Great Sanitary Cheese 4.24

THE GREAT SANITARY CHEESE

HOW SACRAMENTANS SUPPORTED THE UNION DURING THE CIVIL WAR

A Project

Presented to the faculty of the Department of History

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

History

by

Karen A. Richey

SPRING 2012

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A Project

by

Karen A. Richey Approved by: __________________________________, Committee Chair Chloe S. Burke __________________________________, Second Reader Donald J. Azevada, Jr. ____________________________ Date

iii

Student: Karen A. Richey

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University

format manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to

be awarded for the project.

__________________________, Graduate Coordinator ___________________ Mona Siegel Date Department of History

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Abstract

of



by

Karen A. Richey

Statement of Problem The history of the Union states during the Civil War has typically been told with an eastern emphasis. Historians have frequently dismissed or neglected California’s role in the Civil War due to the state’s great distance from the theaters of war. The Common Core State Standards challenges history teachers to develop primary-source based curriculum that allows students to explore historical questions in-depth. Sources of Data Research was conducted primarily at the Center for Sacramento History (CSH), the repository for records from the city and county of Sacramento. A close analysis of Sacramento’s Civil War-era newspapers, the Sacramento Bee and the Sacramento Union was augmented by memoirs and items of personal correspondence from the collections of CSH and the California State Library. Conclusions Reached Sacramento’s support of the Union during the Civil War indicated the community’s deep engagement with the progress and outcome of the war. Given the state’s relatively small population and distance from the east, California provided abundant aid to the Union cause supplying both men and money in support of the war. California teachers can teach the Civil War as local history and in the process engage student interest, help students understand essential historical questions, and develop valuable historical-thinking skills.

_______________________, Committee Chair Chloe S. Burke

_______________________ Date

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DEDICATION

For Craig, you were worth the wait my love.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Dedication ......................................................................................................................v

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………...………… 1

2. WHO REMEMBERS MEMORIAL DAY? ............................................................6

3. THE GREAT SANITARY CHEESE: HOW SACRAMENTO SUPPORTED

THE UNION DURING THE CIVIL WAR…………………………………….. 34

Sectional Tensions & Union Resolutions ....................................................... 36

War Comes! .................................................................................................... 43

Home Front Patriotism .....................................................................................47

Military Service .............................................................................................. 54

Emancipation ...................................................................................................61

Conclusion .......................................................................................................66

4. TEACHING CALIFORNIA AND THE CIVIL WAR ........................................ 71

Appendix A. Primary Source Tools for Teachers .....................................................83

Primary Sources Help Teach Historical Thinking Skills ................................ 83

Guidelines for Using Primary Sources ........................................................... 84

Methods for Integrating Primary Sources ...................................................... 85

Process of Historical Investigation ................................................................. 87

Historical Investigation Template ................................................................... 89

Written Document Analysis Sheet .................................................................. 90

Poster Analysis Worksheet ............................................................................ 91

Photo Analysis Worksheet .............................................................................. 92

Cartoon Analysis Worksheet .......................................................................... 93

Barriers to Historical Reading, Possible Interventions ................................... 94

Appendix B. Model Lessons .................................................................................... 95

Lesson One: The Winter & Spring of Discontent ...........................................95

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Lesson Two: How Opinions about Emancipation Changed

from 1861 to 1863..…………………………………………………………107

Lesson Three: Comparing Multiple Accounts of Emancipation

Celebrations .................................................................................................. 123

Lesson Four: Why did Sacramento Need a City Guard? ..............................135

Lesson Five: The Great Sanitary Cheese………………..………………… 145

Lesson Six: Union Now and Forever! What did ‘Union’ Mean? ................157

Lesson Seven: Rally ‘Round the Flag Boys: The California Hundred and

Battalion .........................................................................................................170

Lesson 8: O Captain! My Captain! The Assassination of President

Abraham Lincoln. ..........................................................................................197

Bibliography ..............................................................................................................218

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Chapter One Introduction

The Civil War inhabits a distinctive position in America’s historical

consciousness. As soon as the war ended, historians began to wrestle with

interpretations of the war’s causes and consequences. The debate was not confined to

historians; both Union and Confederate proponents fought to shape the nation’s historical

memory of the conflict. Chapter two discusses how Civil War memory studies have

explored connections between the war and American history post-Reconstruction. As

Americans grappled with the implications of the war; they solidified their commitment to

the nation-state, while pushing racial equality into the background. The war’s causes and

consequences remain controversial even now. Ongoing debates about the rights of the

states versus the powers of the federal government and the sensitive nature of race

relations in America reflect the continuing legacy of the Civil War in American life.

Over the past thirty years, historians of the Civil War have moved beyond the

generals on the battlefields and the politicians in the capitals and sought to tell the stories

of people who had previously been ignored as historical subjects. Social historians have

combed through the archives searching for sources that recover the “voices” of these

individuals. According to Gary W. Gallagher, “One explores what it [the Civil War]

meant to Americans who lived through it. This avenue of inquiry requires seeking letters,

diaries, newspapers, books, broadsides, illustrative materials, and other evidence

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produced at the time.”1 Recently historians have paid closer attention to the role of

civilians on the home front. Morale on the battlefront and home front were directly

connected. Civilians relied on newspapers to keep them apprised of victories and losses

on the field of battle. Likewise, generals and political leaders relied on newspapers to

keep them updated on the mood of the civilian populations.

Despite efforts to write a more inclusive history, the stories of the Union states

have typically been told with an eastern emphasis. Historians have often dismissed or

neglected California’s role in the war due to the state’s great distance from the theaters of

war. The scholarship that does exist regarding California and the Civil War tends to

concentrate on the state’s military involvement. The focus on military contributions has

obscured the complexity of California’s involvement in the Civil War. Chapter three tells

the story of Sacramento’s support of the Union during the Civil War; a narrative of a

vibrant community, deeply engaged in the progress and outcome of the war and focused

on claiming their place in the union of states by sharing in their nation’s necessary

sacrifices. The research component of this project relies on a close analysis of

Sacramento’s two daily newspapers, the Bee and the Union, to argue that Sacramentans

demonstrated their deep commitment to the Union when they pledged their lives, time,

and money to sustain the Union war effort.

1 Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

2011), 41.

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The Civil War represents both a “symbolic and actual dividing line in American

history.”2 Educators usually organize American history courses with the Civil War as a

seminal event. Universities often arrange their survey-level history courses with one

semester encompassing the colonial period through Reconstruction and the second

semester continuing from Reconstruction through the present. California’s secondary

schools follow a similar model. While 8th grade content standards extend from

Independence to 1914, the 11th grade content standards focus on the twentieth century.

A thorough understanding of the Civil War provides students with a foundation for later

learning. For example, 11th grade teachers who seek to contextualize the Civil Rights

movement for their students must trace its origins back to the Civil War and

Reconstruction.

Each successive generation remembers and interprets history differently and in

the process finds its own lessons in the past. History instruction has powerful

implications for the nation as our remembered past shapes the nation’s identity in the

present. As educator and historian Frederick Drake has observed, “History teaching is a

co-investigation in which teacher and students shape and reshape their interpretations of

the past.”3 History instruction in California’s classrooms is moving away from rote

memorization of isolated facts and toward in-depth investigations of historical questions

2 “The Civil War Repressible or Irrepressible?” In Interpretations of American History: Volume 1

through Reconstruction, Francis G. Couvares, Martha Couvares, Gerald N. Grob, George Athan Billias, eds. (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009), 309.

3 Frederick D. Drake and Sarah Drake Brown, “A Systematic Approach to Improve Students’

Historical Thinking.” History Teacher 36, no. 4, (August 2003): 471.

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as teachers begin to conceptualize implementation of the Common Core State Standards

(CCSS). Chapter three challenges California’s American history teachers to reclaim

California’s Civil War history and introduce a new generation of students to this diverse

and dynamic story.

Appendix A provides history teachers with a variety of tools that support the use

of primary sources in the history classroom, including rationales and guidelines for using

primary sources as well as analysis sheets for specific types of documents. Both content

and historical thinking objectives should guide teachers when they select primary sources

to use with their students. Simply exposing students to primary sources does not promote

historical thinking. Teachers must explicitly instruct and model historical thinking as

students embark upon primary source analysis. In addition, teachers should provide

scaffolds within their primary source instruction as middle school students can exhaust

their cognitive abilities when reading a document, leaving them unable to engage in

analysis.4

Appendix B contains lessons that model how teachers can meet both content

objectives while teaching historical thinking skills using primary sources.

Teachers who model historical thinking aloud can demonstrate for students how

historians weave context by drawing on background knowledge and engaging in a

“dialogue” with sources. If teachers hope to facilitate a “co-investigation” in their history

classrooms, however, they must allow students to practice historical thinking by

4 Jeffery D. Nokes, “Recognizing and Addressing the Barriers to Adolescents' "’Reading Like

Historians.’" The History Teacher 44, no. 3, (May 2011): 380-383.

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themselves. Students need opportunities to read a wide range of historical sources,

grapple with, and construct ideas for themselves.5 Students who can read conflicting

accounts of events, construct an interpretation of those events, and articulate and defend

their interpretation are not only preparing to succeed in their history classrooms, but also

preparing to participate fully in our democratic society.

5 Anne Goudvis and Stephanie Harvey, “Teaching for Historical Literacy: When teachers mesh

content-rich curriculum with good literacy practices, history lessons become meaningful.” Educational Leadership 69, no. 6 (March 2012): 52-57.

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Chapter Two

Who Remembers Memorial Day?

Few Americans today remember the origins of Memorial Day. In the twenty-first

century, Memorial Day opens the summer season with a long weekend generally

associated with shopping and barbecues. The original intent of Memorial Day was very

different. First celebrated by the newly freed slaves of Charleston, South Carolina in

1865, Memorial Day’s remembrance of the deceased soldiers of the Civil War evolved

into “Decoration Day.” Eventually Memorial Day became a part of the reconciliation

movement between the North and the South. Does it matter that the holiday’s origins

were forgotten long ago?

It has been said that each one of us is an historian, creating versions of the past

that make sense to us based on our personal experiences.1 Each successive generation

remembers and interprets history differently and in the process finds its own lessons in

the past. According to Michael Kammen in The Mystic Chords of Memory: the

Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, “Wars have played a fundamental role

in stimulating, defining, justifying, periodizing, and eventually filtering American

memories and traditions.”2 The Civil War occupies a unique place in America’s

historical consciousness. Most historians agree the Civil War may be the most

1 David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life. (Amherst,

Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 9. 2 Michael G. Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in

American Culture. (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 13.

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consequential event in American history.3 The end of the Civil War marked the

beginning of the debates regarding the meaning of the war and the legacy if left

Americans. The debate continues, and historians are not the only ones engaged in it.

In the United States, history education has always been identified with instilling

civic pride and responsibility in the nation’s youth. Thomas Jefferson was among the

first to emphasize the importance of education in a democracy. Jefferson considered

education for all to be a crucial part of the success of the "experiment" undertaken in

1776.4 Because teachers help shape the nation’s collective consciousness about historical

events, the public often scrutinizes their teaching methods. Reflecting on the

controversial nature of history instruction, historian Gary B. Nash noted, “History is a

touchstone of contemporary concerns and a mirror that we hold before us to see who we

are, where we came from, and where we are going.”5 Our individual and group identities

rely on our memories of the past. History instruction has powerful implications for the

nation. How history is taught, how our past is remembered shapes the nation’s identity in

the present.

Sectional tensions remained after the Civil War and many issues such as those

surrounding slavery or the reasons for secession remained intensely divisive. In the

1880s, Northern and Southern veterans’ groups argued over the way history textbooks


through Reconstruction, Francis G. Couvares, Martha Couvares, Gerald N. Grob, George Athan Billias, eds. (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009), 324.

4 Steven Tozer, Guy Senese, and Paul Violas, School and Society: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2009), 30-31.

5 Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the

Teaching of the Past. (New York: Vintage Books, 1997, 2000), 22.

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presented the Civil War to America’s youth. Eventually publishers issued separate

Northern and Southern versions of U.S. history textbooks.6 In the 1960s, Americans

witnessed the juxtaposition of the Civil War Centennial celebrations with the events of

the Civil Rights Movement. In the twenty-first century, Civil War sesquicentennial

observances began during the administration of the first African American president in

United States history. Remembering the Civil War gives Americans the opportunity to

examine the legacies of the war that still impact us today.

As a seminal event in American history, the Civil War and its lasting effects have

remained themes in popular culture. Many contemporary historians engaged in the study

of public memory of the Civil War have identified four reoccurring themes: the Lost

Cause, Unionist, Emancipationist, and Reconciliationist traditions.7 Novels, films, and

music have revisited these themes countless times. Public monuments, memorials, battle

sites, and reenactments commemorate the people and events that deemed significant in

the conflict. Historians have struggled to reconcile scholarly discourse with the influence

of popular culture upon the public’s historical consciousness.

Memory studies of the Civil War date back only as far as the late 1970s; however,

some historians understood the importance of historical memory much earlier. Historian

and philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction, in the 1930s. While Du

6 Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn, History on Trial, 19-20. 7 Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape

What We Know about the Civil War. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina, 2008), 2. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2. Blight identifies three themes; emancipationist, reconciliationist, and white supremacist.

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Bois was not engaging in a memory study, he clearly understood the role historians could

play in shaping the public’s perceptions of events. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois

makes the argument that his fellow historians have whitewashed history in the interest of

making it more pleasant for the public. He angrily criticized those who perpetuate the

“…idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over,” because in doing so

“…history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble

nations, but it does not tell the truth.”8

Du Bois cautioned historians about the dangers of using history as propaganda.

“We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in

order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.”9 In his monograph,

Du Bois attacked many of the leading historical theories of his time as well as the

historians who promoted such theories. Du Bois characterized the Dunning School

historians trained at Columbia University as poor researchers who selected only the facts

that supported their theses. He derided Ulrich B. Philips for having created the “fairy tale

of a beautiful South slave civilization.”10 Du Bois named Progressive historians Charles

and Mary Beard as examples of writers who, “…tend to discuss American slavery so

impartially that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody is right.”11

Du Bois was making a point about the field of history in general, but writing during the

8 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction. (Millwood, New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization

Ltd., 1935, 1976), 722.

9 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 727. 10 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 720.

11 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 714-715.

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Jim Crow era, he was also defiantly demanding the inclusion of African Americans in the

narrative of American history. He sought to restore the actions of African Americans to

the collective memory.

Using modern terms, Du Bois argued for the return of the emancipationist vision

over that of the reconciliationist vision. For Du Bois, “The unending tragedy of

Reconstruction is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance,

its national and worldwide implications.”12 Once again, Du Bois emphasized the point

that emancipation and full citizenship for African Americans should have been – should

be – the legacy of the Civil War, not the restoring of the Union. The emphasis on the rise

of the nation-state ignored the plight of the freedmen, recognizing the triumph and

ignoring the tragedy.

Du Bois was ahead of his time in the historiography. With the exception of C.

Vann Woodward, most contemporary scholars largely ignored Du Bois’s work during his

lifetime and many decades passed before other scholars accepted and utilized his ideas.

Woodward, a revisionist historian, wrote to Du Bois to thank him for the insight he

gained by reading Black Reconstruction. As a revisionist historian, Woodward

recognized race as a subject with profound moral implications during the Reconstruction

era and beyond.13

Thomas J. Pressly’s Americans Interpret Their Civil War, also offers a revisionist

view of the Civil War’s legacy. Believing the war involved issues of enduring

12 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 72, 708.

13 “The Reconstruction Era: How Large in Scope?” In Interpretations of American History: Volume 1 through Reconstruction, F. G. Couvares, M. Couvares, Grob, Billias, eds., 352-353.

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significance for United States history, Pressly wrote from the vantage point of the Civil

War’s centennial. The monograph presents a comprehensive historiography of how

historians have interpreted the war in the one hundred years since hostilities began.

Pressly explores, “…the ideas and attitudes held by both laymen and by trained scholars

when they selected and arranged the evidence into interpretations of the causes of the

Civil War.”14 Pressly’s monograph traces the evolution of historical thought – from the

sectionalist views expressed immediately following the war, to the theory of Irrepressible

Conflict; from the rise of professionally trained historians to the Nationalist Tradition;

from the Progressives to the New South; from the theory of Repressible Conflict to the

Revisionists.

Writing a new forward in 1965 as an addendum to material originally published in

1961, Pressly recounts the story of an African American woman from New Jersey serving

as a delegate to the Civil War Centennial Commission. She was denied a room at the

headquarters hotel in Charleston, South Carolina in 1961. The delegates were in

Charleston to commemorate the Confederates firing on the Union-held Fort Sumter. In

1961, two meetings were eventually held – one for southern delegates of the Centennial

Commission – and one for its northern delegates. Pressly took note of the irony of the

incident, which seemed to, “recreate the tensions of one hundred years earlier.”15 Pressly

was no doubt aware of the Civil Rights Movement and his conclusions were informed by

the history he found himself experiencing. Pressly observed, “The writer of history is

14 Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War. (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 12.

15 Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War, 8.

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himself part of the historical process, his own personal background is a factor in his

understanding of history.”16 Although Pressly demonstrated his awareness of the

interaction between individuals and historical memory, he did not turn his focus to the

topic. The questions of how each individual creates historical meaning and how such

meaning is created by societies collectively would prove to be a very fruitful topic for

later historians.

The subfield of memory studies has demonstrated that history, as the public

understands it, is a dynamic, ever-changing process. As David Lowenthal explains in his

monograph The Past is a Foreign Country, “…historical knowledge is by its very nature

collectively produced and shared; historical awareness implies group activity.”17 Civil

War memory studies were inspired by the emergence of memory studies in the

international historical profession and have been influenced by other “trends such as

multiculturalism, postmodernism, and the rise of cultural and social history.”18 The

Journal of American History noted the trend in 1989 and devoted an entire issue to

historical memory that was later published as Memory and American History. David

Thelen writes in the book’s introduction, “The historical study of memory opens exciting

new opportunities to ask fresh questions of our conventional sources and topics and to

16 Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War, 16.

17 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge

University Press, 1985), 213. 18 Matthew J. Grow, "The Shadow of the Civil War: A Historiography of Civil War Memory."

American Nineteenth Century History 4, no. 2 (Summer2003 2003): 78. America: History & Life, EBSCOhost (accessed April 18, 2010)

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create points for fresh synthesis.”19 In the thirty years since the book’s publication,

numerous historians have contributed to the historiography of Civil War memory.

History and memory function to meet the present needs of society. Historians

can learn a great deal by studying which events and people a society chooses to

memorialize. In addition to Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country, Paul

Connerton’s How Societies Remember, and George Lipsitz’s Time Passages: Collective

Memory and American Popular Culture, have influenced the thinking of Civil War

historians by exploring the construction of historical memory in general. Connerton

writes in the preface to How Societies Remember, “Who owns history? Everyone and no

one –which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of

discovery.”20 Historians of memory unpack the assumptions of the public’s historical

knowledge and explore how these assumptions became part of historical memory in the

first place.

John Bodnar’s Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and

Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, provides an example of a historian beginning to

bridge the study of historical memory in general with concerns specific to the Civil War.

Bodnar is a social historian whose interest in the topic of public memory shows how the

historiography moved away from the “great man” narrative toward studies of the impact

of everyday citizens. Bodnar examines the connections between everyday life and

political issues. Patriotism and memory are viewed as subjects that link the everyday

19 David Thelen, Memory and American History. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990), vii.

20 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember. (New York: Cambridge University Press,1989), xix.

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lives of ordinary people to the larger world of politics.21 Bodnar uses the Civil War

Centennial as one of the vehicles for his study of the political implications of patriotism

and public memory.

Writing thirty years after Thomas Pressly, Bodnar’s work answers some of the

questions Pressly seemed ready to ask in 1965 in his preface to Americans Interpret Their

Civil War. For Bodnar, the state has a political interest in patriotism; the strengthening

of nationalist feeling. The Civil War Centennial Commission sought to reduce the

complexity of the issues surrounding the Civil War so that all Americans could enjoy the

proceedings free of any controversy. According to Bodnar, the commission needed to

establish common ground so that sectional rivalries were not revived. To this end, the

heroism of both sides became the focus of commemoration. “The complexity of all

combatants and of the past itself was reduced to one symbol that would best serve the

interests of those who promoted the power of the state in the present.”22 Ultimately,

Bodnar views the Civil War Centennial Commission’s events as evidence of the

superiority of the nation-state.

Some historians have reached further into the past to consider the formation of

southern and northern nationalism during the Civil War period. Drew Gilpin Faust’s The

Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South,

studies the Confederacy’s efforts to create a common national identity. The

Revolutionary War, Christianity, and slavery were all components of Confederate

21 John E. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), xii.

22 Bodnar, Remaking America , 208-209.

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nationalism according to Faust. Confederates claimed the South had a unique past which

resulted in a culture superior to that of the North. Faust argues that all nationalist

movements require a self-conscious process in which culture is created, and that the

Confederacy was no different in this regard.23 Susan Mary Grant’s North Over South:

Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era, contends that

Northerners also created a separate nationalistic ideology, but that this sectional

ideological shift took place prior to the Civil War. Grant documents how Northerners

engaged in a quest for self-definition that utilized the South as a negative reference point.

The North developed an ideology that made Northern ideals synonymous with American

ideals. According to Grant, “…Northerners managed to exclude the South from their

vision of American national identity. They came to rely on the South as the essential

negative reference point in the construction of that identity.”24 Because the North won

the war and the Union was preserved, the North’s vision of American nationalism

prevailed.

Michael Kammen’s The Mystic Chords of Memory, published in 1993, has had a

pervasive impact upon the study of how historical memory is constructed. Kammen’s

influential monograph about America’s collective memory includes a chapter on the Civil

War entitled, “The Civil War Remembered – But Unreconciled.” In this chapter,

Kammen argues traditions involving the Civil War sprang from tensions between

“oppositional possibilities: the imperative of remembering versus intransigence; the

23 Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 5.

24 Susan Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 56.

16

virtues of a New South versus the romance of a Lost Cause; and conflicting perceptions

of patriotism versus treason.”25 Furthermore, Kammen asserts that politicization of the

war’s memory and selective memory “…kept African Americans outside the mainstream

of retrospective consciousness.”26 Kammen’s theses regarding the tensions shaping Civil

War memory and the exclusion of African Americans from popular memory are further

expanded in the work of scholars such as Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling

Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, David W. Blight,

Race and Reunion and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil

War, and Gary W. Gallagher, Lee and His Generals in War and Memory, and How

Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War. The

contributions of each of these scholars to the historiography will be discussed in greater

depth later.

David Glassberg’s Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life, and

Eric Foner’s Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World, include

sections on Civil War memory as part of a larger discussion of how the public’s

perceptions of historical events often differ from those of historians’. Looking at the

developing historiography of memory, Glassberg notes, “…the new studies primarily

seek to understand the interrelationships between different versions of the past in the

public arena.”27 Both historians address the impact of filmmaker Ken Burns’s

25 Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory, 13. 26 Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory, 121. 27 Glassberg, Sense of History, 8.

17

documentary series The Civil War which first aired on public television in the fall of

1990. Burns’s series was well received by viewers, but received its share of criticism

from academic historians. Burns’s series was his generation’s Gone With the Wind. It

seems no historian can discuss the influence of popular culture or collective memory on

the Civil War without taking a stand on Burns’s documentary. The academic discussion

generated by Burns’s series and the public’s response to it generated a book of essays;

Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond, edited by Robert Brent Toplin.

Burns’s The Civil War offers an example of the intersection between academic

and popular history. Both Glassberg and Foner take issue with Burns’s interpretation of

the Civil War. Glassberg conducted a study of viewers who wrote letters to Burns

regarding the series. In Glassberg’s judgment, few viewers saw any interpretation in

Burns’s series and many “…praised Burns for offering what they believed was an

unbiased picture of the conflict.”28 Glassberg maintains that most viewers saw no bias

because Burns did not challenge their understanding of the war and steered away from

controversial topics. Glassberg charges that by ignoring social history, Burns created a

comfortable history that everyone could enjoy. This criticism echoes W.E.B. Du Bois’s

point in Black Reconstruction about historians writing pleasant history, with one

important difference: Du Bois was chastising his fellow historians. Glassberg, on the

other hand, is noting the difference between how popular ideas about history differ from

how the historical profession views those same topics.

28 Glassberg, Sense of History,102.

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By the 1980s the new social history resulted in a profound reorientation of the

historiography. As Connerton writes in How Societies Remember, “New scholarship

produced a long-overdue diversification of public history…and a remarkable expansion

of the cast of characters included in historical narratives and the methods employed in

historical analysis.”29 Perhaps the academic response to Burns’s series was so strong and

so negative because historians were dismayed that the public’s consciousness had not

expanded to include this “new cast of characters” in the historical narrative of collective

memory. Foner also criticizes Burns’s interpretation; focusing in particular on the war’s

legacy. He questioned why Burns spent only two minutes of screen time on

Reconstruction; concluding that Burns chose to ignore the failures of Reconstruction

because it lacked an outcome that Americans could be proud of. According to Foner,

“The road to reunion was paved with the broken dreams of black Americans, and the

betrayal of those dreams was indispensible to the process of reunion.”30 The film makes

no attempt to transform the reconciliation narrative. It maintains the nation-state narrative

of reunion that Bodnar discusses in Remaking America. For these historians, Burns’s

film was successful with the public because it validated the public’s historical

“memories” of the war.

“Historical memory is unavoidably selective and …historical traditions are

“’invented’” and manipulated. Forgetting some aspects of the past is as much a part of

29 Connerton, How Societies Remember, x.

30 Eric Foner, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World. (New York: Hill

and Wang, 2003), 200.

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historical understanding as remembering others.”31 The work of the historians of

memory is to determine why history is deliberately forgotten – to investigate the social

and cultural forces that facilitate forgetting. Even in the late twentieth century, it was

easier for Americans to focus on the veterans of the Blue and the Gray shaking hands at

the Gettysburg Reunion held in 1913 than to revisit the lost opportunities afforded by

Reconstruction.

Historians’ discussion of Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary underscores the

importance of popular culture in shaping the historical knowledge of American society.

Since the 1980s several scholars have focused on the impact of popular culture, films in

particular, when evaluating how historical memory is created. Films such as Birth of a

Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939) have had a lasting impact upon how

Americans remember the Civil War and Reconstruction. The work of Edward D.C.

Campbell, Jr., The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth, Jim Cullen, The

Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past, and Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won,

Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the

Civil War, show the evolution of the historiography of popular culture’s impact upon

public memory of the Civil War.

