This fall, five college students from the University of South Dakota, South Dakota State University, and Augustana University completed an intensive, hands-on institute — From Archive to Exhibit: Project-Based History Education Institute — hosted by the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) and funded in partnership with the Library of Congress: Teaching with Primary Sources Consortium.
Led by historian Lindsey R. Peterson and educator Stephanie Puhrmann, the institute brought together emerging historians and future educators to explore how primary sources can anchor rigorous, complex, and engaging history education. Over the course of the institute, participants analyzed digitized documents, experimented with innovative teaching strategies, and ultimately created original digital museum exhibits using nineteenth-century sources.
Peterson demonstrates how to incorporate iterative research questions, thesis statements, and secondary and primary source evidence into lectures.
Participants worked extensively with CWRGM’s six-week open access curriculum on the historical research process and the CWRGM digital archive, which contains thousands of letters written to Mississippi’s governors during the Civil War and Reconstruction, as well as complementary materials from the Library of Congress. Participants stepped directly into the role of students, completing the same kinds of tasks they might later assign from the CWRGM curriculum in their classrooms.
Participants practiced strategies for teaching emancipation as a process, not a single moment. Letters from formerly enslaved people, Union soldiers, widows, immigrants, and students revealed how freedom was negotiated differently across time, geography, and social position. These sources became the foundation for lessons on historical context, close reading, and argumentation.
The capstone of the institute asked participants to synthesize their learning by creating online digital museum exhibits using primary sources from CWRGM and the Library of Congress. Each project required students to develop a research question, select and interpret evidence, and present their findings in an accessible, visually engaging digital format intended for a public audience.
Isabella Purzol, a senior History major with an Education minor at the University of South Dakota, created “The Civil War’s Impact on Irish Immigrant Life,” which traced how Irish immigrants in Mississippi and beyond navigated loyalty, labor, and identity during the war.
Sophomore History major with a teaching specialization at South Dakota State University, Kiya Williamson, created “Southern Widows & the Civil War.” Her exhibit centered women’s voices to explore loss, resilience, and survival in the context of war and Confederate nationalism, highlighting how widowhood reshaped family structures and economic realities.
Patrick Wadley, a University of South Dakota student majoring in History and International Studies with a minor in Russian Studies, developed “University of Mississippi’s ‘University Greys’: The Student Experience in War—A Story Told in Letters.” His project examined students’ motivations for enlisting and how they experienced the war intellectually and emotionally, revealing the costs of conflict on young men and educational institutions.
Screen capture of institute attendees, Peterson, and Puhrmann after presenting their digital museum exhibits to the group.
Another highlight was playing Brine & Blood, an educational role-playing game that uses primary sources to immerse players in the moral, political, and personal stakes of emancipation in Civil War Mississippi. Through gameplay, institute attendees grappled with many of the key realities of historical decision-making: constrained choices, incomplete information, and competing perspectives.
For many participants, the institute served as a bridge between academic history and public-facing education. As one participant reflected, “I found the task-based learning—by doing what our students would do—to be extremely valuable. Also the experienced viewpoints on making things accessible will be incredibly valuable and helpful for myself going forward with any digital or educational project.”
Several noted that the experience expanded their sense of who history education is for and where it can happen. Peterson, Puhrmann, and the institute, according to one participant, “were extremely useful.” They continued, “I now have an entire class structure and documentation to use and/or build from as opposed to starting from scratch. They also give me tips and guidance on more informal educational opportunities and approaches.” The institute’s emphasis on digital exhibits, informal learning environments, and collaboration with cultural institutions underscored that history education extends well beyond the traditional classroom.
By engaging directly with backward-designed curriculum, accessibility considerations, and authentic assessment, students left with tools they can immediately adapt for student teaching, museum work, or community-based projects. As the five participants move forward in their academic and professional careers, the institute’s impact will extend into classrooms, museums, and community spaces across the region. Whether guiding high school students through a National History Day project, designing interactive lessons on emancipation, or developing public history exhibits, they carry with them a model for teaching history that is evidence-based, inclusive, and deeply engaging.
The From Archive to Exhibit institute demonstrates what is possible when historians, educators, and students collaborate across institutions to rethink how history is taught—and who gets to tell its stories.
On July 14, 1865, about three months after the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox, Nannie Denman wrote to the Governor of Mississippi, William Sharkey, from Valley Home, her plantation near Yazoo City. In 1860, Denman was a planter with $40,000 in real estate and an estimated $66,635 in personal estate. She claimed sixty one enslaved people, including infants and the elderly.[1] A widow, Denman had run her plantation consistently with the business practices of the time. Hers was a large enterprise, but it was built on debt. She had purchased forty people and 1,000 acres of land in 1860 with a mortgage, paying $30,000 up front with $50,000 remaining to be paid over four years. Of course, the war intervened. As the cost of farming expenses rose, she extended the first payment. The war went on and, as she told Sharkey, “you know the sad fate of our country.” She was still indebted, but now she asked: “do you think that I will be compelled to pay for the negroes when they have been a tax upon me”?[2]
Denman’s predicament was typical for widows and former enslavers alike after the Civil War. The U.S. government’s wartime decision to abolish slavery without compensation to former enslavers left many insolvent after the Civil War and diminished the South’s wealth by sixty percent. Certainly, the mortgage system that undergirded the South’s plantation economy did not predict immediate, uncompensated emancipation. Denman explained, “There was a mortgage taken upon the land & negroes,” but, she suggested, “I believe all bills of sale garentees a negro, Slave for life.” She referred to the written or unwritten warranty that usually accompanied the purchase of an enslaved person. However, as long as the seller had fulfilled their part of the bargain by surrendering, in this case, the land and enslaved people whom Denman purchased, the contract for their sale and therefore Denman’s mortgage was also valid. Similar to Denman, many other debtors appealed to the courts for relief, insisting that, by destroying their property rights in people, emancipation invalidated their original contracts for the purchase of an enslaved person.[3]
Letter from Nannie Denman to Mississippi Governor William L. Sharkey; July 14, 1865. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
With the rise of married women’s property laws before the war, slaveholding widows may also have been especially insolvent. States began to shield women and children from their husbands’ or fathers’ indebtedness with new property laws. After a serious financial panic, Mississippi passed the first U.S. married women’s property law in 1839, followed by a number of states in the next decades. Yet, as historian Laura Edwards has argued, married women’s property acts “were not designed with women’s individual interests in mind.” These antebellum legal practices were designed to keep the wealth from human property in the family. Savvy slaveholding families took advantage of married women’s property laws to shield assets, particularly property in people, from seizure in the event that a patriarch defaulted on his debts.[4]
No longer able to leverage the value and bodies of enslaved people against their debts, debtors petitioned their states and the federal government to invalidate contracts for the purchase of enslaved. As I argue in my recent book, Counting the Cost of Freedom (UNC Press, 2025), debtors’ appeals were part of a widespread effort on the part of white southerners to seek compensation or relief from the cost of immediate, uncompensated emancipation. Many insisted that the Constitution, doctrines of property law, principles of fairness, and the need for regional economic stability dictated that they be reimbursed for the loss of the value of the enslaved humans they legally held as property prior to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In addition, widows like Denman and their representatives made unique claims on their states and the federal government revealing that their claims for relief were in fact attempts to stabilize the southern economy by adapting the gendered logics of the slaveholding household.[5]
Denman’s letter to Sharkey demonstrates many of the ways in which widows and politicians claiming to work on their behalf mobilized widows’ unique gendered and legal status to appeal for relief. Sharkey had been appointed governor by President Andrew Johnson to usher the state back into the Union. Formerly a member of the Whig Party, Sharkey opposed secession and remained a Unionist despite living in Mississippi throughout the Civil War. After his appointment, he called a convention to write a new state constitution, where delegated maneuvered to secure federale compensation for freed slaves. But in the summer of 1865, before the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, few knew how the federal government would carry out emancipation. Delegate to the convention pushed for policies other than immediate, uncompensated emancipation.
