mule ever kicked if I don’t clear a thousand dollars a day.” That year, he took the show to England to perform for Queen Victoria.

The Wild West Show was popular enough that Thomas Edison expended some of his early film to record pieces of it. The first video shows images from his experiment spliced together. It reveals the performers parading through a

packed street as they entered a town. Indians and cavalrymen move in a column amid a churning throng of boys and men. It’s a male crowd; only one girl is immediately obvious, and she seems notably uncomfortable in the setting. Many modern Americans forget that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Indians were not uncommon sights in urban America. This chaotic street scene (complete with boys darting right in front of a horse, which shies away) is an eye-opener.

The rest of the clips on the video show Annie Oakley, a cowboy riding a bronco, and two scenes of Indian dances. The dances are good illustrations that Cody’s “real” West was carefully crafted to show what eastern audiences wanted to see. The filmed dances say far more about racist audiences than Indian cultural practices.

Those dancing scenes contrast powerfully with the still images on this second video. These are photographs taken in the late nineteenth century by artist Gertrude Kasebier. Her goal was to take images of the Lakota in the Wild West Show that would reveal them as individuals. She preferred to capture her subjects at rest, without the accouterments of their stage personas. Her images are quite a contrast to those in the Edison film.

Advice for the Job Season: Interviewing

Heather Cox Richardson

My primary advice for interviewing is to tell candidates that THE SEARCH COMMITTEE MEMBERS WANT YOU TO DO WELL!!! Please, please hear that. It is excruciating to have candidates treat an interview like a comprehensive exam before hostile examiners.

I promise you, we did not just slog through hundreds of pages of recommendation letters and your prose, pick you out of hundreds of applicants, fly to some god-forsaken icy city, and swill cheap coffee and bagels in a cold hotel room waiting for you because we are eager to humiliate you. While it is possible that there is someone in that room who doesn’t like your work, the majority of the committee has gone to the mat to get you onto the interview list, and those search committee members are secretly praying that you will hit a home run. They are on your side.

You may well not know which members those are, though, so do not make any assumptions about who are your friends and who are potential enemies on a committee. Treat everyone as interested colleagues. Even the old jerk in the corner asking impossible questions might be on your side. And if not, the chances are good that everyone else in the room recognizes that s/he’s an old curmudgeon, and are hoping that you will handle her/him with aplomb.
The committee members want you to do well, so help them out. Almost certainly there will be faculty members from different fields in the room who only know your field generally. So explain immediately what you do, and why it is important to someone outside your specialty. Do not make them plead with you to articulate why what you do is significant. (Clearly, they think it is, or they would not have brought you in for an interview. They are trying to see how well you can articulate historical concepts.)

Then listen to their questions. They are trying to draw you out, to see what inspires you, to see what kind of a colleague you will be. If someone is trying to trip you up, others will be trying to toss you softballs. (If that fighting is obvious, you should have real reservations about joining the department, by the way.) Work with them collaboratively as a colleague to create a conversation, not as a student being examined. As they are interviewing you, you are interviewing them. Do they get along? Are they smart? Do they seem to have a sense of humor? Are they people you would like to see in the hallways for the next 20 years? Sometimes an interview tells you that you do not want the job no matter how badly you think you need it; listen to that intuition.

However the interview goes, do not overthink it afterward. So you forgot your coat and had to go back: no one cares. So you could have articulated something better: that happens. So you drew a blank when someone asked you something that should have been obvious: we may not even have noticed. We all recognize that the interview is a strange process and that it’s rare for it to go so brilliantly everyone in the room is blown away.

Finally, do not assume that because you did not get an on-campus interview that you interviewed badly or that your work is somehow less worthy than those who did. The academic pool right now is extraordinarily strong. It’s not uncommon for committees to receive 200-300 applications for an assistant-level post.  Search committees have to make choices by splitting hairs. When you have to cut a pool from a dozen or so candidates to 3, some of the ones who don’t make the cut could just have easily have made it.  The fact that you got an interview at all says that your work impressed enough members of a search committee for them to invest a significant amount of time and effort into it and into you. That’s itself a statement of support.

