Hines Prize Fifth Biennial Competition

Do you have a manuscript in hand or in preparation that would fit the scope of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) book series. Do you know others who do? If your manuscript is for a first book, you should consider entering it for the fifth biennial award of the Hines Prize, given to the best first book relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series.

Previous winners of the Hines Prize are as follows:

2003—This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775—Bradford Wood
2005—Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766-1820—Nicholas Michael Butler
2007—Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World—T.J. Desch-Obi
2009—Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History—Barry Stiefel

For a full listing of the books in the USC Press’s series in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World, see http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/claw.html.

Deadline for submission: May 1st, 2011

Please send your complete manuscript, either in hard-copy to: Professor Simon Lewis, Associate Director, CLAW Program, Department of English, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424-0001;
or in electronic format to Dr Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu.

For further information, please contact Professor Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu

Edward L. Ayers on Virginia’s Seccession

Today’s New York Times contains an essay by Edward L. Ayers on Virginia secession, which draws about a statistical analysis of Virginia’s secession debates. Excerpts follow:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/the-causes-of-the-civil-war-2-0/

The Causes of the Civil War, 2.0
By EDWARD L. AYERS http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/edward-l-ayers/

A new poll http://people-press.org/2011/04/08/civil-war-at-150-still-relevant-still-divisive/ from the Pew Research Center reports that nearly half of Americans identify states’ rights as the primary cause of the Civil War. This is a remarkable finding, because virtually all American textbooks and prominent historians emphasize slavery, as they have for decades. Even more striking, the poll shows young people put more stock in the states’ rights explanation than older people. The 38 percent of Americans who believe slavery was mainly to blame find themselves losing ground.

Of course, there’s no denying that states’ rights played an important role as the language of secession. But how might historians convey a more precise, comparative sense of the role slavery played in the states’ decision to secede? New computer-assisted techniques allow historians to draw clearer conclusions from immense amounts of data, including newspapers, public records and legislative proceedings. And few states left behind a better, more information-rich record of their secession debates than Virginia.

Virginia, a visitor from South Carolina during the secession crisis noted with exasperation, would “not take sides until she is absolutely forced.” In retrospect, it may seem surprising that Virginia took months to decide what to do. The state, after all, had more enslaved people than any other, became famous as the capital of the Confederacy, suffered more battles than anywhere else, and held to the memory of the Lost Cause with a special devotion, long after the war had ended.

But in 1861 it was by no means clear what Virginia might do. After South Carolina seceded in December 1860, quickly followed by six other states in the Lower South, Virginia’s General Assembly responded by calling for a special election in February 1861. Each county in the state would send delegates to a convention to debate the matter thoroughly and then recommend a course of action for the Commonwealth. The great majority of the 152 delegates arrived in Richmond that winter as Unionists, expecting to find a way to save the nation, the state and slavery. Virginia’s convention debated until April – so long, in fact, that secessionists built bonfires of protest in the streets of the city.

The weeks of debate in Richmond were transcribed by local reporters and then gathered and edited in 1965, totaling nearly 3,000 pages. Historians have long mined this record for material to support a wide range of arguments, but until recently it has been impossible to assess the debates as a whole – to measure, for example, exactly how often and in what contexts delegates invoked various words and phrases.

New computer-assisted tools and techniques can find and evaluate patterns of language and emphasis, otherwise hard to see, among those debates. Researchers at the University of Richmond http://dsl.richmond.edu/ have developed a computerized text that allows us to explore those hundreds of speeches over time and space, to find connections buried beneath parliamentary procedure and exasperating digressions. Those tools, available to the public online http://collections.richmond.edu/secession/ , also make it possible for people to explore the Virginia debates themselves, to address this enduring question with their own curiosity and ingenuity.

Some of the patterns in the speeches quickly undermine familiar arguments for Virginia’s secession. Tariffs, which generations of would-be realists have seen as the hidden engine of secession, barely register, and a heated debate over taxation proves, on closer examination, to be a debate over whether the distribution of income from taxes on enslaved people should be shared more broadly across the state. Hotheads eager to fight the Yankees did not play a leading role in the months of debates; despite the occasional outburst, when delegates mentioned war they most often expressed dread and foreboding for Virginia. Honor turns out to be a flexible concept, invoked with equal passion by both the Unionist and secessionist sides. Virtually everyone in the convention agreed that states had the right to secede, yet Unionists in Virginia won one crucial vote after another.

