Over the years, we have built up an array of special online resources designed to assist with teaching the story of Gettysburg, but this summer, we’ve done some of our best work yet on this front.  Our 2018 interns –Frank Kline, Becca Stout, and Cooper Wingert– have organized a series of fascinating posts that tackle less-familiar topics related to the 1863 battle, and the famous cemetery dedication which followed.  

Teachers and students can now learn first-hand many of the tragic details about the so-called “slave hunt” that occurred during the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania in June 1863.  Wingert provides links to diaries and other records that detail how the Army of Northern Virginia captured black residents in south-central Pennsylvania, treating them like fugitive slaves.  One of the cases involved a free black man named Amos Barnes, who was actually later released from a Confederate prison in Richmond because of the intervention of two Dickinsonians.  This summer, Wingert also wrote about the Confederate occupation and shelling of Carlisle in late June and early July, which was part of the famous 1863 campaign, but has mostly been forgotten because of the immense scale of the battle which followed at Gettysburg.  Wingert actually wrote a book about the Confederate approach to Harrisburg a few years ago, but now he has curated several primary sources related to the campaign, included several that have never before been available online.  

Our other interns focused on the story of the cemetery dedication in November 1863 and Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address.  Kline organized an incredibly useful post detailing contemporary newspaper reaction to Lincoln’s remarks and subsequent recollected accounts about how the short speech was written and received.  Kline’s work was inspired by Gabor Boritt’s thought-provoking study, The Gettysburg Gospel (2005).  Many teachers too easily embrace myths about the Gettysburg Address –that it was written on the back of envelope, for example, or that it was poorly received at first– and this post offers a helpful corrective.  Stout’s post also provides an important supplement, especially for classes or families that might be visiting the Soldiers’ National Cemetery themselves.  Stout describes how a half a dozen black army veterans came to be buried in the Civil War section of the national cemetery at Gettysburg.  The story is far more complicated than you might imagine, beginning with the sad revelation that even though the Battle of Gettysburg occurred seven months after the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s endorsement of black soldiers, Union commanders still excluded black men from combat roles in the 1863 fighting in Pennsylvania.  That meant, at first, that the soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg was segregated, despite all of the hope of “a new birth of freedom.”

Other House Divided Project resources on Gettysburg

• Lincoln’s Gettysburg Addresses (2013) exhibit for Google Arts & Culture which tells the story of the five known copies of the speech in Lincoln’s own handwriting
• Gettysburg Virtual Tour (2013) video tour of the battlefield co-produced by the Gilder Lehrman Institute that includes 13 stops and one-hour total of material hosted by Mathew Pinsker
• Blog Divided posts (2007-2018) make sure to check out over two dozen posts on the battle, campaign and its aftermath at our main project blog site
• Research engine records (2007-2018), our main research engine database contains over a thousand records related to Gettysburg, including some amazing zoomable maps
• Lincoln’s Writings (2015), our multi-media edition of Lincoln’s writings ranks the Gettysburg Address as the #1 most teachable Lincoln document –check out the array of resources on this page
• Confederate monument (2015) –Did you know there is a Confederate monument in Mechanicsburg, PA marking an element of the 1863 Confederate invasion?  Check out this classroom-friendly discussion post to find out more.

 

 

While phones can be a distraction in the classroom, with augmented reality (AR) they can help bring lessons to life and create an interactive learning experience. By simply aiming their phones at augmented images, students can unlock the personal stories of historical figures, triggering videos and other online content (called auras). Here at the House Divided Studio, we are working to enhance our visitor experience and to model classroom applications through the use of AR. You can learn more about the various uses of AR and how to create your own free augmented experiences in this instructional post.

Downloading the HP Reveal app

To view the auras created by the House Divided Project, visitors and educators can download the free HP Reveal app, create an account and follow the House Divided channel in HP Reveal. (House Divided content won’t trigger until you follow the channel). Once those steps are completed, simply open the app, select the blue viewer square located at the bottom of the screen, point your phone at images located throughout the studio and the app generates specific video content (auras) related to those images.

 

 

 

 

Using Augmented Reality

Through AR, teachers can bring new experiences into their classrooms. Below are some of the most innovative uses of AR.

• Augmented Portraits – At the House Divided studio, the walls are decorated with augmented portraits that trigger brief student-produced films. At right, check out this augmented portrait of President James Buchanan (Class of 1809).  You can access all of the House Divided images with AR enhancements here at the online version of our studio.
• Handouts/Facsimiles – Reproductions of historic photos, letters and newspaper articles enable students to connect to personal stories.  Here’s an example of Lincoln’s famous Blind Memorandum from the 1864 election, augmented with a video by project director Matthew Pinsker.
• Virtual field trips –  The Google Expeditions app is already being used in schools. Google created a brief promotional video showing how students at an Iowa middle school experienced world-renowned architecture using the app. The app is free, and can be downloaded and accessed by anyone with a Google account. Google Expeditions shows virtual images of sites accompanied by longer text explanations, available by tapping the bottom of your screen. Especially in classroom settings, Google encourages the use of a Virtual Reality headset for the best experience. Students can place their phones into the headsets, known as Google Cardboard, and experience a site. The Cardboard headsets are available for around $15.

