White Paper Report Report ID: 100891 Application Number: HD5108310 Project Director: Edward Ayers (eayers@richmond.edu) Institution: University of Richmond Reporting Period: 9/1/2010-2/29/2012 Report Due: 5/31/2012 Date Submitted: 6/7/2012       Landscapes  of  the  American  Past:  Visualizing  Emancipation     White  Paper   Submitted  to  the     National  Endowment  for  the  Humanities   Office  of  Digital  Humanities     Scott  Nesbit  and  Edward  L.  Ayers     June  2012                 The  spatial  turn  in  the  humanities  has  coincided  with  increasingly  accessible  tools   for  cartography  and  the  powerful  emergence  of  desktop  GIS  computing.    Landscapes   of  the  American  Past:  Visualizing  Emancipation  is  a  prototype  study  in  the   possibilities  for  creating  richly  interactive,  broadly  accessible  digital  projects  that   both  reflect  current  scholarly  understandings  of  large,  complex  processes  and   provide  tools  to  interrogate  those  understandings.    The  resulting  project,   “Visualizing  Emancipation,”  depends  upon  innovative  use  of  earlier  digital   scholarship  and  digitized  texts  and  offers  a  compelling  model  for  undergraduate   research  in  the  humanities.         “Visualizing  Emancipation”  is  the  first  map  of  the  most  dramatic  social   transformation  in  American  history,  the  freedom  of  four  million  slaves  in  the  Civil   War.    In  mapping  this  social  transformation,  it  takes  a  new  perspective  on  a   significant  scholarly  question:  where,  when,  and  under  what  conditions  did  slavery   fall  apart?    It  brings  together  three  kinds  of  evidence  to  answer  this  question,   evidence  showing  where  slavery  was  protected  by  the  US  government  and  where  it   was  not  during  the  Civil  War;  showing  the  approximate  locations  of  U.S.  troops   during  that  war;  and  showing  “emancipation  events,”  documented  instances  where   the  lives  of  enslaved  men  and  women  were  changing,  sometimes  for  good,   sometimes  for  ill,  during  the  war.    By  exposing  the  evidence  on  which  it  draws,  it   allows  students  and  the  public  to  access  the  sources  to  ask  their  own  questions   about  emancipation  and  find  out  how  their  own  locales  and  ancestors  might  have   experienced  the  end  of  slavery.    It  allows  scholars  to  ask  new  questions  about   where,  when,  and  how  enslaved  men  and  women  escaped  bondage,  and  what  their   lives  may  have  looked  like  when  they  did  so.       Interpretation   Like  other  maps,  “Visualizing  Emancipation”  is  both  a  tool  for  interpretation  and  an   image  that  makes  its  own  point:  the  end  of  slavery  did  not  come  about  in  an  instant,   with  the  Emancipation  Proclamation.    It  began  before  shooting  started  and  ended   long  after  the  last  Confederate  armies  surrendered.    It  followed,  in  W.E.B.  DuBois’   words,  as  a  “dark  human  cloud  that  clung  like  remorse”  on  the  rear  of  the  Union’s   swift-­‐marching  columns.1  As  we  indicated  in  “Seeing  Emancipation:  Scale  and   Freedom  in  the  American  South,”  the  first  essay  to  be  published  in  the  award-­‐                                                                                                                 1  W.  E.  B.  Dubois,  The  Souls  of  Black  Folk,  ed.  Henry  Louis  Gates,  Jr.  (1903;  New  York:   Oxford  University  Press,  2007),  11.   winning  Journal  of  the  Civil  War  Era,  emancipation  could  be  found  in  the  interaction   between  men  and  women  operating  at  multiple  scales  of  action.    It  could  be  found  in   the  escape  of  fugitives,  in  Union  and  Confederate  armies’  conscription  of  enslaved   men  to  work  on  fortifications,  and  in  escaped  slaves’  offers  to  guide  U.S.  troops   through  southern  wilds.2         Opportunities  for  freedom  could  at  times  seem  randomly  distributed,  as  men  and   women  participated  in  mass  exodus  on  some  plantations  while  others  nearby  were   left  enslaved.    Yet  emancipation  proceeded  in  patterns,  not  as  a  chaotic,  secular   rapture,  in  which  men  and  women  became  free  without  discernible  sequence,   rationale,  or  order.    Enslaved  people,  legislators,  and  armies,  in  fits  and  starts,   imprinted  the  end  of  slavery  on  the  American  South.         Patterns     Enslaved  men  and  women  found  release  from  their  bonds  in  waves,  rising  and   falling  with  the  campaign  seasons,  the  fortunes  of  Union  arms  and  the  pitiful   defenses  of  contraband  camps.    Unlike  the  legal  extension  of  freedom,  which   gathered  momentum  through  acts,  proclamations,  and  amendments,  enslaved  men   and  women  did  not  experience  emancipation  as  a  process  building  on  past  success,   pointing  toward  a  future  without  bondage.    As  often  as  liberation  was  welcomed   with  exhilaration,  men,  women,  and  children  also  experienced  war  and  freedom  as                                                                                                                   2  Edward  L.  Ayers  and  Scott  Nesbit,  “Seeing  Emancipation:  Scale  and  Freedom  in  the   dangerous  flight  and  backbreaking  labor,  marked  often  by  hunger,  violence,  and   distrust  of  the  liberating  army.       Enslaved  men  and  women  were  more  likely  to  find  freedom  in  some  places  than   others.    Freedom  and  Union  arms  pushed  into  the  Confederacy  by  water  and  rail.     