The Faculty Lounge

Female Institute Trivia

I wish I had the resources to do more with womens colleges in University, Court, and Slave.  I talk some about proslavery thought at womens colleges (and academies) -- through a moral philosophy treatise written by the president of the Tuscaloosa Female Seminary, a proslavery tract written by the head of a female seminary in Greensboro, Alabama, and the short stories written by a teacher in several female seminaries.  University, Court, and Slave relies heavily upon literary and graduation addresses and I use a few given at female institutes, though they're often more on topics like the utility of beauty than on more immediately political topics.  It won't be in this book, but I hope to deal more down the road with ideas and also demography of southern female institutes.  

This is a long way around to saying that I have a trivia question related to a female institute from the pre-War era.  Where is it?  This is a wind-up to a real doozie of a trivia question (or maybe it'll be a series of questions).

Slave Quarters and Student Tours

They're talking about adding the slave quarters to the tour at the University of Alabama again.  The physical surroundings at the campus -- like the slave quarters -- really convey well the connections of the University to slavery.

For those who can't make it to Tuscaloosa for the tour, here's an article that discusses the ideas of education, slavery, and politics in circulation on that campus before the war.  I focus on the addresses -- often given at the beginning of the school year, though also on July Fourth -- that distinguished visitors gave to the students and faculty.  Women and enslaved people were sometimes in the audience at those addresses as well.  Those addresses illustrate the intellectual connections between the University and the defense of slavery.

If you're interested in the ideas in circulation at southern universities before the war, here's an article on addresses at UNC and another one on the ideas of William and Mary history professor Thomas Dew, who wrote a proslavery pamphlet in the wake of Nat Turner's rebellion.

The illustration is from the Library of Congress' fabulous Historic Buildings Survey.  It's one of the slave quarters behind the President's Mansion.

University of Virginia and College Architecture

A couple of UVA alumni commented on my post about Jim Hall's article on the University of Alabama's destruction during the war about how much Alabama's pre-war campus looked like UVA's campus.  (After the war, Alabama modeled one of its dormitories on Virginia Military Institute -- which is a story for another time, but I always love to talk about VMI).  That led my colleague Bill Turnier to point me to wikipedia's discussion of the University of Virginia's influence on campus architture, particularly on southern schools.

Taking a Measure of the Past and Present

Paul Lombardo, the Bobby Lee Cook professor of law at Georgia State, has a terrific op-ed, "When Heroes Stumble," over a controversy about an award given by the American Sexuallty Transmitted Diseases Association in the name of Dr. Thomas Parran.  Here's the beginning of Lombardo's essay: 

The American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association faces a quandary. The name of Dr Thomas Parran, a 20th century hero in the field of sexually transmitted disease prevention, accompanies a prestigious award given by the organization annually. Members are now confronted with the unsettling realization that Parran, like many honored figures of the past, also had a less heroic side. It was already known that he presided over the Public Health Service in the early years of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study; more recently, the world learned that the scandalous intentional infection studies in Guatemala after World War II also occurred on Parran’s watch. Material from the files of Dr John Cutler, who directed the Guatemala experiments, has provided more troubling details. It suggests that Parran not only knew the details of Cutler’s work but also endorsed it with full awareness of its ethical toxicity. Should Parran, a giant of the field, be banished from its Pantheon, or should his eponymous award remain despite the newly found stain on his reputation?

Read the rest here and more on the Parran Award controversy here.

The image is of the Buck v. Bell monument in Charlottesville, which I'm using because Lombardo wrote the leading book on the case and is a leader of the movement to recognize and atone for the tragedy of forced sterilization in the twentieth century. h/t to Greg Dorr, who's the author of another leading work on eugenics in the twentieth century, Segregation's Science.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams (1925-2013)

I saw in the obituaries at the New York Times yedsterday morning that Essie Mae Washington-Williams passed away on Feburary 4.  She was the daughter of Strom Thurmond.  A few years back the monument on the South Carolina statehouse grounds was altered to include her as one of Senator Thurmond's children.

What a story.

Partners and Friendship

Thinking some more about Django.  I'm going to be talking about a bunch of vignettes from the movie, I think, as I try to work through some of my reaction.  I've been wondering about the parternship and then friendship of Schultz and Django -- and in particular that Schultz pays $12,000 for Broomhilda.  At some point the Schultz-Django (or should I call it the Schultz-Freeman) relationship migrated from the point of business to friendship.  I guess that started pretty early on, though it began with an owner-slave relationship, Schultz promised Django freedom in exchange for his help and then it moved to Schultz promising Django help as part of the bounty-hunting business.  And by the time they arrived at Candyland, Schultz was willing to spend a fortune to help Django and Broomhilda.  Would it introduce too paternal an interpretation into this movie about slavery to say that Schultz thought of Django like a son?  (I have a lot more to say on this point if anyone's interested.)