 

Creating Your Own Augmented Reality Experience

Augmented reality is not only an effective teaching tool, but it is also free and relatively easy to learn. Using the HP Reveal studio, you can upload images and augment them. When editing your image, you should use a variety of circles, eclipses and rectangles to mask the background of your image (see below), making faces and main objects easier for the app to recognize.

Tips for masking images:

• Identify and mask mundane objects/spaces in the background of your image. Think of it as removing clutter so the app can recognize the image and trigger your content. For the example above, I masked the indistinct faces of the pursuers in the background, making it easier for the app to focus on the four main figures.
• HP Reveal is often color sensitive. If your trigger image is in color, a black and white version (i.e., photocopies) may not work successfully. For the best results, convert an image to grayscale and then mask it.
• Finally, make sure you save and then share your aura. If you haven’t shared your aura, it will be marked private.

After you have finished masking the image, click “Next” and upload your overlaying video or other content. Press save and then try viewing the image through the HP Reveal app to verify it works.

For more guidance on how to mask images in the HP Reveal studio, see the following House Divided tutorial.

 

Alabama soldier Elihu Wesley Watson arrived in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863 as part of the Army of Northern Virginia’s shocking invasion of Pennsylvania –the one that culminated with the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863).  While he was on brief occupation duty in Carlisle at the end of June, Private Watson spent some time talking to the president of Dickinson College (Herman Johnson), a man he then described in a subsequent letter as “an unmitigated abolitionist and a bitter enemy to the south,” with “principles… as bad as Wm. H Seward’s.” Watson’s fascinating account from the occupation of Carlisle was not an isolated bit of first-hand testimony.  While often overlooked in classroom studies of the great battle, the primary sources describing the days leading up to confrontation at Gettysburg offer rare and very teachable glimpses into the nature of the war and especially into a deeper understanding of the interactions between Confederate soldiers and Northern civilians.

For this post, I have assembled available digitized primary sources from the House Divided Project, the Dickinson College Archives, the Cumberland County Historical Society and from my book, The Confederate Approach on Harrisburg (2012). Featured below are accounts that describe a series of little-known skirmishes and events from the 1863 invasion, including the Confederate occupation of Carlisle. Of special interest are the stories of Samuel Hillman, a Dickinson professor who debated Confederate officers about slavery, and recollections from Dickinson alumni and Confederate officers Richard Beale and Richard Shreve who were among the Confederate troops responsible for shelling Carlisle on the evening of July 1-2.  I created this post originally in the summer of 2018, but we will keep adding materials to it as they become available.  Feel free to make your own suggestions or contributions using the comment box (“Leave A Reply”) below.

 

Primary Sources – Skirmishes 

Confederate Occupation of Carlisle – June 27-28, 1863

• Campbell Brown account (Confederate Staff Officer)
• Samuel Dickinson Hillman account (Dickinson professor) – account for The Methodist, July 18, 1863
• Charles Himes Letter and Diary (Civilian)
• Jedediah Hotchkiss Letter (Confederate map-maker)
• Henry London recollection (32nd North Carolina)
• Robert Park recollection (12th Alabama)
• Leonidas Polk Letter (43rd North Carolina)
• Confederate Supply Requisition, June 27, 1863
• “General Orders No. 72” posted in Carlisle, June 27-30, 1863
• William J. Underwood Letter (4th Georgia) – camps on the Dickinson College campus (Atlanta History Center)
• Elihu Wesley Watson Letter (6th Alabama) – mentions “a long conversation” with Dickinson College President Herman Johnson
• Young Girl’s Pocket Diary, June – July, 1863, CCHS (transcribed by Frank Kline) –The unknown young girl wrote on Monday, June 29 that, “The Rebels are going in every house and stealing all they can”

Confederates in York and Wrightsville – June 27-30, 1863

• Maj. Gen. Jubal Early’s memoir (Confederate)
• Newspaper account of the occupation of York (Civilian)

Battle of Sporting Hill – June 30, 1863

• George Wingate (Union)
• Report of Landis’s Philadelphia Battery (Union)

Shelling of Carlisle – July 1-2, 1863

• Richard L.T. Beale profile and account (Confederate, Dickinson Class of 1838)
• George W. Beale (son of RLT Beale) letter (Confederate)
• Theodore S. Garnett account (Confederate)
• Report of Landis’s Philadelphia Battery (Union)
• Fitzhugh Lee (Confederate)
• Anna Fosdick recollection (Civilian)
• Charles Godfrey Leland memoir (Union)
• Isaac Harris diary (U.S. Sanitary Commission) – took shelter “under the lee of the jail wall” during the shelling
• C. Stuart Patterson account (Union) – wounded during the shelling
• Charles Schaeffer Diary (Union)
• Richard Southeron Shreve account (Confederate, Dickinson Class of 1860)
• John Keagy Stayman letters (Civilian) – Dickinson College as a hospital
• George Wingate (Union)

