|
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Go directly to the collection, First-Person
Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920, in American Memory,
or view a Summary
of Resources related to the collection.
First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920,
includes hundreds of diaries, autobiographies, travel accounts, and
memoirs dealing with life in the southern states before, during, and after
the Civil War. The collection, directly tied to the "Documenting the
American South" collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, allows one to explore a variety of historical topics from the
viewpoints of subaltern perspectives often overlooked in more traditional
surveys of the period. Texts from women, slaves, enlisted soldiers, and
common laborers abound in the collection and often surprise the reader
with their depth of feeling and universality of sentiment on such subjects
as abolition, regional pride, and wartime survival.
1) The Civil War
| The history of the southern
United States from 1860-1920 can appropriately be described as the
history of the American Civil War. Although the war only lasted from
1861-1865, its effects echoed in the decades that followed. In
addition to the great issues such as slavery and states' rights that
found their forum in the violent struggle, more than half a million
men -- a whole generation of Americans -- lost their lives. The
survivors represented in First Person Narratives of the American
South chronicle the experiences of southerners from all stations
in life -- white and black, rich and poor. |
|
Body of a Confederate Soldier.
From Selected
Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865. |
One of the great strengths of this collection is the inclusion of many
documents that relate the common soldier's perspective on the war.
Although readers may be familiar with the great military campaigns and
famous generals who led the armies, the collection affords a wonderful
opportunity to explore the lives and views of the soldiers who fought the
battles and followed their leaders through four long years of deprivation
and suffering. For instance, a search on
Stonewall Jackson yields several documents including John S.
Robson's account of his service as a private in Jackson's army. Robson
speaks for many of his generation when he states:
. . . though the historians will tell, with eloquent pen, of the
grand movements of armies and of the deeds of the Generals, he will
hardly stop to explain how the private soldier was evolved from the
farmer, the clerk, the mechanic, the school-boy, and transformed into
the perfect, all-enduring, untiring and invincible soldier, who broiled
his bacon on a stick and baked his bread on a ramrod.
Page 8, How
a One-Legged Rebel Lives: Reminiscences of the Civil War
Regarding the Battle of Antietam, Robson relates:
We left Harper's Ferry on the 16th, and joined General Lee the
same evening, and our commanders, on both sides, were busy arranging for
the big battle that was to come off tomorrow, as coolly as farmers
getting ready to plant corn. It was no new business to us now - for the
novelty was all worn off - but we did wish for our twenty thousand
stragglers in Virginia. The ball opened at daylight, on the 17th, and as
one old soldier expressed it, "we fought all day before breakfast, and
went on picket all night before supper." "Fighting" Jo Hooker was
immediately in front of Jackson's line; anybody that complained of
employment that day was hard to satisfy.
Page 122, How
a One-Legged Rebel Lives: Reminiscences of the Civil War
- What is the significance of the common soldier's perspective?
- What was the importance of the common soldier's experience to the
post-war South?
- Would you describe Robson's tone as humble or arrogant? Why?
- Do you think that Robson's description of the commanders is
flattering or derogatory?
- Who do you think was Robson's intended audience? Who might be most
likely to read works like this now?
Some of the most fascinating and arresting texts in the collection are
those written by, or about, operatives behind enemy lines. These accounts
contain some of the most biased and vindictive criticisms of the Federal
army in the collection and will help readers appreciate the intensity of
the sectionalism that divided the country. A search on
prisons yields several documents including Miles O. Sherrill's
A
Soldier's Story: Prison Life and Other Incidents in the War of
1861-'65. Sherrill's brief story relates his wounding at
Spottsylvania and the subsequent amputation of his leg by Federal
surgeons. After the tortures of the field hospital, though maimed for
life, Sherrill relates that he was eventually imprisoned in Elmyra, New
York where smallpox, starvation, and dysentery were the norm. Upon
arriving at the prison:
The commanding officer, Major Beal, greeted us with the most
bitter oaths that I ever heard. He swore that he was going to send us
out and have us shot; said he had no room for us, and that we (meaning
the Confederate soldiers) had no mercy on their colored soldiers or
prisoners. He was half drunk, and I was not sure but that we might be
dealt with then and there. Then we were searched and robbed of knives,
cash, etc., and sent into various wards. While we were standing in the
snow, hearing the abuse of Major Beal, some poor ragged Confederate
prisoners were marched by with what was designated as barrel shirts,
with the word "thief" written in large letters pasted on the back of
each barrel, and a squad of little drummer boys following beating the
drums. The mode of wearing the barrel shirts was to take an ordinary
flour barrel, cut a hole through the bottom large enough for the head to
go through, with arm-holes on the right and left, through which the arms
were to be placed. This was put on the poor fellow, resting on his
shoulders, his head and arms coming through as indicated above; thus
they were made to march around for so many hours and so many days. Now,
what do you suppose they had stolen? Why, something to eat. Yes, they
had stolen cabbage leaves and other things from slop barrels, which was
a violation of the rules of the prison.
