The documents I want to look at today are two blues songs, both the music and the words. My interest in blues is really part of my interest, an interest I began to have about 35 years ago, in how do you give voice, restore voice, to those people who have been rendered voiceless because of the kinds of, well, both because of the kinds of sources we use, but I suppose more importantly, because of the kinds of perspectives historians brought to their study. The perspectives they brought were that the significant actors, both in terms of class and race, geographical location, occupation, were the people who left certain kinds, not all kinds, but certain kinds of written sources behind. And one of the most ubiquitous forms of music after slavery—it has roots in slavery, but it really doesn't emerge until the turn of the last century—and that is blues. Blues become one of the most common forms of black music, especially in the North, but in the South as well. They're everywhere. By the early 1900s blues are everywhere. So I began to look at blues.

"Worry Blues" by Jesse Lockett (1939)
Some people say that the worry blues ain't bad,

Well if some people say that the worry blues ain't bad;

But it's the worst old feelin' that I most ever had.
Everything that I do seem like I do it wrong,
Everything that I do seem like I do it wrong,

Sometimes I regret that I was ever born.

Well it's blues and trouble seem to be my best friend,
Oh it's blues and trouble seem to be my best friend.


It's a song sung by one person and a guitar. It's a song that, the structure of which are three line stanzas. It has what we now call an AAB pattern. That is the first line is repeated with a slight variation, Sometimes with no variation, sometimes with a large variation. This one very slight variation. So the first line then the second line is a repeat of the first line with a slight variation, then the third line is culmination—a resolution, a supplement to the first line that's repeated twice. It's a soliloquy, that is it’s about the person—it’s all about the person who's singing. This song and many other songs, "Some people say the worried blues ain't bad, but its the worst old feeling, I most ever had."

It has a formula and therefore if you listen for a while it's familiar and because it’s familiar you can make certain judgments about how well the person operates within the formula. These are things that occurred to me just by looking at this. You wouldn't have to read anything about this—just by studying the structure and the sound.

The message is life is hard. Life is difficult for me, for "I." Life is hard: "My woman left me. I have no money. The soles of my shoes are thin. I can feel a dime right through them. I haven't got enough food, I'm going to catch a train." There's also humor in them. There doesn't happen to be in these two, that I can see, but you know, "I'm going to lay my head right down the railroad track, when I hear the two-o-nine I'm gonna take my head right back." You know, uh, that's—that's, you know, they fool around. They make jokes. There is humor in these things as well. But there is a lot of trouble. So, you without knowing anything else, you—I want to just stress that—you can learn a lot by just listening carefully, reading carefully, these songs, a lot. And I encourage that because I don't want to make, people say—I don't want people to think that if they don't come as scholars they're not going to be able to understand this music. Yes, they can understand a lot of it. To look carefully at what's happening, to listen to the voice—listen, I think the most important thing that students and scholars can do, both professional and lay, is to listen to the voices.

Listening to other blues you can really tell that they're not sitting in a dark room making all of this up completely by themselves, but they've heard other blues, they've sung other blues, there is a reservoir—a cultural reservoir—of lines they can use to depict their own feelings.

"Two White Horses Standin' in Line" by Smith Cason (1939)
Now two white horses standin' in line,
Now two white horses standin',
Now two white horses standin',

Goin' take me to my buryin' ground.
Did you ever hear that coffin sound?
Did you ever hear that coffin?
Did you ever hear that coffin?
You know now that poor boy is in the ground.
Please dig my grave with a silver spoon,
Please dig my grave with a silver,
Please dig my grave with a,
You can let me down with a golden chain.

It's one kind favor I ask of you,
It's one kind favor I ask of you,
It's one kind favor I ask of you,

Be sure my grave be kept clean.

Did you ever hear the church bell tone?
Did you ever hear the church bell?
Did you ever hear the church bell?

You know now the poor boy's dead an' gone.