Primary Sources – Union

• “A Word to Pennsylvania”: New York Times column criticizing Pennsylvanians’ response to the invasion.
• Isaac Harris diary (U.S. Sanitary Commission)
• John Lockwood memoir (23rd New York State National Guard)
• George Wingate history (22nd New York State National Guard)
  

  Union militia camped near Fort Washington, the defenses of Harrisburg. (Cumberland County Historical Society)

Primary Sources – Confederate

• “Gen. Jenkins’ Brigade” Newspaper account (Chronicling America)
• Herman Schuricht Diary (14th Virginia Cavalry)
• William Sillers Letter (30th North Carolina Infantry)

Primary Sources – Civilian

• Anonymous Letter from Cumberland County resident
• “Behavior of Our Citizens Under Rebel Fire” – Carlisle Herald account
• “Boyhood Memories of the Civil War” – James Sullivan account
• “Citizens of the Cumberland Valley” – recruitment poster, July 3, 1863
• Culver Family Correspondence – Hanna Culver’s July 9, 1863 letter detailing the occupation and shelling, and her brother Joseph Culver’s letter of concern for their father.
• Mary Johnson Dillon – (daughter of Dickinson College President Herman Johnson)
• George Chenoweth Letter – Carlisle civilian’s account
• Conway Hillman letter – son of Prof. Samuel D. Hillman, recalls the summer of 1863
• Jacob Hoke – Chambersburg civilian
• “Rebel Occupation of Carlisle” – Carlisle newspaper account
• Thomas Griffith Letter – Carlisle civilian
• Theodore M. Johnson account – (son of Dickinson College President Herman Johnson)

 

For the first twenty years of its existence, there were no black veterans buried in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg.  That famous military cemetery, where President Lincoln had spoken so eloquently about a “new birth of freedom,” was not integrated until 1884, with the burial of Henry Gooden, an African American Civil War soldier from York, PA who had originally enlisted in Carlisle.  Over the next few decades, the U.S. army interred at least five other black veterans  in the cemetery’s Civil War section.  The question is why?  Were they buried there intentionally, to help integrate the “hallowed ground”?

 

Congress authorized the enlistment of black men in the Union army with the Militia Act of July 17, 1862, though President Lincoln did not lend his public support to this policy until the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.  Yet by the time of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, only some black regiments had been mobilized (as United States Colored Troops), and none of them were yet incorporated into the Army of the Potomac.[1] In addition, during the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania in June 1863, Union general Darius Couch, the departmental commander in charge of the state’s defense, actually turned away a group of black volunteers from Philadelphia.[2] For these reasons, no African Americans fought officially at Gettysburg for either the Union field army or the local militias and thus there were no black soldiers to bury afterwards at the national cemetery when President Lincoln was present to help dedicate it on November 19, 1863

In 1884, however, Henry Gooden, a black veteran who had died in 1876, was reinterred at the Soldiers National Cemetery in Gettysburg. Private Henry Gooden does not seem to appear in census records, but his enlistment papers indicate that he was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1821, worked as a laborer, and stood 5’3″.  Gooden enlisted in Carlisle in August 1864 for one year, where he was signed into the Union army by Provost Marshal Robert M. Henderson, a graduate of Dickinson College.  Gooden, who was literate,  served in Company C of the 127th United States Colored Troops. [3] The 127th USCT saw combat briefly near the end of the war and was present for General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. [4] Gooden survived the war, and actually mustered out of service from Texas in late 1865.  He seems to have returned to Carlisle, however, where he died in August 1876. [5] However, on November 8, 1884, Gooden was reburied in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg in the U.S. Regulars Plot, section D, site 30. [6]  Local historian Deb McCauslin claims that the family of the white soldier buried next to Gooden then had his body removed in protest, though park historians have remained somewhat skeptical of that connection, arguing there is no documentary evidence detailing the motivation for the re-interment. [7] 

In 2012, Gettysburg military park historian D. Scott Hartwig wrote a fascinating blog post about the discovery of a photographic image in the NPS archives depicting black army regulars burying one of their own at Gettysburg in 1898. Hartwig identifies a total of four black soldiers who died from disease during the Spanish American War and were buried at Gettysburg in  late 1898. These men were Clifford Henderson, Emmert Martin, and Nicholas Farrell, all of whom served as privates in the 9th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Battalion, and Corporal Harry Prager, who served in Company H, 2nd Tennessee Infantry.[8] 