Advice for the Job Season: How to Think About Applying for a Job, Part 1

Heather Cox Richardson

The academic job market is in full swing. That’s the good news.

And as usual, there are way too few jobs. That’s the bad.

At this point, I’ve spent significant time on both sides of the hiring equation, and have a few suggestions for navigating the job search.

First of all, you almost certainly will not get your dream job. But please, please hear this: THIS IS NOT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT A GOOD CANDIDATE!!! It is because there are too few jobs. The C.V.s that come in for a search these days are frighteningly impressive. Yours is one of them. When committees have to choose whom to interview, I promise you they do not look at your materials and say: “Gee, why did this loser apply?!” They say: “And yet another terrific scholar. Fortunately for us, his work doesn’t quite fit what we’re looking for.” And they put your application aside.

While this is incredibly depressing when you’re going through it—and many schools contribute to the darkness by ignoring you, announcing the interview schedule before informing you you’re not on it, and so on—there is one important light to remember. YOU DO NOT WANT A JOB THAT IS NOT A GOOD FIT FOR YOU. I know, I know, you want any job right now. But actually, you really don’t. Unlike many professions, it’s very hard for academics to change institutions. Try moving your family across the country for a job only to tell your partner six months later you hate your department and are going back on the job market to apply for a job on the other side of the country. Not a good idea. If a search committee doesn’t jump at the chance to interview you, you don’t want to interview them, either. The fit would have been a bad one.

Often, by the way, you won’t be able to tell whether or not your work is a good fit with a department. A scholar of the Taiping would seem, for example, to be a good candidate for an advertised job in nineteenth-century Asia. But that same (hypothetical) ad will not have mentioned that the department has a European scholar who is fiercely protective of his favorite course on world revolutions that highlights the Taiping. So even if you look at the description and think the fit should have been perfect, remember that there could have been a wide range of internal reasons you were not.

So if you’re almost certainly not going to get the job you want, or maybe any job, what’s the point in applying? You should consider jobs outside of the academy (more on that later), but you will have a better relationship with the academic job market if you reorient how you think about it.

If you can, try not to see applying for a position just as a job application. It is advertising. You are letting people who are in a position to appreciate the importance of your work know who you are and what you do. Until now, you have interacted primarily with just a handful of scholars, and most of them are at your own university. It’s the right time for you to take your scholarship to the world, and there is no better way to get an audience for it than to hand your materials to specialists around the country who are on search committees. They may not be able even to interview you because you do not fit the job at hand, but they may still be impressed with your materials. They might well remember you when someone asks for a recommendation for a conference panelist, or tell their editors that you have written an interesting manuscript and should be on their radar screens.

The only way to navigate such a bleak job market is to recognize that historians are a large community of scholars—to which you already belong—and that we are eager to hear what you’re bringing to the table.

Early Color Film

Heather Cox Richardson

In the late 1930s, Charles Cushman began to experiment with color film. For the next three decades, his photos documented the technological and social changes in America in striking images.

The images bring home the human dimension of history. Tractors didn’t just replace horse-drawn carts; farmers driving tractors down dirt roads passed farmers driving their horse-drawn carts the other way. Seeing the men in Cushman’s images brings home the human element imbedded in historical change. It’s impossible not to imagine the pride of the farmer with the new-fangled tractor as he sports the newest technology past his less-well-off neighbor, and to suspect that the man with the horses feels both left behind and superior to the man who has jumped on the latest fad. The photos draw you—and with luck, students—in, putting human experience of the twentieth century’s momentous changes front and center.

They are well worth a look.

Crowd Sourcing Public History

Heather Cox Richardson

In 1901, electrical inventor Nicholas Tesla bought 200 acres of potato field on Long Island to establish a wireless telegraphy plant. Backed with J. P. Morgan’s money, Tesla hired Stanford White to design a red brick laboratory building in what is now Shoreham, New York. Tesla’s tenure in the building was short. In 1903, creditors repossessed his equipment and the man from whom Tesla had bought the land for the laboratory sued the inventor for nonpayment of back taxes. For the next eighty years, Wardenclyffe, as the building was named, passed through the hands of a number of different companies.

