Like many of you, I’ve often been asked to choose one person from the Civil War era to sit down for dinner and conversation. My response is always the same: Abraham Lincoln.
Let’s go with that for this week’s Open Thread Thursday, but instead of sharing the questions you would ask, I am specifically interested in what question you hope your dinner guest would ask of you.
Comments are open for everyone, today.
Go.
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I would choose Judah P. Benjamin. A fascinating, brilliant, charismatic man, and a great conversationalist. I don''t think he'd ask me a specific question, but I do think we'd strike up a very stimulating and enjoyable conversation very quickly. I also think that when I disagreed with him he'd respect me for my convictions and for defending those convictions.
I think I'd like to have a seat at the dinner table of Major General Frederick Steele, perhaps up at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island two years after the end of the Civil War which more or less coincided with the end of what was called the Pig War, which essentially resolved a boundary dispute between the U.S. and Britain over what was not yet Canada. Did Steele's experience in command of Union troops in Brownsville, Texas, in the summer of '65, and his negotiations with the French military, massed on the far shore of the Rio Grande, representing the interests of the Emperor Maximillian on the southern U.S. border, prepare him in any way for negotiating the northern U.S. border a year or two later? Did Steele feel that his decision to retreat from Camden, Arkansas, back to Little Rock in April 1864 was the right decision? It did enable him to maintain his army's occupation of that state as an alternative to following orders and attempting to take possession of Shreveport, the Confederate shadow capital of Louisiana? He had, after all, taken possession of Little Rock through military action nine months earlier? Could Shreveport have been more challenging than Little Rock? Was the damage to his reputation for that failure justified and was he able to redeem himself a year later by leading the Column from Pensacola, consisting of nine regiments of U.S. Colored Troops, recruited in Mississippi and Louisiana, in the successful assault on Fort Blakeley, resulting in the surrender of Mobile? I'd also be curious to know about his planned trip from the Oregon Territory to the Monterey Peninsula in California. Was it a military assignment? Or just a well-earned vacation and a chance to visit his youngest brother, Edgar, who on Frederick's advice had moved to San Luis Obispo and was well on his way to becoming a prosperous dairy farmer after a decade or more of teaching English and barely surviving in eastern Ohio's Western Reserve just west of Pennsylvania. What were Frederick's plans for the next ten or twenty years after the Civil War? Would he remain in the regular army indefinitely or seriously consider retiring before the age of fifty on a fairly generous general's pension? I'm guessing we'll never know, since he died, less than three years after his Civil War service ended, in a carriage accident on the Monterey Peninsula from a cause of death listed as a fit of apoplexy. Boxes and boxes of his letters, both official as well as personal, are stored and have been indexed thoroughly at Stanford University and the Hoover Institute. Steele is descended from a family that founded Hartford, Connecticut, early in the 18th century. His older brother, Osman Steele, served as Undersheriff in a county in New York's Catskills, and died enforcing legal rights to collect rents owed to heirs of former Dutch colonists and opposing clandestine resistors to those rent collections in a movement known as the Anti-Rent War. Osman Steele was murdered in 1844 a year after Frederick Steele graduated from West Point as a classmate of U.S. Grant. Steele's parents and siblings lapsed into poverty as a result of that murder and the resultant upheaval of the social order. During the War with Mexico Steele had served under Winfield Scott and established a reputation as a highly disciplined, capable and skilled soldier. I suspect class warfare was just as big a factor in the Civil War as it was in WWII.
I like George's selection of Frederick Douglass. Now *that* would be an interesting evening.
As for me, I would like to talk with my great-great-great grandfather's twin sons. Both were captured by the Confederate army at Plymouth, NC on April 20, 1864. They were sent to Andersonville and both survived---sort of. When Sherman got close to Andersonville, they were sent with a number of other Union prisoners to Charleston, SC. Issac Rice died of dysentery and was buried in Charleston; his twin Abraham survived and returned to Pennsylvania and later went to Kansas. Out of the 7 brothers, 5 fought for the Union.
