One of the things that both Jaclyn and Ryan discussed is the importance of the legacy of the battle over the actual skirmish itself. Dowling was unique in the number of times he and his troops were memorialized in the forms of statues and monuments—six in total. This, coupled with the narratives and stories put forth by characters such as Davis and other Confederates both during and after the war, show that, for many reasons, the battle had a lasting impact in the wake of the Civil War.

I found Jaclyn’s idea that the narrative of Sabine Pass was important to Southerners grappling with issues such as racism and xenophobia, but I feel it would be a mistake to entirely downplay the importance of the battle during the Civil War itself. By 1863, the Confederacy was becoming more demoralized as the war dragged on through it second year. A decisive victory such as that at Sabine Pass—however much of a fluke combination of good timing for the Confederates and bad luck for the Union it may have been—was important in inspiring troops and boosting morale during the war. As Cotham mentioned several times in the book, Texas was very important strategically to the Confederacy, and loss of it or any of its major seaports to the Union could have had drastic implications for the transport of much-needed military supplies.

Cotham also mentions the scandal the unthinkable defeat at Sabine Pass caused in the North and how it led to several scathing editorials as well as investigations of the various officers involved in the battle. Jaclyn and Ryan both allude to the idea that the victory was a combination of military training and pure luck, but, regardless of how the victory was achieved, it did definitively squelch any further Union efforts to take over Sabine Pass. Furthermore, it led Northerners to question the effectiveness of certain military strategy and commanders, which could have had an affected Union morale in a manner that was beneficial for the troops.

The impact of Sabine Pass during the war also had a definite impact on Union war strategies, particularly relating to Farragut’s increasingly popular practice of conquering a city or town on the shore using naval artillery. Although this strategy had proved successful in capturing cities such as New Orleans, Sabine Pass caused Union generals to reconsider the advisability of these tactics. While Farragut continued to use some elements of this strategy in subsequent battles (189) he did so with much more caution. It should also be noted that this strategy seemed to be one that was almost exclusively effective for Farragut; there were several instances in the book when commanders and strategists on other ships—including those commanding the battles at Sabine Pass—attempted Farragut’s strategies and failed.

While Dowling and his battalion’s victories were much celebrated in the South and particularly in Texas, the scope of the impact of Sabine Pass on Union forces is a part of the story that seems largely silenced. I would find it fairly plausible that this was because, in the grand scheme of the war, Sabine Pass was relatively insignificant to the Union. However, with Trouillot’s book fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help wondering if this was an example of a silenced piece of history that was actually more influential than the standard history books would have their readers believe.

Sabine Pass: The Confederacy’s Thermopylae
Edward T. Cotham, Jr.

As the Battle of Sabine Pass is interpreted one way in the South—or more specifically, in Houston—and another way in the North, so too can Cotham’s argument about the significance of the battle be individually understood.

Ryan, in my opinion, rightly points out that Cotham doesn’t think Sabine Pass is remembered for its military brilliance but its ideological impact in the former Confederacy.

However, the reasons for touting the victory seem to undermine the “Lost Cause” theory — that the Confederacy was bound to lose, regardless of the courage and determination of its soldiers, because of the overwhelming numbers and resources of the Union army — that still lingers, for some, as a viable narrative of the Civil War. If Dowling and his small group could hold off such an overwhelming Union presence at Sabine Pass, why couldn’t that result be achieved elsewhere?

But perhaps this is painting with too broad of a brush, for, undoubtedly, there were certain contextual factors that helped craft the success of the Davis Guards.

The fort at Sabine Pass, redesigned and reconstructed by engineers, was strategically positioned at the junction of two channels. In addition, Dowling and the Davis Guards had undergone extensive conditioning for their moment of glory. The group had the exact training it needed to be successful in the engagement at Sabine Pass: they drilled more often than most troops, because they were (possibly) being discriminated against in terms of receiving choice battlefield assignments (41); they practiced with their second-hand cannon more than they might have if all their cannons were brand new, because they were worried about it working (82).

The second question this realization begs is, “Why remember the battle if it undermines a justification for the Confederacy’s loss that Lee himself proffered?”

