The famed photographer Ansel Adams was a friend of the director who ran the Manzanar camp, one of 10 internment camps. Ansel Adams asked if he could come visit the camp to shoot some photos. At the time the War Relocation Authority, the federal government agency that was in charge of the camps, actually had an extensive project to document what life was like.

But Ansel Adams just wanted to take his own photos, so he came out to Manzanar—which was an isolated place of stark beauty at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas—and shot a series of beautiful black and white photos. These photos captured not just the majesty of the natural landscape, but the effort of Japanese Americans to recreate a sense of community, some semblance of normal life with schools, and newspapers, a bank and post office, and so on. To try to bring the sense for their families, for their children, that life would go on even behind barbed wire, under gun towers, and the watchful eye of soldiers.

Ansel Adams—because he was such a great photographer—was able to document some aspects of the internment that the government didn't want to have shown. They didn't want the barbed wire, and the guard towers, and the armed soldiers to be depicted, so they told Adams that he couldn't photograph those subjects directly. So what did he do? Well, he was very clever. He captured them in the background, in shadows. In some of the photos when you look you can see just faintly that he's taking a photo of something, but in front of the photo you can see barbed wire, or on the ground you can see the shadow of barbed wire. Some of the photos even show the blurry outline of a soldier's shadow. Then for the gun towers, because he wasn't allowed to take photographs of them, he climbed on top of them and shot photographs looking down. That allows the viewer to infer that there must be some sort of very tall structure that you could climb up on top of to shoot the photos.

What Adams wanted to do was show everything about the camps, both the sense that the camps were a place of confinement, loss of liberty, dignity, equality; yet coupled to that the sense that here were people struggling under the circumstances to do the best that they could.

The Manzanar camp [was] hastily built with the quality of army barracks. These were just wood plans and tar-paper ceilings and the wind, fierce wind of the desert winters, would blow through the cracks in these buildings and this was chilling. Dust storms would arise in the summer and the temperature would climb well into the 100s. This was a place of hardship, a place where the photographs—because Adams had such artistry—it gives you a sense of beauty, but if you look closely at it you can also understand what it must have been like to be confined. To have just a 20-by-20 room for an entire family, sometimes two families packed in there together, with just a stove for heat with nothing that would help alleviate the brutal summers. A sense of what it was like to have just life inside a confined space. Inside these barracks where people suffered from tremendous doubt, they didn't know what would happen. All of their possessions had been taken away from them, their bank accounts frozen, they had been put on trains and buses with the windows blacked out so people wouldn't know who was being led away.

They weren't told what would happen to them as the war went on for months and then eventually years. Even though it became apparent that the United States would likely—ultimately—prevail, for these individuals, about 125,000 of them—two thirds of them native-born citizens of this country—almost all of them of Japanese descent. Would they be welcomed back into the hometowns from whence they had come? Because there had been such hostility, even before the war, people who wanted to drive them out. Who said openly—in a way that would surprise us today—"California was for white men, for Christians only." Even though of course many of the Japanese Americans were very much assimilated—they loved baseball, they loved Hollywood movies, and they were indeed Christians—there were many who wanted to exclude them. That's why there were alien land laws that forbade the first generation (those who had come) from owning land. That's why there were naturalization laws that said if you were not a free, white person you could never become a citizen, an equal, a real member of this nation. That's why there were laws about interracial marriage so that people who were of Japanese descent couldn't marry people who were white. There were numerous other legal restrictions on their ability to obtain licenses, to fish or to practice any type of profession, all up and down the west coast.

So there was tremendous uncertainty. Even though they tried as best as they could to establish a sense of community and normal life, they wondered what beyond the barbed wire was left for them. If the neighbors, the people whom they had called friends before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would take them back, would accept them as equals.

This photograph shows the isolation of the camp. When the government said they would build internment camps, many politicians who wanted to be rid of Japanese Americans objected, and said they didn't want the camps located where they were. So the camps were all sited in desolate areas, places where there really weren't very many people—in the desert, in swamps, places where people didn't want to live.

Manzanar was one example. You can see it looks beautiful with the mountains in the background, but that beauty comes with a harshness, a tough physical environment. The closest towns to Manzanar, Bishop and Lone Pine, were dwarfed by Manzanar. When Manzanar opened up it was much larger than any of the little tiny towns nearby. That was true of many of the camps because the effort was made to locate Japanese Americans as far away as possible. When the camps opened up they transformed the local economy, for once people were able to find jobs by working in the camps—if they weren't of Japanese background.

