CWI September 2016 newsletter

2017 Civil War Institute Summer Conference June 9-14, 2017 Space Still Available – Register Now! Please join us for the 2017 CWI Conference as we explore the Civil War era from all angles. Talks on soldiers’ dreams, the political cartoons of Reconstruction, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, myths and realities of Civil War battle tactics, Union POW escapees, southern women, and the generalship of William T. Sherman are just a few of the programs that invite our audiences to see the many sides of the Civil War. In addition to offering a day of specialized tours of Gettysburg, CWI will be visiting Cedar Mountain for the first time, as well as Mine Run. The always popular Dennis Frye will lead a tour into Mosby Country, and Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler will be heading to Antietam. The 2017 faculty features a broad lineup of notable scholars, including Harold Holzer, Brooks Simpson, Peter Carmichael, Jennifer Murray, Lorien Foote, Earl Hess, Ken Noe, and John Marszalek. The CWI conference is noted for offering fresh perspectives and new angles on the Civil War by facilitating dialogue between experts and general audiences. Our faculty will bring the war to life through small group discussions, battlefield tours, lectures, roundtables and panel conversations. At CWI, there is something for everyone, even those who are new to the field of Civil War history.

Registration Updates Both full-time and part-time participation slots are still available for the 2017 conference, although space is filling quickly. On-campus housing is currently available for BOTH full-time and part-time participants. We encourage you to reserve your spot as soon as possible by registering today. A non-refundable and non-transferrable deposit of $100 is due at the time of registration. Invoices for payment of remaining balances will be sent out at the end of the calendar year. Final payments for early registrants are due February 15, 2017. Participants who register after February 15th will be charged full payment at the time of registration.

Full-Tuition Conference Scholarships are available for high school students, K-12 teachers, and public historians. Applications for all three scholarship programs are due FEBRUARY 15, 2017. More information – including eligibility guidelines and application instructions – available here. Additional details about the scholarship program will be forthcoming in the Winter newsletter. CWI 2017 Conference Speakers in the Spotlight Over the course of the next year, we will be interviewing some of the historians scheduled to speak at the CWI 2017 conference about their upcoming talks. Abbreviated interviews with four of our speakers are featured below. Please look for the extended version of these interviews, as well as interviews with additional speakers, in the coming months on The Gettysburg Compiler and on social media. An interview with Harold Holzer: “Lincoln as Wartime President”

Image courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation Harold Holzer is one of the nation’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. A prolific writer and lecturer, and a highly sought-after guest on television, Holzer served for six years as the Chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and for ten years as the co-chair of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. In 2008, he was the recipient of the National Humanities Medal. He currently serves as the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. Holzer has authored, co-authored, or edited 52 books and 560 articles and reviews for both popular magazines and scholarly journals. His most recent major work, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War For Public Opinion (Simon & Schuster, 2014), won numerous prestigious awards, including the Lincoln Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute. CWI: How did Lincoln's relationship with the Constitution, the American people, his political allies and adversaries change or evolve over the course of the war? What were Lincoln's priorities as a wartime president, and how did he strive to balance conflicting priorities?

HOLZER: Lincoln did a “Blondin-like tightrope act as Civil War President—Blondin, by the way, was the most famous tightrope walker of his day—most adroitly when he tried to balance the interests, and maintain the support, of both abolitionists and conservatives. Nowhere was this delicate touch more urgently required than in his effort to maintain the loyalty of the slaveholding Border States, many of whose residents were dubious about Union, and certainly opposed to emancipation. That Lincoln actually gained support over the years in a once-hostile state like Maryland, where he had been driven in 1861 to wearing a disguise and sneaking through the state to reach Washington for his inaugural, represented one of his greatest political triumphs. He thought so, too. CWI: How does a study of Lincoln's wartime presidency help inform our broader understanding of the complexities and challenges of American political leadership? HOLZER: Lincoln teaches us much about the complexities of leadership, particularly how to cut through them… how, for example, to use symbolism, oratory, public appeal, and humor to forge what was almost a cult of personality during his presidency (as well as an un-reconstructable well of opposition). In other words, amidst unimaginable complexities—new technologies, expanded means of communication, intense press scrutiny (all this sounds a bit like 2016, doesn't it?), not to mention rebellion, emancipation, new currency and unheard-of taxation—Lincoln always strove to keep the message simple, and his political enemies off guard. What a master he was at puppet-mastering the media while keeping one eye firmly fixed on the verdict of history. An interview with Dr. Lorien Foote: “The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy”

