Copperhead Gore: Benjamin Wood's Fort Lafayette and Civil War America

Glossary and Explanatory Notes to Fort Lafayette; or, Love and Secession

[ 285 ] GLOSSARY AND EXPLANATORY NOTES TO FORT LAFAYETTE; OR, LOVE AND SECESSION Epigraphs—The ¤rst quotation is from the ¤rst act of Thomas Otway (1652–1685), Venice preserved; or, A Plot Discovered. A Tragedy; the second and third quotations are from James Thomson (1700–1748), the former from The Seasons, the latter from Britannia; and the ¤nal quotation is from part 2 of Henry IV, a phrase attributed therein to the Archbishop of York Page 64, “Palmetto boys at Cherubusco”—One of the heaviest battles of the Mexican war was the capture of the citadel of Cherubusco, on August 20, 1847. South Carolina’s volunteer Palmetto Regiment suffered heavy losses in that battle. Page 64, “Mississippians at Buena Vista”—On the second day of¤ghting in the Mexican War’s battle of Buena Vista, February 22– 23, 1847, the Mississippi regiment commanded by Jefferson Davis¤lled in a break in the American line and became a major factor in the Mexican retreat. Page 82, “northern seminary”—Among the Southern elite much attention was paid the education of women, with an emphasis on the “ornamentals ”—French, piano, singing, drawing, and so forth. While female post-secondary education was more developed in the South than in other parts of the country, there were Southern women who attended Northern academies and seminaries, and by the 1850s colleges too. Page 82, “Yale”—Although by 1850 roughly half of America’s colleges were in the South, many Southerners attended Northern colleges. While Virginians showed a preference for Princeton (one third of whose students came from the South), many others attended Yale and Harvard. By 1850 there were more than 250 Southern students in those three universities. Page 84, “the degradation of slave-dealing”—In the South, no less than the North, stereotype pictured slave traders as cruel, coarse, and dishonest . Due to this negative image, individuals involved in slave Glossary and Explanatory Notes [ 286 ] dealing (as well as the ¤ctional Seth Rawbon) shunned disclosure. Nevertheless, the Richmond directory for 1860 included some 70 listings for professionals of the slave trade. Page 84, “aristocracy of the Old Dominion”—Americans in the early nineteenth century were engaged in a project of crystallizing national and regional character. They came to differentiate between two types of society, culture, and values: the North’s democratic, commercial civilization, and an aristocratic, agrarian civilization in the South. The planting aristocracy of the South was thought to epitomize this constructed Southern ethos, modeled on the English Cavalier tradition. Page 86, “Green Mountains”—Reference is to the Green Mountains of southwestern and west-central Vermont, Wayne’s native state. Page 86, “Cambridge”—This allusion to Beverly and Harold’s college experience con¶icts with Wood’s describing them (above, p. 82) as students at Yale, in New Haven. Page 86, “Virginia Welcome”—The antebellum South was reputed for its largess in hospitality, although by mid-century that tradition was apparently waning among the lower and middle classes. A combination of geographical, economic, and social factors shaped this tradition , to include isolation and rural loneliness, the availability of servants and cheap food, the lack of hotels and inns, frequent visiting bred of strong ties of kinship, as well as the sense of pride and selfimportance of hosts. Page 88, “duel”—Peaking in the revolutionary era, dueling as a social institution for adjusting private con¶ict was in decline from early in the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding increasingly adverse public opinion and anti-dueling ordinances enacted by many legislatures, the custom lingered into mid-century, particularly in the South. Page 91, “scrapbook”—The practice of cutting items readers deemed signi¤cant from ephemeral print publications and pasting a personalized selection of them in blank bound books became wide-spread in the nineteenth century. The practice is understood as a form of accommodation (and to an extent resistance) to the emergence of media of mass commodi¤ed culture, comparable to hyperlinks and pasting of digital sources in contemporary personal web pages. Page 94, “Sumter”—The opening salvo of the Civil War—the ¤ring on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor—began at 4:30 on April 12, 1861, and continued until the afternoon of the fol- Glossary and Explanatory Notes [ 287 ] lowing day. The fort was surrendered to the insurgents on April 14th. Telegraphic reports of the events spread the news of the con¶agration rapidly throughout the country. Page 94, “gridiron bunting...