Now a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to creating a regional science and technology center on eastern Long Island is trying to raise the money to restore Wardenclyffe as a science center.  But money for building new education centers is hard to come by, especially these days. So the organization has turned to crowd sourcing to raise the necessary funds.

The Wardenclyffe fund-raising film raises for me two questions. The first is why the board of directors focused the message of the film on the history of the building, rather than on the purpose of the center. Watching the film leaves a viewer with no sense of why the building is important, aside from its admittedly beautiful structural details. And yet, it seems reasonable to assume that there would be an audience for the idea that a center dedicated to spreading knowledge about science and technology among school children. So why did the directors decide to focus instead on being part of Tesla’s legacy, especially when he was only in the building so briefly?

Are historians right after all, that history matters and people think it’s cool?

The second question involves the role of crowd sourcing in public history. There is no doubt that we are in a new era. It has long been a source of frustration for organizations trying to attract grants—especially federal grants—that the success of applications often seems to depend on the political biases of the scholars the granting institution managed to dragoon onto that year’s advisory board. Crowd sourcing circumvents that problem.

In the process, crowd sourcing forces the people supporting a new project to explain to people—real people, not a blind grant panel—why their project is important enough for individuals to hand over cash to support it. This seems to me to offer a necessary spur to historians to articulate why what we do is important.

There are downsides to crowd sourcing, of course, but it seems to me to be the wave of the future. Historians had better learn how to ride it effectively.

Paean to the Museum of the Fur Trade Quarterly

Heather Cox Richardson

One of my favorite publications—historical or otherwise—is the quarterly magazine of Chadron, Nebraska’s Museum of the Fur Trade. A yearly membership at the museum is $15, and it’s worth every penny, even if, like me, you live two thousand miles away from Chadron, Nebraska. It’s worth it because you get this nifty little magazine.

Nicotiana rustica

The journal is sixteen pages of totally cool information about the artifacts of the fur trade and daily life on the Plains before the twentieth century. It’s always stuff you had never even thought to wonder about. The Fall 2011 issue, for example, has an article by James Hanson on the use of “Circassian Tobacco” in nineteenth-century Russian America. This was apparently an important trade good, exceedingly popular with the Alaskan natives. Turns out it was the same form of tobacco originally cultivated in eastern America. That species, Nicotiana rustica, had been replaced in Virginia by 1620 by a milder South American species, but when eastern Americans abandoned it, Nicotiana rustica traveled to Asia and Europe where its biting flavor remained popular. The article follows Nicotiana rustica through Ukraine and back to Russian America. Five pages of text and photographs and you have learned something you never even thought to wonder about.

But the big news for me—and for anyone who teaches the history of the American West—in the Fall 2011 issue was a wonderful article by W. Raymond Wood exploring the enormous importance of cats on the frontier.

Apparently, the brown rat, also known as the Norway rat, came to the American West with Euroamericans and quickly infested local Indian communities and the frontier forts in their vicinities. In the 1830s, a man at one fort recorded the numbers of rats he trapped: in February 1836 alone he got 89. Mind you, these are just the ones he caught.

In the West, rats and the native field mice decimated stored food. One military leader complained that every day the rats ate five bushels of his fort’s corn supply. Even worse, perhaps, their tunnels undermined any man-made structure, from Mandan earth lodges to military forts.

A detail from George Caleb Bingham's painting

Such a destructive rodent infestation put a premium on cats. Quite literally, for a settler a cat could make the difference between a successful career on the frontier and bankruptcy, because only a cat could protect expensive food supplies. Cats became among the most valued of frontier possessions, as Laura Ingalls Wilder suggested when she recounted the aftermath of a rodent chewing off her father’s hair while he slept. She entitled a chapter of Little Town on the Prairie “The Necessary Cat,” and told how her father paid a small fortune for a newborn kitten to beat back the advancing mice. Thanks to Wood’s article, that passage from Wilder fits into a larger squirming, squeaking story. Now, too, George Caleb Bingham’s famous painting “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri” (1845) makes a great deal more sense . . . and it’s clear that the animal hunched on the bow is a cat, not, as some would have it, a fox.

This magazine is a little gem. I look forward to every issue.

