Week 4 Assignment - Patrick

Response to "Reading the Runaways" and Gay New York

         In a comparison of two narratives of different marginalized groups at different points in American history that are comprised of different people facing their own unique forms of oppression, there are certain common threads that historians may discover that can prove a commonality in humanity’s role in creating oppression as well as its response to it. In both David Waldstreicher’s “Reading the Runaways” and George Chauncey’s Gay New York, the authors present two highly dissimilar worlds that oppress, in the former, Africans forcibly relocated to the American colonies, and in the latter, the gay community in New York City in the early 20^th century, as well as the ways in which both groups fight against their oppressors to obtain either literal or metaphorical freedom. The fundamental difference between the two groups’ experiences is, of course, the existence of slavery in the American colonies. Gay men in 1900s New York were fighting for the freedom of cultural and personal expression, as well as the belonging the community gives, underneath the grip of a society that found them abhorrent. African slaves in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, however, sought new lives away from the oppressive and violent societies in which they were compelled to work. Both authors paint the narratives of the people they try to represent in their works as ones of freedom, but for each group freedom means a very different thing.

           In his article, Waldstreicher focuses on the narrative of the escaped slave through advertisements of the era that slave-owners had bought in newspapers, examining not only the numbers of slaves who were escaping but also their age, profession, and clothing. Through his notice of these details, Waldstreicher argues that white society of the time was aware of the individuality of slaves in the colonies and tried to minimize that individuality as best it could in order to maintain its constructed dehumanization of Africans. He successfully uses primary sources to reconstruct the culture behind slave-owners’ attempt to recapture escaped slaves as well as to uncover the experience of slaves who had managed to escape. The sheer volume of advertisements he presents the reader with reveal the simple truth that experience of Africans in the United States, enslaved, escaped, or freed, was much larger, more harrowing, and gave Africans more agency than the modern day perception gives them. This article can teach students writing large research papers that sources that may seem to be relatively simple or even difficult to obtain information from can actually store a wealth of information that might otherwise be overlooked. Particularly helpful is Waldstreicher’s use of both the descriptions within the advertisements themselves, such as the escaped slave’s clothing, and the status that clothing afforded people in the time period, as described by his secondary material, to inform the reader of the potentially hidden importance of a small detail.

            To contrast Waldstreicher’s almost detective-like work in uncovering the lives and experiences of a group whose history was not preserved by those in power, Chauncey benefits from his temporal closeness to his subjects, through the use of interviews and the simply broader propagation of writing materials that gay men in New York could use to preserve their stories. While Waldstreicher constructs for the reader an interpretation of a historical narrative that otherwise might be left in the dark, Chauncey attempts to describe and explain the emergence of a community and social movement that is still very active today.  Chauncey is successful in using the quotes and stories of gay men from the early 20^th century to inform his broader research without having to recreate their stories, a luxury that Waldstreicher simply lacks. Because Chauncey has a larger and more complete set of primary sources, he is able to focus on defining terms such as “gay,” “fairy,” and “trade,” as well as relaying how these terms developed and how they affected the culture of gay life in New York. Chauncey has a more specific focus than Waldstreicher, but he also presents a more recent time period. The fact that Waldstreicher reconstructs the lives of African slaves who lived in a fundamentally different culture than he does adds a layer of complexity to his argument and his article. Chauncey is able to work with a basic understanding of 20^th century American culture, assuming that his readers will know more general information than Waldstreicher does, and ultimately focusing on specific terminology, locations, and individuals to a greater extent.

            Both authors structure their arguments in their ability to closely examine and discover narratives from primary sources, using secondary ones to add background information and provide context to the primary sources. From advertisements for runaway slaves to letters and books from the 1920s, each type of source has its advantages and disadvantages when considering their application to an author’s thesis. Older sources provide much less of a complete story, but they also allow authors to discover for themselves, informed by secondary literature, what they believe to have been the culture of the time or its history. These two works prove to be an excellent comparison of the different ways to use primary sources in an argument, and they remind scholars of the uses and dangers of old and new sources. 

Statement of Topic: American Jews in the Confederate States of America

             As I’ve considered my initial topic choices, refined my time period and choice of community to examine, and considered the type of project I could expand into a thesis, I’ve chosen to write my paper on the experience and motivations of American Jews in the South during the Civil War. Jewish Americans have a long history in the United States, but stereotypes continue to persist about Jews only living in the Northeast or California, and I’m interested in exploring their experiences in a society that modern scholars may think of as inhospitable to any group that wasn’t white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, including Jews. Some historical figures like Judah Benjamin and Abraham Myers were Jewish Americans who achieved high-ranking status in the Confederate government and military apparatus, despite their own fight to overcome anti-Jewish discrimination in the United States and Confederate States. I am excited to explore how Jews in the South reacted to slavery as an institution, who among them fought for or against slavery, and what prompted them to do so.

            As I studied and was taught about the Civil War, particularly in high school and in general American history survey courses, the narrative of the war is usually condensed into three groups: northern abolitionists, southern slave-owners, and the slaves themselves. However, this limited view ignores many different groups on both sides of the war, including northerners who didn’t want to make the effort to force the South to free its slaves, poor southern whites who might have fought primarily to maintain a system of oppression that benefited them rather than for economic reasons, and the experiences of any group that was also in a minority but not enslaved. Therefore it is important to recognize the different experiences, motivations, and lives of the people who created and fought in the United States’ bloodiest war over its most abhorrent institution. In this way historians may better understand its effects on communities and society as a whole without succumbing to stereotyping and generalizing the lives of people in the 19^th century.

            In general, I will be looking for sources that describe and give insight to the lives of specific members of the Confederate government, likely their own journals and letters as well as articles about them in contemporary newspapers or documents discussing them written by superiors. I am hopeful that sources like these will be feasibly found, but so far I’ve found only a moderate amount of secondary literature. Works such as the New York University Press’s Jews and the Civil War and Robert Rosen’s The Jewish Confederates, will be excellent starting points for much of my research into the time period, but also contextualize the Jewish American experience in the Civil War in regards to the broader history of Jews in America, instead of in the context of opposing forces in the war itself, as is my intent.

            One of the biggest problems I foresee in this project is the availability of sources that do not solely focus on the powerful Jewish Confederates, like CSA Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, but that is a problem common to many studies of particular communities; the “common man” is often left without a voice. However, with the proliferation of historical documents inherent in the governmental apparatus of the 19^th century, along with the direction my secondary sources can give, I hope to find a large and varied collection of sources that can put me on the right track in developing a truthful narrative for American Jews in the Confederacy.