First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920

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First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920, includes hundreds of diaries, autobiographies, travel accounts, and memoirs dealing with life in the southern states before, during, and after the Civil War. The collection, directly tied to the "Documenting the American South" collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, allows one to explore a variety of historical topics from the viewpoints of subaltern perspectives often overlooked in more traditional surveys of the period. Texts from women, slaves, enlisted soldiers, and common laborers abound in the collection and often surprise the reader with their depth of feeling and universality of sentiment on such subjects as abolition, regional pride, and wartime survival.

1) The Civil War

The history of the southern United States from 1860-1920 can appropriately be described as the history of the American Civil War. Although the war only lasted from 1861-1865, its effects echoed in the decades that followed. In addition to the great issues such as slavery and states' rights that found their forum in the violent struggle, more than half a million men -- a whole generation of Americans -- lost their lives. The survivors represented in First Person Narratives of the American South chronicle the experiences of southerners from all stations in life -- white and black, rich and poor.

Body of a Confederate Soldier. From Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865.

One of the great strengths of this collection is the inclusion of many documents that relate the common soldier's perspective on the war. Although readers may be familiar with the great military campaigns and famous generals who led the armies, the collection affords a wonderful opportunity to explore the lives and views of the soldiers who fought the battles and followed their leaders through four long years of deprivation and suffering. For instance, a search on Stonewall Jackson yields several documents including John S. Robson's account of his service as a private in Jackson's army. Robson speaks for many of his generation when he states:

. . . though the historians will tell, with eloquent pen, of the grand movements of armies and of the deeds of the Generals, he will hardly stop to explain how the private soldier was evolved from the farmer, the clerk, the mechanic, the school-boy, and transformed into the perfect, all-enduring, untiring and invincible soldier, who broiled his bacon on a stick and baked his bread on a ramrod.

Page 8, How a One-Legged Rebel Lives: Reminiscences of the Civil War

Regarding the Battle of Antietam, Robson relates:

We left Harper's Ferry on the 16th, and joined General Lee the same evening, and our commanders, on both sides, were busy arranging for the big battle that was to come off tomorrow, as coolly as farmers getting ready to plant corn. It was no new business to us now - for the novelty was all worn off - but we did wish for our twenty thousand stragglers in Virginia. The ball opened at daylight, on the 17th, and as one old soldier expressed it, "we fought all day before breakfast, and went on picket all night before supper." "Fighting" Jo Hooker was immediately in front of Jackson's line; anybody that complained of employment that day was hard to satisfy.

Page 122, How a One-Legged Rebel Lives: Reminiscences of the Civil War

• What is the significance of the common soldier's perspective?
• What was the importance of the common soldier's experience to the post-war South?
• Would you describe Robson's tone as humble or arrogant? Why?
• Do you think that Robson's description of the commanders is flattering or derogatory?
• Who do you think was Robson's intended audience? Who might be most likely to read works like this now?
  

Some of the most fascinating and arresting texts in the collection are those written by, or about, operatives behind enemy lines. These accounts contain some of the most biased and vindictive criticisms of the Federal army in the collection and will help readers appreciate the intensity of the sectionalism that divided the country. A search on prisons yields several documents including Miles O. Sherrill's A Soldier's Story: Prison Life and Other Incidents in the War of 1861-'65. Sherrill's brief story relates his wounding at Spottsylvania and the subsequent amputation of his leg by Federal surgeons. After the tortures of the field hospital, though maimed for life, Sherrill relates that he was eventually imprisoned in Elmyra, New York where smallpox, starvation, and dysentery were the norm. Upon arriving at the prison:

The commanding officer, Major Beal, greeted us with the most bitter oaths that I ever heard. He swore that he was going to send us out and have us shot; said he had no room for us, and that we (meaning the Confederate soldiers) had no mercy on their colored soldiers or prisoners. He was half drunk, and I was not sure but that we might be dealt with then and there. Then we were searched and robbed of knives, cash, etc., and sent into various wards. While we were standing in the snow, hearing the abuse of Major Beal, some poor ragged Confederate prisoners were marched by with what was designated as barrel shirts, with the word "thief" written in large letters pasted on the back of each barrel, and a squad of little drummer boys following beating the drums. The mode of wearing the barrel shirts was to take an ordinary flour barrel, cut a hole through the bottom large enough for the head to go through, with arm-holes on the right and left, through which the arms were to be placed. This was put on the poor fellow, resting on his shoulders, his head and arms coming through as indicated above; thus they were made to march around for so many hours and so many days. Now, what do you suppose they had stolen? Why, something to eat. Yes, they had stolen cabbage leaves and other things from slop barrels, which was a violation of the rules of the prison.

