The source is a biography of Harriet Tubman and it was written by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, who knew Tubman's family from Auburn, NY, and knew Tubman herself. [She] wrote the story of Tubman's life to try to raise money in Tubman's older age when she was quite poor. It gives us a very close account of Harriet Tubman's life, which is valuable in part because Tubman wasn't literate—she didn't read or write English. So the fact that she actually sat down with Sarah Bradford and told her story to Bradford means we can come very close to what it was that Harriet Tubman experienced.

Bradford ended up writing two different versions of this biography. The first one was written in 1868, published in 1869, and it was written really for a clearly intended purpose. Harriet Tubman was poor, she was struggling to get a pension from the U.S. government for her work during the Civil War as a nurse and also as a spy and she hadn't been successful. So she really needed money just to live on and to take care of her household. Her community members in Auburn, NY, thought that telling her life story could be a way to earn money for her. This creates a limitation on the source—it was written so that it would get an audience who would pay money to hear the story. That means that there could be some aspects of the story of Tubman's life that would be told for this audience and some that could be held back because the audience might not want to pay to hear about it.

Harriet Tubman is a mythic figure in African American history, African American women’s history—American women's history—and American history. She has an incredible life story. I think that has been a wonderful thing, but also it has been limiting because she has become a larger-than-life almost stereotype in the ways that we think about the history of slavery. She's often talked about during Black History Month, for example, but only with a sentence or two about her life. Part of the challenge in studying Harriet Tubman's life is to get beyond this picture of a super-human person who had incredible strength and did all of these things that seem impossible. It's very difficult to get at the sense that Harriet Tubman was a real person, she was born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, she had a very, very difficult childhood. She was hired out by her master at a very young age. When she was only five, she was sent to work for another family and she had charge of an infant—a five year old was a babysitter for an infant. She was expected to know how to care for this child and keep it quiet through the night, and of course she couldn't. So she would be whipped by her mistress for not taking proper care of this baby. Tubman was a real person and she suffered real trials, real hardships, under slavery. I think that that aspect of her life gets covered over when we think of her as the woman who went back to the South to save scores of slaves.

Well, she was born around 1820—it's not exactly clear when she was born because records about slaves are often limited—and when she was a young woman she decided to escape. She had already lost sisters who had been sold, and she thought that her best chance at having any kind of future was to secure her own freedom. She organized her own escape in 1849, she made it to Philadelphia, and she then spent the next decade dedicating her life to freeing other people who were enslaved: her family, other people she knew, and then also strangers. It's mind-blowing to think about the incredible dedication that Harriet Tubman had to liberty. When she wasn't going on trips to the South to free people, she was working in the North to earn money to pay for her trips. She did this for about 10 years. Around 1858 she went into maybe "semi-retirement" and she wasn't going back into the South herself, but she was using her home in New York as a place where fugitives who were continuing to head North could stop and have safe haven. When the Civil War came, she was very active working for the Union troops. She had an incredible set of skills and talents. In addition to being someone who knew the landscape well enough to be able to help slaves escape, she was really smart. She organized this spy ring to bring information to the South Carolina interior from the federal troops. She was also very caring, she was a nurse who used her knowledge of native plants to try to help the soldiers.

The biography that Bradford produced in 1869 is a very sketchy work. Bradford produced it in haste before she herself was heading off on a trip to Europe and the purpose was to earn money. The title, which is Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, really does capture what the book is; it's bits and pieces, little snippets, aspects of Harriet Tubman's life . . . of moments in her life. And it's rather disjointed. So we might desire a narrative that kind of goes all the way through connecting different parts of her life, but that's not what this source is. One thing that it does do well though is that—probably in part because Bradford was so rushed—she includes all kinds of additional information about Tubman. Letters that were written to or about Tubman, quotations from newspaper articles that were about Tubman, also appear in the book. So it is a collage in many ways of Tubman's life that allows the reader to get beyond Bradford's narrative and to look at some other primary sources from the time also.

There are many moving stories in the book. One of the most moving aspects of the source is that we get these stories more or less in Harriet Tubman's voice. Now, I say more or less because this is an "as told to" account—we have to trust Sarah Bradford to relate this to us faithfully and we weren't there, so we don't know if she did. Sarah Bradford also renders Harriet Tubman's stories in Bradford's approximation of a black dialect. Which is problematic I think for us because looking back at the source we try to imagine how Harriet Tubman might have really sounded. But, that being said, there are some really moving moments in the narrative that help to fill in the picture of Tubman's life and to put flesh on the bones of the myth of her life.

This is the moment where Tubman first escapes, and Bradford describes this as Tubman passing the "magic 'line'" from slavery to freedom. This is what Tubman says about that moment: "I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven."

This to me is such a powerful representation of Tubman's feeling, of her emotional life, at this incredible turn of her life story. This is something we don't often get access to when we're trying to think about historical figures: how they actually felt about certain moments in their life. I think with Harriet Tubman, we think about her after this moment. We think about her as the Moses of her people, who's got that pistol and who's going through the swamps with her long skirts to take 10, 20, 30, 60—and Bradford actually says 300, that’s been debated—but to take all of those slaves to freedom. We don't see her as the young woman who was first escaping and who felt this incredible sense of joy and relief in the promise of a new kind of life. But, even though we get this sense of incredible joy from Tubman at this moment, immediately we see that she's going to face a complicated future.

Three paragraphs after she talks about feeling so happy that she is free, she talks about her extreme loneliness in this new state. She says, "I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land." So in this moment we get a real sense of a dual emotional response that Tubman is feeling. The joy at freedom, and also the despair of loneliness and the despair of knowing that people that she loves are still enslaved.

We look at Harriet Tubman as an example of someone who has been described as this sort of heroic, mythic figure; but who was a real woman who had all kinds of struggles in her emotional life. With her first husband, for example, with poverty later on in life, for example. I think that's one thing the students are surprised about. To think of Harriet Tubman as a real person who had a host of vulnerabilities. But another thing that surprises students about this book, and I think that's troublesome about this book, is that Harriet Tubman was living and working in a particular context. When she first escaped, she was not yet hooked into the Underground Railroad network, but within a couple of years she was. She was working with white abolitionists and black abolitionists to free other slaves. There were a number of relational issues that came into her movement into this new community. I think one of the things that students feel frustrated about is the way that Harriet Tubman talks about white people.

The prime audience would have been people who had been involved in the abolitionist movement—especially in Auburn, NY, where Harriet Tubman was really beloved and also in the northeast. Bradford says that with the first edition of this book that she does not have hopes for a wide readership, that she really just wants to sell enough copies so that Tubman can raise money to live on.

Now with the second edition of the book that was published in 1886, Bradford sort of enlarges her intention for the narrative. I think you can see that in the changes she makes to the book itself—it's much more organized, she collects many more letters attesting to the importance of Tubman's story. And by the second version in 1886, Bradford seems to be really committed to the idea that she wants to set Harriet Tubman's story into the memory of the nation. Letter writers whose words are also published in the second edition say the same thing, that they are worried that this woman might actually fall out of memory and that this book is important to keep her in people's minds.

I think that went we look back at some of the details that Bradford includes in the account we can sort of broaden our understanding of what might have been the possible reasons for Tubman's success. First of all, she was a remarkable person, that much is clear. She was brilliant, and she was brave. I think that those two aspects of her character combined to make her formidable to all the people who had a bounty on her head, which was said to be as much as $12,000. I think that she was a unique individual. But in addition to that, she was someone who had had lots of different kinds of experiences as a girl. When she was a girl . . . her name was Minty then, Araminta. She changed her name to Harriet, which was her mother's first name, after she escaped to protect her identity. But when she was a girl she was hired out to a number of different families, so she wasn't just working at one plantation. So she got to see a wide variety of contexts, different kinds of households; she got to hear different slaveholders talking about things that they observed, or information that they might have been bringing to their dining room tables. I think she was able to build this broad kind of file of facts, of bits of information and names of people. And I think that that helped her to be able to escape for herself, and then to aid others in escaping later on.

There's an interesting tidbit to follow up on regarding her success, which has to do with information about Tubman that comes from the Civil War period when she was a nurse to the Union soldiers and also to the black "contraband"—as they were called—black slaves who ran away and went to the Union camps. Tubman was said to have been an incredible healer by the soldiers; she was said to have understood how to use native plants. That to me is very interesting. There's only a tidbit of this in Bradford, but it suggests that Tubman knew the environment in which she lived, that she understood something about native plants in her own home of Maryland and that she applied that knowledge to other locations, [like] when she was stationed in South Carolina for instance. So she knew the landscape. She understood how plants grew, she knew the waterways, and she was very observant; this also I think contributed to her success.

Well, the relationship between oppression and agency in the history of slavery is one that is central. It's one that I think is really apparent in Harriet Tubman's life. But it can be lost if we only focus on her as a heroic figure. That's why I think the early picture of her life is so important. Trying to imagine her as a child who did not have the benefit of protection of her parents from being sent out to various people who wanted to hire her. Tubman was actually described as a sickly child: she was a small girl and very weak, and she was often ill. When she came back to her home plantation after these stints working for other people, her mother would have to nurse her back to health because of the whippings and beatings and terrible things that she had to do, such as catching rats in the rivers.

Thinking about everything that she faced as a child—her vulnerability, her realness as a person—I think helps us to remember that slavery was an incredibly oppressive system that sought to render some people out of the category of humanity. Nevertheless, people resisted this because they were human beings. We see the necessity of defining oneself as a person, a person deserving of liberty in Harriet Tubman's life. She says—and this is recounted in Bradford's biography—that she feels that she has two rights on this earth: liberty and death. That's a familiar saying. But she is saying in that line that she feels that she is a person, with the same human rights as any other person, one of those being liberty. Regardless of the fact that she was born into a circumstance that was deeply humiliating and thoroughly violent, she determined that she was not going to accept that circumstance. But, I think it's really important to say here that most enslaved blacks were not able to escape. It took a really unusual set of circumstances that allowed some people to have the opportunity to escape. Harriet Tubman is one of those people, she stands out as the sole figure who had the kind of life that she had.

