Day 7: Vicksburg

Our day started with an unexpected but nice detour to the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site in Tuskegee, Alabama. Sadly, we didn't realize that we'd switched to Central Time, so instead of a short wait for the museum to open, we had to satisfy ourselves with reading the (quite good) interpretive signage and appreciating the view.

Moton Field, training ground for the Tuskegee Airmen

We arrived in Vicksburg in good time, and began in the Visitors' Center with a decent overview film of the campaign and siege. For the first time, I felt a bit uncomfortable as a Northerner, and disagreed with some of the characterizations in the film. In particular, the film seemed to paint Grant's repeated bloody attempts to take the city as a last-ditch effort to save his career, and talked repeatedly about the bravery of the Confederate defenders.

We then set out on a driving tour of the battlefield area itself, using for the first time a cell phone tour that was really quite good. At our first stop, a Park Ranger was waiting for visitors and gave us a great overview of the field from where we were standing. He explained that the unique qualities of the soil in the area made the incredible terrain features that we were seeing, and also made it a highly defensible position for the troops at Vicksburg. He also added quite a few things to our cell phone tour about the artillery tactics of both sides.

Our very patient and helpful Ranger pointing out a Confederate position across the way.

The tour itself took us about two hours, and was really quite fun. It was well laid-out in that it took us first along the line of Union emplacements, then along the Confederate line, so we were able to see the vantage points from both sides and appreciate how the ground made such a huge difference.

The Vicksburg National Military Park has recently embarked on a series of clear-cutting projects to make that ground even more obvious. During the siege, the vegetation would have been stripped bare; as the audio tour explained to us, the forest covering the hills was planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps, believing that it would help keep the land from eroding. Since then, the Park Service has discovered that grass is a more effective vegetation to keep the soil in place. In the first area of the battlefield, the clear-cutting was mostly complete, and it made a huge difference. In the second area, the project was still underway, and it was immediately obvious how much better it made the view and interpretation of the battlefield.

The results of the recent landscape preservation/clear-cutting.

Cutting back vegetation in some cases also revealed the remnants of the tunnels and earthworks dug out by Union soldiers as they made their way through the lines. The last bit of the tour included some remarkably well preserved remnants, such that from a certain vantage point you could see the zigzag of the tunnel as it approached the Confederate lines. Soldiers dug them in those meandering patterns to confuse Confederate sharpshooters.

Zigzag remnants of earthworks.

The last piece of the Vicksburg park (or rather, midway through the tour, but last thematically) was the restored USS Cairo, which is apparently pronounced like the city in Illinois, not like the city in Egypt. The ship itself, her timbers, and her conserved metal portions, was outside under a huge tent, and alongside the ship was a small museum with artifacts salvaged from the Mississippi. The Cairo was sunk even before the siege properly started, and her crew evacuated to land with several of their guns and proceeded to set up shop as if they were still on the ship while taking their place in the Union artillery line. Apparently they cleaned off the emplacements each day as if they were swabbing the deck, kept to the bells system of timing, and were a great source of amusement for the regular army men.

The USS Cairo and her museum.

That night, we visited the other side of Vicksburg. After the Mississippi river shifted its course in a flood after the war, Vicksburg lost most of its economic prosperity. In recent years, it has turned to legalized gambling to alleviate some of its poverty. Casinos, not history, are now Vicksburg's main draw. I had never actually visited a casino until we visited the Ameristar, and likely will not repeat the experience. It mostly struck me as sad, rather than exciting, and left me wishing that there were some way to make history and cultural tourism fill up the gap, rather than gambling.

Ameristar Casino in Vicksburg

Day 3: The Mariners Museum

Our third day was mostly filled with traveling. Five hours or so from Gettysburg to Newport News, VA, first. We visited the Mariners Museum, whose big selling point was that it was the home of the USS Monitor.

Entrance to the Mariners Museum, gorgeously situated in Newport News, VA.

I have to admit, I wasn't expecting much; Civil War naval history has never been of much interest to me, and we were making this detour mainly for my traveling companion, who was obsessed with the Monitor as a child. The Mariners Museum, however, completely blew me away, and I sincerely regret not building in a few more hours to really explore its exhibits in depth.

Lobby entrance to the Mariners Museum.

As it was, we spent a few hours immersed in the Monitor Center, combing through its exhibits and loving them. The overall experience was a wonderful blend of short, to the point exhibit text, illustrations, interactives, objects, and physical installations. The short video telling the story of the Battle of Hampton Roads was genuinely exciting, and the buildup to the Monitor itself was well done. The room with various reproductions of the pieces of the Monitor was excellent, and the full-size reproduction itself was neat.

Exhibit space example: the obligatory "how did we get here again?" Civil War overview.

Neat interactive space that told the story of the refitting of the USS Merrimac to become the CSS Virginia.

The interpretation of the conservation of the Monitor pieces was excellent, as was the presentation, but if I could make one small nitpick it would be that the wayfinding to get to the conservation lab was a bit lacking – I turned down a long hallway out of curiosity, not because I saw a sign saying “MONITOR THIS WAY.”