Pages 9-10, A Soldier's Story: Prison Life and Other Incidents in the War of 1861-'65

• Why do you think that accounts from prisoners and spies are the most vindictive?
• What is the effect of Sherrill's detailed description of the use of barrel shirts for punishment?
• What other types of writing might try to persuade a reader to sympathize with the author's plight? Who might write such works?
• What might prompt an ex-prisoner to write about his/her experiences?

Belle Boyd. Illustration from Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison.

A search on spies yields five documents, all written by women. Nineteenth-century social mores placed women above suspicion and, when they were implicated in illegal activity, thus provided more leniencies. This, in short, made them effective spies. The texts represented in this collection present an array of loyalties and motivations. The autobiography of Belle Boyd, the infamous Confederate spy, details the wartime activities of that Southern firebrand while Kate Plake's The Southern Husband Outwitted By His Union Wife relates that Kentucky author's concurrent quest for matrimonial peace and national freedom. Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez' The Woman in Battle, describes her years of service in the Confederate army disguised as a man, and provides a wealth of gender related topics for discussion.

Women, whether they saw action or not, bore the brunt of the war's effects upon the region's domestic life. The Civil War was fought almost entirely in the South and its battlefields were the wilderness, farms, and towns of the region. The scorched earth policy adopted by Federal military leaders late in the war deprived the southern population of wares and food. Many cities such as Atlanta and Richmond were almost entirely destroyed by bloody campaigns. With the exception of the Revolution, the Civil War was the only prolonged U.S. conflict in which the civilian population was directly affected by the actions of the combatants. In A Diary From Dixie, Mary Boykin Chesnutt describes the situation of a Virginian family that had become refugees in her South Carolina home:

The Fants are refugees here, too; they are Virginians, and have been in exile since the second battle of Manassas. Poor things; they seem to have been everywhere, and seen and suffered everything. They even tried to go back to their own house, but found one chimney only standing alone; even that had been taken possession of by a Yankee who had written his name upon it. Pages 347-48, A Diary From Dixie Why might the Yankee have written his name upon the Fants' chimney? How would it have felt to be a refugee? What sorts of challenges did refugees face? What items might have been hard to find in the Confederacy? Do you think that conditions on the homefront affected soldiers in the field? How?

Mary Boykin Miller Chesnutt. Illustration from A Diary From Dixie.

2) Slavery

The Subject Index heading, Slaves' writings, American, yields fifteen documents including The Narrative of Bethany Veney: a Slave Woman. Although questions of authorship arise in such cases where the "writer's" testimony is transcribed by others with agendas of their own, Ms. Veney's narrative is a compelling story of trial and redemption. Students of the period will benefit from Veney's descriptions of life in the slave South. In the following passage she describes her former master:

Master Kibbler was a Dutchman, - a man of most violent temper, ready to fight anything or anybody who resisted his authority or in any way crossed his path. His one redeeming quality was his love for his horses and dogs. These must be fed before his servants, and their comfort and health always considered. He was a blacksmith by trade, and would have me hold his irons while he worked them. I was awkward one day, and he struck me with a nail-rod, making me so lame my mistress noticed it, and asked Matilda what was the matter with me; and, when she was told, she was greatly troubled, and as I suppose spoke to Kibbler about it, for he called me to him, and bade me go a long way off into a field, and, as he said, cut some sprouts there. But he very soon followed me, and, cutting a rod, beat me severely, and then told me to "go again and tell my mistress that he had hit me with a nail-rod, if I wanted to."

Page 11, The Narrative of Bethany Veney: a Slave Woman

• In what ways is Veney mistreated here?
• Do you think that her story is credible?
• What might the transcriber's motives have been in taking down Veney's story?
• What did former slaves such as Veney have to gain or lose by allowing their stories to be published?
  