I'm sure on elf the things they would ask is, "Do you always eat this well?"
I'm sure a more serious question would be ones we struggle to answer even today. Why do we still see remnants of the Confederacy being revered now days? Confederate flags, statues, the Lost Cause, re-enactment of battles (remember, they would be asking this), among other things they would see here in my home state of Florida (and elsewhere).
I would like to dine with Frederick Douglass. I imagine that he would wonder that even after women's suffrage, an election of a black president and several voters' rights acts, why does it appear that the struggle for equality in America seems to be moving backwards? And then he would ask what am I doing about that? That would be an interesting conversation.
I hope I may invite a trio: Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend, the self-emancipating slavery escapees who, acting with beautiful agency, made the FIRST momentous decision in the Fort Monroe freedom story of May 1861. And I hope I may report what I would ask THEM.
Their decision to escape and seek sanctuary at the Union's mighty, and mighty symbolic, stronghold in Confederate Virginia enabled General Benjamin Butler to make the SECOND momentous decision: to declare them contraband of war, and refuse to return them to the moral criminal who claimed to "own" them.
Fort Monroe by then was the name for the Chesapeake's flat Gibraltar, called Point Comfort when the first captive Africans arrived there in 1619. So it's the place where British North American slavery began in 1619, and where U.S. slavery began to crumble in 1861--thanks to those two decisions, the second of which, according to Adam Goodheart, was the first instance of a federal decision to deny the legal practice of respecting "ownership" of Americans called "slaves."
To greater or lesser extent, those three escapees lived out the country's founding principles. So did the half million who followed, in various places across the land, pressing President Lincoln and history itself toward emancipation. No less than James M. McPherson says that a "self-emancipation thesis" has come to dominate scholarly understanding of emancipation's wartime political evolution. (But it's scanted, or worse, in popular understanding, which is why I'm preparing to start a Substack that would elaborate on my 2022 History News Network essay about these things.)
So here's the question: It's widely understood that antebellum Black people knew that a civil war would bring an enormous freedom opportunity. By capitalizing on it, they demonstrated an inherent knowledge, a natural understanding, of what Jefferson wrote about and what Lincoln re-illuminated. To what extent were self-emancipators directly aware of the principles of the Declaration of Independence?
Perhaps my maternal great-great grandfather and my paternal great grandfather. They fought for the Confederacy, were both small farmers in Virginia with no slaves, and were captured within a day of each other at Five Forks. If I were in appropriate period dress, they might ask me how many slaves I owned. If in 21st century attire, even Sunday best, they’d probably refuse to sit down with me! After we got that out of the way, I would want to ask them why they fought, and see if their reasons aligned in any way with Thomas Fleming’s *A Disease In the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We fought the Civil War* c.2013. He posits that the fear of slave rebellion, starting with Haiti and including Gabriel’s Conspiracy in 1800 and Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, both in Virginia, drove those who were not enslavers to fight to protect their lives and families.
I’d ask him what his plans were for reb leaders. He didn’t want them hung of course, but viewed them differently from civilians and volunteers. He just wanted them to leave the country- what if they didn’t? Any prosecution? Expatriate? Military tribunals?
If I got to pick, I'd probably pick my great-grandfather, Dr. McGuire, and hope he'd ask me why I think slavery was the cause of the war. If I had dinner with Lincoln (he knew my great-great-grandparents, the Kinzies of Chicago; Juliette published a book, "Wau-Bun: the Early Day in the Northwest") we'd probably chat about my relatives.
I'd go with James Marshall Lilly, Jr., of the 1st NC Cavalry. He was from a slaveholding family in piedmont, NC, who may have been conscripted (or not, the records are not clear) and I really need to sit down with someone like him. But the real reason for him is that his mother, who died in 1847, was the subject of my dissertation and boy do I have questions about her. And if he was anything like her, I'm sure that he'd ask me about how it is with my soul. We'd probably both look at each other and say at the same time.... "its complicated."
