Open Thread Thursday: "The Research Trip That Isn't a Vacation"
I know, I know, it’s not Thursday. Predictably, I completely lost track of the days while on vacation this week in beautiful Cape Elizabeth, Maine with my wife and Otis.
I’ve had to use part of my vacation, however, to finalize my research trip next week to the Beaufort/Port Royal region of coastal South Carolina. Given the beautiful weather predicted for next week, I am describing this as a “research trip that isn’t a vacation,” so that my wife doesn’t kill me. :-)
Though I’ve been to Charleston and Savannah, I’ve never spent time in the area in between. As many of you know, this is the area where Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts spent the summer of 1863. I want to see as many of the sites that Shaw wrote about in his letters home and catch a glimpse of what he experienced in those final seven weeks of his life.
We forget that his time along the sea coast islands was brief, but that doesn’t diminish its significance. It was Shaw’s first trip to the Deep South and it couldn’t have come at a more critical moment in 1863. The United States military had occupied the region since November 1861 and had, along with northern reformers, attempted to aid the thousands of formerly enslaved people who worked the land and called it home.