"Pretty Well Fixed": Material Culture and Occupation in Civil War Kentucky

One frigid day in January 1862, enslaved workers drew up a wagon to the back door of the house of their Unionist enslavers—the Underwoods. Trunks, bedding, and a few books were loaded alongside the white family's provisions, a carpet thrown over top to shield them from Confederate soldiers' notice. Some furniture had been sent ahead to the cabins to which the white family and a few enslaved people were relocating, spurred by military orders to leave their farm in Bowling Green, Kentucky. But most of the Underwoods' furnishings were stored at a friend's home or left behind, where they would be used, and perhaps abused, by occupying Confederate soldiers.¹

Furnishings and houses of people from all backgrounds, including the Underwoods, were central to the process, experience, and imaginary of military occupation during the American Civil War. Across the North and South, objects in houses and those in transit crossed paths with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, civilians, deserters, stragglers, travelers, formerly enslaved people, and white refugees. From utilitarian items to fashionable luxury goods, material culture—which I define broadly as the "stuff" and "things" made and used by people—played an especially active role in this war, in part because objects' physical properties helped to determine how they were used, whether they survived, which memories they preserved, and the vitriol produced by their loss. And those objects, in combination with the meanings people attached to them, could be weaponized to fight the war on an emotional battlefront. The use of household furnishings to combat one's enemies was especially apparent in the context of military occupation and appropriation.²

Historians of the American Civil War have explored the experience and effects of military occupation in the context of civilian morale, gender relations, military discipline and strategy, looting, and the problem of property and ownership. The extensive scholarship on women's wartime experiences addresses some aspects of material culture, but with the notable exception of the male violation of female domestic spaces—particularly bedrooms—material objects themselves have not been substantively addressed; material culture is usually a backdrop against which a larger narrative of occupation plays out. Over the last decade, a growing number of historians have turned toward more sustained engagement with material culture to explore questions about wartime experience, building on the methodological approaches and narrative groundwork laid by material culture scholars. Historians, including Joan E. Cashin, Joseph Beilein Jr., James J. Broomall, Dana E. Byrd, Peter S. Carmichael, Shae Smith Cox, Michael DeGruccio, Katie C. Knowles, Jason Phillips, C. Ian Stevenson, and myself, among others, have examined diverse topics ranging from the material culture of patriotic sentiment to the struggle over material resources, to the use of relics in making sense of the war and the roles of objects in shaping enslaved peoples' transitions to freedom. Through such efforts, historians in this still-emerging field continue to hone the critical edge that material culture brings to the work of history, helping us to move beyond glimpses of the material environment and toward a more engaged study of material culture's significance in wartime.³

My own methodological approach, both here and in my broader scholarship, mobilizes material objects not as illustrations but as meaningful sources whose physicality influences the kinds of questions that I pose of a broad array of objects, images, and texts, each of which provides a different piece of the same historical puzzle. Material objects, I have argued elsewhere, "were not merely the abstract reflections or consequences of larger processes but, rather, actively shaped war and wartime society through both their physicality and their interplay with social expectations, cultural beliefs, and political circumstances." Objects, in other words, pose questions and problems with which historians must reckon. As Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra have argued of war more generally, when "we grapple with what it means to be a human during wartime, we need more than words and images. We need to study the objects that move and the objects that are left behind." Indeed, as this article shows, for both the inhabitants of...