The Bouncing Boundaries of Europe

Heather Cox Richardson

I have thought a great deal this winter about nationalism. It seems to me that the rise of the internet, international trade, and NGOs begs us to ask whether or not nationalism was a twentieth-century phenomenon that had little meaning before the mid-nineteenth century, and will have little meaning after the mid-twenty-first century. The bouncing boundaries in this video seem to reinforce that suggestion:

Submarine History

Heather Cox Richardson

This infographic from the BBC is just too good to pass up.

It’s fun for a Friday, in any case, just to take a look at ocean life at different depths. But the historians out there—especially the historians of science—will want to scroll all the way down to the bottom, where there is an interview with Don Walsh, one of the two men ever to travel to the bottom of the deepest place in the world: the Mariana Trench.

The US Navy bathyscaphe Trieste descended to the bottom of the Trench on January 23, 1960, making the deepest dive of Project Nekton, a project designed to launch careful study of the deep sea. Those plans ran aground, though, as the U.S. looked toward space exploration, rather than oceanic studies. Other countries have continued to invest heavily in ocean research—Denmark’s Galathea 3 Project drew international attention in 2006-2007, for example—but the focus of American popular interest has drifted elsewhere.

While Walsh notes that there has never been another manned expedition to the Trench, there are at least three plans underway right now to send crews to the deepest part of the ocean.

None of the groups planning the descents are scientific crews: they are a marine consulting company, a company that makes private submarines, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Oceanic group, which plans to offer undersea adventures.

The Battle of Olustee, February 20, 1864

Heather Cox Richardson

Monday was the anniversary of the Battle of Olustee, the largest Civil War battle fought in Florida. Although few people today have even heard of it, Olustee was crucial in convincing Civil War era Americans to accept black freedom.

On February 7, 1864, Federal troops landed in Jacksonville. Carving Florida off from the rest of the Confederacy had several obvious advantages. First, the Confederacy was hurting for food, especially cattle. When the Union took the Mississippi River, it cut off the Texas herds from the rest of the South. The cattle herds in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and South Carolina could not fill the gap. If the Union could cut the lines for moving the Florida cattle that still fed the South in 1864, it would be closer to starving the South into submission. One general estimated in 1864 that 20,000 head of cattle and 10,000 hogs a year went from Florida to feed the Southern armies.

President Lincoln also wanted to reorganize Florida out from under the Confederacy as a free state much as he was trying to do in Louisiana. Opponents carped that he was trying to get Florida back into Congress so he could count on more electoral votes in the 1864 election, although there were obvious reasons to want Florida back on the Union side even without the president’s reelection fight looming on the horizon.

Finally, an excursion into Florida promised to attract black recruits to fight for the Union. And in 1864, new soldiers would be quite welcome to the battle-thinned Union ranks.

Brigadier General Truman Seymour, the head of the expedition, had strict orders not to move far from Jacksonville. Instead, Union troops under Colonel Guy V. Henry of the Fortieth Massachusetts mounted quick raids that destroyed supplies and reconnoitered the Confederate army. Their operations among the poor and dispirited people were successful and relatively painless: they suffered few losses.

It was perhaps the ease of the raiding to that date that made General Seymour decide on February 17 to march his 5,500 men 100 miles west to destroy the railroad bridge over the Suwanee River. Seymour did not know that Confederate officers had surmised the danger to Florida and had moved troops quickly to prevent Union troops from gaining a foothold in the interior. Five thousand Confederates under Brigadier General Joseph Finegan were encamped on the road Seymour’s men would take, near the railroad station at Olustee, about fifty miles from Jacksonville.

When the two armies came together in mid-afternoon on February 20, Seymour threw his men in without much forethought, apparently believing he was up against the same ragtag fighters Henry had been smashing for weeks. But Finegan’s men were experienced troops. They trained their cannons and held their ground. The Union lost more than 1800 men to the Confederacy’s 950. Most of the surviving Union soldiers ran from the field to hightail it down the road back to Jacksonville.[1]

The Union rout did not turn into a panic solely because the remnants of the Massachusetts 54th and the 35th U. S. Colored Troops held the Confederates back to cover the retreat. The soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th had earned their reputation for bravery in the assault at Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina the previous July. At Olustee, the black soldiers from the 54th and the 35th held their ground until past dark, enabling the white troops to get safely out of range, before they received their orders to move back toward Jacksonville.