The plantation was a fief in which the master and his mistress ruled -- sometimes cruelly and sometimes with compassion -- over their slaves. The social interactions of these two groups came to form a complex, mutually dependent culture. In the years following the Civil War, many writers sought to glorify the deceased slave/master relationship. A search on plantation yields twenty-nine texts. Many of these documents were written decades after the defeat of the Confederacy by old men whose memories of youth were directly tied to the glories, imagined or real, of the Old South. For instance, R.Q. Mallard introduces his Plantation Life Before Emancipation with remarks about slavery that are both nostalgic and defensive:

The purpose of the author has been to portray a civilization now obsolete, to picture the relations of mutual attachment and kindness which in the main bound together master and servant, and to give this and future generations some correct idea of the noble work done by Southern masters and mistresses of all denominations for the salvation of the slave. Page vi, Plantation Life Before Emancipation What assumptions does Mallard make about slavery and about his audience? What do you think Mallard considers "noble work"? Why might Mallard have taken on a defensive attitude in his writing? Why might men such as Mallard have written their autobiographies?

"His Thoughts Dwelt Upon Serious Things." Illustration from Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War.

3) Abolition and Emancipation

The existence among us of a distinct class of people, who by their condition as slaves, are deprived of almost every incentive to virtue and industry, and shut out from many of the sources of light and knowledge, has an evident tendency to corrupt the morals of the people, and to dampen the spirit of enterprise by accustoming the rising generation to look with contempt upon honest labor and to depend for support too much upon the labor of others. It prevents a useful and industrious class of people from settling among us, by rendering the means of subsistence more precarious to the laboring class of whites; it diminishes the resources of the community by throwing the earnings of the poor into the coffers of the rich, thus rendering the former dependent, servile, and improvident, while the latter are tempted to become in the same proportion luxurious and prodigal.

Page 32, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney: Late of Lincoln, Loudoun County, Va.: A Minister in the Religious Society of Friends

• What problems with slavery are identified in this passage?
• Who do these problems affect?
• Who is responsible for these problems? How might these people also suffer?
• What reasons compelled abolitionists such as Janney to live in the slaveholding South?

When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, millions of people in the slave-holding states were thrust into a legal status of freedom that for many had been little more than a vague, however much sought after, idea. Although it would not be until the end of the war that this transformation could be codified and secured, the immediate realization was overwhelming and, in some cases, frightening for African Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line. A search on slavery results in numerous texts pertaining to emancipation, of which Booker T. Washington's autobiography, Up From Slavery, is perhaps the most well known. Washington ably articulates the benefits as well as the attendant problems and complications that his race encountered not only in attaining, but also in asserting, its freedom. In his narrative, Washington describes the scene at his childhood plantation home on the occasion of emancipation:

An Early Portrait of Booker T. Washington. Illustration from Up From Slavery.

For some minutes there was great rejoicing, and thanksgiving, and wild scenes of ecstasy. But there was no feeling of bitterness. In fact, there was pity among the slaves for our former owners. The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches. Was it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters? To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it.

Pages 21-22, Up From Slavery

• What does Washington mean when he describes freedom as "a more serious thing than (the slaves) had expected to find it?"
• What do the responsibilities and questions listed in this passage reveal about the condition of the slaves?
• What is Washington's tone? Does he sound like a disinterested observer or one caught up in the action? How does the tone contribute to the effect of his narrative?
• How do you think that the slaves depicted in this passage might have felt about their former masters?
• Are accounts by former slaves more or less credible than those of former masters, or are they equally suspect?
  

4) Reconstruction, Resistance, and Acclimation

The Freedman's Bureau provided blacks with opportunities to learn practical trades as well as to receive an education. Operating with varying degrees of success throughout the South, the Bureau was also the focal point for voting education and, as such, became the target both of northern opportunists seeking to promote favorable candidates and of southern leaders fearful of a mobilized, informed African-American vote. Some southern whites, however, recognized the need to educate and assist the black population. A search on reconstruction leads to several documents including Richard Taylor's autobiography, Destruction and Reconstruction. Displaying great sympathy for the newly-emancipated race, the author describes the often violent manipulation of the relatively naïve African-American voters that led to the establishment of a Freedman's Bureau in his native Louisiana.