That's an intriguing way to start the discussion, Kevin. Thank you. It isn't a secret that Lincoln had very complex view of Blacks -- not in favor of us serving on juries, voting, marrying white ppl and in favor of "the superior position being assigned to the white man." -- so I'll assume he'd be shocked to be seated at a table with me. Once he got past that (Could he?), I'd hope that he'd ask me what makes me believe I, as a Black person, am his equal.
Lincoln's views certainly evolved over the course of his lifetime and especially his presidency, but you might be surprised by how he interacted with African Americans at the White House. I highly recommend Jonathan White's book, *A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House.*
Unfortunately, I have zero bandwidth to read another book (I still need to crack the cover of Smashing Statues ... waaa!). Thank you for the recommendation, though. Many Presidents (including 45) invite Black ppl to the White House and still believe in "the superior position being assigned to the white man." I don't deny Lincoln's gestures, that's why I regard his view of us as "complex." If you'd positioned this as what I'd ask him, I'd steer the conversation in a different direction, but since that's not what we're doing, I'll stick with hoping he'd ask me why I am (what makes me believe I am) his equal.
And a woman! I’ve read both Elizabeth Keckley’s memoir, *Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, And Four Years in the White House* and *Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave* by Jennifer Fleischner. Mrs. Keckley bought her freedom in 1855 and moved to Washington to become the dressmaker to many Congressional wives, including Mrs. Jefferson Davis. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-war-in-america/biographies/elizabeth-keckley.html
I don’t recall if she ever ate with the First Family, though.
I’ve read that Lincoln expressed interest in visiting California and the West Coast in his second term. Since I’m a native Californian, I would expect that he might ask questions about the state and what issues and concerns Californians might have. Of course, this assumes I’m a Californian from the 1860’s!
Whilst they may play a footnote in Civil War history, I'd like to sit down with the Manchester (and Lancashire) cotton mill workers who (in 1862) voted in support of Lincoln and the Union, whilst experiencing ongoing personal deprivation themselves. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2013/feb/04/lincoln-oscars-manchester-cotton-abraham
(and, though he may be quite busy at other dinners - if he has free time - Frederick Douglass...)
I would choose Judah P. Benjamin. A fascinating, brilliant, charismatic man, and a great conversationalist. I don''t think he'd ask me a specific question, but I do think we'd strike up a very stimulating and enjoyable conversation very quickly. I also think that when I disagreed with him he'd respect me for my convictions and for defending those convictions.
I think I'd like to have a seat at the dinner table of Major General Frederick Steele, perhaps up at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island two years after the end of the Civil War which more or less coincided with the end of what was called the Pig War, which essentially resolved a boundary dispute between the U.S. and Britain over what was not yet Canada. Did Steele's experience in command of Union troops in Brownsville, Texas, in the summer of '65, and his negotiations with the French military, massed on the far shore of the Rio Grande, representing the interests of the Emperor Maximillian on the southern U.S. border, prepare him in any way for negotiating the northern U.S. border a year or two later? Did Steele feel that his decision to retreat from Camden, Arkansas, back to Little Rock in April 1864 was the right decision? It did enable him to maintain his army's occupation of that state as an alternative to following orders and attempting to take possession of Shreveport, the Confederate shadow capital of Louisiana? He had, after all, taken possession of Little Rock through military action nine months earlier? Could Shreveport have been more challenging than Little Rock? Was the damage to his reputation for that failure justified and was he able to redeem himself a year later by leading the Column from Pensacola, consisting of nine regiments of U.S. Colored Troops, recruited in Mississippi and Louisiana, in the successful assault on Fort Blakeley, resulting in the surrender of Mobile? I'd also be curious to know about his planned trip from the Oregon Territory to the Monterey Peninsula in California. Was it a military assignment? Or just a well-earned vacation and a chance to visit his youngest brother, Edgar, who on Frederick's advice had moved to San