Grape & Canister

A roundup of Civil War news, books, videos, and an Otis pic

(Illustration of Horace Greeley’s funeral)

News

Arkansas has unveiled a new statue in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building.

Arkansas introduced a statue of Johnny Cash as the newest contribution to the Capitol’s Statuary Hall collection this week. It’s the second of two statues to replace the state’s previous installments of James Paul Clarke, a white supremacist former governor, and Uriah Rose, a Confederate sympathizer—and it offers a playbook for how to replace statues or other monuments that communities find no longer represent them.

What do you think?

Students at a high school in Montgomery, Alabama are calling on elected officials to change the city’s flag.

The city flag, according to the North American Vexillological Association, was adopted in 1952. The gray from the flag is a reference to the uniforms of Confederate soldiers. The red is for Alabama. The blue was to represent unity, as Union uniforms were blue. The seven white stars represent the original seven states of the Confederacy.

Here is an interesting profile piece about Horace Greeley that focuses on his bid for the presidency and his tragic demise.

When a splinter group of Republicans, disgusted by the rampant corruption of the current administration under their own party’s Ulysses S. Grant, decided to run a third-party presidential candidate in the 1872 election, it came as little surprise that they drafted Greeley for the task. The editor’s campaign got a further boost when the Democratic Party, unable to agree on a candidate of its own, threw its support to him, too.

But after a promising start, Greeley’s presidential bid ended not only in defeat but also tragedy.

Great to see my friend Chris Meekins profiled for his work as an editor of the Civil War Roster Project, which is overseen by the N.C. Division of Historical Resources within the state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Chris and the rest of the team are working to document the names of all North Carolinians, who fought for the Confederacy and the United States.

Snopes recently fact-checked claims surrounding Minnesota’s refusal to return Confederate flags captured at Gettysburg to Virginia. Turns out, it’s true.

(Source: Snopes)

You might be able to gain access to this Wall Street Journal story on how the debate over Confederate monuments continues to divide towns across the country. Don’t worry if you can’t access it as there is nothing much that is new.

Books

Percival Everett, James: A Novel (Doubleday, 2024).

Kate Masur and Liz Clarke, Freedom Was in Sight!: A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region (The University of North Carolina Press, 2024).

Chris Mackowski, A Tempest of Iron and Lead: Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864 (Savas Beatie, 2024).

Andrew Sillen, Kidnapped at Sea: The Civil War Voyage of David Henry White (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).

I can definitely recommend this one. :-)

Videos

This is a wonderful conversation about Frederick Douglass and his family at their home at Cedar Hill with historians David Blight and Leigh Fought. Many of you are familiar with Blight’s fabulous biography of Douglass, but I also highly recommend Fought’s study of the women in Douglass’s life.

A student at Washington College in Lexington, Va., when the Civil War began, Nat Logan joined the Liberty Hall Volunteers, which became part of the 4th Virginia Infantry. He served on clerical duties until late 1864, when he became a frontline combat soldier along the defenses of Richmond and Petersburg. Here's his story.

Here is my friend and fellow historian Christian Keller discussing his recent essay collection on why the Confederacy failed.

Finally, you are definitely going to want to check out John Hennessy talking about slavery and the Army of Virginia during 1862. I read a version of this talk months ago as I was working on my Robert Gould Shaw biography. The presentations from this conference will be eventually be published in a new volume on the Second Manassas Campaign edited by Caroline Janney.

Otis

The big guy just returned from a five-day trip to Maine. I will leave it to you to decide whether Otis enjoyed himself.