Image courtesy of Texas A&M University Dr. Lorien Foote is Professor of History at Texas A&M University, where she teaches classes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, war and society, and 19th-century American reform movements. She is the author of The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (NYU Press, 2010), which received honorable mention as finalist for the 2011 Lincoln Prize. She is also the author of Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform (Ohio University Press, 2003). Dr. Foote is the creator and principal investigator of a project with the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia that is currently mapping the

movement of 3000 Federal prisoners of war who escaped from the Confederacy during the American Civil War. (http://www.ehistory.org/projects/fugitive-federals.html) Her most recent book, The Yankee Plague: Escaped Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy is forthcoming this October from UNC Press. CWI: Which instances of Union prisoner-of-war escapes will you be discussing in your talk? Who was involved in these escape efforts, and what roles did they play? What impact did these escapes have on southerners and the Confederate war effort? What does a study of these escapes tell us about the soldier experience and/or the broader military, political, and cultural history of the war?

CWI: My talk will describe the mass escape of 2800 POWs from Confederate prisons in South Carolina between September 1864 and February 1865. When Confederate officials tried to move prisoners to keep them out of the path of Sherman’s army, bureaucratic problems and chaos created conditions that allowed hundreds of prisoners to escape from trains and from the open fields where they were being held. Once prisoners escaped, they sought the safety of Union lines on the South Carolina coast or in Knoxville, TN. Some tried to find Sherman’s army. These fugitives were aided by slaves and deserters, who provided them with food, guides, information, and shelter. Slaves created organizations and military companies to help the escaped Yankees which accelerated the collapse of slavery in the state. Confederate deserters often traveled to Knoxville with the escaped prisoners, and thousands of men traveled through the mountains in the winter. Loyal Confederates faced the threat of these vagrants on their own and refused to help defend their state against Sherman’s forces because they were trying to secure order in their farms and neighborhoods. Before Sherman’s army invaded, South Carolina’s war effort had collapsed. CWI: Please tell us more about your work on the digital mapping project of Union POW escapes. How might this project inform not only further academic scholarship on Civil War prisoners-of-war, but also the interpretation of the experiences of prisoners of war, POW camps, POW escapes, and their broader significance at public history sites and across "lost" historical landscapes of the Civil War?

FOOTE: I created a database with information on 3000 escaped prisoners that includes their name, regiment, where captured, where escaped, and where arrived in Union lines. I hope to use this data to create an animated map of the escapes that shows movement. By exploring the routes used, it will shed insight into locations of resistance to the Confederate government. Mapping movement of POWs from points of capture to the various prisons where they were held to points of escape will visually demonstrate that being a prisoner during the Civil War did not mean being static. Prisoners moved locations multiple times during their prison experience. It is essential to know more about how prisoners were moved on the battlefield and how this affected campaigns; how their movement behind the lines affected logistics; and how their movement across space affected local communities who encountered POWs. My goal in the book was to integrate the story of POWs into the larger narrative of the war, in my case, the collapse

of the Confederacy. Studies have focused on prisons and how prisoners were treated; but prisoner policy was integral to the conduct of the war as a whole and we need more work that connects them. An interview with Dr. John Coski: “The Confederate Flag”