The language of slavery is everywhere in the debates. It appears as an economic engine, a means of civilizing Africans, an essential security against black uprisings and as a right guaranteed in the United States Constitution. Secessionists and Unionists, who disagreed on so much, agreed on the necessity of slavery, a defining feature of Virginia for over 200 years.

The language of slavery, in fact, became ever more visible as the crisis mounted to the crescendo of secession in mid-April. Slavery in Virginia, delegates warned, would immediately decay if Virginia were cut off from fellow states that served as the market for their slaves and as their political allies against the Republicans. A Virginia trapped, alone, in the United States would find itself defenseless against runaways, abolitionists and slave rebellions.

But the omnipresence of the language of slavery does not settle the 150-year debate over the relative importance of slavery and states’ rights, for the language of rights flourished as well. The debate over the protection of slavery came couched in the language of governance, in words like “state,” “people,” “union,” “right,” “constitution,” “power,” “federal” and “amendment.” Variants of the word “right,” along with variants of “slave,” appear once for every two pages in the convention minutes. When the Virginians talked of Union they talked of a political entity built on the security and sanction of slavery in all its dimensions, across the continent and in perpetuity.

Contrast this with white Republicans in the North, for whom the real issue was the threat slaveholders presented to the nation. For too long, Republicans argued, slaveholders had overridden popular majorities at home and in the United States as a whole, dragged the country into war, and corrupted the Supreme Court, the presidency and the Senate. The Republicans pointed out that only a quarter of white Southerners owned even a single slave and that the rest of Southern whites suffered from the dominion of slaveholders.

But the Republicans miscalculated, underestimating the unanimity of white Southerners, whatever their other divisions, over slavery. Entire states, not merely individuals, possessed and were possessed by slavery. Secessionists and Unionists in Virginia sought to protect the single greatest unifying interest in the state – enslaved labor – with the single language they possessed for doing so, a language of political right. The South sought to protect slavery’s interests in the only way available to them, through shifting their allegiance to a new federal system, the Confederate nation.

In short, the records of the Virginia secession debate demonstrate how the vocabularies of slavery and rights, entangled and intertwined from the very beginning of the United States, became one and the same in the secession crisis. Virginians saw themselves as victims, forced into action. Walter Leake, a delegate from Goochland County, lamented that “Northern fanaticism” had brazenly claimed “the power of the Federal Government for the purpose of advancing their selfish interests, and not for the purpose of saving the Constitution or advancing the rights and interests of all.”

The “disease which has called together this convention,” Leake lamented, was the North’s fixation on slavery. That fixation was not a mere “derangement; it is chronic, it is deep-seated,” and it must come to an end. “It is necessary for the Northern people to correct their sentiments upon the subject of slavery, it is necessary that they should abstain from intermeddling with the institution before any harmony or quiet can be restored.” No one could doubt who, or what, was to blame for the crisis of the Union.

Lincoln’s call for non-seceding states to contribute militia to put down the rebellion in South Carolina after the firing on Fort Sumter forced a choice. Virginia, willing to stand aside while the Union was dismantled, would not raise its hand against the “subjugation” of a “sister” slave state. If the federal government could coerce South Carolina it could coerce Virginia. The call for troops drove a choice between the North and the South and the secessionists seized that moment to push Virginia into disunion.

Perhaps, given new tools and perspectives, Americans can change the focus of our arguments about the “primary cause” of the Civil War. If the North fought to sustain the justice, power and authority of the federal government, the corollary, many assume, must be that the South fought for the opposite, for the power of the states.

But the equation did not balance in that way: the North did not fight at first to end slavery, but the South did fight to protect slavery. It is vital that we use the tools newly available to us to grasp this truth in its immediacy and complexity, before it fades even further from view.

Edward L. Ayers is the president and a professor of history at the University of Richmond. His book “In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America” http://books.wwnorton.com/books/In-the-Presence-of-Mine-Enemies/ won the Bancroft Prize.