Enslaved  men  and  women  living  along  the  Atlantic  seaboard—the  coast  and  Sea   Islands  of  South  Carolina,  within  a  day’s  walk  of  the  North  Carolina  coast,  and  along   Virginia’s  Chesapeake  Bay—had  the  greatest  and  earliest  opportunities  to  find   freedom.    Enslaved  men  and  women  living  along  the  South’s  major  rivers  had  a   greater  chance,  too,  especially  those  on  the  plantations  of  the  Mississippi  delta,   along  the  Tennessee  River  in  northern  Alabama,  and  along  Virginia  tidewater’s   Potomac,  Rappahannock,  and  James  Rivers.         Those  living  or  working  along  the  South’s  10,000  miles  of  railroads  were  also  more   likely  to  find  freedom.3    Confederate  civilians  along  the  line  between  Corinth,   Mississippi,  and  Decatur,  Alabama,  complained  to  their  government  at  the  close  of   1862  that  in  the  past  year  their  enslaved  workers  “had  been  carried  off  in  very  large   numbers,  declared  free,  and  refused  the  liberty  of  returning  to  their  owners.”4     Union  officers  had  “pressed  all  the  negroes  in  this  country”  around  the  Nashville-­‐                                                                                                                 3  William  G.  Thomas,  The  Iron  Way:  Railroads,  the  Civil  War,  and  the  Making  of   Modern  America  (New  Haven:  Yale  University  Press,  2011),  27   4  Civilians,  “To  the  Hon.  Secretary  of  War  of  the  Confederate  States  of  America,”   Florence,  AL,  January  6,  1863,  Official  Records  (hereafter  OR)  I.20.ii,  442-­‐3,   http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/#event/25652.   Decatur  line  by  the  end  of  1863.5  Before  he  followed  the  rails  through  Georgia,  Gen.   William  T.  Sherman  moved  his  troops  along  the  Jackson-­‐Meridian  line  in  Mississippi   with  a  train  of  refugee  families  extending  as  far  as  the  column  itself,  or  in  Sherman’s   turn  of  phrase,  “10  miles  of  negroes.”6    Some  ran  to  U.S.  lines  of  their  own  accord,   others  were  dragged  without  their  assent.    Once  under  Union  protection,  men  and   women  found  themselves  in  a  legal  state  of  freedom,  yet  with  immediate  constraints   no  less  coercive  than  those  they  experienced  under  slavery,  as  they  were  put   immediately  to  work  cooking,  digging,  farming,  or  marching  to  war.     Emancipation  was  made  of  much  more  than  the  rush  of  enslaved  people  to  Union   lines.  Visualizing  Emancipation  breaks  the  actions  and  experiences  of  enslaved  men   and  women  into  what  we  have  called  emancipation  event  types,  each  carrying  a   pattern  distinct  from  but  related  to  the  others.    We  were  particularly  interested  in   the  experiences  that  marked  the  end  of  slavery.    Both  armies  conscripted  men  and   women  into  service,  pulling  them  away  from  their  homes  and  the  forms  of  slavery   they  had  known  before.    People  of  color  took  part  in  irregular  fighting,  raiding   plantations  while  not  enlisted  in  any  military  unit.    They  passed  intelligence  to  the   United  States  army  and  served  as  guides  to  troops.    African  Americans  also  suffered   abuse,  were  rushed  away  from  oncoming  Union  soldiers  so  that  their  owners  might   protect  their  human  property,  and  were  at  times  re-­‐enslaved  once  they  had  escaped   slaveowners’  control.                                                                                                                       5  Granville  M.  Dodge  to  Ulysses  S.  Grant,  Pulaski,  TN,  December  9,  1863,  OR  I.31.iii,   366,  http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/#event/26307.     6  William  T.  Sherman  to  H.  W.  Halleck,  Meridian,  MS,  February  29,  1864,  OR  I.32.ii,   498-­‐499,  http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/#event/25636.       Security   The  patterns  made  by  a  few  of  these  kinds  of  events  suggest  how  emancipation   begins  to  look  differently  once  mapped  in  time  and  space,  and  broken  apart  by  the   different  experiences  black  southerners  encountered.    Our  research  into  the  Official   Records  of  the  War  of  the  Rebellion  shows  that  African  Americans  were  victims  of   war-­‐related  abuse  more  frequently  once  black  men  began  fighting  for  the  United   States.    Accounts  of  the  abuse  of  men  enlisted  in  the  U.S.  Colored  Troops,  including   the  atrocities  at  Fort  Pillow  are  well  known.  Attacks  against  non-­‐uniformed  black   southerners  also  rose  after  1862.  Occasionally  this  abuse  came  at  the  hands  of   undisciplined  U.S.  soldiers,  such  as  those  commanded  by  William  Dwight  who  raped   the  enslaved  women  they  found  at  New  Iberia,  Louisiana  four  months  after  the   Emancipation  Proclamation  went  into  effect.7    More  often  abuse  came  at  the  hands   of  Confederates,  who  killed  unarmed  men  and  women  at  Goodrich’s  Landing,   Mississippi,  on  Hutchinson’s  Island,  South  Carolina,  Helena,  Arkansas,  and  a  large   number  of  other  places  dispersed  throughout  the  South.    Violence  against  African   Americans  composed  a  greater  part  of  the  war  effort  in  the  west  than  the  east.     Attacking  black  men  and  women  was  a  regular  part  of  bushwhackers’  attempts  to   control  Missouri,  and  violence  against  women  and  children  who  worked  U.S.  owned   plantations  along  the  Mississippi  were  at  constant  risk  of  attack  by  small,  marauding   units  of  Confederates.                                                                                                                   7  William  Dwight,  Jr.  to  Richard  B.  