Records of the Field Offices for the State of Mississippi, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1872, Subordinate Field Offices, Yazoo City (Subcommissioner), Register of Plantation Census in Yazoo County, Volume (329). Courtesy of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Widows’ unique claims for federal compensation provided a powerful rhetorical tool for proponents of compensation and relief, tying the two different legal issues together. Denman suggested that uncompensated emancipation placed a particular hardship on debtors. She wrote, “If I had paid for the place & negroes I should not care, but to be forced to give up my home & all I had” in the event that she defaulted on her debt “will be too hard.” She emphasized her sound fiscal decisions and capability, telling Sharkey, “I am & have been a widow for 12 years I have lived economically & tried to manage judiciously to make a home for my little family.” As historian Ariela Gross has shown, the law might side with enslavers, particularly men, if they could demonstrate their “good business sense” in a legal conflict. This is one reason that Denman stressed that her indebtedness was no fault of her own, but a tragedy of circumstance.[6]
Similarly, Denman attempted to shield herself from any blame for the situation she was now in. She would not be impoverished, she insisted, if it were not for emancipation. In the summer of 1865, when many southern white men were still barred from voting or otherwise participating in formal politics, emphasizing the innocence of widows and other women was a way to dissociate the issues of the war — especially slavery — from the politics of reunion. Widows were dependents like other women and children, but as a result of their widowhood, they were no longer sheltered under the same private household relationships as wives or single women. At the same time, the idea that dependents were nonpartisan, nonpolitical beings, loyal to their patriarch and not to their governments, enabled politicians to claim compensation on behalf of “innocent” widows and orphans, but not other enslavers.[7]
However, as women’s historians of the Civil War era have pointed out, women mobilized the politics of loyalty to their own ends. At the end of her letter, Denman alluded to her cousin, who had recently been appointed the provost marshal of her region. She told Sharkey that “the country is quiet & getting along slowly” because he had “no guard to enforce his orders, so has to use policy.” The report would have tied Denman to a U.S. army officer, emphasizing her loyalty by proxy if not by practice.[8]
U.S. Senate Report 45–310, May 1, 1878, Congressional Serial Set 1790. Courtesy of the Law Library of Congress.
The widow’s appeal also had some basis in nineteenth-century law. Especially in the North, states had enacted wrongful death statutes that made widows, dependent children, and next of kin the exclusive beneficiaries of payments in death actions for their patriarchs. The logic was that upstanding families required income from a male provider. Conversely, widows whose husbands and fathers had once provided for them deserved social support. Courts had also traditionally considered the economic consequences of property confiscation to determine whether someone should receive compensation under the takings clause. Wartime relief programs for war widows, for example, may have consolidated this legal logic in the South. Many Confederate states had sponsored relief programs for widows and families whose patriarchs had joined the army or died in war. Denman’s letter similarly portrayed widows as a protected group to beg relief.[9]
There’s much we don’t know from Denman’s letter alone. Did Sharkey answer? Did Denman sell the land or maintain it, particularly by hiring freed people? Did she agree with those Mississippians who did pursue federal compensation for slaves, as well as debt relief? Nevertheless, it’s clear that these questions about compensation and relief affected the economic reconstruction of the South. As she ended her letter, Denman asked Sharkey for business advice, which would have enhanced her gendered approach by appealing to him as a patriarch and focusing the issue back on her business. “I will greatly depend upon your advice or suggestions the course to persue.” She could “give the place back or hold on if the levees are rebult the land will be as valuable as ever.” I don’t know what advice Sharkey gave her, and it’s difficult to identify her in the 1870 Census. It’s possible that the two young girls who lived with her in 1860 moved to Carroll County sometime before 1870, suggesting that the household did not remain intact.[10]
It’s unlikely that Denman received any relief. When it was ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment invalidated any claims for compensation for the value of formerly enslaved people. Although many southern states enacted a series of debt relief laws, including debts for the value of slaves, these laws only went so far. After Denman appealed to Sharkey, many southern courts and, eventually, in 1871 the Supreme Court ruled that emancipation was an act of God that did not constitute a broke contract. They did not agree that a public act should affect private contracts. So Denman and others in her predicament were legally bound to pay their debt, but we also do not know whether they did. They may have defaulted, simply unable to pay.[11]
Map of the Mississippi Delta. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Denman’s letter represents the uncertainty of emancipation policy in the contingent moment of the summer of 1865 and the many legal questions surrounding emancipation that Americans had to confront in Reconstruction. Denman may have been able to maintain her plantation with a different form of labor and eventually pay her debts for slaves, but that possibility was riskier in a world without the antebellum guarantees of slave mortgages and credit valued with property in people. Facing financial instability and new social realities, slaveholding widows and their political allies wielded their local influence and understanding of antebellum law and financial practices to claim the right to relief from the costs of emancipation.
That said, those costs were not evenly distributed. Denman’s Valley Home plantation was near Yazoo City, possibly in Holmes County and near one of the poorest communities in the U.S. today. The area is situated at the southeastern edge of the Mississippi Delta and part of the Black Belt where African Americans were forced into coercive labor conditions and disenfranchised by Jim Crow. Thanks to these practices, most southern families who had claimed enslaved people invented new forms of coerced labor and plunder to recoup their financial losses from emancipation within one generation.[12] Whether Denman was among those planters is a new research question, inspired by the GWRGM project.
Amanda Laury Kleintop is an assistant professor of History at Elon University. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2018. Her first book, Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight for Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Historical Association, and more.
[1] 1860 Federal Census, Mississippi Yazoo, Dwelling 281; Slave Schedules.
[2] Nannie Denman, “Letter from Nannie Denman to Mississippi Governor William L. Sharkey; July 14, 1865,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Sharkey Series 771: Box 955, Folder 3 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed September 12, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_771-955-03-45.
[3] For more an overview of slave mortgages and the plantation economy, see: Richard Kilbourne, Debt, Investments, Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825-1885 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995); Bonnie Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (November 2010): 817–866; Bonnie Martin, “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism: Local Credit Networks and the Mortgaging of Slaves,” in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 107–121; Justin Simard, “Slavery’s Legalism: Lawyers and the Commercial Routine of Slavery,” Law and History Review 37, no. 2 (2019), 571–603. Letters similar to Denman’s include: Letter from Martha Deery Churchwell to Andrew Johnson, July 17, 1865, in Papers of Andrew Johnson (PAJ), vol. 8, edited by LeRoy P. Graf and Ralph W. Haskins (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 416; Annie E. Hutchcroft to Andrew Johnson, July 25, 1865, in PAJ, vol. 8, 471; Ann H. Kincheloe to President Andrew Johnson, January 8, 1866, in PAJ, vol. 9 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 578.