Pages 9-10, A Soldier's Story: Prison Life and Other Incidents in the War of
1861-'65
- Why do you think that accounts from prisoners and spies are the most
vindictive?
- What is the effect of Sherrill's detailed description of the use of
barrel shirts for punishment?
- What other types of writing might try to persuade a reader to
sympathize with the author's plight? Who might write such works?
- What might prompt an ex-prisoner to write about his/her experiences?
Belle Boyd.
Illustration from Belle
Boyd in Camp and Prison. |
|
A search on
spies yields five documents, all written by women.
Nineteenth-century social mores placed women above suspicion and,
when they were implicated in illegal activity, thus provided more
leniencies. This, in short, made them effective spies. The texts
represented in this collection present an array of loyalties and
motivations. The autobiography
of Belle Boyd, the infamous Confederate spy, details the wartime
activities of that Southern firebrand while Kate Plake's The
Southern Husband Outwitted By His Union Wife relates that
Kentucky author's concurrent quest for matrimonial peace and
national freedom. Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez' The
Woman in Battle, describes her years of service in the
Confederate army disguised as a man, and provides a wealth of gender
related topics for discussion. |
Women, whether they saw action or not, bore the brunt of the war's
effects upon the region's domestic life. The Civil War was fought almost
entirely in the South and its battlefields were the wilderness, farms, and
towns of the region. The scorched earth policy adopted by Federal military
leaders late in the war deprived the southern population of wares and
food. Many cities such as Atlanta and Richmond were almost entirely
destroyed by bloody campaigns. With the exception of the Revolution, the
Civil War was the only prolonged U.S. conflict in which the civilian
population was directly affected by the actions of the combatants. In A
Diary From Dixie, Mary Boykin Chesnutt describes the situation of
a Virginian family that had become refugees in her South Carolina
home:
The Fants are refugees here, too; they are Virginians, and
have been in exile since the second battle of Manassas. Poor
things; they seem to have been everywhere, and seen and suffered
everything. They even tried to go back to their own house, but
found one chimney only standing alone; even that had been taken
possession of by a Yankee who had written his name upon it.
Pages 347-48,
A Diary From Dixie
- Why might the Yankee have written his name upon the Fants'
chimney?
- How would it have felt to be a refugee? What sorts of
challenges did refugees face?
- What items might have been hard to find in the Confederacy?
- Do you think that conditions on the homefront affected
soldiers in the field? How?
|
|
Mary Boykin Miller
Chesnutt.
Illustration from A
Diary From Dixie. |
2) Slavery
|
Bethany
Veney.
Illustration from The
Narrative of Bethany Veney.
|
|
Simply put, slavery was the hottest political, social, and
economic issue in the mid-nineteenth century United States.
