~Elizabeth Lorang

The first page of a petition from slaveholder John Harry, seeking compensation for 27 slaves.

With the approach of the 150th anniversary of the Compensated Emancipation Act, our newly revamped and relaunched Civil War Washington site makes available 200 petitions written by Washington, DC slaveholders in the spring and summer of 1862. (By the summer of 2013, Civil War Washington will feature the more than 1,000 petitions filed in response to the act.) The petitions offer unique insight into the lives and experiences of slaves in our nation’s capital. The act, signed by Abraham Lincoln on April 16, 1862, predated the Emancipation Proclamation by eight months and freed all slaves in Washington, DC and the surrounding area. Slaveholders were asked to describe their slaves, estimating their monetary value in order to receive government compensation. And now, 150 years after their creation, these petitions have been digitized, transcribed, and are freely available online. For more on the petitions, see Emancipation Petitions: Historical Contexts at civilwardc.org.

The Civil War Washington project team, with images of the Emancipation petitions in the background.

Project co-director Kenneth Winkle took part in a ceremony at the National Archives in Washington, DC on April 11, 2012 commemorating both the anniversary of the act and the publishing of these largely forgotten documents. Additionally, the release of the petitions has received coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Lincoln Journal Star, and the Washington Post. Check out the Journal Star article here. The National Archives also made a short video about the petitions, which can be viewed here.

The rest of the Civil War Washington site has a new look as well, including a new interactive mapping application (see image below), complete with several historical and current map layers and a time slider. We have also added more issues of historical hospital newspapers, updated and made searchable our collection of medical cases, and redesigned and updated our fully searchable database.

A screenshot of the new mapping application.

- Kevin McMullen

So far, the reviewed cases have come from Part 1, Volume 2 (surgical-injury cases) and from Part 3, Volume 1 (cases of medical diseases) of the MSHWR.  The reported medical conditions, or “camp diseases,” are varied, of course, but there are a great number of cases of just a few diseases — typhoid fever (the most common of the “continued fevers”), tuberculosis (a.k.a. “consumption” or, even more commonly, “phthisis pulmonales”), malaria (“paroxysmal fever” or “remittent fever”), and “diarrhoea and dysentery,” the latter often concurrent with or complicating other conditions — plus presumed “rheumatic diseases” (actually rather ill-defined), a variety of heart conditions (both anatomic and functional), small-pox, measles, scarlet fever, and other infections of the lungs, soft tissues, and central nervous system.  Many case reports of patient deaths also include records of post-mortem examinations, some of the descriptions quite detailed and insightful (and comparable to autopsy reports today), while many others are more cursory (after all, there was a war on).

The surgical cases that have been reviewed so far involve wounds and injuries of the head, face, neck, chest, and spine. These include incised and punctured wounds by sabre, sword, or bayonet; railroad accidents; falls from trees and off of horses; kicks by horses and mules; and (naturally) gunshot wounds that fractured bones, penetrated organs, and created significant hemorrhage.  The cases describe surgical techniques for removing gunshot missiles and debriding bone fragments from the wounds, for relieving increased pressure within the cranium, for removing herniated soft tissues, and for arresting hemorrhage.  The most commonly reported complications of traumatic cranial injuries were infection of the wound, including gangrene or tetanus; meningitis or encephalitis; recurring hemorrhage; paraplegia or hemiplegia; and complete or partial loss of the special senses of sight, hearing, or smell.  The same complications occurred with facial injuries, but also particularly common was the destruction of one eye, soon followed by decompensation of the vision in the other eye.  Spinal injuries and fractures often produced quadriplegia, paraplegia, or hemiplegia.  Frequent chest wound complications were hemorrhage from the major blood vessels located there, pneumothorax (lungs perforated and deflated by the missile itself or by sharp fragments of fractured ribs), pneumonia, inflammation and scarring of pleural membranes, and pyemia.  In fact, all types of penetrating soft tissue injuries also were very prone to secondary pyemia (now known to be disseminated, usually blood-borne, bacterial infections).

