technology. this conversation took place on line due to the coronavirus pandemic and the new york historical society provided the video. >> harold, we've been talking in this series about the power of objects to be touchstones of historical events, to be con duties for understanding the past. it's a thrill and an extraordinary experience to be a historian at new york historical where i work alongside these treasures and use them in my exhibitions. let's talk for a second about the inspiration for this program, the book "civil war in 50 objects". how can 50 objects tell such a sweeping story? >> we used to ask ourselves that question often when we were whittling down the list and there was so much to choose from. the way we did it, as i recall, is first we discussed the medium of the object, we wanted photographs, paintings, documents, relics, and then we wanted to represent every year of the civil war. first the year leading up to it and then 1861, 2, 3, 4, 5. by the time we shifted through the criteria we had more than 50, but we thought we had 50 objects that represented both of those requirements. >> well, there was truly an embarrassment of riches and it was hard to whittle them down for sure. >> and we were unembarrassable by the abundance. >> that's definitely true. tonight, we'll be discussing two objects that consider technology and the civil war. we have a siphor key and the half model of the uss monitor from 1862. let's first consider the key, the two-part object that you see on the top. this thing is in the papers of alexander robert chism, born in 1834, died in 1910 and these papers are at new york historical. he was a stock broker, merchant, railroad investors, and he died during the gilded age in new york city where he had also grown up. but in his youth he served on the confederate side of the civil war. he has a curious background. do tell us about it, please, harold. >> right. he was born in south carolina, the first state to secede from the union, but he was orphaned young and raised by an aunt and uncle, then he inherited a plantation in south carolina, i think 250 enslaved people. so whatever early sense of new york-ism he had, he quickly abandoned it, went back to the plantation and began running it. when the civil war broke out, his allegiance was to work so save his state and to save slavery. so he became engaged in the effort to oust the federal army. >> some of his slaves were assigned to build the batteries that were built at fort sumpter. >> there were myths that there were african-american confederate soldiers. there were no african-americans who willingly fought for the confederate states of america. they were ordered into service, and as you say, good point, they were building the batteries that would attack the fort in 1861. >> let's see this object, this cipher key. our guy had a specific role, and that was to send and receive coded messages. >> right. >> our first object is the very key he used for deciphering these messages. how did this work? it's a curious looking object. >> it is. and, remember, the idea of sending messages across long distant areas in war is as old as war itself and in ancient times it was done with fire at tight, with torches. in the early days of the civil war, messages were went in morris code by torch light or through flags. that used to be done on navy ships as late as world war ii, a system of alphabet by flag waving. first of all, they all came in that box on the bottom. in the top you see the alphabet and below it corresponding letters that could represent the original letters, but would be different, and you could change the bottom row by pulling it and twisting it. so here a would be v, v would be w. if you wanted to write cat, you would write x-v-o. and the person on the other end of the message, which by civil war time would be sent by telegraph, hence the use of this alphabet, would receive the message and then decode it. that was the idea. it sounds cumbersome, it sounds complex. and only decipher experts knew how to do it. but it was revolutionary at the time. >> a technological advancement, if you will, for the 19th century. if we could see the next image. he was a person aide, and in his own words, the confidential friend to bur guard. tell us about these two men. >> he had i think studied at west point under anderson, was flamboyant, very french, louisiana-born gentleman. had gone, of course, to the southern cause, and found himself in command of those batteries built by slave labor, aimed at the port in charleston harbor. major anderson was in charge of the garrison at fort sumpter. and where these lives intersected was in the early days of 1861, before the cipher was coming into play. beauregard would send the messages and our friend would take them out on the boat and they would say surrender or be bombarded and anderson would say not on your life and back and forth they would go and there was no agreement. so war begins in april of 1861 at fort sumpter. >> we see in the next image the bombardment of fort sumpter. so chisy and dbeauregard saw action at -- >> let me talk about fort sumpter for one second. so this furious bombing didn't take any lines inside the fort, but there was no way that they were going to recover or stay aloft, so chism demands the surrender of the fort after this day and a half long siege, and anderson accepts the terms. chism later writes in his recollections and