It seems to me Sabine Pass might be more of a consolation story both for the public at the time and for the people of the present. Against turn-of-the-century cries of racism and xenophobia, one could hold up the story of Dowling and his Irish troops and point to their success, their “integration” into Houston society. Particularly salient in the present, one can say remembering Dowling and the victory at Sabine Pass is not necessarily celebrating the Confederacy and what it stood for, but the saving of Texas and its residents from becoming a theater for the physical ravages of war.

To my understanding, this latter point rings especially true, given the perception of Texas by the rest of the country (and to some extent the self-perception of Texans) as fiercely independent and resolutely pragmatic. One can then extend the remembrance of Dowling to “…the saving of Texas and its residents from becoming a theater for the physical ravages of a war for a cause in which they did not believe,” allowing room for a monument, while silencing the integral status of slavery to the Confederacy.

What is Edward Cotham suggesting when he praises the battle of Sabine Pass as the Confederacy’s Thermopylae? I wrestled with this question throughout my reading of the book, formulating my own interpretation of the claim along the way, and at times vehemently disagreeing with Cotham’s comparison between two very different historical battles. It was not until the final page, however, when I truly grasped the idea that Cotham’s subtitle said more about the Battle’s ideological and historical impact than its military and strategic one. Indeed, Sabine’s location on the outskirts of the primary theaters of the Civil War and the fact that the Confederacy ultimately lost the War seek to diminish the historical significance of the battle from a strategic standpoint. On the contrary, Cotham notes about the battle of Sabine Pass:

It reminds us that occasionally in real life Davids do defeat Goliaths…It is a story that still has the capacity to both amaze and inspire us (202).

This perspective on the battle exemplifies the role of power in historical production as discussed by Trouillot. When Dick Dowling’s legacy is analyzed in the scope of history, we see a man who achieved fame in the immediate wake of Sabine Pass, and remains immortalized via statues and memorials throughout the South. The groups behind the production of such memorials include Irish and Confederate heritage groups, as well as the Daughters of the Confederacy, including Dick’s daughter, Annie. These social groups are understandably interested in keeping Dowling, a man whose legacy embodies the greater Confederate story, present in modern memory. The same can be said about Jefferson Davis, who not only perpetuated the Davis Guards’ story but also amplified it in the post-war years. His dedication to telling the story during the War could easily be dismissed as a desperate Confederate search for a public hero, but his commitment to Sabine after the War confirms Trouillot’s notion that the past is never isolated from the present. Certainly the battle certifies that the history of events are produced in accordance with modern interests, such as the Confederate reluctance to abandon their stance even 150 years after the War’s conclusion. Because of this reluctance, a variety of historical narrators and accounts of Sabine Pass have emerged so that it could be said in the early 20th-century:

“There is not a school boy in Texas who does not know [about Dowling’s battle at Sabine Pass]. And there is not a school boy in all New England who ever heard of Dick Dowling or Sabine Pass” (192).

Naturally Farragut, Crocker and the rest of the Union wanted to silence the battle of Sabine Pass because of their lack of success, while the Confederates sought to preserve its memory because of their victory. Beyond this, the Northern silence of Sabine could have resulted from the idea that the battle really was militarily insignificant. After all, Cotham admits that the Union attack on Sabine was primarily motivated by political and commercial concerns, while most Union generals lobbied for an invasion of Mobile, Alabama. Regardless, such speculation only confirms that there are many reasons why historical events get silenced. Even among the Confederate victors it would appear that silences ensue. Most Confederate sources and memorials, including the statue of Dowling by Hermann Park, silence the fact that a great many of the thousands of Union soldiers present at Sabine were actually never involved in the fighting. Recognition of such a fact would undoubtedly undermine the Confederate victory and the battle’s legacy. Perhaps Jefferson Davis, although, could never have believed such a fact in his time, while any attack on Dowling’s legacy would simply be unthinkable.

After reading Sabine Pass I am interested to hear from everyone else about their interpretation of the battle. I ultimately agree that the battle of Sabine Pass is the Confederacy’s Thermopylae not because it gave the South a strategic upper hand in the Civil War, but because Sabine exists in public memory today as a symbol of courage and a living preservation of the Confederate cause. In light of its immediate and historical impact, therefore, do you agree that the Sabine Pass was (and still is) the Confederacy’s Thermopylae? Or is it perhaps a forty-five minute skirmish that speaks more to Union ineptitude than Confederate heroics?