Hartwig identifies the picture (featured right) as the burial of Clifford Henderson.[9] I found additional information about this story in various newspapers from the period. According to a September 7, 1898 report in Cleveland, “Private Clifford Henderson, Company A. Ninth Ohio (colored) battalion, died of typhoid fever this morning in the Red Cross hospital. His body was sent home to Cleveland for burial.”[10] However, by September 9, the Philadelphia Inquirer was reporting that “this morning the body of Private Clifford Henderson, Company A, Ninth Ohio Battalion, whose home was at Springfield, [OH], was taken to the Gettysburg National Cemetery for burial.”[11]

While there is little other information regarding these soldiers or the particular motivations for burying them in the Civil War section of the national cemetery, Find a Grave has solid entries on Gooden, Prager, Henderson, Martin, and Farrell that show pictures of their grave markers and explain the exact placement of their burial locations. [12] Prager was from Tennessee and served with a unit from his home state, but for some reason, he was buried in the Illinois section.[13] I was also able to find

some interesting information on the 9^th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Battalion, in which three of the soldiers served. This was the unit headed by Col. Charles Young, a famous nineteenth century African American leader. He attended West Point, becoming only the third black graduate of the military academy and later served as the first black U.S. National Park Superintendent. [14] According to a book by Brian G. Shellum, the 9^th Ohio battalion was in the nation’s press quite a bit during the Spanish-American conflict for “its superior discipline and training.” However, the battalion also experienced low morale, especially after their time at Camp Meade, the place where all three soldiers died before being buried at Gettysburg.[15]

The story of the final black veteran buried at Gettysburg is even stranger in some ways than the ones that brought Gooden or Prager and his 1898 peers to the cemetery. Steve Light’s 2012 blog post “Forgotten Valor – The Lincoln Cemetery”   and  James M. Paradis’s  African Americans and the Gettysburg Campaign (2013) help explain how Civil War veteran Charles H. Parker arrived at the cemetery in 1936.[16] Charles H. Parker served in Company F of the 3rd United States Colored Troops. [17]  Upon his death on July 2, 1876, he was buried in the Yellow Hill Cemetery, which became essentially abandoned. [18] Parker’s grave was rediscovered as a part of a restoration project and then reinterred at Gettysburg.[19]

Why these decisions to integrate the Soldiers’ National Cemetery?  The newspaper record is almost completely silent.  Hartwig argues that the four Spanish American War soldiers were buried there because it was the closest National Cemetery.[20] The men had been stationed at Camp Meade in Middletown, Pennsylvania, so the Gettysburg National Cemetery was just under 50 miles away. Margaret S. Creighton’s The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History (2005) argues that segregation within national cemeteries was a major issue for African Americans. She claims that local veteran Lloyd Watts, an African American sergeant during the Civil War, and the “Sons of Good Will,” a black fraternal society he co-created, fought for integration at the various local cemeteries. While

African Americans were permitted to partake in the burials of white soldiers, white soldiers often refused to assist in and attend black soldiers’ burials. Creighton suggests that there was local segregation between the black and white communities in Adams County throughout the 1880s and 1890s. [21] However, the timing of Gooden’s burial in 1884 points to the beginning of the end of this segregation regime at least in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery . As historian John R. Neff argues in  Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (2005), the burial of black soldiers in national cemeteries established them as “the first publicly funded integrated cemeteries in American history.”[22]

Neff assumes that Gooden’s burial was intentional, designed to insure that the  “the color line of segregation…was between blue and gray, not black and white.”[23] Yet the odd stories of the scattered six black burials at Gettysburg and the near total lack of commentary on these developments in the national press, raise questions about this assumption.  Does anyone have more detail, or new theories about how to interpret the halting story of integration at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery?  Feel free to comment below and we will update this post as more information becomes available.

 

Endnotes

[1] James Oakes, “The Emancipation Proclamation,” Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 378, 387.

[2] Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin, Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 291-293. [Google Books]

[3] D. Scott Hartwig, “A Burial in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery,” The Blog of Gettysburg National Military Park, April 2012. [WEB]

[4] Brenna McKelvey, “Henry Gooden,” House Divided Research Engine. [WEB]

[5] D. Scott Hartwig, “A Burial in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery,”

[6] Gettys Bern, “PVT. Henry Gooden,” Find a Grave, August 8, 2006. [WEB]

[7] Brandie Kessler, “Did Union soldier’s family move body away from black soldier’s grave?” Evening Sun, November 19, 2013. [WEB]

[8] D. Scott Hartwig, “A Burial in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery,”

[9] D. Scott Hartwig, “A Burial in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery,”

[10] Brian G. Shellum, “Volunteer Officer in the Spanish-American War,” Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment: The Military Career of Charles Young (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010). [Google Books]

[11] “Governor’s Day at Camp Meade,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, (September 9, 1898), 5. [Newspapers.com Proquest]

[12] Karl Stelly, “CPL Harry S. Prager (1860-1898),” Find A Grave Memorial, August 23, 2009. [WEB]

[13] Karl Stelly,  “PVT Emmert Martin (Unknown-1898),”  Find A Grave Memorial, November 3, 2010. [WEB]; Karl Stelly, “PVT Clifford Henderson (Unknown-1898),” Find A Grave Memorial November 3, 2010. [WEB]; Karl Stelly, “PVT Nicholas Farrell (Unknown-1898),” Find A Grave Memorial, November 3, 2010. [WEB]

[14] “Colonel Charles Young,” National Park Service, May 21, 2018.