[4] Laura Edwards, Scarlet Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 28–31, quote from 29; Kirsten E. Wood, Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Andrew Kull, “The Enforceability after Emancipation of Debts Contracted for the Purchase of Slaves,” Chicago-Kent Law Review (1994), 528; William Calderhead, “How Extensive was the Border State Slave Trade?: A New Look,” Civil War History, 18, no. 1 (March 1972), 47; Kilbourne, Debt, Investments, Slaves, 99–100; Richard H. Chused, “Married Women’s Property Law: Reception of the Early Married Women’s Property Acts by Courts and Legislatures, 1800–1850,” 1398–1400, 1399n207–209; Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were her Property: White Women a Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 25–56, 197.
[5] Amanda Laury Kleintop, Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight for Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), 4–5, 75–86, 123–125.
[6] Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 98–99, 120.
[7] Gregory P. Downs, Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2011), 4.
[8] Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 66–70, 71–84, 97–99; Stephanie McCurry, Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 35–54; John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2012); Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (Lieber Code), articles 155–157.
[9] Erwin Chemerinsky, Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies (New York: Wolters Kluwer, 2015), 663; John Fabian Witt, “From Loss of Services to Loss of Support: The Wrongful Death Statutes, the Origins of Modern Tort Law, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Family” Law & Social Inquiry 25, no. 3 (2000), 736–7, 744; John Fabian Witt, “Toward a New History of American Accident Law: Classical Tort Law and the Cooperative First-Party Insurance Movement” Harvard Law Review 114, no. 3 (2001), 690–841; Edwards, Scarlet Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 91–92, 120–121; Gross, “’And for the Widow and Orphan’: Confederate Widows, Poverty, and Public Assistance,” in Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas, edited by Leslie J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 217–223.
[10] 1870 Federal Census, Mississippi, Carroll County, Township 20 Range 6, Households 85 and 86.
[11] For more studies on courts’ decisions, see: Giuliana Perrone, Nothing More Than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Aviam Soifer, “Status, Contract, and Promises Unkept,” The Yale Law Journal 1916–1959; Edwards, The People and Their Peace; Kull, “The Enforceability after Emancipation of Debts Contracted for the Purchase of Slaves,” 493–538; Diane J. Klein, Naming and Framing the “Subject” of Antebellum Slave Contracts: Introducing Julia, “A Certain Negro Slave,” “A Man,” Joseph, Eliza, and Albert, Rutgers Race & Law Review 9 (2008), 243–283; John C. Williams, Slave Contracts and the Thirteenth Amendment, Seattle University Law Review (2016), 1009–1029; Kilbourne, Debt, Investments, Slaves, 99.
[12] Ager, Boustan, and Eriksson, “The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock: White Southerners After the Civil War.” The American Economic Review 111.11 (2021), 3767–94.
The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) project’s metadata, transcription, subject tagging, and annotation work is accomplished by an incredible team of students from around the nation. Funded by the NHPRC and NEH, CWRGM presently employs seven graduate students, ten undergraduate students, and a high school senior from Mississippi, South Dakota, Illinois, and New York. Their time with the project provides students with hands-on training and experience in documentary editing, historical research, and DublinCore metadata, and many of our past student researchers have gone onto to rewarding careers in libraries, archives, and museums or to continue their graduate-level education in these fields. Their dedication, skill, and commitment are essential to our ability to make these critical historical records freely available online at cwrgm.org, and we believe their training and professional development is crucial to creating a truly collaborative, community-minded digital documentary edition.
This winter, CWRGM co-director Dr. Lindsey R. Peterson sat down with Mariah Cosens, a member of the CWRGM annotation research team and a first-year master’s student in the history department at the University of South Dakota, to discuss her work with the project. In the subsequent interview, Cosens highlights many of the important skills CWRGM student research assistants develop during their tenure with the project and the importance of this work.
Peterson: Hi Mariah. Thank you so much for agreeing to chat with me. Please tell us about yourself.
Mariah Cosens, CWRGM Research Assistant and MA student in the history department at the University of South Dakota
Cosens: My pleasure. I’m Mariah Cosens, a first-year master’s student in the history department at USD, and I did my undergraduate degree in history at the University of Sioux Falls before coming here. I’m interested in twentieth century African American history and my thesis focuses on a Black-owned restaurant in southwest Missouri and how, amidst segregation, it created a safe, communal leisure space for Black soldiers deploying out of Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri during World War II. I am also pursuing a certificate in archival and museum studies at the university and am a researcher on the annotation team for CWRGM. I am also a mother of two young daughters and am married.
Peterson: Thank you; you’re a very busy person. I suppose I should explain a bit about CWRGM’s background for readers. CWRGM, or the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project, is a federally funded digital documentary edition. With the financial support of the National Endowment of the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we are digitizing over 20,000 documents that were sent to the governors of Mississippi from 1859–1882. Many people incorrectly assumed that these records are from the governors themselves, but they are actually from an incredibly diverse body of authors. You can hear from women, impoverished people, soldiers, veterans, and even freed African Americans, among many more constituencies. Essentially it was like the Twitter of the era; just about everyone wrote to their governor. Once we have archival quality scans, student researchers write metadata for the collection, transcribe the original documents, and identify key terms in the collection. These key terms then become hyperlinked subject tags, allowing users to find any document in the collection that also shares that term. This is where the annotation team comes in. So, please tell us about your role with CWRGM.
Cosens: Well, I’m currently a research assistant for the annotation team. I was approached by you about a job openings for graduate students on the project, and I wanted to apply because it would connect my background and interest in Black history with digital and public history and expand my skills. My job on the project is to research those key topics that appear in the collection and give context to users to help them better understand this pivotal period. For example, when references to topics such as mass racial violence, like the Yazoo Race Massacre, appear in the collection, I draft up narrative and contextual explanations of what these events were. Essentially, I help users better understand what they are reading and about the complexities of this era, like the relationship between white and Black Americans during Reconstruction.
Peterson: Well said. Tell us about a favorite key term that you have worked on.
Cosens: That would have to be my annotation for the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It was fun to research and not just explain what the act itself was legally, but I also got to contextualize what previous laws had done and what its larger impact was, especially for those enslaved people who emancipated themselves. Relating the complexities of how people experienced the act was challenging, interesting, and important to work on. Annotations like this one really help me to become a better writer because I have to take a lot of complicated history about a topic and boil it down to a brief annotation that anyone from a grade school student to a scholar to a genealogist can understand.
Peterson: That is a great example. What topics are you looking forward to working on?