Anti-slavery activists in the North pitched their arguments from the
moral high ground and, in their writing and oratory, used extreme
examples of cruelty and degradation. Southern defenders of slavery
countered with equally extreme examples of benevolence and
custodianship. The documents in First Person Narratives of the
American South contain sentiments from both ex-slaves and
ex-masters. In the former case, slavery is recalled with an uneasy
mixture of hatred and tenderness. The latter defend slavery as a
noble and necessary institution that became tainted by northern
agitation and influence. In either case, the writers acknowledge
that the institution supported a way of life that died with
emancipation. |
The Subject
Index heading, Slaves' writings, American, yields fifteen
documents including The
Narrative of Bethany Veney: a Slave Woman. Although questions of
authorship arise in such cases where the "writer's" testimony is
transcribed by others with agendas of their own, Ms. Veney's narrative is
a compelling story of trial and redemption. Students of the period will
benefit from Veney's descriptions of life in the slave South. In the
following passage she describes her former master:
Master Kibbler was a Dutchman, - a man of most violent temper,
ready to fight anything or anybody who resisted his authority or in any
way crossed his path. His one redeeming quality was his love for his
horses and dogs. These must be fed before his servants, and their
comfort and health always considered. He was a blacksmith by trade, and
would have me hold his irons while he worked them. I was awkward one
day, and he struck me with a nail-rod, making me so lame my mistress
noticed it, and asked Matilda what was the matter with me; and, when she
was told, she was greatly troubled, and as I suppose spoke to Kibbler
about it, for he called me to him, and bade me go a long way off into a
field, and, as he said, cut some sprouts there. But he very soon
followed me, and, cutting a rod, beat me severely, and then told me to
"go again and tell my mistress that he had hit me with a nail-rod, if I
wanted to."
Page 11, The Narrative of Bethany Veney: a Slave
Woman
- In what ways is Veney mistreated here?
- Do you think that her story is credible?
- What might the transcriber's motives have been in taking down
Veney's story?
- What did former slaves such as Veney have to gain or lose by
allowing their stories to be published?
The plantation was a fief in which the master and his mistress ruled --
sometimes cruelly and sometimes with compassion -- over their slaves. The
social interactions of these two groups came to form a complex, mutually
dependent culture. In the years following the Civil War, many writers
sought to glorify the deceased slave/master relationship. A search on
plantation yields twenty-nine texts. Many of these documents were
written decades after the defeat of the Confederacy by old men whose
memories of youth were directly tied to the glories, imagined or real, of
the Old South. For instance, R.Q. Mallard introduces his Plantation
Life Before Emancipation with remarks about slavery that are both
nostalgic and defensive:
The purpose of the author has been to portray a civilization
now obsolete, to picture the relations of mutual attachment and
kindness which in the main bound together master and servant, and
to give this and future generations some correct idea of the noble
work done by Southern masters and mistresses of all denominations
for the salvation of the slave.
Page
vi, Plantation
Life Before Emancipation
- What assumptions does Mallard make about slavery and about
his audience?
- What do you think Mallard considers "noble work"?
- Why might Mallard have taken on a defensive attitude in his
writing?
- Why might men such as Mallard have written their
autobiographies?
|
|
"His Thoughts Dwelt Upon
Serious Things."
Illustration from
Social
Life in Old Virginia Before the
War. |
3) Abolition and Emancipation
|
Samuel M.
Janney.
Illustration from Memoirs
of Samuel M. Janney.
|
|
The abolitionist movement in
the North, with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as
its most famous literary product, has been rightly credited with
providing the moral thrust for the abolition of slavery. However,
abolitionists were also active in the South. As in the North, the
impetus for abolition originated in religion, specifically the
pacifist, ethical creed espoused by the Society of Friends, or
Quakers. Among the relevant texts in the collection is the
autobiography of Samuel M. Janney of Virginia, a Quaker religious
leader and one of the leading southern abolitionists of the period.
Janney's document, as well as a host of other abolitionist tracts,
can be located either by searching on
abolitionists or by browsing the Subject
Index heading, Quakers-Biography. In his autobiography,
Janney relates that in the late 1820s, his society drafted a
petition to Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia. The following excerpt is representative of the prevailing
attitude among southern abolitionists of that
time: |
The existence among us of a distinct class of people, who by their
condition as slaves, are deprived of almost every incentive to virtue
and industry, and shut out from many of the sources of light and
knowledge, has an evident tendency to corrupt the morals of the people,
and to dampen the spirit of enterprise by accustoming the rising
generation to look with contempt upon honest labor and to depend for
support too much upon the labor of others. It prevents a useful and
industrious class of people from settling among us, by rendering the
means of subsistence more precarious to the laboring class of whites; it
diminishes the resources of the community by throwing the earnings of
the poor into the coffers of the rich, thus rendering the former
dependent, servile, and improvident, while the latter are tempted to
become in the same proportion luxurious and prodigal.