[15] Brian G. Shellum, “Volunteer Officer in the Spanish-American War,”

[16] Steve Light, “Forgotten Valor – The Lincoln Cemetery,” Battlefield Back Stories, September 29, 2012. [WEB]; James M Paradis, African Americans and the Gettysburg Campaign (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 107-109. [Google Books]

[17] Don Sailer, “Charles H. Parker,” House Divided Research Engine. [WEB]

[18] Steve Light, “Forgotten Valor – The Lincoln Cemetery,” Battlefield Back Stories, September 29, 2012. [WEB]

[19] Savannah Labbe, “Separate but Equal? Gettysburg’s Lincoln Cemetery,” The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History, March 12, 2018. [WEB]

[20] D. Scott Hartwig, “A Burial in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery,”

[21] Margaret S. Creighton, The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 217-218.

[22] John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 133.

[23] John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation, 134.

 

Additional Readings

Primary Source Documents

The Emancipation Proclamation

The Militia Act of July 1862

Secondary Source Documents

Gettysburg General Reading

• Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America. 291-293.
• Map of Cemetery
• African Americans in the Cemetery – The Blog of Gettysburg National Military Park.
• Burials and Lincoln Cemetery

United States Colored Troops

• Henry Gooden – Find A Grave
• Henry Gooden – House Divided Research Engine.
• Henry Gooden – African Americans and the Gettysburg Campaign.
• Henry Gooden Controversy – Evening Sun
• Charles H. Parker – Find A Grave
• Charles H. Parker – House Divided Research Engine.
• Charles H. Parker and Henry Gooden – Battlefield Back Stories

Ninth Ohio Battalion

• Clifford Henderson – Find A Grave
• Emmert Martin – Find A Grave
• Nicholas Farrell – Find A Grave
• Life in the Ninth Ohio Battalion, Clifford Henderson’s Death, and Charles Young – Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment: The Military Career of Charles Young.
• Charles Young – National Park Service

Second Tennessee Infantry

• Harry S. Prager – Find A Grave

To honor Lincoln’s 205th birthday, we are tweeting out the top ten Lincoln resources from House Divided.  But here is the full list:

 

#1    Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition

Created by participants in the “Understanding Lincoln” open online graduate course (offered in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History), this site (still in development) features 150 of Lincoln’s “most teachable” documents and offers a full array of multi-media resources designed to help teach them in the K-12 and undergraduate classroom.  This site is especially useful for Common Core alignments.

#2   Building the Digital Lincoln (Journal of American History)

Created as part of the Lincoln Bicentennial anniversary, this site offers a snapshot of where the “Digital Lincoln” stood as of 2009, and includes a host of examples of research and presentation tools, especially designed for serious student and academic scholars.

#3   Emancipation Digital Classroom

Created in part to help transform insights from James Oakes’s prize-winning study, Freedom National (2013) into use for the modern-day classroom, this site presents an array of primary and secondary source tools for studying the complicated but fascinating subject of emancipation and abolition.

#4  Unofficial Teacher’s Guide to Spielberg’s Lincoln

This “unofficial” guide includes access to Tony Kushner’s script, a full cast of characters (with photo comparisons to actual historical figures), and extensive analysis of the artistic license in the film and the historical reaction to Steven Spielberg’s important movie project.

#5  Lincoln-Douglas Debates Digital Classroom

This site offers a clickable word cloud of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and host of other rare primary sources for use in studying these critical texts.

#6  Abraham Lincoln in the House Divided Research Engine

The House Divided Research Engine is a Drupal-based content management system that contains over 12,000 public domain images and tens of thousands of documents and other historical records.  The link above takes users directly to Abraham Lincoln’s main record page and offers a well-curated gateway for Lincoln research.

#7  Lincoln’s Gettysburg Addresses (Google Cultural Institute)

This short but compelling exhibit came together as part of the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address and helps visitors understand the evolution of the document, including a sharp analysis of all five manuscript versions of the address in Lincoln’s handwriting.

#8  Lincoln’s Autobiographical Sketch (YouTube & RapGenius)

Dickinson College students Leah Miller and Will Nelligan helped create short but engaging tools for studying Lincoln’s most important autobiographical writing –a sketch he produced in late 1859 to help launch his presidential bid.  There is a six minute YouTube video of the sketch and an annotated edition of it through the new platform at RapGenius.