Like Cotham suggests: after all the statues and memorials, only we can formulate our own historical interpretations.

Thanks to everyone for the great first posts about Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. I’m looking forward to reading what you have to say in response to Ryan’s post about the Cotham book, which should appear here by midnight tonight or shortly thereafter.

Last week all of you were struck by the powerful arguments Trouillot makes about the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution. Jocelyn also wondered, after reading Trouillot’s account, what things are happening today that might be too “unthinkable” for us to notice. A related question worth thinking about is this: are there ways of looking at the history of the American Civil War that have remained as “unthinkable” to historians as the Haitian Revolution once was to historians of the Age of Revolutions?

Historian Steven Hahn thinks the answer is “yes.” In fact, in a series of lectures he published a couple of years ago, Hahn argued that the Civil War was not just a war between the United States and the Confederacy, but was actually “the greatest slave rebellion in modern history”–a slave rebellion comparable in its causes, character, and consequences to the Haitian Revolution. But Hahn also argued that for various reasons historians have bypassed that interpretation, in spite of the evidence for it. The idea of the Civil War as a slave rebellion, he suggests, has traditionally been as unthinkable as the Haitian Revolution.

I’m going to post a PDF version of Hahn’s article on the online Fondren reserves for this course and also email it to each of you. I think you’d find it interesting to read as an afterword to Trouillot’s book that may help you see connections between the Trouillot book and the Civil War era. You are welcome, but not required, to post any reactions to the Hahn article to this post.

Initially, I put a different article on the syllabus for this week–an article by Bruce Levine on the “black Confederate” myth. I’m going to post that on Reserves, too, but read it only if you find the time. The Hahn article might be a better follow-up to the Trouillot book anyway.

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A few other follow-ups to our meeting last week.

First, you may want to look more closely at the Omeka examples I briefly showed you at the beginning of class. Here is the Woodson Center’s Omeka site, and here is the one about Lincoln at 200. There is also a more extensive showcase of Omeka exhibits here.

Second, as mentioned last week, you may find it useful to set up an RSS reader to keep up with the blogs I’ve recommended that you follow for this course, as well as to know when this blog is updated. Here’s a useful introduction to using RSS, as well as a tutorial about how to use Google Reader, one of the many available web-based services that allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds.

By Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Using a unique combination of history and memoir, Michel-Rolph Trouillot attempts to examine and explain the processes by which history is produced, silenced, and understood in his book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Arguing that humans participate in history as actors and narrators, Trouillot wishes to explore these roles in terms of what he believes are the two sides of historiocity, “ what happened” and “that which is said to have happened” (2).  Through is selection of historical examples including the Alamo, the Holocaust, the Haitian Revolution, and landing of Christopher Colombus; Trouillot introduces his reader to another side of history, how and why events are celebrated or forgotten.

The crux of Trouillot’s argument revolves around a series of forgotten or neglected pieces of history or “silences,” as Trouillot refers to them.  These silences are an important factor that must be understood as part of the process of producing historical narratives as they are deeply entwined with the historical process:

Silences enter into the historical process at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives; and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance). (48)

This understanding of the act of suppressing or forgetting material as it relates to the four steps of creating history is displayed in specific narratives throughout the rest of Silencing. To illustrate his arguments about silences, Trouillot refers to three specific stories: the story of Sans Souci, a forgotten Haitian Revolution hero; the general neglect of the Haitian Revolution in Western history interpretations; and the redefinition of Christopher Columbus’ discovery and its meaning of Columbus as a figure throughout the world.  Trouillot goes to great pains to demonstrate the process by which history is created and how the relative power of different groups played a role in the creation of historical narrative.  However, Trouillot explainst that there is still room for some reinterpretation of history, but he restricts that “historians build their narrative on the shoulders of previous ones,” and to contribute new material historians must, “both acknowledge and contradict the power embedded in previous understandings” (56).

