The Little Woman, the Great War, and Beginnings

Abraham Lincoln famously said to Harriet Beecher Stowe upon meeting her during the Civil War, "So you're the little woman who started this great war." To be honest, he may have not actually said this. And to be even more honest, the war would almost certainly have occurred even if Uncle Tom's Cabin had not been published.

But Stowe certainly played a role in giving voice to thoughts and giving courage to people who were thinking them. This year marks an anniversary for Stowe and her most famous book, and it's possible to see early traces of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the first work published under her own name. This month 180 years ago she was celebrating the news that she had won a $50 dollar prize and publication in Western Monthly Magazine for a story she had called "Uncle Lot." The magazine called it "A New England Sketch."

The story was about a prototypical New England farmer and was noted for its use of colloquial language--unusual for the time--and for putting dialect into the mouth of Uncle Lot. Both techniques were used nearly 20 years later for Uncle Tom. Slavery did not figure in the story although Stowe (then still Harriet Beecher) had taken the trip to Kentucky that showed her some of the sights and sounds of slavery the previous year.

Stowe wrote the story of Uncle Lot while living in Cincinnati with her father, but her most famous works were put to paper in New England, where several of the places connected to her life remain. Most of Uncle Tom's Cabin was written in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband Calvin Stowe was teaching at Bowdoin College. Their house still stands in Brunswick and is still a part of the college.

Litchfield, Connecticut, where she was born, retains several sites related to her and her famous family, although not her actual birthplace. The house was torn down several years ago (the pieces are supposedly in storage awaiting someone willing to pay for reassembly) but the site of the home is marked with a sign. You can see the church where the Puritan divine Lyman Beecher, Harriet's father, preached. There are several other monuments to the Beecher family in town as well.

In Guilford, Connecticut, there are several contemporary houses still standing in the Nut Plain section, where Harriet spent many months with her mother's family. It was at the grandfather's home in Guilford that she heard stories from an aunt who had married a planter from the Caribbean. The aunt was appalled at the reality of slavery and some of her stories found their way into Harriet Beecher Stowe's most famous work.

More information about these sites as well as directions to them are available in my book Connecticut's Civil war. More information is on the book's website www.ctcivilwar.com.

What was the 77th New England?

The 77th New England didn’t exist, of course, since Union army volunteer regiments were identified by the states rather than the regions that produced them. The “77th New England” was a nickname for the 7th Connecticut and the 7th New Hampshire, two regiments usually brigaded together during the campaigns of 1862-1865 in the southeast,.

Today, February 20, 2014, is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Olustee in northern Florida, perhaps the least successful day in the history of the 77th New England. Earlier in February of 1864 Brigadier General Truman Seymour had arrived in Jacksonville, tasked with destroying Confederate supply routes and securing modest union influences in northern Florida. Otherwise, that part of the Confederacy was insignificant.

Seymour led his small 5,000-plus man expedition (including the 77th New England) westward along existing rail lines, expecting to meet nothing more than Florida militia, composed primarily of young boys and older men. Instead, on the afternoon of February 20, the force met up with 5,000 entrenched Confederate soldiers near the town of Olustee, just east of Lake City.

After hours of battle, the Union expedition was forced to retreat towards Jacksonvile, leaving the Confederates in control of the field. The 77th New England performed poory, particularly the 7th New Hampshire. The 7th Connecticut was never fully engaged. Both regiments were part of the brigade under the command of then-Colonel Joseph R. Hawley of Connecticut, who was enjoying (or not) his first command independent of General Alfred Howe Terry, also of Connecticut.

One regiment did perform admirably. The 54th Massachusetts, the regiment of black soldiers so honored in the 151 years since its glory in defeat at Battery Wagner near Charleston, played the key role in saving a broken down train carrying wounded Union soldiers back to Jacksonville.

Otherwise, the day was a disaster for the Union. With 1,800 men killed, wounded, or missing, the expedition suffered a 34 percent casualty rate—among the worst of any battle of the war.

News of the victory elated the South, for whom successful days were becoming fewer and fewer. The 77th New England left Florida for Virginia where the two regiments became part of the seige of Petersburg. Then,in January of 1865,they were sent to join Terry's Provisional Corps. They participated in the relentless move of Sherman’s Union army across the Carolinas to the real end of the war, which happened in North Carolina rather than at Appomattox.