Even though we can see her life as an example of resistance and agency, we always have to remember the thousands, hundred thousands, and then millions of people who did not share the life experience that she had. But we do have the lyrics to sorrow songs that Tubman told to Bradford, and that Tubman explained the use of to Bradford. The first of these songs is not titled in the source, but I'll just read a few lines from it.

Hail, oh hail ye happy spirits, Death no more shall make you fear, Grief nor sorry, pain nor (anguish) Shall no more distress you dear.

This song goes on for four more stanzas, and Bradford recounts that Tubman sang the song to her—"sweetly" is a descriptor that Bradford uses. Tubman says that this song was a song that she would use as a signal to escaping slaves. If they heard her sing that song the first time, they should pay attention. If they heard her sing it a second time, they knew that it was safe for them to leave.

There’s another song that is recounted right near the same place in the book. This is the familiar song that many of us have heard of "Go Down Moses." Tubman recounts to Bradford the lyrics in the book, saying "Oh go down Moses/Way down into Egypt's land/Tell old Pharaoh let my people go/Old Pharaoh said that we would go cross/Let my people go/And don't get lost in the wilderness/Let my people go." Now what Tubman says to Bradford about the use of this song is that if slaves who wanted to escape heard it, they should know this was a warning that they should actually stay because there was danger on the trail. These are examples of African American cultural history—lyrics to songs and their uses preserved for us right here in this account.

She was a biographer before she wrote this, and perhaps that's why Harriet Tubman's family went to her and asked her to write this book. She uses her sort of literary license to set up scenes before she moves into Harriet Tubman's voice, which she denotes with quotations marks. I think that it would be very clear to students where Bradford begins and where Tubman begins. However, again we have to rely on Bradford for the faithful rendition of Tubman's words. Those quotation marks are a good signal to us that this is what Tubman said, but we have to trust that Bradford wrote that down accurately. We also have to work our way through Bradford's attempt to render what she viewed as an African American dialect. That creates a problem I think in terms of . . . even with the quoted material, what did Bradford think she heard, what did Bradford write down, and what did Tubman actually say? Beside that sticking point, I think that it is very clear where Bradford comes in and where her voice is in this text.

Now Bradford is writing this first edition in 1868. This is a really raw moment in American history. The Civil War has just concluded and relations between blacks and whites, North and South, are by no means clear to anyone. Bradford is writing out of an understanding of black and white relations that places black people on a lower level of civilization, of intelligence, of attainment. This comes out in the way that she writes about Harriet Tubman. She talks about Harriet Tubman's story as "a little story" and she writes that she knows that some of the readers of this book will find it unbelievable that a black woman could be considered a heroine. So Bradford's position as the writer of this book is one that we need to question as we read the text, even though there are clear demarcations between her voice and the quoted material from Tubman.

Another way that Bradford's account of Harriet Tubman's life can be very useful in the classroom is as a window into the Underground Railroad and how it functioned. Harriet Tubman after she freed herself got involved with this network of people—an informal network of people—who were committed to helping black slaves escape. These were white people, black people, women, men, who sort of banded together in this common mission. Bradford's account gives us a little window into the different techniques that they would have used, which is very valuable because of course everything they did was supposed to have been secret to protect the escaped slaves from their former owners and from slave catchers.

Another way in which this text can really be interesting I think in terms of thinking about Harriet Tubman's history and black women's history, is that it shows Harriet Tubman as an intellectual. It places her within a rubric of black women's intellectual history. The history of black women's thinking as it has changed over time. I don’t think Tubman is often thought about as an intellectual, but she was as I said earlier a brilliant woman, she had to be to accomplish all that she did over the many years that she went back to the South to help so many slaves escape. We get an inkling of her thoughts in Bradford's account—we wish for more of course, we wish Harriet Tubman had written her own account—but we do get a bit in Bradford's account. One example of that is that when Tubman is living in Philadelphia, where she works to try to earn money to fund her rescue missions, a group of people invite her to come see a stage production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. She says that she will not go, she has no need to go, because Uncle Tom's Cabin can in no way capture the reality of the experience of slavery, which she herself already knows. So this is a form of cultural criticism. She is saying that as popular as this novel was, even though it was taking the country by storm, that as a former slave that she had a more accurate version of slavery than Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Going back to the beginning of when I first read Watkins, I guess I should call her since it's 1857, was actually finding the language somewhat difficult and feeling that this was a lot to slug through and that the Sojourner Truth are these kind of short sentences and to the point and really kind of skimming over this document initially and saying, my God, this is just a lot of words and, you know, how am I going to make sense of it. Couldn’t she have spoken more simply and just kind of given us the bottom line? So the need to kind of sit down and say, okay, be patient, take an hour out and just look at this speech and try and figure out what’s going on.

And so the first thing reading through and I guess the first thing I noted was all of the different geographies that came into play. And so then saying, okay, well, you know what can I do with this? And realizing that she’s then trying to put together an international context in which then to examine U.S. slavery. And then the other thing is to say, well, why all of this heavy-duty language? These sentences, some of them go on for five, six lines and you get short of breath and so I think it takes real practice at least for somebody today to be able to really speak these sentences aloud. So another thing was, like, why does she have such long sentences? I mean why not break it down and be more like Sojourner Truth?

And in fact when you read about rhetoric of the period there was a movement apparently in the 1850s and '60s towards a more colloquial style so towards the style more of what Sojourner Truth was using but maybe not so folksy. And so Abraham Lincoln is pointed out as one of the key turning points, one of the pivotal figures in moving American rhetoric to what scholars have called the more democratic style.

So one of the things when you get over being annoyed with Harper for using these really, really long sentences, is to say okay, so what was she doing? And I remember kind of going through that process and what she’s doing is really reclaiming classical rhetoric. So I think what I did was go to my books on classical rhetoric and say, boy, she really studied with Cicero. And what she did here was to figure out the way Cicero and other Latin rhetoricians spoke and to incorporate that in her speaking style which is one of the reasons why these sentences are so long.

And then the question is why? And I think that one of the things that she was doing is much more educated, was to claim the ability for blacks at this time to use classical rhetoric and this was then the whole idea that blacks in fact have a soul and they also have a mind and they’re capable of inserting themselves into western traditions. The western tradition here is that of classical rhetoric. So that her claim to authority I guess I would say is doubled. It’s her knowledge of history and her being able to say, I can make these statements because I know history. I know world history and I can compare what’s going on in the United States to what’s going on in the rest of the world. And her other basis of authority is, my language is that of the classical tradition and I am part of this time-hallowed tradition of classical rhetoric which goes back to the Latins since the Roman period.

One of the things that’s so compelling is kind of the intimacy of the tone and here she is feeling that she can speak directly to God and God isn’t a big abstract entity out there that you have to look at with any kind of reverence, but he’s there with her and they’re having a conversation, so I think that that’s something that’s really powerful.

So when I was talking before about the issue of authority, the authority that she has that she asserts here is the authority of personal experience. My personal experience is that I can go out in the field and I can talk to God. God listens to me and God answers me. And I think that that’s what the basis of her authority is here, this kind of personal relationship that she can have with God and converse with him.

We don’t have very much in terms of the way in which Sojourner Truth’s audience reacted to her. It’s hard to tell. I think that audience reaction here might have been somewhat mixed. Because Sojourner Truth couldn’t read or write, we never know exactly what she said and what she intended. So everything about her is constructed and reconstructed. So did she actually give the speech like this or not? We don’t know. And we have to rely on the authority of Olive Gilbert in order to say, well, you know, look, this is what she said or maybe it's approximation or maybe she really didn’t.

Almost all of the accounts of the time say that basically she didn't speak standard English and that she spoke in the language very much like what’s here and all of the speeches of hers that get reconstructed by her white women friends have this kind of language. And so people refer to her language as peculiar, eccentric, idiosyncratic, and quaint. But the image that you're supposed to take of Sojourner Truth is that of an illiterate person who couldn’t speak standard English. I’ve come up across a couple accounts which say that in fact she did and that she was quite capable of speaking in standard English. So one of the issues one could talk about is did her white women friends, or whites in general, want Sojourner Truth to have this kind of folksy image? And what purpose would that serve?

Some of the things that I think that we can consider when we look at these speeches is first of all the question of audience. Who were they speaking to? And in the case of Sojourner Truth and Frances Harper the audiences are quite similar. They’re white and black women or white and blacks, not just women, but a mixed white and black audience. The black people obviously would be antislavery abolitionist people. We can imagine that the white audience might be composed of both abolitionists and people who are on the fence, and so one of the ideas is to convince them of the evils of slavery. So one of the things to consider always when dealing with speeches is who is the person talking to? This is really essential.

Another thing that I think is really interesting and here we can only kind of imagine, is here are these women braving these conventions, speaking out in public to a mixed audience, what was called a promiscuous assembly, of male and female members of the audience and that was what was really considered to be taboo, was speaking to this promiscuous assembly. And so one of the questions which I think is really interesting is what did they do with their bodies? Did these women try and speak in a way that my body isn’t here, just listen to my words and don’t pay attention to my body? So the whole idea is that engaging in this kind of public speaking a women would de-sex herself. Either take away her sexuality or actually masculinize herself. So many times these women got shouted at from the audience and they’re saying, “You’re a man!” And so one of the proofs became having to prove your femininity. So another, I think, interesting question is what do you do with the body?

And in contrast to Truth, and this is what I think is so interesting and where I think these issues of the body and self-presentation are so important, is that in all of these accounts it’s very clear that Harper tried to disembody herself. So the accounts, and they’re many and they’re quite lengthy, Frances Harper got up to speak on the occasion of etc., etc. She stood there, one of the comments is quiet, very few gestures, that she keeps her body very still. There’s a lot of attention to the quality of her voice. And so her voice is rendered as melodious and musical. And her language is pure and chaste. So very different from Truth, who as I said before spoke with her body and was very happy to thrust her body and make that part of her speech. And what we have with Harper, I think, is a kind of disembodiment, almost don’t see me. I am here speaking in front of you, but don’t see me. Don’t look at my body and simply pay attention to my voice. So I think it’s fascinating to contrast the two kind of different speaking methods of the two women.

