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U.S. Grant History Chat, Episode 9: Amy Laurel Fluker
Transcript
- Hello there, this is Nick Sacco, Park Ranger at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri. And you're watching episode nine of the U.S. Grant History Chat. And it's my pleasure to be speaking today with Dr. Amy Laurel Fluker, who is a professor of History at Youngstown State University in Ohio. And Dr. Fluker has a brand new book that just hit the market, it's called "Commonwealth of Compromise: Civil War Commemoration in Missouri" So that's right up my wheelhouse and I was really excited to have Dr. Fluker on for the chat today. So to begin our conversation in reading through the introduction acknowledgments, Dr. Fluker, you mentioned that you grew up in Jefferson City, so I wanted to hear about what were some historic sites in Missouri that you saw growing up in this state and what kind of sparked your interest in the civil war in the first place?
- Yeah, I mean, it's been such a fun project, I think for that reason I've got such a long standing personal connection to this stuff. So I'm not a native Missourian but moved to the state as a young kid. And one of my earliest memories is a family trip to Fort Davidson State Historic Site and to a civil war reenactment down there. And I was young enough where I was pretty scared about what I was seeing, what was going on . But so one of my earliest student memories is, you know has to do a civil war history in Missouri. And my parents were just really wonderful about, you know taking us around to little day trips around the state, So St. Charles was always a thrill for me, Arrow Rock, Hermann places where the 19th century built environment has been so well preserved that it was like falling through a, you know, a window into time and I just loved that. And so, you know those were always my favorite places to visit and and experience history.
- Fantastic, yeah, I've been to Fort Davidson before a few times and it is a really neat site just to learn about this Confederate effort to try to make their way up to St. Louis and it was unsuccessful, but it's great that that battlefield is still being preserved and the pilot knob iron it's an area in Southeastern Missouri. And so you kinda grew up with the civil war, you studied it in college and you became a historian yourself. And so with this book, I'm very curious to hear about some of the central arguments of the book. And what specifically about Civil War commemoration in Missouri is unique you know, here in Missouri you have Confederate veterans, you have Union veterans, you have African Americans who served for the union but are remembering the war perhaps differently than their white counterparts and the union military. So want to hear a little bit about some of your conclusions and insights in the book.
- Sure. You know, one of the things I was thinking as you're asking your question is, as formative as my experience growing up in the state was to the way I thought about, you know the project and my research, it was really when I moved out of Missouri and went to graduate school in Mississippi that I had this sort of awakening, because I thought you know, on paper Missouri's civil work experiences it's so active, right? It's such an active theater of the war. And, you know, and just sort of by the numbers, Missourian should be as invested in the memory of this conflict as anybody else but that wasn't my experience. So I left Jefferson City where, you know there's no traditional soldier monuments to the civil war and moved to Oxford, Mississippi tiny postage stamp of a town where within, you know, two, three square miles, there's five civil war monuments.
- Wow.
- And so that sort of, you know what, got me noticing the difference in terms of commemoration. So, you know, get as much as that experience in Missouri was important, it was the experience leaving the state and kind of seeing what was going on elsewhere in terms of Civil War Commemoration that got me intrigued but what I sort of arrived at and what the central argument of the book is, is that civil war historians have developed this sort of framework for talking about the ways in which different Americans and the different regions remembered the civil war. So, you know, you've got the lost cause which we've been hearing a lot about, which is sort of the way white Southerners remember the war, the Union caused, the Emancipation caused. And Missourians I found really struggled to fit into any of these frameworks of civil war memory that are out there. And it's a part of the reason why I think there's sort of an absence of Civil War Commemoration in Missouri, as opposed to places again, like say Mississippi. there's no ability to build consensus among Missourians about what the civil war meant to them and what its legacy was. And of course it becomes really difficult to do practical things like, form committees and raise money for monuments when no one can agree on what the war was about and why. So, you know, my argument is that Missourians have this unique perspective on the war because it is a border state, a very complicated state. And not only is it a border state between the North and South, but it sits on this very interesting Eastern and Western divide as well. And that shapes the way Missourians thought about the war, I think in a really interesting and different way.
- Interesting, so essentially, you know Missouri is a very bitterly divided state not only is that extend through the civil war but it continues into this, that the post-war effort as well and trying to find common ground within the state. And, I think what's interesting is that, I went to Vicksburg recently and there are monuments to Missouri soldiers for both Union and Confederate. And so I found that to be kind of interesting looking at that when going through Vicksburg myself. And one thing specifically I noticed with your book too is, you, can talk about veteran homes and helping out veterans after the civil war. And I'd love to hear maybe a little bit about some of your insights when it comes to the veteran homes in Missouri.
- Yeah, I'm really... That was a really particularly fun part of the book to work on. I'm glad you mentioned Vicksburg though. I think that's really part two, the argument of the book is that, you know Missourians don't fit into these sort of standard ways of thinking about the war and its legacies. And so I found that white veterans in Missouri in particular really adopted this sort of reconciliation this attitude about civil war memory you can see that, you know at the Vicksburg National Military Park that monument there, to Union and Confederate Missourians really, really unique. And there are a couple similar monuments that have been built now, but at the time that that went up, I believe that was 1917. It was really the only one of its kind in the country, and really speaks to this unique attitude Missourians had about, you know needing to find common ground with one another. And that's reflected in the veteran homes as well. So these are kind of unique because we've got a State Confederate Home and a State Federal Soldiers' Home. So this was different than the National Union Veterans Homes that existed in various places. And the closest would have been in Leavenworth in Kansas. So we have a State Federal Soldiers' Home and a Confederate Veterans' Home. And initially these are privately funded and they're both begun by veterans associations and there women's auxiliaries, so the Women's Relief Corps in the case of the Federal home and the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the case, the Confederate home. And they operate on private funding for a brief little window of time before... In 1897, they're adopted by the state government as Eleemosynary Institutions. So along with hospitals and prisons, they received state funding. And again, Missouri kind of like the monument Vicksburg, this is another reason Missouri so unique because it's at this point the only state to fund homes for both Union and Confederate veterans.