Campbell’s survey of films whose subjects are the antebellum, wartime, or

Reconstruction South was written in the early 1980s, when memory studies were just

beginning to emerge in the United States. Campbell views Hollywood as basically

conservative since the film producers’ primary concern is to release profitable films.

31 Foner, Who Owns History?, 201.

20

Campbell devotes time and attention to Birth of a Nation due to its importance in

establishing the Lost Cause mythology in film; however, he is primarily concerned with

films released in the 1930s and 1940s.

These films built upon the literary traditions of authors such as Thomas Nelson

Page who created the Plantation School of sentimental literature. In this idealized South,

“… ambiance, racial fidelity, and courtly idealism” reigned.32 The films represented a

collection of beliefs that became a part of public memory; slavery is seen as a benign

institution, the war was fought by heroic men on both sides, and Reconstruction was a

disaster because it gave the freedmen rights they were not prepared for. Campbell

pronounces the impact of the mythology created by these films enormous and argues that

although “produced for entertainment, the make-believe became believed.”33 Campbell

shows that the Lost Cause mythology of the Old South entered the public’s consciousness

through films and became part of historical memory.

Jim Cullen’s investigation into the influence of popular culture on Civil War

memory, The Civil War in Popular Culture, was published ten years after Campbell’s

focus on Hollywood films. In his introduction, Cullen claims many people learn about

history from popular culture. This is an observation that history teachers at all levels can

attest to; as students often base their knowledge of historical events on movies they have

seen. Cullen places himself within the sub-discipline of the history of memory and cites

George Lipsitz’s Time Passages, John Bodnar’s Remaking America, Gaines M. Foster’s

32 Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr., The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth. (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 29.

33 Campbell, Jr., The Celluloid South , 28.

21

Ghosts of the Confederacy, and Michael Kammen’s The Mystic Chords of Memory in his

notes.

Cullen widens the scope of his study beyond Hollywood; investigating literature

in the form of Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln biography and Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone

With the Wind, Southern rock ‘n’ roll, and Civil War re-enactors, as well as Ken Burns’s

documentary series The Civil War and the feature film Glory. Cullen’s interest lies in,

“…making revealing juxtapositions and suggestive observations” that reveal not only

Americans’ understanding of the past, but also their concerns in the present.34 Cullen

examines each product of popular culture – book, movie, music – both for their influence

on the public’s understanding of history and for the cultural and social forces that

influenced the writers, producers, and musicians who created them.

Cullen analyzes Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind using the lens of

gender, race, and class, noting the similarities between Mitchell’s protagonist and the

author herself. Mitchell was a product of the New South; an educated woman who saw

women gain the vote in her lifetime, a debutante who was rejected by the Junior League

for being too “fast”, and a white woman comfortable with the status quo of racial

segregation. Cullen connects Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln and its emphasis on

strong federal power with support for the New Deal. The Academy Award-winning film,

Glory (1989), a fictionalized account of the black soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th

Regiment represents the Civil War as a “good war” in contrast with the ambiguities of

34 Jim Cullen, The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past. (Washington, D.C.:

Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 3.

22

Vietnam. The film also attempted to incorporate the larger canvas of history expanded by

the social historians since the 1960s. Cullen credits Glory with developing themes

common in the academic scholarship of African Americans and the Civil War.35 Cullen’s

investigation of major twentieth century popular culture contributions adds to the

dialogue regarding the difference between how history is understood by academics and

how it is understood by the public.

Gary Gallagher’s Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten, considers films and popular

art from the last twenty years in an attempt to chronicle how American’s collective

memory of the Civil War has changed. Gallagher’s monograph serves as an update of

Campbell’s work on the Lost Cause interpretation in the films of the 1930s and 1940s.

Gallagher describes four traditional interpretations of the war; the Lost Cause, the Union

Cause, Emancipation, and Reconciliation. Proceeding from the premise that films

influence perceptions of historical events and teach Americans about the past, Gallagher

notes a change in Hollywood’s interpretations of the Civil War after 1989. Gallagher

argues that since 1989 and the release of Glory, Hollywood has embraced the

Emancipation interpretation with Reconciliation second, but far behind. The cause of the

Union is largely missing in contemporary films – an oversight Gallagher finds very

troubling. Arguing that, “Even moderately successful movies attract a far larger audience

than the most widely read nonfiction books dealing with the conflict,” Gallagher sees

35 Cullen, The Civil War in Popular Culture, 161.

23

merit in exploring how films reinforce our historical memories and the insights about

current events that they reveal.36

Much attention has been paid, by both historians and the public, to films and

novels that depict the Civil War. Popular entertainment such as Ken Burns’s The Civil

War, engaged audiences and resulted in copious amount of academic discourse; proving

that sometimes nonacademic contributions advance the scholarship as well. Tony

Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, is

another such contribution. Horowitz is a journalist, not a trained historian, and his interest

in the subject of Civil War remembrance is personal. Fascinated by the conflict as long

as he can remember, the Confederates in the attic of the title refer to murals depicting

Civil War battles that Horowitz painted on the attic walls in his childhood home.

Horowitz’s quest centers on re-enactors and the ideologies and rationales of those

who still subscribe to the Lost Cause interpretation of the war. Through a series of visits

to important Civil War sites, Horowitz’s book examines how the past is remembered and

forgotten by various groups and individuals and the implications of historical memory on

Americans’ collective interpretation of the past. “Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore

two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and irreconcilable. The past

had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things

past.”37 Horowitz’s book reminds historians that despite the repudiation of the Lost

36 Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten,10.

37 Tony Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. (New

York: G. K. Hall & Company, 2000), 208.

24

Cause mythology in academia, it is still exists as a valid interpretation for some

Americans; the war for ideology continues to be fought.

Confederates in the Attic confronts the issue of America’s racial divide

repeatedly. In this respect it mirrors the most recent trends in the historiography. Kirk

Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-

Century America, and David W. Blight, Race and Reunion and Beyond the Battlefield:

Race, Memory and the American Civil War, are two historians who regard race as the

central question when dissecting Civil War memory. Savage’s monograph focuses on the

ways in which public sculpture and monuments tell the story of the war and

emancipation. Savage’s discussion of race fills in a gap in Bodnar’s Remaking America

that explored monuments and public spaces, but dealt with race only as a peripheral

subject.

For Savage, race is at the forefront. An unprecedented number of monuments

were commissioned in the decades after the Civil War largely through the impetus of

“ordinary” people. These monuments tell the story of the war for all to see, powerfully

reinforcing the images and symbols of the war and creating collective memory. Savage

digs deeply into the stories behind many of America’s most enduring Civil War

monuments. Finalizing a design required the consensus of the community, so

monuments provide a literal representation of a community’s historical memory at a

particular moment in time. Depicting the emancipation of African Americans proved

especially problematic. How to reconcile freedom with slavery? How to sculpt the

bodies of African Americans given the racial attitudes at the time? How to include

25

African Americans in monuments in public spaces while struggling to answer the

question of how to include them as citizens in the United States?

Savage emphasizes how rarely African American soldiers are memorialized; only

three monuments from the nineteenth century showed blacks in military service. The

Shaw Memorial in Boston, dedicated in 1897, was exceptional for its ability to “elevate

the white hero without demoting the black troops.”38 Savage suggests that his study

“bridges the inner and outer realms” combining public consciousness with public policy

to examine our attitudes about race. Frequently cited by other historians, Savage’s

monograph has made a significant impact on the Civil War historiography.

Blight’s Race and Reunion, published in 2001, remains a touchstone monograph

in this field. Memory as a dynamic force is central to Blight’s narrative. Blight’s

account describes the fifty years after the Civil War – a time when memories competed

and struggled for their place in history. Blight views every memory through the prism of

race. He argues that race was and is the “problem” which determines what Americans

choose to remember and what they choose to forget in regards to the Civil War. Blight

identifies three visions of the Civil War; the reconciliationist, the white supremacist, and

the emancipationist.39 Each vision had its proponents and Blight allows them to voice

their views – the surprising, but genuine conciliatory tones of Walt Whitman and Horace

Greeley; the white supremacist hatred of Jefferson Davis and Mildred Lewis Rutherford;

the fierce emancipationist views of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois – all are

38 Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 203.

39 Blight, Race and Reunion, 2.

26

heard in Race and Reunion. As the visions clashed and collided, a national narrative was

shaped. Not only America’s understanding of the past was at stake; the future of race

relations in America was determined by the vision that prevailed.

Blights’ narrative begins and ends with the reunion at Gettysburg in 1913. The

photograph of the Union and Confederate soldiers shaking hands across the stone wall

serves as proof of the triumph of the reconciliationist/white supremacist vision. The

reunion at Gettysburg proclaims the voices that succeeded in shaping the nation’s

memories of the war. The voices of the black participants in the war are not heard at the

reunion, nor were they heard in American society in general. For African Americans

living under Jim Crow laws the war had been a bloody struggle for the promise of

freedom – a promise that remained unfulfilled. Blight’s most important contribution with

Race and Reunion is to show that despite deliberate attempts to bury the emancipationist

vision; it was never completely removed from the American memory. Americans such as

Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois kept it alive, allowing later generations and

leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. to see the promise begin to be fulfilled. In the decade

since the publication of Race and Reunion, historians writing about Civil War memory in

regards to race, emancipation, or reconciliation have found it necessary to engage with

Blight’s central argument.

Another important trend in the historiography involves gender studies. Nina

Silber’s, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South 1865-1900, analyzes

gender imagery to explain the process of reconciliation from the Northern point of view.

Silber’s links social and political developments in the Gilded Age to changes in how

27

Northerners portrayed the war and the South.40 The “romance” of reconciliation is

exemplified by the Southern belle marrying a Union soldier. The Old South comes to

epitomize grace and beauty – a more civilized past.

Silber’s work, which focuses on the North’s changing views of the conflict, fills a

gap in the historiography. When Silber was writing in the early 1990s, scholars had

overwhelmingly focused on the South’s memories and experiences.41 Silber’s attention

to the North, as well as Blight and Savage’s more balanced approach; attempting to

understand both Northern and Southern attitudes toward memories of the war, revealed

a shift toward greater emphasis on the social and political factors that shaped the North’s

views of reconciliation.

W.E.B. Du Bois, born in 1868, witnessed the era of reconciliation and its

consequences for African Americans. His was a lone voice for many years, however,

now any attempt to explain reconciliation on the part of the North must confront racism

as a key factor. Silber writes, “Northerners…replaced their wartime concerns for

southern blacks with a less political and more sentimental interest in the African

American as a picturesque element on the Southern landscape or as a pathetic and

entertaining performer.”42 This sentimental picture of African Americans endured in the

40 Paula Baker, "Book reviews." Journal of American History 81, no. 4 (March 1995): 1734.

America: History & Life, EBSCOhost (accessed May 19, 2010). 41 Grow, "The Shadow of the Civil War: A Historiography of Civil War Memory," 88.

42 Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South 1865-1900. (Chapel Hill,

North Carolina: North Carolina University Press, 1993), 6.

28

American memory as a companion to the reconciliation and Lost Cause visions of the

war.

Civil War memory studies continue to produce new insights into topics that have

already been extensively studied. Using the lens of memory to examine the public’s

historical understanding of Ulysses S. Grant, Joan Waugh’s U.S. Grant: American Hero,

American Myth, examines how Grant was perceived in his own time and how and why

our historical memory of Grant changed. How did someone who had been highly

regarded in his own time come to be rated as one of the least effective presidents ever?

Waugh’s monograph builds upon Blight’s work in Race and Reunion; she documents the

shifting legacy of the meaning of the Civil War. For Waugh, Americans’ memory of

Grant is intertwined with that of Union. The failures of Reconstruction during Grant’s

administration and the ability of the Lost Cause ideology to overshadow his

accomplishments in preserving the Union meant historical memory shifted away from his

accomplishments as a general and toward his failures as a president. As Americans

achieved sectional reunion, reconciliation took precedence and the cause of Union was no

longer emphasized.

Another recent publication, Gary W. Gallagher’s The Union War, attempts to

reopen a dialogue with historians about the importance of Union. Gallagher agrees that

slavery was the primary cause of the war and that emancipation was an important result

of the Union’s defeat of the South, however, he argues strongly that many contemporary

historians have failed to account for Union as a primary factor in the North’s willingness

to engage in a long and bloody struggle with the South. According to Gallagher,

29

“Recapturing how the concept of Union resonated and reverberated throughout the loyal

states in the Civil War era is critical to grasping northern motivation. Devotion to the

Union functioned as a bonding agent among Americans who believed, as a citizenry and

a nation under the Constitution, they were destined for greatness on the world stage.”43

In short, today’s historians, who have been trained in the post-modern era, have found

emancipation to be the most compelling narrative of the war while the majority of Union

soldiers found emancipation to be merely a useful tool in winning the war and preserving

the Union, not the foundation of their motivation.

As David Thelen noted in Memory and American History, “The struggle for

possession and interpretation of memory is rooted in the conflict and interplay among

social, political, and cultural interests and values in the present.”44 Numerous historians

have contributed essays to compilations that explore these intersections in regards to

Civil War memory. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan edited The Myth of the Lost

Cause and Civil War History, which considers the creation of the Lost Cause ideology

from numerous angles. Nolan describes the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War

as, “… an American legend, an American version of great sagas like Beowulf and the

Song of Roland.”45 The essayists consider how the Lost Cause tradition facilitated

43 Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

2011), 46. 44 David Thelen, Memory and American History, xvii. 45 Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History.

(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000), 12.

30

sectional reunion and how it came to represent, at least for a time, the nation’s memory of

the war.

Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh edited The Memory of the Civil War in American

Culture, with the goal of “…thinking holistically about Civil War memory.”46 David

Blight, Gary Gallagher, Joan Waugh, and James M. McPherson are among the historians

who investigate topics ranging from key individuals (Grant and Lee) to southern

textbooks and children’s literature. Waugh also edited Wars within a War: Controversy

and Conflict over the American Civil War. This collection of essays by historians such as

Drew Gilpin Faust, Stephanie McCurry, and Joseph T. Glatthaar focuses on struggles to

define the meanings of the Civil War. The essayists examine how issues of gender,

politics, class, and race affect how those meanings have changed over time.

Some historians are particularly prolific in this field. William Fitzhugh Brundage

edited Where these Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, and

authored a book of essays, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. Where

these Memories Grow examines the importance of Southern memory in creating regional

and individual identities. The book reaches back to the early republic and traces the

evolution of Southern identity through the years of the Confederacy and beyond, into the

turn of the century. Brundage writes in the introduction, “The identity of any group goes

hand in hand with the continuous creation of its sense of the past.”47 Brundage’s The

46 Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds. The Memory of Civil War in American Culture. (Chapel Hill,

North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 259. 47 William Fitzhugh Brundage, ed. Where these Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern

Identity. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 9.

31

Southern Past attempts to fill in the gap regarding the black historical narrative. Noting

that too often Southern identity is assumed to be a white identity, Brundage explores the

ways in which white and black memories competed for space in both the emotional and

physical landscape of Southern historical memory in the hundred years between the Civil

War and the Civil Rights Movement.

2011 marked the beginning of sesquicentennial observances of the Civil War. To

commemorate the anniversary the National Park Service published a handbook entitled

The Civil War Remembered. This slim volume aptly demonstrates the changes that have

occurred in the historiography since the late 1980s. The handbook relies on prominent

historians of the Civil War (James McPherson, James Oliver Horton, Ira Berlin, Carol

Reardon, Nina Silber, Thavolia Glymph, Eric Foner, David W. Blight, and Drew Gilpin

Faust to name a few) to “…address the military, political, racial, social, cultural, and

economic facets of the Civil War and its place in our nation’s legacy and memory.”48

The handbook tells a complex story from many vantage points. With this publication the

National Park Service seeks to bridge the gap between academia and the public, to tell

compelling stories grounded in the latest research. As the anniversary of each important

date approaches, Civil War enthusiasts will remember, revisit, and re-imagine important

sites, events, and debates related to the war.

Memory studies of the Civil War continue to yield fruitful topics for historians. It

seems likely that historians will continue to add to the historiography by focusing on

48 John Latschar and Robert K. Sutton, eds. The Civil War Remembered: Official National Park

Service Handbook. (Walsworth Publishing Company, 2011), back cover.

32

political and social concerns, examining aspects of the war in term of gender, race, and

class, and seeking to add new “characters” to the cast in the historical narrative. The

greatest contribution of Civil War memory studies is to connect the war to the rest of

American history post-Reconstruction. As Americans grappled with the implications of

the war; they solidified their commitment to the nation-state, while pushing racial

equality into the background. Continuing this scholarship, David W. Blight’s American

Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, examines the cultural clashes between the

Civil War’s Centennial Celebrations and the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1960s.

According to Blight, “In 1963, the national temper and mythology still preferred a story

of the mutual valor of the Blue and Gray to the troublesome, disruptive problem of black

and white.”49 What will sesquicentennial commemorations reveal about early twenty-

first century race relations?

In 1896, the wives and daughters of Union veterans dedicated a memorial grove

on the grounds of the California State Capitol. The grove contains trees from Civil War

battlefields and other important sites related to the war. The memorial was intended to

honor all of the war’s combatants, not just those who fought for the Union.50 In the

introduction to the influential work, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past,

French historian Pierre Nora wrote, “Memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history

49 David W. Blight, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Right Era. (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), 3. 50 California State Capitol Museum, “Memorial Grove.” http://capitolmuseum.ca.gov/

VirtualTour.aspx?Content1=1416&Content2=538&Content3=534 (accessed March 17, 2012)

33

attaches itself to events.”51 Memorial Grove connects California to the losses suffered

on the eastern battlefields. A living memorial, the grove shapes Sacramentans’

collective memory regarding California and the Civil War. How many Sacramentans are

aware of California’s contributions to the Union cause during the Civil War? Does

Memorial Grove serve as an apt monument to those contributions, or are there gaps in a

narrative that focuses on battlefield losses? As teachers of history we seek to guide our

students to a remembered experience of the past. It is a valid and important exercise to

question which memories are sustained, and which are forgotten, and why.

51 Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory:

Rethinking the French Past, Ed. Pierre Nora, 1-20, Volume 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 22.

34

Chapter Three The Great Sanitary Cheese: How Sacramentans Supported the Union during the Civil

War

On September 20, 1864, the Sacramento Bee reported that two brothers from

Marin had used 3,500 gallons of milk to create the “Great Sanitary Cheese.” 1

According to the front-page article, the Steele brothers intended to display and sell the

cheese to benefit Union soldiers through the United States Sanitary Commission.

Throughout 1864, Sacramentans were encouraged by notices in both of the city’s daily

papers, the Bee and the Union, to attended balls, picnics, and barbecues with the proceeds

benefitting the Sanitary Commission. Sacramentans’ social lives revolved around

supporting the Union war effort: even consuming cheese could prove one’s patriotism.

April 2011 marked the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of hostilities in the

American Civil War. In the coming months and years as communities around the nation

commemorate the events, sites, and people of our nation’s greatest conflict, Californians

will no doubt ask what, if any, part their state played in the events of 150 years ago?

California’s role in the war has often been dismissed or neglected by historians due to the

state’s great distance from the theaters of war. However, in addition to the long-lost

“Great Sanitary Cheese,” most will be surprised to learn that California’s and

Sacramento’s Civil War story is diverse and rich with historical implications.

Californians donated more money to the Sanitary Commission than any other loyal state

and California’s monthly gold shipments allowed the northern banks to keep the Union

financially solvent. California supported the Union war effort in ways both large and

1 “The Great Sanitary Cheese,” Sacramento Bee, September 20, 1864, page 1, column 3.

35

small, with personal sacrifices and through community involvement. Sacramentans

demonstrated their patriotism with torchlight parades and 100-gun salutes, and they

pledged their lives, time, and money to sustain the Union war effort.

Although the Civil War has long occupied the attention of historians, the advent

of the new social history in the 1960s and 1970s moved the historiography beyond the

generals on the battlefields and the politicians in the capitals and sought to tell the stories

of people that had previously been neglected by historians. Since the 1990s, social

historians have worked to incorporate gender, race, and class analysis into the

historiography. Significant work has been done by historians of women and African

Americans to advance Civil War scholarship.2 In recent years, historians have paid

closer attention to the role of civilians on the home front and each side’s motivation for

continuing a long and costly war.3 Morale on the battlefront and home front were

intertwined. To win the war, the Union had to defeat the Confederacy and repair the

broken nation. To win their independence, the Confederacy had only to destroy the loyal

states’ willingness to fight. Civilians relied on newspapers to keep them apprised of

2 “The Civil War Repressible or Irrepressible?” In Interpretations of American History: Volume

1 through Reconstruction, Francis G. Couvares, Martha Couvares, Gerald N. Grob, George Athan Billias, eds. (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009), 320-322.

3 Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

2011), Judith Geisberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), Susan Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era, (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000), Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).

36

victories and losses on the field of battle. Generals and political leaders relied on

newspapers to keep them updated on the mood of the civilian populations.

Despite efforts to be more inclusive, the stories of the loyal states have typically

been told with an eastern emphasis. The scholarship that does exist regarding California

and the Civil War tends to focus on the state’s military involvement. Relying on a close

analysis of Sacramento’s two daily newspapers, the Bee and the Union, this chapter

examines how Sacramentans reacted to the secession crisis, it explores the numerous

ways Sacramentans supported the Union war effort, and it argues Sacramentans

demonstrated their deep commitment to the Union when they promised their lives and

fortunes to preserve it.

Sectional Tensions & Union Resolutions

The Gold Rush in 1849 brought the first significant numbers of Americans to

California. California’s application to join the Union in 1849 created a crisis in Congress

because it threatened to upset the delicate balance between free and slave states. Henry

Clay’s Compromise of 1850 satisfied no one, but allowed California to enter the Union as

a free state in 1850. In 1861, California was a young state composed mainly of people

who had been born in the east or south; these new Californians brought their political

ideologies west with them. Even before statehood was granted there was a struggle for

power among two wings of the Democratic Party in California: the Southern Democrats

known as the Chivalry Democrats or “Chivs” led by William Gwin, formerly of

Mississippi, and the free-soil Democrats led by New York native David Broderick. The

political battles between Chivalry Democrats, and the free-soil Democrats had only

37

intensified in the decade since statehood.4 The Know-Nothings briefly enjoyed a

majority in the state legislature, but quickly lost influence after 1856. The Republican

Party had a poor showing in California in 1856, despite having the former hero of the

Bear Flag Revolt, John C. Fremont, on the ticket as their presidential candidate. The

Chivs remained in control of the State Legislature for most of the decade. Since the

Legislature elected the state’s senators to the U.S. Congress, California’s pro-Southern

Democratic Senators had been able to use political patronage to fill key government jobs

in the state.

Abraham Lincoln narrowly won the popular vote in California in the 1860

presidential election. During the secession crisis in the winter of 1861, California’s

loyalty to the Union was not assured. Politically, California more closely resembled a

border state than the other free states of the North. California’s Governor Downey noted

the people of California were comprised “of all portions of the Union… representing

every section of the country and every class of society.”5 In his State-of-the-State speech

delivered on January 19, 1861, Governor Downey compared California to the “Border

States” of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Delaware.6 Sacramento’s newspaper

coverage indicates some legislators were loath to take sides in a conflict that promised to

4Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York:

Vintage Books, 2007), Arthur Quinn, The Rivals: William Gwin, David Broderick, and the Birth of California. (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1994).

5 “Federal Relations,” Sacramento Bee, January 19, 1861, page 4, column 4. 6 Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee remained in the Union until after hostilities

began in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861.

38

be so divisive among their constituents. The governor advocated that California take on

the role of a mediator and possible peace maker in the secession crisis.

At the time of the Governor’s speech, the State Assembly was composed of thirty-

five Democrats, one National Democrat, one Unionist, and nineteen Republicans; forty of

the legislators were native to free-states and twenty-eight were native to slave-holding

states. In the State Senate, there were eighteen Breckenridge Democrats, one Old Line

Democrat, and five Republicans; eighteen of the legislators were native to free-states and

fifteen were native to slave-holding states.7 The previous spring California Congressman

Milton S. Latham gave a speech in Congress in which he claimed if the Union dissolved,

California would “…sustain ourselves the relations of a free and independent state.” 8

With the secession of the South seemingly inevitable following Lincoln’s election,

several Chivalry Democrats raised the possibility of California seceding from the Union

and forming a Pacific Republic. According to the San Francisco-based Daily Alta

California, the Pacific Republic would consist of California, Oregon, Washington, Utah,

New Mexico, and Nevada.9 A microcosm of the nation as a whole, California’s

legislators expressed a wide range of opinions regarding a state’s right to secession.

Discussion of a Pacific Republic or of neutrality in the event of a war between the states

7 “Who and What are our Legislators?” Sacramento Daily Union, January 19, 1861, Page 2

column 3. The Union article cited its source as the “Homographic Chart” compiled by the State Legislature.

8 Richards, The California Gold Rush, 226, 228. 9 Daily Alta California, December 8, 1860.

39

were openly and hotly debated in the State Legislature as various Union resolutions were

proposed in both legislative houses in January and debated throughout the winter.

Most Sacramentans maintained personal ties to the eastern or southern states and

followed the news about the secession crisis closely through the exchange of letters with

friends, family, and business associates, and by reading the daily newspapers, the Bee and

the Union. News printed by Sacramento’s newspapers was sent by telegraph and then

taken by Pony Express from Ft. Kearney, Nebraska to Sacramento. Mail coming by

Pony Express arrived in Sacramento two or three days a week, and took twenty days, in

good weather, to travel from the East Coast to California.10 The sectional crisis

heightened the need for information to move more quickly and by early 1861, plans were

made to connect the telegraph from the Atlantic states all the way to San Francisco,

California. Within ten months the continental telegraph was connected, and messages

could travel from New York to San Francisco in only three hours and fifteen minutes.11

The new sense of immediacy created by transcontinental telegraph connected California

more closely with events unfolding in the east.

The possibility of war occupied the minds of many Americans during the winter

of 1861. On January 30, George Wheeler Gibson wrote from Stuyvesant, New York to

D.O. Mills and Co. in Sacramento, which managed Mr. Gibson’s California business

affairs. “From the Pony Express you no doubt keep well posted up of our troubles with

the Southern states, which I trust will be at an end as soon as our new President gets the

10 “News of the Morning,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 29, 1861, page 2, column 1.

11 “Made,” Sacramento Daily Bee, October 25, 1861, page 2, column 1.