When you look at this photo, you also see barracks, the housing that was built. This was built by the Army in some instances; sometimes by volunteers, people who were themselves Japanese Americans—usually men—who went before the families came and helped to build these structures that you see with thin wood walls and tar-paper roofs. These structures where families would be all cramped together, where they would be issued numbers and identified in that way, and then they would have a specific block that they would live on. Everything was very orderly, because this was originally run by the Army, it was a military effort that was eventually transferred to a civilian government agency. Never before had the U.S. government tried to confine this many people on a mass basis because of race and ethnicity. When you look at the orderly rows here you can get a sense of the confinement, a sense that this was a project undertaken by the government, the sort of thing where people were made to live there. As beautiful as the background is, this isn't the sort of place that anyone would volunteer to move, losing everything that they had. These photos capture for us a sense of the environment on the one hand, and the loss of liberty on the other hand.

This photograph is a wonderful, poignant photograph that captures for us how assimilated Japanese Americans were. These were folks who had embraced baseball and apple pie. Before Pearl Harbor there was an all-Nisei league in Southern California; Nisei is the Japanese term for "second generation." These were boys whose mothers sewed baseball uniforms for them out of burlap sacks or whatever they could find because they were of modest means. Or in some instances, if they were lucky, maybe a local hardware store or Baptist church would sponsor them and their uniforms might be a little fancier. They embraced baseball—a great American game—that really captures the spirit of what this nation is about with its teamwork, with its sense of celebrating, and being outdoors. With people of all backgrounds, baseball was the sport that brought people together. They would listen to broadcast on the radio, on the old Philco, the family might gather around and listen to a ballgame.

Well, this photograph shows Japanese Americans in the camps enjoying baseball. Not only did they gather in large crowds to watch the youngsters play, but in some instances they were even allowed to travel from camp to camp. Sometimes the baseball diamond would be built out away from the camp past the barbed wire and armed guards. You might wonder, "Why, if people were being locked up, would you let them out in that way?" Well, in part it shows the amount of trust. Japanese Americans were so assimilated that they reported to the camps as a group without protest; 125,000 people—two thirds of them citizens of this nation—loyal to this nation. There was not a single instance before the camps, during, or after of espionage, sabotage, treason, or any sort of conduct that would cause anyone to think—other than race and ethnicity—that this was a group that would ever present any risks or problems.

So once they were in the camps, the folks who ran the camps realized, well, it's perfectly safe to let Japanese Americans travel from camp to camp to play baseball, that would help maintain order. Plus, if you thought about it, if anyone tried to escape, where would they go? These camps were built in the desert or in swamps; places where there really weren't cities nearby, there were scarcely even towns. So if a lone Japanese American outfielder suddenly decided he'd had enough, and took off, he'd have to walk for days before he reached anything at all, and even then he would be quickly spotted as obviously different.

So it was that baseball thrived inside the internment camps. This photograph captures in a wonderful way how—even though they had been locked up by their own government, even though they'd lost liberty, equality, and dignity—Japanese Americans still embraced the great American pastime. Still came out to cheer in large numbers they watched, as they tried to enjoy what they could of the life they recreated.

The internment of Japanese Americans is so well documented—it's wonderful. You can go back and look at primary sources that are just text that are the laws themselves, that are the cases—the Supreme Court did consider, not one or two or three, but four major cases that remain important precedent to this day. Those are a part of the legal background to this story.

But in addition, there's been a wonderful effort to collect oral histories; through the Densho Project and others, much of which is available online. You can hear from folks who are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, even older who will recall their memories from the time when they were—in some instances just children—but in other instances teenagers and already grown up; as they recount the stories of life before Pearl Harbor, during the camps, and of how after the war was over and the normalcy of the 1950s was upon us, how they attempted to put together the pieces. This gives you a sense—first hand from the people who were there—what it was like.

You can also take a look at the many artifacts that have been preserved. There are art exhibits now of what people made. Arts and crafts projects where they took cast-off bits of wood, where they took debris, and carefully, painstakingly carved small toys and jewelry and other objects that they gave to family and friends within the camp.

Because these camps involved so many people—they involved children, the elderly, entire families—this was the relocation and confinement of an entire community. It was very different and it gave people an opportunity, even as they were behind the barbed wire, and under the gun towers and the watchful eye of soldiers, to try to put together life. A different life, to be sure, but to put together a life that had a sense of community and belonging. There are many objects now that testament to what that life was like.

There also are objects that have been saved that were part of the internment itself. Washboards, for example, that women used when they were doing laundry. When they didn't have washing machines or dryers, they had a single day of the week dedicated to laundry, where all the women would go out and in a communal manner do the laundry; and that's painstaking, backbreaking work that most of us don't know today. But they had washboards, old-fashioned washboards, and steel tubs that they had to use. There are museum exhibits where you can see these objects, where they’ve been preserved, where they actually have tried to recreate the barracks or one of the rooms that they had.