those are in the historical society, too, that he thought that anderson should be court-martialed for surrendering without a fight. kind of a bullying recollection of this. i'm sorry to interrupt, but he did go on, of course. >> they supposedly led a successful calvary charge and first major engagement of the war. the confederates won, but there is a myth about this win. what is that? >> well, there are several. first of all, the union shouldn't have lost. they outnumbered the rebels, all of washington society turned out to watch this event with picnic baskets packed with lunch. but in the afternoon, the federals came back and routed -- i'm sorry, the confederates came back and routed the federalists, the union. and chism was engaged in sending coded messages. if a message was captured, it could give away the plan if it was written without code. so he becomes very active. but there are reports that he sent a message to jefferson davis saying we need your help, and davis arrived, but he arrived so late in the action that it was really over. and although prints of the period, images showed him coming to the rescue on a white horse, he actually came by railroad and the battle was all but won. so i'm not sure the decoded message did all that much to turn the tide in this case. >> since we're talking about cipher keys and codes, it was sort of a romantic story that we can just throw in there. this is the detail on the cover of the key, which reads in beautiful handwriting, arrangement of cipher key used by general beauregard while in command of confederate armies. our navy, our pride. it's beautiful to see the detail of this object. so the men serve out the war together. chism is acting as a scribe, a confidential messenger. after the war, he sought a pardon from andrew johnson and was the first officer to go to dc for that purpose. he sold his plantation, returned to new york, became a shipping merchant and had a great deal of money. but he valued his experience in the military so much that he saved all of his papers and donated them to new york historical. so did you look over this collection? what exactly apart from the cipher key is in it? >> so it's very well arranged and classified and decoded at the historical society. so there are letters, military letters, and there are scrapbooks which are interesting, which he finds praise worthy articles about general beauregard, which decreased in number as the war went on. the early fascination with him declined in the south, for sure. and then there was this cipher key, which is the remarkable thing. and happily for us it was listed separately. suddenly there is a cipher system that opens like a fan and can be coded. by the way, we have no idea how this our navy, our pride works. there must be some real secret code. he was completely unreconstructed, which is sort of shocking. he was an admirer of the confederacy for his entire life. he wrote letters to "the new york times" defending beauregard and he was the head of the local chapter of the sons of confederate veterans, which indicates to me, to my dismay, that there was an active camp of veterans who lived in new york. but the good news is we have this amazing technological piece from the war. it didn't prove enough to save the confederate cause, happily, but it's a marvel to have. >> absolutely. let's just see the other detail of this object. did the union and the confederate ciphers differ at all? >> they were all fans or circles or fold-out accordions like this one. but they were definitely used in the union. even when abraham lincoln wrote letters to his wife while she was visiting new york or other places, he would write on top, quote, cipher, unquote, which he consistently misspelled. he was not a great speller. he used the cipher all the time. i've seen a few of the messages as they look in code, and this is spy versus spy, mad magazine style, but in the civil war. >> i've never really seen too many cipher keys. >> i have to say, this is the only one i've ever seen. >> it's great and it's beautifully intact. wonderful object to begin our conversation with. let's move on to the second object. this is a half model of the uss monitor, 1862. we're continuing with our theme of war and technology and it looks like a charming decorative ship model, but it's actually a very important piece of history. will you explain what this is, harold? >> so this is the first rendering of the first ironclad in naval history. the first specifically designed one in all of america and the second in the civil war. the first was a rebuilt wooden shift that became ironclad. this was more than an ironclad, although it is called that. this is the model that was created by engineer thomas fitch roland and we have every reason to believe this is the model that was taken to the white house in 1861 to show abraham lincoln and to convince him that we had better -- the union side had better get with the program and develop this kind of a naval vessel or really be conquered. >> let's look at the picture of the swedish-born inventor who was working in brooklyn. in 1861, a connecticut industrialist was convinced that this man, john erickson was on to something extraordinary. who was erickson and what was extraordinary about this invention? >> erickson is simply a visionary war designer. he had the right group with him. roland was the perfect engineer and he had lots of -- bushnell was an advocate. the