40

reins of government in his hands.”12 Gold miner George B. Campbell writing from

California to his parents in the east on February 10, had a more pessimistic tone:

“About the only excitement is the trouble in the Atlantic States which I suppose you are

posted on. It will make but little difference here how it is settled provided the union does

not bust up altogether. They are having a great deal of trouble with South Carolina at

present; it is hard telling how it may end."13 As civilians speculated about the outcome

of the secession crisis, California’s legislators struggled to make an unambiguous

official statement regarding California’s role in it.

By March 5, the State Assembly had spent fourteen days in discussion of the

Union resolutions, while the State Senate had devoted ten days to the issue.14 Tensions

grew as California and the rest of the nation waited for news of an outcome to the

standoff between the Confederates and the federals troops at Fort Sumter in Charleston,

South Carolina. On April 12, 1861, the day Confederate forces opened fire upon Fort

Sumter; the Sacramento Daily Union described an altercation in the State Assembly

between Assemblymen Conness, a Republican, and Laspeyre, a Democrat. “A very

considerable amount of sectional partisan hatred mingled in the affray yesterday,” the

Union reported. “Inkstands were thrown, and a huge bowie knife displayed in the hands

12 George Wheeler Gibson Collection, California State Library, Box 343, Folder 5. 13 George B. Campbell Collection, 1831-1910, California State Library, Box 11, Folder 4. Note:

Punctuation has been added and spelling corrected to make the excerpts easier for a modern reader to follow.

14 “News of the Morning,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 5, 1861, page 2, column 1.

41

of Laspeyre.”15 Such sectional partisan violence among the state’s legislators sent a clear

message that a neutral California was not a viable option. The news of Fort Sumter’s

surrender did not reach Sacramento until April 24, 1861 and was not reported in the city’s

newspapers until April 26, 1861. Once the news reached California, however, the time

for debate had ended and legislators and citizens alike were compelled to make clear

where their allegiances would lie.

When federal soldiers surrendered Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 15,

President Lincoln called for volunteers to enlist in the Union army. The loyal states

prepared for war. George Wheeler Gibson noted in a letter to his business manager at

D.O. Mills and Co. in Sacramento, “This universal feeling of the North seems to be in

relation of this secession question. “‘Let us have the question settled permanently now.’”

In Gibson’s opinion, “…the Administration has taken a through ticket and will not turn

back or stop over at any of the …stations.” Gibson also expressed his pleasure that

California seemed likely to remain loyal to the Union, writing, “In view of the present

trouble in our government I am delighted to know there is so strong a Union feeling in

your section of the country.”16 By May of 1861, the idea of California remaining neutral

in the coming conflict or forming a Pacific Republic was becoming less and less credible.

California’s legislature finally took a definitive stand and passed Union

resolutions on May 17, 1861, the last day of the legislative session. The final vote on

Union resolutions in the Senate resulted in, twenty-four yes votes and five no votes, in

15 “News of the Morning,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 12, 1861, page 2, column 1.

16 George Wheeler Gibson Collection, California State Library, Box 343, Folder 5.

42

the Assembly, forty-two yes votes and twelve no votes. As printed in the Sacramento

Union, the resolutions read:

That the people of California are devoted to the Constitution and Union of the United States, and will not fail in fidelity and fealty to that Constitution and Union now, the hour of trial and peril. Resolved, That California is ready to maintain the rights and honor of the National Government at home and abroad, and at all times to respond to any requisition that may be made upon her to defend the Republic against foreign and domestic foes.17

Conscious of the thousands of miles separating them from the events in the east,

California’s declaration of loyalty was a self-conscious demonstration of fidelity to the

Union, affirming its devotion to the principles of a democratic republic. For those who

believed the Union must be preserved, waging war against the Confederacy was

absolutely necessary.

Civil War historian Gary W. Gallagher argues in his recent monograph, The

Union War, that Union was the primary factor in the North’s willingness to engage in a

long and bloody struggle with the South. According to Gallagher, “Recapturing how the

concept of Union resonated and reverberated throughout the loyal states in the Civil War

era is critical to grasping northern motivation. Devotion to the Union functioned as a

bonding agent among Americans who believed, as a citizenry and a nation under the

Constitution, they were destined for greatness on the world stage.”18 Sacramento’s two

17 “News of the Morning,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 22, 1861, page 2, column 1. 18 Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

2011), 46. Gallagher’s work provides a very readable and instructive historiography that reviews Civil War scholarship over the past forty years. I am greatly indebted to Professor Gallagher. Reading the Union War and attending the Gilder Lehrman seminar, “The American Civil War: Origins and Consequences,” that he led in the summer of 2011, had a tremendous impact on my project. Gallagher’s work helped me understand how preserving the Union functioned as the primary motivation for the loyal states engaging in

43

daily newspapers, both pro-Union and supportive of the Lincoln administration, bear out

Gallagher’s thesis. “To most of our citizens the Union has never seemed more sacred-

the flag so beautiful- the Constitution so inestimable- as they now appear, surrounded by

the clouds of danger,” the Sacramento Union’s editors commented in May of 1861.19

The United States was the oldest successful democratic republic up to that date.

Unionists believed secession was treason; rending the Union was counter to the principles

the Founders had set forth in the Constitution and the Union must be preserved despite

the costs of a civil war.

War Comes!

The bombardment and subsequent surrender of Fort Sumter to Confederate

commander P. G. T. Beauregard was widely regarded as the moment when war began

between the North and the South. Once war actually came, most Californians remained

steadfast in their commitment to the Union, because in the minds of loyal Americans, to

do otherwise was an act of treason. Americans carried a strong sense of their

exceptionalism as a nation. Americans’ participation in a democratic republic was at the

core of their claims to exceptionalism, as a result the Union must be preserved as a

vanguard against tyranny, not just in the United States, but around the world. 20

According to the Sacramento Union’s coverage of the firing on Fort Sumter, the reaction

a war with the South. See also Joan Waugh, U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: North Carolina University Press, 2009), and John Latschar and Robert K. Sutton, eds. The Civil War Remembered: Official National Park Service Handbook. (Walsworth Publishing Company, 2011).

19 “Still Enrolling,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 1, 1861, page 3, column 1. 20 Gallagher, The Union War, 68-73.

44

of Northern Californian’s newspapers was uniformly in favor of preserving the Union.

Only the San Joaquin Republican suggested Californians remain “aloof from the

fratricidal strife and remain sad spectators, ready at any time to act as mediators and

peacemakers.”21 Thousands of miles separated Californians from the strife in the east; a

sense of aloofness would be understandable, even practical, given the circumstances.

Yet, most Californians seemed determined to affirm their attachment to the Union.

The day after news of Fort Sumter’s surrender reached Sacramento, the

Sacramento Union called for the formation of Union Clubs across the state.22 Echoing

the pledge taken by the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the members of

Union Clubs promised to support the Union cause. “We, whose names are hereunto

subscribed, hereby pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to stand by the

flag of our country, defend the same against all enemies, whether foreign or domestic,

and to uphold and assist the constituted authorities of the United States in maintaining

and preserving the same.”23 Within a few weeks, a Union Club meeting held in

Sacramento had over 1,000 members in attendance.24 Joining a Union Club and signing

one’s name to a series of resolutions was a public act that signified one’s allegiance to the

federal government.

21 “Fort Sumter,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 29, 1861, page 1 column 6 & 7, page 2, column

1. 22 “A Union Club,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 27, 1861, page 2, column 1. 23 “Union Meetings in California,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 11, 1861, page 1, column 7. 24 “Union Meeting,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 20, 1861, page 3, column 1.

45

Sacramentans’ understanding of the concept of Union and California’s place

within the Union would evolve over the course of the war. Once hostilities began, public

displays of patriotism became commonplace. Young ladies walked down Sacramento’s

main commercial thoroughfare carrying American flags. Young men paraded down the

city’s streets carrying flags and playing the Star-Spangled Banner. The Sacramento Bee

reported that thirty-four star Union flags were in such high demand in the spring of 1861

that bunting had become scarce in Sacramento and San Francisco.25 Various businesses

displayed flags or mentioned the Union in their advertisements. An ad for kerosene

lamps printed in the Sacramento Bee read, “The Union Must and Shall be Preserved.

Lamps for those that need LIGHT on the subject of Secession.”26 An air of insecurity

permeated Sacramentans’ need to publicly display their patriotism. These patriotic acts

identified Sacramentans with the Union cause, but did not require any real effort or

sacrifice on the part of the Unionists. When armed conflict finally began, patriotism

would take a more serious tone.

Privately, in letters to friends and family, some Californians expressed both their

emotional investment in the preservation of the Union and their ambivalence about the

war. On June 16, 1861, Mrs. Hollis of Grass Valley, California wrote to her friend Mrs.

Edwards and shared her misgivings regarding the war. “You wanted to know what we

think of the times. I think it is dreadful, brother at war with brother and God only knows

where or when it will end. We are for the Union, but when I think our son is in the midst

25“Bunting Wanted,” Sacramento Bee, May 11, 1861, page 3, column 1. 26 Sacramento Bee, February 4, 1861, page 3, column 4.

46

of it I am most crazy and we can’t hear from him nor he from us.” In another passage of

the letter, Mrs. Hollis writes, “…we will hope and pray that the difficulty in the states

may be speedily settled but I fear it will be a long time before they are, when I think of

the lives that are and will be lost, I wish they had let the states secede and the property go

with them rather than had any fighting.”27 Mrs. Hollis supported the preservation of the

Union, but she feared for the safety of her son and anticipated the human costs of the

conflict.

The armies finally clashed for the first time at the Battle of Bull Run, fought

on July 21, 1861. News of the battle reached Sacramento on August 5. A few days later,

miner George B. Campbell in California wrote to his parents in the east, “This awful war

engulfs everything. The all-absorbing topic of the day is the war now raging in the east.

Both parties have their backers here, although the South is in the minority. It appears

horrible to think that the best government ever formed should be broken up and so many

lives lost just to gratify a pack of howling abolitionists – for my part I should like to see

them all hung higher than old John Brown they are the cause of all the trouble.”28

Campbell’s words echo those in Mrs. Hollis’s letter. His primary concern was over the

loss of the Union and he acknowledged the lives that will be lost in order to restore it.

Campbell’s letter also implies that the abolitionists were to blame for secession; a

position that shows sympathy toward the Confederacy. While the newspapers

27 Lincoln Edwards Collection, Center for Sacramento History. 68/109/100. Note: Punctuation

has been added to make the excerpts easier for a modern reader to follow. 28 George B. Campbell Collection, 1831-1910, California State Library, Box 11, Folder 4. Note:

Punctuation has been added and spelling corrected to make the excerpts easier for a modern reader to follow.

47

represented the community’s prevailing attitude toward the war and struck a tone of

public unity, in their letters and diaries, individuals felt more freedom to express their

doubts and misgivings about the war. Both Mr. Campbell and Mrs. Hollis recognized the

part slavery played in the coming of the war and yet, neither would have advocated war

as a means to ending slavery in 1861.

Home Front Patriotism

Sacramentans demonstrated their patriotism by joining the Home Guard,

supporting soldiers’ aid societies, and participating in public demonstrations. Within a

month of Fort Sumter’s surrender, Sacramentans had formed at least seven military

companies and had begun holding drilling exercises regularly. These companies were

made up of all classes of the city’s citizens and included “merchants, mechanics, lawyers,

laborers, editors, teamsters, clerks, traders, etc.”29 Many of these companies would

eventually be attached to the state militia, but others would function as a “home guard”

keeping the local citizens safe from the possibility of secessionist uprisings. Timothy

Hopkins, the foster son of Sacramento railroad baron Mark Hopkins, was just an infant

when the war began. In his reminiscences about life in wartime Sacramento, he

remembered the Home Guard of infantry and artillery companies which included Mark

Hopkins and his partner in the Central Pacific Railroad Charles Crocker. The armory

was “in the Agricultural Pavilion…only a half block from our house, and as M Street was

the widest and best one in the city for maneuvers it was a familiar sight to witness these

29 City Intelligence: Military,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 25, 1861, page 3, column 1.

48

citizen soldiers drilling before our doors.”30 A citizen militia was a long-standing

tradition in the United States, one that predated independence.

A Home Guard made sense in the eastern states. Pennsylvania’s Home Guard was

called into service when Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia

invaded the state in June of 1863. Was a Home Guard truly necessary in California, or

did these Sacramento merchants and mechanics simply enjoy playing soldier? What

threats faced Sacramento? In spite of their distance from the battlefield, the men of

Sacramento were doing more than playing soldier. California’s Union Resolutions and

declarations of loyalty had not eradicated all the secessionist sympathizers within the

state. While numerous Californians returned to their native southern states and fought on

behalf of the Confederacy, some chose to stay in their adopted state. The Home Guard

units served a dual purpose, acting as proof of Sacramentans’ Union loyalty, while also

functioning as a deterrent to secessionist activity in the region.

During the first year of the war, Sacramento’s newspapers reported incidents of

secessionist activity that included flying the Palmetto flag, Unionists and secessionists

exchanging words in saloons, and secessionists threatening to fire a salute to

commemorate a Confederate victory. The incidents were reported matter-of-factly, but in

an almost lighthearted vein. Reading the accounts one does not feel the incidents posed

any true threat. As the war continued and the casualties mounted, however, speech

supporting secession was taken more seriously. In October of 1862, Sacramento’s

30 Timothy Hopkins, Memory of a Boyhood in Sacramento: Reminiscences of Timothy Hopkins.

(Sacramento, California: The Sacramento Pioneers Association, 1987), 18. Note: Spelling has been corrected to make the excerpts easier for a modern reader to follow.

49

National Guard, a branch of the state militia, required all members to take an oath of

allegiance to the federal government.31 Mary Ackley, a young woman living in

Sacramento during the Civil War, remembered that a man who expressed his pleasure at

the assassination of President Lincoln soon after the event was immediately arrested and

forced to take the oath of allegiance to the Union or leave town. Ackley recalled that

even though the man took the oath, he left town soon after as the citizens would no longer

patronize his business.32

In the spring of 1863, General George Wright, Commander of the Department of

the Pacific, issued a warning that there were, “traitors in our midst … doing all in their

power to involve this country in the horrors of civil war.”33 Persons suspected of

secessionist sympathies were required to take the loyalty oath or face imprisonment in

Alcatraz. In response to the perceived threats around them, Sacramentans established a

Union League to promote loyalty to the Union and support the policies of Lincoln’s

administration. The Union’s editors described the Union League as “an antidote for the

venom of the Copperheads.”34 Copperheads were northern Democrats who advocated a

peace settlement with the Confederacy. The Sacramento Union characterized

Copperheads as traitors who threatened to derail the Union’s war effort from within. The

newspaper’s editors placed anyone who objected to the war or to the Lincoln

31 “National Guard,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 15, 1862, page 3, column 1. 32 Mary Ackley, Crossing the Plains and Early Days in California: Memories of Girlhood Days

in California’s Golden Age. (Sacramento, California: Sacramento Book Collectors Club 2004), 64-65. 33 “Proclamation of General Wright,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 10, 1863, page 2, column 3. 34 “Why We Unite,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 20, 1863, page 4 column 2.

50

administration’s policies in league with the Copperheads. The lines were more sharply

drawn as the war continued with few Union victories. By spring of 1863, Sacramento’s

newspapers claimed that anyone who held anti-Lincoln views was anti-Union and

therefore the enemy.

Sacramento began to mobilize its support for Union soldiers in the fall of 1862.

The social life of Sacramentans became focused on supporting the Union war effort.

Jane Stanford, the governor’s wife, headed the Ladies Lint Society. The society met to

make bandages to be sent east to the battlefront. Around this same time the Sanitary

Fund began soliciting donations in support of the United States Sanitary Commission.

The Sanitary Commission had been established in 1861 to assist the federal government

and U.S. army in managing military hospitals and in the promotion of sanitary practices.

As the war continued into its second year, the Commission became a distribution center

for clothing, bedding, and food produced by a network of ladies’ aid societies throughout

the loyal states.35 Barbecues, balls, and lectures were all used as avenues for patriotic

fund-raising. Timothy Hopkins remembered, “…loyal California was generous in its

support of the war, and large sums of money and supplies were sent East through the

Sanitary Commission for relief of suffering in the Army.”36

The Reverend T. Starr King proved to be a driving force behind Sacramento’s

support of the Sanitary Commission. Starr King, a Unitarian minister, had developed a

35 Judith E. Harper, Women during the Civil War, an Encyclopedia. (New York: Routledge,

2004), 429-430. 36 Hopkins, Memory of a Boyhood in Sacramento, 20. Note: Spelling has been corrected to make

the excerpts easier for a modern reader to follow.

51

reputation as an outstanding orator while serving as the minister of the Hollis Street

Church in Boston. In 1860 he accepted a call to the First Unitarian Church in San

Francisco. The Reverend T. Starr King was physically slight and unassuming when not

on the podium, but his fiery orations in support of the Union soon made him much in

demand as a lecturer. In 1861, the reverend embarked on a lecture tour of California’s

interior in which he presented patriotic lectures as a means of promoting Union

sentiment. Starr King spoke in Sacramento several times. His lectures were well

attended and excerpts were printed in the newspapers.

In 1862 Starr King focused his energy in a new direction when he organized the

Pacific Branch of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Starr King was recruited to the cause

by his friend and fellow Unitarian minister, Dr. Henry Bellows, the first president of the

Sanitary Commission. Starr King’s rousing speeches were attended by as many as

40,000 people.37 The reverend sought to prick the consciences of his audiences and

appeal to their sense of Christian charity. Sacramentans were admonished to share the

“burdens as well as the blessings of the Union.”38 At the conclusion of this speech,

Sacramento’s citizens were called on to contribute to the Patriotic Fund and establish a

local branch in support of the Sanitary Commission.

37 Richard H. Peterson, “The United States Sanitary Commission and Thomas Starr King in

California, 1861-1864.” California Historical Society 72, no. 4 (Winter, 1993/1994): 333. 38 Robert Monzingo, Thomas Starr King: Eminent Californian, Civil War Statesmen, Unitarian

Minister. ( Pacific Grove, California: Boxwood Press, 1991), 164. “The Lecture,” Sacramento Bee, September 25, 1862, page 3, column 2. “The Patriotic Fund,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 26, 1862, page 3 column 1; this article describes the organization of the Patriotic Fund Committee that followed Starr King’s lecture.

52

Sacramentans responded to Starr King’s call to action. The devastating floods of

1861-1862 had destroyed or damaged millions of dollars worth of property in the

Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. Despite the fact that Sacramento was completely

flooded and a new levee had to be built, the city still contributed generously. Governor

Leland Stanford, who headed the Sacramento Patriotic Fund Committee, telegraphed Dr.

Bellows, “The city of Sacramento from her baptism of water to her suffering brethren in

the East in the baptism of blood send $20,000 by mail today.”39 In June of 1864, in

response to the great need following the casualties suffered in General Grant’s Overland

Campaign, Sacramento sent $18,000 in gold to the Commission’s headquarters in New

York City.40 Although California was thousands of miles from the battlefront and had a

small population, the state contributed more than any other state: a quarter of the national

total of all the cash donated to the U.S. Sanitary Commission.41 Few Sacramentans could

fight in the terrible battles raging in the east or nurse the wounded men who fell in those

battles, so they expressed their devotion to the Union through donations to the Sanitary

Commission.

Although geography separated Sacramentans from events in the east, their

emotional ties to the Union were strengthened during the war years. Sacramentans

relied on the newspapers to help them follow the great armies across the battlefields.

When the newspapers brought news of a victory, Sacramentans took to the streets to

39 Monzingo, Thomas Starr King, 179-180.

40 “Sacramento’s Contribution,” Sacramento Bee, June 18, 1864, page 3, column 2.

41 Peterson, “The United States Sanitary Commission and Thomas Starr King in California,” 328.

“The Sanitary Commission,” Sacramento Bee, November 7, 1863, Page 4, column 1.

53

participate in public displays of patriotism. In the midst of a long and difficult war,

Sacramentans sought the sense of community that a public celebration brought.

Torchlight parades celebrated the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg.

Timothy Hopkins remembered, “Union victories during the war were celebrated in

Sacramento by parades, illuminations, and other forms of rejoicing.” Torchlight parades

consisted of citizens carrying “cans of oil with heavy open wicks attached to long sticks

and carried over the shoulder.” Those marching were accompanied by the “bells of the

fire engines” and the “singing of patriotic songs.”42

The Union Clubs that sprang up in every community during the first few months

of the war remained active throughout the war. During the 1864 presidential campaign,

community demonstrations by Union Clubs were common. Mary Ackley described such

a scene in her memoir, “During President Lincoln’s last campaign for re-election, there

were many torchlight processions….we Union women illuminated our homes with

candles by placing them in our front windows.”43 Members of the California Volunteers

went on the record with their support of the president. They signed their names to the

following resolution printed in the Sacramento Daily Union,

Resolved, That we jointly and severely indorse, in the fullest and most emphatic manner, the Administration of Abraham Lincoln, and that we will support him and it with our votes at the next election, as we have with our swords and bayonets during the three years past.44

42Hopkins, Memory of a Boyhood in Sacramento, 22. 43Ackley, Crossing the Plains and Early Days in California, 63. 44“Resolutions of the Soldiers,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 14, 1864, page 2, column 2.

54

The headline announcing Lincoln’s re-election in 1864, proclaimed, “The Union is

Saved!”45 Lincoln’s re-election meant the war would continue until the Union was

restored and that the sacrifices made by the loyal states would not be in vain.

Military Service

Colonel Lowell is as brave as a lion, always leading us. He compliments the Californians, declaring he never saw raw troops act better, or endure the hardships of soldiering with so little fault finding. -Charles Roberts, 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry46 Corporal Roberts was a member of the California Hundred, which served as

members of the Massachusetts 2nd Cavalry. His letter describes his company’s first

weeks in Virginia under the command of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr. During the war the

Union published several of Roberts’s letters to his parents who lived in El Dorado

County, California.

During the Civil War, regiments were organized, mustered in, and equipped by

the states and then sent to the federal army. As residents of one of the youngest states in

the Union, many of California’s citizens were native to either the eastern or the southern

states. In 1861, approximately 6% of male Californians hailed from one of the eleven

Confederate states and 7% were from one of the border slave states.47 Some Californians

returned “home” to the east to fight for either the Union or the Confederacy. Numerous

attempts were made in California to raise a regiment for service in the east. Each attempt

45 Sacramento Union, November 11, 1864, page 2, column 4. 46 “Letter from A California Corporal,” Sacramento Daily Union, August 19, 1863, page 1,

column 7. 47 Richards, The California Gold Rush, 230.

55

was rejected by the War Department as too costly. At issue was transporting the

volunteers from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast. The federal government simply

could not afford to pay the cost of the recruits’ steamer passage.48 When conscription

became necessary midway through the war Californians were exempt, but were required

to “enroll” with government agents beginning in the fall of 1863.

When the Civil War began, nearly 75% of the army’s soldiers serving in posts

west of the Mississippi River; fulfillment of Manifest Destiny required Regular Army

soldiers to protect routes to the west.49 Several men who became prominent Civil War

generals had served in the army in California during the antebellum period, including

Henry Halleck, Joseph Hooker, William T. Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and Albert Sidney

Johnston. When the Union Army began to mobilize in 1861, the War Department

ordered its West Point trained officers and Regular Army soldiers serving in the west

back to the east. If armed conflict broke out in California, it would have to be dealt with

locally. California Volunteers were needed to fill the army posts along the west coast.50

48 “Speaking of the Cavalry,” Sacramento Bee, October 31, 1862, page 2, column 2. The Bee

indicates the cost of “placing a company in the field ready for service” was $20,000. The company they were referring to, the California Hundred, served as members of the Massachusetts 2nd Cavalry. James McLean, California Sabers: The 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry in the Civil War. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000), 6. McLean writes that the $20,000 for the Massachusetts 2nd Cavalry was raised by subscription among Boston’s wealthiest families.

49 Gregory Paynter Shine, “The War and Westward Expansion” in The Civil War Remembered:

Official National Park Service Handbook, John Latschar and Robert K. Sutton, eds. (Walsworth Publishing Company, 2011), 124.

50 “News of the Morning,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 21, 1861, Page 2, Column 1. The

army regulars were called east and California volunteers were needed to replace them on western posts. California Adjunct General’s Office, Records of California Men in the War of the Rebellion 1861 to 1867. Revised and Compiled by Brig-Gen. Richard H. Orton. (Sacramento: State Office, 1890), 5. According to this report, California Volunteers “occupied nearly all the posts from Puget Sound to San Elizario, Texas.” Also see pages 885-887 for an “incomplete list of the stations occupied by California troops.”

56

Potential threats to the nation’s security on the Pacific coast included attacks by Native

Americans, Confederates in the southwest, secessionist uprisings, and the potential that

foreign nations such as France, Britain, and Russia could take advantage of the instability

created by the Civil War.

The Civil War required mobilization of men and material unprecedented in

American history. California’s wartime mobilization was on a much smaller scale than in

the eastern states, but still required detailed planning and organization as thousands of

volunteers were mustered into service. Many volunteers in Northern California came

through Camp Union near Sutterville at some point during their service. In October of

1861, the camp consisted of twenty tents. The volunteers were “drilled three times a day,

from an hour to an hour and a half at a time.”51 Timothy Hopkins recalled, “…soldiers

were stationed at Sacramento on the State Agricultural Fairgrounds, then called Union

Park, and I remember seeing the troops of Cavalry training on the level plain outside the

Park and the infantry drilling within it.”52 Barracks were completed at Camp Union in

December of 1862. At various times, Camp Union housed as many as eight hundred

soldiers.53 The camp provided a convenient location for California’s wartime governors

to review the troops. These reviews proved to be a popular attraction for Sacramentans.

51 “Camp Union,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 14, 1861, page 3, column 1. State historical

marker #666 identifies the former location of Camp Union. The marker is in William Land Park across the street from the Sacramento Zoo.

52 Hopkins, Memory of a Boyhood in Sacramento, 20. 53 “Winter Quarters,” Sacramento Daily Bee, December 16, 1861, page 3, column 2.

57

Sacramento’s newspapers reported every troop movement made by the State Militia

throughout the duration of the war.