The reviewing process continues now and will eventually include cases of injuries, surgical problems, and operations of all the other parts of the body.  The only remaining cases of medical disease to be reviewed are all found in Part 2, Volume 1 of MSHWR — the final volume published and dedicated entirely to cases, statistics, epidemiology, and therapeutics of acute and chronic “diarrhoea and dysentery,” also called “the Alvine Fluxes,” across the temporal length and geographic breadth of the Civil War.  “These disorders occurred with more frequency and produced more sickness and mortality than any other form of disease,” wrote Dr. Joseph J. Woodward, the editor of that volume.[1]

In the immediate future the additional surgical-injury cases will include abdominal injuries, injuries of the pelvic area, and all injuries of the four extremities.  The case reports of the latter injuries include many more reports of diverse types of surgical interventions than have been reported for the injuries reviewed previously.

As I review the cases, I am also collecting on my own an already long list of medical and therapeutic terms that are much less familiar to health care providers today and easily could be unknown to those less experienced in reading about medicine in the 19^th century.  I hope to develop a glossary — and perhaps even a mid-19^th century pharmacopeia — for users of the web site.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             – Matthew M. Bosley

Screenshot of new project map (in progress), showing currently mapped point and line layers, as well as voting wards.

In the near future, we will launch an expanded and improved Map section. Featuring nearly twenty layers of mapped features and two historical base maps, the revamped project GIS will allow users to select layers, study changes over time, and locate addresses. In addition, the interface enables users to draw on the maps, measure distances, and print customized maps.

The Data section of Civil War Washington will soon look remarkably different as well. Users will have direct access to the newly designed project relational database, with more than 3,000 records of people and nearly 400 places, in addition to hundreds of records for events, organizations, and documents (see below for sample image). The database also documents relationships across the full range of categories, so that an object of one type can be linked to an object of any other type.

The public interface to the project database will look very similar to the private interface (shown here). Users will have the ability to search the database, trace relationships, and move between database records and other content on the site.

The first half of 2012 should also see hundreds of new texts added to the site, including encoded transcriptions of the petitions for compensated emancipation. We are also taking a different approach to presenting cases from the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, and we will begin presenting the cases in their new format soon. Each case will be presented individually, with easy access to other cases that treat the same kinds of diseases and wounds. Along with an HTML view of each case and petition rendered in the browser, we will make available the TEI-encoded XML for individual documents. In addition, users will be able to download corpus files that include the XML of all cases and all petitions. Indeed, throughout the site, users will have access to our presentation of the material and to the files from which our website is generated, including a complete dump of all data from our relational database and project GIS files made available as both shapefiles and KML.

Look for other changes and additions to the site in 2012 as well. If you have comments or suggestions for Civil War Washington, please send them to us.

~Elizabeth Lorang

Many Americans believed that emancipation would hurt blacks because they were not ready for, nor capable of, freedom. However, Chaplain C. W. Denison often wrote to The National Republican from various refugee camps about just how capable “contrabands” were proving to be. Whether at Fortress Monroe or in South Carolina or elsewhere, he saw contrabands eager to learn and improve their condition. They were more than willing to work hard in the fields to earn their living.[vi] Contrabands, especially adults, attended classes diligently to learn to read and write. The Chaplain wrote that rumors of contrabands being lazy and uneducated were only true when Union Generals would not employ them or only put them to work as servants.[vii] Denison argued that if fairly treated and paid, contrabands had a great advantage because they were willing to work hard to maintain their freedom, which many army officers would attest to.[viii] Denison also vehemently insisted that “negroes [could] do other things to promote the Constitution and liberty besides work,” although work was the most important.[ix] In the past, blacks had acted as citizens should. They took care of their sick, buried their dead, set up schools and improvement organizations for their own betterment, and more. African Americans would continue to act as citizens should to help their recently freed brethren upon passage of the District Emancipation Act.[x]

When asked what would happen to the contrabands if emancipated, Frederick Douglass advocated leaving the them to themselves. These freed persons would not be violent nor would they incite violence from pro-slavery fanatics and start a race war (ending in the genocide of all blacks). They would not overrun jails or cheapen labor. They would work just as they had before and would learn just as he had.[xi] He recommended that white citizens leave them alone to make their own decisions because it was their “doing with them [that was blacks'] greatest misfortune.”[xii] “As colored men … [they] only ask to be allowed to do with [them]selves,” a sentiment that resonated with all black Washingtonians.[xiii]

However capable African Americans seemed to be or believed they could be, many emancipationists did not foresee any major changes within society as a result of emancipation. They considered black inferiority a law of nature that could not be altered by the laws of men. Each race would remain separate – in schools, churches, and neighborhoods.  New freedmen would remain in the same second class station that free blacks in DC already inhabited. Emancipation was purposely seen and presented to the community as a change in legal status. The only difference would be that these freed persons were no longer in bondage and were entitled to equality under the law. African Americans received legal rights – liberty, property, assembly.  Legal equality did not confer social equality. The District Emancipation Act did not entitle African Americans to be treated differently by society. And because of that, many DC residents supported it.