Another question is the authority to speak. Where do you get your authority to speak? If you’re a women and you’re supposed to be domestic and in the household and you're out there speaking about a very public issue, antislavery, where do you get that authority? And then in what you say, what is the basis for the authority of what you actually say? And the last thing is more kind of close attention to the language and the style of the speech itself. What are the rhetorical techniques that you are going to use in order to persuade your audience? So I think these are some of the really important questions that one can ask when looking at these documents.

The first thing that I would do is talk to students about the 19th-century voice and that the 19th-century voice is really quite different from the 20th-century voice and that it takes a while to get used to it. And then to move on from there and to say, okay, well what can I do with this unfamiliarity? And just to, you know, read the passages over to maybe look for the personal voice. You know, we all want to know "I the speaker," what makes this Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's speech as opposed to anybody else’s.

But then to realize that part of the 19th-century voice is the omission of the eye, of the personal, and that Truth is in fact much more exceptional in that way than Harper. That it is very, very hard to find any kind of personal voice or the reliance on personal experience in these 19th-century women. And that they were very determined to keep themselves, their private self in the background. That’s not what we’re about or there's this kind of reticence and this sense of privacy, which we’ve totally lost in the 20th century. But really kind of my private business is my private business. And that I am here doing the public work of racial uplift or of abolition, of anti-slavery.

One thing that you can do, and this involves more primary research, you can go and look for other versions of the speech. So for example, Sojourner Truth's very famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech is not the only version we have, there are at least three or four others. So if you go and look at that you find that was the—“Ain’t I a Woman” speech first came out, I think, in 1863 and the version was by Frances Gage, so a white woman abolitionist. And of course Sojourner Truth gave the speech at a women’s rights convention, sometime in the early '50s. So one of the things to think about is that Frances Gage was there but didn’t write up the account until 10 to 12 years later.

If you go to the newspapers of the time, the anti-slavery newspapers, there is in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, which comes out of Ohio and it’s a white abolitionist paper, about two weeks after Sojourner Truth gives that speech there is a rendition, a version, which would then be our first version of the speech. So one of the things one can do is compare those two versions and there are in fact interesting discrepancies between the two. If I remember correctly, Sojourner Truth says all of these things and then she says, “Ain’t I a woman.” That “Ain’t I a woman” phrase never appears in the 1851 Anti-Slavery Bugle version. Instead she says all these things and ends up by saying, “and I can do as much as any man.” So that’s not the same. “Ain’t I a woman” and “I can do as much as any man” is not exactly the same.

So one can go and do kind of this kind of mined archives, find other speeches and do this kind of comparative work. And then I guess what you can do is speculate on why the person writing up the particular version did it in that way. Well, first of all you have to say that we don’t know whether Sojourner Truth ever said “Ain’t I a woman” or not. We just don’t know. Assuming that she didn’t, why then would Frances Gage want to say that?

This particular image struck me, not only because of its early date—this particular image was done in 1853, less than 15 years after the introduction and invention of the photographic medium—but also because of its size. Most 19th-century photographs that you look at are quite small. And this is a full-plate daguerreotype that has been encased in this gilded frame. Obviously a tremendous amount of care has gone into constructing this image. This would not have been something that would have been bought for next to nothing. Somebody would have invested a certain amount of money and that the photographer has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to create, some type of souvenir maybe, a document that speaks to these tourists' experience at this very special American landmark—Niagara Falls.

When I saw it the first time, it of course reminded me of snapshots that we all take of family members on vacation at scenic landmarks whether it be Yosemite, Yellowstone, here the example being Niagara Falls. But as I looked at it more and more, it was obvious that this was a very carefully constructed image that was not simply spontaneously done. That it follows certain pictorial traditions in terms of the visual iconography of Niagara Falls, and that there was nothing spontaneous at all about it.

When reading photographic texts, I typically follow three lines of inquiry. And let me just review very briefly what those questions are. The first question of course is: "What is it?" For there is not one photography, but there are many 'photographies.' It is important, I think, to have students acknowledge or to understand the great variety of different formats, techniques, approaches; so it's very important to look very closely at what it is. In this case, "it" being a full-plate daguerreotype from 1853.

A second question would be: "How has the photographer figured his or her subject?" Indeed, what is the relationship between the photographer and his subject? What decisions has the photographer made in creating this image?

And a third series of questions that I would ask of a picture like this would be: "How is this photograph being used? What is the context in which this image is being seen?" Photographs are not made in a vacuum, there are reasons for taking pictures like this and I think it's important that—and this is what makes me excited as an historian—to try to unearth what this picture is about, why it was created, how it was used, how this subject that was depicted here was understood.

If we go inside the picture itself, you'll notice how a group of these tourists have been lined on the very brink of the American Falls. One of the things that strikes me as particularly curious is the fact that all these characters have their backs to us. They're not facing the camera, as we might typically do if we were standing at a tourist landmark today. One all of a sudden asks, "Are these people even aware they're being photographed? Has the photographer somehow surreptitiously taken their photograph?"

And as an historian, we don't necessarily have the answer—I don't have the answer for that question. But what I do know, of course, is that there's a long visual tradition of posing figures in front of sublime landscapes that goes back to 18th-century English landscape aesthetics. One of the things is the great number of these pictures that are absolutely identical to each other, except for the very fact that there are different configurations of characters here at the brink of the falls. Obviously you begin to understand that this particular image is not unique, it’s part of a well-constructed formula that the photographer has set out.

Actually the photographer has made, in this case, a great number of very deliberate decisions. So what are those decisions? Well, first of all he's decided to take pictures at this particular site itself. Why Niagara Falls as opposed to Trenton Falls, or the Potomac River? Well, Niagara Falls is this sort of "National Icon"; it is a landmark that Americans have invested with a great deal of significance—patriotic significance.

Other decisions that the photographer perhaps is making include what he has chosen to include and to leave out. I find it particularly interesting in this view that he does include a tree on the left-hand side of the image. It sort of frames the picture; it suggests that this is the left-hand margin of our picture. That he has also within the frame tried to capture the panoramic sweep of the falls. If you've ever been to the falls, you know that there are…it's not just one single fall, it's a series of three or four individual falls—American Falls, Horseshoe Falls—and here the photographer has tried to provide information about the entire panoramic sweep. That's another, I think, very deliberate decision.

Who exactly is Platt Babbit? Where did he come from? What is his background? Does he have artistic training? What type of business does he run? How has he gotten to this site? And, what of course is his relationship to the subjects that he's photographing?

A little bit of research will reveal that Babbit carved out a very successful career as a commercial landscape photographer in the service of tourism. Which provides a nice bridge in to a fourth concern, which would be that this photograph participates in the cultural practice of tourism; a phenomenon that grew into a mass-market phenomena in the mid-nineteenth century at places like Niagara Falls. And I would argue that photography was instrumental in defining the boundaries of the modern tourist experience. For photography taught people where to go, what was worth seeing. Photography educated the eye of the tourist, showing him or her how to see a particular site.

And last of all, photography served as one of the central rituals of one's tourist experience. These people are tourist who have traveled—as records from hotel registries at Niagara Falls indicate—from as far away as, not only New York and Boston, but also London and Paris. Niagara Falls, thanks to photography—and at the same time the promotional efforts of other tourists developers like the railroads and the hotels are responsible for advertising places like this to a clientele that reaches not only throughout the United States, but as far away as Europe as well. And these are those who have the disposable income at the time and the inclination to go to a place like Niagara Falls.

First of all would be to Niagara Falls itself, and to try to understand what this landscape actually looks like. I mentioned earlier that photographs are very interesting documents because they seem to be transparent windows into this site. And yet, at the same time, this is not all that Niagara is, that this transparency is not so…this is a very constructed image. So, I would sort of understand…where else could he have set up his camera? What other perspectives could he have used to shoot this picture? I'd also look at guidebooks—guidebooks to Niagara Falls. Where are the tourist developers, the hotels, the railroads, encouraging people (visitors) to go to see these particular images? For often times there are elaborate descriptive texts that shape how one navigates one's experience at a place like Niagara Falls. Interestingly, many of these tourist guidebooks were illustrated with engraved reproductions of photographs—by Babbit—in a sense holding out the photograph, "Here it is. This is what you're looking for. This is your goal," in a sense.

And then of course, another level of research involves trying to understand Babbit as a businessman. How did he make a living? Is all that he did landscape photography? Was there a market in the 1850's for simply landscape photography? Who was underwriting him? What is the machinery responsible for creating the tourism infrastructure at a place like Niagara Falls? One thing right away that you think about, of course, is the railroads. And there is some evidence that in looking at railroad archives related to lines that went to the falls, that Babbit was being commissioned to take photographs; that these railroads were buying his images to be used in their promotional materials.

I think looking at local newspapers, that speak to his sort of business at this very specific site, and what you learn, of course—if you do that type of archival research—is that Babbit had a thriving studio right on Main street in Niagara Falls. That he had commercial arrangements with souvenir shops at the site itself. That he had a little business pavilion, right next to his pavilion here at the brink of the falls. So that though we only see in the image itself a bunch of tourists lined up at the falls, in fact behind the picture is a vast world of information about Babbit, that I think allows us to better understand how we get to this [i.e. to the picture].

I was really stunned by the other half of Reconstruction, which we never paid any attention to, which was the money debate. There was a huge debate about money during the same time—these were these great issues: what do we do about the ex-slaves and what do we do with the money? Because the North used greenbacks to finance the Civil War; they didn't want to tax people, so they just printed money, they made it legal tender. I think 240 million dollars in greenbacks, which are purely paper money—they have no value other that what people are willing to believe is in them. And they're very successful during the war: they don't cause a lot of inflation, they allow Lincoln to prosecute the war without having to raise taxes, and keep the sort of massive dissent under control.

