As previously mentioned in this blog, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill supports a fantastic website for researching all aspects of the South during the Civil War era called Documenting the American South.  On this website, there are several important resources that relate to the crucial election of 1860.  A simple search of the collection for the term “election of 1860” does not yield much relevant information; therefore, as is often the case, the subject index is more useful for finding these materials.  In this instance, the best materials are found under the heading United States — Politics and Government — 1857-1861.  An important document found here is John Willis Ellis’s speech at the 1860 North Carolina Democratic Convention.  It presents a look into the Democratic party in North Carolina leading up to the election of 1860.  While the speech was an acceptance of his party’s nomination for a second term as governor, Ellis focused on national issues in his address.  He attacked William H. Seward, then running for the Republican presidential nomination, and called on Democrats to overlook the divisive issue of the ad valorem tax in favor of party unity.  This was supported by western Democrats but opposed by eastern Democrats because it taxed slaves at lower rates.  The division of the Democratic party along this (and other) lines was a deciding factor in Republican Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860.  In this speech, Governor Ellis saw the divisions already forming in the party, however his warnings were not enough to unite the Democrats.

When Delia Locke and her husband moved to northern California in 1855, she started a diary that she continued to write in until her death in 1922. Thanks to the University of the Pacific, her diary entries between 1855 and 1879 are available online. Locke not only recorded detailed observations about daily life, but she also commented on major political events. Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election was “good news,” as Locke noted on November 16, 1860. Four years later she still supported Lincoln. Even though she could not vote, she had strong opinions about the candidates. While Lincoln “[was] the representative of freedom,” Locke believed that Democrat George McClellan represented “slavery” and led a political “party which [was] composed of traitors at heart.” The University of the Pacific also has other interesting digital projects to explore, including “John Muir Journals,” John Muir Photographs, and several collections related to Japanese-American Internment Camps.

The Virginia Military Institute has a number of interesting digital collections related to the Civil War era, including one that focuses on the school’s involvement in John Brown’s execution. After Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859, VMI Superintendent Francis H. Smith wrote Virginia Governor Henry Wise and offered to send some of the cadets to Charles Town, Virginia to provide extra security for the execution. After the cadets arrived in late November 1859, their commanding officer reminded them that he “expected…[everyone] to abstain from impropriety which could by possibility impair the standing of the corps.” This collection includes Superintendent Smith’s letters to Gov. Wise, Smith’s report on the deployment, orders issued to the cadets, and eyewitness accounts from VMI Prof. Thomas J. Jackson and John T. L. Preston.

Lieutenant Cornelius C. Platter’s diary (Nov. 1864 – April 1865), which is available from the Digital Library of Georgia, provides an account of his service with the 81st Ohio Infantry Volunteers as they marched through Georgia and the Carolinas with General William T. Sherman. This diary offers an interesting perspective on life as an officer throughout this campaign. “We are entirely cut off from communication with the north and are an isolated command,” as Platter wrote on November 13, 1864. One can view the entire diary at once or select a specific section through the table of contents. The project also includes a collection of all the images from George Barnard’s Photographic Views of the Sherman Campaign (1866).

James McPherson writes in Battle Cry of Freedom (1989) that “On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government” (p. 78). Yet that one exception –the fugitive slave law– was a principal cause of the coming Civil War and potentially changes one’s view of the war’s meaning. White southerners were repeatedly infuriated by signs of northern resistance to the fugitive slave law. Abolitionists even taunted them by dubbing their efforts to help runaways an “Underground Railroad.” There was essentially a low-grade border war between North and South over this issue that lasted more than a decade and drove the conflict as much as the crisis over the western territories. Not everybody, not even McPherson, sees the impact of the Underground Railroad as looming this large during the antebellum period, but most of us at the House Divided Project do. That is why the first digital classroom we created was about the Underground Railroad. Partly funded by the NEH, this site offers a host of resources, including historic documents, images, interviews with leading scholars, Google Earth field trips, dozens of K-12 lesson plans and many more tools for the classroom. Especially since this is Black History Month, I hope readers of this blog post will use this opportunity to check out or reexamine these resources and post comments below offering feedback. Everything in the House Divided Project is still in what we are calling a draft edition –all can be fixed, improved or changed as we move toward a public launch during the Civil War 150th commemoration (2011-15).

“Westbrook Seminary: Educating Women” is an interesting digital exhibit available through Maine Memory Network, which is managed by the Maine Historical Society. One can read a student’s diary (1843-1844) as well as learn more about several students who attended Westbrook Seminary throughout the 19th century.  Check out all of the digital exhibits on Maine Memory Network here (including “Debates Over Suffrage,” “Hannibal Hamlin of Paris Hill,” and “Irish Immigrants in Nineteenth Century Maine” )

“N. A. Chandler California Gold Rush Era Letters” is a great digital project available from Claremont College. Newton Chandler (1818?-1880), who arrived in San Francisco in 1855, wrote over fifty letters to his wife between 1855 and 1872. These letters provide interesting insights into the Gold Rush, including Chandler’s journey to California in 1855. While he “had a first rate passage…[and] enjoyed it well,” Chandler explained that conditions for “deck passengers was very bad.”

The University of Iowa has a small but interesting digital collection of diaries from children who lived in Iowa from 1860 to the 1900s. Of the eleven diaries that are available, three were written between 1860 and 1870. Even though they are relatively short (only a few pages have been digitized in some cases), the diaries can still provide interesting insights into the children’s experiences. One entry suggests that at least some children were paying attention to the important political issues of their day – Ellery Hancock, who was only about ten years old in 1860, noted on November 6 that Abraham Lincoln had been “elected.” One can learn more about the author through the short biographical sketch on the “document description” page in each diary.

Duke University’s “The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 – 1920” is a great resource for learning more about the early advertising history in the United States. This collection, which has over 9,000 images, is organized into eleven categories – almost all of the advertisements produced before 1870 are in “Broadsides” and “Advertising Ephemera.” Yet there is still a wide variety of material from the Civil War era, as one can find broadsides for political parties (Democrat, Republican) to advertisements for hotels. If you want to find more broadsides from the Civil War, check out the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s collection, which I discussed in a previous post.

The University of Maryland has an interesting collection of sixty two letters from a family who lived in Maryland during the Civil War. This project consists primarily of Tillie Farquhar Sterling’s correspondence with her mother, which can provide an interesting look into daily life in Maryland between 1862 and 1864. Other letters in the collection include those written by Tillie’s husband, who was an officer in the US army. In addition, the site has a short essay that provides more information on the family’s history. The New York State Library also has a collection of letters from this family, although they have not been digitized yet.