Luis Obispo and was well on his way to becoming a prosperous dairy farmer after a decade or more of teaching English and barely surviving in eastern Ohio's Western Reserve just west of Pennsylvania. What were Frederick's plans for the next ten or twenty years after the Civil War? Would he remain in the regular army indefinitely or seriously consider retiring before the age of fifty on a fairly generous general's pension? I'm guessing we'll never know, since he died, less than three years after his Civil War service ended, in a carriage accident on the Monterey Peninsula from a cause of death listed as a fit of apoplexy. Boxes and boxes of his letters, both official as well as personal, are stored and have been indexed thoroughly at Stanford University and the Hoover Institute. Steele is descended from a family that founded Hartford, Connecticut, early in the 18th century. His older brother, Osman Steele, served as Undersheriff in a county in New York's Catskills, and died enforcing legal rights to collect rents owed to heirs of former Dutch colonists and opposing clandestine resistors to those rent collections in a movement known as the Anti-Rent War. Osman Steele was murdered in 1844 a year after Frederick Steele graduated from West Point as a classmate of U.S. Grant. Steele's parents and siblings lapsed into poverty as a result of that murder and the resultant upheaval of the social order. During the War with Mexico Steele had served under Winfield Scott and established a reputation as a highly disciplined, capable and skilled soldier. I suspect class warfare was just as big a factor in the Civil War as it was in WWII.
Thanks for this. I know next to nothing about Steele.
Thanks everyone for your responses. Really enjoyed reading them.
I like George's selection of Frederick Douglass. Now *that* would be an interesting evening.
As for me, I would like to talk with my great-great-great grandfather's twin sons. Both were captured by the Confederate army at Plymouth, NC on April 20, 1864. They were sent to Andersonville and both survived---sort of. When Sherman got close to Andersonville, they were sent with a number of other Union prisoners to Charleston, SC. Issac Rice died of dysentery and was buried in Charleston; his twin Abraham survived and returned to Pennsylvania and later went to Kansas. Out of the 7 brothers, 5 fought for the Union.
I'm sure on elf the things they would ask is, "Do you always eat this well?"
I'm sure a more serious question would be ones we struggle to answer even today. Why do we still see remnants of the Confederacy being revered now days? Confederate flags, statues, the Lost Cause, re-enactment of battles (remember, they would be asking this), among other things they would see here in my home state of Florida (and elsewhere).
It would make for an eventful evening.
I would like to dine with Frederick Douglass. I imagine that he would wonder that even after women's suffrage, an election of a black president and several voters' rights acts, why does it appear that the struggle for equality in America seems to be moving backwards? And then he would ask what am I doing about that? That would be an interesting conversation.
I hope I may invite a trio: Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend, the self-emancipating slavery escapees who, acting with beautiful agency, made the FIRST momentous decision in the Fort Monroe freedom story of May 1861. And I hope I may report what I would ask THEM.
Their decision to escape and seek sanctuary at the Union's mighty, and mighty symbolic, stronghold in Confederate Virginia enabled General Benjamin Butler to make the SECOND momentous decision: to declare them contraband of war, and refuse to return them to the moral criminal who claimed to "own" them.
Fort Monroe by then was the name for the Chesapeake's flat Gibraltar, called Point Comfort when the first captive Africans arrived there in 1619. So it's the place where British North American slavery began in 1619, and where U.S. slavery began to crumble in 1861--thanks to those two decisions, the second of which, according to Adam Goodheart, was the first instance of a federal decision to deny the legal practice of respecting "ownership" of Americans called "slaves."
To greater or lesser extent, those three escapees lived out the country's founding principles. So did the half million who followed, in various places across the land, pressing President Lincoln and history itself toward emancipation. No less than James M. McPherson says that a "self-emancipation thesis" has come to dominate scholarly understanding of emancipation's wartime political evolution. (But it's scanted, or worse, in popular understanding, which is why I'm preparing to start a Substack that would elaborate on my 2022 History News Network essay about these things.)