The District Emancipation Act freed all slaves, but not all slave holders filed for compensation – subsequently not all freed their slaves – and, even worse, some stole their slaves out of the district to avoid emancipating them. Accounts of this slave smuggling are present in many of DC’s newspapers. Even after its passage people tried smuggling their slaves out of the District. Reports surfaced of owners fraudulently imprisoning people, effectively keeping them in servitude.

To offset the aforementioned problems this second bill was drafted and passed in Congress on July 12, 1862. This allowed slaves to file petitions for themselves if they had been covered under the original Act. The same committee met over three months to decide upon the validity of each petition, and granted certificates of freedom accordingly. A part of the Supplemental Act allowed slaves from other states who had been employed in the District to be emancipated, as well. This was conditional, because owners technically had to give consent for a slave to receive their certificate of freedom under this bill. Owners testified that the slave had been employed/ in the District on or after April 16, 1862.  Only 22 of these 161 petitions were rejected.[i]

Often contradictions appear in the testimony included in these petitions. The Supplemental Act equally weighed black testimony with that of whites when conflicts arose.[ii] Charlotte Beckett is an example of this sort. She was owned by Mary Bibb and granted a certificate of freedom on October 1, 1862, for herself and children (George, Zara, Mary Ann, and Bohemia). Of Beckett’s 18 witnesses most affirmed her testimony about working in the District upon the bill’s passage. One witness, H. Key Hunter testified that she’d known Charlotte for 12 years and she definitely had been working in Georgetown before April 16. Witnesses also testified to the fact her owner’s husband took the Becketts out of the DC when the District Emancipation Act first passed.  Owners were supposed to give consent, yet Mary Bibb claimed she’d had no knowledge of Charlotte’s intent to petition and that all of her slaves were fugitives as the Fugitive Slave Law was still enforced in DC at this time. The commissioners still issued certificates for Charlotte and her children.[iii]

The biggest difference between the Supplemental Act and the earlier compensated emancipation act was that the final result often ended up being the issuing of a certificate of freedom to former slaves instead of compensation to former slave owners. In the Supplemental Act slave owners were longer entitled to compensation.  Another difference was the petitions themselves. These petitions were just testimonials. Petitioner had to bring at least two witnesses to testify on their behalf but there were no formal petition template.  Also, it was geographically expanded to cover the surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia. When the Supplemental Act was first implemented slaves still had to have been in the District on or before April 16, 1862. Later it became that if their owner was a DC resident they qualified. The committee otherwise went through the same process of evaluating these petitions.

~Brittany Jones

Lincoln believed slavery would eventually die out if not allowed to expand. As such, when the Civil War began he did not feel that emancipation was a necessity at the time nor that he had a right to personally alter slavery. However, Delaware’s state legislature failed to pass Lincoln’s emancipation bill. The Union was fighting over slavery, whether or not its citizens acknowledged that fact. Lincoln came to see the exigency of emancipation, even if only as a means to save the Union, and he thus decided to take emancipation to the nation’s capital.

One could argue the District Emancipation Act (passed April 16, 1862) resulted from years of past emancipation legislation, yet the American Civil War provided the catalyst necessary to transform the ideals of emancipation into a legal document. In 1805 the first bill advocating the emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia was proposed and defeated in Congress. Congress rejected a dozen more emancipation bills over the next half century. On December 16, 1861, Congress heard the most anticipated bill of the century: Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts proposed “An Act for the Release of Certain Persons held to Service or Labor in the District of Columbia by Reason of African Descent.” Wilson’s act was debated by Congressmen and DC residents alike. After many modifications, Wilson’s proposal passed as the District Emancipation Act on April 16, 1862.

