drawing connections between the civil war and the 19th century urban space

Still image from Gangs of New York (2002)

Monday’s talk here at the University of Alabama by David Roediger, my University of Illinois dissertation adviser, made me wonder about how the urban space and culture figured into the Civil War. I became especially interested in this issue after seeing several images of how artists depicted American life during and after the war.

I found myself reaching for Drew Gilpin Faust’s study of death and the war, the first book on the war that I ever owned. This book was a part of what is known as the Book in Common reading in the Department of History at the University of Illinois. Once a year, everyone in the department gets a free copy of a book and we meet for a couple of hours and discuss it. The goal is to bring people with very different research agendas and political positions together to talk about a subject. In this case, it was death and the Civil War. 

To prepare for today's lecture, I scanned Faust's book just to see if the words city or urban showed up in her index. I was not surprised to see that neither did. This was clearly a book about death. But if you scan the pages, you will definitely see various cities mentioned in it. There was certainly lots of destruction in cities. Some of the destruction took place in New York City during the draft riots of 1863 not long after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation. The riots were the largest civil insurrection in American history outside of the Civil War itself. The rioters were mostly working-class and mostly Irish men who resented that wealthier men were spared the draft. The protests eventually turned into an ugly race riot with Irish immigrants attacking African Americans. I mentioned to the students that race and class are often mutually intertwined in power struggles. 

These draft riots figure into a movie I have deliberately not shown in this class. It is always the one that everyone mentions when I say that I am teaching a class on the 19^th century city in the United States: Gangs of New York. After thinking about Dave's talk and today's lecture and what the students are learning about urban life via Gunther Barth's City People, I’d argue that this riot was about the draft and about the war, but as Barth tells us, it was also a way that white working class men were trying to make sense of the world in which they lived, which also happened to be urban. In such a setting one could easily see accumulating wealth. We saw something similar in our attention to Cincinnati where working class whites also  confronted African Americans.

Girl in mourning dress. Source: Library of Congress.

I discussed other things occurring in America's emerging city life as presented by Barth that compel us to think about the Civil War, among them the changing roles of women. Dave made this point when he showed a Winslow Homer image that appeared in Harper's Weekly. It showed a woman driving a buggy. Seated beside her is her husband who has lost one arm in the war. The image speaks volumes about the changing roles of women in the public sphere, an issue that Barth addresses several times, among them, his discussion of department stores where women worked, but also shopped because they were increasingly making household spending decisions. I wondered about the degree to which the mourning dresses that many women and girls wore after the war, a topic that Faust also addresses, figured into this consumer culture.