{"id":1444,"date":"2016-01-22T02:56:09","date_gmt":"2016-01-22T02:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/?p=1444"},"modified":"2016-01-22T03:12:46","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T03:12:46","slug":"end-of-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/2016\/01\/22\/end-of-civil-war\/","title":{"rendered":"End of Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"

The end of the Civil War brought about\u00a0the restoration of the Union and the end of slavery, but were these two objectives really one and the same? \u00a0If so, does Abraham Lincoln deserve the lion’s share of the credit for melding them together? \u00a0These are the types of questions that historians argue over. \u00a0So did nineteenth-century Americans. \u00a0One way to engage a fresh perspective on\u00a0that\u00a0debate is to examine what a\u00a0commercial printer in Philadelphia did with a popular image following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Here is what the image looked like that year:<\/p>\n

\"Emancipation<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet here is what the original illustration looked like in January 1863 when Thomas Nast first drew it for\u00a0Harpers Weekly:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Emancipation<\/a>The difference is more than just color. \u00a0Nast’s allegory for emancipation has now been subtly altered to give the martyred president a greater role.<\/p>\n

\"cropped-cropped-cropped-cropped-emancipation.jpg\"<\/a>\"Emancipation<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Below\u00a0is a photograph taken at Fort Sumter on Friday, April 14, 1865. \u00a0That was a special day for the Union coalition –a kind of “mission accomplished” moment as Col. Robert Anderson returned with a delegation of notables, including abolitionists like Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and William Lloyd Garrison, to raise the American flag once again over the fort in Charleston harbor where the Civil War had begun almost exactly four years earlier.<\/p>\n

\"Sumter<\/a>Note the cracked glass plate from this seemingly ruined photograph now in the collection of the Library of Congress. \u00a0But look what happens to this image when it is digitized at a high resolution and then magnified.<\/p>\n

\"Sumter<\/a><\/p>\n

That’s Rev. Henry Ward Beecher speaking on the afternoon of Friday, April 14, 1865, from what he called “this pulpit of broken stone.” \u00a0Originally, scholars, using magnifying glasses, thought that William Lloyd Garrison was perhaps seated on Beecher’s left.<\/p>\n

\"Garrison<\/a>But now we are\u00a0confident at the House Divided Project that Garrison was actually seated in a special section on Beecher’s right, with other leading abolitionists and Lincoln administration notables.<\/p>\n

\"Garrison<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Garrison<\/a><\/p>\n

It was obviously a moving, reflective moment for Garrison, one captured in this detail image above from right after the ceremony and by the little known story of his visit the following morning to see the grave of secessionist icon John C. Calhoun. \u00a0You can read more about this episode here<\/a> and here<\/a>. \u00a0Sometimes people are surprised by the stories that slip out of public memory and don’t make it into standard textbooks. \u00a0The Garrison visit to South Carolina in April 1865 is certainly one of them, but another such lost tale involves a Dickinsonian named John A.J. Creswell, who was deeply involved in the final passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, which occurred in early January 1865. \u00a0Here is the image that appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper<\/em> to celebrate\u00a0that moment.<\/p>\n

\"Thirteenth<\/a><\/p>\n

You will notice the trio of men in the lower right hand corner, obviously prominent figures according to the illustrator. \u00a0We researched them here at the college and were thrilled to discover that one of them was a Dickinsonian. \u00a0It turns out that these are\u00a0three congressman from the Mid-Atlantic (from left to right) Thaddeus Stevens, William D. Kelley, and John A.J. Creswell. \u00a0We used a detail from that image for the cover of our first House Divided e-book, which profiles Creswell, a Dickinson graduate and Maryland politician who became one of the nation’s most important wartime abolitionists. \u00a0Yet, he’s almost completely forgotten, not even mentioned in Steven Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln” (2012)<\/a>, which concerned passage of the amendment. \u00a0You can download a free copy of Creswell’s biography, written by Dickinson college emeritus history professor John Osborne and college librarian Christine Bombaro, here<\/a>. \u00a0Ultimately, that might be the best way to rediscover the drama at the\u00a0end of the Civil War –by seeing old stories from new perspectives.<\/p>\n

\"Forgotten<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The end of the Civil War brought about\u00a0the restoration of the Union and the end of slavery, but were these two objectives really one and the same? \u00a0If so, does Abraham Lincoln deserve the lion’s share of the credit for melding them together? \u00a0These are the types of questions that historians argue over. \u00a0So did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13150],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1860s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}