Irwin,  Washington,  LA,  April  27,  1863,  OR  I.15.i,   373,  http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/#event/24699.     Freedom  was  more  secure  in  the  eastern  theater  of  war,  particularly  in  Virginia  and   North  Carolina,  than  those  in  the  West,  but  more  dangerous  to  achieve.    In  Virginia,   escaping  slavery  itself  was  an  incredibly  dangerous  business  because  of  the  highly   mobile  and  numerous  Confederate  units  operating  throughout  the  state.    The   likelihood  that  an  enslaved  man  or  woman  would  be  caught  while  attempting  to  get   to  Union  lines  was  great,  even  if  they  were  accompanying  a  U.S.  unit.    Confederate   troops  were  eager  to  attack  smaller  commands  that  had  moved  in  advance  of  the   main  body  of  U.S.  troops.  They  captured  hundreds  of  escaped  slaves  after  halting   Brig.  Gens.  James  Wilson’s  and  August  Kautz’s  raid  along  the  Danville  Railroad  in   June  1864.8         Yet  once  behind  Union  lines  in  a  refugee  camp,  fugitives  from  slavery  were  relatively   safe.    Few  raiding  parties  penetrated  Union  lines  to  seize  black  southerners  living   around  Fortress  Monroe  in  Virginia  or  in  New  Bern,  North  Carolina.    The  tens  of   thousands  of  African  Americans  who  left  their  farms  in  the  tidewater  regions  of   Virginia  and  North  Carolina  were  secure  in  their  freedom  after  the  Emancipation   Proclamation.    Refugee  camps  and  U.S.  owned  plantations  along  the  Mississippi   River  did  not  share  the  natural  geographic  advantages  of  the  Atlantic  seaboard.     These  farms  and  villages  were  often  lightly  guarded  and  suffered  frequent  raids,   some  of  which  re-­‐enslaved  hundreds  of  men  and  women.                                                                                                                       8  “Reports  from  Petersburg,”  Richmond  Daily  Dispatch,  July  1,  1864,   http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/#event/26053.   Scale   The  events  we  gathered,  detailing  where  and  when  men  and  women  became  free,   should  be  viewed  together  at  multiple  scales.    From  the  widest  vantage-­‐point,  we   can  discover  differences  at  the  level  of  the  region,  distinguishing  between  the  likely   experience  of  men  and  women  in  the  East  from  those  in  the  West.    Examinations  of   differences  at  the  local  level  require  different  vantage  points  and  data  with  greater   specificity.    Each  emancipation  event  is  encoded  with  a  geographic  precision  level,   which  appears  as  a  halo  around  events.    We  surround  events  about  which  we  lack   great  geographic  precision  with  large  halos,  warning  against  misinterpretation.     Events  about  whose  location  we  have  very  specific  knowledge  do  not  receive  these   marks,  and  can  be  used  for  detailed,  local-­‐level  analysis.     For  example,  it  is  clear  that,  from  the  widest  vantage  point,  enslaved  men  and   women  ran  away  in  greater  numbers  when  United  States  army  units  came  near.    In   many  cases,  this  was  because  these  units  visited  southern  farms  and  either  invited   or  forced  enslaved  men  and  women  to  leave  with  them.    Our  research  suggests  more   complicated  dynamics  at  work  as  well.    When  U.S.  units  led  by  Maj.  Gen.  David   Hunter  entered  Augusta  County,  Virginia,  in  June  1864,  they  created  new   opportunities  for  enslaved  men  and  women  there.    Twenty  enslaved  men  and   women  working  at  the  Central  Asylum  in  Staunton  left  with  the  Union  troops.     Confederates  stationed  nearby  reported  the  next  day  that  the  “Yankees”  were   “capturing  negroes,”  and  were  intent  on  burning  the  railroad  bridge  at  the  cusp  of   the  Blue  Ridge  Mountains.9     Not  all  those  who  left  their  owners,  however,  went  with  Hunter’s  troops.    Some  took   advantage  of  the  disruption  created  by  U.S.  forces  in  the  area  to  leave  the  area  for   their  own  purposes.    Shortly  after  U.S.  troops  came  through,  a  man  named  Jack  left   the  plantation  on  which  he  was  held.    His  owner  guessed  that  the  enslaved  worker   was  headed,  not  to  the  Southwest  with  the  Union  forces  but  east,  toward  his  family’s   home  in  Petersburg.10    The  patterns  that  we  see  turn  out  often  to  have  complex   backstories.    Enslaved  men  and  women  used  armies  to  find  freedom  and  each  other.       Evidence     The  patterns  that  emerge  from  “Visualizing  Emancipation”  are  complex,  operating  at   multiple  scales  and  revealing  the  violence  that  attended  freedom  and  the   connections  tying  widely  disparate  actions.    Gathering  and  encoding  the  evidence   upon  which  this  project  rests  likewise  required  attention  to  patterns  and  potential   linkages  between  disparate  sources  and  depended  upon  robust  collections  of   digitized  sources  and  the  interpretive  abilities  of  undergraduates,  given  a  controlled   research  environment.                                                                                                                     9  Staunton  Republican  Vindicator,  July  15,  1864,  Valley  of  the  Shadow;  Francis  T.   Nichols  to  John  C.  Breckinridge,  Lynchburg,  Virginia,  June  11,  1864,  OR  I.37.i,  757-­‐ 758,  http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/#event/27879.       10  Staunton  Republican  Vindicator,  July  8,  1864,  Valley  of  the  Shadow.   Mapping  the  movement  of  United  States  troops  required  algorithmic  manipulation   of  previously  digitized  texts.    