But after the war what do you do with them? That's an interesting question. One argument is you just get rid of the greenbacks—they're not real money; they don't have any real value; they're a lie; they're a fraud and a cheat. "Burn 'em," some people would say. "Contract them" and—they call it contracting the currency—"bring 'em back in and burn 'em, destroy them and go back to real money," which at the time was supposed to be gold. And the other argument is that we need more paper money—money is just a social convenience—it's whatever we say it is, and we should get rid of gold. The document comes out of that debate—it comes out of this debate about the nature of money.

And as I started to look at it, I got really fascinated by that question. I mean, why not use paper money? What's the argument for gold? And when I started to read the arguments for gold, they became really fascinating and absurd. I mean they're superficially rational. Economists in the 19th century would go through this long rational explanation about prices and supply and demand and then you'll finally get to the core of the metaphor, which is gold just is valuable, because it is. And that's always there: it just is. And sometimes they'll say, God made it to be money. And they'll say this; I see this again and again: God made gold to be money. Okay, this is the money, this is going to be burned for heat, I mean it's really…it's that clear. And there's this what you'd have to call a fetish about gold. That it has this magical value—that's independent of what people think—it just has this magical value. And I got really interested in that question.

So this Nast cartoon was produced as part of the attack on paper money. Nast was a really strong hard-money guy, and he referred to paper money as the "rag baby," that was his name for it. Cause paper money was also referred to as "rag money." It was made out of rags—old rags, rags and trash, and inflated paper trash he'd say. This was part of an argument against paper money. And it's a really good expression of the gold standard position. It's a really strong expression of the gold standard position. And because Nast is good, it's pretty coherent.

What does it embody? Well in this thing the rag baby cannot embody a real baby. He's pointing out the futility of trying to embody qualities in things they don't have. And it's connected to forms of economic prosperity—like this is a house and lot—these are symbols of economic success. Or this is a cow, which I think refers to farming—you know it refers to the sentimental symbolic place farming has in American life, it's where real values are, it's where real work comes from. This is money by Act of Congress, this is milk by Act of Congress—you can't feed yourself on pure paper—it's not a rag baby, but a real baby. So it became a really good embodiment of the problem of substituting signs for things. And it seems like a pretty straightforward, and generally commonsensical point of view. I mean you can't hand a baby a milk card and get a baby to drink it. I mean it's a witty expression of that.

But because of the structure of it, with the signs, it's really also, I think, critique of advertising in the 19th century, and the emerging culture of mass sort of…signage—advertisements, placards, billboards, competing signs. It's also a comment on the chaoticness of post-Civil War life. And so it's not just commenting about money, it's also commenting about, what would you call it? The virtualness of industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism is increasingly virtual, where you market something as a chair that looks like a handmade chair but it's actually stamped-on pressed and there are 20 thousand of them. The watch looks like it's gold but it's actually plated in some new technological process. There's a quote from Henry Ward Beecher where he says that we live in a culture of lies—lying flour in our bread, our clothes are lies: they look like things they're not. And it's partly a commentary on that commercial world. And it uses money as the door to open that kind of critique.

One of the things that's unconsciously revealed here is a certain amount of anxiety about reproduction. Why choose a rag baby? Why choose to embody it that way? A baby in some ways is a symbol of concreteness. It's a new life but it's made out of two other forms of life, and its unimpeachably real. It's the symbol of a kind of realness, and the idea of declaring something a baby which isn't a baby, is kind of the ultimate expression of the arrogance of people. You can't create life—life is the most basic thing you can't make—and you can't make a baby out of parts or pieces. So it has something…it's not unlike Frankenstein—it seems to me it has some of that same concern about generation and reproduction.

So one of the things I'd say is that it's not an accident that he chose a rag baby. And you could say, it has a lot of values; on the one hand it mocks children's fantasy play, and it says that paper money is a child's foolishness, sort of a foolish childish act.

It was the most naked, I think, and frank description of the gold standard position. You can't substitute paper for the real thing. An idea can't be a thing. A thing has to be something material. But of course, in fact, it's an economy where a house and lot is just a piece of paper. And in fact, the ownership of the house and lot is purely a fictional paper title. Ownership doesn't exist physically, it only exists in law. It only exists in custom. And for the purposes of the market a paper representation of a house and lot is exactly as good as a house and lot. So that was sort of interesting to me. The cow—obviously you can't milk a piece of paper, but you can buy and sell symbolic cows which are nothing more than pieces of paper. And from the perspective of the greenbackers, the money itself is an embodiment of all these other tangible physical goods, which are part of the United States. So it seemed like a nice way to get at both a really strong expression of the gold standard position and some of the incoherences of it at the same time.

The first thing I'd ask them is why did he choose to make paper money into a rag doll? What are the rhetorical strategies of this thing? And the claim that paper money is a rag baby is an interesting claim to make; I mean why does he choose to symbolize it that way? Why not call it, you know, a scarecrow? Why a baby? Why a rag baby? And then I'd ask why would he want to have it in the form of this weird impossible situation of a shelf with signs put around it. I would want to ask them why the argument takes that form. Try to get them to say, "Well, maybe it has something to do with the commercial street, and the world of signs and advertising.”

If I had to describe a methodology, I'd say you have to have some factual context. You have to understand why certain terms appear. You have to know what's going on in the era the document appeared in, but beyond that you want an attitude of skepticism about the rhetoric, about the strategies of argument the document makes. You want to be able to question not just the points the argument makes, but the means by which the arguments get there. The more complicated way to say this is you don't just want the answer to the question—you want to know what does asking that question do? What effects does asking that question produce; what kind of outcomes does that question always point towards?

The first thing I do when I'm talking about reading images is I say there's absolutely nothing in an image that can be taken for granted. And if you're going to read it, you have to go sector by sector. You have to ask the "why" question about every piece of an image. Why is this particular thing here and not somewhere else? Why do you choose to draw it this way? You have to really interrogate images. I mean that's the basic method I want to bring when I'm using an image. There's nothing in it that's a product of chance—well, if there is something in it that's a product of chance it might be more interesting than the things that are in there deliberately.

The first thing they'd want to do is take careful notes, either on paper or mentally, about what the thing depicts and how it depicts it. And sometimes just writing it down is a big help. You know, it's a baby and it's in front of…I find when I'm taking notes, that when I write down the image I often learn a lot about it. So the first thing they want to do is give it a careful formal study of the structure of the thing—what is it depicting and how?

You have to have some sense of what the historical references are. So if they see this as railroad stock, they would have to investigate something about railroad stock and feelings about the railroad in the 1870s. They'd have to discover some sense of historical context. But I'd also want to know something about Nast. Particularly because he's such a…there's so much stuff by Nast, and he has such a strong influence. He's a very powerful artist. I would want them to investigate how else Nast depicted babies; how else he depicted money; how he depicted business and finance in general. So I'd want them to have some sense of the author, and the author's characteristic forms of…his rhetorical tricks—the author's characteristic rhetorical style. And how does this deviate from his characteristic style.

I would ask them to look for other iterations of that phrase. You know, where else does "rag baby" show up and who else uses it? Well, one thing I'd ask them to do is look at how else Nast drew babies. I mean what else did Nast do with babies and how else did they appear in his work. Did he sentimentalize them as the exact opposite of this? Or, how were babies depicted in the popular culture generally? And I think the answer usually is they're highly sentimentalized. They're the objects around which real feeling is generated, and the objects that represent genuineness. So I'd ask them to contextualize it—what is the context of babyhood?

The song, “John Brown’s Body,” consists of tune and words. And often times in the 19th century, new words got set to familiar tunes because it was an easy way to learn songs. So the tune to “John Brown’s Body” had been around for a while.

“John Brown’s body lies a-moulderin’ in the grave, John Brown’s body lies a-moulderin’ in the grave, John Brown’s body lies a-moulderin’ in the grave, But, His soul is marching on. Glory, Glory Hallelujah! Glory, Glory Hallelujah! Glory, Glory Hallelujah! His soul is marching on.”

The words to “John Brown’s Body” went through several different variations. The original John Brown that it’s singing of was not even the John Brown that we think of—John Brown, the anti-slavery figure. He was a soldier in the Union Army in a Massachusetts regiment who had the name John Brown and the song was initially a way for his fellow soldiers to tease him. But the song caught on and passed beyond his regiment. When other regiments sang the song “John Brown’s Body,” they probably had no idea that there was a Massachusetts soldier named John Brown.

They thought they were singing about John Brown, the anti-slavery figure. And the words, again, they changed and they evolved over the course of the war. Different groups would add different verses that fit their experiences. And what makes this song so interesting to me is that the image of John Brown, the anti-slavery figure, did the same thing. It changed so much over time and also varied depending on who you ask. So different groups would ascribe certain characteristics just like different soldiers would add different lyrics.

It becomes one of the Union Army’s favorite marching tunes. Partly because it’s quite a stirring melody and you can envision marching to this song. But also because the anti-slavery cause that John Brown came to stand for in the public mind takes on such added importance as the Civil War progresses, among Union soldiers and among the Northern public. So the popularity of the song far outstrips the popularity of John Brown. The song’s fate during the war is really quite telling about how attitudes about slavery and anti-slavery changed over time, but particularly within the war itself.

The first thing I would ask is, “What does it sound like?” In terms of tune, is it slow or fast? Is it the sort of thing you would use to sing a baby to sleep or is it the sort of thing that you would march to? I would also listen for repetition. Why do particular words recur again and again? Why this word as opposed to another word? What might this verse be talking about? There’s clearly a lot of military and army overtones. “A soldier in the Army of the Lord.” What do they think that means? There’s a war going on at the time so it could mean a couple of things. Does it mean the original John Brown? What does that tell us about how John Brown saw himself and saw his quest to free the slaves? We could talk about “Army of the Lord” in that symbolic sense in John Brown’s eyes. What does that mean to the soldiers who are singing it in the Union Army? What does that tell us about how they think about their own cause in the Union Army?

“He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord, He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord, He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord, His soul is marching on.”

