13 April 2011
Major Robert Anderson, Hero of Fort Sumter
[detail, Maps.71495.(54)]
Many people's sympathies were divided by secession in 1861. Major Anderson, who had served as an artillery officer in the Black Hawk, Seminole and Mexican wars, was born in Jefferson County, Kentucky, and owned a few enslaved African Americans in his wife's state of Georgia. Believing that secession was ultimately inevitable, he wrote that, 'In this controversy between the North and the South, my sympathies are entirely with the South.' Nonetheless, his commitment to the Union and the constitution of the United States ensured he remained loyal to Washington, and he was placed in command of the three federal forts at Charleston, South Carolina. When that state seceded on 20 December, he realised that only Fort Sumter, an island in Charleston Harbor, was defensible, and secretly moved there during the night of 26 December.
There then began a long blockade by confederate forces, in which Anderson faced dwindling supplies and the worry that he might be responsible for starting a war. Soon, the entire, but divided, nation, was watching the standoff.
On 11 April, his former student, the confederate brigadier general Pierre Beauragard demanded his surrender. Anderson refused, at at 4:30 a.m. on 12 April, bombardment of the fort began. The barrage continued for 34 hours. Along with 127 officers and men, and 43 civilians, Anderson defended the fort until he they were finally forced to surrender on 13 April, and the banner was lowered on April 14.
His defence made him the Union's first war hero, celebrated in portraits such as the one above, taken from a contemporary map, which placed him alongside images of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. After serving in Kentucky and Tennessee, he returned to Fort Sumter on 14 April 1865, where he once again raised the Union flag.
He died in Nice, in 1871. His letters to his wife during the Mexican War are published in An Artillery Officer in the Mexican War, 1846-7. Letters of Robert Anderson ... (G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York & London, 1911) [9555.v.2]
12 April 2011
Bang!
As if by clockwork, the first bunch of US Civil War maps arrive for the sesquicentennial (although we got a jump start yesterday, with an Eccles Centre conference on the war, featuring my rambling thoughts on the early oil industry during the war years, and the very brilliant Amanda Foreman talking about The World on Fire). Lot's more to follow. Meanwhile, here's Fort Sumter for you.
[MS]
17 March 2011
Miles O'Reilly and Irish Americans in the Civil War
Something for St Patrick's Day (as well as the tasty Viennese [sic] biscuits that Jerry has kindly brought in):
It's the fancy Edward F. Mullen cover of Miles O'Reilly: His Book (New York: Carleton, 1864), composed by Charles Graham Halpin (styled Halpine after his move to New York), a journalist born in Co. Meath in 1829 to Anglican parents. He studied medicine and law at Trinity College Dublin and emigrated to Boston 1851, whereupon he became an assistant editor of the Boston Post. He moved to New York, where he worked for the Times and Herald, covering Walker's Nicaraguan Filibuster War of 1855-6.
In 1861, he responded to Lincoln's call to arms, and enlisted in the New York Sixty-ninth Regiment of Irish volunteers, serving in Missouri and at Hilton Head. In 1863, a series of anti-draft riots led to the first of his stories and poems of the exploits of Miles O'Reilly in the New York Herald as an attempt to drum up support for the military among the New York Irish. Fiercely egalitarian, O'Reilly rarely refuses the opportunity to tell his superiors how to win the war; the tales were a great success, and were widely reprinted. And, as the American National Biography puts it: 'he helped change the image of the Irish in the North and gave the Irish themselves a sense that they had a future in the United States, that the country was worth fighting for'.
Overwork and insomnia led to overdose of chloroform in 1868, not far from the Herald offices. For a photo of him, visit the Pageant of America in the NYPL Digital Library.
Happy St. Patrick's Day.
[M.J.S.]
10 February 2011
The U.S. Civil War on the Web: a guide [updated 2.8.11]
U.S. history titles on the Civil War probably outnumber any other historical subject (although WWII may give it a run for its money); the same is probably true for the web. As part of our Civil War project, we plan to curate some of it - selecting the best or the first ports of call.