When  we  began  the  project,  we  intended  to  map  the   movements  of  United  States  armies  using  the  Official  Records  of  the  War  of  the   Rebellion  at  the  level  of  the  army  and  army  group.    It  quickly  became  apparent  that   this  task  was  at  once  too  large  and  too  small,  too  large  because  even  acquiring  this   level  of  detail  from  the  collected  reports  was  far  too  ambitious  and  too  small   because  this  level  of  detail  would  not  enable  us  to  capture  the  movements  of  smaller   units  that  moved  throughout  the  American  South.    When  it  became  clear  that   mapping  the  units  from  the  Official  Records  was  impracticable,  we  began  looking  for   other  ways  of  finding  the  places  Civil  War  armies  moved.    One  source,  Frederick   Dyer’s  Compendium  of  the  War  of  the  Rebellion,  contained  this  information,  though  it   was  published  one  hundred  years  ago.    Fortunately,  we  discovered  that  Dyer’s   Compendium  was  among  the  sources  that  researchers  at  the  Tufts  University   Perseus  Digital  Library  had  recently  digitized  and  deeply  marked  up  according  to   the  Text  Encoding  Initiative  standards.    Perseus  researchers  had  tagged  Dyer’s   Compendium  with  structured  xml  data,  indicating  the  names  of  regiments,  places,   and  dates  mentioned  in  the  text.         Dyer  had  written  his  text  as  a  sequential  list  of  actions  taken  by  Union  regiments  in   a  highly  structured  fashion.    Because  he  had  structured  the  text  sequentially,  we   were  able  to  develop  relatively  straightforward  algorithms  that  associated  the   places  he  mentioned  with  the  appropriate  dates.    We  then  worked  with  University  of   Richmond  undergraduates  to  clean  the  resulting  dataset  of  obvious  errors.    The   result  is  the  most  robust  map  to  date  of  Union  army  movements,  a  dataset  including   more  than  forty  thousand  individual  unit  location/date  pairs  (for  more  on  this   dataset,  see  Appendix  I).     “Visualizing  Emancipation”  depends  on  the  generosity  and  excellence  of  an  earlier   generation  of  digital  humanities  projects.    We  would  not  have  been  able  to  build  a   map  of  Union  army  movements  in  the  limited  scope  of  a  Digital  Start-­‐Up  grant   without  prior  digitization  efforts  and  experiments  in  automated,  deep  encoding  of   texts  by  the  Perseus  Digital  Library.    The  emancipation  events  that  form  the  core  of   our  project’s  dataset  likewise  relies  on  exemplary,  freely  accessible  archival  projects   in  the  digital  humanities  published  within  the  last  two  decades,  particularly  the   University  of  Virginia’s  Valley  of  the  Shadow,  Cornell  University  Library’s  Making  of   America,  and  the  University  of  Richmond’s  own  Daily  Dispatch  archive.    Making  use   of  these  sources  in  order  to  harvest  and  encode  emancipation  events  required  a   variety  of  methods  and  enabled  us  to  think  purposefully  about  the  role  of   undergraduates  in  humanities  research.     Finding  and  encoding  emancipation  events  required  much  more  nuance  than  we   could  achieve  using  algorithms  alone.    It  instead  required  a  recursive,  careful   weighing  of  evidence  and  refinement  of  our  hypotheses  about  what  emancipation   looked  like  in  the  Civil  War.  While  we  knew  that  finding  evidence  of  men  and   women  becoming  free  would  be  a  complicated  task,  we  did  not  anticipate  the   difficulty  we  had  in  judging  who  was  becoming  free  and  who  was  not  during  the   war.    We  quickly  decided  that  we  would  look  for  a  much  more  general  set  of  events;   we  asked  students  to  look  for  any  document  in  which  slavery  was  changing,  or  any   evidence  of  African  Americans  acting  (outside  their  normal  course  of  duty  as   members  of  the  United  States  Colored  Troops).    While  giving  this  broad  directive,   we  asked  students  to  describe  what  they  found.    After  a  few  months  of  describing   these  emancipation  events  without  a  controlled  vocabulary,  we  began  refining  the   ways  that  we  discussed  emancipation  events,  combining  some  categories  with  large   overlap,  eliminating  others  that  seemed  too  vague.    Together  with  our  student-­‐ researchers,  we  decided  on  nine  emancipation  event  types  that  described  much  of   what  we  found  in  the  Official  Records  and  other  sources.    We  describe  these  event   types  in  Appendix  II.     Expanding  Research  Opportunities     While  we  anticipate  that  the  results  of  this  research  will  be  significant,  we  believe   that  the  model  of  undergraduate  research  we  pursued  brings  just  as  important   ramifications  for  undergraduate  education  in  the  humanities.    Humanists  have  often   labored  under  the  assumption  that  undergraduates  are  not  able  to  do  the  kinds  of   careful  work  required  for  effective  research  in  the  humanities.    Our  experience  with   this  project  leads  us  to  believe  that,  given  proper  controls  and  guidance,   undergraduates  can  be  effective  researchers  in  large-­‐scale  humanities  projects.         We  made  two  decisions  that  we  believe  were  essential  for  coordinating   undergraduate  researchers.    First,  we  created  opportunities  for  controlled,   interpretive  decisions  that  did  not  rely  on  large  bodies  of  contextual  knowledge.    