Where the verses are in relation to each other. Why do certain ideas follow from certain other ideas? Might just be nonsense. We all make up nonsense songs, but not always. And in this case, I think where verses fall in relation to each other really does tell us something about how the war changed many of the men who fought it. Lyrics that don’t quite make sense to them, that they don’t quite understand because their context is different. And that context matters. That’s where sometimes you have to be careful because how we use words, what we mean by words, that can change over time. It’s worthwhile to spend time really looking at lyrics and what they would’ve meant to somebody in the 1860s.

Songs are a wonderful way to get at 19th-century life because so much of people’s entertainment had to be self-created. A way to entertain yourself was get together and to sing. The way it gets produced formally is in sheet music, pieces of paper with the words and the notes. But more often how people learn music is word of mouth. Words to songs are often set to tunes that people already know. That’s one way in which songs can spread so quickly. Learning a song is learning new words as opposed to learning both words and music. People do change the words as they go along. And that’s why you’ll see so many different versions and different lyrics.

When there are many versions, you have to be a little bit careful not to assume that everybody is (a) singing the same thing, or (b) means the same thing. But watching how words change over time and looking at particular words that are chosen and what certain lyrics might refer to can, I think, really be helpful in understanding what do people have on their minds at the time. They start to insert their experiences and things from the news and their ideas and attitudes into these songs.

John Brown’s raid happens in the year 1859 and then the Civil War breaks out in 1861. Northerners and Southerners have been growing apart on the issue of slavery. But the question that has really been dividing Northerners and Southerners at the time that John Brown’s raid happens is, what should the ultimate fate of slavery be as the nation expands? New territories are being added. Should they be slave or should they be free? Northern opinion is very divided. Some just don’t want to talk about it. Others think, slavery exists in the Southern states and it’s not really our business to touch it there. You can keep it if you already have it, but we don’t want to send it anywhere else.

Then there’s Southern opinion, which says, we need this institution. It’s central to our way of life. Not allowing it to spread first of all goes against the will of God and, second of all, is going to be dangerous. What if we become so outnumbered that all the other states in the Union can get together in Congress and can outlaw slavery. For many white Northerners, it can be kind of an abstract issue; this isn’t something they live with every day. Most white Southerners live among slaves every day, whether or not they actually own any. The institution of slavery is an inherently violent institution.

So for Southerners, the fear of a slave uprising is never absent. When somebody like John Brown, an outsider, a man from the North, comes into the South to incite an uprising of slaves, it sounds like your worst nightmare. That clearly shows that we have to take dramatic steps to protect ourselves. And for some white Southerners, the only step that will really protect us is to separate, to leave the Union. So John Brown is one man. He’s certainly not indicative of majority opinion. He only gets 19 people to help him. The rebellion doesn’t work. It lasts less than 36 hours. He’s tried and executed. The great uprising, all the slaves flocking to him, that he had envisioned never happened. But its impact shouldn’t be underestimated. Because he really does stand for so much of what white Southerners fear by 1860.

“John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back.” I would want to talk with students about what’s a knapsack. And what they think that one might mean.

“John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back, John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back, John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back, His soul is marching on.”

That verse seems to me to be a clear outgrowth of the experience of being in the army for so many soldiers. That’s new. They have likely not been away from home before, much less in an army. So I think that verse gives us a chance to talk about the experience of being a soldier.

A lot of students carry a knapsack to school with them every day and in their knapsack they’ll put the things that they’re going to need from day to day. If a soldier is in the Union Army and he’s away from home, sometimes for the first time, what might he put in his knapsack? What would he need for his day-to-day life? What kinds of things do soldiers carry with them? What’s it like to be a soldier?

He’d probably have to carry his food, so what would he eat? He would have to carry a blanket. What would sleeping be like if you were on the march? How much can you really carry if you have to carry it all day long? Not that much. So if you had to think about the few things you could carry with you, what would you take? Two pairs of socks and your uniform and not a lot else. How does that affect your life?

I can see why singing songs would look like such a good time because you don’t have much else with you. Maybe a pack of cards. It becomes possible to talk about the bareness of life with that knapsack.

We go from this verse about the experience of being a soldier—trudging and carrying things, stomping through the mud—and then we go right into “John Brown died that the slaves might be free.” That’s an interesting juxtaposition because it suggests that this tromping through mud and being cold and being hot and being lonely actually has come to be for the purpose that this institution of slavery might come to an end.

“John Brown died that the slave might be free, John Brown died that the slave might be free, John Brown died that the slave might be free, His soul is marching on."

They first enter the Union Army for all kinds of different reasons. Some so that slaves might be free, but others might enter the Army because they really think that keeping one United States matters. So they might enter for patriotic motives. They might enter because they’re 19 years old and tired of working on the farm and they think it will be a big adventure. They might enter because other young men from their town are entering and they don’t want to look like a coward. So there’re all kinds of reasons why a person might decide to enter the Union Army.

But the experience of being in the Union Army really does begin to make many soldiers think about things they might not have really wanted to think a lot about before. And they’re doing this thinking in states that have slavery and most of them have never seen slavery before. They knew it existed, but it’s different to see it in person. So for many of them, seeing slavery in person really changes their minds.

And really does make them think that all this mucking around in the mud and loneliness and fear and boredom and all the other things that being a soldier entails is for a purpose. So I think the juxtaposition of those two verses, the very ordinary verse about a knapsack and all of a sudden this moral verse about “died that the slaves might be free,” I think that’s more than an accident. I think that those things got put together for a purpose.

The second version is a later version. The lyrics are more elaborate. They look to me like lyrics that somebody actually sat down and thought about as opposed to the lyrics that somebody made up as they were going along. They talk even more explicitly about exactly who was John Brown, exactly what did he do. There doesn’t seem to be much confusion at all about John Brown. John Brown’s a hero.

“Old John Brown’s Body lies mouldering in the grave; While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save; But tho’ he lost his life while struggling for the slave; His soul is marching on.” It starts right off not with the experiential part about a knapsack, but instead here is who John Brown was. And he was a person willing to sacrifice his life to end slavery. And then the next verse, it’s even more clear that the writer of the song really admires John Brown. This verse says: “John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true and brave; And Kansas knows his valor when he fought her rights to save; Now, though the grass grows green above his grave, his soul is marching on.”

The writer of the second verse is a fairly educated person who must know something about John Brown’s life. Before John Brown decides to lead this uprising in Virginia, he goes to be part of this struggle to free Kansas. And then the second verse has a lot of details about his raid in Virginia.

“He captured Harper’s Ferry with his 19 men so few and frightened ’Old Virginny’ till she trembled through and through.” “They hung him for a traitor, themselves the traitor crew” must happen after secession because many Northerners see secession as the work of traitors. Again, it’s quite detailed. This person knows that there were 19 men involved in the raid. It’s not clear that the writer of the first version has that kind of detailed knowledge. “He captured Harper’s Ferry with his 19 men so true, And frightened old Virginny till she trembled through and through. They hung him for a traitor, themselves the traitor crew. His soul is marching on.” “The conflict that he heralded, he looks from heaven to view; On the army of the Union with its flag red, white and blue. And heaven shall ring with anthems o’er the deed they mean to do; For his soul his marching on.”

Now this is a fascinating verse. It draws a direct link between what John Brown does and the outbreak of the Civil War. But what I find even more interesting is this explicit connection between John Brown and his raid on Virginia and the Union flag of red, white, and blue. John Brown saw the United States government as protecting slavery. He led this raid in Harper’s Ferry, VA, against the Union government. He chose to attack a federal arsenal which is where the United States government keeps its firearms. It was the United States government that was partly guilty for this institution. John Brown’s cause becoming attached to the United States government, again, I think is a very interesting glimpse at how much the war changed things and changed peoples’ views about slavery.

And then we go on to “Ye soldiers of Freedom, then strike, while strike ye may; The death blow of oppression in a better time and way; For the dawn of old John Brown has brightened into day; And his soul is marching on.” The connection between the cause of John Brown and the cause of the Union Army, “Ye soldiers of Freedom,” becomes clear. But again, I suspect this is a song that comes in the second year of the war or later.

John Brown was born in 1800 to a family of very stern religious convictions and a father who was very sternly anti-slavery. Both of those things rubbed off on John Brown. And he’s never very successful at making a living. From a sort of material point of view, his life is a failure.

When he starts to become important is in the 1850s when Kansas Territory opens up for white settlement and the question arises, should Kansas be slave or free?

To John Brown, this is not even a question. It should be free. And so he goes to Kansas to participate in the struggle to make Kansas a free state. In December of 1855, the town of Lawrence, KS, a town committed to making Kansas free, was attacked by pro-slavery forces. And Brown’s involved in the defense of Lawrence. Later in 1856, there are a series of assassinations and executions of free state settlers. And in response to (1) those assassinations, (2) another attack on the town of Lawrence and, (3) an event that happens back in the United States Congress in which a pro-slavery senator attacked an anti-slavery senator, these three events just boil up in John Brown.

In May of 1856, he decided that if pro-slavery forces are going to try and force slavery on Kansas with violence, then anti-slavery forces have to react with violence. So he killed five pro-slavery settlers. The justification was that those who are willing to kill for slavery should be willing to die for slavery. To most people it was a gruesome act.

Brown denied that he did it. And he began to travel back among the eastern states to gain support for anti-slavery settlers in Kansas. He says he’s raising money for free state settlers in Kansas, but actually he had begun to plan his raid on Harper’s Ferry. He is back in Kansas in 1859 and his last hurrah is to cross over into Missouri and to free 11 slaves and to escape with them to Canada.

Harper’s Ferry. He found six wealthy Northeasterners, mostly New Englanders, who thought that they were supporting Kansas who really are the people who financed his raid. They’re known as the “Secret Six.” He also met with a number of free African American Northern leaders to try and get them to help him recruit men. Frederick Douglass told him that the plan was insane and wouldn’t help him. So Brown entered the raid disappointed. He had hoped for more widespread support.