Now two white horses standin' in line;
Now two white horses standin',
Now two white horses standin',

Oh, take me to my buryin' ground.
Did you ever hear that coffin sound?
Did you ever hear that coffin?
Did you ever hear that?
You know now the poor boy's in the ground.

Well, right off the bat you know you're listening to the blues. It's got a lot of the same structure as the other one—again, you got that most common form of blues, that is, a three line stanza with an AAB pattern: A line, repeated, and then a third line. There are ABB patterns, there are BAA patterns, there are different kinds of things. But the most common form of blues is AAB, and this has it. Once again it's centered around the singer—it’s a lamentation, its about hard times. This guy's about to die, or at least symbolically, metaphorically, he's about to die and he's worried about his grave being cleaned. And he's talking about the church, and horses burying him. You might say that burials are important. If you knew nothing else, you might conclude that burials are an important thing. And you might also conclude that these people are singing out of a certain negative frame of reference. That is, life is hard for them and they're singing. So there are many similarities. It stands right out however that they're not identical musically. You don't have to know a lot about music to hear that. But this guy is using a guitar in a very epiphanal way. It's call and response—very overtly. He's talking to the guitar. He's sometimes letting the guitar finish his sentences for him. He's having a discussion with the guitar and the guitar is taking on a very vocal, human voice. The guitar is speaking. You hear falsetto on the guitar, you can just listen to this without much background and here are these two people having a conversation. So you could say if you know anything about music, that epiphany, that is call and response, is one of the important elements. It is one of the most important elements of slave music. It's continued here.

All kinds of thing are being done musically, and I'm not a musician, but all kinds of things are being done musically that you don't necessarily hear in typical American music. Slides, slurs, falsetto, polyrhythms, where you keep more than one rhythm going at a time—he does that with his guitar and his voice. And he sometimes doesn't finish lines and lets you imagine the finish because he's established a pattern by now and if you come from this culture you know the finish. And he doesn't need to sing it.

So there's a musical diversity. One type of blues does not set the parameters for all types of blues, and you can tell that without knowing very much. Just by listening to these songs. They're both blues, they're both blues sung by nonprofessional singers in prisons. We should say that: these were both recorded in prisons by guys who did not earn their livings singing blues. So, that's another thing. If you know that then you can say, well, maybe you've heard BB King, but these guys ain't BB King. Or they are not BB King. And they nevertheless do a pretty good job. So you might conclude without knowing anything else, that this is community music.

This is pretty definitely the music of freedom, because there is nothing like this in slave music. First of all, all slave music is really antiphonal in a human sense, that is call and response, there is no solo in slave music. There is none, zilch, nada—no solo in slave music. I read these and I said, well, it's acculturation. What freedmen, freed men and women, had done is they had acculturated into the individual consciousness, of post-Emancipation European culture. The individual is in the center of the universe. The individual speaks. The individual assumes that you're interested in the individual's troubles, worries, woes, and they dominate this music. So that's good if you're a scholar trying to write a book because that's a point of change. Slaves have acculturated. They now have mobility. They now have literacy. They hear more different kinds of music. They can see more different kinds of music. They have a variety of different situations. Life is more expansive for them. We always focus on the difficulties blacks have, but they also have great opportunities compared to slavery. And they move around and they're all over the country, and they get different kinds of jobs, and they can even go to school. And they begin, the blues tells us, since its the most ubiquitous African American music we know in this period, the blues tells us, that they begin to take on the kind of consciousness that is typical of the society, the larger society in which they were living, and to which they were not acculturated in slavery, but to which they seem to be becoming acculturated now.

So there's another half to the story if you know what European American music sounded like in the 19th century. And the other half of the story, if you know what African music sounded like, the other half of the story is that at a time when slaves were—they're not slaves anymore—when African Americans were open to a larger variety of cultural materials than ever before, at a time when they could have lost their music, or diluted it, or just contributed to a larger stream of music. They wouldn't have lost it, but they would have contributed to Euro-American music, then seen it meld—pick up the melding and go their way, with this new consciousness. They didn't. Even as they're stepping into the culture with the consciousness—this consciousness of the "I," the individual, the importance of "me," they are stepping back and reaffirming African music, or African American music. This music is not Euro-American. It's the kind of music that changes Euro-American music forever—in the boundaries of the United States and in all of South America as well, in Mexico and the Caribbean.