By   asking  students  to  describe  in  a  few  words  the  actions  they  found  within  the   documents,  we  enabled  them  to  practice  historical  interpretation  on  a  very  modest   scale.    By  recursively  moving  from  the  texts  they  studied  to  their  determinations  of   emancipation  event  types,  they  did  historical  work  manageable  for  many   undergraduate  students.    Second,  we  offered  students  assignments  that  could  yield   interpretive  insight  at  multiple  scales.    Undergraduates  could  find  patterns  within   their  own  documents  simply  by  examining  a  season  of  the  American  Civil  War  in  a   single  place  using  one  source.    Their  contribution  to  the  larger  project  had  its  own   coherence  as  a  research  agenda,  over  which  they  could  rightly  claim  deep   knowledge  and  on  which  they  might  write  their  own  interpretations.         Organizing  our  research  as  an  extensible  project,  amenable  to  the  contributions  of   undergraduate  researchers,  has  also  enabled  us  to  open  the  project  beyond  its  initial   creators  at  the  University  of  Richmond,  to  the  public  and  undergraduates  involved   in  coursework  at  other  institutions.    Azavea,  a  geospatial  development  firm  in   Philadelphia,  proved  to  be  an  excellent  partner  in  developing  the  project’s  user   interface.    Developers  at  Azavea  built  a  crowdsourcing  system  for  “Visualizing   Emancipation,”  by  which  registered  users  of  the  project  from  anywhere  in  the  world   might  submit  emancipation  events  to  be  approved  by  scholars  at  the  Digital   Scholarship  Lab  and  published  on  our  map.  Members  of  the  public  have  begun   contributing  their  own  emancipation  events  to  the  project.    They  have  drawn  on   sources  available  online  and  in  archives  across  the  country  as  they  ensure  that  the   places  they  know  intimately  are  properly  represented  on  a  map  of  the  end  of   slavery.       Since  we  believe  that  “Visualizing  Emancipation”  offers  a  model  for  undergraduate   research,  we  have  encouraged  instructors  at  other  universities,  colleges,  and   advanced  undergraduate  classes  to  organize  research  assignments  around  the  site.     We  look  forward  to  partnering  with  classes  to  upload  emancipation  events  based  on   local,  archival  newspaper  sources  and  those  held  by  the  Library  of  Congress  as  part   of  its  Chronicling  America  newspaper  digitization  project  beginning  in  Fall  2012.     Instructors  teaching  a  wide  range  of  courses,  from  graduate  research  seminars  to   American  History  survey  and  Advanced  Placement  U.S.  History  courses,  have   expressed  interest  in  contributing  to  “Visualizing  Emancipation”  in  this  way.     We  wholeheartedly  encourage  efforts  such  as  these  that  combine  face-­‐to-­‐face   classroom  instruction  with  digital  tools  and  materials.    We  have  been  interested  in   such  challenges  for  a  number  of  years,  starting  with  the  History  Engine,  which  we   created  at  the  University  of  Virginia  in  2005  and  which  is  now  hosted  and  directed   by  the  Digital  Scholarship  Lab.    Asynchronous  collaborations  such  as  these   encourage  early  on  the  practices  of  history  that  we  find  most  compelling:  research   in  primary  sources,  the  careful  weighing  of  evidence,  and  the  crafting  of  narratives   based  on  research  in  primary  source  materials.    By  adding  to  ongoing,  large-­‐scale   datasets,  these  collaborations  among  strangers  bring  to  light  new  sources  for  the   public  and  scholars  alike.       “Visualizing  Emancipation”  is  an  ongoing  research  project-­‐-­‐necessarily  incomplete,   since  it  invites  the  contributions  of  the  public  and  classrooms  across  the  country.     We  have  also  begun  thinking  about  the  ways  in  which  “Visualizing  Emancipation”   might  be  extended  beyond  public  contributions  to  its  dataset.    Extending  the   usefulness  of  databases  and  collaborative  projects  such  as  “Visualizing   Emancipation”  remains  an  opportunity.         As  the  project  grows,  we  expect  to  add  functionality  in  two  areas.    In  order  to  share   data  more  effectively,  it  is  important  that  we  build  a  tool  that  will  allow  for   download  of  the  latest  version  of  our  data.    As  we  build  a  data  download  tool,  we   will  also  continue  to  clean  our  dataset  and  refine  our  metadata  descriptions,  so  that   our  data  will  be  of  use  to  others.  These  modifications  will  make  use  of  our  strict   division  of  data  from  the  visualizations  that  rely  on  those  data,  enabling  us  the   flexibility  to  adapt  our  project  as  visualization  technology  changes  in  the  future.         Extending  the  usefulness  of  the  project  will  also  involve  analyzing  the  effectiveness   of  the  current  user  interface.    We  believe  that  the  simple  message  to  be  taken  away   from  “Visualizing  Emancipation”—that  the  end  of  slavery  occurred  not  simply   through  fiat  in  Washington  D.C.,  but  through  the  actions  of  individuals  throughout   the  American  South—is  best  learned  through  exploratory  interaction  with  primary   sources.    In  order  to  make  this  exploratory  environment  accessible  to  teachers  and   students,  we  have  begun  developing  lesson  plans  and  learning  modules  to  facilitate   use  of  the  project  in  classrooms  at  the  middle  and  high  school  levels.    These  will   modules  will  include  video  tutorials  introducing  the  project,  its  interface,  and  a   number  of  narrative  threads,  pointing  out  to  visitors  some  of  the  patterns  in  our   large  and  growing  database.     “Visualizing  Emancipation”  aims  to  organize  the  sources  for  the  study  of  the  end  of   slavery  in  time  and  space  for  a  broad  audience.    The  fundamental  patterns  of   emancipation  were  geographic,  as  soldiers  and  slaves  moved  about  the  war-­‐torn   South.    Their  interactions  followed  recognizable  patterns,  along  rails  and  riverbeds,   up  coastlines  and  at  strategic  junctions  across  the  South.    We  provide  a  platform  for   thinking  about  these  patterns  and  for  encouraging  other  scholars,  teachers,  and   students  to  understand  the  end  of  slavery  in  increasingly  sophisticated  ways,   fulfilling  our  ongoing  goal  of  creating  technically  innovative,  engaging,  scholarly   applications  for  the  public  good.                                       Appendices           Appendix  I:    Union  Army  Regiment  Locations     “Visualizing  Emancipation”  for  the  first  time  plots  the  locations  of  regiments  in  the   United  States  army.    These  locations  should  be  regarded  as  approximations  subject   to  a  number  of  caveats.     Our  information  on  the  location  of  U.S.  regiments  comes  from  the  careful  cataloging   of  Frederick  H.  Dyer,  a  former  drummer  boy  in  the  United  States  Army  who  went  on   to  compile  the  Compendium  of  the  War  of  the  Rebellion  (1908).    The  Compendium   supplies  a  nearly  complete  list  of  Union  regiments  during  the  Civil  War  along  with   detailed  descriptions  of  those  units’  movements  over  the  course  of  the  war.    The   Perseus  Digital  Library  at  Tufts  University  digitized  this  text,  creating  approximately   3500  files,  one  for  each  regiment,  encoded  according  to  the  standards  established  by   the  Text  Encoding  Initiative  (TEI).    Scholars  at  Perseus  used  algorithms  to  recognize   the  places  and  dates  mentioned  in  Dyer’s  text.       Scholars  at  the  Digital  Scholarship  Lab  transformed  these  files  into  a  format  that   mapping  applications,  such  as  Google  Earth,  can  read.    We  paired  the  places  and   dates  that  Perseus  identified  in  the  Compendium,  then  went  about  checking  for   errors.         We  are  aware  that  errors,  unfortunately,  remain  in  this  dataset.    These  arise  from  a   few  different  sources.    Frederick  Dyer’s  Compendium  is  quite  reliable,  yet  even   more  detailed  and  thoroughly  researched  sources  exist  for  tracking  U.S.  Civil  War   military  units,  particularly  the  Supplement  to  the  Official  Records  of  the  War  of  the   Rebellion.    Some  errors  were  introduced  into  Dyer’s  text  through  digitization,  and   more  errors  appeared  during  the  process  of  identifying  place-­‐names;  some   historical  places  are  not  listed  in  even  the  best  modern  gazetteers,  while  other   places  remained  ambiguous  to  the  computational  models  because  they  are  shared   by  multiple  locations.  The  Digital  Scholarship  Lab  introduced  further  errors  in   computationally  pairing  dates  and  locations.    While  we  have  caught  hundreds  of   errors,  we  know  that  many  others  still  remain  to  be  corrected.    We  are  currently   looking  for  ways  to  correct  remaining  errors  in  the  armies  dataset.         Appendix  II:  Emancipation  Event  Types     The  end  of  slavery  in  the  United  States  was  a  complex  process  that  occurred   simultaneously  in  courtrooms  and  plantations,  on  battlefields  and  city  streets.    It   involved  a  wide  variety  of  human  interactions,  many  of  which  we  represent  in  this   map  as  emancipation  events.    We  have  identified  ten  distinct  but  interrelated  kinds   of  events:     a.  African  Americans  Helping  the  Union       Over  the  course  of  the  Civil  War,  African  Americans  helped  Union  troops  in  a  variety   of  ways.    This  event  type  tags  those  places  where  former  slaves  aided  troops  in   informal  capacities,  usually  outside  their  conscription  as  laborers  on  plantations,  as   soldiers,  or  as  cooks  in  military  camps.    We  have  especially  used  this  tag  to  note   where  people  of  color  gave  information  to  U.S.  forces  or  served  as  guides  for  troops   navigating  the  southern  terrain.  They  did  so  throughout  the  South,  unevenly  over   the  course  of  the  war.  Isaac  I.  Stevens  found  enslaved  men  of  great  help  during  his   navigation  of  the  Sea  Islands.    Near  Coosaw  Island  he  found  Cyas,  who,  he  wrote,   “subsequently  proved  of  great  service  from  the  intimate  knowledge  he  possessed  of   the  country.”  (OR  I.6.i,  91-­‐92)     b.  Abuse  of  African  Americans       Emancipation  caused  chaos  on  the  land,  and  African  Americans  bore  the  brunt  of   this  disruption.  This  category  indicates  places  where  whites  in  either  the  Union  or   the  Confederacy  abused  people  of  color  during  the  war.  Documents  tagged  under   this  event  include  incidents  of  murder,  discriminatory  pay,  beatings,  and  starvation.     Perhaps  the  most  infamous  of  these  were  the  events  at  Fort  Pillow.  Brig.  Gen.  M.   Brayman  wrote  to  his  superiors,  describing  the  events  there:  “Fort  Pillow  was  taken   by  storm  at  3p.m.  on  the  12th,  with  six  guns.    The  negroes,  about  300,  murdered,   after  surrendering  with  their  officers.  Of  the  200  white  men,  57  have  just  arrived,   and  sent  to  Mound  City;  about  100  are  prisoners,  and  the  rest  killed.    The  whole   affair  was  a  scene  of  murder.”  (OR  I.32.ii,  361)       c.  