O Say Can You See?

Civil War portraits: Where personal and public meet (VIDEO)

We are just at the beginning of several years of marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War; and we’ve still got a long way to go. As it turns out, there really is a lot to say about how photographs shaped the public’s knowledge and experience of the war. We can also reverse that and look at how people shaped photographs to leave a legacy of how they personally experienced and understood the war.

Boston-area photographer George K. Warren assembled cartes de visites that he and others made into an album. Close examination of the sitters begins to suggest what his political leanings might have been.

This summer, the museum started a collaboration with film-making students from American University’s School of Communication. My intern and I developed a plan for a series of short videos about Civil War-era images from the Photographic History Collection. Our first video is about cartes de visite albums.

You can also find a video about a mystery pair of glasses and the Time Trial of John Brown, also created by AU students.

This album page shows a variety of portrait posing styles. The compiler of this album added Civil War related portraits as a matter of course, suggesting the Civil War was just another of her life’s events.

While the photographs of battlefields are absolutely compelling, I’m really interested in the ways in which personal relationships with photography during a national crisis help us understand the nuances of past individual experiences. By drilling down to the personal, the complexities of the political, social and cultural life are revealed and create a richer history. For me, it all started with a 1860s yearbook from Rutgers. But that’s another story.

Shannon Perich is Associate Curator for the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History.

How should John Brown be remembered?

An  actor portrays abolitionist John Brown

This summer, the National Museum of American History’s History Alive! Theater program brought visitors the Time Trial of John Brown. A controversial character in American history, John Brown was a radical abolitionist in the mid-19th century. Brown advocated violence to combat slavery and led armed insurrections that would lead to his execution.

This is the second show in the Time Trials series, which invites visitors to serve as jurors in a short hearing for a historical person. In the Time Trial of John Brown, audience members deliberate on John Brown’s contested legacy and decide how he should be remembered in American history.

Check out the video below to get a sense of the process behind the show and why we’re so interested in getting people talking about history.

How do you think John Brown should be remembered?

Susan Evans is Daily Programs and Theater Coordinator and Julia Imbriaco is Floor Manager at the National Museum of American History.

A closer look at a Civil War watch

My colleague Diane Wendt’s excellent work on a Civil War nurse reminded me that the museum has a closely related object—a Civil War surgeon’s pocket watch. More than two decades ago, I had collected the watch to document a critical technical episode in the early history of the American watch industry. Recently I pulled the watch out of storage for a closer look. It was as though I was seeing the watch for the first time, with a heightened appreciation for its Civil War roots.

The inscription tells the story of the watch

The watch’s most distinguishing feature is an interior inscription. On the dust cap that covers the movement, the engraving reads: “White Hall USA Gen’l Hospital, Feb. 15, 1865 Presented to Dr. G. D. O’Farrell, USA, by the patients of Ward C as a token of regard & respect for his ability as a surgeon and unswerving integrity as a man.”

A little digging over the past few days (ok, a little web surfing) allowed me to sketch an outline of the life of the surgeon who received this gift. Gerald Dunne O’Farrell was born in Ireland in 1836 and had medical training at the University of Pennsylvania, class of ’62. From March of 1863 through the end of July 1865, he served as assistant surgeon with the 63rd and 215th Pennsylvania Regiments. He settled after the war in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, married Eliza M. Broffy—also from Ireland—in 1866, and together they had a son G. D. O’Farrell Jr., another Penn graduate, class of ’94. A physician to the end, the senior O’Farrell died on a house call on March 27, 1902.

The interior mechanics of the watch on display

The hospital named in the inscription—White Hall U.S. Army General Hospital—is a little harder to pin down. There were, it seems, two civil war hospitals in Pennsylvania called White Hall or Whitehall, one near Bristol and the other near Williamsport. Bristol’s White Hall, a grand Greek Revival building on the National Register of Historic Places, was once the home of Bristol College and served after the war as a school for the orphans of African American soldiers.

But none of these spare facts tells us what it was like to be a young surgeon, straight from school, thrust into the horrific fray of the American Civil War. Other wartime physicians have left their reminiscences, published or otherwise, but not O’Farrell. I can’t tell you what demonstrations of surgical skill his patients observed or what acts of “unswerving integrity” prompted their gift. I wonder what kind of man O’Farrell was. Who were his Ward C patients? What were their injuries? Their fates?

The watch offers no clues about any of these, but it does tell us other things. The silver watch case shows signs of wear, an indicator that Dr. O’Farrell wore it and consulted it, perhaps to measure a patient's pulse or catch a train on time. The watch movement—the part of the watch that ticks—is well cared for, a sign of a valued possession. The movement, marked “Wm. Ellery/Boston, Mass.” tells us that the watch is a product of the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts. And this relationship with Waltham is why I collected the watch in the first place.

The watch shows signs of wear

In the 1850s, watchmakers at what would become the American Watch Co.developed the world’s first machine-made watches. The firm’s early years were financially unsteady and success finally came from an unexpected quarter. During the Civil War, the Waltham factory designed and produced the low-cost William Ellery model, like the one Dr. O’Farrell got. Selling for an unbelievable $13, these watches became a fad with Union soldiers. Roving merchants sold thousands of cheap watches to eager customers in wartime encampments. By 1865, the year the war ended, William Ellery movements represented about 45% of Waltham’s unit sales.

To make something as tiny and complicated as a watch by machine had seemed impossible in 1850, but a decade later American watchmakers had an industry that produced quality watches in quantity, an industry that would come to symbolize the best of American know-how and organization on the world stage.