Long, nondescript hallway leading to the conservation lab.

Which is a shame, really because the actual lab was really, really well-presented and neat.

Cannon on the right, and I believe a gun emplacement on the left.

The temporary exhibit “Up Pops the Monitor!” was inspired, and short but sweet as it presented the way the ironclads and the Monitor have been remembered in popular culture since the Civil War.

Loved the exhibit design here!

Found at Sea: Mapping Ships' Locations on the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Brown Bag Lunch at the Massachusetts Historical Society

I was once again fortunate to be able to attend a brown bag lunch at the Massachusetts Historical Society on June 27. The speaker, John Dixon from Harvard University, shared with us an ongoing project called "Found at Sea: Mapping Ships' Locations on the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic."

In essentials, Dixon was taking ships' logs and translating their information into intricate maps via GIS software. It was a surprisingly original idea, and I was taken with some of the things he'd thought to map and compare.

One of his basic theories was that most of what we know about routes back and forth across the Atlantic in the late eighteenth-century - he was looking at approximately 1775-1800 - comes from idealized sources. Sailors and merchants would publish routes that they believed offered the best advantages in speed and safety, and there were generally agreed-upon trends such as going east in a northerly arc and going west in a southerly arc to take advantage of the clockwise trade winds.

However, until Dixon began mapping, there was really no good way to quantify large quantities of information gathered by actual sailors back and forth across the Atlantic. Did they actually follow those idealized routes? If they deviated, what caused their changes?

Using GIS software allowed Dixon to visually represent those actual routes, and by including data points he could start to see other patterns - for example, in wind, in distance sailed, in weather, and through encounters with other ships - and characterization of those encounters as hostile, friendly, or neutral. Mapping many ships could start to expose patterns in international shipping lanes - one of the best questions from an attendee was whether Dixon belied his work would provide a new way to talk about conceptions of national boundaries at sea. Was there a clear sense of national identity among merchants and sailors, or were there occasions in which a maritime identity trumped that nationalistic sense? (He thought it would, but wasn't far enough along to offer any theses of his own.)

One thing I learned and was glad to think about was how fluid the ideas of communication and location were while at sea. For one thing, while latitude was fairly easy to make, no one had yet come up with a simple and easy way to mark longitude. Ships could be much further east or west than they thought, and would often hail other ships to compare longitude in order to get a fix.

For another, sometimes it was difficult to discern the nature of an encounter at sea. Sometimes French warships chased French merchant ships and only realized their mistake when they caught up; sometimes ships chased one another without ever knowing the identity of another ship; sometimes there were genuinely hostile or friendly encounters that lasted for days. Thus, even what ultimately was a friendly encounter could have all the characteristics of a hostile encounter.

I love projects that do what Dixon did: harness the power of technology to expose new and interesting ideas about history. Maritime history can particularly benefit from GIS systems. I was intrigued to think about how I could apply some of these same ideas to my own work - the catch, unfortunately, is that cavalry officers rarely, if ever, recorded their latitude and longitude with the same precision as sea captains.

Historian Sam Willis at the Massachusetts Historical Society

On May 23, I attended a brown bag lunch at the Massachusetts Historical Society to hear naval historian Sam Willis talk about his work on the maritime history of the American Revolution. It's a subject I'm almost entirely unfamiliar with - my specialty has always been in land action - and I was pleased to be able to walk over from work and listen in.

Willis was an engaging speaker with a good breadth and depth of knowledge, and was very candid about where he was in his research. He has some interesting perspectives on the traditional view of the naval war - namely, that the things we think were important weren't all that, and that the British more or less bungled it from lack of preparation.

I took notes on a few points that I found interesting and perhaps applicable to my own thinking about American military history. In no particular order:

- The existing maritime infrastructure of the American colonies (via trade and fishing) gave them a leg up when it came to mobilizing naval power during the Revolution, particularly in terms of authorizing privateers. (I have been doing some thinking recently about the influence of pre-existing knowledge on military service; in particular, recruits to the cavalry who have some knowledge of horses versus those coming from inner cities.)

- The importance of seapower is sometimes in its very existence; for example, when the (however small) American navy was authorized during the Revolution, it forced Great Britain to spend valuable time building up its forces instead of simply attacking.

- There were no real standout men or battles, despite the traditional view on the period. Willis contends that the overall impression is one of very ordinary men muddling through.

- America's decision to build a naval fleet wasn't as much a military decision as it was a diplomatic one. Having a navy was a sign of an independent nation and signaled to France that America might be a feasible ally. The actual ships themselves - as in, having them finished and out on the seas - were less important than proving you had the capability to build them. It takes a certain level of governmental organization to pull off the planning and implementation of a shipbuilding program, as well as a certain level of trade and supply.

I've seen evidence of the last point in the organization of the dragoons in the 1830s. One of the arguments in congress pursued most ardently by Secretary of War Lewis Cass and Representative (later Vice President) Richard M. Johnson was that adding a mounted force to the American army would put it on a par with other world powers. If adding a navy was a sign of an independent state, then some clearly thought that adding a mounted force was the next step - a sign of a burgeoning imperial power instead of a castoff colony.