Orders  or  regulations     Emancipation  came  about  not  only  through  the  initiative  of  enslaved  people  or  the   actions  of  individual  soldiers,  but  through  official  orders,  policies,  and  regulations.     Events  tagged  within  this  category  were  policy  changes  directly  affecting  the  slave   regime  issued  the  Union  and  Confederate  governments.  Among  other  events,  these   include  orders  declaring  enslaved  men  and  women  in  a  territory  free,  orders   requiring  commanders  to  send  enslaved  men  and  women  to  the  quartermaster,  and   Confederate  responses  to  emancipation  and  the  enlistment  of  black  troops.  In   Louisiana,  for  example,  Confederate  authorities  struggled  with  the  best  approach  to   captured  African  American  troops.    While  they  saw  the  benefits  of  taking  a  hard  line   against  black  troops  by  enslaving  them,  they  worried  that  such  a  policy  could   backfire.  The  Assistant  Adjutant  General  in  Confederate  Louisiana  in  1864,  Charles   Le  D.  Elgee,  proposed  treating  US  Colored  Troop  soldiers  “with  all  proper  leniency,”   as  prisoners  of  war  in  order  not  to  dissuade  dissatisfied  black  troops  from  deserting   the  enemy.  (OR  I.34.ii,  953-­‐54).       d.  Conscription  and  Recruitment,  Union     These  events  detail  the  marshaling  of  enslaved  men  and  women  in  the  fight  against   the  Confederacy.  Included  in  this  category  are  the  drafting  of  contraband  men  and   women  to  work  in  military  camps,  fortifications,  as  soldiers,  or  as  servants  in   various  capacities.  In  some  places,  this  was  a  systematic  effort  to  draw  upon  black   labor  to  the  greatest  possible  degree.  By  July  1863,  Gen.  Nathaniel  Banks  reported   from  Louisiana  that  “every  negro  within  the  present  lines  of  this  department,  or   within  reach  of  them,  without  distinction  of  age,  sex,  or  condition,  is  in  the  service  of   the  Government,  either  in  the  army  or  in  producing  food  for  the  army  and  its   dependents.”  (OR  I.26.i,  573)       e.  Conscription,  Confederate     The  Confederacy  depended  upon  slave  labor  on  plantations  to  provide  food  and  the   normal  operations  of  its  slave  society,  and  near  the  front  lines  in  direct  service  to   the  government.  These  events  describe  the  ways  that  Confederates  were  able  to  use   African  American  labor  for  their  war  effort.    It  includes  orders  and  reports  of   impressment  of  slaves  for  use  in  building  fortifications,  railroads,  and  other  efforts   while  bypassing  most  mentions  of  African  Americans  working  as  on  privately  held   farms.  Confederate  conscription  began  early  in  the  war.  In  late  July,  1861,  Gen.  John   B.  Magruder  ordered  that  half  the  male  slaves  and  all  free  men  of  color  in   Gloucester,  Middlesex,  and  Matthews  Counties  muster  “to  finish  the  works  around   Gloucester  Point.    Magruder  promised  recompense  to  the  slaveowners:  “fifty  cents  a   day  and  a  ration  for  each  negro  man  during  the  time  he  is  at  work.”    (OR  I.2.i,  1007)   Magruder  sent  agents  into  the  county  to  enforce  the  order.     f.  Irregular  fighting     This  event  category  documents  African  Americans’  involvement  in  irregular  fighting   and  appropriation  of  property  that  accompanied  the  Civil  War,  either  as  willing   participants  or  as  victims.    Within  this  category  we  have  collected  incidents   involving  African  Americans  taking  or  destroying  property  claimed  by  landowners,   enslaved  men  and  women  killing  white  civilians  or  military  personnel,  and  instances   where  people  of  color  were  the  objects  of  irregular  fighting  or  pillaging.         Included  among  these  events  are  the  regrets  of  Maj.  Gen.  Samuel  R.  Curtis  in  a  letter   to  Colonel  N.  P.  Chipman  in  Helena,  Arkansas  the  day  after  the  emancipation   proclamation  went  into  effect.  “I  am  sorry  indeed,”  Curtis  wrote,  “to  hear  of  the  loss   of  Mrs.  Craig’s  house  by  burning.”    Curtis  wrote  of  their  wealthy  mutual   acquaintance  in  a  mournful  tone.  Alas,  this  is  war;  although  it  was  the  negroes  who   did  it,  still,  it  is  the  result  of  war.”  (Samuel  R.  Curtis  to  N.  P.  Chipman,  St.  Louis,  MO,   January  2,  1863,  OR  I.22,  10-­‐11.)       g.  Capture/enslavement/re-­‐enslavement  of  African  Americans  by  Confederates   Confederate  troops  and  civilians  made  concerted  efforts  to  re-­‐enslave  African   Americans  who  had  escaped  their  control  during  the  war  and  to  enslave  free  blacks   who  lived  in  northern  states.    This  effort  included  counterattacks  and  ambushes  on   smaller  Union  regiments  travelling  with  people  of  color,  raids  on  contraband  camps   along  the  Mississippi  and  Atlantic  seaboard,  and  dragnets  at  the  edges  of   Confederate-­‐held  territory  watching  for  the  escape  of  African  Americans  from  the   southern  interior.     During  Confederate  General  Sterling  Price’s  series  of  attacks  in  Missouri  in  the   autumn  of  1864,  for  example,  a  Confederate  scouting  party  ran  into  a  train  of   wagons  manned  by  a  small  number  of  federal  troops.    Brig.  Gen.  John  Shelby   reported  the  results.    They  “captured  25,  2  caissons,  20  artillery  horses  with   harness,  100  negroes,  and  30  prisoners,  besides  killing  and  wounding  a  large   portion  of  the  guard.”  (OR  I.41.iii,  978)  Confederate  attacks  on  African  Americans   such  as  this  one  appear  throughout  the  U.S.  