This room for reinterpretation is not without use in Trouillot’s eyes, especially in the case of his example of the Haitian Revolution, which Trouillot explains has been neglected in Western history due to erasure and banalization.  Having just taken a class on the Caribbean in the age of revolutions, this neglect of the subject both shocked and upset me as the Haitian Revolution had far reaching consequences in the greater Atlantic world.  Yet, Trouillot, a native Haitian, moves beyond this neglect to prescribe a new doctrine for future historians so that they might be able to influence the future development of narrative in a more balanced nature  understanding the complex interplay of power, silences, identity and the present upon historical interpretation.  As he states,

“As various crises of our times impinge upon the identities thought to be long established or silent, we move closer to the era when professional historians will have to position themselves more clearly within the present, lest politicians, magnates, or ethnic leaders alone write history for them.” (152)

On this note, Trouillot sends forth his reader educated in the basics of the production of history and a mission to influence the production of future narratives for the better.  A mission that might perhaps remove historians from the comfort of the past, to the understanding of the present.

With Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot is not so much commenting on the process of historical production as he is exposing and disenchanting it. Trouillot’s exploration into the Haitian Revolution transcends traditional historical debate in the sense that he is taking history into his own hands; examining why certain elements of the Revolution emerged to become “facts,” while others dissolved into the depths of obscurity. Perhaps Trouillot’s most compelling argument arises here, which holds that the historical production process is preceded by power, which controls what is to be included in the historical narrative and similarly what is to be silenced. The result is a constant interplay and dichotomy between what actually happened and what is said to have happened.

Throughout Silencing, Trouillot investigates why such historical inaccuracies, embellishments and omissions develop. Within the early pages, however, Trouillot points out that it often begins with how the individual regards knowledge. On its most basic level, historical narratives become flawed when we view knowledge as recollection, or adopt what is known as the storage model. This happens when history is regarded as an isolated and separate entity that can be accessed through the retrieval of memories. Employing logic, Trouillot argues that since nobody is alive today that actually witnessed the Haitian Revolution, and subsequently could ever access an authentic memory, the storage model leads us to start creating the past: selecting sources, making archives and retrieving what we consider “facts.” Reflecting on the common American education, one can only agree with Trouilott in that history during primary and secondary education is generally relegated to the memorization of dates and names associated with the common single-sided interpretation of grand events. Because of this, Trouilott delivers a revelation that is simple yet not easily arrived at:

“That some people and things are absent of history, lost, as it were, to the possible world of knowledge, is much less relevant to the historical practice than the fact that some people and things are absent in history, and that this absence itself is constitutive of the process of historical production” (48-49).

Trouilott devotes a great deal of Silencing to exhibiting areas of the Haitian Revolution that have been silenced in Western historiography, especially the identity of Sans Souci, a man whose integral role in the Revolution is often considered an inconvenience and a distraction from the neat and tidy message about the revolt that many historians seek to promote. Pursuing the issue further, Trouillot sees the silencing of Sans Souci in the context of the greater Western attempt to silence the Revolution itself, revealing just how messy the historical production process can get.

The most intriguing segment of Silencing came when Trouillot stops just short of justifying Western manipulation of the history of the Haitian Revolution:

“…I am not suggesting that eighteenth-century men and women should have thought about the fundamental equality of humankind in the same way some of us do today. On the contrary, I am arguing that they could not have done so” (82).

During its occurrence and even in the coming generation, the Revolution in Haiti was inconceivable to the West due to instilled ideas about slavery, race and colonialism. Because the idea of a mass slave revolt was so unthinkable, the Revolution, like so many other chapters in history, was destined to be silenced from the start. In his closing words, Trouillot maintains that the past will continue to be silenced as long as a “fetishism of the facts, premised on an antiquated model of the natural sciences” prevails in the production process. Like Trouillot, it seems that we need to transcend mere debate and take history into our own hands.

In this book, Trouillot attempts to understand why it is that events such as the Haitian Revolution and Columbus’ landing in the Americas—extraordinarily significant events in history—continues to be ignored or misrepresented today. In the case of the Haitian Revolution, giving the event the proper degree of recognition was impractical and challenging politically when it happened, and it has been forgotten in subsequent narratives because it did not fit in as neatly into the chain of Western historical events. With the story of Columbus, Trouillot showed how a figure can be claimed or misrepresented by countless groups with their own agendas, which, incidentally, vaguely reminded me of Dowling.