And if you really want to know what it tells you about the time period you've got to learn something about the time period. And maybe these blues are, uh, were written in a period of depression, in fact they were. 1939 was a period of deep depression. You would hear this in the '30s everywhere. And uh, So you might be right if you knew nothing about the '30s, you could—you could say two things and they'd both be right: one is that times were bad and the other is that blacks were in bad shape. And they were both right. They were always in bad shape-that is, blacks more than other Americans—were in lower socioeconomic levels—and they were particularly hard hit by the '30s. And there's a lot of black music by people who were nowhere near prisons. Blacks sing an enormous amount in the '30s, for instance, about the New Deal. There's a huge, well huge is too strong, there's a significant number of blues about the New Deal, about Roosevelt, about the WPA, about the AAA. They sing about, you know the alphabet soup of institutions, because they benefit from them, or they want to benefit from them. So you can learn a lot of history from the blues without knowing any background. And then if you read about the period, that period, you know, you'll understand more. You may not know what the WPA Works Projects Administrations is, but you'll read a book on the New Deal, and you will learn and you will understand that blues a little better. Some of the blues for instance say, "I won't go." "I won't go," and they even talk about being betrayed by institutions, "I was in an orphanage, and I'm going to die in a poor man's home." And so they talk about the way institutions have betrayed them. And how they don't trust them and then they say, "I ain't going down there." You get that too. And you can figure that out without a lot of work. Read some books on the period.

Documents only will tell you as much as a document will tell you. For instance, when I wrote about black slavery, if I had just gone in there and done a study of spirituals, just spirituals—you could write a great book about that. And that's all I looked at. And then I generalized about black culture from the spirituals, I would have been making a very big mistake, because blacks were more than their spirituals. They used their spirituals for certain things. They said certain things through their spirituals, but if you want to hear the whole story about what blacks in slavery were saying you have to look at their folktales and their work songs and the like. I'm not sure of America—if you just studied television today—if you wanted to figure out America today, and just studied television, and didn't look at other aspects of American society—you'd get a skewed picture of American society—a very skewed picture. So we should read these documents and listen to the voices, but by themselves they're not going to be enough to tell you about the larger picture. You need documents from all the sources—we should always remember that.

These are political cartoons, which typically do appear on the editorial page and are a comment on the major political events of the day. The first cartoon from May of 1954 entitled "Now What," was drawn and published in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision.

Typically, the editorial cartoonists will reflect the editorial position of the newspaper. Certainly in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in the 1950s, the cartoonists would’ve more or less reflected the editorial position of the newspaper. By the time you get to the ’50s, you cannot avoid talking about massive resistance, you can’t avoid commenting on the Brown decision, you can’t avoid commenting on the imminent closing of the public schools. These are single images that convey a quite bit of information. Once you really begin to look deeply at this, you start to understand and to see where Virginia has gone in the four years from the Brown decision.

Virginius Dabney was the editor of the Times-Dispatch from the ’30s until late 1960s. And he recognized that massive resistance itself was not going to lead to anything productive, but the publisher of the paper, the Bryan family, were firm supporters of massive resistance, and so the bargain that essentially was worked out is that Dabney just didn’t say much about massive resistance. He certainly didn’t editorialize against it.

This is actually, I think, quite typical of the elites in Virginia, He was certainly amongst those, but Virginius Dabney once famously described massive resistance as an aberration from Virginia’s heritage of sound leadership and forward-looking thought. So, he was able to sort of dismiss this four- or five-year period as a blip on an otherwise excellent record when, in fact in many, many ways, massive resistance is the logical culmination of a particular type of race relations that people like Virginius Dabney did support.