Page 32, Memoirs
of Samuel M. Janney: Late of Lincoln, Loudoun County, Va.: A Minister in
the Religious Society of Friends
- What problems with slavery are identified in this passage?
- Who do these problems affect?
- Who is responsible for these problems? How might these people also
suffer?
- What reasons compelled abolitionists such as Janney to live in the
slaveholding South?
| When Abraham Lincoln signed
the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, millions of people in the
slave-holding states were thrust into a legal status of freedom that
for many had been little more than a vague, however much sought
after, idea. Although it would not be until the end of the war that
this transformation could be codified and secured, the immediate
realization was overwhelming and, in some cases, frightening for
African Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line. A search on
slavery results in numerous texts pertaining to emancipation,
of which Booker T. Washington's autobiography, Up
From Slavery, is perhaps the most well known. Washington
ably articulates the benefits as well as the attendant problems and
complications that his race encountered not only in attaining, but
also in asserting, its freedom. In his narrative, Washington
describes the scene at his childhood plantation home on the occasion
of emancipation: |
|
An Early Portrait of
Booker T. Washington.
Illustration from
Up
From Slavery. |
For some minutes there was great rejoicing, and thanksgiving, and
wild scenes of ecstasy. But there was no feeling of bitterness. In fact,
there was pity among the slaves for our former owners. The wild
rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for
a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their
cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of
being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan
for themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them. It
was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out
into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great
questions with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for
centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the
questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education,
citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches. Was it any
wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased and a feeling
of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters? To some it seemed
that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more
serious thing than they had expected to find it.
Pages 21-22, Up
From Slavery
- What does Washington mean when he describes freedom as "a more
serious thing than (the slaves) had expected to find it?"
- What do the responsibilities and questions listed in this passage
reveal about the condition of the slaves?
- What is Washington's tone? Does he sound like a disinterested
observer or one caught up in the action? How does the tone contribute to
the effect of his narrative?
- How do you think that the slaves depicted in this passage might have
felt about their former masters?
- Are accounts by former slaves more or less credible than those of
former masters, or are they equally suspect?
4) Reconstruction, Resistance, and AcclimationDuring
Reconstruction, Federal soldiers were stationed throughout the South as
the confederate states were gradually readmitted into the Union. Many
southerners resented the presence not only of troops, but of opportunistic
northern businessmen, known as "carpetbaggers," and of politicians who
sought to secure gains from the impoverished region. Northern encroachment
took many forms, and there was considerable controversy when the Federal
goverment, realizing that the region teetered under the weight of poverty,
established a bureau to handle the needs of the recently freed black
population.
The Freedman's Bureau provided blacks with opportunities to learn
practical trades as well as to receive an education. Operating with
varying degrees of success throughout the South, the Bureau was also the
focal point for voting education and, as such, became the target both of
northern opportunists seeking to promote favorable candidates and of
southern leaders fearful of a mobilized, informed African-American vote.
Some southern whites, however, recognized the need to educate and assist
the black population. A search on
reconstruction leads to several documents including Richard
Taylor's autobiography, Destruction
and Reconstruction. Displaying great sympathy for the
newly-emancipated race, the author describes the often violent
manipulation of the relatively naïve African-American voters that led to
the establishment of a Freedman's Bureau in his native Louisiana.
| Conservative southern whites
reacted to African-American empowerment by banding together in clubs
and societies. The most infamous among the secret societies that
sprang up in Reconstruction-era South, was the Ku Klux Klan, which
sought to inspire fear among the African-American population.
Although ostensibly organized on both the local and national levels,
the Klan really operated as a collection of loosely organized
vigilante terrorists whose members took quick and often violent
action to prevent African-American organization and empowerment. A
search on
Klan directs the reader to Laura Elizabeth Battle's Forget-me-nots
of the Civil War. Battle, a southern belle whose family
suffered a severe financial setback due to the war, does not attempt
to hide her passive support of the Klan's activities. In the
following passage, Battle describes an action by North Carolina Klan
members to prevent the meetings of local blacks who were trying to
organize a militia group known as the "Red Stringers": |
|
Laura Elizabeth Lee
Battle.