Few people now remember Florida’s major Civil War battle, but it made a searing impression on President Lincoln. “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South,” he told visitors in August 1864. “I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing.” (AL to Alexander W. Randall and Joseph T. Mills, August 19, 1864, in Roy P. Basler, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, volume 7, pp. 507.)
___________

[1] The New York Times noted that the Colonel Henry had three horses shot out from under him during the battle, but was himself unhurt. His luck would not hold. Henry continued to serve in the army until 1892. He fought in the Apache campaign before joining the Sioux Wars. He was shot in the face in the Battle of the Rosebud, losing part of his cheek and one eye. He later led the Ninth Cavalry in the events surrounding the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee Massacre.

Board Games, Capitalism, and Piracy

Heather Cox Richardson

It’s fairly widely known that the game Monopoly was developed in America in the late nineteenth century to illustrate the evils of land monopoly. Rising prices, especially in the cities, in the 1870s and 1880s brought fortunes to a lucky few and misery to many. Ideas for negotiating this rough transition to a modern economy sprouted from all sorts of fertile minds, but few held the popularity accorded to Henry George’s Single Tax plan. George had lived both in California and New York during land booms and argued that land values rose through public development, rather than through individual enterprise. To restore equality, he argued, the government should take this unearned wealth back from the pockets into which it fell by taxing the value of the land.

This seemed a remarkably easy way to address the problem of growing inequality. Henry George clubs sprang up across the U.S. and even spread to Europe. George came close to winning the mayoralty of New York City in 1886 (he won more votes than newcomer Theodore Roosevelt). And Elizabeth Magie invented The Landlord’s Game, Monopoly’s forerunner, to explain the principles of land monopoly to potential Single Tax acolytes.

As anyone who has endured a rainy afternoon as a child knows, playing Monopoly was also a brutal lesson in the harshest form of capitalism. Invariably, one player emerged early as the canniest trader, or was lucky enough to capture Boardwalk and Park Place. S/he would slowly bleed the rest of the players dry over the long, painful course of hours. The only real option for a losing player was to rob the bank (something that, sadly, I didn’t figure out until I watched my children play the game). As someone said to me today, a young loser did not figure out the game was rigged, but rather assumed s/he was just bad at the game.

The structure of “land monopoly” and the internalization of failure, of course, were what Henry George’s followers were trying to highlight.

In contrast to the long, slow death of Monopoly stands the original Pirateer, a game that took the toy world by storm in 1994. It was produced independently, very briefly, by the Mendocino Game Company. In 1996, it won the Mensa Select Award for board games. In Pirateer, four gangs of pirates compete to collect a treasure from the island at the center of the board. They must then get it back to their own harbor before their ships are sunk by the other pirates, tacking according to wind patterns and the roll of dice. It is a rollicking game, essentially a free-for-all, but one that is bounded by natural laws (the wind), limited elements of luck—the roll of dice—and by a player’s strategic skill.

Crucially, anyone can win Pirateer right up to the very last play of the game. A clever four-year-old seeing the patterns of the board differently than his opponents can beat a seasoned player. No one can have a lucky break that determines the entire cast of the game. Everyone stays enthusiastic. No one gets an early advantage that means success four painful hours later. And the resentments at the end of Pirateer are correspondingly minor compared with those after Monopoly.

The contrast between these games hit me today when someone suggested that the true secret to the success of capital accumulation was protecting goods from piracy. The discussion was of the 1400s and the importance of walled cities, but it seems to me to hold true for colonial settlements in America, and even for modern-day attempts to regulate the internet.

Monopoly and Pirateer. Worth thinking about.

Pardoning Alan Turing

Heather Cox Richardson

Last week the British House of Lords declined to pardon Alan Turing for the crime of being gay. Convicted of indecency in 1952, Turing chose chemical castration rather than a prison term. Two years later, he killed himself by ingesting cyanide. Perhaps not ironically—since such symbolism was almost certainly intentional when committed by such a brilliant individual—he administered the poison to himself in an apple.