Conservative southern whites reacted to African-American empowerment by banding together in clubs and societies. The most infamous among the secret societies that sprang up in Reconstruction-era South, was the Ku Klux Klan, which sought to inspire fear among the African-American population. Although ostensibly organized on both the local and national levels, the Klan really operated as a collection of loosely organized vigilante terrorists whose members took quick and often violent action to prevent African-American organization and empowerment. A search on Klan directs the reader to Laura Elizabeth Battle's Forget-me-nots of the Civil War. Battle, a southern belle whose family suffered a severe financial setback due to the war, does not attempt to hide her passive support of the Klan's activities. In the following passage, Battle describes an action by North Carolina Klan members to prevent the meetings of local blacks who were trying to organize a militia group known as the "Red Stringers":

Laura Elizabeth Lee Battle. Illustration from Forget-me-nots of the Civil War.

This lady whose husband, I suppose was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, told of a company of grotesque figures that had been seen the night before, mounted on horseback, appearing like the heads of skeletons illuminated, their grinning teeth and horrible looking sockets glittering with lights shining out from a white robe that enveloped both horse and rider. She related further that a negro, who had made threats against some of the white people had been found, killed and quartered and hung from Neuse river bridge, with a notice of warning to the other negroes and "Red Stringers." However, that cured our county of such lawlessness . . . so that the Society of Red Strings disbanded and never drilled again.

Page 173, Forget-me-nots of the Civil War

• Why might the word "lawless" seem ironic in this passage?
• What is the effect of Battle's description of the Klan members?
• What did the Ku Klux Klan and its supporters fear from the African Americans?
• How does the situation described by Taylor and Battle compare with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s?

"The hoe they consider purely a feminine implement," Illustration from A Woman Rice Planter.

It is important to remember that, although Reconstruction introduced changes to the region, life had to go on -- crops harvested and families fed. Soon after the war, those individuals who still possessed land realized that a system of sharecropping -- previously extended to poor white farmers, -- would keep the black labor force in the fields. Conversely, many of the newly-emancipated blacks, reluctant to leave behind the security of the farms and families that they had known most of their lives, desired to stay and work the land. In A Woman Rice Planter, Elizabeth Pringle details the hardships and rewards that attended her efforts to subsist on the Georgia farm worked by her antebellum forebears. The document, located through a search on planter, reveals a woman eminently familiar with the costs and margins attendant to the planting and harvesting of a profitable crop. Pringle was successful in her agrarian endeavors, however, only because she was able to assess and adapt to post-emancipation labor relationships and motivations:

I assembled the hands and told them that all who could not support themselves for a year would have to leave the place. With one accord they declared they could do it; but I explained to them that I was going to take charge myself, that I was a woman, with no resources of money behind me, and, having only the land, I intended to rent to them for ten bushels of rice to the acre. I could advance nothing but the seed. I could give them a chance to work for themselves and prove themselves worthy to be free men. I intended to have no overseer; each man would be entirely responsible for the land he rented.

Page 2, A Woman Rice Planter

• In what ways does the offer that Pringle makes to her workers differ from that made to slaves?
• Do you think that Pringle uses her gender to her advantage or disadvantage in this passage?
• Does Pringle's offer to her workers sound fair?
• What other ways might poor southerners have survived if they did not want to be sharecroppers? Do you think that they had any options?
  

5) Freedom Becomes Education

Numerous texts in the collection written by African Americans detail the importance of education and literacy in shaping their lives, both as slaves and as free persons. Five items are listed under the Subject Index heading, Afro-Americans-Education-Southern States, including Robert Russa Moton's autobiography, Finding a Way Out. Born in 1867, at the height of Reconstruction, Moton describes his early years working as a houseboy on the plantation to which his father had hired as labor boss. Moton's mother, who taught him to read, shared the common view that Virginia whites did not like blacks to become literate. As Moton relates, however, one fateful night, the mistress of the house knocked on the cabin door in the middle of a lesson:

My mother was tempted to hide the book when she discovered who was at the door, but my father objected, saying we were free and that he would leave the Vaughans if they made any objections; that he could find plenty of work at good pay at any one of a dozen plantations in the district. So the door was opened and in walked "Miss Lucy", to find us in the very act. She expressed the greatest surprise when she discovered what was taking place, but she astonished us equally when she indicated that she was very much pleased, and commended my mother on the fact that she could read and told her she was very wise to teach her son to read.