Image courtesy of Janet Greentree and the Bull Run Civil War Round Table Dr. John Coski is the Historian of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. Prior to 2014, he served as the Historian of The Museum of the Confederacy, where he had worked in various capacities since 1988, and was the editor and principal writer of the Museum’s quarterly Magazine. He is the author of several books, most notably The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (Harvard University Press, 2005) and Capital Navy: The Men, Ships, and Operations of the James River Squadron (Savas Beatie, 1996), and more than 125 essays, articles, and reviews. A leading authority on the history of the Confederate flag, he has lectured widely on Civil War topics and participated in many academic conferences and community discussions about Confederate symbols and controversies. CWI: What are some of the most common perceptions and/or misconceptions about the Confederate flag? COSKI: The most common misperception about the flag is that there’s only one (legitimate) perception of its meaning. Even if someone believes fervently that her own perception of the flag is the only correct one, he/she quickly realizes that not everyone shares that perception. How he/she – and how we all – react to that realization is the essence of our modern discussions about the flag. CWI: How has the meaning, use, and memory of the Confederate flag changed or evolved over time and why? What role has the flag played in public culture as well as in American memory? COSKI: Somebody could write a book on that subject! The shorthand I’ve developed to

explain this without regurgitating my entire book is that the flag has evolved from a battle flag to a de facto national flag, to the symbol of the white South and of its defense, to a symbol of rebellion generally, to a symbol of divergent understandings of the Confederacy and its legacies. This evolution has been accretive; each use, perception, and meaning adds to, not replaces, the flag’s historical and symbolic baggage. The rise and fall of the flag as part of America’s public culture – as a part of the nation’s commemorative landscape – provides insight into the influence of the “Confederate tradition” in the national memory of the Civil War and into the history of American race relations. CWI: With so much recent debate in the news and amongst the general public about the Confederate flag and its proper role in public culture, why does an understanding of the complex and evolutionary history of the Confederate flag matter today? COSKI: The Confederate flag has been and continues to be the most frequent stimulus for public discussion over the causes and consequences of the American Civil War. Although that discussion is, unfortunately, often simplistic and emotional, it is occasionally insightful, instructive, and constructive. An understanding of the flag’s complex history and evolution promotes the constructive discussion of the War and its continuing legacies that we all seek. An interview with Dr. Anthony Kaye: “Alarm in the Neighborhood: Reinterpreting Nat Turner and His Rebellion”

Image courtesy of the National Humanities Center Anthony Kaye is the newly appointed Vice President for Scholarly Programs at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Prior to his appointment at the NHC, Kaye was Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, where he taught since 2002. In 2015, he served as the Robert F. and Margaret Goheen Fellow at the National Humanities Center, where he worked toward the completion of a book project entitled Taking Canaan: Rethinking the Nat Turner Revolt. Kaye has published

widely on Atlantic slavery, the African diaspora, the Civil War and emancipation, and Reconstruction, and has served as the Associate Editor of the scholarly journal, The Journal of the Civil War Era. He is the author of Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (UNC Press, 2009). CWI: What new interpretive lens do you plan to apply to Nat Turner and his rebellion in your upcoming talk? How might a reinterpretation of Turner be applied more broadly, not only in the classroom and in academic scholarship, but at public history sites in their discussions of the rebellion and slavery in general? KAYE: I'll be focusing on Turner's religion. His rebellion doesn't make much sense without coming to grips with his religious experience and his religious visions. The visions are well known to scholars, but we have largely averted our eyes. As secular people, we tend to treat religious ideas as if they were something else--a psychological projection of rebellious impulses against oppressive conditions, a coded attack on slavery, or a coded call for freedom. And perhaps religion was all these things--I certainly thought so before I began working on Turner--but it was something more too. It was a way of knowing (what scholars call an epistemology) that he believed, that shaped his understanding of his situation in the broadest sense and of the possibilities in his future. In short, I think we have to look at Turner's revolt through a religious lens because that's how he saw it. Turner is not the only historical subject whose religious ideas get treated as sociology, nor is he the only person in the early republic whose religious ideas infused his thoughts about himself, his future, and his world. Scholars routinely give the sociological treatment to all manner of people in history--from evangelicals in Turner's day to civil rights leaders and leaders of the Christian Right in our own day. Perhaps the religious ideas in slave spirituals, in the speeches of Rev. Martin Luther King and his many colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or in the sermons of televangelists would give us some insight into the worldview of slaves, why civil rights leaders believed they could prevail against such persistent, violent opposition, and what modern evangelicals have thought is wrong with modern American culture. I think those insights could change how scholars view those and other people's histories and that those insights will speak to the general audience public history addresses. CWI: What role did Nat Turner's rebellion play in the coming of the Civil War? What role did it play in the public life and culture of both northerners and southerners? How did the rebellion--and other rebellions or instances of slave resistance-- influence the way that southerners both experienced and prosecuted the war itself? KAYE: Every generation of slaveholders was taught by slave rebels to fear slave rebellion. For the Founding generation, it was the men and women who relentlessly waged the Hatian Revolution until they had founded the second republic in all the Americas. For the antebellum generation, I think, it was Nat Turner. The Turner revolt created divisions that would be reopened and enlarged time and again throughout the