If Candie is Simon Legare, then I'm thinking that Schultz is John Brown.  Schultz is willing to die for the cause of opposition to slavery; and late in the movie Django pays respects to Schultz' body.  So that set me to thinking about business partners who then became friends.  And my mind turned to a cemetery monument in the Shockoe Hill Cemetery in Richmond, which was put up by a businessman to commemorate the life of his partner.  I'm intrigued by it for a couple of reasons -- one is that though it's stone, it looks like wood (hard to tell that from the picture).  The second is that I don't recall seeing a lot of monuments like this.

Petersburg Courthouse

Last December I started a tradition of posting a favorite picture from the year.   That one was from the Gettysburg cemetery.  This tradition isn't quite Elf on the Shelf (btw, whoever came up with that idea is an absolute genius -- what a marketing coup!).  In re Elf: have you seen the internet industry they've got going -- including a recipe for reindeer nuggets.  (Not what you might think.)  Ok -- back to this post....

I thought that I'd post one of my favorite pictures of this year -- it's of the Petersburg Courthouse.  I absolutely adore that building -- and city.  One of these years I'm going to have to spend some time working on probate records there, following in the footsteps of Suzanne Lebsock's Free Women of Petersburg.  I'm interested in how the incidence of trusts in southern urban settings differs from even super affluent rural areas.

Here's to a 2013 filled with lots of exciting teaching and scholarship!

World's Hardest Antebellum Building Trivia Question

It's the end of the year -- and you all have been fantastic at picking off the trivia questions.  Over time I guess the accomplishments of Owen, Richard Paschal, Jason Mazzone, Calvin Massey, Alissa Ardito, Joan Vogel, Bob Steinfeld, Joel Eisen, Robert Folsom, Brando Starkey, and anyone else who picked off a trivia question this year whom I've failed to list will live in myth and memory.  And over time the memory and the myth will converge.  That's how this memory business works, after all.

So I guess it's time to have a really tough test.  Even if the heading of this post is an exaggeration (which it may not be), this is certainly very, very difficult.   This is the hardest antebellum trivia question I've asked and it's the kind pf question I don't think is fair, really -- it's in a very obscure place.  Where is it and what is it?  And why is it important?  Good luck.  Even with the writing on the front it's an absurdly difficult  question.  Go ahead, google it.  See if that helps.  When you're ready for a hint let me know.

Hanover County Confederate Monument

Now that Richard Paschal's identified the Hanover County Courthouse, here's the picture of the Confederate monument on the courthouse lawn that I promised.

Rather impressive, but not my favorite Confederate monument.   I prefer ones with images of people, I think.  Whatever -- as I say, it's impressive.

Next up -- the world's hardest antebellum building trivia.

Greensville Virginia World War I Memorial

Now that Owen's identified the Greensville County Courthouse in Emporia, Virginia, I want to talk a little bit about the World War I monument on the courthouse lawn.  At right is a picture of it.

Here's what I find really interesting about this -- the gun is not from the US; it's a captured German cannon.  Am I the only person who finds it surprising that we use a captured weapon as a monument?  I don't know as I've ever seen this before.  But I guess I can see this in some ways as making sense -- it's a reminder of what our soldiers faced in battle, for instance.  As the plaque in from of the gun says:

A captured Imperial German Army 150MM Field Artillery Cannon manufactured by Krupp Works in 1917.  Many thousands of Americans and allied young men gave their lives in France to enemy fire from weapons like this to make the world safe for democracy.  Placed here by local veterans of Bulla Post 46 American Legion in 1925.  On Permanent Loan by U.S. Army it is one of 8 allocated as memorials to these brave soldiers and veterans.

Now, the second thing I find surprising: the gun was restored in 2008 by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.  This is further evidence -- as if any is necessary -- of reunion through violence.  Mostly people speak about the Spanish American War as a moment of reunion; maybe we should be talking about World War I in these terms, as well.  Of course World War I was also a key moment in the African American march towards equality (see chapter 1).

I have two more trivia questions before the end of the year.  Next up ... colonial courthouse trivia.

Courthouse Trivia

Well, it's been a long time since we've had a courhouse trivia question.  Maybe that's been because it's been a long time since I've visited a new courthouse!  But on the road today I detoured for about an hour to get this picture.  It's at an oblique angle because the front has the county name in huge letters and so a picture head-on would be a complete give-away.  I think the only part that goes back to before the Civil War is the center part.  The wings look like a twentieth-century addition.  And might I add that I'm not a fan of the gray paint on this building.  

Once we get this identified, I want to talk about the World War I monument in the foreground.  It's unexpected in two ways.

Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History ... coming soon

I'm delighted to report that Sally Hadden and Patricia Minter's co-edited volume, Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History will be coming out from University of Georgia Press soon.  Cribbing now from the UGA Press website for the book:

In Signposts, Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's pathbreaking 1984 work, Ambivalent Legacy, inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history.

Contributors to Signposts explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in Signposts show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South.

The contributors are Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Laura F. Edwards, James W. Ely Jr., Tim Alan Garrison, Sally E. Hadden, Roman J. Hoyos, Thomas N. Ingersoll, Jessica K. Lowe, Patricia Hagler Minter, Cynthia Nicoletti, Susan Richbourg Parker, Christopher W. Schmidt, Jennifer M. Spear, Christopher R. Waldrep, Peter Wallenstein, Charles L. Zelden, and me.

It will not surprise faculty lounge readers that I'm very much looking forward to this volume.  My essay asks that intellectual historians of the pre-Civil War South more fully integrate lawyers and judges into their story.  In particular I argue that because the law (in this case treatises and appellate decisions) was closely linked to economic and demographic reality that legal thinkers show how people who truck in ideas were closely related to their society, rather than distinct from it.  This is a point of substantial contention among historians of southern intellectual history.  Though my dataset in this chapter is largely drawn from appellate cases, I develop some of these themes about how lawyers and judges reflected the ideas of their era in a recent article on addresses by judges and lawyers here at UNC before the Civil War.  (And in an earlier essay on addresses at the University of Alabama before the war.)

I must add that I suggested they use a picture of Blackhead Signpost Road in Southampton as the cover art.  I thought it fit so perfectly with the legal history of the South -- the road, after all, gets its name from the slave who was executed there and whose head was left on a post as a warning to others.  Wow. About this I will have a lot -- lot -- more to say in the spring when I start talking about the Nat Turner rebellion trials.  Obviously wiser (or maybe it's calmer) heads prevailed in this case.

The Smithsonian and Slavery

Mark Auslander's recent article in Southern Spaces, "Enslaved Labor and Building the Smithsonian: Reading the Stones," shows that the stones used to build the original Smithsonian (now known as "The Castle") were quarried by slaves.  The Washington Post has a story about this here.  I guess at this point none of this should surprise me; slavery was so ubiquitous.  When I have some more time I want to talk about Mark's work and about his reliance on probate records to trace the lineage of the slaves who worked at the quarry in Maryland.  And maybe I'll join that with a little talk about the controversy over Jefferson as a slave owner.

Update: Check out the comments to the Post article; there are over 700 as of 5 pm and a bunch are raising the issue of reparations.

The image is of the Smithsonian Building from the Library of Congress' Making of American website.

Monument to Slaves -- Coming Today to Union County, North Carolina

My colleague Bill Turnier reminded me that today there is a new monument to African Americans who served the Confederate cause coming to Monroe, North Carolina (in Union County).  WUNC, the local NPR station, ran a short story on this this morning -- apparently the monument will list the names of 10 African American youths, nine of whom were slaves, who served the Confederate army.  According to the story this is the first monument to African Americans in Union County.  I'm sorry that I couldn't attend this -- just too much work to be done here to get away for it.

Though NPR spun this as honoring African Americans, I think this has a lot more to do with neo-Confederate history about loyal slaves who fought for (or in this case worked as servants to) the Confederacy.  Thus, I'd classify this more as a modern day faithful slave monument than as a monument to the achievements of African Americans.

One other thing: the story I linked to above from the Charlotte Observer mentions that many years later those people received small state pensions as Civil War veterans.  I've been meaning to look systematically at the southern state pensions to African Americans.  The last time I started investigating this, I focused on South Carolina -- and as I recall the state started giving pensions to African American "veterans" substantially later than it gave them to white veterans.

I guess I need to add this to the list of war monuments that classify Americans based on race.

The image is of the North Carolina monument at Appomattox.

Update: Here is the Charlotte Observer story about the dedication ceremony.  As I predicted, the slaves are being used to promote Confederate heritgage.  But what I found of particular interest is that one of the people there is the daughter -- yes, daughter, not remote descendant -- of one of the slaves.  She was born in the 1920s, when her father was elderly.

Reconciliation Monument Trivia

Well, given the conflict over Bill Reynolds' post on the South and the Civil War, I thought it might be time for a  little talk of reconciliation here!  So ... I have a trivia question related to a monument dedicated to reconciliation.  Where most of the monuments related to the Civil War honor one side or the other (most, but not all -- you may recall my discussion of a monument put up in Dinwiddie County back in the early 1970s that talked about both sides) the one at right is dedicated to talk of re-unification.  Whether it does that effectively -- and how it attempts this -- I want to talk about after someone identifies where it is and when it was put up.