#9  Burlingame’s Lincoln Biography (Teaching Edition)

Michael Burlingame’s prize-winning Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008) is the most important new multi-volume study of Lincoln, but it is difficult to teach because it is so lengthy.  With permission, however, from both the author and the publisher (Johns Hopkins University Press), we have created short visually enhanced excerpts from the work that focus on the election of 1860 and include clickable footnotes, allowing teachers and students to “see” Burlingame’s sources directly.

#10  Mash Up of Collected Works, Lincoln Day-By-Day, and Lincoln Papers

Created by technologist Rafael Alvarado, this mash up includes an integrated interface allowing users to see the online edition of Lincoln’s Collected Works (his known writings), Lincoln Day-By-Day (his daily schedule), and The Abraham Lincoln Papers At the Library of Congress (the bulk of his extant correspondence) for the essential “one-stop” shopping experience.  There is nothing else quite like this “timemap” available on the Internet –a must-see for serious and aspiring scholars.

Standing on the ground at the battlefields of Gettysburg is both a breathtaking, yet unsatisfying experience. Realizing that your feet are touching the same ground as men who died for a heroic cause brings humility, perspective, and a strong connection with history that cannot be experienced in an ordinary classroom. However, there remains a sense of disconnect from the souls of people, which site-seeing itself cannot satisfy. This missing connection, perhaps, is one that can only be attained through the careful teaching of stories that invoke that which will unite humanity for all time: emotion. When placed in its proper context, emotional stories not only bridge the gap between past and present, but also provide a better understanding for the events themselves. With the powerful combination of primary sources and modern technology, teachers are able to use these types of stories today more effectively than ever before from their own classrooms.

As a summer intern for Professor Pinsker at Dickinson College, I had the privilege to travel with him to Gettysburg as he led a group of high school teachers from Oklahoma on a tour of the battlegrounds. Before the trip, he asked me to be thinking about a story that I believe is especially impactful, and how I would use it to teach high school students about history and the Civil War. After some of the more well-known sites, we eventually stopped at a fire station on Stratton Street. It was here that I first heard the story of Amos Humiston, a soldier who died on that very ground almost 150 years ago, with a photo of his three children clutched in his hand. Humiston’s emotional story immediately interested me, and after talking with several of the high school teachers there about the needs and struggles of their students to understand history, I realized that Amos Humiston could potentially fill the gap. A little known story from the Battle of Gettysburg, his is one that nonetheless can be used to capture both the context of the times and heart of a soldier, while also providing opportunites for students to take a historians approach to the past.

Providing Context

To gain initial background and perspective, students should become familiar with a textbook explanation of the Battle of Gettysburg. To add interest and depth, media sites such as Google Earth show fantastic views of the landscape, and maps or pictures from sites like House Divided show the military strategy and devastation of the battle.

Once students have grasped an overall understanding of the Gettysburg Campaign, provide the students with a copy of an article from the October 19, 1863 Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Whose Father Was He?” Have the students analyze the document, and write down what they think it tells them about the war, family, and religion at the time.

For more background and better analysis, the students could also read several paragraphs on pages 6 & 7 from Drew Gilpin Faust’s book titled The Republic of Suffering. In it, she explains the meaning and importance of “The Good Death” during the Civil War, describing how soldiers sought to be at peace with God and die honorably.

Relating to the Past

Once the students complete this task, go on to identify the unknown soldier from the Philadelphia Inquirer as Amos Humiston, and explain his story. A detailed version of the story can by found in a five-part blog post by Errol Morris for the New York Times titled “Whose Father Was He.” In addition, a shortened handout version along with a brief video can be found on the Day 1 Gettysburg Virtual Tour for the House Divided website. Use photos of he and his children as visual aids, and provide the students with examples of his letters and poems. In addition, students could even write thier own poem or letter to thier family as if they were a soldier at the time. These devices and techniques are very helpful in getting students to empathize with people from the past, and provide a strong connection to their emotions.

 

Writing Like Historians

After the students have gained an understanding of the context in which Amos Humiston lived and have identified with him emotionally, they must then begin to write as historians. Have them use everything they have learned thus far about Humiston from primary and secondary sources, and instruct them to write a brief memorial about him for the Gettysburg Battlefield. While brief, it will allow them to think critically about how to approach the past, and provide them with writing techniques that will be beneficial in future research papers. To conclude, a picture of the actual Gettysburg monument to Amos Humiston can be shown and read in class.

While there is no real substitute for a field trip to Gettysburg, modern technology has provided an opportunity for individuals to engage the past in significant ways. The high availability of primary and secondary sources over the internet allow teachers to present history to their students both accurately and creatively. Captivating stories such as Amos Humiston allow for the perfect combination of these sources and show students (if only a glimpse) of how real historians operate.