Alan Turing is widely considered to be the father of the modern computer. He was a key figure in Britain’s World War II code breaking center at Bletchley Park, inventing a machine that could break ciphers, including the difficult German Enigma codes. After the war, he continued to work in the world of artificial intelligence. Engineers still use the Turing Test to judge a machine’s ability to show intelligent behavior.

In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a formal apology to Dr. Turing. Noting that the brilliant scientist had truly helped to turn the tide of war, Brown called it “horrifying” that he was treated “so inhumanely.” “While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him,” Brown said. “So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work, I am very proud to say: we're sorry. You deserved so much better.”

The formal apology was followed by an on-line petition asking British government officials to pardon Turing. By February 2012, 23,000 people had signed it. Last week, the Justice Minister declined to do as they asked. “A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turning was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence,” he explained.

Never shy about his defense of gay rights, columnist Dan Savage compared the conviction of Turing to the conviction of a Swiss man who also broke a law we now find appalling. In 1942, Jakob Spirig helped Jewish refugees from Germany cross into Switzerland, and was sent to prison for his crime. In January 2004, the Swiss government pardoned Spirig, and all other people convicted for helping refugees escaping Nazi Germany. Savage asked the House of Lords: “Did the Swiss government err when it pardoned Jakob Spirig? Or did you err by not pardoning Alan Turing?

Much though I hate to disagree with Dan Savage, who could rest on his laurels for the It Gets Better Project alone, I’m not a fan of pardoning people who have committed the crime of being human under inhumane laws. This describes Turing. He doesn’t need a pardon; the society that made him a criminal does. As the Justice Minster went on to explain: “It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd, particularly... given his outstanding contribution to the war effort…. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.”

An apology is appropriate; a pardon is not.

Some things can never be put right. Pardoning a dead victim for the crime of being hated is a gift to the present, not the past. It lets modern-day people off the hook. They can be comfortable in their own righteousness, concluding that today’s injustices have nothing to do with such right-thinking people as they are. But they do. Laws reflect a society, and the ones that turned Turing and Spirig into criminals implicated not just their homophobic or pro-Nazi fellow citizens, but all of the members of their society who accepted those laws. A pardon in a case like Turing’s is a Get Out of Jail Free card not for him, but for us.

It’s way too late to pardon Alan Turing. And it’s way too early to pardon ourselves.

Civil War Soldiers and Conversation Hearts

Heather Cox Richardson

Valentine’s Day is synonymous with Sweethearts Conversation Hearts, those heart-shaped sugar candies with the messages on them: “Be Mine,” “I’m Yours,” and now, “E-mail Me.” The hearts are made in Revere, Massachusetts, at the New England Confectionery Company. Necco makes them from late February through mid-January of the following year for the Valentine’s Day market. They manufacture about 100,000 pounds a day, making more than 8 billion of the hearts every year.

Conversation hearts are the holiday version of the perennial Necco Wafers. Rumor—in the shape of an NPR story, a Boston Globe story, and hundreds of references on the internet—says that Union soldiers carried Necco wafers, which were called Hub Wafers in those days, in their haversacks. To write a lecture on the growth of industry during the Civil War, I set out to verify that little tidbit.

It was harder than you would think.

The histories on the Necco website and the Reference For Business website explain that Necco is the oldest candy company in America. In its earliest incarnation, it was founded in 1847 by an English immigrant to Boston, Oliver B. Chase, and his brother. Chase invented a device that would cut a simple candy, made of sugar, gelatin, and flavoring, into wafers. These early candies were called “Hub Wafers” (“Hub” was the nineteenth-century nickname for Boston). They were surprisingly popular, since they were cheap, durable, and lasted a very long time. This made them easy to ship and to carry, and thus, a likely thing for Civil War soldiers to take with them on their long marches.

But these histories don’t mention the Civil War. To solve my problem, I decided to try the company directly. Telephone calls to the Necco headquarters netted me only answering machines and an email to the company went unanswered.