Illustration from Forget-me-nots
of the Civil War. |
This lady whose husband, I suppose was a member of the Ku Klux
Klan, told of a company of grotesque figures that had been seen the
night before, mounted on horseback, appearing like the heads of
skeletons illuminated, their grinning teeth and horrible looking sockets
glittering with lights shining out from a white robe that enveloped both
horse and rider. She related further that a negro, who had made threats
against some of the white people had been found, killed and quartered
and hung from Neuse river bridge, with a notice of warning to the other
negroes and "Red Stringers." However, that cured our county of such
lawlessness . . . so that the Society of Red Strings disbanded and never
drilled again.
Page 173, Forget-me-nots
of the Civil War
- Why might the word "lawless" seem ironic in this passage?
- What is the effect of Battle's description of the Klan members?
- What did the Ku Klux Klan and its supporters fear from the African
Americans?
- How does the situation described by Taylor and Battle compare with
the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s?
"The hoe they consider
purely a feminine implement,"
Illustration from A
Woman Rice Planter. |
|
It is important to remember
that, although Reconstruction introduced changes to the region, life
had to go on -- crops harvested and families fed. Soon after the
war, those individuals who still possessed land realized that a
system of sharecropping -- previously extended to poor white
farmers, -- would keep the black labor force in the fields.
Conversely, many of the newly-emancipated blacks, reluctant to leave
behind the security of the farms and families that they had known
most of their lives, desired to stay and work the land. In A
Woman Rice Planter, Elizabeth Pringle details the hardships
and rewards that attended her efforts to subsist on the Georgia farm
worked by her antebellum forebears. The document, located through a
search on
planter, reveals a woman eminently familiar with the costs
and margins attendant to the planting and harvesting of a profitable
crop. Pringle was successful in her agrarian endeavors, however,
only because she was able to assess and adapt to post-emancipation
labor relationships and motivations: |
I assembled the hands and told them that all who could not support
themselves for a year would have to leave the place. With one accord
they declared they could do it; but I explained to them that I was going
to take charge myself, that I was a woman, with no resources of money
behind me, and, having only the land, I intended to rent to them for ten
bushels of rice to the acre. I could advance nothing but the seed. I
could give them a chance to work for themselves and prove themselves
worthy to be free men. I intended to have no overseer; each man would be
entirely responsible for the land he rented.
Page 2, A
Woman Rice Planter
- In what ways does the offer that Pringle makes to her workers differ
from that made to slaves?
- Do you think that Pringle uses her gender to her advantage or
disadvantage in this passage?
- Does Pringle's offer to her workers sound fair?
- What other ways might poor southerners have survived if they did not
want to be sharecroppers? Do you think that they had any
options?
5) Freedom Becomes Education
Numerous texts in the collection written by African Americans detail
the importance of education and literacy in shaping their lives, both as
slaves and as free persons. Five items are listed under the Subject
Index heading, Afro-Americans-Education-Southern States,
including Robert Russa Moton's autobiography, Finding
a Way Out. Born in 1867, at the height of Reconstruction, Moton
describes his early years working as a houseboy on the plantation to which
his father had hired as labor boss. Moton's mother, who taught him to
read, shared the common view that Virginia whites did not like blacks to
become literate. As Moton relates, however, one fateful night, the
mistress of the house knocked on the cabin door in the middle of a
lesson:
My mother was tempted to hide the book when she
discovered who was at the door, but my father objected, saying we were
free and that he would leave the Vaughans if they made any objections;
that he could find plenty of work at good pay at any one of a dozen
plantations in the district. So the door was opened and in walked "Miss
Lucy", to find us in the very act. She expressed the greatest surprise
when she discovered what was taking place, but she astonished us equally
when she indicated that she was very much pleased, and commended my
mother on the fact that she could read and told her she was very wise to
teach her son to read.
Page 21, Finding
a Way Out
- What does this passage reveal about the relationship between work
and education? Slavery and education?
- What would it be like for education to be a crime?
- What advantages did literacy bestow in the late nineteenth-century
South?
- Would learning to read have the same meaning for those with access
to schooling as it had for Moton?
| More typical, however, was the
white community's general suspicion of African-American education.