Lincoln’s support was crucial to passage of the bill. Wilson’s bill had two of Lincoln’s fundamental features, colonization and compensation. Wilson, however, did not believe emancipation could ever be gradual. Both sides were reflected in the city’s newspaper editorials, and the public was split on all three aspects of the District Emancipation Act. Gradual emancipation was essential for some citizens and abominable for others. Colonization was a must for many DC residents, while others saw it as an injustice to those who considered America their home. Compensation proved to be the most disputed feature of the bill. Slaveholders argued that the compensation that was offered—initially set at a maximum of $300 per slave—was insufficient, while abolitionists argued it was more than enough. After four months of debates in Congress and in editorials, a compromise was reached in which Lincoln gave up the gradual and voluntary features of his bill, while Congress kept the colonization and compensation measures intact. The resulting Act instituted immediate emancipation, voluntary colonization, and compensation. The original Act was  to be in effect for 90 days, in which slaveholders had the option of filing a petition for compensation for their slaves. A committee of three men was appointed by Lincoln to assess the petitions.

Ultimately the President supported the bill, and DC citizens also supported the bill. As written in many newspapers of the time, residents of DC saw the inevitability of emancipation in DC. They might not have agreed wholeheartedly on the District Emancipation Act and its implications, but they trusted the President and saw the immorality of slavery, especially regarding its degradation of the nation. Many saw the present rebellion as a consequence of the nation not definitively addressing the slavery question and not conclusively affirming the supremacy of the national government. The city rejoiced when the District Emancipation Act was signed into law. This Act provided a remedy of sorts to the moral degradation of slavery and finally put the nation’s capital in harmony with its declaration as a free nation for all. In this regard DC was an example for the nation. DC embraced emancipation, if not social change, and stood behind Lincoln and the nation.

Components of the District Emancipation Act can be found in the Emancipation Proclamation. For example, although the District Emancipation Act was not gradual, Lincoln and many citizens intended it to be. The Act initially only pertained to slaves working or living in DC at the time of its passage. On July 12, 1862, the Act was extended to include any slaves owned by DC residents and slaves from nearby Virginia and Maryland counties. Slaves in DC whose owners had neither filed for compensation nor emancipated them could also file for certificates of freedom.

The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves in states in rebellion who were freed by the Union Army, which was gradual, as Lincoln had planned. President Lincoln also wanted the Proclamation to include compensation on a national scale, but freeing some 3 million slaves was not financially feasible. Lastly, just as slaves under the District Act had the option of immigrating to parts of South America and Africa, that also was the case for former slaves following the Proclamation. Although not an exact replica of the District Emancipation Act, the Emancipation Proclamation was essentially the Act on a national scale.

~Brittany Jones

Since May, project directors and staff have been working on infrastructure and content for the site, and we’ve also talked about Civil War Washington in a range of venues, sharing about our project and soliciting feedback. A few highlights:

• In May, Ken Price presented his paper “The Work of Recovery: Civil War Poetry in Washington, DC’s Armory Square Hospital Gazette,” at the annual meeting of the American Literature Association.
• In June, I participated in the week-long seminar “Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities,” led by Ian Gregory at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, BC.
• At the annual meeting of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, held at Stanford University in June, Price,  Brett Barney, and I presented our paper, “Civil War Washington: An Experiment in Freedom, Integration, and Constraint.”
• August saw the launch of version 2.0 of our project relational database. Currently, the database is internal only, but we anticipate making a public version of the database available by late 2011 or early 2012.
• Courtney Geerhart joined the staff of Civil War Washington for several months this summer as an Institute of Museum and Library Services intern. She worked on transcribing and encoding compensated emancipation petitions, scanning primary documents, and researching information for the project database.
• Also this summer, Matt Bosley, an undergraduate student in human nutrition, joined the staff of Civil War Washington, after taking Susan Lawrence’s history of medicine course last spring. He was so taken by the work Lawrence describes in her “Cases in the Classroom” post, that he sought out additional work on our project. To date, he’s worked his way through more than 1,100 medical cases from DC hospitals, checking the transcription and encoding and adding essential metadata.
• With the start of the academic year, we welcomed three additional staff members, Janel Cayer, graduate research assistant in the Department of English; AJ Howell, who comes to Civil War Washington through the Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experiences (UCARE) program; and Rob Shepard, a graduate student in the Geography Department and a graduate research assistant in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.

We’ll be writing more about many of these topics in the coming months. In particular, look for more posts on compensated emancipation petitions, the project database, wounds and injuries from DC hospitals, and the project GIS.

~Elizabeth Lorang

An extract of Case 805 from the MSHWR, as it appears in the print volume.

While the work that the students do has provided the site with some corrected OCR texts and, this year, corrected OCR and marked-up text, the primary purpose of engaging the students with a small amount of editing work is to ensure that they read the cases very carefully. To edit their cases, students must go through them word by word. Skimming doesn’t work, and not reading the cases at all makes that student’s editing partner annoyed and frustrated.