Site: http://archives.gov/exhibits/civil-war/
Description: Linked to the National Archives exhibition (from 30 April 2011), but also serving as a guide to their resources, with an excellent guide to existing National Archive-related materials, such as Kevin J. Foster's 'The Diplomats Who Sank a Fleet:
The Confederacy's Undelivered European Fleet and the Union Consular Service' (Prologue, Fall, 2001). The site and exhibition also sees things in global terms.
Includes digitised collection items, guides and multimedia materials.
Audience: General public, schools, librarians, undergraduates
Date visited: 2011-02-01
2. Southern Cultures: the sesquicentennial: how should we remember the Civil War?
Site: http://www.southerncultures.org/content/read/read_by_subject/civil_war/
Description: featured content from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, including older articles and new essays focussing on the Civil War in collective (Southern) memory. Links to selected articles from the journal Southern Cultures via Project Muse.
Audience: undergraduate and research.
Date visited: 2011-03-08
3. Places in History (Library of Congress)
Site: http://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/placesinhistory/archive/2011/20110301_descriptiveintro.html
Description: Beginning March 4, 2011 until April 20, 2015, the Geography and Map Division will post selected maps from its digitized collections relating to political and economic issues leading up to the Civil War as well as military maps ranging from maps of minor skirmishes to major battles during the week of the 150th anniversary of those conflicts. Each map is accompanied by text discussing the selected maps, as well as citations and references. The site will be updated weekly during the four year anniversary of the Civil War and a keyword searchable weekly archive accompanies the site.
See also: Library of Congress Civil War Maps.
Audience: General public, schools, librarians, undergraduates
Date visited: 2011-03-08
4. Civil War Resources: Teaching the Sesquicentennial
Site: http://blog.historians.org/resources/1289/civil-war-resources-teaching-the-sesquicentennial
Description: A collection of useful teaching resources links from the American Historical Association. Includes links to lesson plans.
See also: http://blog.historians.org/resources/785/civil-war-resources
Audience: teachers, students, general public, academics
Date visited: 2011-02-22
5. Union or Secession: Virginians Decide (Library of Virginia)
Site: http://www.virginiamemory.com/online_classroom/union_or_secession/
Description: Drawn primarily from the collections of the Library of Virginia, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide presents private letters, public debates, and other records that allow Virginians who experienced the crisis between the autumn of 1860 and the summer of 1861 to explain their thoughts, fears, and decisions in their own words. Union or Secession also contains the life stories of forty Virginians who experienced slavery, the sectional tensions of the 1850s, the secession crisis, and the split of their state into two.
Audience: teachers, schools, general public, researchers
Date visited: 2011-03-30
6. Life and Limb. The Toll of the American Civil War (U.S. National Library of Medicine)
Site: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/LifeandLimb/
Description: The perspectives of surgeons, physicians, and nurses are richly documented in the history of Civil War medicine, which highlights the heroism and brutality of battlefield operations and the challenges of caring for the wounded during wartime. Yet the experiences of injured soldiers during the conflict and in the years afterwards are less well-known. Life and Limb: The Toll of the Civil War focuses on disabled veterans and their role as symbols of the fractured nation.
Audience: teachers, schools, general public
Date visited: 2011-03-30
Reviews, etc:
McPherson, James M., 'What Drove the Terrible War' (A. Foreman, A World on Fire; G. Gallagher, The Union War, A. Goodheart, 1861; D. Goldfield, America Aflame; G. Rable, God's Almost Chosen Peoples), review article in New York Review of Books, 14 July 2011. [accessed 2 Aug 2011] Review contained additional footnotes to the printed article.
[M.J.S.]
Americas and Oceania Collections blog recent posts
- E-resources: US historic and contemporary newspapers
- Celebrating Juneteenth
- American Studies Training Day in Boston Spa
- An Irish Account of the First Days of the American Civil War
- Lincoln's Funeral Cortege
- US Civil War Maps
- Civil War Transformations
- An Incident in the Retreat at the Battle of Manassas (21 July 1861)
- Civil War Project update – A journey through the Southern (and Northern) States
- Lincoln, Alexander Gardner and the Silent Indian
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