Sixteen-thousand California men served in the west during the Civil War. The

California Column saw action in the southwest, fighting Confederates as well as

Apaches. One company of infantry and five companies of Cavalry were charged with

protecting the overland mail routes between Carson City in Nevada Territory and Salt

Lake City in Utah Territory. The State of California’s official record of their service

notes the California Volunteers “were engaged in hundreds of fights with Indians and

small forces of Confederate troops on the frontiers, in Texas and Mexico. By their

loyalty, they preserved peace in these western States and Territories.”54 Although the

Californians battled more Indians than Confederates, California Volunteers also engaged

in small skirmishes with secession sympathizers in Visalia, in California’s central

valley.55

As the war continued, the French occupation of Mexico and the British military

presence in Canada made the role played by the California Volunteers in defending the

west even more vital to the nation’s interests.56 Alcatraz and Angel Island were fortified

with additional batteries to aid in the protection of gold shipments sent by steamer from

San Francisco to New York. California’s financial support of the Union was absolutely

54 California Adjunct General’s Office, Records of California Men in the War of the Rebellion 1861 to 1867, 5.

55 “The Visalia Difficulty,” Sacramento Daily Bee, August 8, 1863, page 2, column 1. 56 Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. (New

York: Random House, 2010). Foreman follows events on both sides of the Atlantic and demonstrates how the Confederacy’s push for official recognition from the British and the Union’s determination to deny the Confederates that recognition kept the U.S. and Britain on the edge of war.

58

vital to the success of the Union army. On average, $1 million in gold sailed out of the

San Francisco Bay each month during the war. In 1864, over $46 million in gold was

sent via Panama to support the North’s credit and help arm, feed, and clothe a million

Union soldiers.57

Despite the important contributions the California Volunteers were making to the

war effort, many men still craved a chance to fight as members of a California company

in the eastern theater of war. In the fall of 1862, Ira P. Rankin and James S. Reed of San

Francisco wrote to Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. They offered a group of one

hundred men to serve as a cavalry company within a Massachusetts regiment. After

receiving approval for the plan from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Governor

Andrew accepted the company from California to serve under his state’s quota.

Recruitment began immediately, and the company mustered in on December 10, 1862.

Company A became known as the “California Hundred.”58 The large number of

applicants allowed those organizing the company to set high standards for the recruits.

The only Sacramentan in Company A on the list published by the Sacramento Union on

57 John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848-1869. (Columbia, South Carolina: University

of South Carolina Press, 1990), 208-209; 255 Appendix III.

58 For information about Californians’ military service in the Union army; California Adjunct General’s Office, Records of California Men in the War of the Rebellion 1861 to 1867. Revised and Compiled by Brig-Gen. Richard H. Orton. (Sacramento: State Office, 1890), James McLean, California Sabers: The Second Massachusetts Cavalry in the Civil War. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000), Thomas E. Parson, Bear Flag and Bay State in the Civil War: The Californians of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2001), and Larry Rogers and Keith Rogers, Their Horses Climbed Trees: A Chronicle of the California 100 and Battalion in the Civil War; from San Francisco to Appomattox. (Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Military History, 2001).

59

December 8, 1862, was S.J. Corbet.59 So many men applied for enlistment that four more

companies were raised to form a battalion attached to the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry.

The California Battalion consisted of one hundred four natives of New York state, thirty-

nine men born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, one hundred nine from New England

(including fifty-four from Massachusetts), ninety-nine from the Midwest, twenty-one

from border states, and eight Southerners. Forty-one of the volunteers came from

Europe. Company A also included James “Santiago” Watson from Monterey, the only

native-born Californian.60

The battalion was mounted, armed, and equipped for the field after they arrived in

Readville, Massachusetts in March of 1863. Attached to the Army of the Potomac, the

Californians served in the eastern theater of war, skirmishing with Confederate John S.

Mosby’s partisan rangers in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. In August of 1864, after

the death of their commander, Charles Russell Lowell, the battalion was assigned to

Major General Phil Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah. Under Sheridan’s command,

the Californians clashed with Confederate Cavalry led by Jubal Early. Some were

present when Confederate General Robert E. Lee sent a flag of truce into the Union line

near Appomattox Courthouse in April of 1865. Of the 500 Californians who mustered

into service in 1862 as members of the California Battalion less than 200 were left in

59“The California Rangers,” Sacramento Daily Union, December 8, 1862, Page 2, Column 5.

National Park Service, “Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System,” http://www.itd.nps.gov/ cwss/regiments. cfm (accessed November 23, 2011). According to the National Park Service’s website, Samuel J. Corbet entered Company A of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry as a private and achieved the rank of Sergeant.

60McLean, Massachusetts Cavalry, 13.

60

service when the war ended and these men had to finance their own journeys home from

Massachusetts.61

During the war Sacramento’s newspapers followed the movements of the

California Hundred carefully. The California Hundred gave Californians a direct

connection to the events in the eastern theater. The battalion provided a focal point for

Sacramentans as they followed newspaper accounts of the great battles taking place in

Virginia. News of Captain Sewell Reed’s death while leading his men against Mosby’s

guerrillas caused great sorrow in Sacramento. Sacramento’s fire companies flew their

flags at half-staff when they heard the news.62 As the hero of J. Henry Rogers’s narrative

poem The California Hundred published in 1865, Reed was introduced with the

following lines:

First for his country in her need, For Volunteers was SEWELL REED, Long had he watched with a heart of flame The South traduce Columbia’s name:63

Rogers’s poem treats Reed as a martyr to the Union cause. Californians serving in the

Union army forged a powerful connection between the state and the nation.

61Richards, The California Gold Rush, 233. Richards claims 182 men were mustered out in

August of 1865. Parson, Bear Flag and Bay State in the Civil War, 199. Regarding casualties Parson says, “During the course of the war the regiment lost eight officers and 82 enlisted men killed and mortally wounded, and three officers and 138 enlisted men by disease.” Parson’s numbers match those of the National Park Service, http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/regiments.cfm and the California Adjunct General’s Office, Records of California Men in the War of the Rebellion 1861 to 1867, 853. The regimental history presented by Major D.W.C. Thompson, Major California Cavalry Battalion in the State of California’s official record gives a different number citing one hundred and forty-eight mustered out at the battalion’s final discharge from service.

62 “Death of a California Officer,” Sacramento Daily Union, February 26, 1864, page 3, column 3.

63 J. Henry Rogers, The California Hundred: A Poem. (San Francisco, California: Towne and

Bacon, 1865), 23.

61

Californians were sensitive to charges that California, free from conscription and

threat of Confederate invasion, had not suffered the horrors of war that the rest of the

loyal states had endured. According to the Sacramento Bee of April 28, 1864, a Chicago

newspaper had remarked, “that California, in a military point of view; bears few, if any,

of the burdens of this war.” The Bee countered that, “Out of a population of 400,000,

California has furnished about 8,000 soldiers for the Union army – that is one out of

every fifty.”64 The Bee also reminded its readers that, “We have, besides, contributed

over half a million to the Sanitary Fund.” The editors of the Bee responded to similar

charges when U.S. Representative McKenney introduced a resolution in the House of

Representatives in January of 1865 asking the Secretary of War why California had not

enforced the draft. The Sacramento Bee’s editors wrote, “A fair count will show that

this State has furnished at least 11,000 men for the service of the United States – a little

over one-ninth of the voting population.”65 Given the state’s relatively small population

and distance from the east, California provided abundant aid to the Union. Californians

were proud of their state’s military and monetary contributions to the Union and felt no

need to apologize to the other loyal states.

Emancipation

According to the 1860 census, San Francisco and Sacramento counties contained

almost one-third of California’s African American population, yet fewer than 500

64“California and the War,” Sacramento Bee, April 28, 1864, page 2, column 1.

65“California’s Quota,” Sacramento Bee, February 24, 1865, page 2, column 3.

62

African Americans lived in Sacramento at this time.66 One will not find the voices or

opinions of the African American community represented in either of Sacramento’s

daily newspapers. The newspapers’ coverage of emancipation centered on its impact

upon the war, not about the individual men and women affected. “Colored residents”

are mentioned; newspapers reported that the colored residents celebrated emancipation,

a colored military company was organized in San Francisco, but these residents were

never identified by name.67

An African American newspaper, The Pacific Appeal, began publication in San

Francisco in 1862. Articles in the Pacific Appeal offer a glimpse into the reactions of

California’s African American community to the government’s evolving policy toward

emancipation during the Civil War. The Pacific Appeal’s editors made the connection

between Union victory and emancipation months before the Sacramento Bee. On May

10, 1862, they wrote, “…the war will not fail a space, until Victory and Emancipation

become synonymous.” Reacting to the news of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,

the Pacific Appeal commented that the proclamation, “…will help immediately in

crushing the rebellion, and saving the Union, and put the nation immeasurably

forward.”68 Declaring 1863 the “Year of Jubilee,” the Pacific Appeal asserted, “To-day

the Government has washed its hands clean of the stains of slavery in the States and

66Rudolph M. Lapp, “The Negro in Gold Rush California.” The Journal of Negro History 49, no.

2, (April 1964): 84.

67“New Emancipation Day,” Sacramento Daily Union, December 29, 1862, page 3, column 1. “Colored Company,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 22, 1863, page 4, column 3.

68Pacific Appeal, September 27, 1862.

63

parts of States that are in rebellion. America, henceforth, looms up with grandeur. She

has burst the bonds that have bound her.”69 The editors argued that the institution of

slavery had confined not only the individuals enslaved, but also America as a nation.

Ridding the Union of slavery would allow America to reclaim her exceptional position

among the nations of the world.

Historians now agree that slavery was a primary cause of the war. Emancipation,

however, was not a primary goal of most of the loyal white citizens when the war began.

Preserving the union and maintaining a democratic republic were the reasons most

Union men gave for fighting in 1861.70 In the fall of that year, the Sacramento Union

noted that abolitionists who anticipated the end of slavery “as one of the consequences

of this rebellion…are doomed to disappointment.”71 There was considerable public

debate about the United States’ policy toward slaves as Union commanders moved into

Confederate territory and slaves left their masters for the safety of Union lines.

Questions of constitutionality and the original goals of the war were overridden by the

immediate question of what the government’s policy should be toward these individuals

christened “contrabands” of war by Union General Benjamin Butler. As the war

progressed, Unionists began to see emancipation as both of tool for winning the war and

a necessary step in ensuring the future survival of the Union. The evolution in

69Pacific Appeal, January 3, 1863. 70See the following for discussions of emancipation and Union; David W. Blight, Race and

Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War, and Chandra Manning, What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

71 Sacramento Daily Union, October 5, 1861, page 2, column 2.

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Unionists’ thinking regarding emancipation can be traced through the newspapers’

coverage of slavery, emancipation, and the enrollment of African American soldiers in

the Union army.

As the war entered its second year, the illusion of a quick and easy victory had

vanished. The Union army had suffered several defeats in the eastern theater of war. The

Confederacy’s determination to defend the peculiar institution had resulted in what the

Sacramento Union called a “revolution in public sentiment in the loyal States as well as

in the army, on the negro question.” The editors argued that “if the institution of slavery

stands in the way of those engaged in the work of crushing rebellion and preserving the

Union let it perish, and that negroes shall be employed in the army in the capacity in

which they can be rendered most efficient and useful to the cause of Union.”72 This

article was published on September 13, 1862, weeks before President Lincoln issued the

Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The sentiment in the loyal states shifted toward

support for emancipation as citizens realized that slavery must end or an independent

Confederacy would have to be recognized. Gallagher notes, “Without slavery and the

various issues related to its expansion, most white northerners could envision no serious

internal threat to their beloved Union.”73 Those loyal to the Union began to realize that

repairing the Union would require an end to slavery once and for all.

California had entered the Union as a free state and the Emancipation

Proclamation was a military order that freed slaves only in the states in rebellion against

72 “The Negro Policy,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 13, 1862, page 2, column 3. 73 Gallagher, The Union War, 77.

65

the United States government. The direct impact of the proclamation in California was

negligible; still, the public understood that the proclamation sounded the death knell for

slavery. The editors of the Union claimed the proclamation, “inaugurates a new era in the

history of this war” and cited it as “evidence that the President is convinced that such an

important step is necessary to enable him to preserve the Union.”74 By the time the

Emancipation Proclamation became official on January 1, 1863, Sacramentans were in

the mood to celebrate emancipation as a new goal of the war. Salutes were fired

throughout the city and “huzzas of joy” accompanied public readings of the

proclamation.75 From this point forward, ending slavery became a means to preserving

the Union. Depriving the Confederacy of slave labor dealt a severe blow to its efforts to

maintain independence. Tying the abolition of slavery to a reunited Union, meant the

most divisive issue the nation had ever faced would finally be put to rest.

The war did, however, offer enslaved African Americans opportunity for

freedom, and ultimately, African American men opportunities for citizenship. Americans

have long recognized a connection between a man’s military service and his right to

citizenship. The Emancipation Proclamation, in addition to freeing slaves in the states in

rebellion, also authorized the use of African American soldiers in the Union army.

Military necessity played a part in the decision to allow African Americans to serve. The

Union had suffered astounding casualties by 1863, more than 12,000 in a single day at

74 “The Proclamation,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 24, 1862, page 2, column 2.

75 “Gunpowder,” Sacramento Bee, January 2, 1863, page 3, column 1. “Cheering the

Proclamation,” Sacramento Bee, January 5, 1863, page 3, column 1. “Proclamation Salute,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 2, 1863, page 3, column 1.

66

Antietam for example. Conscription had proved unpopular, yet additional soldiers were

needed to continue the war. By the war’s end, more than 200,000 African American men

would serve in the Union forces. Sacramentans were deeply interested in these

developments. Sacramento’s newspapers reported the movements of African American

troops; articles detailed the troops’ engagements at Fort Wagner, the massacre at Fort

Pillow, and the explosion at the Battle of the Crater. For their service in the Union army,

African American soldiers earned respect and the recognition that they fought for

freedom, “A negro who has the intelligence to make a soldier,” the Sacramento Bee

opined, “has the intelligence to fight for liberty, not slavery.”76

The war brought about a revolution in how citizens of the loyal states viewed

slavery as an institution, and as numerous historians have contended, emancipation

remains one of the most important legacies of the Civil War. In his prize winning

monograph, The Fiery Trail: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, Eric Foner wrote,

“The proclamation altered the nature of the Civil War, the relationship of the federal

government to slavery, and the course of American history.”77 For the citizens of the

Union states, slavery had caused the war and it must end for the sake of the Union, but

for the white citizens, support of emancipation did not equal support for racial equality.

Conclusion

Reading Sacramento’s Civil War-era newspapers provides one with a palpable

sense of the community’s deep engagement with the progress and outcome of the war.

76 “Can Slavery Survive?” Sacramento Bee, September 2, 1863, page 2, column 1. 77 Eric Foner. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. (New York: W.W.

Norton & Company, 2010), 245.

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News of the surrender of Lee and his army to Grant on April 9, 1865, was received from

the east within hours and relayed to churches throughout Sacramento where the good

news was announced from the pulpit.78 A celebratory atmosphere permeated the

Union’s coverage of the surrender. On the evening of the 9th, Sacramento’s downtown

buildings were illuminated, fire and church bells rang, bonfires were lit up and down the

city’s main thoroughfares, and numerous salutes were fired. The Board of Education

declared April 12, 1865, a school holiday so that, “…teachers and pupils may be as

patriotic and enthusiastic as they please.”79 After four long years of war, California had

affirmed its attachment to the Union by helping to ensure its survival.

Within a week Sacramentans’ celebratory mood would turn to sorrow as

Unionists mourned the loss of President Lincoln. The stark contrast between the hope

and joy that greeted the news of the surrender and the distress brought by the news of

the assassination was expressed by Sacramento’s newspapers. Reports of the details of

the president’s assassination were printed in columns bordered by heavy black lines.

Even now, the sorrow articulated by these articles feels tangible; the loss feels personal.

In the midst of this hope and confidence and patriotic joy the news of the death by violence of the Chief

magistrate of the nation was received, producing a degree of gloom and sadness which but few had ever experienced before. Tears fell from the cheeks of strong men on the streets, and prayers ascended from the lips of women at their hearth-stones.80

78 “Surrender of Lee and His Army,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 10, 1865, page 5, column 1. 79 “No School To-Day,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 12, 1865, page 3, column 2. 80 “News of the Assassination,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 17, 1865, page 3, column 1.

68

Timothy Hopkins recalled being on a picnic with a group that included his mother, , Mrs.

Stanford, and Charles Crocker when they learned of President Lincoln’s assassination.

Everyone was sobered, the people gathered in groups to discuss the crime, the houses were draped in black, and gloom prevailed. My father was an Abolitionist and a Whig, a strong Union man, and he and Leland Stanford were among the organizers of the Republican party in California. He was a firm believer in Lincoln’s policies and so much an admirer of his masterly Gettysburg address that he often read it aloud in the family circle. In this atmosphere of loyalty to the President and nation the assassination of Lincoln became almost a personal loss. As a boy it affected me deeply.81

150 years after the war, Sacramentans may ask again, what is Sacramento’s Civil

War legacy? What should its legacy be? According to Kevin Starr, an eminent scholar

of California history, “The war forced Californians, after a decade and a half of isolation

and ambiguous relationship, to assert their loyalty to the Union, despite the thousands of

uncivilized miles between itself and the Atlantic states.”82 The Sacramento Bee’s 100

year retrospective on California’s involvement was titled, “Civil War Welded California

into Solid, Mature State.”83 What does the Civil War mean to California in the twenty-

first century?

For those Californians who retain a memory of their state’s involvement in the

Civil War it revolves mainly around the California Hundred, an elite group of soldiers

who fought for the Union. Schoolchildren on fieldtrips and families on vacation visiting

81 Hopkins, Memory of a Boyhood in Sacramento, 28.

82 Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915. (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1973), 122.

83 William B. Carr, Sacramento Bee, April 23, 1961, page B1, B6.

69

the California State Capitol may encounter the bronze statue of minister Thomas Starr

King in Memorial Grove or see the battalion flag of the Massachusetts 2nd Cavalry and

wonder about California’s Civil War involvement. Unfortunately, there are no

photographs of the Great Sanitary Cheese, which raised $1,890 for the Sanitary

Commission.84 Nor are there pictures of the torchlight parades up J Street in

Sacramento. What would it mean for Sacramentans to reclaim these historical

memories, to understand the depth of their predecessors’ devotion to the Union?

Memories, memorials, and landscapes change over time. As they change, so do

the meanings they convey. Reverend Starr King’s statue was moved from the National

Statuary Hall to the state capitol grounds in 2006 after California State Senator Dennis

Hollingsworth sponsored a bill to replace it with a statue of Ronald Reagan. "To be

honest with you, I wasn't sure who Thomas Starr King was, and I think there's probably a

lot of Californians like me," said Hollingsworth.85 Mr. Hollingsworth is undoubtedly

correct.

“The challenge of history,” as David Thelen has noted, “is to recover the past and

introduce it to the present.”86 The story of Sacramento’s support of the Union during the

Civil War is a story of a vibrant community, deeply engaged in the outcome of the war

and focused on claiming their place in the union of states by sharing in their nation’s

84Peterson, “The United States Sanitary Commission and Thomas Starr King in California, 328.

85 Kimberly Geiger, “National Statuary Hall Debate urged on Starr King eviction,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 25, 2006, B-3.

86 David Thelen, “Memory and American History.” The Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1989): 1117.

70

necessary sacrifices. The challenge for classroom teachers of American history is to

reclaim California’s Civil War history by introducing a new generation of students to this

diverse and dynamic story.

71

Chapter Four Teaching California and the Civil War

Every 8th grade history teacher in the state of California knows the Civil War will

be a major focus of his or her instruction each year. California History-Social Science

Content Standard 8.10 reads, “Students analyze the multiple causes, key events, and

complex consequences of the Civil War.” This statement’s brevity belies its complexity.

The causes of the Civil War are myriad. For example, persistent debates over slavery in

eighteenth and nineteenth century America materialized in a succession of acts and

events: the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise and Fugitive Slave Clause, the

nullification crisis, the states’ rights doctrine, the Missouri Compromise, the annexation

of Texas, the Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise of 1850, the Dred Scott decision, the

Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Lincoln-Douglass debates –all incidents which seem to

foreshadow the Civil War, an event which some historians and nineteenth-century

Americans called an “irrepressible conflict.”1 Despite enjoying the benefits of hindsight,

effective history teachers will place each of these events in its own context and provide

students with the skills to grapple with the complex reality of historical contingency. “We

need to help our students to see the maze of history from the beginning,” teacher Scott

Waring argues, “and to realize all of the possibilities available to the agents involved.”2

Americans living in the 1850s did not live in an “antebellum era:” the term was applied

later by historians. Americans of the “antebellum era” could not know a civil war would


through Reconstruction, Francis G. Couvares, Martha Couvares, Gerald N. Grob, George Athan Billias, eds. (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009), 310-324.

2 Scott M. Waring, “Escaping Myopia: Teaching Students about Historical Causality.” The History Teacher 43, no. 2, (February 2010): 283.

72

break out in 1861 any more than Americans living today know the major events that will

occur ten years into the future.

The lessons contained within the appendix of this project are meant to provide

teachers with a model of how to use primary sources to engage students’ interest, help

students understand essential questions in history, and learn valuable historical-thinking

skills. These lesson plans draw on research conducted in the summer of 2011 at the

Center for Sacramento History, the archives for the city and county of Sacramento.

Using a close analysis of Sacramento’s Civil War-era newspapers, the Sacramento Bee

and the Sacramento Daily Union, teachers can teach the Civil War as local history since

these sources reveal Sacramento and California’s deep investment in the progress and

outcome of the war. Most Californians would be surprised to learn of the state’s many

contributions to the Union war effort despite being located thousands of miles from the

theaters of war. The lessons are intended for teachers to use as supplementary material to

enhance existing lessons and open further avenues of inquiry with students. Teachers can

adapt the lessons as needed to meet the needs of their students and their specific teaching

environment. The lessons encompass a number of topics which include the secession

crisis of 1861, the Emancipation Proclamation, Sacramento’s City Guard, the Sanitary

Commission, the meaning of the term ‘Union,’ Californians’ military service in the

eastern theater of war, and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. To

demonstrate how these lessons teach historical thinking, this chapter focuses on the

Emancipation Proclamation (Appendix B, Lesson Two).

73

Since their adoption in 1998, the standards have played the central role in aligning

instructional materials with assessments in California.3 The California Standards Test

(CSTs), first implemented in 2003, attempts to measure students’ mastery of the content

standards. The 8th grade CST includes questions drawn from the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade

standards which, as education researcher Bradley Fogo has noted, require students to

recall information drawn from “hundreds of historical figures, groups, events, and

phenomena spread over wide expanses of time.”4 The content standards were meant to

provide a broad outline for teachers to follow; however, teachers who wish to fully

prepare their students for the CSTs often find themselves covering topics at a rapid pace

in order to teach all of the required standards before the CSTs are given in April.

In his book Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of

Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History, sociologist James Loewen

reminds teachers that, “Our goal must be to help students uncover the past rather than

cover it.”5 Too many teachers treat the standards as a checklist. Teaching a survey course

that skims across the top of hundreds of items of historical information in a single school

year makes a teacher little more than a tour guide whose primary objective is to keep the

group moving. This type of fly-by instruction satisfies neither students nor teachers. In

fact, the Curriculum Frameworks, which were created to guide teachers in

3 Bradley Fogo, “Making and Measuring the California History Standards.” Kappan 92, no. 8,

(May 2011): 64. 4 Fogo, “Making and Measuring,” 66. 5 James W. Loewen, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009), 19.

74

implementation of the content standards, states, “Students must be given the time to study

specific periods of history fully and in depth and to learn about the people and events,

ordinary and extraordinary that make these studies exciting.”6 Teachers who utilize the

content standards and frameworks in tandem must be selective; choosing topics that

allow students to form a historical narrative and wrestle with multiple interpretations of

historical events.7 Merely memorizing and recalling facts does not capture students’

interest, nor does it foster historical thinking.

At first glance, the introduction of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS),

approved by California’s legislature in August of 2010, would seem to complicate the

history teacher’s task even more. Under the CCSS, teachers of all academic disciplines

share responsibility for student literacy. History teachers are expected to explicitly teach

the reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills that are necessary to develop historical

literacy; skills such as determining the meaning of discipline-specific vocabulary,

determining the central idea of primary and secondary sources, and citing textual

evidence to support one’s analysis of a source. The CCSS takes an interdisciplinary

approach to literacy based on “…extensive research establishing the need for college and

career ready students to be proficient in reading complex informational text

6 California Department of Education. “History-Social Science Framework Field Review Draft.”

July 2009, 136. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/hs/cf/ (accessed April 3, 2012). In 2009, faced with budgetary constraints, the California State Legislature suspended the process and procedures for adopting instructional materials, including framework revisions, until the 2015-16 school year.

7Carlson, Peter, “Interview: Sam Wineburg, critic of history education.” American History 46,

no. 5, (December 2011): 28-29., Loewen. Teaching What Really Happened, Waring, “Escaping Myopia,” Sam Wineburg, Daisy Martin, and Chauncey Monte-Sano, Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School History Classrooms. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011).

75

independently in a variety of content areas.”8 Rather than mandating additional standards

for history teachers, the CCSS liberates history teachers by emphasizing the use and

analysis of texts, which can be used to promote strategies for teaching historical thinking.

Why teach historical thinking? If we acknowledge that our students will leave

our 8th grade history classrooms incapable of remembering all the important facts about

American history from the American Revolution to the beginning of World War I, then

what skills and knowledge do we want our students to carry with them? According to

Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, “To ask where

information comes from and why texts are written is to confront the written word as an

empowered agent, not a passive consumer. Knowing how to read and think in this way is

a survival kit for democratic life.”9 In the digital media age, data is readily accessible.

Most students have phones that will allow them to check historical facts. While smart

phones allow students to access a constant stream of information, our students need skills

to evaluate the sources of that information: its biases as well as the contexts in which it

was created: and they need the ability to compare and evaluate multiple accounts of the

same event. Historical thinking provides students with skills that empower them to fully

participate in a democratic society.

How do we teach historical thinking? The Common Core assumes teachers will

use primary sources in addition to secondary sources such as a textbook. The state

8 Common Core State Standards Initiative, “English Language Arts Standards: History/Social

Studies, Grades 6-8.” http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards/english-language-arts-standards/history-social-studies/grades-6-8/ (accessed April 4, 2012).

9 Sam Wineburg, “What Does NCATE Have to Say to Future History Teachers? Not Much.” Phi

Delta Kappan 86, no. 9, (May 2005): 662.

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framework also promotes the use of primary sources. The framework advises that when

learning about the Civil War, “In addition to studying the critical battlefield campaigns of

the war, students [should] use a variety of primary sources to examine the human

meaning of the war in the lives of soldiers, free African Americans, slaves, women, and

others.”10 Effective use of primary sources demands close reading and analysis. Using

primary sources forces students to take their time to consider what can be gleaned from

the source. While a textbook simplifies the historical narrative and discourages questions

beyond factual recall, primary sources reveal new questions. Teachers who guide

students in careful analysis of primary source documents can effectively teach historical-

thinking strategies such as sourcing, contextualization, causality, and the comparison and

evaluation of multiple accounts.