confederates are take ago wooden chip and putting iron plates on it. erickson had an idea that no one had, and that is for a revolving gun turant that would be low to the water and would rotate. so commonplace on battleships and destroyers, there had never been rotating guns on a ship of war. the ships had to sidle up to each other and fire at each other from nearby. those of us who have seen aaron flynn movies knows that's the way it always went. so this was a true revolution and they brought it -- bushnell brought this model to washington. >> right, and he shows it to lincoln and has a talk with lincoln about this work. what was lincoln's response? >> his initial response is not my decision, let's walk over to the navy board tomorrow and show it to the sages of naval warfare, which they did. they met there and showed it to the naval board and they all booked at lincoln, and lincoln looked at them, and his immortal words, they said, mr. president, what do you think? and he said, well, it reminds me of the story of the young woman who put on her stockings and she looked up and said, i think there's something in it. i don't know if they got this, you know, there's something in it. but they went to work immediately. >> they took that to be a yes. >> yeah, that's a go. but it's a good thing, because the confederates are building this ship, so they rush back to new york with a model and they get to work on the actual ship. >> let's see that image, the image that sort of shows the launch of the monitor. >> yeah, and, you know, it was built in my mother's ancestral home of green point. there's still a park there. my mother went to the monitor school in 1921. it's still there. built in the 1890s. so it was a big shed where ships were made and they converted to day and night, 24/7 production of this ship with a crew of workers by the way, that some of them thought they were being drafted and conscripted even though there was no drafting. they got this amazing thing done. here you see them sliding it down, where it went all the way to the brooklyn navy yard and that's where they put the fancy tables. it was a magnificent ship, by the way. and even though it was dubbed a cheese box on a raft by skeptics, it was not small. it's like 170 feet long. a scale model was built about ten years ago at a norfolk shipyards by navy trainees, and it's big. they built a deck as a party space, i hate to say. but it is a big vessel. it had lots of features inside that made it rather palatial. >> let's see the image of the continental works, which was in green point, brooklyn. this is a picturesque image. >> yeah, there's another monitor, maybe not this monitor, but they went into production of monitors, although they called the first one the monitor, it was really a class of ship. and you see the revolving turrant on top and the smokestack in the back. >> what inspired that name, the monitor, and how long did it take to launch the vessel? >> so it really was done in three months. it was fast. it left in the nick of time. it was towed to virginia, by the way. in bad weather. it almost capsized. so ericsson had the idea of calling it a monitor because he said it would be a monitor against the southern leadership that wants to destroy the union. it reminds me of when the governor, the first governor cuomo used to greet audiences by saying i looked up the definition of governor. the second definition is something that gets in the way of machines and slows them down. so it's an extra definition. like a hall monitor, who stops you from doing bad deeds. >> you mentioned that it was towed to virginia. before it could arrive there, the confederate ironclad, which is a wooden boat that was clad in iron, as opposed to built this way, it was at virginia, and it was proven to be formidable doing damage on the union, which is very interesting. and of course that makes the whole incident that much more dramatic. >> well, it steamed into hampton roads, virginia, and it was last at by the union fleet, which was in the harbor there. and what happened next was the deadliest and costliest day in american naval history up until pearl harbor, when all the ships were destroyed by the japanese. in this case, the original merrimac had a long battering ram at the end, so it rammed the cumberland, and the cumberland sank immediately with great loss of life. and then it lobbed shells at another ship, the uss congress, which caught on fire and more lives were lost. and then it chased, as slow as it was, it chased this petrified captain of the minnesota to shore and the ship ran aground and tilted. then the tide changed, so the virginia retreated back toward norfolk. but the navy had no doubt that the next morning the merrimac would re-emerge around dawn, this smaller low-lying vessel appears on the horizon, enters the harbor and what happens next is the monitor engaging the merrimac in the most famous naval duel in american history. >> here's a picture of that incident, the most dramatic and unforgettable duel of the civil war. >> one is like a big stack. although of all the shells fired that day, no damage was done to the merrimac, really. some damage was done to the turret and one explosion blinded the captain, and he was out for the duration. the other thing that happened is this turret was struck early, and guess what, it stopped revolving. so for the ship to get -- actually, it didn't stop revolving, i beg your