He and some of his sons and some other compatriots, for a grand total of eventually 19 people, rented a farm house in Maryland, just seven miles from Harper’s Ferry. His hope was that he would seize this federal armory, the symbol of the United States government, which he blamed for helping to keep slavery. And then slaves from all around would flock to his banner and they would march to the South and free slaves as they went.

They seize the armory without too much difficulty. They do it in the middle of night. Nobody’s expecting a raid on Harper’s Ferry. But after that, it’s a little mysterious as to exactly what Brown thought would happen because he really just stayed put. Probably he was waiting for all of these slaves to rush to his banner and they didn’t. So eventually the locals surround Brown. Brown and his men eventually congregate in one building at the Harper’s Ferry arsenal, the engine house. Meanwhile, local people have contacted the United States military. A force of Marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee comes to Harper’s Ferry and is able to capture Brown and his followers. A few of them escape. Some are them killed. Most of them are captured and will go on trial.

Brown goes on trial very quickly, so speedily that the judge will not even wait for a lawyer to arrive to serve as John Brown’s defense lawyer. That decision turned out to be important in first beginning to shift Northern opinion. They thought, first of all, this is a nutty idea. What on earth did he think he was going to achieve? And they did not see themselves as advocating the use of violence. And they did not see themselves as advocating marching into a Southern state and physically attacking slavery. And they certainly didn’t want Southerners to think that they advocated that kind of thing.

Then the judge makes the decision not to wait for the lawyer. Northerners begin to think that due process is being taken away. These Southerners are so worried about slavery that they’re willing to overlook civil liberties. They’re willing to overlook the Bill of Rights. Now John Brown is beginning to look a little different. He’s beginning to look like somebody who’s sacrificing himself in a greater cause. He’s beginning to look a little bit like a martyr.

Most Northerners are not on board with that view yet. But then he’s executed and he comports himself with great dignity. He gives a very eloquent last speech. He writes a very eloquent last letter in which he says, “I once thought it would be possible to end slavery by shedding just a little blood. Now I see that the crimes of this guilty land are too great and they will only be expiated with the shedding of a lot of blood.”

So, Northern opinion begins to shift a little more. And Southern opinion becomes a little more nervous about Brown. Once the war happens, that’s when Brown really becomes elevated in Northern opinion. He might’ve tried to end slavery by shedding just a little blood. Now, we have this great war that has shed a lot of blood. Suddenly he looks like a martyr and a prophet.

That this is certainly not a man who’s a hero right away. So you begin to see a shift in newspaper articles when John Brown is hanged. But then you really see a shift as the war progresses. One thing that would be really useful would be to find some newspaper articles about John Brown from those three different times: when the raid first happens; when he is executed; and then the during the war. And I think you’d see a big change in how people thought about John Brown. I think you might also benefit from looking at the letters that Union soldiers wrote during the war. What did they say about slavery before they go to war? When they first go to war? And after they’ve been there for a while? For some, there’s not a change. Some either always thought slavery should go away. Some never wanted to fight for the end of slavery.

But there’s a big group in the middle who really hadn’t given the topic a whole lot of thought when they went to war but whose minds changed as a result of being in the South, of seeing slavery. And, also, as they fight the war, they think, if it’s slavery that started this war in the first place or if at least without slavery there wouldn’t have been a war, then the only way we can assure there will never be another one is to get rid of slavery. So I think soldier’s letters will help you see a change in soldiers’ views of slavery and also what the relationship between slavery and the war would be.

John Brown’s raid happened in October of 1859. John Brown was executed in December of 1859. 1860 was a presidential election. Presidential elections, then as now, are yearlong events. So we go into the year 1860. John Brown’s on everybody’s mind and it’s time to choose candidates for president. The North has this new political party, which doesn’t exist in the South. It’s called the Republican Party. And it exists for the purpose of stopping the westward spread of slavery. No way can a Republican candidate on this platform get votes in the South, but this platform is gaining strength in the North.

Meanwhile, the lower South states. Everyone’s nervous about John Brown. So they decide that the candidate that they are willing to support will have to be a candidate who’s very committed to something called the Federal Slave Code which would mean that the federal government would have to pass a code promising to protect slavery. And the Democrats in the lower South states, it’s only one party there, decide that that’s who they need for their president in 1860. Northern Democrats think that’s a terrible idea, but they also think that the Republicans are a terrible idea. They think that the president should run on a platform of “popular sovereignty.” The federal government shouldn’t have anything to do with slavery in the western territories. Congress shouldn’t decide and the president shouldn’t decide. Instead, the voters in the territory should decide if they want to be slave or free.

Democrats have their convention to choose their candidates; they split. And the Southern Democrats break away. The Northern Democrats nominate a candidate named Steven Douglas who says, let people in territories decide for themselves if the territory should be slave or free.

When that happens, the Southern Democrats split away. We need a candidate who’s going to make the federal government protect slavery. When they split the Democratic Party in two, they nominate their own candidate. So now there are two Democratic candidates and one Republican candidate. What that means is the Democratic vote’s going to be split and the Republican’s going to get enough to win. He’s not going to get a majority but he’s going to get enough because he’s going to get more than those two Democratic candidates.

Well, that Republican candidate turns out to be Abraham Lincoln and that’s precisely what happens. He carries enough of the North to win the election because the Democrats are split. Within weeks, the first state, South Carolina, leaves the Union. Sees the election of Lincoln on this platform of not letting slavery spread west as a clear threat to the Southern states. Six other states leave, too.

Virginia’s really a middle state in this growing contest between North and South. Much of the South is reliant on what’s called “staple crop agriculture” or “commercial agriculture.” People grow one crop and they sell it for cash. They use the cash to buy everything else that they need. So, much of the South doesn’t grow food. It’s not self-sufficient. Virginia is a little bit more diversified. It is still dependent on a cash crop. You grow lots of tobacco in order to sell it and then you use the money to buy the other things that you need. The problem with tobacco is that it wears soil out very quickly. So by the time Harper’s Ferry happens Virginia has actually been in a state of decline. It’s soil is wearing out because of tobacco farming.

There are sections of the state, however, that are more diversified—that grow wheat, potatoes, things that you would need to eat. The big crops grown for money are dependent on a slave labor force. The other crops—wheat, corn, the things that you can live off of—sometimes those are grown in the slave labor and sometimes they are not. As these large plantations become less profitable, the plantation owners find that they have more laborers than they need, but there are big cotton plantations in Alabama and in Georgia. So selling your slaves South is one of the single biggest sources of revenue for the whole state of Virginia. So in that sense, Virginia is very closely tied in to the deeper South.

The North is still a largely agricultural society. The North is also beginning to develop what we would recognize as an industrialized base. So diversified agriculture helps the North because all those people in the factories need wheat and corn and they need things to eat. Virginia in parts has a mixed economy, too. The largest ironworks in the country is in Virginia. There are factories and textile mills. It has clear links to the staple crop, plantation, slave-based agriculture of the lower South. It also, though, has more diversified agriculture than much of the South. And it also is beginning to develop industry like the North. So when John Brown happens and when the Civil War happens, Virginia’s really torn. Many Virginians feel ties to the South, but many feel ties to the United States as well. So it’s a very interesting state to look at in 1860. It’s a crossroads for many of the different ways of life in the United States at the time.

Lincoln takes office in March of 1861. Seven states have left the Union and formed the Confederacy. The standoff comes to center on a fort outside of the city of Charleston called Fort Sumter. The governor of South Carolina demanded the surrender of the fort to South Carolina and the United States Army officer inside said no. He couldn’t give a United States fort to a state that had left the Union because that would be treason. So Abraham Lincoln takes office and he immediately learns that here is this fort in the harbor outside of South Carolina and the soldiers have no food left. Lincoln decides that what he must do as a Commander in Chief is supply food to those soldiers. So he writes to the governor of South Carolina and he writes to Jefferson Davis who has now become the president of this new Confederates States of America. And he tells him, I’m sending a ship with food and I’m not sending arms. If you fire on us, we will fire back. But we’re just sending food and not arms.

Then Jefferson Davis and the governor of South Carolina have to decide what to do. Do they want the United States, who they now see as an enemy, sailing into Charleston harbor or not? And they decide not to take the chance. They fire on Fort Sumter before the food gets there. To Lincoln and to much of the Northern public, now we have a open rebellion. So Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers, soldiers, to put down the rebellion. Virginia and three other states—Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina—were hoping not to have to choose. But when Lincoln calls for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion, they have to decide. Are we going to fight with or against the Union or the Southern states? And Virginia decides to go with the Southern states. It’s a hard decision for many white Virginians. It feels links with the states that have left, but it also feels links with the Union. The other reason why this is a difficult decision for Virginia is because it is located so close to the national capitol. It was pretty clear to Virginians that a lot of the fighting was going to take place in Virginia. And they were right.

West Virginia is more tied to the North. There are very few slaves. Agriculture there is very diversified. There’s not a lot of tobacco grown for cash. It looks much more like a Northern economy than a Southern economy. The state of Virginia has decided to secede, to leave the Union, but we don’t want to. We actually see that as being a traitor to the United States. So these counties decide to secede from Virginia and they enter the United States in 1863 as the state of West Virginia.

The first thing that I think that I would do is ask students, what do they notice? What stands out to them. And I would use that as the starting point, to invest them in the song. How does the sound of the song make you feel? Does it make you feel energetic? Does it make you feel sleepy? Does the song seem to praise Brown? Does it seem to condemn him? And then I think I would look at particular verses. That knapsack verse, for example. And ask them, what’s a knapsack? And, what do you put in your knapsack? What would a soldier put in his knapsack? And use that verse as a way to talk about what being a soldier is like.

“John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back, John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back, John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back, His soul is marching on.”

I would move immediately to the next verse about “John Brown died that the slaves might be free” and ask them to think about why those two verses come right next to each other.

“John Brown died that the slave might be free, John Brown died that the slave might be free, John Brown died that the slave might be free, But His soul is marching on."