Depending on the complexity of the cases—some are very short, while others are quite lengthy—the student pairs have from three to two dozen cases in their samples. This year, we focused on wounds to the abdomen, pelvis and upper extremity (MSHWR, Part II, Volume II). In my class of 38, I had 19 pairs, with 6 pairs with abdominal wounds, 3 with pelvic wounds and 10 with wounds to the upper extremities. Each pair had to write a summary report of their cases (total number, ages, type of injury, use—or not—of anesthesia during any surgical procedure, and outcome) to post to their shared web space. Students could then use each other’s summary data to compile larger numbers, and could read each other’s corrected texts, if they chose to do so. I also provided them with some supplementary information from the MSHWR, including the circular letters sent to all military surgeons by the Surgeon General about submitting case reports, and links to major primary sources, such as Samuel Gross’s A Manual of Military Surgery: or Hints on the Emergencies of Field, Camp, and Hospital Practice (1862).

Uncorrected OCR text of Case 805; Case 805 after the text has been corrected and metadata added.

We spent class time working on the cases and discussing their historical context. What sort of education had the surgeons in the Washington hospitals likely had? What was the background for the development of surgical anesthesia, and why could the students not simply assume that it was always used in operations? How did soldiers get from the battlefields to the Washington hospitals? Why were the surgeons so concerned about identifying weapons used for various wounds? In addition, I constantly asked the students what they thought they needed to know in order to understand the cases that they were poring over.

The final part of the assignment was a four to five page paper, in which each student developed a theme about the ways in which their cases helped them to understand Civil War medicine. I gave them some suggestions, too. One possibility asked them to compare the practices that surgeons actually employed in the cases they studied compared with what Samuel Gross recommended in his Manual. Another suggested that they examine the cases’ language for evidence of whether the surgeons related to their patients as individuals or as simply problems to solve. I encouraged them to find their own insights, and to write about what the cases actually taught them instead of what they thought the cases should say because—as they too often still wrote—the surgeons “back then” didn’t know about germs and didn’t have modern technology.

Among the most common discoveries that my students make are the ones that go against the grain of what they think that they already know about the Civil War. They have discovered, to their surprise, that men with significant wounds actually lived and healed without all of the trappings of twenty-first-century hospitals. They have wondered at the fact that not all amputations ended in infection and death, and that men whose limbs were rendered useless by wound damage still preferred to keep their arms or legs, if they could. Most students, moreover, express an awareness that the cases that they edited were about real people, with real names, not simply vague figures of history. One of my students put it very well when she wrote:

Carefully structured and archived case summaries help scholars of today make sense of the aftermath of Civil War battles, and get a detailed view of the suffering of the men who fought them. The men in the cases I examined ranged in age from 22 to 38, and suffered their gunshot wounds at five different places throughout the war-torn nation. Altogether, they spent nearly 1,300 days in hospitals, but only three got to leave. Two of those men left with only one arm left, and endured pain and infections while still in the hospital. Reading the gruesome details of all of these injuries has breathed new life into the statistics about the war and its casualties that students have heard—but may not have fully comprehended—before.^*

Using the cases of soldiers who ended up in Washington hospitals as primary sources for courses in the history of medicine, the history of the Civil War, or even American history in general, offers students not only a large enough sample that they can grasp the toll the war took on American society, but also the individual stories that can spur their empathy with those who suffered.

^*Quoted with the permission of Minda Haas, a student in my History of American Medicine course in Spring 2011.

~Susan C. Lawrence

• Eric W. Sanderson, Associate Director for Landscape Ecology and Geographic Analysis in the Living Landscape Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, Founder and Director of The Mannahatta Project, and author of the book Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City.
• Philip J. Ethington, Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Director of the Ghost Metropolis digital site, and author of the forthcoming book of the same name.
• Myself, speaking on behalf of the Civil War Washington digital site, which is situated within the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

On this occasion, and in the august company of Eric Sanderson and Philip Ethington, I presented the following narrative remarks on the origins, mission, and current status of Civil War Washington.

The Civil War Washington digital site began about five years ago as a collaboration between Ken Price, Professor of English here at UNL and Co-Editor of the Walt Whitman Archive, and myself. Ken realized that as a Whitman scholar and a Lincoln scholar, respectively, he and I shared a mutual interest in Washington, DC, during the Civil War. Walt Whitman, of course, spent a considerable portion of the war in Washington, tending to his wounded brother and more than 100,000 other sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals that sprang up there by the dozens. So Ken proposed a digital site highlighting the experiences and contributions of Washington, DC, as a wartime capital city.