pardon. it lost control. it kept revolving. so the only times they could get off a shot is when it turned all the way around and somebody could shoot. it would keep turning around and it was agonizingly hot in the ship, maybe over 100 degrees and dangerous. but this changed warfare. >> well, both sides claimed victory. so why does this so-called battle of hampton roads have such a mythic inspirational, artistic quality to it? every seventh grader knows about the monitor and the merrimac who studies american history. who is it that this became so myth im in our historical im imagination? >> first of all, it was observed by so many people on shore. this was not far from the shoreline. second, we have the artistic happenstance of the good guys, and of course the good guys are the ones that do the drawings and paintings, meaning the north. the good guys spewed white smoke and the bad guys spewed black smoke. one was a relic, one was new technology. but i think the real reason is that this here was the end of the era we were joking about a few minutes ago, with a reference to flynn movies. this was the end of the era of the wooden warship and it's romanticized impact on the culture, and sailers bravely shooting cannons in the face of fire. this was, in a way, the dehumanization of war as war shifted from men to machines and there was a sense, after this, hlt win the war. >> let's see an image of the man and the machine. what was lincoln's reaction to this achievement, and was he still as drawn to the new technology as he had been initially? >> by the way, i'm struck by how toy-like the boat looks in that drawing on the bottom. so after the battle, it gets a little warmer in virginia and they've put up this amazing canvas tent to shield the turret from the sun, but that's the turret. do you see all the rivets? this turret was recovered years later from the bottom of the sea and it's being restored now in newport news at the monitor center, as it's called. but i think the most extraordinary thing about this post-battle depiction is, if you look to the left of the porthole in the picture, in the photograph, you see the indentations, the pock marks that reflect the confederate shells hitting that turret as it revolved slowly around without any constraint and without any monitor during the battle. regarding lincoln, he was always interested in technology. remember, he is the only american president to hold a patent for an invention. what was the invention? it was a boat. it was a boat that would lift itself above shoals in shallow waters to be able to navigate the muddy streams of illinois. it was never manufactured, but he did devise it in some of his idle hours and the actual model of that is in the national archives. so he loved ships, even though he was a land lover and he always like technology. and during the civil war some people said his office would sometimes look like a gun store, filled with weapons. so he encouraged the creation of armor, guns, balloons, both for spying a spying and meteorological balloons. one of his inventors had a double barrel gun and he said it was designed for cross-eyed soldiers so they could shoot both sides of the river at the same time. at a more deadly level, because lincoln pleevd th lincoln believed this, he said breath alone kills no rebels. he encouraged niter, which is a primitive form of napon for war time. it was all about new technologies. and he used to walk around the grounds firing new kinds of weaponry. there's a great sketch of him doing that. so, yes, fascinated with technology and a big booster of military technology, as deadly as it became. >> if we could just see that image of the monitor one more time, the half model. this is the technological achievement. >> donated in 1862. that's pretty remarkable. donated right around the time the monitor and the merrimac engaged in one-on-one combat. >> it was great awareness of its historical importance, even then. so i think we're about ready for our q&apportion of the evening. and our first question is do we know of any examples of crucial messages that were interpreted by the cipher key? >> well, we dink -- that's a good question. we think the cipher was used to convey messages at the battle of shiloh, for one. the battle of shiloh probably should have been a confederate route that ended the career of ulyss ulysses s. grant before it matured. there was a surprise attack, for which the union was unprepared and a total route, somehow the union rallied and held back a total route on that first day, and lived to fight another day. grant famously turned to sherman and said get them tomorrow, and they did. so i would think, you know -- remember, the messages are maintain the seerk racrecy of battlefield instructions, but they don't ensure they're the right instructions. so it's still left to the human brain and tactical and strategic skill to win a battle. and grant, no doubt, had his own codes and his own vision to guide him back. >> next question, was the wreck of the monitor ever recovered, and if so, where is it displayed? >> we got into a little of that. so the ship was followed by many monitors, but the original was pretty famous. but it was never tremendously seaworthy. it should have stayed very close to shore. instead, it was dispatched out to cape hatteras, which is a famous graveyard for naval vessels. and on new year's day, 1862, so just nine months after it became the