All of this talk of war and reconciliation, though makes me realize that I also want to talk about Gone With the Wind.  It's been a long time since I've seen that movie and it's not something I think a lot about; though I recognize that the images it promulgated about a prosperous south in the era of slavery and the happiness of the pre-War era (as well as the evil Yankees) was critically important for decades.  But on Wednesday night as I was editing my paper on the Nat Turner trials I had it on in the background.  Odd juxtaposition; that's for sure.  

That got me to thinking about any number of things.  One of the things that I'm interested in is change between generations.  I'm interested in shifts within families, but also within a culture.  And I find when there are human connections between past events and the present that there is a particular salience to those past events.  This is one of the reasons that I think reparations for Tulsa riot victims presents (soon I shall have to say presented) a particularly compelling case.  

I think of GWTW as a relic of another age.  I mean it was released in 1939.  Before the modern civil rights movement; before World War II.  That was a long time ago.  And that caused me to look up a little bit about the cast -- I mean, who were these people?  I've heard good things about Clark Gable's views on race.  Little aside here, which my friend Mark Auslander told me when we were talking about GWTW's opening in Atlanta.  Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her performance, was not allowed in the Lowe's Grand Theatre in Atlanta.  Gable, Mark tells me, initially wasn't going to go either, but McDaniel convinced him to attend.  The person most associated in the popular mind with mamie was barred by Jim Crow from the attending the opening.  Wow.  

Anyway, to get back to the story: I was interested in when the people who made and starred in the movie passed away; I thought that would be a gauge of when our country changed.  The first of the major stars to pass away was Leslie Howard; he was killed when the civilian airplane he was traveling in was shot down by the Nazis in 1943.  Hattie McDaniel -- who, by the way, was part of a lawsuit challenging a racially restrictive covenant in Los Angeles -- died in 1952.  Clark Gable passed away in 1960; Vivien Leigh in 1969.  Those were all early deaths -- Howard was 47; McDaniel was 57; Gable was 59; Leigh was 54.

That's it for the major stars, except one: Olivia De Havilland.  She is still with us.  What an unexpected turn that someone who was a central figure in that movie is still with us.  We have a direct, living connection to the world of that movie.

Veterans Day Legal History & Monument Trivia

Ok -- today in honor of Veterans Day I want to combine a Civil War monument and a Supreme Court trivia question.  I hope I get this question right -- I think I've got all these pieces working together.  First off, where is the monument at right?  Second -- and this is where I may be a little off, but I think I have the story right.  This monument featured in a movie about a US Supreme Court Justice.  Which Justice?  Which movie?

The Latest on the Law of Confederate Monuments

I know Kyle Graham's going to make fun of me for this, but ... have you heard about the controversy in Caddo Parish, Louisiana over whether the United Daughters of the Confederacy or the Parish own the plot of land where their Confederate monument, placed there in the early twentieth century, is located?  (I just realized that there's an article that deals with the Confederate flag at the courthouse in Caddo.) Or the lawsuit filed against Selma for revoking a permit to repair a Confederate statue in a cemetery there?

Sussex County Confederate Monument

As further evidence that Kyle Graham's gotten exactly right what our motto should be here at the faculty lounge ("your go-to source for breaking news on Confederate monuments and eugenic experiments") ... and now that Owen's identified the Sussex County Court House, I want to talk a little bit about the Confederate monument on the courthouse's lawn!

And in particular I want to focus on the inscription in the front, "The principles for which they fought live eternally."  This is in some tension with a monument at Appomattox Court House, whose monument speaks of  "principles believed fundamental."  Maybe I make too much out of the past tense on the Appomattox monument -- but certainly the Sussex monument is stark in its support of the principles of the war.  And here's a picture of the entire monument with the courthouse in the background.

I highly recommend a visit to Sussex next time you're on I-95 south of Petersburg -- it's not too far off 95 and is an astonishingly beautiful hamlet.

One of these days I'll get back to talking about eugenics.  I've been distracted of late with work on Nat Turner.

Civil War Building Trivia

Well, here's a photograph from south of the Mason-Dixon Line of a building that was occupied by General Grant for a time.  Where is it?  (And what's its pre-war history?  This is on a spot of substantial importance for decades, I guess really centuries, before the war.)

Yale College Naming

Thanks to a tip from Leah Campbell, I see this article from the Yale Herald on the naming of two new residential colleges at Yale.  It has extensive discussion of the naming of Yale's colleges back in the 1930s, including the decision to name one of the colleges after Yale alumnus John C. Calhoun and what we make of that decision now.

Ah, the law and morality of building naming and renaming.  The image is Calhoun's home, Fort Hill, on the Clemson campus.