In the antebellum period, several states had passed laws making it
illegal to educate slaves. With emancipation, however,
African-American leaders such as Booker T. Washington worked to
establish schools for their race. In My
Larger Education, also accessible under Subject
Index heading, Afro-Americans-Education-Southern States,
Washington describes the resistance that he encountered from various
groups in establishing the Tuskegee Institute, a trade school for
African Americans: |
|
"Bricklaying at Hampton
Institute."
Illustration from My
Larger Education. |
The questions came to me in this way: Coloured people
wanted to know why I proposed to teach their children to work. They said
that they and their parents had been compelled to work for two hundred
and fifty years, and now they wanted their children to go to school so
that they might be free and live like the white folks--without working.
That was the way in which the average coloured man looked at the matter.
Some of the Southern white people, on the contrary, were opposed to any
kind of education of the Negro. Others inquired whether I was merely
going to train preachers and teachers, or whether I proposed to furnish
them with trained servants. Some of the people in the North understood
that I proposed to train the Negro to be a mere "hewer of wood and
drawer of water," and feared that my school would make no effort to
prepare him to take his place in the community as a man and a
citizen.
Page 21-22, My
Larger Education
"Blacksmithing at Hampton
Institute."
Illustration from My
Larger Education. |
- According to Washington, what objection did some African
Americans have against learning a trade? What other objections
might African Americans have had to a trade school?
- What, according to the passage, is the difference between why
southern and northern white people objected to the establishment
of a trade school for African Americans?
- What distinctions does the passage draw between manual and
intellectual labor?
- Would the establishment of an academic institution raise
different questions than the establishment of a trade school? Why?
- What motivations did people such as Washington have for
starting schools?
- Do you think that Washington's assessment of people's views is
accurate? On what grounds might you question its accuracy?
|
6) The "Lost Cause" Movement
Thomas Smith Gregory
Dabney.
Illustration from Memorials
of a Southern Planter. |
|
The materials in First Person Narratives of the American
South reveal a region of proud people struggling to reaffirm
their independence and unique character within a legacy of defeat.
After the war, the antebellum South, with the plantation at its
core, took on the reputation of a golden age in the region's
history. Post-war sermons, ceremonies such as monument dedications,
veterans' reunions, and special holidays glorified the Old South and
constituted what historians have called a "Lost Cause" movement, in
which regional identity took the place of the Confederacy.
Although few southerners could afford to maintain large tracts of
land after the war, the plantation and the codes of honor that it
perpetuated were a source of pride for many who had fought for the
Confederacy. The First Person Narratives of the American
South collection contains numerous documents by former planters
recalling the glory of their pre-war existence. Several documents
fall under the Subject
Index heading, Plantation life-Southern States-History.
Typical among these texts is Memorials
of a Southern Planter, written by Susan Dabney Smedes in
remembrance of her father, Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney, a southern
planter and slave-owner: |
A Southern plantation, well managed, had nearly everything necessary
to life done within its bounds . . . The land in cultivation looked like a
lady's garden, scarcely a blade of grass to be seen in hundreds of acres.
The rows and hills and furrows were laid off so carefully as to be a
pleasure to the eye. The fences and bridges, gates and roads, were in good
order. His wagons never broke down. All these details may seem quite out
of place and superfluous. But they show the character of the man in a
country where many such things were neglected for the one important
consideration, - the cotton crop.
Page 82-83, Memorials
of a Southern Planter
- What relationship does Smedes establish between the appearance of
the land and the character of its owner? What does her description of
the land indicate about the character of its owner?
- Does the setting described in this passage seem idyllic or
realistic?
- What motivations would people such as Smedes have for publishing
their recollections?
For the enfranchised upper class, the end of the Confederacy meant the
end of a profitable economic and easy social way of life that their
families had known for generations. Edward J. Thomas echoed the common
lament of his peers when he prefaced his memoirs by stating:
My young manhood having spent in the South just before, during and
after the War of Secession, I may say I lived in two distinct periods of
our Southern history, for this war completely severed the grand old
plantation life, with all its peculiar interests and demands, from the
stirring and striving conditions that followed. The first was a life
complete in all things to foster intelligence and honor; the second
simply, for me, a constant struggle and a hard fight to keep the
proverbial wolf from the door, but with pluck, frugality and endurance
the fight was won, and now, in my old age, with kind relatives and good
friends, I have found happiness and contentment.