Content Standard 8.10.4 reads, in part, “Discuss Abraham Lincoln's presidency

and his significant writings and speeches and their relationship to the Declaration of

Independence.” Students typically enter 8th grade with some basic knowledge about

Abraham Lincoln. In elementary school, students learned that Lincoln freed the slaves.

When students read the Emancipation Proclamation as 8th graders they usually have

numerous questions. Students notice that the proclamation only freed slaves residing in

the rebellious states. How did enslaved people living in the Confederacy gain their

freedom based on this proclamation? What about slaves in the Border States that

remained in the Union, why didn’t Lincoln free them? Rich discussions ensue about why

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in his capacity of Commander-in-Chief

10 California Department of Education, “History-Social Science Framework Field Review Draft.”

July 2009, 233-234. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/hs/cf/ (accessed April 3, 2012).

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and classified the proclamation as a war measure. Would this discussion be enough to

cover the standard? Undoubtedly, but the challenging questions generated by the

students represent an opportunity turn their curiosity into a historical investigation.

Professional historians specialize and develop extensive knowledge of the

secondary literature within their areas of focus. Classroom teachers are required to have

survey-level knowledge of potentially hundreds of historical topics. While classroom

teachers cannot master the historiography of every topic they will be expected to teach,

they can provide students with background knowledge that includes basic chronology and

key historical developments as well as necessary vocabulary.11 In order for students to

experience success when working with primary sources, teachers must choose short,

readable, interesting texts. Reading historical documents can exhaust middle school

students’ cognitive abilities leaving them unable to engage in analysis.12 Each lesson in

the appendix provides teachers with usable documents and tools to support students’

comprehension of primary sources so that students can move past literal comprehension

toward analysis.

The historical information provided at the beginning of each lesson helps teachers

establish a historical context. During the lesson, students define key terms in order to

develop vocabulary that will be essential to their comprehension of the texts that follow.

11 Avishag Reisman and Sam Wineburg, “Teaching the Skill of Contextualizing in History.” The

Social Studies 99, no. 5, (September/October 2008): 204. 12 Jeffery D. Nokes, “Recognizing and Addressing the Barriers to Adolescents' "’Reading Like

Historians.’" The History Teacher 44, no. 3, (May 2011): 381. Consult the “Primary Source Tools for Teachers” in the Appendix to see a chart of interventions to address students’ barriers to successfully comprehending primary source documents.

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Historians begin their investigations with questions. Historians Patricia Cleary and David

Neumann have worked with K-12 teachers to combine the content knowledge of

historians with the pedagogical knowledge of classroom teachers. Their work

emphasizes the importance of teachers choosing the right question to investigate when

using primary sources in the classroom. According to Cleary and Neumann, “Asking the

right question may be as important as choosing the right documents” and “a good

question provokes students to reflect on the complexity of historical circumstances.”13

The guiding question posed in each of the appendix lessons encourages students to view

the documents as a group. Returning again and again to the guiding question prompts

students to compare and contrast the documents that comprise each lesson and use the

document to construct a historical context.

The guiding question in one of the lessons on the Emancipation Proclamation

asks, “How did Sacramentans’ opinions about emancipation change from 1861 to 1863?”

(Appendix B, Lesson Two). When the Civil War began, most Northerners framed the

conflict as a war to preserve the Union; the abolition of slavery in the United States was

not the primary goal of most white citizens in 1861. The documents selected for this

lesson show an evolution in how Unionists viewed emancipation. The focus activity,

designed to generate discussion, asks students to examine a Sacramento Daily Union

article published on October 5, 1861. The article calls the total abolition of slavery in the

United States, “socially and physically an impossibility.” It opines, “The two races

13 Patricia Cleary and David Neumann, “The Challenges of Primary Sources, Collaboration, and

the K.-16 Elizabeth Murray Project.” The History Teacher 43, no. 1 (November 2009): 76-77.

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cannot live together upon terms of equality.” The editors cite the social consequences

that they believe are sure to follow emancipation; “a war of extermination.” These

statements challenge students to see events from the “perspective of the agents

themselves looking forward into what was yet unknown.”14 In 1861, the editors of the

Sacramento Union could not envision a nation in which freed men and women peacefully

live alongside their former owners. Less than two years after this article was printed, this

same newspaper reported a 100-gun salute fired in honor of the Emancipation

Proclamation. What changed in the intervening months? This lesson compels students to

examine how historical events resulted in a change in the white citizens’ attitudes toward

emancipation.

Numerous skills are embedded in the analysis questions that follow each

document. Analysis questions “prompt students to read carefully and think deeply about

a document’s attribution of source, historical context, and use of language.”15 First,

teachers think aloud to model how historians use reading strategies that are specific to

history as a discipline. Next, teachers support individual students as they model these

strategies, and finally, students work with partners to practice reading and thinking about

each source aloud. Students often discover that analysis of primary source documents

generates new questions. As the students analyze each document, they work to create a

context for that document and the documents as a group, a form of analysis that

Wineburg refers to as a “zigzagging process” in which the historian engages in a dialogue

14 Waring, “Escaping Myopia,” 283. 15 Reisman and Wineburg, “Teaching the Skill of Contextualizing in History,” 204.

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with the source.16 Historians rarely move through documents in a linear fashion.

Information from one document informs the historian’s understanding others documents.

Students develop more sophisticated understanding of contextualized thinking as they

practice this process.

In 2005 Wineburg wrote that “in English and social studies/history classes ...

students will encounter complex narratives and dense expository texts, learning to

formulate their thoughts about both in written form. Acts of literacy should be at the

center of what goes on in social studies.”17 Wineburg’s statement embodies the goals of

the CCSS. Historical literacy involves discipline-specific ways of reading and writing.

Historians use primary and secondary sources to craft a well-reasoned interpretation of

historical events. “Teachers should assess students’ understanding of events through

open-ended questions that allow expressions of substantiated opinions. This type of

speaking and writing more accurately reflects the work of historians as they develop a

hypothesis and marshal evidence.”18 At the conclusion of the emancipation lesson,

students use their analysis of the documents to write a paragraph that shows how opinions

about emancipation changed in Sacramento from 1861 to 1863. The ability to analyze

multiple sources of evidence and write an explanation that accurately conveys complex

information is a skill that benefits students beyond the classroom. Students who develop

familiarity with the complexity of issues surrounding slavery and emancipation in the

16 Reisman and Wineburg, “Teaching the Skill of Contextualizing in History,” 206. 17 Wineburg, “What Does NCATE Have to Say to Future History Teachers?,” 663. 18 Nokes, “Recognizing and Addressing the Barriers to Adolescents' "’Reading Like Historians,’"

394.

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United States are also adding to their understanding of the nation’s history of race

relations since the war.

In addition to the lesson detailed above, Appendix B contains several more

lessons that allow students to delve into complex investigations of California’s Civil War

story. California’s population had exploded in 1849 due to the Gold Rush, allowing the

territory to apply for statehood in 1850. Immigrants to California brought their sectional

loyalties west with them. After the southern states began to secede in 1861, Californians

were divided in their opinions regarding California’s role in the crisis. In the end,

California remained loyal to the Union, but Lesson One allows students to examine a

diversity of opinions regarding secession that were expressed in California throughout the

winter of 1861. California’s decision to remain in the Union would prove to be critical to

the Union‘s success in many ways.

How can students understand a war fought to maintain the Union without first

scrutinizing what the term ‘Union’ meant to nineteenth-century Americans? Lesson Six

asks students to think about what ‘Union’ symbolized for the people of the loyal states in

1861. Constructing an understanding of this crucial term requires students to weave a

historical context. After the Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, California’s State

Legislature passed Union resolutions and Sacramentans formed Union clubs pledging

their lives, fortunes, and honor to uphold the United States government. Students’ ability

to understand the North’s motivation for waging war against the Confederacy in 1861

relies upon their ability to comprehend the sense of exceptionalism with which

Americans viewed their nation.

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In spite of California’s great distance from any of the Civil War battlefields,

many students are fascinated by the military aspects of the war. The California Hundred

and Battalion fought in the eastern theater as members of the Massachusetts 2nd Cavalry.

They served in the eastern theater and saw action in more than fifty engagements, mostly

in Virginia. The California Hundred and Battalion provide a direct link between

California and the eastern theater of war. Lesson Seven requires students to examine and

analyze documents relating to the military service of the Californians. Students then

design a memorial plaque that details the contributions of the California Hundred and

Battalion and explains their historical importance. During the war, Sacramento’s

newspapers followed the movements of the California Hundred and Battalion closely as

battles raged across Virginia. The men serving in the Union army helped to forge a

powerful connection between their state and the nation.

Masterful teachers rarely follow other teacher’s lesson plans in a prescribed

manner; their pedagogy combines art with science. Masterful history teachers bring their

own insights about historical content and pedagogy, as well as knowledge of their

specific students, when they adapt lesson plans to make them effective in their

classrooms. The intent of the lesson plans contained in Appendix B is to model how

California teachers can meet content standards while also teaching historical-thinking

skills; to inspire teachers to continue to create primary-source based lesson that foster

students’ interest in history and strengthen their ability to think historically.

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Appendix A: Primary Source Tools for Teachers

source: http://www.archives.gov/nae/education/pdf/primary-sources-and-historical-thinking-skills.pdf

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source: http://www.archives.gov/nae/education/pdf/guidelines-for-using-primary-sources.pdf

85

86

source: http://www.archives.gov/nae/education/pdf/integrating-primary-sources-into-the-classroom.pdf

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88

source: http://historyproject.ucdavis.edu/pdfs/Process_of_Historical_Investigation.pdf

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source: http://historyproject.ucdavis.edu/pdfs/investigation_template.pdf

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source: http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/worksheets/written_document_analysis_worksheet. pdf

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source:

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/worksheets/poster_analysis_worksheet.pdf

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source: http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/worksheets/photo_analysis_worksheet.pdf

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source: http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/worksheets/cartoon_analysis_worksheet.pdf

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source: Jeffery D. Nokes, “Recognizing and Addressing the Barriers to Adolescents' "’Reading Like Historians.’" The History Teacher 44, no. 3, (May 2011): 398.

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Appendix B: Model Lessons Lesson One

The Winter & Spring of Discontent

Common Core Standards ELA – History/Social Science RH.6-8.1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources. RH.6-8.2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions. RH.6-8.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. RH.6-8.10. By the end of grade 8 read and comprehends history/social studies texts in the grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently. California State History Social Science Content Standards

8.10 Students analyze the multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War. Objectives- Students will discuss reactions to the Secession Crisis in the winter and spring of 1861. Students will recognize a range of opinions regarding secession existed in the loyal states during the Secession Crisis of 1861. Materials- Duplicate and distribute the documents and accompanying analysis questions needed for the lesson. Procedures- Vocabulary Development- A list of key terms has been provided. Guide students in a careful reading of each document. Students should first use context clues as they read to discover the meaning of important words and phrases. Students may also use classroom resources such as a dictionary, a thesaurus, or their textbook to define important terms.

Document Analysis and Discussion- Students read each document independently and attempt to answer the questions that follow. The analysis (and a second read-through) can be done in pairs, within small groups or as a whole-class activity. The teacher should closely monitor student understanding and continuously return to the guiding question, “What were Californians’ reactions to the Secession Crisis of 1861?”

Assessment- Students evaluate reactions to the Secession Crisis of 1861 and place opinions expressed in the sources on a continuum varying from strongly in favor of a state’s right to secede to strongly opposed to a state’s right to secede.

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Extended Activities- 1. Students conduct research on California’s political leaders who served during the

1860-1861 sessions at the state or national level. John Conness, Charles Crocker, William Gwin, Thomas Laspeyre, Milton S. Latham, and Zachariah Montgomery all served during this period. Questions to pursue include; Where was each man born? When did he come to California? Which political party did each man belong to? Which legislators left California once the Civil War began? Which men returned to the South to support the Confederacy? Which men remained supportive of the Union? Of those who left, did any return to California when the war ended? How did the political composition of the California Legislature change once the Civil War began?

Historical Context

In 1861, California was a young state composed mainly of people who had been

born in the east or south; these new Californians brought their political ideologies west

with them. Even before statehood was granted there was a struggle for power among two

wings of the Democratic Party in California; the Southern Democrats known as the

Chivalry Democrats or “Chivs” led by William Gwin, formerly of Mississippi, and the

free-soil Democrats led by New York native David Broderick. The political battles

between Chivalry Democrats, and the free-soil Democrats had only intensified in the

decade since statehood.1 The Chivs had remained in control of the State Legislature for

most of the decade. Since the Legislature elected the state’s senators to the U.S.

Congress, California’s pro-Southern Democratic Senators had been able to use political

patronage to fill key government jobs in the state.

During the secession crisis in the winter of 1861, California’s loyalty to the

Union was not assured. Politically, California more closely resembled a border state than

1Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York:

Vintage Books, 2007), Arthur Quinn, The Rivals: William Gwin, David Broderick, and the Birth of California. (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.,1994).

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the other free states of the North. California’s Governor Downey noted the people of

California were comprised “of all portions of the Union… representing every section of

the country and every class of society.”2 In his State-of-the-State speech delivered on

January 19, 1861, Governor Downey compared California to the “Border States” of

Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Delaware. (Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and

Tennessee remained in the Union until after hostilities began in Charleston Harbor on

April 12, 1861.) The governor advocated California take on the role of a mediator and

possible peace maker in the secession crisis.

At the time of the Governor’s speech, the State Assembly had thirty-five

Democrats, one National Democrat, one Unionist, and nineteen Republicans; forty of the

legislators were native to free-states and twenty-eight were native to slave-holding states.

In the State Senate, there were eighteen Breckenridge Democrats (pro-Southern), one Old

Line Democrat, and five Republicans; eighteen of the legislators were native to free-

states and fifteen were native to slave-holding states.3 The previous spring California

Congressman Milton S. Latham gave a speech in Congress in which he claimed if the

Union dissolved, California would “…sustain ourselves the relations of a free and

independent state. “ 4 A microcosm of the nation as a whole, California’s legislators

expressed a wide range of opinions regarding a state’s right to secession. Discussion of

2 “Federal Relations,” Sacramento Bee, January 19, 1861, page 4, column 4. 3 “Who and What are our Legislators?” Sacramento Daily Union, January 19, 1861, Page 2

column 3. The Union article cited its source as the “Homographic Chart” compiled by the State Legislature.

4 Richards, The California Gold Rush, 226, 228.

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a Pacific Republic or of neutrality in the event of a war between the states was openly

and hotly debated in the State Legislature as various Union resolutions were proposed in

both legislative houses in January and debated throughout the winter.

Most Sacramentans maintained personal ties to the eastern or southern states and

followed the news about the secession crisis closely through the exchange of letters with

friends, family, and business associates, and by reading the daily newspapers, the Bee and

the Union. News printed by Sacramento’s newspapers was sent by telegraph and then

taken by Pony Express from Ft. Kearney, Nebraska to Sacramento. Mail coming by

Pony Express arrived in Sacramento two or three days a week, and took twenty days, in

good weather, to travel from the East Coast to California.5 The sectional crisis heightened

the need for information to move more quickly and by early 1861 plans were made to

connect the telegraph from the Atlantic states all the way to San Francisco, California.

Within ten months the continental telegraph was connected, and messages could travel

from New York to San Francisco in only three hours and fifteen minutes.6 The new

sense of immediacy created by transcontinental telegraph connected California more

closely with events unfolding in the east.

Guiding Question

What were Californians’ reactions to the Secession Crisis of 1861?

5 “News of the Morning,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 29, 1861, page 2, column 1.

6 “Made,” Sacramento Daily Bee, October 25, 1861, page 2, column 1.

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Key Terms

Union

secession

Confederacy

Resolution

abolitionists

John Brown

Focus Activity

Use the lithographs in Documents A and B to begin a discussion about the Secession Crisis of 1861.

Document A

source: Woods, Oliver Even. “The Pending Conflict.” Lithograph. Philadelphia, PA: Herline & Hensel, 1863. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/ pictures/item/2008661658/ (accessed March 24, 2012)

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Document A: Analysis Questions

1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. List the objects or people you see in the lithograph. 5. Write the lithograph’s caption and/or title. 6. Record any important words or phrases in the lithograph. 7. List adjectives that describe the emotions portrayed in the lithograph. 8. Explain the message of the lithograph. 9. Who is the intended audience of the source? 10. What perspective does this lithograph take about the Secession Crisis of 1861?

Document B

source: Crehen, Ernest. “Our National Confederate Anthem.” Lithograph. Richmond, VA: C.T. De Coeniel, 1862. From Library of Congress Music Division. http://www.loc.gov/ pictures/item/2008661638/ (accessed March 24, 2012).

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Document B: Analysis Questions

1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. List the objects or people you see in the lithograph. 5. Write the lithograph’s caption and/or title. 6. Record any important words or phrases in the lithograph. 7. List adjectives that describe the emotions portrayed in the lithograph. 8. Who is the intended audience of the source? 9. What perspective does this lithograph take about secession?

Task Students will analyze each of the following documents. Each document will be examined for how Californians reacted to the Secession Crisis of 1861.

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Document C Note: Document C discusses Union Resolutions proposed by three different members of the California Assembly. The editors not only report the contents of each resolution, but also give their opinions about each man’s proposal.

source: Sacramento Daily Union, January 22, 1861

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Document C: Analysis Questions

1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. What was different about this time from ours? 4. Who is the intended audience of the source? 5. What resolution does Assemblyman Patrick offer? 6. What resolutions does Assemblyman Montgomery offer? 7. What resolutions does Assemblyman Crocker offer? 8. Which speakers seem to support the South’s right to secede from the Union?

Provide evidence from the text of the document. 9. Which speaker does not recognize a State’s right to secede from the Union?

Provide evidence from the text of the document. 10. Whose ideas do the editors of the Sacramento Union seem to support? How do

you know? What is your evidence from the text of the document?


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Document D

Document D: Analysis Questions

1. When and where were the sources written or produced? 2. What type of documents are these? 3. Are the letters primary or secondary sources? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of each of the sources? 6. What opinions regarding secession does George Wheeler Gibson express in his

letter? 7. What opinions regarding secession does George Campbell express in his letter?

“In view of the present trouble in our government I am delighted to know there is so strong a Union feeling in your section of the country.”- George Wheeler Gibson, January 30, 1861, in a letter to a business associate in Sacramento source: George Wheeler Gibson Collection, California State Library, Box 343, Folder 5.

“About the only excitement is the trouble in the Atlantic States which I suppose you are posted on. It will make but little difference here how it is settled provided the union does not bust up altogether. They are having a great deal of trouble South Carolina at present; it is hard telling how it may end.”- California miner George B. Campbell, February 10, 1861, writing to his parents source: George B. Campbell Collection, 1831-1910, California State Library, Box 11, Folder 4.

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Document E

Note: Mrs. Hollis’s letter was written after Ft. Sumter surrendered but before the first battle at Bull Run. Mr. Campbell’s letter was written shortly after news of the Battle of Bull Run reached Sacramento.

Document E: Analysis Questions

1. When and where was each of the sources written or produced? 2. What type of documents are these? 3. Are these letters primary or secondary sources? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of each source? 6. What opinions regarding secession does Mrs. Hollis express in her letter? What

opinions regarding secession does George Campbell express in his letter?

“You wanted to know what we think of the times. I think it is dreadful, brother at war with brother and God only knows where or when it will end. We are for the Union, but when I think our son is in the midst of it I am most crazy and we can’t hear from him nor he from us.” “…we will hope and pray that the difficulty in the states may be speedily settled but I fear it will be a long time before they are. When I think of the lives that are and will be lost, I wish they had let the states secede and the property go with them rather than had any fighting.”- Mrs. Hollis of Grass Valley, CA to Mrs. Edwards, June 16, 1861 source: Lincoln Edwards Collection, Center for Sacramento History. 68/109/100.

“This awful war engulfs everything. The all absorbing topic of the day is the war now raging in the east. Both parties have their backers here, although the South is in the minority. It appears horrible to think that the best government ever formed should be broken up and so many lives lost just to gratify a pack of howling abolitionists- for my part I should like to see them all hung higher than old John Brown they are the cause of all the trouble.”- miner George B. Campbell, August 10, 1861, writing to his parents from California source: George B. Campbell Collection, 1831-1910, California State Library, Box 11, Folder 4.

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Writing Task

Students will place each of the following people; Assemblyman Patrick, Assemblyman Montgomery, Assemblyman Crocker, George Wheeler Gibson, George B. Campbell, and Mrs. Hollis on a continuum varying from strongly in favor of a state’s right to secede to strongly opposed to a state’s right to secede.

Strongly Favors a Strongly Opposes a State’s State’s Right to Secede Right to Secede

Students need to cite textual evidence from the documents to justify their choices. Name Supports/Opposes a State’s

Right to Secede Textual Evidence

Patrick He doesn’t oppose a state’s right to secede.

“While anything exists worth of being called an American Union, California will cling to it.”

Montgomery

Crocker

Gibson

Campbell

Hollis

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Lesson Two How Opinions about Emancipation Changed from 1861 to 1863

Common Core Standards ELA – History/Social Science RH.6-8.1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources. RH.6-8.2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions. RH.6-8.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. RH.6-8.6. Identify aspects of a text that reveal an author’s point of view or purpose (e.g., loaded language, inclusion or avoidance of particular facts). RH.6-8.10. By the end of grade 8 read and comprehends history/social studies texts in the grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently. Anchor Standards for Writing- Text Types and Purposes 1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. California State History Social Science Content Standards

8.10 Students analyze the multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War. Time- The lesson can be conducted in two to three class periods; one to two days for document analysis and an additional day for completing the writing task. Objectives- Students will be able to discuss how opinions (as reflected in articles from the Sacramento Daily Union) regarding emancipation changed from 1861 when the Civil War began, to 1863 when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Materials- Duplicate and distribute the documents and accompanying analysis questions needed for the lesson. Procedures- Vocabulary Development- A list of key terms has been provided. Guide students in a careful reading of each document. Students should first use context clues as they read to discover the meaning of important words and phrases. Students may also use classroom resources such as a dictionary, a thesaurus, or their textbook to define important terms. Document Analysis and Discussion- Students read each document independently and attempt to answer the questions that follow. The analysis (and a second read-through) can be done in pairs, within small groups or as a whole-class activity. The teacher should

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closely monitor student understanding and continuously return to the guiding question, “How did Sacramentans’ opinions about emancipation change from 1861 to 1863?” Assessment- Students write a paragraph explaining how opinions about emancipation changed from 1861 to 1863 when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. In order to successfully complete the task, students must use a citation from Document A and compare it to a citation from at least one of the other documents. A suggested rubric follows the documents. Extended Activities-

2. Provide students with a copy of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project’s “Chronology of Emancipation during the Civil War.” Students choose one of the years under consideration; 1861, 1862 or 1863. Students write a brief, one-to-two sentence summary of Documents A-D. Next, students place each document into the timeline in the correct place chronologically. Finally, students write a paragraph using events in the timeline as context for one of the documents from the year they chose.

Historical Context

Historians now agree that slavery was a primary cause of the war. Emancipation,

however, was not a primary goal of the loyal white citizens when the war began.

Preserving the union and maintaining a democratic republic are the reasons most Union

men gave for fighting in 1861.1 There was considerable public debate about the United

States’ policy toward slaves as Union commanders moved into Confederate territory and

slaves left their masters for the safety of Union lines. Questions of constitutionality and

the original goals of the war were overridden by the immediate question of what the

government’s policy should be toward these individuals christened “contrabands” of war

by Union General Benjamin Butler. As the war progressed, Unionists began to see

emancipation as both of tool for winning the war and a necessary step in ensuring the

1 See the following for discussions of emancipation and Union; David W. Blight, Race and

Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), Gary W. Gallagher. The Union War. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011) and Chandra Manning, What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

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future survival of the Union. The evolution in Unionists’ thinking regarding

emancipation can be traced through the newspapers’ coverage of slavery, emancipation,

and the enrollment of African American soldiers in the Union army.

Guiding Question

How did Sacramentans’ opinions about emancipation change from 1861 to 1863?

Key Terms

abolition

emancipation

subjugate

annihilate

military necessity

pregnant with consequences

Secessionists

treason

Focus Activity

Use the following excerpts from an article in the Sacramento Daily Union to engage students’ interest in the topic of emancipation. The article makes some provocative statements that should generate discussion.

Document A

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Help the students analyze the source using the following questions;

1. What strong descriptive words are used in the source? 2. When and where was the source written or produced? 3. What type of document is this? 4. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 5. What was different about this time from ours? 6. Who is the intended audience of the source? 7. What are the Sacramento Union editors’ opinions about emancipation in 1861?

Task Students will analyze each of the following documents and compare them with Document A. Each document will be examined for evidence of how opinions about emancipation changed from 1861 to 1863.

source: Sacramento Daily Union, October 5, 1861

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Document B


1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. How is this source different from Document A? 7. Why might the length of the war determine the fate of slavery in the United

States?

source: Sacramento Daily Union, May 19, 1862

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8. What opinions regarding emancipation do the Union’s editors express in May of 1862? How can you use this source to answer the question, “How did Sacramentans’ opinions about emancipation change from 1861 to 1863?”

Document C

Blythe, David Gilmore. “President Lincoln Writing the Proclamation of Freedom.” Lithograph. Ehrgott, Forbriger & Co, Pittsburg, PA, 1863. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov /pictures/resource/cph.3a05801/ (accessed March 24, 2012).

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1. When and where were the sources written or produced? 2. What type of documents are these? 3. Are these sources primary or secondary sources? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of each of the sources? 6. How are these sources different from Documents A and B? 7. What opinions regarding emancipation do the Union’s editors express in

September of 1862? How can you use this source to answer the question, “How did Sacramentans’ opinions about emancipation change from 1861 to 1863?”

source: Sacramento Daily Union, September 24, 1862

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Document D

source: Abingdon Virginian, October 9, 1862. From the Library of Congress Historic American Newspapers. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84025980/1862-10-03/ed-1/seq-2/ (accessed March 24, 2012).

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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. How is this source different from the other sources? 7. What opinions regarding emancipation do the Abingdon Virginian’s editors

express?

Document E


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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. How is this source different from Document A? 7. What opinions regarding emancipation do the Union’s editors express in January

of 1863? How can you use this source to answer the question, “How did Sacramentans’ opinions about emancipation change from 1861 to 1863?”