Company I, 54th Massachusetts Reenactment Regiment

On Monday, July 18, 2011, Civil War reenactors will commemorate the 148th anniversary of the Assault on Battery Wagner. Volunteer reenactors from Company I, 54th Massachusetts Reenactment Regiment will honor the men that participated in that historic battle on July 18, 1863. The event will occur on Morris Island, SC and the public is invited to attend.

The boat for the one-hour event will leave from the Charleston Maritime Center (10 Wharfside Street, downtown Charleston) at 3:00 pm, and return at 5:00 pm. Make your reservations by calling Joseph McGill at (843) 408-7727. Participants should arrive thirty minutes before their reserved time. The cost of the boat ride and visit to the island is $25.00.

The event is sponsored by Company I, 54th Massachusetts Reenactment Regiment.

How Can South Carolina Move Beyond the Civil War?

For Immediate Release
April 6, 2011

South Carolina ETV’s “The Big Picture” Seeks Common Ground
Columbia, SC…

Thursday, April 21 at 7 p.m., South Carolina ETV’s “The Big Picture” brings together a diverse array of organizations that rarely share the same stage to discuss how we commemorate the 150 th anniversary of the Civil War, and how we make peace with this chapter in our history and move past it.

Among the guests appearing on the show are:
Mark Simpson, SC Commander, Sons of Confederate Veterans∙
Jannie Harriot, SC African American Heritage Commission∙
Eloise Verdin, President, SC Daughters of the Confederacy∙
Blake Hallman, Ft. Sumter Ft. Moultrie Trust∙
Michael Allen, National Park Service∙
Eric Emerson, South Carolina Archives and History
Lonnie Randolph, South Carolina Branch President, NAACP

Hosted by Mark Quinn, The Civil War: “Finding Common Ground” presents a civil discussion that seeks to find agreement from seemingly opposing groups on many of the divisive issues surrounding South Carolina’s role in this dark chapter in our nation’s history.

The conversation will continue on Friday, April 22 at 1 p.m., with “ The Big Picture on the Radio,” heard on ETV Radio’s news stations.

Re-broadcasts of the television program will air on the following schedule:
ETV-HD:Sunday, April 24 at 12 noon
The SC Channel:Sunday, April 24 at 10 a.m.
ETV World:Sunday April 24 at 4 p.m.
Tuesday, April 26 at 4:30 p.m.
Friday, April 29 at 4:30 p.m.

Race, Gender, and Sexualities in the Atlantic World, March 9-10, 2012

The Carolina Lowcountry in the Atlantic World Program (CLAW) at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC invites paper proposals addressing women, gender, and sexuality in the Atlantic World 1500-Present. The featured keynote speaker is Jennifer L. Morgan (New York University). We invite scholars to submit proposals for individual papers and panels that might address such questions as:

• Performances of Gender
• Gender and Discovery
• Colonialism
• Constructions of Sexualities
• Native American Contact
• Race and Gender
• African Diaspora and Slavery

As with previous successful CLAW program events the conference will be run in a seminar style: accepted participants will be expected to send completed papers to the organizers in advance of the conference itself (by March 1st, 2012) for circulation via password-protected site. At the conference itself presenters will talk for no more than ten minutes about their paper, working on the assumption that everyone has read the paper itself. This arrangement means that papers may be considerably lengthier and more carefully argued than the typical 20-minute presentation; and it leads to more substantive, better informed discussion. It also generally allows us to move quite smoothly toward publication of a selection of essays with the University of South Carolina Press.

Proposals for individual papers should be 200 words, and should be accompanied by a brief one-page biographical statement indicating institutional affiliation, research interests, and relevant publishing record for each participant, including chairs and commentators. Please place the panel proposal, and its accompanying paper proposals and vitas in one file. Please submit your proposal electronically with CLAW conference in the subject line to the conference chair, Dr. Sandra Slater at slaters@cofc.edu by December 2, 2011.

If you wish to send a proposal for a 3- or 4-person panel, please send a 300 to 500-word proposal describing the panel as a whole as well as proposals for each of the individual papers, along with biographical statements for each of the presenters. The organizers reserve the right to accept individual papers from panel proposals, to break up panels, and to add papers to panels. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 31st, 2012.

Organizing Committee: Sandra Slater (History), Lisa Randle (CLAW & Avery Research Center), John White (CLAW), Simon Lewis (CLAW) [all College of Charleston]