During the Civil War, Washington was:

• The seat of the U.S. government.
• The headquarters of the Union military effort.
• A strategic site one hundred miles from the Confederate capital of Richmond.
• The country’s largest depot for the collection and distribution of soldiers and supplies.
• The focus of the Union’s medical system for treating sick and wounded soldiers. (At the start of the war, Washington had only one hospital, which immediately burned down; it ended up with over 80, more than one-fourth of all Union military hospitals.)
• The focus of repeated Confederate military threats. (Three major Confederate campaigns targeted Washington, and there was one literal attack on the city.)
• A magnet for abolitionists and other reformers from across the North. (After the war began, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and a long list of others, visited or moved to Washington.)
• The “entering wedge” of emancipation, as both supporters and opponents of freedom sometimes called it. (Washington was originally a southern community committed to slavery but underwent a wartime transformation from slavery to freedom that preceded the similar transformation that the entire nation underwent.)

Finally, Washington was a paramount symbol of national power and national persistence in the face of profound adversity, and by the end of the war the now national principles of freedom and equality.

In fact, the city was, we believed, a microcosm of the larger national struggle over the character of American government and specifically the American principles of freedom and equality, embodied in the struggle to end slavery and extend civil rights to all. Ken and I wanted to tell the story of Washington’s endurance through the sectional conflict, the resilience of its people as they endured the challenges of civil war, its role in achieving the Union victory and exemplifying fundamental national values, and its own transformation from a southern slaveowning tradition to a more forward-looking example of freedom and equality that the nation could be proud of and the world could look up to.

We originally chose Lincoln and Whitman as our focus and called the project Lincoln and Whitman in Civil War Washington. Then, three years ago, Susan Lawrence, a historian of medicine, joined our faculty as Professor of History and Director of UNL’s Humanities in Medicine Program. We immediately recruited her as a Co-Director to contribute her expertise in the history of medicine, adding a new dimension to the project, and as we began to see even more possibilities for expanding our mission, we renamed the site simply Civil War Washington to keep the scope of the project open-ended.

The core of the site, from the beginning, was a map of the District of Columbia, because we believed that the changes that the city underwent—and undertook—would be reflected in visible geographic features, such as government buildings, fortifications, military encampments, theaters, transportation routes, hospitals, hotels, fugitive slave camps and later freedmen’s villages, as well as a host of other mappable features. Our goal is a map that changes over time as the war progressed and as the city responded to unfolding events and escalating needs. Washington had only one hospital when the war began but over one hundred sixty by the end of the war, so the map shows the appearance of new hospitals as the need arose. Up to forty thousand sick and wounded soldiers could pour into the city after a major military campaign. The federal government erected over four hundred new buildings during the course of the war and built a thirty-seven-mile-long ring of fortifications around the city, making it the most heavily fortified place on earth. As fugitive slaves arrived, the government set up camps which gradually evolved into villages—freedmen’s villages—and they pop up on the map over time.

We chose a detailed base map from 1860 and “populated it” with geographical features, each of which is a hyperlink to data fields providing additional information, which we provide as we acquire it.

Civil War Washington base map, showing locations of fortifications, hospitals, and theaters.

The map is central to the project in another way, setting geographical and temporal limits on the scope of the project. We decided to include the original one hundred square miles of the District, one third of which (southwest of the Potomac) was retroceded to Virginia in 1847.

But of course important things happened on the Virginia side of the Potomac during the war, both in Alexandria, which was the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, and at Arlington, which was Robert E. Lee’s plantation. The Union seized Arlington, turned Arlington House itself into a military headquarters, cut down eight hundred acres of trees (mostly for firewood), built two forts on the land, created Arlington National Cemetery, and established two freedmen’s villages for former slaves. This was of course Washington’s line of defense to the southwest. (Coincidentally, the Pentagon is now the most visible feature of the former Lee estate.) So we included the entire one hundred square miles and limited our scope to the war years, 1860-1865. So the result is, in effect, a geographical case study of this critical one-hundred-square-mile region over a limited period of five years.