most famous ship in the union navy, it sank off cape hatteras, and there it remained for 145 years, until the national oceanic and aeronautic association located it. parts of it were recovered. the hull had disintegrated, although the shape was discernible to divers. but they brought up the dolgren gun, they brought up the turret, which is an amazing achievement, and they brought up lanterns and coins and dinner wear and spoons and all of them now are at the mariner's center. and the gun and the turret sit in a saline tank outdoors. you can walk up a plank to see it. and there, slowly, these bubbles and oxygenation is being applied and the crustaceans are being removed from the relic. in five more years you'll be able to see the actual turret. you can already see some of the dents from the confederate shelling. >> how exciting. that's great. >> yeah. >> here is a question, actually, that came up when i was re-reading the essay. wasn't the merrimac renamed the virginia and do northerners refer to call it the merrimac? how did that nomenclature work out? >> if you read the period newspapers or look at the engravings and lithographs, most of them say merrimac. it was the uss merrimac, it was aship the confederates had seized and they said let's not call it that american name, let's call it virginia after the state we're in. the name never really caught on. the purists always say the virginiaen. it goes by both. i call it the merrimac more often than not. >> that's the way i learned about it when i first studied it. >> you left it open, val. yes, they both claimed victory. but because the virginia was so slow and heavy, when the tide went down, it left. if you leave the field of battle, that's losing. and then by another calculation, the monitor was able to prevent any further destruction to the outdated wooden fleet. so it was a victory by those standards, too. even though by winning the victory it sort of spelled the doom of the wooden navy itself. everything would become iron after that. >> back to the naming of the monitor and merrimac, do northerners prefer to call it the merrimac or that just sort of seems to sound right? >> it sounds right. i mean, i think northerners prefer it because it sounds like of past, that we had our way with, i guess. civil war historians more often say the virginian. it's probably the only ship to be burned twice, because when the union army marched near norfolk and looked about to capture the boatyard there, the confederates burned the virginia so it could not be taken over by the union. and so it vanished yet again. >> interesting. so here's a question about the cipher again. what is revolutionary about it? it seems very simple to this person who posed the question. >> right. i think the whole notion of carrying around on one's person a wheel or a booklet that would allow you to transpose letters and actually change the cipher during the course of a battle or a campaign, as long as both sides understood what the new code was, was pretty revolutionary. and, again, there was an understood symbol of flags, flag signals and torch signals, but that couldn't easily change because what conservative sttit letter was a letter. morris code was morris code. so the cipher allowed you to switch out and you could change it every week. you could prearrange to change it every week. the whole alphabet would shift. so i think it's pretty ingenious and very, very portable. >> yeah. off topic time of the evening, did you find the recent find three-part tv series on grant to be accurate and fair? >> oh, that's a heavy question. so i thought it was more than fair, more than accurate in some ways. i mean, it stressed the great achievements of grant and his amazing talent for seeing action, for relentlessness and it made a very strong case that he did not win the war just because of superior numbers and ruthlessness and willingness to take casualties, but out of a master plan. what it didn't do was talk about his shortcomings, and one of them that i think is always worth remembering is that in his zeal to route out spies and disloyalty and misperceptions, he banned all jews from his theatre of the war in 1862, and in effect instituted a program that saw jews from kentucky just leaving their homes in search of refuge. and this order had been countered by lincoln's insistence when rabbis went to the white house to say let my people go back and lincoln obliged them, although he took pains not to embarrass grant. so i think the series could have spent a little time on his shortcoming, including his drinking, which was alluded to only briefing at the beginning. but i thought the actor that portrayed grant was pretty good. he was good. the lincoln, not so much. >> not so much. >> too skinny, too short. had the mole on the wrong side of his cheek in one scene. anyway -- >> back to our objects. were there other nations who made ironclad ships around the same time as the monitor? >> that's a really good question. in fact, ours were not the first. the french made a few before the civil war. but they were also more unwielding and they were never permanently adopted as a design or style. once the monitor combines both keeping most of your sailers under the waterline and having them breathe, right, solving that problem, getting them out of harm's way and keeping a gun up above and also having it rotate, that was the new design of choice. everything would follow that. there