Page 21, Finding a Way Out

• What does this passage reveal about the relationship between work and education? Slavery and education?
• What would it be like for education to be a crime?
• What advantages did literacy bestow in the late nineteenth-century South?
• Would learning to read have the same meaning for those with access to schooling as it had for Moton?

More typical, however, was the white community's general suspicion of African-American education. In the antebellum period, several states had passed laws making it illegal to educate slaves. With emancipation, however, African-American leaders such as Booker T. Washington worked to establish schools for their race. In My Larger Education, also accessible under Subject Index heading, Afro-Americans-Education-Southern States, Washington describes the resistance that he encountered from various groups in establishing the Tuskegee Institute, a trade school for African Americans:

"Bricklaying at Hampton Institute." Illustration from My Larger Education.

The questions came to me in this way: Coloured people wanted to know why I proposed to teach their children to work. They said that they and their parents had been compelled to work for two hundred and fifty years, and now they wanted their children to go to school so that they might be free and live like the white folks--without working. That was the way in which the average coloured man looked at the matter. Some of the Southern white people, on the contrary, were opposed to any kind of education of the Negro. Others inquired whether I was merely going to train preachers and teachers, or whether I proposed to furnish them with trained servants. Some of the people in the North understood that I proposed to train the Negro to be a mere "hewer of wood and drawer of water," and feared that my school would make no effort to prepare him to take his place in the community as a man and a citizen.

Page 21-22, My Larger Education

"Blacksmithing at Hampton Institute." Illustration from My Larger Education.

According to Washington, what objection did some African Americans have against learning a trade? What other objections might African Americans have had to a trade school? What, according to the passage, is the difference between why southern and northern white people objected to the establishment of a trade school for African Americans? What distinctions does the passage draw between manual and intellectual labor? Would the establishment of an academic institution raise different questions than the establishment of a trade school? Why? What motivations did people such as Washington have for starting schools? Do you think that Washington's assessment of people's views is accurate? On what grounds might you question its accuracy?

6) The "Lost Cause" Movement

Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney. Illustration from Memorials of a Southern Planter.

The materials in First Person Narratives of the American South reveal a region of proud people struggling to reaffirm their independence and unique character within a legacy of defeat. After the war, the antebellum South, with the plantation at its core, took on the reputation of a golden age in the region's history. Post-war sermons, ceremonies such as monument dedications, veterans' reunions, and special holidays glorified the Old South and constituted what historians have called a "Lost Cause" movement, in which regional identity took the place of the Confederacy. Although few southerners could afford to maintain large tracts of land after the war, the plantation and the codes of honor that it perpetuated were a source of pride for many who had fought for the Confederacy. The First Person Narratives of the American South collection contains numerous documents by former planters recalling the glory of their pre-war existence. Several documents fall under the Subject Index heading, Plantation life-Southern States-History. Typical among these texts is Memorials of a Southern Planter, written by Susan Dabney Smedes in remembrance of her father, Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney, a southern planter and slave-owner:

A Southern plantation, well managed, had nearly everything necessary to life done within its bounds . . . The land in cultivation looked like a lady's garden, scarcely a blade of grass to be seen in hundreds of acres. The rows and hills and furrows were laid off so carefully as to be a pleasure to the eye. The fences and bridges, gates and roads, were in good order. His wagons never broke down. All these details may seem quite out of place and superfluous. But they show the character of the man in a country where many such things were neglected for the one important consideration, - the cotton crop.

Page 82-83, Memorials of a Southern Planter

• What relationship does Smedes establish between the appearance of the land and the character of its owner? What does her description of the land indicate about the character of its owner?
• Does the setting described in this passage seem idyllic or realistic?
• What motivations would people such as Smedes have for publishing their recollections?