Happy Anniversary Kansas-Nebraska Act

We are well into the Civil War 150th anniversaries. Last year: Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and Chicamauga. This year: the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor and the seige of Petersburg. But there are other anniversaries to consider this year. This week marks the 160th anniversary of a milestone event, one that played a part in the inevitablity of war. And a man from Connecticut was watching closely to see what happened.

The milestone was the Kansas-Nebraska Act. On January 30, 1854, after months of negotiations, failed amendments, and succesful additions, debate opened in the Senate on the final version of the act. The bill passed the Senate in March and,after much further debate, got through the House of Representatives in May. President Franklin Pierce signed it into law the final week of May, 1854.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively threw out the Missouri Compromise, which had kept slavery out of land above the 36 degree 30' parallel, with the exception of the new state of Missouri. The country had managed to avoid war over slavery for more than 30 years, thanks to the Compromise. But the new act permitted Kansas and Nebraska to come into the Union either slave or free, depending on the vote of white male settlers.

John Brown,a 54-year-old native of Torrington, Connecticut,was living--after a checkered personal and business career in the midwest--on a small farm in the rugged and cold Adirondack Mountains of New York. Not surprisingly, the farm was doing poorly, as was a settlement of free blacks that the ardent abolitionist supported in the area. When he heard that pro-slavery settlers were pouring into Kansas from slave-holding Missouri, Brown, his sons, and other supporters moved to Kansas to settle temporarily and to encourage anti-slavery sentiment. The Brown movement felt obligated to match violence on the part of pro-slavery settlers with equal violence of their own. Kansas became a bloody microcosm of national sentiment.

Later, Brown returned to the east where he traveled through New England, particularly Connecticut and Massachusetts, raising money for a new bold plan. That turned out to be his raid on the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, then in Virginia. The raid, in October 1859, failed, but Brown, who was hanged six weeks later, made himself into a martyr to the cause of the abolition of slavery. The war could not then be avoided.

The house where John Brown was born is long gone, but there is a state historic sign at the location, a few miles west of Torrington just off Route 4. There is also a haunting reminder of the man who started the Civil War (or at least who assured that it would start when it did). The stone front steps to the old house remain. John Brown left Torrington as a child of five in 1805, but he was certainly old enough to have walked up those steps hundreds of times. So, two days from now, remember the 160th anniversary of a event that a righteous and violent descendant of New England puritans used to force his country to reach a goal that he knew in his soul was right.

I've got a new website up dealing with Connecticut in the Civil War. It's primarily to promote my book Connecticut's Civil War, but there's plenty of information and some interesting photos.Please check it out:

www.ctcivilwar.com

Joseph Hawley's House

After a long break for a harness racing book (The Best There Ever Was: Dan Patch and the Dawn of the American Century) I'm back to my other favorite topic. The Connecticut house of one of the state's Civil War heroes is threatened.  First, here's the essay I wrote about him as part of the effort to save the house.



JOSPEH R. HAWLEY (1826-1905)



There was no better-known public figure in Connecticut during the last half of the 19th century than Joseph R. Hawley, crusading abolitionist newspaper editor, Civil War brevet Major General, Connecticut governor, congressman, and U.S. Senator.

Ironically, this ardent anti-slavery crusader was born in North Carolina, the son of a Connecticut-born minister who had been hired by a congregation in that slave-holding state. The family returned to Connecticut when Hawley was eleven, but he was old enough to bring with him an abiding hatred of slavery.

Hawley trained to be an attorney and briefly practiced law, but he turned to politics at the age of 25, becoming an active member of the Free Soil party, an organization whose aim was to prevent the spread of slavery to the new states of the west.

In 1852 Hawley became the editor of the Charter Oak, an abolitionist newspaper published in Hartford. It was not as well-known as William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, published in Boston, but it was still widely reviled in the South.

In 1857 the Charter Oak was folded into the Hartford Evening Press, a more conventional newspaper created by Gideon Welles, soon to become Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy. Hawley became editor of the Press, which was still enthusiasticallt abolitionist.