Cosens: Probably the annotations on the people that show up in the collection. I think that will be really interesting because I am excited to start seeing people overlapping in specific causes and become familiar with them. Sometimes historians feel as though they are acquainted with the people in their research, and I am eager to learn more about their life paths, their struggles, the decisions they made and why they communicated with their governors. Plus, this is where we will really start to identify Black authors by name and flesh out the lives of people who so often go unnamed in history. I also just started work on annotating organizations and that has been fascinating as well because these annotations become spaces where I get to tell broader stories about the past. It is so important to see how individuals impacted a historical narrative and it’s always enjoyable expanding my historical knowledge.
CWRGM co-director Dr. Lindsey R. Peterson and student researcher Mariah Cosens collaborating on a project annotation
Peterson: I agree, the collection is full of interesting people and topics. How has your work with CWRGM connected with your studies in the history department’s master’s program at USD?
Cosens: The work is fascinating and has taught me a lot of valuable research skills, especially the importance of digital research skills and resources. I often research in online historical newspapers, journals, military records, and the census. And working from South Dakota to find quality primary sources on Mississippi’s history would be impossible without digitization. Not only that, but the sources I am helping put online will also become resources for other students, genealogists, and scholars in their own research, and I have even been able to contextualize my own research better. The themes I find from working on past annotations pertaining to CWRGM’s African American history have helped me to draw connections to my own thesis work, so that’s been really cool to see. As a student, it’s refreshing when your employment mirrors the skills required in your educational path. I get paid to hone these skills, and then I can deploy them directly into my own coursework.
Peterson: That is fantastic! So many of the skills needed to create these editions are applicable to future careers for humanities students. That has certainly been my own experience. So, what’s surprised you in your work at CWRGM?
Cosens: I forgot how hard it is to read cursive. (laughs) What is annoyingly surprising is how in the nineteenth century there were not given names to places, so there are all of these locations that existed then and were known colloquially, but they don’t exist anymore. Or at least they no longer are recognizable by their former names, so those terms have been difficult to locate. An example would be Harrison Station, Mississippi. Often these older towns or unincorporated areas were known colloquially through who first purchased and settled the land, but they’ve been subsumed by larger incorporated towns and cease to exist or are just a populated area in a county now. Finding locations like this really takes some digging. I went through many sources with Harrison Station, but none were verifiable or quality sources, so I had to keep researching. Eventually I found a history of the county that finally gave a substantial history to Harrison Station, its settlement dates, and other general context that would have been lost to the ages without the digitization of the source I used. Some days this job feels like a treasure hunt! But I find it very rewarding to finally locate a difficult to find location, person, or organization.
Peterson: You’re essentially a historical detective! What are some of the challenges of the job?
Screen capture of CWRGM letter, “Letter from A. P. Miller to Mississippi Governor James L. Alcorn; March 19, 1870,” showing the pop-up annotation associated with the “Emancipation and Self Emancipation” subject tag
Cosens:The size of the tasks in front of me can be a challenge. Some of these terms are huge, so where do I start? How do I boil down an experience like emancipation, with all of its diversity and impact, into a few sentences or paragraphs? It is a monumental task. The reverse is also true. I would also say that learning to be okay with not being able to identify a term and accepting that can be very difficult. Sometimes you can find information about a key term but cannot verify it with quality sources, so you have to move on. Other times you can’t find anything about that topic. It is just lost to history.
Peterson: That is very true. Before we wrap up, please tell us about your future work with CWRGM and your own career goals.
Cosens: Well, I still have a year and a half left in my Master’s, so I’ll be finishing my coursework and my thesis. I’ll also continue with the annotation team but am interested in learning more about digital editing, and CWRGM is a place where I can gain those skills. Concerning the long term, though, I am leaning towards going into some type of public history field but am open to anything where I can use my historical research and writing skills. I am especially interested in digital research and connecting history to the public in digital spaces, so my training with CWRGM is invaluable to learning digital workflows, research, and communication. My interests have primarily been in African American history, but I’m also open to working on public history concerning United States history at large, too. If I could keep doing something as flexible, accessible, and fascinating as this work long-term, I would be delighted!
In the Spring of 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant began his campaign to capture the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. As Grant pursued his indirect course to the city and eventually laid siege to it, Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, Governor of Mississippi John J. Pettus, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis frantically telegrammed each other about how to proceed. Their messages underscore the Confederate high command’s waning confidence in each other and their ability to protect the Gibraltar of the Confederacy.
Pemberton, in a telegram to Pettus on May 1, 1863, indicated that despite Confederate resistance, “there will be ten thousand troops at Jackson in a few days.”[1] A month later, with the city of Vicksburg well under siege, President Davis reminded Governor Pettus of the lengths to which the Confederacy had already gone to reinforce the Vicksburg and declined interest in doing any more. On June 5, Davis informed the governor that he “had not the power to comply with the request” Pettus had made for more troops. He then called into question whether Mississippi was adequately using the forces it already possessed. Davis pointed to the fact that there had been no efforts to draw from “the militia or exempts of the state” and concluded that “to furnish the reinforcements sent to Mississippi” already, the Confederacy had “drawn from other points more heavily than was considered altogether safe.”[2]
This correspondence between Davis and Pettus only soured. As Vicksburg languished under siege, Davis again telegrammed Pettus that the “withdrawal of thirty thousand troops as suggested” by Pettus, from another part of the Confederacy to reinforce Vicksburg, would ultimately have to come from Middle Tennessee where they could not be spared. Davis acknowledged the importance of the situation at Vicksburg but nonetheless expressed discouragement that the governor’s recent communications indicated “no reliance on efforts to be made with the forces on the spot.”[3] Davis thereby indicated a declining faith that either Pemberton or Pettus could sustain Vicksburg with any number of troops.
By July 8, four days after the city belonged once more to the United States, a despondent Davis could only ask Pettus “what is the state of affairs at Vicksburg?”[4] The next day, Pettus informed the Confederate president of Vicksburg’s surrender but remained hopeful. He wrote Davis that Vicksburg had indeed fallen on their former nation’s anniversary “for want of provisions,” rather than unwillingness to fight. However, he maintained that “twenty-two thousand officers retain side arms and private property…and remain prisoners of war until exchanged. If arms are promptly sent them and the exchange pressed to a speedy completion Miss. may yet be saved.” Less optimistically, Pettus noted that the Federals were then within seven miles of Jackson and “battle expected.”[5]
These communications between Davis, Pemberton, and Pettus underscore growing divisiveness within the Confederate high command. Such telegrams threatened to boost Union morale and, in Pettus’ case, foil their military strategy, if leaked to the national public. To stave off such an eventuality, each of the above communications was written in code.
Telegram from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus; June 5, 1863. Courtesy of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.
Davis, Pemberton, and Pettus all adopted a substitution cipher known as a Vigenere cipher to encrypt their messages. It’s popularity among the Confederacy’s leaders, particularly at Vicksburg, produced its contemporary nickname, the “Vicksburg cipher.” As a substitution cipher, each letter in the original document is “substituted” for a coded letter based on a specific encryption pattern. The root of that pattern is a word or phrase that serves as the key to writing and then deciphering the code. The Confederacy used multiple keys including the most popular “Manchester Bluff.” If one has the key and the encoded letters, then deciphering the message is relatively straightforward. Vigenere ciphers work off an alphabetical grid like the one below.