- Wow, that's really fascinating, and we can also see sort of that, a redefinition of the Missouri State Government in the sense that, this is really kind of the social safety net offering an opportunity for veterans who are really struggling to have, you know some support from originally these private organizations within the state government as well.
- Yeah. And that was really interesting part of the story. And one of the things that really shocked me about that as I was doing the research is I had this assumption that, people would be pretty willing to spend money on veterans, that this would be sort of a bipartisan issue that people could get behind. It ultimately was but it took time to convince people that providing relief to veterans wasn't in some way making them dependence or wards of the state that, that wasn't somehow diminishing actually the status of veterans.
- Right.
- So, the Missouri constitution actually has to be changed to ensure that veteran residents of these Eleemosynary Institutions can retain the right to vote for example, which would not have been true for residents of the asylums or the prisons, right? They wanna make sure that, you know they're providing veterans care, but that care remains distinct from other recipients of welfare in the state. So it's really, really interesting.
- Wow, then it really is fascinating absolutely. And just, just we're on the topic of commemoration here, was there a particular, is there a particular monument or statue or an event like a parade or something that really kind of sticks out in your mind, is sort of symbolic of Missouri?
- Yeah, the thing that I stumbled across that really fascinated me was the 1887 National G.A.R. encampment which was held in St. Louis. And I think this really spoke to again, one of the central arguments of the book which was getting at how Missourians don't fit easily into the standard narratives of the war. So the Grand Army of the Republic which is this Massive National Organization for Union Veterans they decide they're gonna host their 1887 meeting at St. Louis. And growing up in the state, I always think of St. Louis is the pocket of unionism that wasn't clear to folks in 1887, there was a lot of resistance to that, and people are saying, "that's a really weird location for us, that's a Southern state, we don't know about that". President Cleveland decides he's not gonna attend. And that casts kind of a further shadow on the event, black veterans come out and use that event as an opportunity to challenge racial discrimination within the G.A.R, not necessarily in Missouri they're actually talking about instances that happen in G.A.R post in Southern States. And the Department of the Gulf is what they call it. But, this event gets, you know sort of criticized from, you know, fellow Union is saying why are we gonna have it in Missouri? African-American veterans saying we need to pay attention to racial discrimination, you know among the ranks of Union veterans.
- Right.
- Say, Lewin's are kind of like, you know you're gonna have a good time we promise just come and give us a .
- Sure.
- And so, they do, and the event goes off without a hitch, all those, you know fears were ultimately sort of misplaced but, that event really stuck out to me because Union veterans and Missouri are constantly trying to prove to their comrades across the North that, we're just as loyal as we were loyal during the war. We're loyal now, and you really shouldn't pay attention to these guerrillas and these Confederates that live amongst us because they're such a tiny minority of our population don't reflect the spirit of our state.
- Ah, interesting, interesting. And then finally, just to wrap up our interview, I guess something I'm kinda curious about is if you're working with students, why should students have the war study Missouri? What, is unique about the Missouri experience during the civil war that makes it worth studying?
- Yeah, that's a great question. I think really two answers I guess to the question. One is that I think civil war historians are getting better and better about this all the time but we tend to fall into the shorthand way of talking about the conflict, is this North versus South conflict. And it's so much more complicated than that. And again, as a border state between the North and South and as the East and West Missouri, really highlights the complicated regional dynamics of this, and highlights the fact that even within these regions you have people that are very conflicted about the war, you know, so we have Missourians to oppose secession, we have Missourians who are loyal to the Union yet defend slavery. And so by, you know, shining a light on this local story you can really see how incredibly divisive and complicated this was, especially in Missouri but across the country. The other thing that I hope people will sort of gather from the book or potentially students is that, as much as civil war monuments, particularly Confederate monuments are seen as controversial, now, in many ways, the arguments and the conversations we're having about these monuments, now Missouri's we're having them 120, 130 years ago as well. The idea that monuments represents the objective history of the war. Wasn't something that the civil war generation accepted and they were very concerned about the different interpretations of the war that these monuments might promote. And again, I think that's why we just don't see a ton of them in Missouri, because there was so much back and forth over which interpretation mattered and which should represent the state.
- Those are wonderful points and it's for another time. But even the Confederate volume in here in St. Louis was opposed by some Union veterans here in St. Louis. So that's for another time, but Dr. Amy Laurel Fluker thank you so much for being with us today. Again, the book is "Commonwealth of Compromise: Civil War Commemoration in Missouri", published through the University of Missouri press. So we'll look forward to reading that book, and anywhere else we can find you if we wanna learn more about your working in what you're doing.
- Yeah, you can take a look at my Twitter @amyfluker. I also have a website, amylaurelfluker.com.
- Fantastic. Okay, thank you Dr. Fluker,
- Thank you.
Description
Ranger Nick interviews Amy Laurel Fluker, Professor of History at Youngstown State University. Dr. Fluker discussed the Civil War in Missouri and shared some insights from her new book, "Commonwealth of Compromise: Civil War Commemoration in Missouri" (University of Missouri Press).
Duration
15 minutes, 2 seconds
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