The Civil War placed the United States on the world stage in the 19th century. And these days, the international context of that war that has attracted a lot of fresh historical scholarship. Timed with this anniversary year of the war’s beginnings, new research is offering a closer look at a bigger picture than our watch affords. A great place to start my summer reading!

Carlene Stephens is a curator of the Division of Work and Industry at the National Museum of American History.

 

Finding the Civil War in Washington, D.C.

“You ought to see the scene of the wounded arriving at the landing here foot of Sixth street, at night. Two boat loads came about half-past seven last night. A little after eight it rain’d a long and violent shower. The poor, pale, helpless soldiers had been debark’d, and lay around on the wharf and neighborhood anywhere. The rain was, probably, grateful to them; at any rate they were exposed to it. The few torches light up the spectacle. All around—on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places—the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, &c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs.”

—Walt Whitman, May,1863, from Memoranda During the War

On a bright and breezy afternoon last week, I walked with colleagues down to the piers near the base of Sixth Street in Southwest Washington, D.C. I was looking for the place where Whitman’s wounded lay–a place I had often read about in the past year as I developed a small exhibit about a woman who served as a nurse in one of Washington’s Civil War hospitals.

 
Approximate site of Sixth Street Wharf, showing the District Harbor Patrol Pier with the Washington Monument in distance. Photo by Diane Wendt.

During the war, Washington’s busy wharves were the focal point for moving people and supplies into and out of the city. Here the wounded from the Virginia battlefields were off-loaded from steamboats to await transport to the city’s many hospitals. The most severe cases were taken to the nearest – Armory Square Hospital—about ten blocks north on Seventh Street where it crossed the National Mall. Amanda Akin, the subject of my exhibit, worked as a nurse there, and Whitman often visited, bringing treats and comfort to the soldiers. Akin did not care for him and pronounced a letter that he wrote both “ludicrous” and “incoherent.” They both left published accounts of their war experiences: Whitman in Memoranda During the War and Akin in The Lady Nurse of Ward E.

Sixth Street wharf at time of the Civil War, note the unfinished Washington Monument on the far left. Charles Magnus print, Library of Congress.

The wharves are at site #12 on the DC Heritage trail, River Farms to Urban Towers: Southwest Heritage Trail, and a sign commemorates the spot.

Site #12 on the DC Heritage trail, River Farms to Urban Towers: Southwest Heritage Trail. Photo by Diane Wendt.

There are still two good sized piers here—one for the District Harbor Patrol and one for tourist cruises – with a marina and restaurants nearby. On this particular workday afternoon the pleasure boats are mostly moored and the area is quite deserted. Whitman’s scene of enormous suffering is obliterated by the sun and the blossoms and the passage of so many years. But the words of Whitman, Akin, and others who experienced the war first hand are still available to us and provide a glimpse into the unimaginable past.

(Left) Walt Whitman, Library of Congress; (Right) Amanda Akin, National Library of Medicine.

Diane Wendt is Associate Curator in the Division of Medicine and Science at the National Museum of American History.

Exploring the Gettysburg Address with kids

Today’s guest post was written by Dr. James Beeghley, who writes the blog Teaching the Civil War with Technology and presents workshops on integrating technology into the social studies classroom.

“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” This simple sentence was spoken on November 19, 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln when he gave the now famous Gettysburg Address. For those of us in education, we must take every opportunity to teach students about the American Civil War lest they forget this important part of our history.

Battle of Gettysburg Lithograph, Division of Armed Forces History, National Museum of American History.

Traditionally, the topic of the Civil War has been discussed using the tried and true methods of lecturing from textbooks, showing pictures from reference books, using filmstrips or slide shows, and occasionally using artifacts to give students a hands-on experience. Today, teachers have high speed access to the Internet and high quality multimedia resources to use as tools for researching and presenting the subject of the Civil War. One of my favorite examples of using technology to teach the Civil War is the National Museum of American History’s interactive Gettysburg Address.

 

The interactive allows you and your students to explore the Gettysburg Address through high-resolution images, audio, and text. You can zoom in and examine President Lincoln’s handwriting. You can listen to the words spoken by the President and even click on certain parts of the document to learn more about specific topics.

 

The Interactive Gettsyburg Address allows you to engage with one of America's most famous historical documents!

One of the most famous speeches in American history, the Gettysburg Address was only 9 sentences long, has fewer than 300 words and was delivered in less than 3 minutes. Three quarters of the words are only one syllable and 92% of the words have no more than two syllables. You might consider having students listen to the audio version of the speech on the website and jot down the words that they hear as they listen, or that stand out to them after the speech is over. Then, have them copy the text into Wordle and have a conversation about the results and how they compare to the words they noted as they listened.

On the interactive Gettysburg Address, there are several highlighted sections of the speech that provide additional information and allow for a deeper discussion. By selecting sections of the speech and pulling information from the website, you can develop some deeper thinking questions, including “Why has the Gettysburg Address become one of the most famous speeches in American history?”

 

In addition to exploring the speech on the website, you can also look up the location in Google Earth to explore the battlefield and have students consider the reasons behind its design. These are just a few suggestions for using this one resource from Smithsonian’s History Explorer for teaching the Civil War. Imagine what you could do with the thousands of other resources that are available to you for free!

Editor’s Note: You can find more tips for exploring the Gettysburg Address with grades 5-12 on our History Explorer website for educators. Or visit our online exhibition where you can download and print the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s own hand.

Dr. James Beeghley is an educational technologist and blogger.