Browse Items (26 total)

In this book, historian William L. Barney explored transformations in white southern identity through the life of Walter Lenoir of North Carolina. Before the war, Lenoir, uncomfortable as a slaveholder, contemplated abandoning slavery and moving to a…

Cyrus Boyd was a twenty-four-year-old Iowa farmhand when he enlisted in the Fifteenth Iowa Volunteer Infantry in October 1861. Like many white men at the beginning of the war, Boyd thought the fighting would be over fairly quickly and worried about…

Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia slaveholder, had been a strong proponent of secession. In the following excerpts from his diary, Ruffin recounted his family’s troubles with their slaves during the early years of the war on their Marlbourne plantation as…

Spotswood Rice had been held in bondage by Benjamin Lewis in Missouri. He enlisted in the 67th US Colored Infantry in early February 1864. He wrote the following letter (with some assistance) in September 1864 from Benton Barracks Hospital in St.…

On May 1, 1863 the Confederate Congress, acting on the recommendations of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, passed a series of resolutions responding to the Emancipation Proclamation and the use of black soldiers in Union forces. They declared…

In the cartoon, Jefferson Davis is placed on a chair upon a barrel of gunpowder. There is a large hand giving Jefferson Davis a large cup containing a “smash.” The “smash” contains a grouping of ships crowded in the water. The ships in the cartoon…

The cartoon depicts a slave on a porch watching in amazement of the sheer numbers of Union soldiers marching through the Confederate homefront during Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea. Published in Harper’s Weekly,…

This cartoon, published in Harper's Weekly shortly after the beginning of the Civil War, depicted an unidentified Union soldier chasing an unidentified Confederate Soldier to Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital. This cartoon showed that most…