Dabney is a complicated figure in this in that he was somebody who always editorialized for the better treatment of African Americans in Virginia. But within this paternalistic vein that had developed in Virginia; at one point in time he was seen as a liberal in the '30s because he was advocating better treatment of blacks and anti-lynching. By the '40s he’s more moderate, by the late '50s and '60s he’s actually seen as quite conservative.

Richmond had two papers. There was the Times-Dispatch which was the morning paper and then the News Leader which is the afternoon paper. The editor of the News Leader was James Kilpatrick who was one of the real leaders of massive resistance in many ways. In Norfolk, you have the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, the other major paper in the state and it was the only one of the white papers that opposed massive resistance. Not that they embraced and desired integration, but that they recognized that the Supreme Court was the law of the land, that the Justice[s] had spoken and it was a responsibility to adhere to those decisions.

The Norfolk Journal & Guide and the Richmond Afro-American were black papers of the time. They were weeklies, and they had a relatively small readership. I think that most African Americans felt they had the Supreme Court ruling on their side and that ultimately that would have to prevail, but getting there wasn’t easy. Richmond was the capital, the power center, and so the Richmond paper certainly was the most important in the state and then the Norfolk paper after that in terms of overall readership.

The 13th Amendment simply abolished slavery towards the end of the Civil War. The 14th Amendment said that no citizen of the United States can be denied the equal protection of the laws. What was so important about the 14th Amendment was that it basically said that any citizen of the United States is first and foremost a citizen of the United States and secondarily, a citizen of their individual state and therefore it meant that no state could deny any individual any of the guarantees that were made by the federal government.

The 15th Amendment said that no person could be denied the right to vote based on race or previous condition of servitude. It doesn’t say that you can’t be denied the right to vote for other reasons, so what you end up with is the implementation of Jim Crow. Because of the 15th Amendment, no state could pass a law which said blacks can’t vote, but what they did instead was come up with all sorts of other methods for achieving essentially the same purpose.

Understanding clauses were educational tests where it was up to individual registrars to decide who passed certain tests. One of the problems with the literacy tests and understanding clauses is that there were in fact many uneducated whites who might have failed those tests. This is where you get grandfather clauses in which states would pass a law which said that if your grandfather could vote, then you can vote. There was no black person whose grandfather could vote because you’re talking about the slave era.

It was under the guise of the 14th Amendment that in Brown, the Supreme Court basically says that the court in Plessy was wrong, that equal protection laws do not allow for segregation. The 14th and 15th Amendment are quite important in terms of understanding the whole edifice of white supremacy and of Jim Crow. It’s not until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act that the vestiges of the disfranchisement laws are finally put to rest.

In the late 19th century you have the implementation of series of state laws, many of them begin with railroad transportation and quickly spread to other aspects of public life. As public schools come into being, they are fully segregated. The segregation laws tend to have to do with public separation of the races in public places.

The whole notion of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 when the Supreme Court gives its permission for the South to maintain and build a segregated state. Homer Plessy, who was a man who was one-eighth black, wanted to test the law. The state of Louisiana had passed a law which said that the races could not sit together on railroad cars. He did so anyway. He was arrested, charged with a violation of the law.

The case went to the Supreme Court and by an eight-to-one decision, the Supreme Court said that laws that mandated segregation were okay as long as facilities for both blacks and whites were equal and so the phrase separate but equal comes out of this, talking about parks, playgrounds, schools, trolley cars, then later buses, railroad cars, any sort of place of where the public might mingle.

The standards definition of desegregation is the abolishment of racial segregation and integration, as the full equality of all races in the use of public facilities. A distinction I often find helpful especially in the context of understanding massive resistance, and even more so with what happens after massive resistance is that I think that in many respects desegregation means the end of state-sponsored segregation. Desegregation comes to mean the absolute minimum necessary to comply with the law. What really happens in the wake of massive resistance is that you end up with token integration, at least for another decade until another series of court decisions force more complete integration.