For the enfranchised upper class, the end of the Confederacy meant the end of a profitable economic and easy social way of life that their families had known for generations. Edward J. Thomas echoed the common lament of his peers when he prefaced his memoirs by stating:

My young manhood having spent in the South just before, during and after the War of Secession, I may say I lived in two distinct periods of our Southern history, for this war completely severed the grand old plantation life, with all its peculiar interests and demands, from the stirring and striving conditions that followed. The first was a life complete in all things to foster intelligence and honor; the second simply, for me, a constant struggle and a hard fight to keep the proverbial wolf from the door, but with pluck, frugality and endurance the fight was won, and now, in my old age, with kind relatives and good friends, I have found happiness and contentment.

Page 5, Memoirs of a Southerner, 1840-1923

• What does the author identify as the cause of great change in his life?
• Do you think that the passage is flattering to the author?
• What aspects of the Old South do you think "fostered intelligence and honor"? What other qualities do the authors assign to the Old South?
• What criticisms, if any, would a man such as Smedes or Thomas have of the Old South?
• How might the events of Reconstruction have affected the Lost Cause movement?
  

7) Expansion, Exploration, and Movement (1880-1920)

The decades following the Civil War were ones of unprecedented growth for the United States. The West was settled and the last free Native American tribes were exterminated or tamed and sequestered to reservations. Industrialization, which took a firm hold of the North, crept into the South as urban centers such as Atlanta and New Orleans sought to keep up with national production trends. Transcontinental railroads were built and new technologies made large-scale farming in the West a reality. Also, during these years, the United States broke from its isolationism to fight in two foreign wars. In all this, southerners played a part, and several documents from this collection relate individual experiences with these momentous forces of change.

After I spent thirteen days with my mother I slipped off and walked to Jackson, Ky., a distance of sixty-five miles, and enlisted for two years and was sent to Cuba and was signed to Col. Teddy Roosevelt's brigade. That was where Teddy and I first met. He soon took a liking to me, and after the Battle of Santiago Teddy, without a wound and I with a bullet wound in my left arm, took me by the hand and said: "Fess, we have gained a great battle for our country. You or I will be the next President of the United States, and if you get the nomination I am for you, and if I get the nomination I want you to be for me, for you have a great influence in the United States." We shook hands and parted. So Teddy was from the North and had more votes than the South and beat me to the nomination. But I was for him and am still for him. Page 41, History of Corporal Fess Whitaker

"The author when firing for the Sante Fe R. R. and Engineer Brisley." Illustration from History of Corporal Fess Whitaker.

• Do you believe Whitaker's story? What does it reveal about him?
• How would an early twentieth-century audience have reacted to this passage?
• What role does humor play in Whitaker's description?
• Would the above statement have helped or hurt an aspiring politician?

The First World War had been raging for several years before the United States entered the conflict in 1917. Although Woodrow Wilson had won the presidency with the slogan, "He kept us out of war," Americans rallied when Germany resumed its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and supported a U.S. declaration of war soon after. African Americans served in the U.S. Army in France and African-American leaders used this fact to support the claim that their race was a fully integrated, beneficial component of American culture. The principal of the Talladega School, Robert Russa Moton, was appointed by a presidential commission to study the conduct of black soldiers and, in that capacity, visited France. In his autobiography Finding a Way Out, Moton relates:

While in France, I visited nearly every point where Negro soldiers were stationed. At most of them I spoke to the men, and at each place I was most cordially welcomed by the officers and men. I also had the privilege of conferring with Col. E. M. House; Bishop Brent, senior chaplain of the American Expeditionary Forces; General Pershing, and many other high officials of the American and French governments, all of whom I consulted with reference to the record which had been made by Negro troops, and received only words of very highest praise and commendation on their character and conduct in all branches of the service.

Page 251, Finding a Way Out

• Do Moton's claims seem credible?
• What biases might the author have had?
• How would other African-American leaders have benefitted from Moton's conclusions?
• Is it necessary to serve in a war to establish loyalty? What stake did African Americans have in World War I?

Several documents in First Person Narratives of the American South pay witness to the consolidation of a national system of railroads, the introduction of science and technology to everyday life, and the ideological struggle between the tenants of natural history and creationism. A search on evolution directs the reader to the Autobiography of Joseph Le Conte, an eminent scientist, travel writer, and natural historian.