So I turned to Civil War reenactors. Surely, in their quest for accuracy, they would know whether or not Union soldiers had carried Hub Wafers. Two hours of trolling through reenacting outfitters, newsletters, and educational websites about what Civil War soldiers carried netted me fascinating glimpses of army life (the US Army Center of Military History has a great website on haversacks and mess gear), but nothing on Hub Wafers. A telephone call to a reenactor yielded a fun chat, but no information on Hub Wafers. He had never heard of them.

Turning to primary sources on-line offered more information. In fact, Hub Wafers—or Necco Wafers, as they were sometimes known by the twentieth century, since both words were on the wrapper—seem to have become very visible and very popular in 1913-1915. Both advertising images and original wrappers are available from this era, some for purchase. The ads promise apothecary owners that the wafers will increase profits; they assure mothers that the candies are healthy and a good addition to afternoon tea. It turns out that this timing makes sense. According to the company history, Necco launched an aggressive advertising campaign in 1912; and in 1913, made much of the fact that Arctic explorer Donald MacMillan took Necco Wafers along on his journey, “using them for nutrition and as rewards to Eskimo children.”

By the 1930s, the candies had a huge following. During the Depression, they were cheap enough to be a treat, and well-loved enough that Admiral Richard Byrd took two tons of Necco Wafers on his own polar expedition. By the time of Pearl Harbor, they were the nation’s premier portable candy: the US government requisitioned the entire output of the Necco factory during WWII.

I never did find a historical source for the information that Civil War soldiers carried Hub Wafers. My guess is that some Boston boys did, as they would have carried other foods from home, but that it was hardly systematic. Instead, my search taught me that before modern techniques of refrigeration enabled people to keep chocolate from melting and spoiling, portability was such an important quality in a sweet that Necco was able to turn its wafers into the nation’s leading candy. While eclipsed now by newer products, Necco Wafers still exist, sold in a wrapper almost identical to that of 100 years ago.

Not bad for a candy that may—or may not—have been carried by Civil War soldiers.

A Plea for Maritime History

Heather Cox Richardson

“Difficulty between the United States and Great Britain about Wild Pigs.”

How can anyone not love a title like that? It’s from the New York Times, May 23, 1854, p. 4. The story explains that American whalemen had killed a few wild pigs on one of the Falkland Islands and that England and America were at a diplomatic breaking point over the incident. According to the article, American fishermen had stocked the islands with hogs thirty years before, and hunted them for food when they were fishing in the area. The French had introduced cattle to one of the islands with the same purpose. The problem now arose because the British crown now claimed possession of the Falklands, and all the animals on them.

In February 1854, the commander of the H. M. S. Express arrested the captains of two American vessels for the crime of killing thirty wild pigs the previous year. He took the captured fishing schooners to Port William, where apparently the ships were to be sold for the value of the pigs and to pay the fine for the crime of killing the animals. The effort was a fiasco, it seems. The American consul at Port William called over a warship from the coast of Brazil; the trial revealed that no one really knew who was where, when, and what laws applied anyway (the only longstanding rule on the books was against killing “cattle, &c.,” forcing the prosecutors to try to argue that a “wild pig” fell under the “&c.” part of that rule). It wasn’t even clear how many pigs had been killed. Ultimately, one of the American captains was fined, a cost he paid under protest.

The message of the crisis was clear to the newspaper reporter, though:

The English are trying to do here what they attempt everywhere they get an opportunity. They bluster and bully, and claim what they please to, and if their claim is admitted very well—they will then negotiate, and let you, for a handsome consideration, enjoy what was your own before.

The message of the crisis is also clear to this historian: Why on earth isn’t maritime history more popular? Admittedly, the death of a few wild pigs might be of enormous historical significance itself, but looking into it does suggest that there is a whole world of history out there that isn’t getting the attention it deserves. The crisis over the pigs illuminates on ongoing contest between the claims of landholders and fishermen to resources, a contest that stretched throughout the nineteenth century and that was key both to the construction of nations and to their interactions with other countries. The Falkland Islands, for example, changed hands so many times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that when I looked up their history I stopped trying to keep track. And a leading American newspaper highlighted the story of the wild pigs and interpreted it as a major development in the nation’s relationship with England.