This grid is a copy of one presented to the Union Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1865. Reproduced in “Overview of Civil War Codes and Ciphers” courtesy of Cryptiana.
The keyword indicates the correct horizontal row. So, if the first letter of the key phrase is “m” as in “Manchester Bluff,” one should start on the horizontal row that begins with “m.” If the first letter in the coded message was then “I” as it is in the June 21 telegram from Jefferson Davis, the decoder would move horizontally along the row beginning with “m” until reaching the letter “I.” The letter at the top of that column indicates the author’s meaning, here the letter “w.” Locating each letter, then, becomes a matter of navigating the grid in a backwards “L” shape.
Writing the code would require working backwards, locating the true letter at the top of the grid and going downward along that column until reaching the horizontal row indicated by the keyword. The axis of the two would produce the coded letter one would write down. CWRGM’s documents only contain coded letters, but fortunately other historians have located the common keyword “Manchester Bluff,” which I adopted as a starting point when working on the documents as a graduate research assistant.[6] I wrote each letter out longhand to make it easier to see how the letters lined up, placing the keyword at the top, the code underneath, and the prospective meaning at the bottom. For example, to get the meaning of Davis’s June 21 telegram, I wrote:
Key
M
A
N
C
H
E
S
T
E
R
Code
I
L
G
J
K
V
S
P
E
C
Meaning
W
I
T
H
D
R
A
W
A
L
Fortunately, Davis, Pettus, and Pemberton were kind enough to universally use “Manchester Bluff” as their key, saving Union Army codebreakers and impatient graduate researchers much trouble. Perhaps due to the haste required by their circumstances, Pemberton and Pettus even preserved the correct spacing between each word, whereas in the rest of the documents I had to parse out the words for myself from a lengthy, unbroken chain of letters.
Aside from offering an interesting puzzle to sort out, these codes underscore the CWRGM database’s usefulness to researchers. The documents mentioned above embody the urgency and anxiety felt in a Confederacy faced with the loss of one of its most important cities, and their staunch hope of preserving the Confederate war effort despite it. They also provide a window into the decision-making and internal bickering of an army on its heels. Not only did Davis, Pettus, and Pemberton sharply disagree over how to proceed, and make subtle jabs at each other’s efforts, they took infinite pains to keep those disagreements secret from Union interceptors and, if unintentionally, historians. While the decoding of ciphers from Vicksburg is not new, CWRGM’s effort to provide deciphered transcriptions of these documents is ensuring that even documents designed specifically for secrecy are available and accessible to wide audience. CWRGM’s database thereby highlights the digital humanities’ role in pushing historical inquiry further by exploring not only the content of historical documents but the often more insightful forms of that content.
In this July 8, 1863 telegram, Confederate President Jefferson Davis writes in a Vigenere Cypher and requests that the governor respond likewise. Telegram from President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus; July 8, 1863. Courtesy of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.
A. J. Blaylock is a Ph. D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a B.A. in History from the University of Southern Mississippi and an M.A. in History from the University of Alabama. He has worked on three different Civil War Governors projects in Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky and is currently an Assistant Editor for the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Digital Project. His current research focuses on the intersections of race, military service, and historical memory in the nineteenth-century U. S. South.
[1] “Telegram from General John C. Pemberton to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus,” May 9, 1863. Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_762-948-08-37.
[2] “Telegram from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus,” June 5, 1863. Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_762-948-09-06.
[3] “Copies of Telegram from President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus, June 1863. Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_762-948-09-24.
[4] “Telegram from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus, July 8, 1863.Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_762-948-10-09.
[5] “Letter from Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus to President Jefferson Davis; July 9, 1863,” Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_757-945-04-25.
Increasing quantities of data are being made available online, making it easier to lose sight of humanity in digital spaces. Therefore, it is essential for diverse groups of users — scholars, educators, archivists, librarians, students, and the public — to evaluate the quality of online resources. This often means critically assessing our data and its uses, including if the representation of the people in the collection and its data is equitable. Users should be asking whether the data produced by digital editions is replicating, amplifying, or challenging inequalities and stratifications in contemporary society. This post introduces users to an expansive (but not exhaustive) list of questions to ask of data in digital editions based on our own exploration of the data we are producing at the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project (CWRGM). Consequently, it is designed to aid educators invested in teaching data literacy and accompanies CWRGM’s “Exploring Data in Digital Editions” lesson plan. Fundamentally, it seeks to remind users of data’s human element.
USING DIGITAL EDITIONS
Digital editions produce massive amounts of data for scholarly, educational, and public use. Implicit within digital editions are concerns about equity. The Data Equity Framework is an online resource advocating for equity in data science. They note, “Data science methods can produce results, but only through interpretation can we garner any useful meaning from them.” Rather than being infallible, they remind us that processing data is subjective. They note, “It’s a combination of our best understanding of the limitations of the data, the methodology, and the content.” Data, however, often seems objective. Therefore, issues of equitable data are even more critical, as users mistakenly equate data with fact. This can lead users to overlook the need to evaluate online resources. While this post is specifically about documentary editions, the digital humanities seek to help users uncover and explore the subjective nature of data.
The following questions are designed to push users to analyze: Whose voices are represented in these collections and how? Whose voices are absent and why? It is imperative for users to critically evaluate the data produced by digital editions. Throughout this post, I offer several questions to help users do just that by providing examples from CWRGM where I work as the project’s co-director alongside Dr. Susannah J. Ural.
These key questions of analysis are designed to assist users who want to evaluate online resources. Specifically, I will review the data created by CWRGM, paying particular attention to equity and representation. But I also reflect on open access, digital accessibility, and usability. These questions can serve as a guide for facilitating discussions about data literacy, the humanities, and digital editions in the K-12 and post-secondary classroom. CWRGM even offers a 12th grade lesson plan at the website to help users do just that, which users can find here.
KEY QUESTIONS TO EVALUATE ONLINE RESOURCES:
What kinds of qualitative and quantitative data does the project produce and how is it generated and maintained?
For example, is it by metadata, indexing, transcriptions, images, mapping/GIS coordinates, annotation, or something else?
Is it open? What programs generate the data and how is it created?
How does the edition’s data impact how people use the edition and what they know about the subjects/people contained in the collection?
How are people represented by the data?
For example, is it by a marker on a map, name, a group identity, or something else?
How does this representation shape what can be learned about the subjects/people in the collection?
What are the potential limitations and/or dangers of these representations or lack of representations?
How can the digital edition address or subvert these possible limitations?
How can users’ work—such as annotation, research, or art—address or subvert these possible limitations?
While these questions are useful in the abstract, diving into the data found within CWRGM demonstrates how these ideas and inquiries can be framed when looking at a specific digital edition. I also offer examples of potential issues and opportunities found within CWRGM’s data.
Petition to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; March 24, 1876. Courtesy of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.
WHAT IS CWRGM?
CWRGM is a digital edition that is digitizing 20,000 documents sent to the governors of Mississippi during the American Civil War and Reconstruction (1859–1882). Americans from all backgrounds wrote to the state’s governors with their concerns, and after 1865, this included African American authors. With NEH/NHPRC-funding, along with other support, these records are made freely available online. They include high-quality images of the original documents alongside transcriptions, which also feature annotated subject tags.