I would start at the big level, what do you notice? I would then go to, how does it sound? How does the sound make you feel? And then have them imagine that they are soldiers in an army on a march making up their own lyrics. Maybe some could be Union soldiers and some could be Confederate soldiers. And if they were to sing a song about John Brown as they were marching along, what kinds of words might they add? Which would do two things—one is emphasize the self-creating aspect of music in the 19th century, the participatory aspect. But also really get them thinking about what John Brown and what he stood for would mean and how that would change over time.

The first letter, first chronologically, was a letter written in October of 1862 by Jasper Barney, a private in an Illinois regiment. He fought for the Union Army, he was a farmer from Illinois and he is writing to his brother-in-law, another family member, about the state of the war and particularly about Emancipation.

The second letter is written the following month, November of 1862, but it is by a white Confederate soldier, prosperous farmer John White to his wife. And he is writing at a moment when militarily, the Confederacy is enjoying more success but Confederate civilians are living with the uncertainties of having a war fought in their own backyard. He's also writing about the Emancipation Proclamation and the fears that it has stirred up amongst Confederate civilians at home. His letter is a very personal letter too, in that he is quite forthcoming with his wife about how much he misses home and how torn he feels between his desire to be home and protect his family and the need to fight this war.

And then the third letter is written in February of 1864. It is by a black member of the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery, a black regiment. And he is writing from the city of New Orleans, which his regiment is occupying at the time to really articulate what he and many other black soldiers see as the stakes, as why this war matters for black Americans in particular.

Men in a regiment, or at least in a company, tended to enlist together. So letters that come from home will be read probably by more than one person, will probably be read out loud. A letter to home will often include a passage that says, "Brother A says to say, 'X, Y, Z'" With Civil War soldier's letters the vagaries of letter survival can skew our picture a little bit. The letters to home have a much greater survival rate than the letters from home to the front.

The letters from home don't survive because soldiers have nothing that they can do with them. Also, before battle soldiers are likely to destroy any personal letters that they have on them. Their fear is if personal letters are found on them that the enemy will somehow use that information.

The Union has the U.S. Postal Service; the Confederacy never really has a very efficient or working postal service. There's travel back and forth between home and the frontlines all the time, so often somebody from home or nearby is in camp and going home and you send letters that way and when that person comes they bring letters. There are also private express companies.

Jasper Barney's in the hospital when he writes the letter. He is trying to recover from a wound so the first part of the letter is about recovering from his wound and that actually in one sense is typical because almost every soldier's letter talks about his health to almost excessive degrees.

The letter is written in October of 1862, and in the fall of 1862 there's quite a lot of turbulence on the Northern home front and regarding the Union Army cause in general. The war militarily had gone fairly well for the Union in the early months of 1862 and then in the summer of 1862 the war started going poorly for the Union militarily and the North sort of woke up to the fact that this was going to be a much longer war than anybody had anticipated. So by the fall of 1862 the Northern home front and soldiers are still trying to cope with that realization.

One of those new measures that is taken to fight the war is the Emancipation Proclamation. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had been issued on September 22nd of 1862 and the Emancipation Proclamation really changed the whole aim of a war that had been begun to save the Union. Now it becomes a war also to end slavery. Now those two goals had never been completely separable but the official line had always been "This is a war to save the Union" and not to have really much of anything to do with slavery. Those changes really rocked much of the Civil War North, particularly the Northern home front.

You have quite a lot of dissent among white Northerners over the Emancipation Proclamation. Black Northerners, there is no dissent. They think this is exactly what has been needed since well before the war began. There are a number of issues at stake in the 1862 elections. There are economic issues, there are issues having to do with civil liberties, what actions can and cannot the United States government take during wartime and there's the war and of course there's the Emancipation Proclamation.

Meanwhile you have a number of new soldiers entering the ranks. So you have elections, tumult and dissent, and a host of new soldiers coming into the army, all at about the same time. And that's when this letter is written.

This letter is written by Barney who has actually been in the army for a while. So he is writing as an experienced soldier to his brother-in-law who has just joined. Barney, who would normally show a certain modicum of deference or respect for his more socially-elite and older brother-in-law thinks that this is too important an issue to stand on ceremony and so he tells him straight up, I think that you're wrong, I think that the Emancipation Proclamation is exactly what is needed to end this war. And what is more, you're going to think so too as soon as you have been in the war for any length of time.

Barney is fairly typical, he certainly wouldn't have called himself an abolitionist, he certainly would not have predicted that in less than a year he would be calling for the end of an institution that's older than the nation itself. It's quite a radical thing to talk about ending slavery in the 1860s. He's undergone what is a huge transformation in his thinking. As you can see from the letter to his brother in law, his family has not really kept up with this transition. So a gulf has really opened between many soldiers and their families at home.

He is on the Emancipation question even on the first paragraph, he says, "Now my lady love is more attentive for I got a letter from her yesterday. She is all right on the goose question." "All right on the goose" means how you stand on the slavery question, she agrees with him about Emancipation so he is pleased about that.

Then in the next paragraph he's addressing what he sees as his brother-in-law's mistaken views. "You say in your letter that you or your regiment is not in for freeing the Negroes. I am sorry to hear it. You wanted to know what I and my comrades thought of the Negro question. I think Old Abe's Proclamation is all right and there is very few old soldiers that is against it. It is my opinion that yourself and the greater part of your regiment will be in favor of it before you are in the service six months. I was of the same opinion of yourself when I first came into the service but I have learned better. You said you thought the thing would come to a finish by spring if the Negroes was left alone, but I think you will soon find out different. For it is my opinion that the war will never come to a close while the Negroes is left where they are to raise supplies for the rebel army. Even if we could suppress the rebellion and leave the main root where it was before, it wouldn't be long before they would try the same game as before. But if we take away the main root of evil and confiscate all their property they will have nothing to fight for hereafter."

First of all, it's the war that has changed his opinion. Second of all, it's going to change his brother-in-law's opinion too. His reasoning is actually quite pragmatic, what he's talking about is the recognition that without the institution of slavery there never would have been a war. So if we want the war to end and if we want not to fight it again we have to get rid of the cause. That passage encapsulates quite well a major shift in thinking that goes on. It's a pretty astute analysis on his part and on many soldiers' part that there's no way that the Confederacy could have conducted a four-year war without a slave labor force. The Confederate workforce is mobilized, is in the army.

"Old Abe gave them 90 days and that was long enough for them to come to terms and save their property and Negroes, but it seems like they wanted to go the whole hog or none. Now, I think it is perfectly right to take the hog and leave them none and then if they ain't satisfied, I am in for banishing every rebel and rebel sympathizer from the U.S. I am a whole soul Union man and believe in giving the rebels a lesson to be remembered in after generations. Then we will never be troubled with civil war again."

He's talking about the precise terms of the Emancipation Proclamation here. The Emancipation Proclamation issued on September 22nd is actually more, probably the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and what it says is that the slaves in the states that are still in rebellion against the Union as of January 1st, 1863, will be freed.

And so essentially it's an ultimatum delivered to states in rebellion and the reverse of it would say, therefore if you return to the Union before January 1st, 1863, your slaves won't be freed. And the Proclamation says that because it is operating in a context of a Constitution that protects slavery.

And so, the Emancipation Proclamation can only justify itself as a war measure. So what he is saying is, Lincoln gave the states 90 days to come back. He gives them a chance to retain slavery and if they won't take that chance, if their demands in terms of greater protection for slavery are more important to them than coming back in the Union and keeping slavery where it is then they made their own bed and let them lie in it.

By the time Barney writes this letter he has no qualms at all about confiscating the property of even non-combatants. As he sees it now the only thing that's going to end this war is to take a much harder line, to take away the root of the war.

And in the next paragraph he wants to assure his brother-in-law that 'I am not some wild-eyed abolitionist here, I am not a crazy reformer, this is in fact what most of us hardened commonsensical soldiers think.' He says, "Well, I think I gave you a very good sample of the opinions of myself and comrades."

I think the next paragraph is a good clue into the sort of limits of growing Emancipation sentiment among the Union Army, in other words he is all for ending slavery, but ending slavery is quite different in his view from increasing rights of former slaves or anything approaching racial equality.

You see that when he says, "P.S. I am not in favor of freeing the Negroes and leaving them to run free and mingle among us. Neither is such the intention of Old Abe, but we will send them off and colonize them. The government is already making preparations for the same and you may be assured it will be carried into effect."

So he doesn't know what should become of former slaves, but he certainly doesn't want them living among his own friends and family in the North. He refers to a passage in the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that does not mandate but suggests as a possible outcome for former slaves, 'maybe they'd be happier if we send them back to Africa or to some place in South America and they could start their own society.'

By the time of the final Proclamation all reference to colonization has been omitted. Slavery was Southern, but prejudice was nationwide. And so colonization was sort of a way of coping with the tension between the insistence that we really need to get rid of slavery and uncertainty about what do we do with real slaves?

The Confederate soldier is named John White. He is part of the army of Northern Virginia, which is the fabled army of Robert E. Lee and he is writing from Fredericksburg, VA, in late November of 1862. So he's essentially writing while Union forces are getting ready to try and take Fredericksburg. It's cold, it's miserable, it's wet, his letter may or may not make it outside of battle lines. He's writing to his wife, there are armies in her backyard. Moreover, White's wife lives in a part of the state where there are slaves and there is a terror that the war is going to inspire a slave insurrection. Those fears are present from the very beginning of the war but at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation they become even more acute.

There is more uncertainty and there is a lot more worry in his letter. Even though militarily the war's going a lot better for his side at this time than it is for Barney's side. The Confederacy is very centralized, much more centralized than the Union and the Confederate Government nationalizes the economy to a much greater degree than the Union could even dream of doing.

And there's major disagreement about whether the Confederate State has any authority to do this. The reason why that disagreement doesn't spill over into a massive rush to rejoin the Union is all that stuff stinks, but it's not as bad as the Union. And I think that's the calculus that goes on in the minds of most Confederate soldiers. It's not liking the Union more than liking or feeling any attachment to the Confederacy that keeps the Confederate army in the ranks. Civilians are ready to throw in the towel a lot earlier than soldiers are.