rebellion. The Garrisonian abolitionist movement got off the ground just a few months before the revolt, and their reaction to it was emblematic of what Southerners saw as abolitionist "fanaticism." The Garrisonians ultimately lamented the bloodshed in Southampton, but until then, they treated it as confirmation of their view that the South would be beset by slave rebellion until it abolished slavery. Some scholars have argued that secession, especially at its beginning in South Carolina, was motivated by fear of insurrection. And there was indeed a wave of slave conspiracy scares. It's even less clear what Turner meant to the emancipation generation of former slaves. But the tens of thousands of slaves who left their owners during the Civil War to enlist in the Union army were doing exactly what Nat Turner thought he was doing: Going to war. A Dispatch From the Front

Under the auspices of the Civil War Institute’s Brian C. Pohanka Internship program, 24 Gettysburg College students spent the summer of 2016 on the frontlines of history, interning at a wide variety of the nation’s leading historic sites and museums. Pohanka interns led tours and developed public programs, processed archival collections, created multimedia products, led children’s programs, catalogued artifacts, contributed to social media accounts, staffed visitor information desks, and conducted historical research for their host sites. Established in 2011 thanks to the generosity of the John J. Pohanka Family Foundation, the Pohanka Internship Program supports long-term partnerships between Gettysburg College and a wide range of the nation's most high-profile Civil War sites. Interns participate in a rigorous interview process, and those selected for participation in the program receive free housing and a $1500 stipend. Please see below to read about Annika Jensen 18’s experiences at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Jensen is an English major with minors in Civil War Era Studies and Middle East and Islamic Studies, and serves as Managing Editor of The Gettysburg Compiler, which featured a number of posts over the summer from Pohanka interns.

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Now Quite Certain: Uncovering the Unexpected History of Harpers Ferry Annika Jensen ‘18

If my experience in Harpers Ferry this summer had a thesis statement, it would be

this: there is so much more than John Brown. Going into my first day of work in the education department, I had a tightly-wrapped set of expectations regarding not only the nature of the place in which I was now living but my own skills as an interpreter as well as a teacher; I was just as convinced that Harpers Ferry was a town trapped in the history of the Civil War as I was that I was no good with kids. I had read about Jackson’s position in the town and Sheridan’s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, but I could not admit to knowing much more than that.

The last ten weeks, however, have taken me notably beyond my Civil War comfort zone into a glossary of names, movements, and historical upheavals that I would not have thought to associate with Harpers Ferry: George Washington and the Potowmack Company, Thomas Jefferson (who, as it happens, made an excellent travel writer), Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, Sarah Jane Foster and her daily walk up to the blossoming Storer College, the Freedmen's Bureau, the Niagara Movement turned NAACP, and the Civil Rights Movement, catalyzed by such figures as W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Julian Bond.