Document metadata, in-text subject tags, and annotations are designed to increase the discoverability of the people within the collection. They can help shine a light on historically marginalized people such as African Americans, women, and impoverished people. But the project also generates massive amounts of quantitative data for research and classroom use. New documents become available every few months until the project’s completion in 2030. The quantitative data is made freely available on the website and is updated every six months.
The documents housed at CWRGM provide an example of how to evaluate online resources. The methods our research team employs to increase discoverability within these collections create fruitful opportunities for users to think critically about how data is produced, the ethical implications of that data, and the data’s opportunities and its limitations. To explore these possibilities, I will refer to the African Americans subject tag and its cooccurrences file.
Screen capture of subject tags and facets under the Military Units category.Courtesy of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view all available military unit subject tags at CWRGM.
WHAT IS A CWRGM SUBJECT TAG?
When project researchers identify language that falls under one of CWRGM’s nine subject tag categories, they link it to an internally controlled vocabulary. For example, various references to enslaved people (such as servants, slave, servile population, etc.) are tagged with the controlled subject term “African Americans–Enslaved People.” A tag is added to a document no more than once. Then it generates an index of all documents containing it in the collection. While indexes like these are incredibly useful to users, we should always evaluate online resources like this. We can start by asking:
How easy or challenging was it to find the data and methods on the project website and why does this matter?
What benefits are created by subject tagging or indexing a collection? How can they aid users?
How can these indexes make records pertaining to historically marginalized people more discoverable?
What are some issues that may arise?
For example, while every document is drafted and goes through two stages of review by different CWRGM researchers (per CWRGM’s tagging protocols), subject tags are applied by humans and can be overlooked and misapplied in the collection. Furthermore, the boundaries of every subject tag are debatable. For example, how do you apply the African Americans tag when the subject is biracial? The authors’ meaning or intent can also be unclear. Sometimes tags can be added that don’t belong there or should have been added when they do apply. Multiple stages of review and transparency, including providing open access to the project’s protocols or explanatory subject tag annotations, are therefore essential to addressing these concerns.
WHAT IS A CWRGM COOCCURRENCES FILE?
Subject tagging creates an index of the documents within the collection that contain that subject tag. For example, this is an index of all of the documents in the collection that refer to African Americans. A cooccurrences file then exports the other subject tags that were also tagged in documents that received the African Americans subject tag. This file allows users to see what other terms are most frequently discussed alongside that subject tag. Again, users should evaluate these online resources:
CWRGM users will find, for example, that to obtain other cooccurrences files they must email the CWRGM research team. Balancing a need to protect finalized versions of documents with the technology available to the project led to this decision. But emailing the CWRGM editorial team for cooccurrence data still creates a barrier to access.
COOCURRENCES & REPRESENTATION
Users may also note the potential issues and opportunities regarding representation in the collection’s data. For example, the African Americans subject tag shows a high correlation with tags connected to criminality. This could highlight and even reinforce long standing stereotyping of Blackness with deviance and criminality. Conversely, it also shows that criminal records and criminal proceedings may be a fruitful avenue for exploring Black experiences during the era. This may lead users to investigate white Americans’ use of the legal system to control, restrict, and subjugate African Americans during Reconstruction. It also can reveal Black efforts to resist the racially based adjudication of the law.
People can also be reduced to a group identity in the collection’s data. Where white men, are often readily identifiable by first name and surname, other historically disempowered people are less likely to be found this way. Many women for example are listed as Mrs. David Johnson. Enslaved people are rarely named and when they are, it is typically unclear what their self-identified names were. This document offers a rare opportunity where enslaved people included their first name and surnames. Other groups, such as the patients at the Mississippi State Mental Health Hospital are overwhelmingly referred to as inmates.
Annotations tied to subject tags, however, provide readers with missing information. They also do not alter the transcription of the original text. While CWRGM preferences tagging full names wherever possible, they also add the “African Americans–Enslaved People” subject tag to the document to link all references to enslaved people under one subject tag. This practice allows users to more easily study the experiences of those belonging to a collective identity.
WHAT IS A CWRGM ANNOTATED DOCUMENT?
Pop-up annotation for the “Convict Labor. Mississippi. Leasing Program” subject tag on Copy of contract; October 27, 1874.Courtesy of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.
Pages include an archival-quality digital file of the original document alongside a transcription that includes annotated subject tags. You can see an example here. Subject tag annotations provide users with historical context, explanation, and clarification for how the term is used in the collection. While the document transcriptions and their subject tags produce the collections’ data, the annotated documents themselves offer opportunities to overcome some of the shortcomings of the collection’s data. These possibilities present exciting questions:
How can reading the qualitative data (documents and annotations) and using qualitative thinking impact what we know, or think we know, about the quantitative data (or subject tagging and cooccurrences files)?
How does this shape what we know about history/society and our research subject/s?
Data can help point users in fruitful directions, but it contains bias and can be used in harmful ways. Incorporating qualitative reasoning using the documents themselves into our research allows users to discover more about the people within the collection—such as their names, feelings, and experiences—and uncover the human experience where quantitative data often falls short. But there are also limits to what qualitative information can provide. Even with external research, for example, many groups of people cannot be identified by name.
ANNOTATIONS & DISCOVERABILITY
Annotated subject tags and transcriptions offer exciting possibilities for increased access and discoverability in digital editions. Transcriptions, for example, can aid users with disabilities because they can be used in conjunction with online accessibility plugins, where the document images cannot.
Furthermore, adding subject tags within the document offers users (especially students) more appropriate, contemporary naming practices. It is important to keep in mind that not all members of that identity agree on the appropriate terminology or who belongs under the umbrella term.
“Jackson, Mississippi,” Elisaeus von Seutter Collection. Ca. 1800s. Sysid 96984. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Adding annotations to the subject tags can help users learn more about the people who appear in these collections. For example, we can see women’s maiden names or identify the names of an enslaved person without automatically bestowing the enslaver’s surname onto them. Furthermore, historians can offer context in places where the document’s author used coded, inappropriate, or misleading language. For example, when an author refers to penitentiary work, an annotation can provide the greater context about Mississippi’s convict leasing program to highlight the racial inequalities institutionalized within the system.
WHY THIS MATTERS?
Digital editions offer users access to primary sources and historical data on an unprecedented scale but comprise only an infinitesimal portion of the online resources available today. Society has struggled to critically evaluate the mass proliferation of information that has become available with a few quick clicks. The skills to critically evaluate online resources—how they were generated, presented, and maintained—therefore, are paramount. Turning to resources like this lesson plan, the Data Equity Framework, and digital humanities projects like CWRGM can begin to provide users with the tools and resources they need to ask critical questions of online information and most importantly, recenter the human element within the data.
Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D. is co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project and the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion). Thanks to funding from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, she attended the 2023 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) where she completed the Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis in the Humanities course. An earlier version of this piece was published as “How to Evaluate Online Resources using a Digital Edition,” a blog post she authored as part of her time at DHSI, which can be accessed here.