He starts off by talking about a local neighbor's and he explains that's how he got some letters from his wife and is able to send some letters to her. But then, he hasn't even gone through the state of his health or the health of all their children or their friends at home before he gets to his concerns about the possibility of slave insurrection.

So his two main concerns, right from the outset are one, we can't be in touch with each other as much as I would like us to be and two, you're worried and I'm worried about slave uprising.

He talks about the battle that he calls Sharpsburg and Union soldiers would call Antietam. The battle of Antietam took place on September 17th of 1862, right before the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Confederacy stages a number of invasions of Union soil in the fall of 1862. Robert E. Lee's army marches into Maryland and the Union Army meets the Confederate Army at Sharpsburg, the name of the town in Maryland, along a creek called Antietam Creek.

The Confederates tend to name battles after the town nearest where a battle is fought while the Union tends to name battles after natural features, most often bodies of water. Militarily that battle was a draw, but it counts as enough of a Union victory because the Confederates were trying to invade the North. Their invasion was stopped at Antietam. And so the Confederates retreat back into the Confederacy.

Confederates do not see this as a devastating defeat by any means, but the Union has been so desperate for a victory because Lincoln has been trying to find a way to issue the Emancipation Proclamation since the summer of 1862. But he did not want to do it at a time when the Union Army appeared to be failing because then it would just look like a desperate move and that's not how he wanted it to look.

As you can see from White's description of the battle, he saw it as a terrible battle. But he doesn't really see it as a major Confederate defeat.

"Oh Matt, it almost makes me shudder to think of it. How will the 17th of September live in the memory of the 32nd Virginia Regiment and its friends? Oh, it was an awful day. Imagine my feelings, if you can, when I saw my comrades and friends falling all around me from the death-dealing shot and shell of the enemy and knew not how soon it would be my fate. Thanks be to a kind providence, I came out unhurt but narrowly escaped. A ball passed through my blanket between my body and right arm. I shot my gun until I could hardly get a cartridge down her. Finally, they gave way and ran, hotly pursued by our brigade, the 32nd leading the charge until pursuit was dangerous. They were said to be three to our one."

He's writing this more than a month later, but it's still a pretty fresh impression of his experience of battle. It's such an overwhelming experience to be in a Civil War battle. The impressions are roaring noise, and smoke, and a horrific smell. And those are hard sensations to really write precise words about. And so there are a series of stock phrases that soldiers tend to fall back on. There's nothing in her experience that he could compare it to. It doesn't so much make his description hollow as highlight the enormity of the experience, because he's clearly an eloquent man, and yet that's too overpowering for him.

But it's really important to him for two reasons, one, the enormity of the battle itself but two, it becomes the occasion for this Emancipation Proclamation. White and his wife aren't shocked by the Emancipation Proclamation so much, they sort of have expected it, they thought since the beginning that the Union was out to destroy slavery and all this talk of Union is really just a red herring. But the Emancipation Proclamation makes those fears more real for them. Moreover, they worry that slaves are going to hear about this Emancipation Proclamation and will become emboldened and as a result will start holding uprisings and possibly go on killing sprees.

"Dear Matt, I must tell you I am in a hard place and know not what to do. When I think of my sufferings, both in mind and body which are indescribable and how much my services are needed home, I am tempted to try and get there. I see no probability of getting there if I remain in the service. The war is likely to last for years yet and I cannot reasonably expect to survive it. Besides this, you are threatened with an insurrection," which is again a reference to the slave uprising that they fear is going to happen because of the Emancipation Proclamation, "and how better can I die than defending my family and fireside. To do this, I came in the war and now that you are threated, I consider it my Christian duty to come to your rescue and protection. Dear Matt, you know that I love my country but I love my family better."

And I think in that passage he captures the dilemma that's going to be a dilemma for a great number of Confederate soldiers. And the dilemma is this; most Confederate soldiers don't own slaves. Two thirds of white families in the Confederacy are not slave owners. But they're not stupid, they know full well that this war was begun to protect the institution of slavery and they're not embarrassed about that. In fact, they agree that it was important and the reason why is not necessarily that they own slaves, they live in a place where 40 percent of the population is black. Parts of the Confederacy, the majority is black slaves. And they honestly believe that the two races cannot live together harmoniously without the institution of slavery.

"Dear Matt, you know that I love my country but I love my family better." Now that sounds to me like a very unguarded moment. That's not the sort of sentence you would want anyone you didn't really trust to see. Particularly in wartime when there were questions of loyalty, when there were questions of patriotism, when your own honor rests in part on your reputation for fearlessly defending your country. There's no censorship, there's no official mechanism by which superior officers are going to read his mail. But you don't know that it's not going to go amiss, that it's not going to get dropped somewhere and have someone pick it up. So that he took that risk really underscores the sincerity of that line for me.

The problem is, that if the heart of the motivation is to protect what one sees as the best interests, the health and the safety of one's family. And then the war to protect one's family starts threatening one's family, what do you do? Does he best protect his family by staying in the army and trying to secure an independent Confederacy where slavery will be protected forever or does he best help his family and protect his family by going home so that if there is an insurrection he's there to take care of them? And that tension will haunt him and will haunt most Confederate soldiers really for the rest of the war and is at the heart of the war experience for a very great many Confederate soldiers.

The third letter is written by a black Union soldier to the editor of the most prominent African American newspaper during the Civil War, the Weekly Anglo-African and black soldiers throughout their term of the service in the Union Armies do this. They write to Northern newspapers, particularly black newspapers, about their soldiering experience. The majority of black Union soldiers were former slaves who could not read and write and so we don't have letters from them. Who we have letters from are the minority, who are Northern free blacks, who could read and write before the war. They sort of see themselves as having obligations, not just to their family, representing the war experience to their family, but to a broader, at least black, public.

He is writing from New Orleans, LA, in February of 1864. This soldier is a member of the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery. New Orleans has been under Union control since May of 1862 so he is really an occupation force.

He is also fighting two battles at once because initially black Northerners who tried to join the Union Army were refused. Black soldiers were not accepted into the Union ranks until 1862 and they didn't join in big numbers until 1863.

Once they're in the ranks, they're paid less. At first there are no black officers and at first they are barred from combat duty. So he is fighting to save the Union and to redefine it, to redefine it as a place where he and people like him are seen as citizens, are seen as invested with the same rights and promises as white Americans are. And you see evidence, I think, of both battles in this letter. The immediate audience for the Anglo-African is Northern blacks. However, all newspapers in the 19th century have a habit of picking up letters, columns, articles from one paper and running it in their own pages. There is always the chance that this could run in a white newspaper too.

So he always has a definite audience and a potential audience in mind.

"I will give a brief account of the battalion to which I am now attached, and to which I hope to belong until this cruel war is ended, and the nation enjoys once more the blessings of peace." Well there he's talking about Union versus the Confederacy but then the next passage after that he's onto the battle for respect for citizenship, for equality within the Union itself.

"The Battalion is composed of as good material and contains as brave hearts as any equal number of men that ever shouldered a musket in this war." We are just as good, we are just as brave as any other soldiers, including the white ones, is what he's saying there. "These men have left their own dear homes, their wives and children, of their own free will: why, then, should they not fight?" We have made the decision to fight in this war, just as white men have, so if one of the sort of hallmarks of fitness for citizenship is the ability to reason, to excerpt one's own free will, look, we have done that.

"Yes they will," fight, "as they know full well that this is the golden opportunity that they have given them to establish their manhood, and capability as soldiers before the world."

Manhood shows up all the time in black soldier's letters and it can have one of two meanings. Sometimes it means recognition of the full humanity of all black Americans. In this one, though, he clearly means the adult male identity of black men because one characteristic of the adult man in 19th-century American culture is the ability to take care of a family, the ability to support a wife and children. And its men who are entitled to full political rights and he has twice told his readers that 'we have characteristics of manhood. One is in the moral agency, that we of our own free will decided to do something and two is, we have wives and children, we support families. We therefore have the attributes of adult males and are entitled to the rights of adult males.' So he means manhood in that explicitly gendered way.

The next and final paragraph is a very conventional one. This is the sort of thing that shows up in a number of public letters. "If it be my lot to fall on the battle-field, I shall be content to die far from home and friends, if my ears are saluted by the shout of my comrades, 'The battle is over; the stars and stripes wave triumphantly, and the slave is free!' This is a letter that is not just telling loved ones how he feels but is really also fighting this very public campaign for respect for black soldiers and for African Americans in general.

He signs it with the name Macy and this is another challenge of working with black soldiers' letters. They take pseudonyms all the time. I don't know who this soldier is. That could have been a nickname, it could have been his first name, and he in fact does give his company and his regiment. But he doesn't sign his full name and so positive identification is a lot harder with black soldiers than with white soldiers.

I think juxtaposition works pretty well with letters. The Union and Confederate and the white and the black letters really do sound different. Students I think generally like reading letters too. They feel like real people that seems interesting to them. But having them read the letters against each other, just asking them what jumps out to you, what are they talking about, what strikes you, what surprises you, initial reactions.

With these particular letters it'll work pretty well. If what you want them to talk about is the Emancipation Proclamation it's all over those first two letters. Another strategy, a sort of teaching assignment might be to imagine the letter in response. You could talk about home front and battlefield using these letters because you could ask students to imagine how might Jasper Barney's brother-in-law have responded to this letter. Asking them to imagine responses I think also really makes them really engaged with the questions and the issues that are raised by the letters.

There's not a lot of talk about politics in the Union letter and there's often politics in Union letters. There's not overt criticism of Jefferson Davis or some aspect of the Confederacy in the Confederate letter which there often is in Confederate letters. At the time black soldiers are fighting for equal pay and you'd expect that to show up and it doesn't. In February of 1864 that's a hot issue and it not showing up is a little surprising. That is the drawback to using one letter. Of the letters that went amiss from John White, 12 of them might have talked about something that you would expect, but this letter doesn't. So, it's hard sometimes to resist the temptation to think we know everything about him from this one letter. We don't.