What I’m Working On

By John Coski · Originally published January 2017 · p. 2

Pub. note: With this column by John Coski, Historian of the American Civil War Museum, we are launching a new series of occasional articles, “What I’m Working on.” Mr. Coski is well-known throughout the Civil War community and is deeply immersed in our national conversation about remembrance of the War. We therefore asked him, well, what he is working on. Here’s what he told us. For more than a quarter-century I have been fortunate to work for an institution endowed with an incredibly rich collection of documents, manuscripts, objects, and photographs from the Confederate side of the Civil War, and that is dedicated to an objective study of the war. When I started at The Museum of the Confederacy in 1988, it had just opened the restored White House of the Confederacy and was preparing the landmark NEH-sponsored exhibit, “Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South.” Since then, many of my research and writing projects have grown out of my work for the Museum. Although written on my own time, my books on the Confederate James River Squadron (Capital Navy, 1996) and the Confederate battle flag (The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem, 2005) began life as Museum assignments. For a dozen years, I had the privilege of directing the Museum’s Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library. The job involved using my knowledge of the library’s manuscript sources to assist the research of other people – from “buffs” and genealogists to young graduate students to established scholars whose books I have been reading most of my life. Working in the library introduced me to the Civil War scholars whom I recruited for the Museum’s lecture series and symposia and as judges for the Museum’s book award program (another part of my portfolio). I have been able to help graduate students with their dissertation research and, years later, present them with awards for their finished books, and then bring them back to Richmond to deliver lectures. As Civil War News readers know, The Museum of the Confederacy has had to evolve and seek ways to survive and thrive in the increasingly congested neighborhood around the White House. In 2012, we opened a new Museum “wing” – 90 miles west in Appomattox – as part of a break-out strategy. In 2014 the

MOC combined with the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar to form the American Civil War Museum. We soon will be breaking ground on a new museum building on Richmond’s James River waterfront. The merger also entailed a licensing agreement with the venerable Virginia Historical Society. By that agreement, we have transferred custody (though not ownership) of our manuscript collections to the VHS. There the manuscripts will be available to researchers at a new Civil War Research Center. Researchers coming to Richmond will have one-stop access to the combined resources of the two institutions. In coming years, much of the Museum’s research collection will be digitized and made available on the internet. The creation of the VHS-based Civil War Research Center is a work in progress, and some of our materials may be unavailable for short periods. Since 2009, my primary duty (aside from helping to create the exhibits for the Museum of the Confederacy at Appomattox and overseeing scholarly programs) has been as editor and principle writer of the Museum’s quarterly Magazine. Researching and writing articles for the Magazine has afforded me the opportunity to use the sources that I had been serving to others and to publish excerpts from the many document transcripts that I and my colleagues, interns, and volunteers have made over the decades. Through the Magazine I have been able to showcase dozens of the countless compelling human stories that lie within our manuscript collections. Whenever possible, I make this work do double or triple-duty in the form of Museum programs or articles for other Civil War publications. A collection of more than 300 letters written by ordinary southerners in 1865 and intercepted by Federal troops provided a window onto conditions and attitudes in the South in the war’s closing months. A recent donation of four diaries kept by an Ohio soldier gave the Museum – in the words of the donor – “diaries of brothers who fought on opposite sides of the war.” The unusually perceptive and articulate diaries of John Summerfield Petty, USA, and James Thomas Petty, CSA (in our collections since 1943) were a joy to read and to write about, and I hope to do more with them. On my own time, I have begun what I hope will be a booklength study of Belle Isle. I want

John and his dog Portia. to explore not only the island’s role as an infamous Civil War prisoner-of-war camp, but its wider history as an industrial and recreational site and the practical and philosophical questions presented by a piece of “hallowed ground” that is now the city’s playground – questions that I have occasionally pondered during the 20 years that I have bicycle commuted across the island. Belle Isle lies just across a narrow river channel from Tredegar Iron Works and the American Civil War Museum’s future home, so my research will also aid the Museum’s interpretation of the Richmond Civil War waterfront. In my career, as in William Faulkner’s famous observation about southern history, the past isn’t ever really past. I continue to talk and write about the Confederate Navy and, especially, the Confederate battle flag. In the wake of the June 2015 murders at Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, I spent a month in full media mode – giving interviews to print, broadcast, and online journalists around the globe about the history and evolving meaning of the Confederate flag. As it has over the past 28 years, my interests and objectives as an historian have dovetailed with those of the Museum: to provide background and perspective on the controversies that arise from the legacies and memories of the Civil War and contribute to a constructive discussion of those issues. Next on the horizon is the Museum’s annual symposium (co-sponsored with the University of Virginia’s John L. Nau III Center for Civil War Studies and hosted by the Library of Virginia) on February 25, 2017, which will explore the past, present, and future of Civil War monuments.