On a national level Brown v. Board of Education was the culmination of a nearly two-decade campaign led by the NAACP to attack segregated education at the professional and graduate school—the whole notion of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 when the Supreme Court gives its permission for the South to maintain and build a segregated state.

The NAACP began winning a series of precedents: in the Maryland courts, then Missouri, in Texas, Oklahoma. NAACP recognized that they could keep doing this forever and ever, they basically were arguing that there was nothing equal about segregation, that the states were failing to meet their constitutional mandate under Plessy. The hope was not that they’ll simply increase funding and we’ll have a separate but equal society, but that they would recognize that to do so would be so prohibitively expensive, that real meaningful change would have to take place.

The case of Brown v. Board of Education, which was five cases which all examined the question of segregation in the public schools at the pre-collegiate level—these cases worked their way through the different courts and then finally they were bundled together by the Supreme Court and we know them as Brown v. Board of Education.

In the early ’50s we know Virginia provided one of the cases that was bundled in Brown, the case out of Prince Edward County which started when a group of young students led by Barbara Johns, who was a junior at Moton High School—the facilities in Farmville are horrific and the students finally say enough. Many of their parents are scared because their parents’ jobs depend upon not causing trouble and so the students don’t tell their parents about this. One day they march down to the superintendent’s office and have a protest of their own.

It would be simply wrong to suggest that African Americans in Virginia weren’t demanding more change. Even though the Brown case comes out of Kansas, it’s every bit as much about life in Virginia. People often assume that the Brown decision dealt with segregation and all of its guises and aspects, but the Brown decision actually was limited to segregation in the schools.

Part of the problem with Brown and part of what why we end up with massive resistance is that the court they’re obviously worried about the reaction in the South. So they actually did not in 1954 issue an actual implementation ruling. They could have said all public schools in the South must be desegregated beginning in September, but they did not. They left it up to the district courts and they said they must move with quote unquote “all deliberate speed” and this provides the context for massive resistance.

The NAACP basically said look you’ve got to do this now, or else the white South is going to stall and certainly the NAACP proved to be quite right about this. So, the court decision comes down in May of 1954 and the initial response in Virginia is sort of like this cartoon suggests. The Virginia constitution guarantees every child the right to a public education. So, there were some who thought well maybe if we get rid of that guarantee then we don’t have to run public schools. There were others who thought you know that was going a bit too far. So you have this ferment in the summer or fall of 1954 who are trying to figure out what to do.

We have an ocean with no land in sight whatsoever, but a giant rock sticking up right in the middle. It says "Supreme Court Segregation Decision," in reference to the Brown decision which declared segregation of the schools unconstitutional. The ship itself is sitting on top of the rock. It’s on the point of the rock so you could imagine if the weight shifted too much one way or the other that it would fall into the ocean. The water itself is pretty still.

The ship is an old wooden vessel labeled The South. Inside the ship there is a schoolhouse. It says public schools. In the front, presumably the captain of the ship is a man that looks like a throwback from the Confederate era. He’s got the trademark long moustache and long, pointed beard. The big top hat, almost a 10-gallon hat except we’re not in Texas but otherwise similar to that. Almost the type of man that you would imagine as a model for Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. This is an old Confederate general, the embodiment of the myth of the lost cause if you will, of the Southern confederacy, and yet here he is in 1954 at the helm of the ship The South standing at the front, but firmly inside the boat, gazing out to sea to look and see whether or not help might be coming.

The overall message is that the Supreme Court decision has put the South in a very difficult spot with regard to the public schools, but disaster is not necessarily imminent. There may yet be a way out of this. The ship is not breaking apart as far as we can see. It’s stuck but not coming apart. The title of the cartoon itself “Now What” suggests some ambivalence about where things are headed.