Politics and economics only begin to dip into what we can seine from maritime history. What about the environment? Wild pigs do enormous damage to the land, as scientists in Hawaii have documented. How did whalemen change local environments by turning them into commissaries? What about communication networks? The same page of the newspaper that yielded the pig story has long columns listing all the ships that had sailed, been seen, or been contacted in the previous two months, their port of call, what they carried, and where they were at the time. It also mentioned collisions and damage to ships. A scholar using GIS could recreate these voyages, and with them the world of maritime trade.

It seems to me likely that interest in maritime history took a dive when the turn-of-the-century expansionism and nationalism of Alfred T. Mahan fell into disfavor. But the fact that early practitioners took their studies in a direction that is no longer popular is no reason to ignore the history of human interaction with what amounts to about seventy percent of the earth’s surface.

The Meaning of National Boundaries

Heather Cox Richardson

In a recent quest to explore American maritime history, I tumbled across Joshua M. Smith’s Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820. Smith tells the story of smuggling in Passamaquoddy Bay at the mouth of the St. Croix River between Maine and New Brunswick. As he explores what smuggling meant to those involved, he also investigates the attempts of different governments to enforce boundaries. That, in turn, got me to thinking about just how malleable national boundaries really are.

In retrospect, that seems like a no-brainer, and probably is for most historians. But I’m accustomed to thinking of national boundaries as lines that divide land, demarcations that are often as stark in reality as they are on a map. In The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland, Beth LaDow explored the meaning of a hundred miles of border between Montana and Saskatchewan. She showed the power of national boundaries to change the fortunes of people escaping from the law on either side of the border. Most notably, perhaps, Sitting Bull and his people crossed that “medicine line” after the Battle of Little Bighorn, escaping to Canada to avoid the wrath of the U.S. soldiers sent to hunt them.

With examples like that in front of me, land boundaries have always seemed terribly clear.

Somehow, seeing Smith illustrate the concept of a boundary through water rather than land brought home just how hard it is to delineate a marker between nations. Men who smuggled in Passamaquoddy Bay spent very little time worrying about where the boundaries were, just as people who fish today often work hard not to notice when they “drift” into foreign waters. An artificial boundary dividing the bay had very little meaning for the everyday lives of people in Passamaquoddy, except when governments got involved.

That sudden realization—dawn breaks over Marblehead!—got me to thinking about national boundaries in general. To what extent are they entirely artificial, reflecting the wishes of a central state rather than the realities of life on a borderland? To what extent is the idea of a national boundary a modern concept? And if it is a recent idea, will it continue to be relevant as technology continues to break down borders?

Maybe I’m behind the curve on this idea, but it’s sure got me thinking . . .

Structured Procrastination

Heather Cox Richardson

Over the years, I have been blessed with wonderful teachers. Advisors taught me to think and to write; colleagues pointed out my egregious errors; students kept me from making logical leaps by tripping me up with healthy skepticism. But all of these teachers have all worked in the academic, rather than the spiritual realm.

Finally, finally, I have found a guru.

His name is John Perry, and he is an emeritus philosophy professor at Stanford. He has recently won an Ig Nobel Prize for his work exploring the benefits of procrastination. One day, Professor Perry realized with surprise that he had a reputation for high production even though, as far as he was concerned, he never did anything. Thinking about that contrast, he figured out that it was possible to use procrastination well. Some scholars, he argues, use their determination to avoid big, unwelcome projects to whip off a number of projects that they perceive to be small and easy. Professor Perry points out that really good structured procrastinators—like himself—actually get a lot done. It’s just not necessarily what they felt they had to do.

Professor Perry’s argument is so odd it’s funny, but it’s also one of those ideas that make you sit up and think. What he describes is precisely the way I work. Give me a big, unmanageable, and preferably boring project, and it’s astonishing how many other things I can accomplish in my quest to avoid it. Grading, blog posts, book chapters… all seem negligible when compared to getting estimates for fixing the caved-in car door (which, by the way, I still have not done). I think Dr. Perry is on to something, and I’m thrilled to hear such a prophet. In the spirit of an acolyte, I would urge everyone worried about that article they’re avoiding to spend some time reading what he has to say.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone whose webpage presents a photo of the author jumping rope with a piece of seaweed has got to be worth listening to.