Who would have thought? Certainly not me, and certainly not the students who entered the park every day. I kicked off my internship with no teaching experience and no semblance of an idea of how to interact with kids; I am not in an education program, and before this summer I had not given much thought to the idea of teaching as a career. The first few days were predictably awkward, shadowing other rangers who worked flawlessly with the kids while trying to cram all 200+ years of Harpers Ferry history, from George Washington to Julian Bond, into my overwhelmed brain. I had not been prepared to interpret the significance of water-powered industry and the impact of John Hall’s interchangeable parts on modern manufacturing for seventh grade students, but I would do it anyway.

My first day working with middle school students participating in the Jr. NYLC (National Youth Leaders Conference) came as a shock and a delight; not only were the students respectful and approachable, but they had a genuine interest in what I was teaching. They engaged the material and asked questions about John Brown, the Civil War, and even contemporary social justice issues. Throughout the course of the summer these students engaged in meaningful dialogue with me and their peers about the meaning and implications of the Confederate flag, the refugee crisis, racially-motivated and hate crimes, terrorism, the presidential race, and widespread global violence. What's more, this dialogue was prompted by the history which I was interpreting for them. I will never forget the girl who raised her hand and said that if she could change anything about the world, she would ensure equality for all women regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation. I saw myself in her bright-eyed aspirations and felt I was genuinely making a difference in the lives of these students.

This summer has provided me with a shining image of the National Park Service as its own school of thought, encouraging students like the Jr. NYLC scholars and myself to develop our own ideas about history through nature and preservation. I have played the role of teacher and pupil, eagerly attending programs illustrating the Battle of Harpers Ferry in September 1862 and the development of Storer College, the “Hope on the Hill” for newly-freed African Americans after the war’s end. I have listened to children no older than 12 years old describe the daily discrimination they face for being black or for having two mothers. I have pressed upon them the importance of listening to the other

side of the debate, even if their hearts are set against it, and explained to them the importance of dialogue in prompting change.

My summer at Harpers Ferry has shaped much more than just my perceptions of the Civil War; it has helped me visualize a career in teaching and public history, and helped me form opinions on contemporary issues molded by events and movements that occurred within miles of where I worked every day. I have watched people remove their shoes before entering John Brown’s fort and children finally--finally--understand the implications of the Civil War on their lives 150 years later. I have learned as much as I have taught. It was so much more than John Brown.

Photo #1 Caption: Harpers’ Ferry from the heights. Photo courtesy of Annika Jensen.

Photo #2 Caption: Marisa Shultz '17 (left) and Annika Jensen ‘18 demonstrate 19th-century games at the Family & Youth Tent. Photo courtesy of Annika Jensen. Carmichael Leads Tour of Harmon Farm for Students On September 21, the CWI invited a group of Gettysburg College students out to the battlefield to explore the Harmon Farm, a relatively recent addition to Gettysburg National Military Park. It was there that, on July 1, 1863, the Iron Brigade clashed with the 26th North Carolina in fierce combat that would help determine the course of the next two days of fighting. In the wake of the battle, the land would become the site of the Springs Hotel, a hotspot for early battlefield tourists. In the 20th century, when the land was redeveloped into the Gettysburg Country Club, it played host to the likes of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and other world leaders visiting him at his Gettysburg farm. Peter Carmichael led the tour for the students, interpreting both the battle and the postwar history of the property. This tour provided the opportunity for new students to engage with the Civil War Institute and for returning students to come together to discover an often-neglected but deeply historical corner of the battlefield.