The first thing that struck me about this book was that it was a sort of half-history and half-memoir. Trouillot shared a great deal of his personal thoughts, feelings and experiences and then interspersed these reflections with the historical narrative. While I would not normally think this would be a very effective strategy for writing a history book, and at times Trouillot did ramble a bit too much, I found it to be generally effective. One of the major themes of the book was how the Haitian Revolution has been largely ignored at worst and at best dismissed or undermined by historians. The anecdotes and discussion of historical theory helped explain why this might have been the case, and also provided some individual examples of the dangers of forgetting the Haitian Revolution. One which particularly stood out to me was the conversation Trouillot had with one of his students in his course on the “Black Experience in the Americas.” The anecdote exemplified a major theme of the book: the dangers of omitting certain parts of history, such as the Haitian Revolution, and how this could skew people’s perspectives of other historical events, such as slavery in the South.

I found Trouillot’s explanation of how the Haitian Revolution was unthinkable and how that made it difficult for people at the time and subsequent historians to process in the historical narrative particularly interesting. As historians living in the present day, when we look back on events and movements, it is easy for us to forget how unexpected or different they are. Just as slavery would be unthinkable to the average American or European today, the idea that slaves could successfully revolt to achieve independence in the late 18^th century was equally unthinkable to the average American or European 220 years ago. While it all makes perfect sense, I was still very surprised that the response to such a—pardon the pun—revolutionary event would be to ignore it completely. It makes me wonder what types of events are going on in our modern world today that we are choosing to ignore or undermine for our own political or cultural purposes.

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
Michel Rolph-Trouillot

In Silencing the Past, Trouillot gives the reader cause to re-examine encounters with historical process and historical knowledge. He delineates two faces of historicity — what happened and what is said to have happened — and emphasizes four moments of fact-production throughout the crafting of historical narratives. It is within this framework that Trouillot looks at events that have either been silenced, skewed, or somehow mis-presented: the Haitian revolution, the battle of the Alamo, Columbus’ landing in the Americas. He brings the analysis to a fruitful conclusion in the closing pages:

“…historical authenticity resides not in the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-á-vis the present as it re-presents that past.” (150).

Under this premise, the historical silences that Trouillot points to, created between what happened and what is said to have happened, are important in their historical context but gain far more meaning in how we, as “actors and narrators” of history, engage them in the present. Trouillot draws on the memory of the Holocaust, saying that no amount of collective guilt about The Past or visits to concentration camps can be as powerful as protesting against skinheads in The Present.

I found this challenge quite relevant, especially upon spending the past semester in Berlin: In a city where the appropriateness of memorials and monuments is publicly — and heatedly — debated, where certain historical narratives are suppressed in favor of others, where walking down a street is an exercise in honoring history authentically. The other somewhat tautological, but often overlooked, fact Trouillot emphasizes with his “silence-moments” framework is that for every thing that is recorded, some other thing is left out. “Silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing” Trouillot writes. This, he argues, is a byproduct of a number of contextual factors, including, among them, the vocabulary of the times, the capacity of the audience to understand the facts created, the accessibility (or “consumability”) of the narrative presented. The allusion to Censors from Roman antiquity is both appropriate and illuminating with regard to fact-silencing.

Trouillot rightly offers a defense of his silence model, assuming readers might take his argument to the other, albeit hyperbolic, end of the spectrum: the inclusion of every piece of information exactly at the moment it happens so as not to leave any thing out:

“If the account was indeed fully comprehensive of all facts it would be incomprehensible. Further, the selection of what matters, the dual creation of mentions and silences, is premised on the understanding of the rules of the game by broadcaster and audience alike.” (51).

With this, Trouillot outlines the differences between historical production and fiction. The extended sports metaphor aside, Trouillot is emphasizing the crucial responsibility historians have to authentic presentation of facts. Yet, he notes the “corner” (151) academia has pushed itself into regarding this issue: the guild is obsessed with facts and, I think he believes to its detriment, not with present-day contextualization and situated perspectives.