was sub melittle three or four-man things that were sort of torpedoes that never came back. and also battleship guns that can turn around and follow the action. >> back to our cipher codes, did either side ever break the cipher codes during the war? >> there were some instances of a cipher being broken. before a battle, some orders that i believe were in cipher -- someone will correct me. the good thing about our series is i'm corrected every week if i make a miscue. i get lots of great info from the straight and narrow. so there were orders that were found rolled into a cigar and they were discovered, decoded, and it didn't help mcclellen enough. it was not sufficient. but, yeah, codes were broken. so, again, you just moved the bar, as they say. >> back to our man, chisolm, was he wrong with anderson and fort sumpter? was there any hope of the union army relieving him if he held out? >> that's a really good question. so anderson was told by the lincoln administration that his fort would not be reinforced, it would be resupplied. he was running out of ammunition, so he had no way to defend himself for much longer and the supply ships were turned back by the shelling, so he didn't even get food and water. but there's a great story about anderson. he was allowed to leave. there were casualties because an area of the fort blew up during the flag ceremony, not during the shelling. he took the flag with him. he went on a boat and went all the way back to new york, center of the universe even then, and he admitted that when he was on the ship to new york he did not know whether he was going to be given a court-martial or a parade. well, guess what? he was given a parade. his flag was draped over the equestrian statue of george washington that sits in union square park and 100,000 people came out. and then a few days later when the seventh regimen, new york's elite regimen marched down broadway to board ships to head to virginia and fight, they passed by a jewelry company called ball black, which had a pediment on which major anderson stood waving with the flag of fort sumpter blowing in the breeze. it came a great symbol of resistance, ultimately, and anderson went on to continuous, although not so a dramatic career in the union army. >> one more question about cryptology. did it advance at all during the civil war? >> i think what you saw is what you got. has it advanced more since? i'm not sure it's advanced more since from the basic premise of substituting letters. i mean, when radio came in, of course messages were sent to the resistance in europe during world war ii and the messages would be in code, like the church bells will ring at 4:00, which meant something completely opposite. but the underground had absorbed that it would be a signal. but basically i think the cipher was the big advance. and, remember, before that do it by land or sea. that was the idea of the cipher before the civil war. >> well, as always, a pleasure. it looks like our time is up. harold, thank you for being such a compelling and gracious guest. and thank you all for watching and listening and for supporting new york historical society. we'll see you all again next week. >> thank you, val. >> thank you. >> announcer: you're watching american history tv. every weekend on c-span3, explore our nation's past. c-span3, created by america's cable television companies as a public service, and brought to you today by your television provider. >> announcer: week nights this month, we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. tonight, a look at hiroshima, nagasaki and the end of world war ii. august 9th marked 75 years since the u.s. dropped a second atomic bomb on japan, devastating the city of nagasaki days after the first attack on hiroshima. we examine president harry truman's decision to use the weapon and the legacy of the attacks. guests include richard frank, author of "downfall" and peter kusnik, director of the nuclear studies institute. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 eastern. american history tv, this week and every weekend on c-span3. >> announcer: american history tv on c-span3, exploring the people and events that tell the american story, every weekend. coming up this weekend, saturday, at 10:00 a.m. eastern, on american artifacts, library of congress curator, on life in the 1930s and '40s, through color photographs, and sunday at 4:00 p.m. eastern, on real america, three films on the 1976 elections, produced by the u.s. information agency, for an international audience. then at 8:00 p.m. eastern on the presidency, acceptance speeches from five presidential nominees, harry truman, stevenson, dwight eisenhower, john kennedy, and richard nixon. exploring the american story. watch american history tv. this weekend on c-span3. up next on the civil war, matt adkinson discusses the post-war life of robert e. lee. he highlights the efforts to promo promote an attitude towards southerners and his time at the college now own as washington and lee university. >> what we're

Related Keywords

Brooklyn , Virginia , United States , New York , Japan , South Carolina , Washington , Kentucky , Hiroshima , Minnesota , Hamptonroads , Illinois , Whitehouse , District Of Columbia , France , America , Virginian , French , Japanese , American , Harry Truman , Abraham Lincoln , Richard Frank , Andrew Johnson , Harold Holzer , John Kennedy , John Erickson , Robert Chism ,