1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [268]
16. Inside Business: The Hampton Roads Business Journal, June 11, 2010; Hampton Roads Daily Press, Aug. 9, 2010; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Jan. 10, 2010.
17. U.S. Census data, 1870–1920; Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, pp. 145–46. The census worker in 1920 recorded Mallory’s age as seventy, but other records make it clear he was approximately a decade older than that.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The total number of books published on the Civil War since 1861 roughly equals the total number of soldiers—both Union and Confederate—who fought the First Battle of Bull Run. Sending my own off into that fray, I have of course benefited enormously from the work of those who went before, including trailblazing research during the past two decades that has done much to open new fields of inquiry and correct past imbalances.
Surprisingly, there are still some topics that remain too little explored, such as the presidential campaigns of 1860 (especially the Wide Awake phenomenon); the transcontinental telegraph; the distinctive roles of Germans and other white ethnic groups; and the story of the contrabands at Fortress Monroe and elsewhere during the opening year of the war.
Space does not permit a full listing of every source that I drew upon; the bibliographical essay below touches on a few highlights for each chapter, especially the secondary sources. A much more complete bibliography can be found on the website for this book, www.1861book.com.
The Civil War era is, of course, also incredibly rich in visual images. The technology of the printed page cannot do full justice to the astonishing detail captured in a glass-plate photograph, but that of the Internet can: zooming in bit by bit is like entering the vanished moment itself. High-resolution versions of the photographs in this book are available on my website. Readers will also find there the full texts of poems quoted as epigraphs.
In referring to African-Americans, I have used the terms “Negro” and “colored,” in keeping with the usage of the time. Unfortunately, giving a full sense of the period also compels the historian to quote racist rhetoric that is often quite ugly. But this was so much a part of the political culture of the Civil War era, in both North and South, that it cannot and should not be avoided. In providing verbal quotations from African-Americans themselves as reported by whites, I have, reluctantly, preserved the “dialect” versions used in almost all the original sources, even though some of the conventional spellings (e.g., “wuz” for “was”) served no conceivable phonetic purpose, and were as characteristic of Southern whites’ speech as of blacks’. Trying to correct this would have required bowdlerizing the original sources, and I believe that the voices of the original speakers ring through eloquently despite the white writers’ reflexive habits of belittlement.
Period newspapers are essential sources for the Civil War era, but must be used with caution, since objectivity was an alien concept in the 1860s, and most editors cared more about providing sensational coverage than about being accurate. (For example, many Northern papers originally described the disasters at Big Bethel and Bull Run as magnificent Union victories.) On the other hand, the concept of eyewitness journalism was just coming into its own, and when a reporter was actually on the scene, he often recounted details quite vividly and usually with reasonable accuracy. Even “second-tier” papers such as the Cincinnati Daily Commercial and the Philadelphia Press often provide a surprising amount of valuable firsthand reporting by those papers’ national correspondents.
It is considerably more difficult to hear the voices of ordinary Americans from the months that this book covers than from later in the war. Eventually, of course, the long struggle would generate a tremendous outpouring of letters and diaries written by enlisted men and their families back home, papers that (unlike most routine correspondence during peacetime) would be treasured and preserved by them and their