Author: Matthew Pinsker

Which usage was more common during the Civil War itself: Confederates or Rebels?  Which usage is more appropriate today?  The answer to those questions require some careful thinking about evidence and perspective.

One way to test that proposition is by using an online tool from Google known as the Ngram Viewer.  This resource allows users to chart the appearance of words in over 15 million printed books and pamphlets that have appeared since the 16th century.  If you narrow the search to the period 1861-1865 and enter the terms Confederates and Rebels (case sensitive) separated by a comma (and with the smoothing function reduced to zero), you might get a sense of one possible answer (see image below).

Or you might try searching the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln to see how he used the terms.  During the war, his writings included 160 references to “rebels” and only about twenty references to “confederates.”

Perhaps the most fruitful way to answer this question would be to create a series of visualizations from various digitized historical newspapers.  Of course, that idea is quite ambitious.  It appears for now at least that nobody has yet attempted to do this.  However, the New York Times Disunion series contains an excellent post from a professor and student at Gettysburg College that addresses an aspect of this issue in a thought-provoking way.  Professor Scott Hancock and undergraduate student Alexandra Milano wrote about the “Real Rebels of the Civil War” in October 2013.  Their post is worth reading for anyone interested in how the use of words can dramatically affect the interpretations of actions.

Who was living with Abraham Lincoln in 1860?  The question is more complicated than it sounds.  A quick check of the 1860 census (via a subscription database service such as Ancestry or Fold3) reveals that in addition to his wife (Mary, age 35) and three young boys (listed by the census taker as Robert T, 16, Willie W, 9, and Thomas, 7), there was also an eighteen-year-old female servant named M. Johnson and a young fourteen-year-old male named Phillip Dinkell.

Other Lincoln scholars have identified the servant as Mary Johnson, an Irish immigrant, who helped Mary Lincoln around the house and with the boys.  Mrs. Lincoln hired a series of young female, mostly Irish-born, domestic servants like Mary Johnson, during the 1840s and 1850s while the family was living in Springfield, Illinois.  At the White House, the Lincoln relied on a wider range of servants –male, female, white and black– but the most important hired figure, at least in terms of the family’s life during that period was probably  housekeeper Mary Ann Cuthbert.

There is a letter from Philip Dinkel’s brother (note spelling) in the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Private George J. Dinkel reported on May 28, 1864 that Philip was in Chicago studying to be a minister.    Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame includes a story in his work about Mary Lincoln allegedly berating Philip Dinkel, whom he describes as a “servant boy”:  “she ordered a servant boy, Phillip Dinkel, ‘to get out, and threw his suit case out the window after him.’  However, this account is recollected, second-hand and at least some of the information in Burlingame’s footnote does not seem to be a match for this Philip Dinkel.  The 1864 letter from brother George (not included in Burlingame’s materials) suggests that perhaps Philip was boarding at the Lincoln’s but was not a “servant,” and instead may have been more like a tutor.  Burlingame’s indispensable multi-volume biography, by the way, is available freely online from the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College.  You can find his reference to Philip Dinkel with the supporting footnotes in the PDF for Volume 1, Chapter 6, ‘It would Just Kill Me to Marry Mary Todd’: Courtship and Marriage, (1840-42).”  Here are the details from Burlingame’s footnote to the Dinkel story:

“Philip Dingle,” age five, appears in the 1850 census of Sangamon County. The 1860 census for Sangamon County lists Phillip Dinkell living in the Lincoln household as a servant. Military records show German-born Philip Dinkle, age 18, on the rolls of the Union Army in 1862-63. He died of consumption in 1865. Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 27 October 1865. His widowed mother, Barbara Dinkel, lived a block and a half from the Lincolns, on Edwards Street between Eighth and Ninth, according to the 1860-61 Springfield City Directory. Temple, Lincoln’s Home, 66.

Clearly, there’s more to find out about Lincoln’s neighbors, the Dinkels.  And perhaps there’s even a paper to be written about a figure like Philip Dinkel….

For an update on the Dinkel family research, check out this short post.

Historical images of Henry “Box” Brown are not as rare as one might imagine.  The nickname refers to a slave who escaped from Richmond, Virginia in March 1849 inside of box that was shipped to Philadelphia via Adams Express over the course of about 24 hours.  The “Box” Brown escape became the most sensational of the Underground Railroad stories in the years before the Civil War.  There are no known photographs of Henry Brown, but the publicity surrounding his remarkable “resurrection” (as abolitionists quickly called it) produced a number of popular book illustrations and lithographic prints. All of them can be tracked down with a simple Google “Images” search.  Here are some examples below.

The best discussion of these early images comes from Jeffrey Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown (2003).  That excellent monograph, however, is not available online.   To read organizer William Still’s account of the Henry Brown escape, see this excerpt from his memoir online, formatted as a flip book.  Or check out this online exhibition: Henry “Box” Brown or this Google Earth tour that recreate’s Brown’s journey on March 23, 1849.  All of those online tools are available within the Underground Railroad Digital Classroom from the House Divided Project at Dickinson College.

Eric Foner writes in A Short History of Reconstruction (1990) that, “Four interrelated areas reveal the extent and limits of Republican efforts to reshape Southern society:  education, race relations, the labor system, economic development” (p. 156).  Students in History 288 should be able to explain what Foner means by this statement and how the politics of 1868 in particular reveal the limits of Republican efforts to transform the South.  Foner’s narrative is thick with revealing details, but  students should try to identify at least one example for each category.  For those who want to visualize these issues, consult the online exhibit built around Foner’s groundbreaking work from the University of Houston’s “Digital History” site:  “America’s Reconstruction.”  The slideshows are full of fascinating stories and great images, such as a rare photograph of an auction of confiscated Confederate lands in South Carolina in 1865, the image of a black marriage ceremony after the war, “reunion” advertisements by former slaves seeking lost relatives, the roll book for a black school in Richmond, excerpts from the infamous Black Codes, original text from the Reconstruction era amendments and civil rights laws, and a startling cartoon about the Freedman’s Bureau produced in Pennsylvania (see below).