All of this helps to give people a sense of what it was really like. These primary sources are so rich in their detail and in what they convey—the meaning that is packed in there, that even the best secondary source—the best nonfiction books that have been written, or fiction even, about the internment camps—those can't come close to capturing for us what a primary source can show us, what it can teach us. Even so, we need to have the background and context. When you're just looking at an object, at a washboard or basin, well, you might not even know what that is. So it has to be explained, it has to be situated within the sense of life as it was lived then.

That's why it's important for historians to do the work that they do. So the secondary sources compliment the primary sources. They help us by giving us the interpretive framework. Because if all we're doing is just looking at objects, and we don't understand what those objects were for, how they fit in to the day-to-day lives of the people who owned and used them, then we've really missed out on an important part of the story.

When I've taught the internment, what I've done is I've asked students to imagine. With high school students it's perfect, because they're just the age that so many who went to the camps were. High school students. And when I ask them to imagine—there's a specific decision that young men had to make—and to a lesser extent young women too. That decision came when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president, decided that he would reinstitute the military draft.

Now there were many Japanese Americans serving in the United States Armed Forces when Pearl Harbor took place. Almost all of them were immediately discharged because they were regarded—even if they were native born—as enemy aliens, and they were all reclassified. Not only that, anyone who was a young man who was of draft-eligible age who otherwise would have been put in the Army, they too were kept out. But after it became apparent that the camps—well, it was creating a public relations problem, FDR decided—especially given how loyal the Japanese Americans had already proved themselves, he decided that he would restart the draft. He would say if you’re Japanese American and you're of the age that you would normally go into the Army or the Navy, that we will continue to require you to do that. He actually made a statement about how loyalty is a matter of the heart, not of race.

So when I teach this, what I do is I ask young men and women, "If you were 17 or 18, and you knew that you would be drafted, what would you do? Would you on the one hand serve voluntarily—in a segregated unit?” Because remember back then the U.S. Army had specific units based on race; there were African American units and white units and it was clear which units were the more favored. The African American units had white officers, and the same thing was done for this group. There were Japanese American units—the 42nd and the 100th. Over time, by the way, they became the most highly decorated U.S. military units in history. So these soldiers prove, through the most profound sacrifice you could make of life and limb, that they indeed were loyal to this nation.

What I do is I ask the students—who are almost exactly the same age as the real people who faced this choice then—what would you do? Would you go off to war? Would you fight Hitler? Would you risk the possibility that you would be killed wearing the uniform of a soldier who looked just like those who were guarding your family, your parents, your cousins, everyone that you had known? Would you fight for a flag that did not fly for you?

Or, would you be a draft resister. Would you answer the loyalty questions that were put to you? Because everyone in the camp was asked to answer an enormous series of questions about whether you were loyal to the United States, whether you liked Japanese culture, whether you had promised to fight for the United States if asked to do so, and so on. Would you answer those questions no and no, there were two specific questions that were about loyalty, and face the possibility that you would be prosecuted. In ever instance, those who had lost were sent to the federal penitentiary, where they served with murderers and bank robbers at places like Leavenworth, and they emerged with criminal records. Which choice would you make?

Now as it happens, overwhelmingly Japanese Americans faced with this choice chose to respond by fighting—they volunteered, they served, they became decorated military heroes. And not just the men, but women too, they served in the WACs and the WAVES. Outside each camp, the Japanese American Citizens League erected an honor roll—a big board—where they had on pieces of wood the names of everyone who was in the U.S. Armed Forces. They put it up on this honor roll so that they could see who was defending their nation, meaning of course the United States.

That was the choice almost everyone made. But a handful became draft resisters as well. The decisions that the young men made then, those were life-changing decisions. Those were decisions that defined not just who they would be as young men, but who they would be for the course of their lives. All the way until the time that the United States, in 1988, decided to apologize for all of this. They passed a law, the Civil Liberties Act, that paid reparations to those in the camps. The young men—sometimes would be cousins, maybe even brothers, who had made very different choices—some of them had stopped speaking with each other; because the one went off to fight, and the other became a draft resister. This reflected such different—radically different philosophies of how they viewed themselves, how they viewed their country, how they viewed rights and responsibilities. That break was just too much.

I’ve always found that that’s a good way for people to think about this. To ask, what would it be like if I were there? If I were of Japanese descent? If I loved baseball and spoke English and was assimilated in every way and together with my family was rounded up and locked away. If I lost everything—would I, nonetheless, continue to embrace my nation, or would I become embittered? That framing allows us to think through all of these issues the way that the best history is done. By asking what would it be like for us now, today, under very different circumstances—material and in every way with the changes of technology. But, we’re still human. How would we—if we were part of the community then that faced these challenges, how would we have responded?

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.