South.     h.  Fugitive  Slaves/Runaways   Men  and  women  ran  from  slavery  to  Union  lines  before  any  major  battles  had  been   fought.    Events  tagged  as  “Fugitive  Slaves/Runaways”  are  instances  where  enslaved   people  ran  away  from  their  owners  or  turned  up  before  Union  units  seeking   protection.    Many  of  these  events  are  taken  from  newspaper  advertisements  seeking   the  return  of  escaped  slaves.    Typical  is  John  Werth’s  complaint  to  the  Richmond   Daily  Dispatch,  promising  a  fifty  dollar  reward  “for  the  apprehension  and  delivery  to   me,  in  Richmond,  of  Jack  Oseen,  a  slave,  who  absconded  last  week  from  the   fortifications  in  Chesterfield  county.  Jack  is  a  black  negro,  about  19  years  of  age,   slightly  built,  good  teeth,  but  rather  far  apart,  has  a  scar  on  the  right  hand,  and   another  on  the  left  wrist;  was  lately  purchased  from  near  Goldsborough,  N.C.”  (“Fifty   Dollars  Reward,”  Richmond  Daily  Dispatch,  April  1,  1863)     i.  Capture  of  African  Americans  by  Union  troops   If  many  African  Americans  eluded  slavery  by  leaving  their  plantations  without   outside  intervention,  others  escaped  through  the  direct  intervention  of  United   States  troops.    In  many  of  these  cases,  military  reports  leave  some  ambiguity  to  the   question  whether  enslaved  men  and  women  had  any  choice  about  leaving  their   property,  neighbors,  and  homes.    We  have  assigned  instances  of  direct  military   intervention  on  plantations  to  this  category,  “Capture  of  African  Americans  by  Union   Troops.”  Brig.  Gen.  Grenville  M.  Dodge  reported  the  results  of  his  unit’s  expedition  in   northern  Alabama  in  just  this  way:  “It  has  rendered  desolate  one  of  the  best   granaries  of  the  South,  preventing  them  from  raising  another  crop  this  year,  and   taking  away  from  them  some  1,500  negroes.”  (OR  I.23.i,  249).       j.  Protecting  slave  property  from  Union  troops   Slave  owners  in  the  border  South  and  Confederate  states  sought  to  protect  their   property  in  human  beings  from  emancipation  in  any  way  they  could.    For   slaveholders  in  the  border  South,  this  often  meant  pressing  soldiers  to  return  the   men  and  women  they  claimed.  In  the  Confederate  states,  especially  after  the   Emancipation  Proclamation,  slave  owners  transported  men,  women,  and  children  to   places  they  hoped  would  be  “safe”  from  Union  troops  and  freedom.  Events  of  this   type  document  the  efforts  of  slave  owners  to  retain  their  property.    Before  his   assault  on  Atlanta,  Gen.  William  T.  Sherman  complained  that  he  was  encountering   very  few  African  Americans  in  northern  Georgia,  “because  their  owners  have  driven   them”  to  the  southwest  corner  of  the  state.  “Negroes  are  as  scarce  in  North  Georgia   as  in  Ohio.    All  are  at  and  below  Macon  and  Columbus,  Ga.”  (OR  I.39.ii,  132)     These  event  types  together  capture  most  of  the  events  we  gathered  in  Visualizing   Emancipation.    Because  these  types  of  events  are  interrelated,  many  events  are   encoded  with  multiple  types.     Undergraduate  researchers  at  the  University  of  Richmond  recorded  and  coded   events  from  a  number  of  different  sources.    They  searched  through  letters,  diaries,   and  newspapers—particularly  newspapers  gathered  in  the  Valley  of  the  Shadow   project  and  in  the  Richmond  Daily  Dispatch.    They  spent  by  far  the  most  time  on  a   full  canvas  of  the  Official  Records  of  the  War  of  the  Rebellion.    In  most  cases,  we   depended  on  the  Making  of  America  project  at  Cornell  University  for  access  to  these   texts,  though  in  some  cases  we  supplemented  this  version  with  the  version  digitized   and  managed  by  e-­‐history  at  Ohio  State  University.         Students  searched  through  this  corpus  for  words  commonly  used  during  the  Civil   War  to  refer  to  African  American  men  and  women  in  the  South:  contraband,  negro,   black,  colored,  slave.    If  the  document  detailed  the  changing  practice  of  slavery  or  its   dissolution,  students  recorded  it  along  with  a  number  of  pieces  of  information  about   that  event,  particularly  its  date,  location,  and  an  event  type.       We  were  not  always  certain  where  an  event  occurred.    Some  events  we  were  sure   occurred  on  a  certain  city  block;  we  had  only  the  vaguest  sense  of  where  others   happened.    Because  of  this  uncertainty,  students  recorded  a  precision  level  for  each   event.    We  represent  this  level  of  uncertainty  as  a  halo  around  the  events:  if  the  map   displays  events  at  a  zoom  level  that  implies  greater  certainty  than  is  warranted,  the   event  is  displayed  with  a  halo  that  grows  larger  with  our  uncertainty  about  that   event.         Undergraduate  students  also  recorded  the  number  of  African  Americans  affected  by   events.    Some  events  describe  the  actions  of  only  one  or  two  enslaved  men  or   women;  others  describe  the  activities  of  thousands.    More  often,  the  sources  give   only  the  vaguest  suggestion  of  the  numbers  of  men  and  women  involved:  there  were   “several,”  “many,”  “masses.”    Because  these  descriptions  are  so  unreliable,  we  do  not   currently  represent  on  the  map  the  number  of  men  or  women  involved  in  an  event.     Each  documented  event  is  represented  with  a  dot  of  the  same  size  and  color.