 

For even further reading on Amos Humiston, see:

Mark H. Dunkelman, Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier: The Life, Death and Celebrity of Amos Humiston (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999)

As a summer intern with the House Divided Project of Dickinson College, I’ve been assigned the task of coming up with a lesson plan for the incredible story of how the tragic death of Bayard Wilkeson during the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg touched our nation.  Make sure to read the full story contained within one of our previous posts, or take the virtual “teacher’s tour” of Gettysburg to find out more.

The (Brief) Story:

On the first day of the Gettysburg campaign (1 July 1863), nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson was severely wounded in the leg at Barlow’s Knoll. Medics carried him off the battlefield to the Adams County Alms House where they attempted to amputate his mangled limb. Unfortunately, the Alms House was overrun by Confederate troops and the surgeons fled, leaving young Wilkeson to amputate his own leg with his own knife, from which he died of shock several hours later.

His father, Samuel Wilkeson, was a war correspondent for the New York Times, and he arrived at Gettysburg on 2 July and began to look for his son. He found Bayard’s body in the Alms House a few days later, and wrote a report of the campaign which was featured in the Times on 6 June. According to Professor Matthew Pinsker, the director of the House Divided Project, Wilkeson’s concluding words, “Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh have baptised with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied!” may have influenced the conclusion of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Why Teach It:

The story of Bayard and Samuel Wilkeson is a small but powerful episode of the Gettysburg campaign not taught in most textbooks.  It emphasizes the emotional side of the battle, the side that tore apart families and took the lives of young men.  Bayard Wilkeson’s young age will allow your students to identify more easily with the story, imagining themselves in his position as he fought courageously, was severely wounded, and desperately mutilated himself in an attempt to save his own life.  The New York Times article written by Samuel Wilkeson conveys the emotional intensity of a father who had lost his son to what he deemed  a noble cause, and the conflict of interest there.  Most importantly, Samuel Wilkeson was a top war correspondent for the New York Times; his story was first published in the Times but later was reproduced as a pamphlet entitled, “Samuel Wilkeson’s Thrilling Word Picture Of Gettysburgh“.  Many people would have been familiar with the story, including President Lincoln, who had been friends with the Wilkeson family.  Lincoln ended his most famous speech, the Gettysburg address, with these words:

“It is rather for us [the living] to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…”

which seem to have been directly derived from Wilkeson’s famous article.

Tools for Teaching Bayard Wilkeson:

It could be a means to introduce the topic by discussing the casualties in the Battle of Gettysburg.  A great and impacting illustration of the Union casualties is in this diagram of the layout of the Gettysburg Civil War Cemetery; your students can see in picture-form which states lost the most amount of men, and how many men were buried unidentified.  The largest section of graves, on the outer edge of the semicircle, belongs to New York, where Bayard Wilkeson was born.  The second-worst case was Pennsylvania’s.  From here you could lead into the story of Bayard Wilkeson, whose death represented so much for the American people, and Lincoln himself.

Below is a simple interactive map I’ve created for the story using GoogleMaps.  It could be a helpful tool for your students to see the Confederate and Union lines across the battlefield and the modern-day town of Gettysburg.  Important takeaways include the distance between where Bayard was injured at Barlow’s Knoll and the Alms House, where he was carried, as well as the proximity of the delivery of the Gettysburg Address, meant to evoke the well-known story of Bayard’s death and emotional memories that accompanied it.

It is too easy to forget that the past was often not at all like the present.  To remind your students of this, and to provide helpful context for the story, you could briefly describe Civil War era medicine.  For example, here is a link to a site on Civil War era medicine.  Take note of  the establishment of a system for wounded-soldier evacuation, the techniques for field dressing, and the description of field hospitals.  Here is a link to mid-nineteeth century medical equipment, including tools used in the performance of amputation.

On the other hand, the Civil War era press was different from our newspapers of today.  Most newspapers did not contain images, so stories like Samuel Wilkeson’s were meant to paint a picture of the events at Gettysburg.  The Civil War was also the first major war in which families could find out about the death of their loved ones before the war was over (and they just didn’t come home), and newspapers played a critical role in that respect.  Here is an article on the conflict between the military and the home front regarding the issue of press censorship in the Civil War.

It would be most useful to show Samuel Wilkeson’s article and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address side by side to show the relationship between the two.  Lincoln’s Address, which was meant to evoke sentiment rather than statistics, draws upon the emotional intensity of the Battle of Gettysburg, just as Samuel Wilkeson’s article raved passionately about the loss of his son.  It is very important that your students see the connection between Lincoln’s phrase, “It is rather for us [the living] to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…” evokes Samuel Wilkeson’s phrase, “Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh have baptised with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied!” (emphases added), including the idea that what the soldiers died for was worth it.

Finally, I’m including a handout created by House Divided director Matthew Pinsker on the Bayard Wilkeson story.  It would be useful for your students to have a physical copy to include in their notes.

