Get down with L O C

One of the interesting thing about being a researcher is finding out when people have made stuff up. This has happened twice now, and this time I was able to track down what happened. Makes for an interesting story (for a given value of interesting, mind you).


Chapter one of my dissertation is about the Cakewalk. Accordingly, I have looked at many different scholarly articles that have dealt with the subject previously. One such article produced this picture, of a "contraband ball" during the siege of Vicksburg. The author attributed the picture to Harper's Weekly newspaper, and gave the date for publication as 1863 and the page number as 337. The text underneath the picture was fairly important to the author's argument:


"The negroes (sic)preserve all their African fondness for music and dancing, and in the modified form which they have assumed here have given rise to negro dancing and melodies in our theatres, a form of amusement which has enriched many. But the colored people should be seen in one of their own balls to enjoy the reality. The character of the music and the dance, the strange gradation of colors, from the sooty black of the pure breed to those creatures, fair and beautiful, whose position among their darker brethren shows the brutal cruelty of their male ancestors for generations, who begot them to degrade them, and who had this for years been putting white blood into slavery. There is in these balls one thing which cannot fail to impress any observer. Coming as they all do from a degraded and oppressed class, the negroes assume nevertheless, in their intercourse with each other, as far as they can, the manners and language of the best classes in society. There is often a grotesque exaggeration, indeed, but there is an appreciation of refinement and an endeavor to attain it which we seldom see in the same class of whites."


Now, that might not trip any bells for y'all. The siege of Vicksburg was in 1863, however, and that seems mighty early for someone to be claiming that their dancing and melodies have influenced white theater. Not impossible, mind you, but . . . early. So, I decided to take a look at the actual paper itself, to see if there was something else going on. And guess what? Page #337 of Harper's Weekly 1863 does not have this picture. Nor does Harper's Weekly for 1862, or 1864. A little digging (Praise Google!) did turn the image up in an 1896 book, "Frank Leslie's Famous Leaders and Battle Scenes of the Civil War," published by Mrs. Frank Leslie. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly was a big competitor of Harper's during the Civil War, and hey! That's where the original woodcut was published, on January 30th, 1864.


This quote fits very nicely into the picture I am building in my research, and so I have been hanging a fair amount of weight on it. One thing I learned in my master's research is to always get a look at the original document, if you can. And, the Library of Congress has both the newspaper and the book on microform, so yesterday I hied my way downtown. You have to have a researchers' card to get into the LOC, but as it happens I do have one, and so I strolled on into the Jefferson building, hit the main reading room, and went to work.


The original woodcut? Check. Problem though, the only print under that picture is "A New Year's Day Contraband Ball and Vicksburg, Miss." Nothing else. The text that my original reference attributed to 1863 was actually first published, as far as I can ascertain, in 1896. Which context gives it a VERY different meaning, so now I have to go back and include that into my chapter. Which is cool, the quote still says interesting things about the people who wrote it -- speaking to my argument that whites read the performances of blacks through the lens of their own expectations, rather than trying to understand what African American performance meant within their own culture. No doubt you will be hearing more about that argument if you keep reading . . .



If nothing else, this experience shows me how . . . problematic it is to take other scholar's work at face value, particularly regarding stuff that happened 150 years ago. How did that person mis-attribute both the source and the date? I don't know. Harper's is certainly a plausible place for such a woodcut to have been published. Maybe they were just lazy? Maybe they didn't HAVE the source, but running an image like that without a source wouldn't have been any good, so they just threw something out there, assuming that no one would notice? And there is another lesson - eventually, someone is going to notice.