So here's the question: It's widely understood that antebellum Black people knew that a civil war would bring an enormous freedom opportunity. By capitalizing on it, they demonstrated an inherent knowledge, a natural understanding, of what Jefferson wrote about and what Lincoln re-illuminated. To what extent were self-emancipators directly aware of the principles of the Declaration of Independence?
Steven T. Corneliussen
Perhaps my maternal great-great grandfather and my paternal great grandfather. They fought for the Confederacy, were both small farmers in Virginia with no slaves, and were captured within a day of each other at Five Forks. If I were in appropriate period dress, they might ask me how many slaves I owned. If in 21st century attire, even Sunday best, they’d probably refuse to sit down with me! After we got that out of the way, I would want to ask them why they fought, and see if their reasons aligned in any way with Thomas Fleming’s *A Disease In the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We fought the Civil War* c.2013. He posits that the fear of slave rebellion, starting with Haiti and including Gabriel’s Conspiracy in 1800 and Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, both in Virginia, drove those who were not enslavers to fight to protect their lives and families.
How's your steak?
I’d choose Lincoln too, no contest for me.
I’d ask him what his plans were for reb leaders. He didn’t want them hung of course, but viewed them differently from civilians and volunteers. He just wanted them to leave the country- what if they didn’t? Any prosecution? Expatriate? Military tribunals?
🤔
If I got to pick, I'd probably pick my great-grandfather, Dr. McGuire, and hope he'd ask me why I think slavery was the cause of the war. If I had dinner with Lincoln (he knew my great-great-grandparents, the Kinzies of Chicago; Juliette published a book, "Wau-Bun: the Early Day in the Northwest") we'd probably chat about my relatives.
I'd go with James Marshall Lilly, Jr., of the 1st NC Cavalry. He was from a slaveholding family in piedmont, NC, who may have been conscripted (or not, the records are not clear) and I really need to sit down with someone like him. But the real reason for him is that his mother, who died in 1847, was the subject of my dissertation and boy do I have questions about her. And if he was anything like her, I'm sure that he'd ask me about how it is with my soul. We'd probably both look at each other and say at the same time.... "its complicated."
That's an intriguing way to start the discussion, Kevin. Thank you. It isn't a secret that Lincoln had very complex view of Blacks -- not in favor of us serving on juries, voting, marrying white ppl and in favor of "the superior position being assigned to the white man." -- so I'll assume he'd be shocked to be seated at a table with me. Once he got past that (Could he?), I'd hope that he'd ask me what makes me believe I, as a Black person, am his equal.
Hi Lisa,
Lincoln's views certainly evolved over the course of his lifetime and especially his presidency, but you might be surprised by how he interacted with African Americans at the White House. I highly recommend Jonathan White's book, *A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House.*
https://amzn.to/3pGGYEj
Unfortunately, I have zero bandwidth to read another book (I still need to crack the cover of Smashing Statues ... waaa!). Thank you for the recommendation, though. Many Presidents (including 45) invite Black ppl to the White House and still believe in "the superior position being assigned to the white man." I don't deny Lincoln's gestures, that's why I regard his view of us as "complex." If you'd positioned this as what I'd ask him, I'd steer the conversation in a different direction, but since that's not what we're doing, I'll stick with hoping he'd ask me why I am (what makes me believe I am) his equal.
And a woman! I’ve read both Elizabeth Keckley’s memoir, *Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, And Four Years in the White House* and *Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave* by Jennifer Fleischner. Mrs. Keckley bought her freedom in 1855 and moved to Washington to become the dressmaker to many Congressional wives, including Mrs. Jefferson Davis. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-war-in-america/biographies/elizabeth-keckley.html
I don’t recall if she ever ate with the First Family, though.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love your question for Lincoln. I don't know if he was ever directly challenged in such a way.
I’ve read that Lincoln expressed interest in visiting California and the West Coast in his second term. Since I’m a native Californian, I would expect that he might ask questions about the state and what issues and concerns Californians might have. Of course, this assumes I’m a Californian from the 1860’s!