Painting by Don Troiani depicting the clash between the Iron Brigade and the 26th North Carolina on July 1, 1863 on the Harmon

Farm in Gettysburg. Image courtesy of Don Troiani—Historical Art Prints

Peter Carmichael leads a battlefield tour of the former Harmon Farm for Gettysburg College students. Image courtesy of CWI. Ryan Nadeau, ’16, Conducts Oral History Project

Image courtesy of CWI In recent years, few issues have provoked such passionate debate about the memory and legacy of the Civil War as the place of the Confederate flag in the public sphere. This summer, recent graduate Ryan Nadeau ’16 collected oral histories of Gettysburg residents about their feelings toward the flag. His interviews document deep fissures in the Gettysburg community over the flag, with his subjects articulating a variety of personal, political, and historical reasons for their perspectives. The oral histories will eventually be made available to researchers at Special Collections & College Archives at Musselman Library. Ryan conducted the project as part of his work as the 2016 Robert Sibley Cooper Fellow, a role that also saw him assist the Civil War Institute Annual Summer Conference and the Gilder Lehrman Teachers’ Seminar. Ryan is back in Gettysburg this fall, now employed as the scholarly communications assistant at Musselman Library. He will be presenting on his oral history project during a poster session held at the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Historical Association at Shippensburg University in October. 2016 Fortenbaugh Lecture Features Lincoln Prize-winner Martha Hodes “Mourning Lincoln: The Assassination and the Aftermath of the Civil War”

Image courtesy of New York University

Professor Martha Hodes will present the 55th annual Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture at 7:00 pm on Saturday, November 19, at the Majestic Theater (25 Carlisle Street, Gettysburg, PA). Tickets are free, but required for admission. To reserve tickets, please contact the Majestic Theater at 717-337-8200. A public reception and book signing with Dr. Hodes will follow immediately after the lecture.

Martha Hodes is Professor of History at New York University. She holds degrees from Bowdoin College, Harvard University, and Princeton University. She is the author, most recently, of Mourning Lincoln (Yale University Press, 2015), which won the Lincoln Prize in 2016 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Professor Hodes is also the author of The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (W.W. Norton, 2006), which was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize, and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (Yale University Press, 1997), winner of the Allan Nevins Prize for Literary Distinction in the Writing of History. She is also the editor of a collection of essays, Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History.

Professor Hodes has been awarded numerous fellowships from a variety of distinguished institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Whiting Foundation. She is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians, an organization devoted to distinguished historical writing.

The Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture is presented each year on November 19, the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. The goal of the lecture is to speak to the literate general public without abandoning solid scholarly moorings. The first Fortenbaugh Lecture was delivered by Bruce Catton in 1962; subsequent lecturers

include David Herbert Donald, John Hope Franklin, C. Vann Woodward, Drew Gilpin Faust, David W. Blight, and other luminaries of American historical writing.

The Gettysburg Compiler: A Blog Written by Civil War Institute Fellows The Gettysburg Compiler is written and edited by students and staff of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Readers can follow students as they take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to a public audience. Each entry is researched and written by a Gettysburg College student serving as a Civil War Institute Fellow. The students’ work interrogates important original sources, much of it housed in the Special Collections at the Musselman Library at Gettysburg College.

Over the course of the past year, our writers have looked at salient issues in both Civil War and 19th-century American history such as race, gender, religion, and nationalism; explored the cultural history of the Civil War era through posts on poetry, music, and artwork; discussed novel techniques of public history; engaged in conversations about Reconstruction and its role in shaping the long-term memory and legacy of the war, and much more. The Compiler has endeavored to broaden its appeal to reach a wider audience with both hard-hitting works of historical analysis and entertaining posts intended to provoke public reflection about the past. Additionally, two new series, “Find Your Park Fridays”--a series inspired by the National Park Service Centennial featuring student reflections on their visits to neighboring NPS sites--as well as a “This Month in Civil War History” series are now featured alongside reviews of scholarly lectures and popular historical dramas. The Compiler is also proud to have had two posts promoted to a global audience by the editors of the blogging platform Wordpress this past year, while another post regarding the Colfax Massacre was shared by author Ta-Nahesi Coates to stimulate conversations about Reconstruction. You can follow our student writers’ work on The Gettysburg Compiler and get a sense of the bright future of the field by visiting www.GettysburgCompiler.com.