At the outset of our project, we received generous start-up support from the University of Nebraska, including the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, Dean Joan Giesecke on behalf of University Libraries, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Dr. Prem Paul, the Departments of History and English, and the UCARE Program, as well as external support for a project manager from the Center for Library and Information Resources. Our collaboration with the Walt Whitman Archive has been both welcome and important.

In July 2010, we received major external funding through a three-year NEH Collaborative Research Grant that has received “We the People” designation, which emphasizes the project’s mission to promote a fuller understanding of the fundamental values that underlie American history and culture. The focus of this NEH grant is race, slavery, and emancipation in Washington, DC, during the Civil War, so this dimension of the site will constitute our primary objective for at least the next three years.

During the Civil War, Washington, DC, became a crucible in which Americans struggled over and resolved many of the fundamental sectional and cultural conflicts over race, slavery, freedom, and equality. Washington had always been a southern city, but during the war, northerners poured into the capital and tried to remake it into a northern city. As a federal district, the District of Columbia fell under the direct control of Congress, allowing Congress not only to convert the city into a “citadel” for military purposes but also to launch “experiments” in freedom and equality. Radicals in Congress called the District of Columbia a laboratory for legislation—”an experimental station.” Senator Charles Sumner wanted to make it “an example for all the land.”

In April 1862, Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, eight months before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared the three million slaves in the Confederacy free. During the war, Congress also created the first publicly funded schools for African Americans, granted them legal rights, outlawed segregation on the city’s streetcars, and in 1867 enfranchised African American men (three years before the 15th Amendment). These milestones are all firsts for the South and presaged the broader advances enacted during the Reconstruction Era. We are hoping to dissect this process through which Washington helped to win the war while simultaneously promoting freedom and equality as national ideals.

Our primary task this year under our NEH grant is examining the passage and implementation of the Compensated Emancipation Act of April 1862 and analyzing its impact on the city and the nation. This act emancipated 3,300 slaves who belonged to almost 1,000 slaveowners in the District of Columbia. To fund this unique compensated emancipation, Congress appropriated $900,000 or about $300 per slave. Because slaveowners were compensated for their slaves, they had to file a petition and testify before a Board of Emancipation Commissioners.

The first page of the petition seeking compensation for former slave Sophia Davis.

This produced a voluminous, rich, and detailed record of the character of slavery in Washington and a vivid portrait of the three thousand three hundred slaves who gained their freedom in 1862. (The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 did not compensate slaveowners, so they did not produce any comparable records of enslavement and emancipation.) Two of our student team members, research assistant Rob Voss and UCARE intern Brittany Jones, along with Rhiannon Root, a student worker in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, are digitizing, transcribing, and marking up the nearly one thousand petitions, which are located in the National Archives but are fortunately available on six reels of microfilm.

We are also exploiting the U.S. Census to characterize the city and its inhabitants, both free and slave, in 1860 and chart changes over the decade. Washington was divided into seven wards, and we can present census data graphically by ward, when it is available. We are also extracting individual-level data about slave and free families from the census.

Screenshot of records in the Ward I data set, derived from the 1860 U.S. Census.

This chart illustrates the proportion of the population in Ward I identified in the 1860 Census as "white," "black," and "mixed race."

This graph shows the distribution of wealth in Ward I according to race, as represented in the 1860 Census.

We have also made significant progress documenting Washington’s role in the medical dimension of the Civil War, analyzing the city’s contributions not only to tending hundreds of thousands of sick and wounded soldiers but the broader impact and legacy of evolving medical theories and practices during the war. This horrific experience in the nation’s capital held dramatic long-term implications for scientific thought, humanitarian debate, and emerging government policies toward public health in the United States. Our primary resource is the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, which the government published in seven volumes from 1870 to 1888. We have constructed a database containing information on about one thousand five hundred case studies of soldiers treated in Washington’s military hospitals that are documented in detail in the Medical and Surgical History. This information includes the origin of the soldiers’ diseases or wounds, their transportation to Washington, their diagnosis and course of treatment, their subsequent health and medical care, and their pension history, following individual patients from the battlefield through their treatment and (among those who survived) into old age and ultimately their deaths.

Washington, DC, was an extraordinary city, primarily because of its status as a national capital and federal district, its geographical location on the border between the slave South and the free North, and its significant contributions to winning the war while defending and extending the national principles of freedom and equality. During the Civil War, Washington sat on the front lines of both the military struggle to save the Union and the moral imperative to end slavery while treating the human casualties of the conflict in a heroic effort to mitigate the tragedy of the war.

~Kenneth J. Winkle