Page 5, Memoirs
of a Southerner, 1840-1923
- What does the author identify as the cause of great change in his
life?
- Do you think that the passage is flattering to the author?
- What aspects of the Old South do you think "fostered intelligence
and honor"? What other qualities do the authors assign to the Old South?
- What criticisms, if any, would a man such as Smedes or Thomas have
of the Old South?
- How might the events of Reconstruction have affected the Lost Cause
movement?
7) Expansion, Exploration, and Movement (1880-1920)
The decades following the Civil War were ones of unprecedented growth
for the United States. The West was settled and the last free Native
American tribes were exterminated or tamed and sequestered to
reservations. Industrialization, which took a firm hold of the North,
crept into the South as urban centers such as Atlanta and New Orleans
sought to keep up with national production trends. Transcontinental
railroads were built and new technologies made large-scale farming in the
West a reality. Also, during these years, the United States broke from its
isolationism to fight in two foreign wars. In all this, southerners played
a part, and several documents from this collection relate
individual experiences with these momentous forces of change. The
Spanish-American War is perhaps best remembered as the event that made
Teddy Roosevelt a hero and catapulted him into public office. The war also
made a big impression on Kentuckian Fess Whitaker who, though having won
the office of jailer in his native Letcher County in the later years of
his life, chose to entitle his memoirs History of Corporal Fess
Whitaker to reflect his army rank during the war. A search on
Spanish-American War directs the reader to Whitaker's document, in
which the author humorously recounts his first meeting with Roosevelt:
After I spent thirteen days with my mother I slipped off and
walked to Jackson, Ky., a distance of sixty-five miles, and
enlisted for two years and was sent to Cuba and was signed to Col.
Teddy Roosevelt's brigade. That was where Teddy and I first met.
He soon took a liking to me, and after the Battle of Santiago
Teddy, without a wound and I with a bullet wound in my left arm,
took me by the hand and said: "Fess, we have gained a great battle
for our country. You or I will be the next President of the United
States, and if you get the nomination I am for you, and if I get
the nomination I want you to be for me, for you have a great
influence in the United States." We shook hands and parted. So
Teddy was from the North and had more votes than the South and
beat me to the nomination. But I was for him and am still for
him.
Page 41, History
of Corporal Fess Whitaker |
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"The author when firing
for the Sante Fe R. R. and Engineer Brisley."
Illustration from History
of Corporal Fess Whitaker. |
- Do you believe Whitaker's story? What does it reveal about him?
- How would an early twentieth-century audience have reacted to this
passage?
- What role does humor play in Whitaker's description?
- Would the above statement have helped or hurt an aspiring
politician?
The First World War had been raging for several years before the United
States entered the conflict in 1917. Although Woodrow Wilson had won the
presidency with the slogan, "He kept us out of war," Americans rallied
when Germany resumed its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and
supported a U.S. declaration of war soon after. African Americans served
in the U.S. Army in France and African-American leaders used this fact to
support the claim that their race was a fully integrated, beneficial
component of American culture. The principal of the Talladega School,
Robert Russa Moton, was appointed by a presidential commission to study
the conduct of black soldiers and, in that capacity, visited France. In
his autobiography Finding
a Way Out, Moton relates:
While in France, I visited nearly every point where Negro soldiers
were stationed. At most of them I spoke to the men, and at each place I
was most cordially welcomed by the officers and men. I also had the
privilege of conferring with Col. E. M. House; Bishop Brent, senior
chaplain of the American Expeditionary Forces; General Pershing, and
many other high officials of the American and French governments, all of
whom I consulted with reference to the record which had been made by
Negro troops, and received only words of very highest praise and
commendation on their character and conduct in all branches of the
service.
Page 251, Finding
a Way Out
- Do Moton's claims seem credible?
- What biases might the author have had?
- How would other African-American leaders have benefitted from
Moton's conclusions?
- Is it necessary to serve in a war to establish loyalty? What stake
did African Americans have in World War I?
Several documents in First Person Narratives of the American
South pay witness to the consolidation of a national system of
railroads, the introduction of science and technology to everyday life,
and the ideological struggle between the tenants of natural history and
creationism. A search on
evolution directs the reader to the Autobiography
of Joseph Le Conte, an eminent scientist, travel writer, and natural
historian.
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