The Byrds would have to be considered the most prominent political family in Virginia in the 20th century. Harry Byrd, Sr., was the dominant political figure in Virginia from the early 1920s until his death in the mid 1960s. He was elected governor in 1925 as a very young man. Recognized as the head of what comes to be known as the Organization—a small tightly-knit group of important political figures that revolved around the county courthouse the county clerk and the county judge and the county sheriff. He was brilliant at maintaining contact with people, at knowing how to relate with people. People around the state loved Harry Byrd and he was as a governor in some respects progressive for the time, but certainly on issues of race and many others, quite, quite conservative. He went to the U.S. Senate, until 1965 when he became very ill and he actually resigned his seat so that the governor could appoint his son, Harry Byrd, Jr., and then Harry Byrd, Jr., occupied that Senate seat until he retired in 1982.

It’s interesting to note the ways in which the political dynamics of Virginia and the South shifted. Up until the 1960s, Virginia, like every other Southern state, was virtually all Democrats. The Democrats were the party of white supremacy, which makes sense if you think about the Republicans as the party of Lincoln and of Reconstruction. The Democrats regained control in the late 19th century, and it was very much a one-party state until the advent of the civil rights movement when the national Democratic party embraces civil rights beginning in 1948 and then accelerating in the 1960s, you begin to see many southern Democrats switching parties.

A lot of the South was watching to see what Virginia would do. In the fall, the governor appoints what’s known as the Gray Commission in November of 1955. The Gray Commission issues a report. The key provision, and the most controversial one, was a recommendation that the state begin to make available tuition grants so that any white family that objected to sending their child to a school which was integrated could get a tuition grant from the state to go to private school. In January of 1956 the state overwhelmingly voted to amend the Constitution to allow for tuition grants.

The Gray Commission would actually have allowed some integration in places. It was very clear that Arlington especially was ready to integrate its schools. Also, the mountainous parts of Virginia, there’re very few African Americans and they would’ve made financial sense to integrate the schools because running two separate school systems was costly. So the fear was that there were parts of the state that would in fact comply with the court decision and for a lot of people in the southern part of the state, that was untenable.

So, it’s in the spring/summer of 1956 that Harry Byrd and others began to try to formulate a plan and this leads to the real showdown in August and September of 1956 when the governor calls a Special Session of the legislature and what come to be known as the Massive Resistance Laws are passed. The most important components of Virginia’s Massive Resistance Laws were that the people placement was taken out of the hands of local officials and put in the hands of a state people placement board, so that meant that people in Arlington, for instance, could not automatically send to a formerly white school a handful of black students.

Secondly, the Massive Resistance Laws provided for tuition grants. Most importantly, though, what the Massive Resistance Laws did is that they empowered the governor to take control of and close down any schools which integrated as a result of court orders.

On the other side of the issue, there were various people who made very clear that they were more committed to public education than they were to segregation. I think if you had surveyed most white Virginians at the time of the Brown decision they would have preferred to maintain segregation, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily willing to defy the Supreme Court. If forced to choose between segregation and public education, they would prefer public education.

The portions of the state, which had the heaviest concentration of African Americans, most of whom were prevented from voting by a variety of reasons, were vastly overrepresented in the Virginia legislature. In the 1956 Special Session when the Massive Resistance Laws were implemented, the key vote in the state Senate was 21 to 17. The 17 who voted against massive resistance actually represented more Virginians than did the 21 who voted to implement the law.

The second cartoon is from late September 1958 and clearly things are quite different. The ship is still intact but somehow it has managed to get off the rock. We have huge waves. There’s massive lightning bolts which appear that they might be headed towards the ship even if they haven’t hit quite yet. The storm is clearly in full force and presumably the waves have risen high enough to pull the ship off of the rocks.

The title "Riding Out the Storm" suggests that there is a way out of this. The fact that the ship has not turned over. It’s still upright. We still have the Confederate-era gentlemen at the helm. He’s now identified specifically as Virginia as opposed to the South. He’s looking out to see what’s ahead, and the presumption is that there is a possibility of still riding out the storm, however severe it now seems to be.