The Connecticut branch of the new Republican Party was organized in Hawley’s office in 1856 and in 1860, when Lincoln was testing the waters for a possible presidential run, Hawley asked the Illinois lawyer to visit Hartford and helped organize Lincoln’s speaking tour that year.

The day after the fall of Ft. Sumter, when the newly elected Lincoln asked for troops, Joseph Hawley became one of the first New England men to volunteer. He joined the First Connecticut Infantry, one of the few Union regiments that performed well at the first battle of Bull Run, a fiasco for the North. He then joined the 7th Connecticut, which was sent south to take part in the recovery of the Atlantic coast forts that had fallen to the Confederacy during the early months of the war.

Hawley rose to Brigadier General and eventually to Major General as the 7th was involved in the recovery of Fort Pulaski, James Island, Fort Wagner, and Fort Fisher, He also saw action at Olustee in Florida and the battles surrounding the siege of Petersburg. During the last months of the war, General Hawley was military governor of North Carolina. For several months after Appomattox, Hawley served as second-in-command to General Alfred Terry of New Haven, military governor of Virginia.

A few months after mustering out in January of 1866, Joseph Hawley was elected governor of Connecticut. He failed in his reelection bid, mostly because of his uncompromising stance on full civil liberties for freed slaves. He returned to newspapers, where he supervised the consolidation of the Press and the Hartford Courant, becoming editor of the new Courant. But he left that job to run for Congress, serving three terms. In 1881 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, serving 24 years.

Immediately after the war Hawley’s primary home was in the Nook Farm section of Hartford, where he was a neighbor of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Hawley’s wife was Stowe’s cousin). In the 1890’s Hawley purchased a cottage in the Woodmont section of Milford, and eventually that cottage became his sole Connecticut residence. In the winters he lived in Washington D.C. where he attended to his senatorial duties.

Hawley became famous throughout the state for his appearances at monument dedications, ceremonies honoring Civil War veterans, and other public events, Even as his health failed late in his life he made an effort to speak wherever he was asked, although he often needed help to walk to the podium.

Hawley died in 1905 of heart disease and the lingering effects of the malaria he contracted during the war. His death was front page news around the country and he lay in state in the U.S. Capitol.

Now, about the house. His final house has been purchased by someone who wants to demolish it. It hasn't happened yet, but only because Milford, Connecicut's city historian has imposed a 90 day demolition delay which can be used to allow a little time to change minds or explore other options for historic houses. Unfortunately, the buyer wants the location: on a hill a block from Long Island Sound that was not touched by Superstorm Sandy. It's an attractive small Victorian cottage, with the operative words being "small" and "cottage." Although it's in decent shape, it's not what people today seem to want. It's not protected and will probably go. It will be a sad day when it does.

DID ELI WHITNEY CAUSE THE CIVIL WAR?

Having successfully launched my book Connecticut's Civil War: A Guide for Travelers and having completed nearly a dozen speaking engagements I'm enjoying a little mid-winter downtime, with no more appearances scheduled until March. So it's time to get going on this blog which I hope turns into a dialog on my favorite subject.

Here's one to start: how much responsibility should we give Massachusetts-born and Connecticut-educated Eli Whitney for the Civil War? His story in a nutshell: as a young Yale graduate he accepted a post as a tutor on a Georgia plantation where he observed the difficulty in harvesting the easily-grown short staple cotton. The hard-to-clean variety was the only kind that could be grown through much of the south and that fact limited the spreaed of cotton culture and concurrently the spread of slavery. Whitney's cleaning engine, the cotton gin, helped insure that both cotton and slavery would expand. And expand it did: at the time of his invention, early in the 1790's, there were about 800,000 slaves in North America. Seventy years later, there were nearly 4 million.

On the not responsible side: what became cotton land might have been have been used for something else that needed slaves; other people had already designed gins (although none quite as effective as Eli's); an effective gin would almost certainly been invented later.

On the responsible side: the earlier inventions didn't work well; we don't know if slaves would have been so important in the deep south without cotton; and a good gin might not have come before slavery was too far along towards extinction to make a difference. Slavery became so important to the economy of the southern states that war was inevitable.

I tend towards the responsible side, or at least partially responsible.