The Civil War (ours), re-viewed

This past weekend, I went to a “CU on the Weekend” class. This program sponsors weekend mini-courses, usually a half day long, taught by CU faculty and free to the public. I’ve been to a couple of them before–one on musicals (which was a total kick!) and one on healthcare discrepancies due to race (not exactly a “kick,” but really excellent). The title of this one promised to make the Civil War “much more interesting.” I arrived with high expectations and came away totally delighted with having spent a Saturday morning sitting in a school rom. Here’s what was so interesting … well, part of it anyhow.

Brief background: Back in the day, one of my favorite courses to teach was on the history of psychology. I loved it for a lot of reasons, but particularly in the later years, I especially loved teaching it as a “new” history course. It’s remotely possible that there are still folks out there who still believe that history is a simple telling of facts, but most people figured out along the way that it’s more complicated than that. Questions like “whose’ facts’ are taken as true?” and “who picks what stories get told?” and “why this perspective and not that one?” sort of change the game. For instance, we might ask, whose story is it when we talk about “the winning of the West”? 

So, “new” history asks questions like that, questions that pretty quickly turn the old views on their collective head. The result is a history that looks for what’s missing, who’s silenced, who made the choices about what counts as important. Howard Zinn called this "People's History." It's also been called "revisionist history" because it "revises" the simplistic dead-white-men version of the story. Others call it "contextual history" because of the focus on the broad contexts of history instead of the narrow events that typical make it into text books. Whatever it's called, this approach leads to a totally different view of any topic—from the evolution of psychology to the nature of the Civil War. Fun to teach back then, still fun to think about today.

So, I was delighted when the person teaching this class, Peter Wood, was of the new, people's history school of thought. He was far less interested in the dates and locations of military campaigns than in the experience of the country as a whole during the war, the lives of everyday folks, the submerged political machinations beneath the “brother-against-brother” narrative. And he was especially interested in the experiences of African-American people during the war–which was, after all, about their enslavement and the possibility of their freedom. As he talked about this, I realized how little I’d ever read or heard about the thoughts and reactions of slaves and newly “emancipated” African Americans to the war. I know a bit about Black soldiers–that there were some African-American soldiers, that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in part to free slaves so that they could enlist, that they got paid less than White soldiers. But what about the folks left on the plantations in the South? What about those in border states who regularly saw the armies of the North and South fighting, marching through, commandeering land and crops and homes, burning land and crops and homes. Why have they been silent in history–or silenced by history, I wondered. And so did this teacher.

So, rather than attempt to write Cliff notes from the whole morning, let me share with you the substance of the final segment of the class, the culmination of the earlier hours. During the last part of the morning, Wood talked about an apparently simple painting, not of a battle or a politician, but of a lone African-American woman. Let me share the thoughts he raised about this painting, a sort of exercise in "new" art history. 

The picture, called “Near Andersonville,” was painted by Winslow Homer–best known for his landscape paintings, but also one of the most important visual chroniclers of the war. Here’s the painting:

Now, the very fact that Winslow painted this picture is already an illustration of his own “new history” bent. His other pictures of the war, some of them very famous, were different from the usual glory, battle, and death themes. But this particular picture stands out in a whole new way. The central figure is a woman, standing in the door of her home. Not a man, as the central figures of paintings—especially war paintings—would typically be, and not in a glorious setting. Then, as if that weren’t iconoclastic enough, she’s an African-American woman, a slave. Twice removed from the predictable “mainstream” society subjects of art. And finally there’s the broader picture surrounding this moment: if you look at the background, you’ll see a passing line of soldiers. They’re carrying a Confederate flag. The title, “Near Andersonville” is crucial. 

Remember the emphasis in “new history” on context: no historical event, however small, happens in a vacuum—and here’s the context signaled by the painting’s title. When African-American soldiers entered the war, the South decided that any Black soldier who was captured was, in effect, a runaway slave and was subject to execution. So rather than being held as prisoners of war, Black soldiers were simply murdered. The North decided to respond to this egregious violation of the laws of war by refusing to participate in prisoner exchanges. (If you kill our soldiers, we won’t return yours.) The South was thus forced to hold thousands of Union prisoners of war. And the largest, most desolate and deadly POW camp was at Andersonville, Georgia.

So, Wood pointed out, the Black woman in this picture is watching a line of Confederate troops pass by, marching Union soldiers to the POW camp at Andersonville. She is not an irrelevant “bystander” in this war machine, powerless though she may be. She is well aware of where they are going. She is also aware of what this might mean for her: a Confederate victory, one that historians can identify from the timing of the painting as a deadly and dangerous moment in the war, when the Union appeared to be foundering. Look at her face and see if you can’t imagine what she’s thinking, feeling as she watches the column pass by. Watching a moment that might signal the end of her hopes of freedom, recently raised by the Emancipation Proclamation.

Then, look again and see whether you think she might be pregnant. Maybe yes, maybe no … but imagine that she is. What does her face say about her thoughts for her child? And on yet another level, imagine who this child’s father might be. Her chosen partner? If so, what will continuing slavery mean for him, for the child, for them as a family? Or might the father be the plantation owner, a not uncommon scenario. This simple picture, and so many questions. So much feeling: hopes raised and dashed, fear and uncertainty, perhaps anger and revulsion, doubt, depression … all read on the face not of a general or a president presiding over a battle or a cabinet meeting, but an African-American slave woman standing on the wooden stoop of her cabin. That’s new history in a painting.

I can’t possibly do justice to this thought-provoking, mind-stretching class in a few paragraphs, but maybe you get the picture. And hopefully you get the great challenge that this approach to history raises for us all. “History” as written is always just one story of many possible ones. The joy of this class was its challenge to the story of the Civil War that most of us so uncritically absorbed somewhere in our youth. And the same sort of critique can be brought to all other “stories” of how it was, how it is, how it must be.

I’m reminded of a line from a song that was popular during Bush 43’s second term “When they own the information, they can bend it all they want.” I took it as a commentary on the Bush administration, but the very same can be said of any rendition of “history.” Whoever “owns the information” can bend it all they want. Our job, should we wish to accept it, is to try to work out the kinks and see what’s been squeezed out in the bending.

You can call it revisionist history, contextual history, people's history, or new history. I call it fascinating, overdue, and mind-changing. A good antidote whenever we think we have the single, true story about virtually anything.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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