This isn’t a cartoon that has an image of an integrated classroom that somehow leads to some catastrophe. But it certainly suggests that it’s important to maintain segregated schools. Integration is seen as a cause of a storm that’s going to somehow damage or change the way of life.

The character is the same person in both cartoons and yet in the first cartoon, it says "The South," certainly a sense that the South as a whole is sort of stuck looking for a way out, whereas in the second one, it doesn’t say "The South" anywhere. It does say "Virginia" and so in that case it’s more a sense of this is Virginia’s path because by 1958 much of the rest of the South is watching to see what Virginia will do. The message of the first cartoon is that the Supreme Court decision has caused some problems for the South. It’s not entirely clear what’s going to happen next, but what does that actually mean in practical terms.

By 1958, four years later, quite a lot has happened, both on the national level but especially in Virginia. Those who are most committed to keeping the schools segregated have now taken quite a different step. Instead of the ship saying "The South" on the side, it actually now says "public school closing." This is the point just a few weeks before schools actually are closed. There’s still a message here that Virginia can navigate its way through the waters. Despite the Supreme Court edicts, this is somehow a viable strategy to get through this crisis, although it’s become much more problematic.

This was a public relations disaster for the state. Histories of massive resistance are often quick to credit a group of businessmen and bankers in Richmond who quietly said you’ve got to do something to stop this, this is hurting the state’s reputation, it’s hurting business.
I think we should be very careful because these individuals said nothing for four years, so to give them credit for stepping in when they should’ve done so much earlier I think is problematic. By the end of 1958, early 1959, the NAACP and others were challenging the constitutionality of the Massive Resistance Laws in both federal and state courts. In January of 1959, both state and federal courts ruled the Virginia Massive Resistance Laws unconstitutional.

So in the spring of 1959, you have a final showdown between those who want to return to the local option, but with tuition grants, always giving white students the option of getting out of integrated schools at state expense and then those who continued to resist despite all the court decisions. What you really end up with is very token integration. The percentage of black students attending white schools is quite small until the late 1960s. In 1968, the Supreme Court finally said enough of 'all deliberate speed.' It’s been 15 years since the Brown decision.

Start with what appears to be the obvious and then draw out from that what the different components represent. What does this ship represent? What does the person at the helm represent? What is it that’s going on in the sea here? What might the cartoonist not be telling us or not sharing with us? Asking them to explain what do they see here, what do they think is likely to happen?

I think it's important to pay attention to all of the details, to really look at each particular component both on its own and also collectively. See how these pieces fit together. You could look at the cartoons without the caption at the top and it would be interesting to see whether the caption is one that you would necessarily come up with yourself based on the image. In reading any cartoon or any image it's important also to ask what’s not in the picture. And one way you might answer that question is think about how would other newspapers have portrayed the series of events. And in Virginia certainly if you looked at either of the African American newspapers you would have gotten a very different perspective.

The northern Virginian Pilot is the only major white newspaper in the state that opposed massive resistance. And certainly if you were to compare this to cartoons that they had at the time you would see a very different image. They would’ve suggested what they argued editorially, which is that it was doomed to fail. That it could not possibly pass constitutional muster. That by prolonging the inevitable, you’re simply heightening tensions.

It would be very interesting to compare the cartoons with the actual written editorials of those papers. It would be interesting to think about the different ways in which public opinion is reflected. Newspapers aren’t necessarily always accurate. Public documents, to compare what a newspaper is reporting with what the actual public statements are, whether it’s a press release of the governor or looking at the actual laws, looking at election returns. One of the things that’s quite fascinating is to look at private letters, what people are saying behind the scenes. What is the cartoon telling us about the event versus what does it tell us about the person who’s actually created the image. The more sources you can find the better because you’re going to often get conflicting points of view and then it’s important to try to understand those sources in a way that makes those seeming disparities make sense.

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.