Writing Task

Write a paragraph describing how opinions about emancipation changed from 1861 to 1863 when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Use information from Document A as evidence of how Sacramentans were thinking about emancipation in 1861. Then, use evidence from Document B, C, or E to show how thinking about emancipation changed as the war continued.

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Rubric Category Mastery Proficient Basic Below Basic Organization Paragraph

contains an introduction that includes a background, definition, and thesis. Sentences are well developed and organized with evidence that supports thesis

Paragraph contains most elements of an introduction that includes a background, definition and thesis. Sentences are mostly well developed with evidence that supports thesis.

Paragraph may lack elements of an introduction. Sentences are recognizable but may not be well developed and may not support thesis. Organization and development is adequate.

Paragraph lacks elements of an introduction. May lack thesis. Sentences may not be recognizable or are poorly organized and developed.

Documents Uses Document A and 2 other documents (B, C, or E) effectively to support thesis. Documents are correctly cited.

Uses Document A and at least 1 other document (B, C, or E) somewhat effectively and mostly accurately. Cites documents accurately.

Contains limited reference to documents. Interpretation may be inaccurate or irrelevant to thesis. Citations missing or inaccurate.

Make no reference to documents or interpretation shows a lack of familiarity with documents.

Analysis Demonstrates analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of evidence. Provides logical analysis of evidence to support thesis.

Shows some analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of evidence. Includes some analysis of evidence with limited insight.

Limited analysis. Analysis may be irrelevant to argument.

No analysis. Provides a summary or retelling of events.

Mechanics No grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors

Few grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors

Several grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors

Many grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors.

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Timeline of Events Related to Emancipation

1861- May 24 Fugitive slaves at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, are received and put to work by Union general Benjamin F. Butler, who declares them “contraband of war”

August 6 First Confiscation Act nullifies owners' claims to fugitive slaves who had been employed in the Confederate war effort 30 Invoking martial law, General John C. Frémont declares free the slaves of disloyal owners in Missouri; President Lincoln asks that he modify his order so as not to exceed congressional laws respecting emancipation

September 11 General Frémont having refused to modify his emancipation order, President Lincoln orders him to do so

December 1 Secretary of War Simon Cameron issues his annual report, from which President Lincoln had required the deletion of passages advocating emancipation and the employment of former slaves as military laborers and soldiers; Cameron is soon replaced by Edwin M. Stanton

1862- March 13 Congress adopts an additional article of war forbidding members of the army and navy to return fugitive slaves to their owners

April 3 General David Hunter, Union commander in the South Carolina Sea Islands, requests permission to arm black men for military service; receiving no response, he begins recruiting on his own authority in early May, but the War Department refuses to pay or equip the regiment and Hunter is therefore compelled to disband it 10 At Lincoln's request, Congress pledges financial aid to any state that undertakes gradual emancipation with compensation to owners 16 Congress abolishes slavery in the District of Columbia, with compensation to loyal owners, and appropriates money for the voluntary removal (“colonization”) of former slaves to Haiti, Liberia, or other countries

May 9 General David Hunter declares free all slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida

source: Freedmen and Southern Society Project, “Chronology of Emancipation during the Civil War.” University of Maryland. http://www.history .umd.edu/Freedmen/chronol.htm (accessed March 21, 2012)

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19 President Lincoln issues a proclamation nullifying General Hunter's emancipation edict and urging the border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware) to embrace gradual, compensated emancipation

June 19 Congress prohibits slavery in the territories

July 12 President Lincoln appeals to congressmen from the border states to support gradual, compensated emancipation, with colonization of freed slaves outside the United States, warning that if they do not act soon, slavery in their states “will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion – by the mere incidents of the war”; two days later, a majority of the congressmen reject Lincoln's appeal 17 Second Confiscation Act frees the slaves of persons engaged in or assisting the rebellion and provides for the seizure and sale of other property owned by disloyal citizens; it also forbids army and navy personnel to decide on the validity of any fugitive slave's claim to freedom or to surrender any fugitive to any claimant, and authorizes the president to employ “persons of African descent” in any capacity to suppress the rebellion 17 Militia Act provides for the employment of “persons of African descent” in “any military or naval service for which they may be found competent,” granting freedom to slaves so employed (and to their families if they belong to disloyal owners) 22 President Lincoln announces to his cabinet his intention to issue a proclamation freeing slaves in the rebel states, but agrees to postpone it until after a suitable military victory

August 22 In New Orleans, General Benjamin F. Butler incorporates into Union forces several “Native Guard” units composed of free-black soldiers; soon thereafter he begins recruiting both free-black and ex-slave men for additional regiments 25 After having withheld its permission for months, the War Department authorizes recruitment of black soldiers in the South Carolina Sea Islands

September 22 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln; it announces that all slaves in those states or portions of states still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, will be declared free, pledges monetary aid for slave states not in rebellion that adopt either immediate or gradual emancipation, and reiterates support for the colonization of freed slaves outside the United States

1863

January 1 Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln; it declares free all slaves in

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the Confederate states (except Tennessee, southern Louisiana, and parts of Virginia) and announces the Union's intention to enlist black soldiers and sailors. By late spring, recruitment is under way throughout the North and in all the Union-occupied Confederate states except Tennessee

March 16 American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission appointed by Secretary of War Stanton to investigate the condition of former slaves and recommend measures for their employment and welfare

May 22 Bureau of Colored Troops created within the War Department 27 Black soldiers play important role in failed assault on Port Hudson, Louisiana

June 7 Black soldiers repel Confederate attack at Milliken's Bend, Louisiana

July 18 Black soldiers spearhead failed assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina 30 President Lincoln pledges that Union soldiers, black or white, are entitled to equal protection if captured by the enemy and threatens retaliation for Confederate enslavement of black prisoners of war

October 3 War Department orders full-scale recruitment of black soldiers in Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee, with compensation to loyal owners

December 8 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction issued by President Lincoln; it offers pardon and restoration of property (except slaves) to Confederates who take an oath of allegiance to the Union and agree to accept emancipation; it also proposes a plan by which loyal voters of a seceded state can begin the process of readmission into the Union

1864

March 16 New Arkansas state constitution, which abolishes slavery, is ratified by pro-Union voters

April 8 Senate approves constitutional amendment abolishing slavery 12 Confederate troops under General Nathan B. Forrest massacre black soldiers captured at Fort Pillow, Tennessee

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June 7 Enlistment in Kentucky opened to slave men irrespective of their owners' consent, with compensation to loyal owners 15 House of Representatives fails to approve constitutional amendment abolishing slavery 15 Congress makes pay of black soldiers (which had been $10 per month for all ranks) equal to that of white soldiers ($13 per month for privates, larger amounts for higher ranks); the change is retroactive to January 1, 1864, or, for men who were free before the war, to the time of enlistment 20 Congress increases the pay of all privates, black and white, to $16 per month, with corresponding increases for higher ranks

September 5 New Louisiana state constitution, which abolishes slavery, is ratified by pro-Union voters

November 1 New Maryland state constitution, which abolishes slavery, takes effect, having been ratified in October 8 Abraham Lincoln is reelected president, defeating George B. McClellan

1865

January 11 Missouri state constitutional convention abolishes slavery 12 General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton meet with twenty black leaders in Savannah, Georgia, to discuss the future of the ex-slaves 16 General Sherman issues Special Field Order 15 setting aside part of coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida for settlement exclusively by black people, settlers to receive “possessory title” to forty-acre plots 31 House of Representatives approves constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, sending it to the states for ratification

February 22 Amendment to Tennessee state constitution abolishes slavery

March 3 Congress approves a joint resolution liberating the wives and children of black soldiers 3 Congress establishes Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen's Bureau) to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom 13 Confederate Congress authorizes President Jefferson Davis to recruit slave men as soldiers, with the permission of their owners; Confederate War Department issues order governing the enlistment on March 23.

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April 9 Surrender of the army of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, Virginia 14 President Lincoln assassinated; Vice-President Andrew Johnson succeeds to the presidency

December 18 Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution announced by the Secretary of State; the amendment abolishes slavery throughout the United States

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Lesson Three Comparing Multiple Accounts of Emancipation Celebrations

Common Core Standards ELA – History/Social Science RH.6-8.1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources. RH.6-8.2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions. RH.6-8.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. RH.6-8.6. Identify aspects of a text that reveal an author’s point of view or purpose (e.g., loaded language, inclusion or avoidance of particular facts). RH.6-8.9. Analyze the relationship between a primary and secondary source on the same topic. RH.6-8.10. By the end of grade 8 read and comprehends history/social studies texts in the grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently. California State History Social Science Content Standards

8.10 Students analyze the multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War. Time- The lesson can be conducted in two to three class periods; one to two days for document analysis and an additional day for completing the writing task. Objectives- Students will compare and contrast multiple accounts of the same event using articles published in the Sacramento Bee, the Sacramento Daily Union, and the Pacific Appeal (an African American newspaper). Students will discuss the question, “Why did Sacramentans believe the Emancipation Proclamation was a good thing?” Materials- Duplicate and distribute the documents and accompanying analysis questions needed for the lesson. Procedures- Vocabulary Development- A list of key terms has been provided. Guide students in a careful reading of each document. Students should first use context clues as they read to discover the meaning of important words and phrases. Students may also use classroom resources such as a dictionary, a thesaurus, or their textbook to define important terms. Document Analysis and Discussion- Students read each document independently and attempt to answer the questions that follow. The analysis (and a second read-through) can be done in pairs, within small groups or as a whole-class activity. Students will create a Venn diagram as a way to organize their thinking about the three of the sources. Students

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use textual evidence from the document to support their answers to the analysis questions for each document. Assessment- Students write a newspaper article, journal entry, or letter describing Sacramento’s Emancipation Celebrations assuming the perspective of someone living at the time. Extended Activities-

1. Assign students the task of finding articles from two or three different publications (sources may be print or electronic publications) about the same current event. Students should evaluate each source using the following questions;

a) When and where was the source written or produced? b) What type of source is this? c) Who is the intended audience of the source? d) How does this source differ from the other source(s) you chose for the same

event? e) What reasons can you give for the differences between the sources’ coverage of

the same event? f) How did reading more than one account of the same event complicate your

understanding of the event? Did it lead to more questions? Did the sources conflict? What are the benefits of reading more than one source? Are there disadvantages to reading multiple sources? If so, what are the disadvantages?

Historical Context

California had entered the Union as a free state and the Emancipation

Proclamation was a military order that freed slaves only in the states in rebellion against

the United States government. The direct impact of the proclamation in California was

negligible; still, the public understood that the proclamation sounded the death knell for

slavery. The editors of the Sacramento Union claimed the proclamation, “inaugurates a

new era in the history of this war” and cited it as “evidence that the President is

convinced that such an important step is necessary to enable him to preserve the

Union.”168 By the time the Emancipation Proclamation became official on January 1,

168 “The Proclamation,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 24, 1862, page 2, column 2.

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1863, Sacramentans were in the mood to celebrate emancipation as a new goal of the

war. Salutes were fired throughout the city and “huzzas of joy” accompanied public

readings of the proclamation.169 From this point forward, ending slavery became a means

to preserving the Union. Depriving the Confederacy of slave labor dealt a severe blow to

its efforts to maintain independence. Tying the abolition of slavery to a reunited Union,

meant the most divisive issue the nation had ever faced would finally be put to rest.

According to the 1860 census, San Francisco and Sacramento counties contained

almost one-third of California’s African American population, yet fewer than 500 African

Americans lived in Sacramento at this time.170 The Sacramento Bee and the Sacramento

Daily Union were the two daily newspapers published in Sacramento during the Civil

War. One will not find the voices or opinions of the African American community in

either of Sacramento’s daily newspapers. The newspapers’ coverage of emancipation

focused on its impact upon the war, and only rarely touched its effect upon the

individuals. The Pacific Appeal, an African American newspaper began publication in

San Francisco in 1862. Articles in the Pacific Appeal offer a glimpse into the reactions

of California’s African American community to the government’s evolving policy toward

emancipation during the Civil War.

169 “Gunpowder,” Sacramento Bee, January 2, 1863, page 3, column 1. “Cheering the Proclamation,” Sacramento Bee, January 5, 1863, page 3, column 1. “Proclamation Salute,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 2, 1863, page 3, column 1.

170 Rudolph M. Lapp, “The Negro in Gold Rush California.” The Journal of Negro History 49,

No. 2 (April 1964): 84.

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Guiding Question

“Why did Sacramentans believe the Emancipation Proclamation was a good thing?”

Key Terms

emancipation

decorum

jubilee

bondsmen

abolition

Focus Activity

Choose two accounts of the same current event; articles about the same event from two different newspapers or a clips from two news programs comparing the lead story of the day. Lead students in a discussion that compares and contrasts the two accounts. How did the two accounts differ? What reasons can students give for the differences between the sources’ coverage of the same event? How did reading or watching more than one account of the same event complicate their understanding of the event? Did it lead to more questions? Did the sources conflict? What are the benefits of reading or watching more than one source? Are there disadvantages to consulting multiple sources? If so, what are the disadvantages?

The Stanford History Education Group has a lesson titled, “Lunchroom Fight” that helps students determine, “how events are interpreted, remembered, explained, and judged to be trustworthy.”1 The Lunchroom Fight lesson helps students recognize that when historians construct a narrative about the past they consult multiple sources and consider the trustworthiness of each source. Task

Students analyze each of the following documents. Then, students will create a Venn diagram as a way to compare and contrast articles about Emancipation Proclamation celebrations from three different newspapers in Sacramento and San Francisco.

1 Stanford History Education Group. “Lunchroom Fight.” http://sheg.stanford.edu/?q=node/21

(accessed March 23, 2012).

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Document A

source: Heard and Moseley, Photographer. “Watch meeting, Dec. 31, 1862 – Waiting for the hour.” Photograph. Boston, MA. 1863. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ resource/ppmsca.10980/ (accessed March 24, 2012).

source: Sacramento Daily Union, December 29, 1863

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1. When and where were the sources written or produced? 2. What type of documents are these? 3. Are these sources primary or secondary sources? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of each of the source? 6. What do these sources tell us about how the Emancipation Proclamation was

celebrated in 1863? 7. How does this source help us answer the question, “Why did Sacramentans

believe the Emancipation Proclamation was a good thing?”

Document B

Watts, J.W. “Reading the Emancipation Proclamation.” Steel Engraving. S.A. Peters and Co. Hartford, CN, c 1864. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003678043/ (accessed March 24, 2012).

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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. List the objects or people you see in the lithograph. 5. What is the lithograph’s caption and/or title? 6. What adjectives would you use to describe the emotions portrayed in the

lithograph? 7. Explain the message of the lithograph. 8. How is this time different from ours? 9. Who is the intended audience of the source? 10. What does this source tell us about why the Emancipation Proclamation was

important?

Document C Document C

CHEERING THE PROCLAMATION—On Saturday night, when the crowd of residents and strangers who were waiting in the reading room of the Orleans for the extra had learned its contents a F.F. Fargo arose and proposed three cheers for the proclamation. They were given with huzzas of joy, which welled up loudly from the public heart, the finest chords of which had been so delicately yet so powerfully touched. In two minutes thereafter we heard a young man, who is a stranger here, say in private conversation to a friend, “What a change! If four years ago, any man had dared, in this room and in this crowd, to make such a proposition, he would have been kicked from the house and probably thrown from the river. Now every man rejoices at it – at least no one objects, and I did not see any who refused to cheer. And war has made all this change.” We may also state in this connection, that the colored population were deeply moved by it, and kept up their Saturday night’s rejoicings to a late-hour.in many places, observing the utmost decorum. source: Sacramento Bee, January 5, 1863

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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. What does this source tell us about how the Emancipation Proclamation was

celebrated in 1863? 7. How does this source differ from Document A? 8. What reasons can you give for the differences between Document A and

Document B? 9. How does this source help us answer the question, “Why did Sacramentans


Document D

source: University of Detroit Mercy, “Black Abolitionist Archive,” http://research.udmercy.edu/find/special_collections/digital/baa/index.php? (accessed February 17, 2012).

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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. What does this source tell us about how the Emancipation Proclamation was

celebrated in San Francisco in 1863? 7. How does this source differ from the others? 8. What reasons can you give for the differences between Documents A, B, and C?

Document E


1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 3. Who is the intended audience of the source? 4. What does this source tell us about why the Emancipation Proclamation was

important? 5. How does this source differ from the others? 6. How does this source help us answer the question, “Why did Sacramentans


“The proclamation altered the nature of the Civil War, the relationship of the federal government to slavery, and the course of American history.” “By making the army an agent of emancipation and wedding the goals of Union and abolition, it ensured that northern victory would produce a social transformation in the South and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American life.” source: Eric Foner. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 2010, 245.

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Document F

Document F: Analysis Questions


lithograph? 7. Explain the message of the lithograph. 8. How is this time different from ours? 9. Who is the intended audience of the source? 10. What does this source tell us about why the Emancipation Proclamation was

important?

source: “The effects of the proclamation - freed Negroes coming into our lines at Newbern, North Carolina.” Illustration. Harper’s Weekly, February 21, 1863. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc. gov/ pictures/item/95501775/ (accessed March 24, 2012).

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11. How does this source help us answer the question, “Why did Sacramentans believe the Emancipation Proclamation was a good thing?”

Pre-Writing

Use the Venn diagram below to compare and contrast three accounts of Emancipation Proclamation Celebrations.

Writing Task

Write a newspaper article, journal entry, or letter describing Sacramento’s Emancipation Celebration. Write from the perspective of someone living at the time.

Doc __

Doc __Doc __

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Class Discussion

How did reading more than one account of the same event complicate your understanding of the event? Did it lead to more questions? Did the sources conflict? What are the benefits of reading more than one source? Are there disadvantages to consulting multiple sources? If so, what are the disadvantages? How did you account for the differences among the sources when you were constructing your narrative? What information would improve your narrative? What kinds of sources would you look for? Where could you find them? Did you prefer one account more than the others? Why? Is one account more accurate than the others? How would you know? How could you find out?

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Lesson Four Why did Sacramento Need a City Guard?

Common Core Standards ELA – History/Social Science RH.6-8.1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources. RH.6-8.2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions. RH.6-8.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. RH.6-8.10. By the end of grade 8 read and comprehends history/social studies texts in the grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently. Anchor Standards for Writing- Text Types and Purposes

2. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details and well-structured event sequences.

California State History Social Science Content Standards

8.10 Students analyze the multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War.

7. Explain how the war affected combatants, civilians, the physical environment, and future warfare.

Time- The lesson can be conducted in two class periods; one day for document analysis and a second day for completing the writing task. Objectives- Students will be able to discuss why Sacramento maintained a City Guard, or citizens’ militia throughout the Civil War. Students use the sources to develop an argument explaining why Sacramento maintained a City Guard during the Civil War. Materials- Duplicate and distribute the documents and accompanying analysis questions needed for the lesson. Procedures- Vocabulary Development- A list of key terms has been provided. Guide students in a careful reading of each document. Students should first use context clues as they read to discover the meaning of important words and phrases. Students may also use classroom resources such as a dictionary, a thesaurus, or their textbook to define important terms. Document Analysis and Discussion- Students read each document independently and attempt to answer the questions that follow. The analysis (and a second read-through) can be done in pairs, within small groups or as a whole-class activity. The teacher should

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closely monitor student understanding and continuously return to the guiding question, “Why did Sacramento need a City Guard during the Civil War?” Assessment- Students write a letter from the perspective of someone living in Sacramento during the Civil War to a newspaper or the Sacramento Board of Supervisors. In their letter, the students will explain why it is necessary that Sacramento maintains a City Guard. Use the letter rubric created using RubiStar (www.rubistar.4teachers.org) to assess students’ understanding of why Sacramento needed a City Guard during the Civil War. Historical Context

Within a month of Fort Sumter’s surrender, Sacramentans had formed at least

seven military companies and had begun holding drilling exercises regularly. These

companies were made up of all classes of the city’s citizens and included “merchants,

mechanics, lawyers, laborers, editors, teamsters, clerks, traders, etc.”1 Many of these

companies would eventually be attached to the state militia, but others would function as

a “home guard” keeping the local citizens safe from the possibility of secessionist

uprisings. A citizen militia was a long-standing tradition in the United States, one that

predated independence.

A Home Guard made sense in the eastern states. Pennsylvania’s Home Guard was

called into service when Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia

invaded the state in June of 1863. Was a Home Guard truly necessary in California, or

did these Sacramento merchants and mechanics simply enjoy playing soldier? What

threatened Sacramento? The men of Sacramento were doing more than playing soldier.

California’s Union Resolutions and declarations of loyalty had not eradicated all the

secessionist sympathizers within the state. While numerous Californians returned to their

1 City Intelligence: Military,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 25, 1861, page 3, column 1.

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native southern states and fought on behalf of the Confederacy, some chose to stay in

their adopted state. The Home Guard units served a dual purpose, acting as proof of

Sacramentans’ Union loyalty, while also functioning as a deterrent to secessionist activity

in the region.

During the first year of the war, Sacramento’s newspapers reported incidents of

secessionist activity that included flying the Palmetto flag, Unionists and secessionists

exchanging words in saloons, and secessionists threatening to fire a salute to

commemorate a Confederate victory. As the war continued and the casualties mounted,

however, speech supporting secession was taken more seriously. In October of 1862,

Sacramento’s National Guard, a branch of the state militia, required all members to take

an oath of allegiance to the federal government.2 Persons suspected of secessionist

sympathies were required to take the loyalty oath or face imprisonment in Alcatraz.

In response to the perceived threats around them, Sacramentans established a

Union League to promote loyalty to the Union and support the policies of Lincoln’s

administration. The Union’s editors described the Union League as “an antidote for the

venom of the Copperheads.”3 Copperheads were northern Democrats who advocated a

peace settlement with the Confederacy. The Sacramento Union characterized

Copperheads as traitors who threatened to derail the Union’s war effort from within. The

newspaper’s editors placed anyone who objected to the war or to the Lincoln

administration’s policies in league with the Copperheads. The lines were more sharply

2 “National Guard,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 15, 1862, page 3, column 1. 3 “Why We Unite,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 20, 1863, page 4 column 2.

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drawn as the war continued with few Union victories. By spring of 1863, Sacramento’s

newspapers claimed that anyone who held anti-Lincoln views was anti-Union and

therefore the enemy.

Guiding Question

“Why did Sacramento need a City Guard during the Civil War?”

Key Terms

Union

scourge

prosperity

imprudence

Secessionists

oath of allegiance

militia

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Focus Activity

Use General Wright’s proclamation printed in the Sacramento Daily Union to focus students’ interest in the topic of the Sacramento City Guard. The proclamation makes some provocative statements that should generate discussion.

Document A

source: Sacramento Daily Union, April 10, 1863

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1. What strong descriptive words are used in the source? 2. When and where was the source written or produced? 3. What type of document is this? 4. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 5. What was different about this time from ours? 6. Who is the intended audience of the source? 7. Who is the author of this military proclamation? What is his name and title? 8. What is the proclamation’s message? Who is General Wright warning? 9. How does this document help us answer the question, “Why did Sacramento need

a City Guard during the Civil War?”

Task Students will analyze each of the following documents. Each document will be evaluated to help students decide if Sacramento needed a City Guard during the Civil War. Document B


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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. What was different about this time from ours? 7. How does this document help us answer the question, “Why did Sacramento need


Document C


1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. How is this source different from Documents A and B? 7. What tone do the Bee’s editors take toward Secessionists? 8. How does this document help us answer the question, “Why did Sacramento need


The Visalia Difficulty. Our telegraphic dispatch from Visalia, confirming the conflict between a few Secessionists and the soldiers, and the additional news of the burning of Wells’ house raises suspicions and doubts as to whether or not we are to escape civil war. If the Secessionists or the Union men of our State act with imprudence under the excitement which seems to prevail, there is certainly danger of an immediate conflict. It is hoped, however, that the excitement will pass away and the peace and quiet of the State be not disturbed by a few crazy-headed Secessionists, who have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Note: The incident in Visalia, located in Central California, took place about four months after General Wright’s proclamation was issued. source: Sacramento Bee, August 8, 1863

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Document D


1. When and where these source written or produced? 2. Are these sources primary or secondary sources? 3. What was different about this time from ours? 4. Who is the intended audience of the source? 5. How are these sources different from Documents B and C? 6. What is “Union Boy”? 7. How does these documents help us answer the question, “

Why did Sacramento need a City Guard during the Civil War?”

Captain W.M. Siddons of Sacramento with the cannon, “Union Boy,” on City Plaza in Sacramento. source: Center for Sacramento History, 85/24/3781

source: Sacramento Daily Union, November 9, 1863

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Document E Document E: Analysis Questions

1. When and where was this source written or produced? 2. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 3. What was different about this time from ours? 4. Who is the intended audience of the source? 5. How is this source different from Documents B, C, and D? 6. How does this document help us answer the question, “Why did Sacramento need


Writing Task

Imagine you are living in Sacramento during the Civil War. The city is considering whether or not to keep the City Guard. Write a letter to a newspaper or the Sacramento Board of Supervisors. In your letter, explain why it is necessary that Sacramento maintains a City Guard.

Sacramentan Mary Ackley remembered, “An aged couple lived next door to us and every time there was a Union victory up would go their flag. Early one morning I looked out and the flag was at half-mast. I ran over to their home and asked, “’What is the sad news?’” He replied, “’Our President has been shot and is not expected to live.’” There was much excitement in the town. One man who kept a hotel and was a rebel remarked that he was glad of it, and said it should have been done long ago. He was arrested at once. The militia was called out and he was marched to the Plaza, and he had either to take the oath of allegiance under the flag or leave town. He took the oath, but the citizens made it so unpleasant for him that he soon left town.” source: Mary Ackley, Crossing the Plains and Early Days in California: Memories of Girlhood Days in California’s Golden Age. (Sacramento, California: Sacramento Book Collectors Club, 2004), 65.