Handout: Wilkeson’s Gettysburg Address

In the excitement over the new “Lincoln” movie and Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning and truly mesmerizing performance as Abraham Lincoln, it is easy to overlook one of the very best sources of information on Lincoln’s life –Lincoln himself.  Abraham Lincoln never kept a diary or wrote a memoir, but he did craft a few, brief autobiographical sketches.  The most important of these efforts came in December 1859 at the request of a Pennsylvania newspaper (Chester County Times) that was preparing a series on potential Republican nominees for president in 1860.  Joseph J. Lewis, publisher of the Chester Times asked a mutual friend, Bloomington, Illinois attorney (and Pennsylvania native) Jesse W. Fell, to approach Lincoln for information that could be used to craft a profile.

What Lincoln produced was a 600-word document that reveals a striking amount about his background and style.  You can access a written transcript of the sketch (along with the equally revealing cover letter to Fell, where Honest Abe states confidentially, “Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself.”) along with a special audio version of the documents created for the House Divided Project by noted actor and Dickinson College theatre professor Todd Wronski. [NOTE: Just right-click on this audio link and select “Save Link As…” in order to download the audio file to your computer / network).

For a Common Core-aligned assignment, students should read and listen to Lincoln’s autobiographical sketch and prepare a short informational essay that summarizes Lincoln’s life story using Lincoln’s own words.  After they have completed their essays and discussed them in class, teachers should show clips from Matthew Pinsker’s college-level discussion of Lincoln’s autobiographical sketch, which was filmed by C-SPAN’s American History TV
continue reading "Teaching Lincoln’s Autobiography in the Common Core"

On July 13, 1865 P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City burned down and the Lost Museum’s interactive online exhibit allows you to figure out who is responsible for the crime. Before you start the investigation, it helps to watch the video introduction or at least read this overview of the exhibit. (You can also just skip the mystery part and explore the 3-D museum). The American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center launched the site for use in the classroom and teachers can pick from a number of different activities, such as “The Path to War?,” “John Brown, Violence, and Social Change,” and “The Debate Over Women’s Roles in Public.” In addition, the Lost Museum Archive has a number of different types of primary sources available – these include those related to the “Sectional Crisis,” “Amusement Devices,” “Civil War in New York City,” and “Tom Thumb.” The essays are also important since they help put Barnum’s museum in context – see especially “Barnum’s American Museum,” Ann Fabian’s “Women in P. T. Barnum’s New York City,” and Peter G. Buckley’s “Urban Popular Culture in the Age of Barnum.” Each essay includes links to relevant primary sources. This website was produced in collaboration with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which created other digital history resources such as “Exploring U. S. History,” “Virginia 400,” and “Historical Thinking Matters.” You can learn more about the city in Ernest A. McKay’s The Civil War and New York City (1990).

The Battle of Mobile Bay (also known as the Passing of Forts Morgan and Gaines) took place from August 2-23, 1864 in Mobile and Baldwin Counties, Alabama.  In early August, a large Union fleet under the command of Admiral David G. Farragut entered Mobile Bay and came under fire from Confederate forces.  Farragut led his forces past the forts and forced Confederate Admiral Franklin Buchanan to surrender.  On August 23, Fort Morgan was the last place to fall and Mobile Bay’s port closed.  The Civil War Preservation Trust’s website offers an article, “Damn the Torpedoes: The Battle of Mobile Bay,” which provides a detailed summary of the battle and its commanding officers.  The website also includes a map that depicts the movement of Union and Confederate forces as well as a list of recommended readings for more information on Mobile Bay.  The National Park Service’s website includes a lesson plan on Fort Morgan and the Battle of Mobile Bay that includes images, readings, and maps.  Foxhall Alexander Parker commented on Farragut as he and his forces crossed into Mobile Bay:

“As they were passing the Brooklyn, her captain reported ‘a heavy line of torpedoes across the channel.’ ‘Damn the torpedoes!’ was the emphatic reply of Farragut. ‘Jouett, full speed!  Four bells, Captain Drayton.’ And the Hartford, as if eager to bear the admiral’s flag to the front, bounded forward ‘like a thing of life,’ and, increasing her speed at each instant, crossed both lines of torpedoes, going over the ground at the rate of nine miles an hour; for so far had she drifted to the northward and westward while her engines were stopped, as if to make it impossible for the admiral, without heading directly on to Fort Morgan, to obey his own instructions to ‘pass eastward of the easternmost buoy.’”

Another resource that may be useful is West Wind, Flood Tide: The Battle of Mobile Bay, available as a preview on Google Books, which provides a detailed overview of the Battle of Mobile Bay and its significance during the Civil War.  Also available on Google Books is By Sea and By River: The Naval History of the Civil War which includes details on the battle as well as the aftermath and consequences of Mobile Bay.  The Civil War Trail’s website has information for those planning on visiting the battle site for a field trip as well as details on the different stops within the area and historic sites close by.