To be unenfranchised does not mean that one is voiceless, nor does it mean that one must sit idly by and let the world move around them. The women of Mississippi had no official political power in the 1800s, but this did not stop southern white women from participating in political acts. They took part in political conventions as early as the 1830s to defend slavery, balked against the interventions being made on their domestic fronts, and engaged with the political process by taking their complaints directly to the executive officer of the state.
“Jackson, Mississippi,” Elisaeus von Seutter Collection. Ca. 1800s. Sysid 96984. Credit: Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
We can find examples of those direct interactions in the records of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) project, which is digitizing the state’s governors’ papers from 1859 through 1882. These letters make it possible to hear from these women who called upon their governor for various reasons before, during, and after the Civil War. In this three-part series, we will look at how the nature and volume of these letters changed over this period and study these women’s experiences in such revolutionary times.
There is no way to gauge within this collection of letters how often women wrote the governor before the Civil War started. Still, within the span we can access, we can see that the frequency increased drastically as the war went on. Seven letters stand out from the period of April 1860 through April 1861 that reflect this trend, and each reveals women engaging in the political process to protect their family or their family’s interests. The first letter, dated April 29, 1860, comes from Jane White, who asked Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus to pardon her husband’s criminal charges. He was sentenced to five years for stealing an enslaved person. Jane gives a testament to her husband’s character but admits that it’s not “misery, trials or troubles,” but the “tender tie called love” that prompts her request. This letter stands out in the collection because of the motive in which she pleads for her husband’s return. When the war begins, the reasoning for requesting the return of a loved one predominately leaned toward safety and sustaining the family rather than the affection expressed in this instance. Serving in the war was a duty, and now soldiers’ families were expected to sacrifice the absence of their loved ones for the greater good.
It’s significant, too, that Jane White reveals no thought about how her husband’s actions may have damaged an enslaved family. The voices of African-American women are rare in the pre-emancipation portion of this collection. Still, we can find glimpses of their experiences and how white arguments about protecting the white domestic sphere could affect them. Five months earlier, for example, Governor Pettus received a petition from a free woman of color named Anne Mataw. Mississippi laws at that time made it almost impossible for her to remain in the state and remain free, so Mataw made the gut-wrenching decision to be enslaved or re-enslaved. Her petition includes Mataw’s mark, but I have found nothing else about her (yet). Did Mataw do this to protect her own family as best she could? Was this the only way she could remain near her children or husband? Scholars have argued that these were common motivators in re-enslavement petitions rather than the reason the document suggests that “slavery with a humane owner is preferable to freedom in a free state.”[1] By no means are Mataw’s experiences the same as those of the white women described in this post. But like them, she may have used the governor’s office to protect herself and her family.
Anne Mataw Petition, December 2, 1859. Courtesy The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.
As tensions escalated throughout the 1860 election year, petitions from concerned women continued to arrive on Governor Pettus’s desk. In each case, the author made her case on the grounds of domestic security and family preservation. In October 1860, for example, Mary Garrett wrote on behalf of her son, who was being held on charges she never clearly defined. In this letter, Garrett reminds the Governor that she came before him with a petition for her son’s release last February. She also notes the Governor’s failure to follow through on his pledge to speak with a Judge Cothern about her son’s case, stating, “I suppose you forgot me, as the Judge states he—never got your letter he also states he was with you last July and not knowing you had a petition never hearing of your receiving any information relative to the case.” Garrett argues that Cothern assumed Pettus would have dismissed the charges and then softens her approach by asking Pettus to acknowledge that wisdom comes with age and that her son has grown up since his infraction. She asks Pettus to empathize with her, encouraging him to recall his own affectionate mother and what she likely did for her children. Determined to save her son, Mary Garrett wrote another letter that day to Major Alfred Harden that conveyed her situation and requested him to write to Pettus on her son’s behalf. It is within the scope of these interactions that we see Mary Garrett was comfortable enough to petition the Governor in person, to follow up with the Judge that is mentioned, to hold Governor Pettus accountable to his commitment, and to encourage another man of standing to intervene as well. As scholars have noted, though 19th-century women were disenfranchised, they still found ways to navigate the political realm and often did so with arguments about their familial duties as dedicated wives, mothers, or daughters.
We can see another example of this in a November 1860 letter from Mrs. J. M. Girault asking to be released from the debt that her husband incurred. She explains that if she were to repay the debt, it would leave her and her children homeless or drain her father’s estate. It is unclear whether or not Mrs. Girault owned property, but she does state that she is not requesting to be released from her half of the debt and claims that if it had been in her power to do so, the debt would have never been incurred. Mississippi was the first state to allow married women to own property; this law was enacted in 1839 and meant that a married woman’s property could not be seized to pay her husband’s debts.[2] This letter suggests that Girault still retained the means to pay her half of the deficit and her willingness to assert herself to protect her family’s financial standing.
Though the Civil War started on April 12, 1861, Mississippi seceded from the Union four months before this date, meaning militia were already forming in the state. When the Copiah Horse Guard mustered into service in March 1861, Josephine Martin tried to ensure her husband did not join the unit. She asked Governor Pettus to exempt her husband from service because her “health was bad and [she] needed his attention at all times.” She admitted that “his business also (not being settled up)” required attention, but it’s worth noting that the first concern Mrs. Martin asserted focused on her immediate needs. Indeed, the document is an answer to a request for a statement of why Mr. Martin would not be able to join the Copiah Horse Guard. This was just the first of many requests to reach Pettus’s desk once the war was underway. What makes it significant for our purposes, though, is that Mrs. Martin is writing it because Mr. Martin did not want to. She was asserting herself on behalf of her family and her health to keep her husband at home despite the pressures of their community, the state, and the Confederate nation.
Finally, in early April 1861, just one day before Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Sarah P. E. Simmons, a teacher of 20 years, contacted Governor Pettus. She was applying for a scholarship to the University of Mississippi on behalf of her son, Jeremiah Ellington. His father, Sarah Simmons explains, was killed by someone who held a position of authority. She feared that this person might use leverage to deny Ellington’s application. Simmons included several references in the hope that Pettus would grant the scholarship. Despite the fact that conflict abounded, Sarah Simmons does not appear to have been affected by the rage militaire that inspired so many enlistments that spring. Instead, she hoped her son would be able to attend college so he “may prove worthy of this his native Sunny Land.”
Looking at letters sent to the governor of Mississippi before the outbreak of the Civil War gives the reader a glimpse of how middling and upper-class women of the state asserted their priorities and sought to protect their families. They advocated for love, on behalf of their children, for the betterment of their own financial situations, and a better quality of life. We also have a case where similar motivations may have influenced the actions of a free woman of color. Though the letters in this collection from women before the war are few, it shows a precedent of their political engagement in an increasingly politically charged environment. The next post will show how women’s engagement—of all classes— expanded during the war and analyze the impact of these developments.
[1] For more on Mississippi antebellum laws regulating the rights of free people of color, see this essay at Mississippi History Now; see also Ted Maris-Wolf, Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia.
[2] Woody Holton “Equality as Unintended Consequence: The Contracts Clause and the Married Women’s Property Acts.” The Journal of Southern History 81, no. 2 (2015): 313–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43917912.