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Lesson Five The Great Sanitary Cheese

Common Core Standards ELA – History/Social Science RH.6-8.1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources. RH.6-8.2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions. RH.6-8.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. RH.6-8.6. Identify aspects of a text that reveal an author’s point of view or purpose (e.g., loaded language, inclusion or avoidance of particular facts). RH.6-8.9. Analyze the relationship between a primary and secondary source on the same topic. RH.6-8.10. By the end of grade 8 read and comprehends history/social studies texts in the grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently. California State History Social Science Content Standards



Time- The lesson can be conducted in two class periods; one day for document analysis and a second day for completing the advertisement for the auction of the “Great Sanitary Cheese.” Objectives- Students will explain what the role of the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. Students will be able to give examples of how civilians raised money to support Union soldiers during the Civil War. Materials- Duplicate and distribute the documents and accompanying analysis questions needed for the lesson. Procedures- Vocabulary Development- A list of key terms has been provided. Guide students in a careful reading of each document. Students should first use context clues as they read to discover the meaning of important words and phrases. Students may also use classroom resources such as a dictionary, a thesaurus, or their textbook to define important terms. Document Analysis and Discussion- Students read each document independently and attempt to answer the questions that follow. The analysis (and a second read-through) can

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be done in pairs, within small groups or as a whole-class activity. The teacher should closely monitor student understanding and continuously return to the guiding question, “How did civilians in California help the Union war effort?” Assessment- Students create an advertisement for an auction of the Great Sanitary Cheese. The auction will be held to raise money for the Sanitary Commission to use on behalf of Union soldiers. Use the poster rubric created using RubiStar (www.rubistar.4teachers.org) to assess students’ understanding of the role of the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War and how civilians helped the Union war effort. Extended Activities-

1. Students create illustrations of additional items to be auctioned at a Sanitary Fair. Illustrations can be posted around the classroom. Next, students go on a gallery walk to see the items available for auction. Then, students write a newspaper article detailing the items that will be available at the upcoming auction.

Historical Context

In the fall of 1862, Sacramento began to formally mobilize in support of the

Union soldiers. The social life of Sacramentans became focused on supporting the Union

war effort. Jane Stanford, the governor’s wife, headed the Ladies Lint Society. The

society met to make bandages to be sent east to the battlefront. Around this same time

the Sanitary Fund began soliciting donations in support of the United States Sanitary

Commission. The Sanitary Commission had been established in 1861 to assist the federal

government and U.S. army in managing military hospitals and in the promotion of

sanitary practices. As the war continued into its second year, the Commission became a

distribution center for clothing, bedding, and food produced by a network of ladies aid

societies throughout the loyal states.1 Barbecues, balls, and lectures were all used as

avenues for patriotic fund-raising.

1 Judith E. Harper, Women during the Civil War, an Encyclopedia. (New York: Routledge,

2004), 429-430.

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The Reverend T. Starr King proved to be a driving force behind Sacramento’s

support of the Sanitary Commission. Starr King, a Unitarian minister, had developed a

reputation as an outstanding orator while serving as the minister of the Hollis Street

Church in Boston. In 1860 he accepted a call to the First Unitarian Church in San

Francisco. The Reverend T. Starr King was physically slight and unassuming when not

on the podium, but his fiery orations in support of the Union soon made him much in

demand as a lecturer. In 1861, the reverend embarked on a lecture tour of California’s

interior in which he presented patriotic lectures as a means of promoting Union

sentiment. Starr King spoke in Sacramento several times. His lectures were well

attended and excerpts were printed in the newspapers.

In 1862 Starr King focused his energy in a new direction when he organized the

Pacific Branch of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Starr King was recruited to the cause

by his friend and fellow Unitarian minister, Dr. Henry Bellows, the first president of the

Sanitary Commission. Starr King’s rousing speeches were attended by as many as

40,000 people.2 The reverend sought to prick the consciences of his audiences and

appeal to their sense of Christian charity. Sacramentans were admonished to share the

“burdens as well as the blessings of the Union.”3 At the conclusion of this speech,

2 Richard H. Peterson, “The United States Sanitary Commission and Thomas Starr King in

California, 1861-1864.” California Historical Society 72, No. 4 (Winter, 1993/1994): 333. 3 Robert Monzingo, Thomas Starr King: Eminent Californian, Civil War Statesmen, Unitarian

Minister. ( Pacific Grove, California: Boxwood Press, 1991), 164. “The Lecture,” Sacramento Bee, September 25, 1862, page 3, column 2. “The Patriotic Fund,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 26, 1862, page 3 column 1; this article describes the organization of the Patriotic Fund Committee that followed Starr King’s lecture.

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Sacramento’s citizens were called on to contribute to the Patriotic Fund and establish a

local branch in support of the Sanitary Commission.

Sacramentans responded to Starr King’s call to action. The devastating floods of

1861-1862 had destroyed or damaged millions of dollars worth of property in the

Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. Despite the fact that Sacramento was completely

flooded and a new levee had to be built, the city still contributed generously. Governor

Leland Stanford, who headed the Sacramento Patriotic Fund Committee, telegraphed Dr.

Bellows, “The city of Sacramento from her baptism of water to her suffering brethren in

the East in the baptism of blood send $20,000 by mail today.”4 In June of 1864, in

response to the great need following the casualties suffered in General Grant’s Overland

Campaign; Sacramento sent $18,000 in gold to the Commission’s headquarters in New

York City.5 Although California was thousands of miles from the battlefront and had a

small population, the state contributed a quarter of the national total of all the cash

donated to the U.S. Sanitary Commission, more than any other state.6 Few Sacramentans

could fight in the terrible battles raging in the east or nurse the wounded men who fell in

those battles, so they expressed their devotion to the Union through donations to the

Sanitary Commission.

4 Monzingo, Thomas Starr King, 179-180.

5 “Sacramento’s Contribution,” Sacramento Bee, June 18, 1864, page 3, column 2.

6 Peterson, “The United States Sanitary Commission and Thomas Starr King in California,” 328.

“The Sanitary Commission,” Sacramento Bee, November 7, 1863, Page 4, column 1.

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Guiding Question

“How did civilians in California help the Union war effort?”

Key Terms

Sanitary Commission

sanitary

ministrations

gala

Focus Activity

Mary Elizabeth Massey was one of the first historians to investigate the role women

played in supporting the war effort. Use this passage from Massey’s book to begin a

discussion about how civilians supported the war effort. Students can brainstorm a list of

ways men and women on the home front supported soldiers serving during the Civil War.

Document A

“Within two weeks after the outbreak of war there were more than 20,000 aid societies hard at work in the Union and Confederacy.” “In the North many local groups were soon brought together under the supervision of the Sanitary Commission, which informed the women of what was needed and systematized their efforts.” source: Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 32.

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Task Students will analyze each of the following documents. Each document will be evaluated to help students learn about ways in which civilians raised money to help the Sanitary Commission support soldiers during the Civil War. Document B


1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. How is this source different from Document A? 7. How can you use this source to answer the question, “How did civilians in

California help the Union war effort?”

source: Sacramento Daily Union, December 15, 1862 Note: In today’s dollars, $1,520 would be the equivalent of $33,800 and $21,510 would be equivalent to $481,000. (http://www.measuringworth. com/uscompare/relativevalue.php (accessed March 24, 2012).

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Document C


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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. How is this source different from Document B? 7. What types of activities are described in the article? 8. How can you use this source to answer the question, “How did civilians in



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Document D Document D: Analysis Questions

1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. What connections can you make between this source and Document C? 7. How can you use this source to answer the question, “How did civilians in


Sacramento’s Contribution The Sanitary Commission of this city to-day forwarded to the Sanitary Commission at New York, the sum of $18,000 in gold, the result of the picnic, collections, lectures, etc. – all gathered in during the last month. Wells, Fargo & Co. take the money forward for four per. Cent., and the amount of gold at New York, at less than present rates, will net about $36,000 in currency. It will be noticed that all the money has been collected since Grant’s first battle in Virginia. If the rest of the State has done as well as since that time, a sum equal to over $200,000 in currency will go forward on the next steamer. The sum contributed here amounts to over six dollars in gold for each voter in the city. source: Sacramento Bee, June 18, 1864

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Document E

SANITARY CHEESE – About one-half of this mammoth production of the dairy has been sold, realizing the sum of $600 for the Sanitary fund. What with the sale of the remainder, and the price received for admission to its proportions during the progress of the Mechanics’ Fair, it is estimated that his cheese will produce $2,200 for the Fund. source: Sacramento Bee, November 26, 1864

The Great Sanitary Cheese. A pamphlet published by the Sanitary Commission says: “After mature thought, the Messrs. Steele, in the Spring of 1864, communicated to R.G. Sneath, Esq., the present Treasurer for the Commission for California, their desire to make a mammoth cheese to be exhibited under the direction of the Commission, and then sold, the entire proceeds to insure the Sanitary Fund. The measure having been approved, the design executed in the month of June. The Messrs. Steele having a dairy of 600 cows in Marin county, and another of 800 in Santa Cruz county selected 600 of the choicest and best at their establishment in Santa Cruz County, assigned the work to thirty men, experienced in the business, who under their own eye and management, milked from these 600 cows in three and one-half days, more than 3,500 gallons of milk, which was properly cared for and the curd prepared; when the immense mass, entirely homogeneous in consistence and color, was subjected to the huge press, constructed expressly for this purpose, where under the scientific and skillful management of the experienced proprietors, it settled into form, assumed shape, and took, on proportion with all the readiness of a cheese of ordinary size. The great feature of interest is that so large a body of cheese, measuring five feet eight inches across, and one foot ten and one-half inches deep, and weighing three thousand nine hundred and thirty pounds, should be so skillfully manipulated as to sustain its perfect form and beauty, and settle to ripeness with such regularity and readiness, that it is to-day, September 10th, as well formed and handsome as when it first issued from the press, and to all appearance so cured that every ounce of it is fit to grace the table of a Queen. This wonderful production was formally presented to the Sanitary Commission by Mr. Steele on Thursday evening, September 8, 1864.” source: Sacramento Bee, September 20, 1864

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1. When and where was these sources written or produced? 2. What type of documents are these? 3. Are these sources primary or secondary sources? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. What is the Great Sanitary Cheese? Why is it being sold? 7. How can you use these sources to answer the question, “How did civilians in


Document F


1. When and where was this source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. Who is the intended audience of the source? 5. How does this source help you understand the previous sources? 6. How can you use this source to answer the question, “How did civilians in


“At the end of the war money from the Pacific coast had totaled $1,473,407.07. Western support placed the Sanitary Commission ahead of all other relief agencies. The power of money dramatized the commission before the public; it awakened confidence in Sanitary ministrations, rousing other sections to give on a large scale through fairs.” Note: In today’s dollars, $1,473,000 would be the equivalent of $17,400,000. (http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php accessed March 24, 2012). source: William Quentin Maxwell. Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., Inc.), 1956, 188-189.

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Task

Imagine you are in charge of the Sanitary Committee. The Committee is holding a Sanitary Fair at which the Giant Cheese and other items will be auctioned. All the money raised by the auction will benefit Union soldiers through the Sanitary Commission. Create a poster advertising the auction of the Great Sanitary Cheese. Describe the cheese and explain why the Sanitary Commission needs to raise money.

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Lesson Six Union Now and Forever! What did ‘Union’ Mean?

Common Core Standards ELA – History/Social Science RH.6-8.1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources. RH.6-8.2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions. RH.6-8.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. RH.6-8.6. Identify aspects of a text that reveal an author’s point of view or purpose (e.g., loaded language, inclusion or avoidance of particular facts). RH.6-8.9. Analyze the relationship between a primary and secondary source on the same topic. RH.6-8.10. By the end of grade 8 read and comprehends history/social studies texts in the grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently. Anchor Standards for Writing- Text Types and Purposes

3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details and well-structured event sequences.

California State History Social Science Content Standards



Time- The lesson can be conducted in two to three class periods; one to two days for document analysis and an additional day for completing the letter. Objectives- Students will explain what the term ‘Union’ meant to the citizens of the loyal states during the Civil War. Materials- Duplicate and distribute the documents and accompanying analysis questions needed for the lesson. Duplicate the Union letter rubric. Procedures- Vocabulary Development- A list of key terms has been provided. Guide students in a careful reading of each document. Students should first use context clues as they read to discover the meaning of important words and phrases. Students may also use classroom resources such as a dictionary, a thesaurus, or their textbook to define important terms.

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Document Analysis and Discussion- Students read each document independently and attempt to answer the questions that follow. The analysis (and a second read-through) can be done in pairs, within small groups or as a whole-class activity. The teacher should closely monitor student understanding and continuously return to the guiding question, “What did the term ‘Union’ mean to the citizens of the loyal states?” Assessment- Using the perspective of someone living in California during the Civil War, students write a letter to a friend explaining why the loyal states are fighting a war to maintain the Union. Use the letter rubric created using RubiStar (www.rubistar .4teachers.org) to assess students’ understanding of the term “Union” and what it meant to the citizens of the loyal states during the Civil War. Extended Activities-

1. Students create a Union envelope for the state of California.

Historical Context

Civil War historian Gary W. Gallagher argues in his monograph, The Union War,

that Union was the primary factor in the North’s willingness to engage in a long and

bloody struggle with the South. According to Gallagher, “Recapturing how the concept

of Union resonated and reverberated throughout the loyal states in the Civil War era is

critical to grasping northern motivation. Devotion to the Union functioned as a bonding

agent among Americans who believed, as a citizenry and a nation under the Constitution,

they were destined for greatness on the world stage.”1 Sacramento’s two daily

newspapers, both pro-Union and supportive of the Lincoln administration, bear out

Gallagher’s thesis. “To most of our citizens the Union has never seemed more sacred-

the flag so beautiful- the Constitution so inestimable- as they now appear, surrounded by

1 Gary W. Gallagher. The Union War. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

2011), 46. See also Joan Waugh. U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: North Carolina University Press, 2009). and John Latschar and Robert K. Sutton, eds. The Civil War Remembered: Official National Park Service Handbook. (Walsworth Publishing Company, 2011).

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the clouds of danger,” the Sacramento Union’s editors commented in May of 1861.2 The

United States was the oldest successful democratic republic up to that date. Unionists

believed secession was treason; rending the Union was counter to the principles the

Founders had set forth in the Constitution and the Union must be preserved despite the

costs of a civil war.

The bombardment and subsequent surrender of Fort Sumter to Confederate

commander P. G. T. Beauregard was widely regarded as the moment when war began

between the North and the South. Once war actually came, most Californians remained

steadfast in their commitment to the Union, because in the minds of loyal Americans, to

do otherwise was an act of treason. Americans carried a strong sense of their

exceptionalism as a nation. Americans’ participation in a democratic republic was at the

core of their claims to exceptionalism.3 The thinking was that the Union must be

preserved as a vanguard against tyranny, not just in the United States, but around the

world. According to the Sacramento Union’s coverage of the firing on Fort Sumter, the

reaction of Northern Californian’s newspapers was uniformly in favor of the Union. Only

the San Joaquin Republican suggested Californians remain “aloof from the fratricidal

strife and remain sad spectators, ready at any time to act as mediators and peacemakers.”4

Thousands of miles separated Californians from the strife in the East; a sense of

aloofness would be understandable, even practical, given the circumstances. Yet, most

2 “Still Enrolling,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 1, 1861, page 3, column 1. 3 Gallagher, The Union War, 68-73. 4 “Fort Sumter,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 29, 1861, page 1 column 6 & 7, page 2, column

1.

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Californians seemed determined to affirm their attachment to the Union. Once hostilities

began, public displays of patriotism became commonplace. Young ladies walked down

Sacramento’s main commercial thoroughfare carrying American flags. Young men

paraded down the city’s streets carrying flags and playing the Star-Spangled Banner. The

Sacramento Bee reported that thirty-four star Union flags were in such high demand in

the spring of 1861 that bunting had become scarce in Sacramento and San Francisco.5

Guiding Question

“What did the term ‘Union’ mean to the citizens of the loyal states?” Key Terms

Union

Jefferson Davis

Republic

fidelity

fealty

domestic

foes

5“Bunting Wanted,” Sacramento Bee, May 11, 1861, page 3, column 1.

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Focus Activity

Use this envelope printed in Charleston, South Carolina, to begin a discussion about what

19th Century Americans meant when they used the term ‘Union.’

Task Students will analyze each of the following documents. Each document will be evaluated to help students learn about what the term ‘Union’ meant to the citizens of the loyal states during the Civil War.

Note: The inscription on the envelope reads, “The device of our Fathers in their first struggle for liberty. – 1776 “SLAVE STATES, once more let me repeat that the only way of preserving our slave property, or what we prize more than life, our LIBERTY, is by a UNION WITH EACH OTHER.” Jefferson Davis source: Falen, G.W. Printer. “Unite or Die.” Civil War Treasures from the New-York Historical Society, [Digital ID, nhnycw/aj aj92036] http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/query/h?ammem /cwnyhs:@field (DOCID+@lit(aj92036)) (accessed March 27, 2012).

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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. List the objects or people you see in the envelope. 5. Write the envelope’s caption and/or title. 6. Record any important words or phrases printed on the envelope. 7. Who is Jefferson Davis? 8. Who are the Fathers of 1776? 9. What important event in American history occurred in 1776? 10. Who is the intended audience of the source? 11. What perspective does this envelope take toward secession?

Document B

source: Currier & Ives. “The Flag of our Union.” Lithograph. Currier & Ives, New York, 1861. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001699164/ (accessed March 24, 2012).

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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. List the objects or people you see in the lithograph. 5. Write the lithograph’s caption and/or title. 6. List adjectives that describe the emotions portrayed in the lithograph. 7. Explain the message of the lithograph. 8. Who is the intended audience of the source? 9. How is Document B different from Document A? 10. How does this source help you answer the question, “What did the term ‘Union’

mean to the citizens of the loyal states?”

Document C


1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 3. Who is the intended audience of the source? 4. How does this source differ from the others? 5. Why is it important that historians understand how people used key words in the

past? 6. How does this source help us learn about what the term ‘Union’ meant to citizens

of the loyal states? 7. Do people today use the word “Union” when talking about the United States?

Why or why not?

“One explores what it [the Civil War] meant to Americans who lived through it. This avenue of inquiry requires seeking letters, diaries, newspapers, books, broadsides, illustrative materials, and other evidence produced at the time. It involves trying to discern how people used language and what key words and phrases and expressions meant to past generations.” source: Gary W. Gallagher. The Union War. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), 41.

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Document D


1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. Who is the intended audience of the source? 5. Define the following words; fidelity, fealty, requisition, Republic, and domestic.

Rewrite California’s Union Resolution using words a middle school student would understand.

6. How does this source help you answer the question, “What did the term ‘Union mean’ to the citizens of the loyal states?”


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Document E


1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. List the objects or people you see in the lithograph. 5. Write the lithograph’s caption and/or title. 6. List adjectives that describe the emotions portrayed in the lithograph. 7. Explain the message of the lithograph. 8. Who is the intended audience of the source? 9. How does this source help you answer the question, “What did the term ‘Union’


“Hail! Glorious banner of our land. Spirit of the Union.” Lithograph. Gibson & Co., c1861. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92504751/ (accessed March 27, 2012).

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Document F


1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. Who is the intended audience of the source? 5. The last line of the Declaration of Independence reads, “And for the support of

this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” Why would the Union Club Pledge have some of the same words as the Declaration of Independence?

6. How does this source help you answer the question, “What did the term ‘Union mean’ to the citizens of the loyal states?”

“We, whose names are hereunto subscribed, hereby pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to stand by the flag of our country, defend the same against all enemies, whether foreign or domestic, and to uphold and assist the constituted authorities of the United States in maintaining and preserving the same.” - Union Club Pledge source: Sacramento Daily Union, May 11, 1861

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Document G

source: Civil War envelope showing eagle holding American flag in talons with message "Union & libe[rty]" From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/2011660251/ (accessed March 27, 2012)

source: “Civil War envelope showing flying 34-star American flag with message ’The Union, now and forever,’" 1861. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/2011660243/ (accessed March 27, 2012)

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Document G: Analysis Questions

1. When were the sources written or produced? 2. What type of documents are these? 3. Are these sources primary or secondary sources? 4. List the objects or people you see in the envelopes. 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. How does this source help you answer the question, “What did the term ‘Union’


Document H

Document H: Analysis Questions

1. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 2. Who is the intended audience of the source? 3. How does this source differ from the others? 4. How does this source help us learn about what the term ‘Union’ meant to citizens

of the loyal states?

Writing Task Imagine you live in California or another loyal state during the Civil War. Write a letter to a friend explaining why the loyal states are fighting a war to maintain the Union.

“Recapturing how the concept of Union resonated and reverberated throughout the loyal states in the Civil War era is critical to grasping northern motivation. Devotion to the Union functioned as a bonding agent among Americans who believed, as a citizenry and a nation under the Constitution, they were destined for greatness on the world stage.” source: Gary W. Gallagher. The Union War. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), 46.

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Lesson Seven

Rally ‘Round the Flag Boys: The California Hundred and Battalion

Common Core Standards ELA – History/Social Science RH.6-8.1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources. RH.6-8.2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions. RH.6-8.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. RH.6-8.7. Integrate visual information (e.g., in charts, graphs, photographs, videos, or maps) with other information in print and digital texts. RH.6-8.10. By the end of grade 8 read and comprehends history/social studies texts in the grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently. California State History Social Science Content Standards


5. Study the views and lives of leaders (e.g., Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee) and soldiers on both sides of the war, including those of black soldiers and regiments.

6. Describe critical developments and events in the war, including the major battles, geographical advantages and obstacles, technological advances, and General Lee's surrender at Appomattox.


Time- The lesson can be conducted in two to three class periods; one to two days for document analysis and an additional day for designing the memorial plaque. Objectives- Students will learn about the service of the California Hundred/Battalion. Students will use evidence from a variety of sources to write an explanation of whom the California Hundred was and why they should be remembered. Materials- Duplicate and distribute the documents and document analysis matrix. Procedures- Vocabulary Development- A list of key terms has been provided. Guide students in a careful reading of each document. Students should first use context clues as they read to

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discover the meaning of important words and phrases. Students may also use classroom resources such as a dictionary, a thesaurus, or their textbook to define important terms. Document Analysis and Discussion- Students choose at least six of the documents to examine. The analysis can be done in pairs or within small groups. Students should evaluate each source using the matrix. As they evaluate each source, students should focus on the guiding question, “What should Californians remember about the California Hundred and Battalion?” Assessment- Students will design a memorial plaque honoring the California Hundred and Battalion. The plaque’s inscription should be between fifty and one hundred words. The inscription should answer the following questions about the California Hundred and Battalion; “Who were they?”, “What did they do?” When did they serve?”, “Where did they serve?”, and “Why did they serve?” Extended Activities-

1. Students create a digital portfolio of Civil War Memorials using PowerPoint. Each slide of the presentation should have a picture of the memorial, a short description of the memorial, and information about when and where the memorial was dedicated. When complete each portfolio should include at least five Union and five Confederate memorials.

Historical Context

Residing in one of the youngest states in the Union, many of California’s citizens

were native to either the eastern or the southern states. During the Civil War, regiments

were organized, mustered in, and equipped by the states and then sent to the federal army.

Some Californians returned “home” to the east to fight for either the Union or the

Confederacy. In 1861, approximately 6% of male Californians hailed from one of the

eleven Confederate states and 7% were from one of the border slave states.1 Numerous

attempts were made in California to raise a regiment for service in the east. Each attempt

was rejected by the War Department as too costly. At issue was transporting the

volunteers from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast. The federal government simply

1 Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War. (New York:

Vintage Books, 2007), 230.

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could not afford to pay the cost of the recruits’ steamer passage.2 When conscription

became necessary midway through the war Californians were exempt, but were required

to “enroll” with government agents beginning in the fall of 1863.

When the Civil War began, nearly 75% of the army’s soldiers served in posts

west of the Mississippi River.3 Fulfillment of Manifest Destiny required Regular Army

soldiers to protect routes to the west. Several men who became prominent Civil War

generals had served in the army in California during the antebellum period; including

Henry Halleck, Joseph Hooker, William T. Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and Albert Sidney

Johnston. When the Union Army began to mobilize in 1861, the War Department

ordered its West Point trained officers and Regular Army soldiers serving in the west

back to the east. If armed conflict broke out in California, it would have to be dealt with

locally. California Volunteers were needed to fill the army posts along the west coast.4

Potential threats to the nation’s security on the Pacific coast included attacks by Native

Americans, Confederates in the southwest, secessionist uprisings, and the potential that

2 “Speaking of the Cavalry,” Sacramento Bee, October 31, 1862, page 2, column 2. The Bee

indicates the cost of “placing a company in the field ready for service” was $20,000. The company they were referring to, the California Hundred, served as members of the Massachusetts 2nd Cavalry. James McLean, California Sabers: The 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry in the Civil War. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000), 6. McLean writes that the $20,000 for the Massachusetts 2nd Cavalry was raised by subscription among Boston’s wealthiest families.

3 Gregory Paynter Shine, “The War and Westward Expansion” in The Civil War Remembered:

Official National Park Service Handbook, John Latschar and Robert K. Sutton, eds. (Walsworth Publishing Company, 2011), 124.

4 “News of the Morning,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 21, 1861, Page 2, Column 1. The

army regulars were called east and California volunteers were needed to replace them on western posts. California Adjunct General’s Office, Records of California Men in the War of the Rebellion 1861 to 1867. Revised and Compiled by Brig-Gen. Richard H. Orton. (Sacramento: State Office, 1890), 5. According to this report, California Volunteers “occupied nearly all the posts from Puget Sound to San Elizario, Texas.” Also see pages 885-887 for an “incomplete list of the stations occupied by California troops.”

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foreign nations such as France, Britain, and Russia could take advantage of the instability

created by the Civil War.

The Civil War required mobilization of men and material unprecedented in

American history. California’s wartime mobilization was on a much smaller scale than in

the eastern states, but still required detailed planning and organization as thousands of

volunteers were mustered into service. Many volunteers in Northern California came

through Camp Union near Sutterville at some point during their service. In October of

1861, the camp consisted of twenty tents. Barracks were completed at Camp Union in

December of 1862. At various times, Camp Union housed as many as eight hundred

soldiers.5 The camp provided a convenient location for California’s wartime governors to

review the troops. These reviews proved to be a popular attraction for Sacramentans.

Sacramento’s newspapers reported every troop movement made by the State Militia

throughout the duration of the war.

Sixteen-thousand California men served in the west during the Civil War. The

California Column saw action in the southwest, fighting Confederates as well as

Apaches. One company of infantry and five companies of Cavalry were charged with

protecting the overland mail routes between Carson City in Nevada Territory and Salt

Lake City in Utah Territory. The State of California’s official record of their service

notes the California Volunteers “were engaged in hundreds of fights with Indians and

small forces of Confederate troops on the frontiers, in Texas and Mexico. By their

5 “Winter Quarters,” Sacramento Daily Bee, December 16, 1861, page 3, column 2.

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loyalty, they preserved peace in these western States and Territories.”6 The Californians

engaged in more battles with the Indians than the Confederates. California Volunteers

also engaged in small skirmishes with secession sympathizers in Visalia, in California’s

central valley.7

Alcatraz and Angel Island were fortified with additional batteries to aid in the

protection of gold shipments sent by steamer from San Francisco to New York.

California’s financial support of the Union was absolutely vital to the success of the

Union army. On average, $1 million in gold sailed out of the San Francisco Bay each

month during the war. In 1864, over $46 million in gold was sent via Panama to support

the North’s credit and help arm, feed, and clothe a million Union soldiers.8 As the war

continued, the French occupation of Mexico and the British military presence in Canada

made the role played by the California Volunteers in defending the west even more vital

to the nation’s interests.9

Despite the important contributions the California Volunteers were making to the

war effort, many men still craved a chance to fight as members of a California company

in the eastern theater of war. In the fall of 1862, Ira P. Rankin and James S. Reed of San

6 California Adjunct General’s Office, Records of California Men in the War of the Rebellion 1861

to 1867, 5. 7 “The Visalia Difficulty,” Sacramento Daily Bee, August 8, 1863, page 2, column 1. 8 John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848-1869. (Columbia, South Carolina: University

of South Carolina Press, 1990), 208-209; 255 Appendix III.

9 Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. (New York: Random House, 2010). Foreman follows events on both sides of the Atlantic and demonstrates how the Confederacy’s push for official recognition from the British and the Union’s determination to deny the Confederates that recognition kept the U.S. and Britain on the edge of war.

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Francisco wrote to Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. They offered a group of one

hundred men to serve as a Cavalry company within a Massachusetts regiment. After

receiving approval for the plan from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Governor

Andrew accepted the company from California to serve under his state’s quota.

Recruitment began immediately, and the company mustered in on December 10, 1862.

Company A became known as the “California Hundred.”10 The large number of

applicants allowed those organizing the company to set high standards for the recruits.

The only Sacramentan in Company A, as listed by the Sacramento Union on December 8,

1862, was S.J. Corbet.11 So many men applied for enlistment that four more companies

were raised to form a battalion attached to the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry. The California

Battalion consisted of one hundred four natives of New York state, thirty-nine men born

in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, one hundred nine from New England (including fifty-

four from Massachusetts), ninety-nine from the Midwest, twenty-one from border states,

and eight Southerners. Forty-one of the volunteers came from Europe. Company A also

included James “Santiago” Watson from Monterey, the only native Californian.12

10 For information about Californians’ military service in the Union army; California Adjunct

General’s Office, Records of California Men in the War of the Rebellion 1861 to 1867. Revised and Compiled by Brig-Gen. Richard H. Orton. (Sacramento: State Office, 1890), James McLean, California Sabers: The Second Massachusetts Cavalry in the Civil War. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000). Thomas E. Parson, Bear Flag and Bay State in the Civil War: The Californians of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2001), and Larry Rogers and Keith Rogers, Their Horses Climbed Trees: A Chronicle of the California 100 and Battalion in the Civil War; from San Francisco to Appomattox. (Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Military History, 2001).

11“The California Rangers,” Sacramento Daily Union, December 8, 1862, Page 2, Column 5.

National Park Service, “Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System,” http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/ regiments.cfm (accessed November 23, 2011). According to the National Park Service’s website, Samuel J. Corbet entered Company A of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry as a private and achieved the rank of Sergeant.

12 McLean, Massachusetts Cavalry, 13.

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The battalion was mounted, armed, and equipped for the field after they arrived in

Readville, Massachusetts in March of 1863. Attached to the Army of the Potomac, the

Californians served in the eastern theater of war, skirmishing with Confederate John S.

Mosby’s partisan rangers in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. In August of 1864, after

the death of their commander, Charles Russell Lowell, the battalion was assigned to

Major General Phil Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah. Under Sheridan’s command,

the Californians clashed with Confederate Cavalry led by Jubal Early. Some were

present when Confederate General Robert E. Lee sent a flag of truce into the Union line

near Appomattox Courthouse in April of 1865. Of the 500 Californians who mustered

into service in 1862 as members of the California Battalion less than 200 were left in

service when the war ended and these men had to finance their own journeys home from

Massachusetts.13

During the war Sacramento’s newspapers followed the movements of the

California Hundred carefully. The California Hundred gave Californians a direct

connection to the events in the eastern theater. The battalion provided a focal point for

Sacramentans as they followed newspaper accounts of the great battles taking place in

Virginia. News of Captain Sewell’s death leading his men against Mosby’s guerrillas

13 Richards, The California Gold Rush, 233. Richards claims 182 men were mustered out in August of 1865. Parson, Bear Flag and Bay State in the Civil War, 199. Regarding casualties Parson says, “During the course of the war the regiment lost eight officers and 82 enlisted men killed and mortally wounded, and three officers and 138 enlisted men by disease.” Parson’s numbers match those of the National Park Service. http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/regiments.cfm and the California Adjunct General’s Office, Records of California Men in the War of the Rebellion 1861 to 1867, 853. The regimental history presented by Major D.W.C. Thompson, Major California Cavalry Battalion in the State of California’s official record gives a different number citing one hundred and forty-eight mustered out at the battalion’s final discharge from service.

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caused great sorrow in Sacramento. Sacramento’s fire companies flew their flags at half-

staff when they heard the news.14 Californians serving in the Union army forged a

powerful connection between the state and the nation.

Guiding Question

What should Californians remember about the California Hundred and Battalion?

Key Terms

regiment

Cavalry

steamer (steamship)

enlist

recruit

quota

Columbia

General Meade

General Lee

skirmish

14 “Death of a California Officer,” Sacramento Daily Union, February 26, 1864, page 3, column 3.

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guerrillas

Focus Activity

Use the lithograph in Document A to focus students’ attention on the topic of military service during the Civil War. Use the document analysis questions to guide class discussion. Document A

source: “Group of Union soldiers with Abraham Lincoln holding U.S. flag in foreground; four verses of Rally Round the Flag below image.” Harper’s Weekly, October 1, 1864. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002724031/ (accessed March 24, 2012).

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lithograph? 7. Explain the message of the lithograph. 8. How is this time different from ours? 9. Who is the intended audience of the source?

Task Students choose at least six of the document to analyze with a partner. Students fill in the matrix noting the following information about each document set; document letter, whether the sources are primary or secondary, how this time is different from ours, what information can be learned about the California Hundred/Battalion from this document set, and a key quote or phrase from the document set.

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Document B

A CHANCE TO VOLUNTEER – At last the anxious ones, to the number of 100 have opportunity offered to get into active service, if they be good horsemen, in tip-top health, stand five-feet-ten in their stockings, and weight in the vicinity of 160. It happened this wise: Collector Rankin, of San Francisco, on behalf of a number of Massachusetts men in San Francisco, wrote September 15, to Governor Andrew saying: “There are thousands of our citizens who would gladly enlist were it judged prudent to send them out of the State, if they could go to the other side and take part in the war directly. Among such persons is Capt. J. Sewell Reed, Commander of a Cavalry company in this city, [the First Light Dragoons] and friends of his, all like himself natives of Massachusetts, who are earnestly desirous of making up a troop of 100 men to go immediately East and make a part of the Massachusetts contingent. It is at the request of Capt. Reed and his friends that I write to you and offer their services. They are true men, skilled as horsemen by the habits of the country as few men in the Atlantic states ever become, and if they can have an opportunity they will certainly make their mark. They propose to uniform themselves, provide saddles, revolvers, rifles, and all equipments—everything except horses – if provision can be made for their passage by steamer from here to New York.” To this, Governor Andrew replies, Oct. 22nd: “The Secretary of War authorizes Massachusetts to accept a Cavalry company, subject to the provisions of your letter. The Mayor of Boston agrees to pay $200 each for men, which will cover the cost of transportation. I await your telegram that a full company shall be sent. The company should number 100, officers and men, all medically examined and mustered. When can they start? Thanks and honor to California.” The Bulletin says: “Capt. Reed will at once commence enlisting his company. To pass examination, every candidate must be a first-class rider, strong, healthy, of about 160 lbs. weight, capable of enduring fatigue and the hardest service they may be called on to perform. A Committee, consisting of Collector Rankin, Mayor Teechemacher, Major-General Allen, Assistant Adjutant-General Thompson, Capt. C.L. Taylor, James Otis, and Dr. Isaac Rowell, will have charge of fitting out the company, and looking out that the proper clothing and equipments are furnished.” source: Sacramento Bee, October 25, 1862

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Document C


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Document D

RECRUITS WANTED LIGHT CAVALRY WANTED FIFTY MEN WANTED For company C and D, of the California Cavalry Battalion, for active service in the East. The balance of the Battalion left for New York on the 21st of March to be followed by the detachment on April [?]st or 11th. All parties wishing to join this service can apply on FOURTH STREET between J and K, Sacramento, or on MARKET STREET, between [?] and Montgomery, San Francisco, where all necessary information can be obtained. Due notice will be given when the Battalion is full. D.A. DeMERRITT, Captain Commanding Company D source: Sacramento Bee, April 13, 1863

Captain David A. DeMerrit, Company F, California Battalion source: Second Mass Cavalry, California 100 & California Battalion Homepage, “The Second Massachusetts and Its Fighting Californians.” http://www. 2mass.reunioncivilwar.com/ (accessed March 16, 2012).

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Document E

PRESENTATION- Captain DeMerritt, recently of the Sacramento Rangers, has been presented with a handsome and valuable saddle by the City Guard of this city. source: Sacramento Bee, April 14, 1863

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Sacramento March 31, 1863 Dear Sir, The undersigned having been appointed a committee, on behalf of the

“City Guard” of this city to present to you some suitable testimonial on your

departure from among us for active service with the Massachusetts Battalion,

respectfully ask your acceptance of the accompanying Saddle, Bridle, Etc.

While we regret your departure from this state, we are pleased to know

that the great Union Army is increased by the acquisition of so good a soldier,

and we wish you a hearty “God Speed.” Hoping that an honorable distinction

awaits you in the service you are about to enter upon, we remain

Respectfully Yours J. Howell, Commander Benjamin [?] Gilbert [?] Witham D.A. De Merritt Captain [?] Co – Massachusetts Battalion source: Gwen DeMerritt Crosby Collection, Center for Sacramento History, 86/21/07.

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Document F

June 2, 1863 Special Order No. 278

Capt David A DeMerritt 2 Regt of Cavalry Mass Volunteers will proceed to Washington D.C. on Friday next (5th) with the detachment of Companies F and H, now under his command at Readville, and report to the Commanding Officer of his Regiment.

Capt DeMerritt will apply to Capt [?] U.S.A. for transportation. By order of the Commander in Chief, [?] Adjt General

source: Gwen DeMerritt Crosby Collection, Center for Sacramento History, 86/21/06.

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Document G

Waud, Alfred R. “Review by the President of the Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac.” Illustration. Harper’s Weekly, May 2, 1863. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004660456/ (accessed March 24, 2012). Note: The California Hundred and Battalion were attached to the Army of the Potomac after September of 1864.

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Document H


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Document I

source: Sacramento Daily Union, March 23, 1864

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Document J

source: Sacramento Daily Union, February 26, 1864

First for his country in her need, For volunteers was SEWELL REED, Long had he watched with a heart of flame The South traduce Columbia’s name: source: J. Henry Rogers, The California Hundred: A Poem. (San Francisco, California: Towne and Bacon, 1865), 23.

J. Sewell Reed, Captain Company A, California Hundred source: Second Mass Cavalry, California 100 & California Battalion Homepage, “The Second Massachusetts and Its Fighting Californians.” http://www.2mass.reunioncivilwar.com/ (accessed March 16, 2012).

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Document K

source: Sacramento Daily Union, July 2, 1864

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source: Sacramento Daily Union, July 2, 1864

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Document L


193


194

Document M

Document N

Note: Some members of the California Hundred were present when General Lee sent his men to the Union lines with a flag of truce. source: Waud, Alfred R. “Custer Receiving the Flag of Truce- Appomattox.” Illustration. April 8, 1865. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004660263/ (accessed March 24, 2012).

“August 3rd, 1865, 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, 883 men strong, was paid off and officially disbanded. During the course of the war the regiment lost eight officers and 82 enlisted men killed and mortally wounded, and three officers and 138 enlisted men by disease. There was no fanfare…no final speeches or parades. No mention was made in any of the newspapers. The men simply left camp, alone or in small groups, returning to their lives or embarking on new ones. It was over.” source: Thomas E. Parson. Bear Flag and Bay State in the Civil War: The Californians of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2001), 199.

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What should Californians remember about the California Hundred/Battalion? Document Primary or

Secondary Source?

How is this time different from ours?

What does this source tell you about the California Hundred/Battalion?

Key Quote or Phrase

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Writing Task Design a memorial plaque for the California Hundred/Battalion. Your plaque’s inscription should contain approximately fifty to one hundred words. When designing your plaque keep the following questions in mind. What should Californians know about the California Hundred? Who were the Hundred? What did they do? When did they fight? Where did they fight? Why did they fight? Why should Californians know about the California Hundred/Battalion? Where will the plaque be located? Who do you hope will read it?

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Lesson Eight

O Captain! My Captain! The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Common Core Standards ELA – History/Social Science RH.6-8.1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources. RH.6-8.2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions. RH.6-8.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. RH.6.8.9. Analyze the relationship between a primary and secondary source on the same topic. RH.6-8.10. By the end of grade 8, read and comprehends history/social studies texts in the grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently. Anchor Standards for Writing- Text Types and Purposes 3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details and well-structured event sequences. California State History Social Science Content Standards


8. Study the views and lives of leaders (e.g., Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee) and soldiers on both sides of the war, including those of black soldiers and regiments.

9. Describe critical developments and events in the war, including the major battles, geographical advantages and obstacles, technological advances, and General Lee's surrender at Appomattox.


Time- The lesson can be conducted in two to three class periods; one or two days for document analysis and an additional day for completing the writing task and presenting the brief newscasts. A shortened version of the lesson can be conducted in one to two class periods. After completing the Focus Activity and analysis of Document B as a class, assign groups one document from the set (Documents C- I) to analyze. Students then prepare and present their brief newscast report. Objectives- Students will provide an accurate summary of a source in the form of a brief newscast.

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Materials- Duplicate and distribute the documents and accompanying analysis questions needed for the lesson. Duplicate the rubric for the newscast reports. Procedures- Vocabulary Development- A list of key terms has been provided. Guide students in a careful reading of each document. Students should first use context clues as they read to discover the meaning of important words and phrases. Students may also use classroom resources such as a dictionary, a thesaurus, or their textbook to define important terms. Document Analysis and Discussion- Students read each document independently and attempt to answer the questions that follow. The analysis (and a second read-through) can be done in pairs, within small groups or as a whole-class activity. The teacher should closely monitor student understanding and continuously return to the guiding question, How does this source help you answer the question, “How did Abraham Lincoln’s assassination affect the nation?” Assessment- Use the newscast presentation rubric created using RubiStar (www.rubistar.4teachers.org) to assess students’ summary of one of the documents used in the lesson. Extended Activities-

1. Students write a summary statement of each document as they watch the newscasts of their fellow students.

2. Students create a visual storyboard of their newscast.

Historical Context

Sacramento’s Civil War-era newspapers provide proof of the community’s deep

engagement with the outcome of the war. News of the surrender of Lee and his army to

Grant on April 9, 1865, was received from the east within hours and relayed to churches

throughout Sacramento where the good news was announced from the pulpit.1 A

celebratory atmosphere permeates the Sacramento Daily Union’s coverage of the

surrender. Sacramento’s downtown buildings were illuminated, fire and church bells

rang, bonfires were lit up and down the city’s main thoroughfares, and numerous salutes

1 “Surrender of Lee and His Army,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 10, 1865, page 5, column 1.

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were fired. The Board of Education declared April 12, 1865, a school holiday so that,

“…teachers and pupils may be as patriotic and enthusiastic as they please.”2 After four

long years of war, California had affirmed its attachment to the Union by helping to

ensure its survival.

Within a week Sacramentans’ celebratory mood would turn to sorrow as

Unionists mourned the loss of President Lincoln. A stark contrast exists between the

hope and joy that greeted the news of the surrender and the distress brought by the news

of the assassination. Sacramento’s newspapers reported the details of the president’s

assassination in columns bordered by heavy black lines. The sorrow feels tangible. The

loss feels personal.

Most Americans learn about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington in

elementary school. The first and sixteenth presidents may be the only past presidents

students are familiar with when they enter secondary school. Students should gain a

more complex understanding of historical events and figures as they mature. The

sources that follow help students learn more about how Abraham Lincoln’s

assassination affected Americans living in 1865. Students are also asked to think about

what Lincoln’s most important achievement was during his presidency.

Guiding Question

“How did Abraham Lincoln’s assassination affect the nation?”

2 “No School To-Day,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 12, 1865, page 3, column 2.

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Key Terms

assassination

Whig

Unionists

Confederates

Chief Magistrate

revered

Rebs

abhorrence

pantheon

emancipation

abolitionist

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Focus Activity

Ask students to imagine the reactions of Unionists and Confederates when they learned of Lincoln’s assassination. As a class, brainstorm a list of possible reactions.

Task Students will analyze each of the following documents. Each document will be evaluated to help students learn about how Abraham Lincoln’s assassination affected the nation.

source: Currier & Ives. “The Assassination of President Lincoln.” Lithograph. Currier & Ives, 1865 From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/presp:@field (NUMBER+@band(cph+3b49830)) (accessed March 24, 2012).

“On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and his wife attended a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. During the play, John Wilkes Booth, a southerner who opposed Lincoln’s policies, sneaked into the president’s theater box and shot him. Lincoln was rushed to a boarding house across the street, where he died early the next morning.” source: United States History: Independence to 1914. (Holt, Rinehart & Winston: New York, 2006), 517.

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Document B

source: Shober, Charles. Lithographer. National picture. “Behold oh! America, your sons. The greatest among men.” Lithograph. Chicago: Shober, c1865. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003656573/ (accessed March 24, 2012)

“Coupled with the achievements of piloting the United States through its greatest crisis and presiding over the emancipation of the slaves, the manner of his death ensured Lincoln’s place in the pantheon of the most revered American leaders.” -Eric Foner is a renowned historian who teaches at Columbia University. The book this passage is taken from won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize when it was published in 2010. source: Eric Foner. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), 333.

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1. When and where were the sources written or produced? 2. What type of documents are these? 3. Are these sources primary or secondary sources? 4. Who is the intended audience of each source? 5. Does the lithograph help illustrate the quote from Professor Foner? Why or why

not? 6. What emotions are expressed in the lithograph? 7. What do you remember learning about Washington and Lincoln in elementary

school? 8. Why do you think Washington and Lincoln are often pictured together although

they never met? 9. What are the two great achievements of Lincoln’s presidency according to

Professor Foner? 10. What is Lincoln’s greatest achievement according to the lithograph?

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Document C

source: Sacramento Daily Union, April 17, 1865

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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. List adjectives that describe the emotions expressed in the article. 6. Who is the intended audience of the source? 7. How did people react to the news of Lincoln’s assassination? 8. In this account, was everyone mourning the death of the president? Provide

evidence from the text of the source in your answer. 9. How does this source help you answer the question, “How did Abraham Lincoln’s

assassination affect the nation?”

Document D


1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. List adjectives that describe the emotions expressed by Timothy Hopkins. 6. Who is the intended audience of the source? 7. In this account, how did people react to the news of Lincoln’s assassination? 8. What are the similarities and differences between this source and Document C? 9. How does this source help you answer the question, “How did Abraham Lincoln’s


Timothy Hopkins recalled being on a picnic with a group that included his mother Mrs. Hopkins, Mrs. Stanford, and Charles Crocker when they learned of President Lincoln’s assassination. “Everyone was sobered, the people gathered in groups to discuss the crime, the houses were draped in black, and gloom prevailed. My father was an Abolitionist and a Whig, a strong Union man, and he and Leland Stanford were among the organizers of the Republican Party in California. He was a firm believer in Lincoln’s policies and so much an admirer of his masterly Gettysburg address that he often read it aloud in the family circle. In this atmosphere of loyalty to the President and nation the assassination of Lincoln became almost a personal loss. As a boy it affected me deeply.” source: Timothy Hopkins. Memory of a Boyhood in Sacramento: Reminiscences of Timothy Hopkins. (Sacramento, California: The Sacramento Pioneers Association), 1987, 28.

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Document E

source: Richmond Whig, April 18, 1865

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The Assassination Denounced in Richmond. Washington, April 18. – The Richmond Whig of yesterday says: “The heaviest blow which has ever fallen upon the people of the south has descended! Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, has been assassinated. The decease of the Chief Magistrate of a nation at any period is an event which profoundly affects the public mind, but the time, manner, and circumstances of President Lincoln’s death render it the most momentous, most appalling, most deplorable calamity which has ever befallen the people of the United States.” “The thoughtless and vicious may affect to derive satisfaction from the sudden and tragic close of the President’s career, but every reflecting person will deplore the awful event. Just as everything was happily conspiring to a restoration of that peace under the benignity and magnanimous policy of Mr. Lincoln, comes this terrible blow. God grant that it may not rekindle or inflame the passions again. That a state of war almost fratricidal should give rise to bitter feelings and bloody deeds in the field was to be expected; but that the assassin’s knife and bullet should follow the great and best loved of the nation in their daily walks, and reach them when surrounded by their friends, in an atrocity which will shock and appall every honorable man and woman in the land. The secrecy, with which the assassin or assassins pursued their victims, indicates that there were but few accomplices in the inhuman crime. “The abhorrence with which it is regarded on all sides will, it is hoped, deter insane and malignant men from the emulation of the infamy which attaches to this infernal deed. We cannot pursue the subject further. We contemplate too deeply and painfully the terrible aspects of this calamity, to comment upon it further. The people of Petersburg had this afflicting news yesterday, before it was made public here. Judge W.T. Jaynes, R.A. Pryor, John Lyon and other prominent citizens united in a call for a public meeting to express, if words could do so, their grief for so sad an event, their abhorrence of the deed, and their sympathy for the bereaved. We know the citizens of Richmond will take similar action.” source: Richmond Whig, April 18, 1865

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1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. List adjectives that describe the emotions expressed in the article. 6. Who is the intended audience of the source? 7. How did people in this account react to the news of Lincoln’s assassination? 8. Documents C and D were produced by Sacramentans. Document E is from a

Richmond, VA newspaper. How are the three sources similar? How are they different? What reasons can you give for the similarities? What reasons can you give for the differences?

9. How does this source help you answer the question, “How did Abraham Lincoln’s assassination affect the nation?”

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Document F

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source: Norman Henry Ives Collection, courtesy of Arlis Groves, Elk Grove, CA

Norman Henry Ives, Company B, 37th Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry

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1. When and where were the sources written or produced? 2. What type of documents are these? 3. Are these sources primary or secondary sources? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. List adjectives that describe the emotions expressed in the letter. 6. Who is the intended audience of the source? 7. How does Mr. Oakley react to the news of Lincoln’s assassination? 8. Reread the first few sentences of Document E. How are the feelings expressed in

the newspaper article similar to those expressed by Mr. Oakley in his letter to Mr. Ives?

9. Compare Mr. Oakley’s letter to one of the newspaper articles (Document C or Document E). How does the letter’s discussion of Lincoln’s assassination differ from the newspaper’s account?

10. Why might historians use newspaper articles when conducting research? What can they learn from newspapers as a source?

11. Why might historians use personal correspondence (letters) when conducting research? What can they learn from letters as a source?


213

Document G Document G: Analysis Questions

1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. List adjectives that describe the emotions expressed in the poem. 6. Who is the intended audience of the source? 7. How does the poet react to the news of Lincoln’s assassination? 8. How does the poem’s discussion of Lincoln’s assassination differ from that of the

other sources? 9. What can historians learn from poetry written about Lincoln’s assassination? 10. How does this source help you answer the question, “How did Abraham Lincoln’s


O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;

The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

source: Walt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!” 1865, lines 1-8

.

Note: Whitman wrote the poem after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

The “ship” is the United States and Lincoln is the “Captain” of the ship

of state.

214

Document H

Source: The Highland News, Hillsborough, OH, April 19, 1865. From the Library of Congress Historic American Newspapers Collection. http://chroniclingamerica.loc. gov/lccn/sn85038158/1865-04-20/ed-1/seq-2/ (accessed March 24, 2012).

215

Document H: Analysis Questions

1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. List adjectives that describe the emotions expressed in the article. 6. Who is the intended audience of the source? 7. How did people in this account react to the news of Lincoln’s assassination? 8. List three similarities and at least one difference between this newspaper article

and one of the others you have read (Document C or E.) Be sure to cite specific evidence from the text of the source.


Document I

Document I: Analysis Questions

1. When and where was the source written or produced? 2. What type of document is this? 3. Is this source a primary or secondary source? 4. What was different about this time from ours? 5. Who is the intended audience of the source? 6. In this account, how did people react to the news of Lincoln’s assassination? 7. How does this source help you answer the question, “How did Abraham Lincoln’s


Sacramentan Mary Ackley remembered, “An aged couple lived next door to us and every time there was a Union victory up would go their flag. Early one morning I looked out and the flag was at half-mast. I ran over to their home and asked, “’What is the sad news?’” He replied, “’Our President has been shot and is not expected to live.’” There was much excitement in the town. One man who kept a hotel and was a rebel remarked that he was glad of it, and said it should have been done long ago. He was arrested at once. The militia was called out and he was marched to the Plaza, and he had either to take the oath of allegiance under the flag or leave town. He took the oath, but the citizens made it so unpleasant for him that he soon left town.” source: Mary Ackley, Crossing the Plains and Early Days in California: Memories of Girlhood Days in California’s Golden Age. (Sacramento, California: Sacramento Book Collectors Club, 2004), 65.

216

Task

Students will work with a partner or small group to create a brief newscast based on one of the assigned documents. Each pair/group will share their report with the class. Roles: Document A; reporter on the scene at Ford’s Theater & anchor at the studio Document B; reporter interviewing Professor Eric Foner Document C; reporter interviewing Sacramento citizens & J.S. Cunningham Document D; reporter interviewing Timothy Hopkins Document E; reporter interviewing Richmond citizens & anchor at the studio Document F; Mr. Oakley, Mr. Ives’s response to Mr. Oakley’s letter Document G; reporter interviewing Walt Whitman about his poem Document H; reporter interviewing Ohio citizens & anchor in the studio Document I; reporter interviewing Mary Ackley, her neighbors, and the man arrested by the militia

217

218

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