Sarah West is a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern Mississippi and the Assistant Editor of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. She earned her M.A. in History from California State University, San Bernardino in May of 2022 and served as a 2021 Summer intern on the CWRGM project, which inspired her Master’s thesis, titled The “Honorable” Woman: Gender, Honor and Privilege in the Civil War South.
By: Michael Singleton, Former CWRGM Assistant Editor
In the last post, I relayed several of the unique documents from the CWRGM collection that featured proposals sent by civilians to Mississippi Governor John Pettus on how best to fortify and defend the Mississippi River. While notable for their detail and designs, those propositions primarily focused on conventional techniques like land-based fortifications and a network of river obstructions. Today’s post highlights a series of letters from 1862 that offered a plan for an unconventional naval weapon that the author believed would neutralize the power of the United States Navy. Like the previous documents, these proposals contain a fascinating drawing accompanying the written proposal. Similarly, it also appears to have gone unimplemented at the state and national levels for untold reasons. Regardless, these documents contain a range of innovative, technical, and scientific thinking that—even if disregarded by government authorities— further demonstrate the extent to which some enterprising civilians sought to support and influence the Confederate war effort with their own advice and insight.
On July 29, 1862, William R. Scott of Wilmington, North Carolina, sent a letter to Governor Pettus detailing his plans for a “Steam Battering Ram” that he felt would allow the Confederate Navy to “Destroy the Federal Navy that is in the Miss River” and thus “win and Rule their own rights.” Scott’s proposal envisioned an ironclad ship adapted from the hull and boilers of an existing steamboat. The crux of his design was a steam-powered, multi-use battering ram that he asserted could deliver repeated blows below the waterline on an enemy ship. Scott suggested that the state of Mississippi complete the construction at the shipyard on the Yazoo River and likened its armored design to that of the famed CSS Arkansas that had only weeks before been completed.[1] In total, Scott’s first letter was long on rhetoric and short on technical details. He provided no specifics on how the ram would operate, nor details on its prospective dimensions, crew, armament, or necessary construction material. In this initial proposition, all Scott provided was his brief proposal, a rough sketch (that is missing), and an assessment conducted by officials from the Confederate Navy Department that endorsed his design.
Figure 1. The CSS Arkansas under construction on the Yazoo River, 1862. Image courtesy of Wikicommons.
It is clear that Pettus did not answer Scott’s initial letter because, in December 1862, he again petitioned the Governor and stated that “not having heard from you concerning it” he would “take the liberty to send you another sketch.” Scott’s second letter is of greater significance as he included a detailed sketch of the boat and an eight-page copy of the meeting minutes from a sub-commission of the South Carolina government that inspected and approved the plans. Scott’s design (Fig. 2) shows a double-acting steam engine mounted towards the boat’s bow that would operate a “battering ram” protruding below the waterline. He asserted that this weapon could be “driven with a force of from one hundred to six hundred tons depending on the size of the engine” and could do so against an enemy ship at a rapid pace of up to twenty blows per minute.
Figure 2. William Scott’s design for his ironclad with its steam-powered battering ram. At top is a endview of the ship while the middle and bottom views are a top and side view respectively. Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.
In essence, Scott envisioned a vessel that would, like a boxer, close with a Federal ship and deliver repeated body blows until its hull was breached or the craft fled. Such a design differed widely from the operation of conventional naval rams like the CSS Virginia and the CSS Tennessee, which both depended on the force of the ship’s momentum to deliver a blow and relied on mounted artillery for defense and offensive capabilities.[2] Contrarily, Scott’s ship would be purely offensive in nature as it evidently (according to the basic design) featured no other form of armament beyond the steam ram. This decision would mean that the ship would have relied solely on the reliability of its steam engines to generate sufficient speed and its ability to get close to enemy ships to be effective. The design further meant that the ship would have no other defensive capabilities than its ability to close with and batter enemy vessels.
Nevertheless, more than any other innovative proposal in the CWRGM collection, Scott’s design appears to have come the closest to fulfillment. This fact is evident from the South Carolina commission report, which included copies of correspondence between Scott and numerous high-level Confederate officials who each expressed support for his design. For example, Confederate Lieutenant General P. G. T. Beauregard endorsed the plan in October 1862 by stating that he thought “favorably of the proposed battering Ram of Mr. W. R. Scott” because it could “continue the battering process without having to back for a new momentum.” Moreover, the South Carolina commission unanimously approved the plan and recommended its immediate implementation, while some Confederate Naval Department officials like its Chief Engineer William P. Williamson likewise endorsed the proposal and recommended it for action. Finally, Scott’s plan even reached the desk of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in September 1862, whose secretary (and son of Robert E. Lee) Colonel George Washington Custis Lee promised to refer the plan to the Secretary of the Navy, Stephen F. Mallory.
Figure 3. The CSS Manassas, the only Confederate ironclad to operate as a singular ram. It served briefly as it suffered damage and was abandoned in an engagement near New Orleans, LA, in September 1861. Image courtesy of Wikicommons.
Likely, Scott’s plan went no further than Mallory’s (or Pettus’) desk, for no such ironclad was ever constructed in total in Mississippi or elsewhere. This is possibly because of the failure of the singular ram CSS Manassas in combat in 1861 or that it violated Mallory’s policy to both offensive and defensively capable ironclads.[3] However, it is possible that Scott’s plan did influence the construction of the CSS Charleston, which was constructed by the state of South Carolina in the fall of 1862 and that interestingly featured a unique iron ram protruding at length from its bow.[4] This is a feature not seen any other Confederate ironclads and, given the South Carolina commission’s enthusiasm and recommendation for his proposal, could mean that they incorporated the spirit of Scott’s design rather than it completely. In any event, despite his evident passion and persistence, William Scott’s idea went unfulfilled as it applied to the state of Mississippi as Pettus, and local Confederates forged ahead with more conventional plans on the Mississippi River. In a third and final post, we will move below the waves to detail another unconventional proposal broached to Governor Pettus about thwarting the Federal Navy along the Mississippi River. Stay tuned!
Michael Singleton was the CWRGM Assistant Editor from 2021-2022. He earned his M.A. in History from the University of Southern Mississippi in August 2022 and his B.A. in History from the Virginia Military Institute in 2013. While a student at USM, Michael served as a Public History intern on the CWRGM project in the summer of 2021 and a graduate teaching assistant from 2020-2021. He also served as an active duty Infantry officer in the U.S. Army from 2013 to 2020.
[1] The CSS Arkansas was a large ironclad completed at a shipyard located on the Yazoo River in Mississippi in the mid-summer of 1862. It featured railroad iron for armor and two large (but unreliable) steam engines for propulsion. It left the shipyard on July 14, 1862 to engage Federal ships on the Mississippi River. In a series of engagements, it ran the Federal fleet above Vicksburg and remained near that city until it travelled south to participate in a Confederate offensive to retake Baton Rouge, LA. In that action, it suffered debilitating engine trouble and was abandoned and scuttled under fire by its crew. See, Saxon Bisbee, Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironclads and Steam Engineering in the American Civil War (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2018), 68-81.
