Library Corner: A Few Battlefield Guides

As you might have guessed, my day job has kept me quite busy over the last month or two. Hence the lack of posts. Though I haven't had much time for blogging, I have squeezed in a few battlefield visits. At the end of July I spent a full day hiking at Manassas National Battlefield, while this past weekend I visited sites on the Petersburg National Battlefield and at Pamplin Park.

View looking over the Stone House and toward Buck Hill and Matthew's Hill at Manassas.

I have visited the Manassas National Battlefield before, though it's been nearly a decade and I never had much of a chance to take advantage of the park's forty-plus miles of trails. On the last weekend of July, I decided to change that. Armed with plenty of water and snacking provisions, a trail guide obtained at the Visitor Center, a copy of John Hennessy's Return to Bull Run, and the Civil War Trust's Second Manassas App on my phone, I set off on the 6.2 mile Second Manassas trail. This loop trail starts on Henry House Hill and covers most of the battlefield, including the Stone House, Buck Hill, a good portion of the Unfinished Railroad Cut, Groveton, and Chinn Ridge. I opted to hike an extra mile or two by adding on the Brawner Farm loop. All told, I was able to cover most of ground the battle was fought over - from the opening shots on the Brawner Farm on August 28th, 1862, to John Pope's attacks against the Railroad Cut on the 29th and 30th, and concluding fittingly with James Longstreet's counterattack that swept Pope's army from the field on the afternoon of the 30th.

The position of Stephen D. Lee's Confederate artillery, which was so effective
against Pope's assaults on the Railroad Cut.

When I finished my tour, I had just enough time to poke my head into the Visitor Center's bookstore. Here I picked up a nice looking guidebook for my next visit: Ethan Rafuse's Manassas: A Battlefield Guide. This book came out in 2014 as part of the University of Nebraska's This Hallowed Ground: Guide to Civil War Battlefields series. Though I wasn't able to use it on the field, I spent quite a few days after my visit perusing the guidebook, and it looks quite useful. The book contains detailed battlefield tours of both First and Second Manassas, as well as campaign excursions that guide you to sites further afield from the National Park. Each stop contains several subsection headings, including: directions, orientation, what happened, analysis, vignette, and further reading. The book also contains numerous illustrations and superb maps drawn by Erin Greb.

Monument to the 5th New York - Duryee's Zouaves. In just a short ten minutes, this regiment lost 332 men
of 525 engaged. Of these 121 were killed or mortally wounded.

I found myself pouring over the book for days after my visit. Those who cannot make it to Second Manssas will assuredly find it a useful resource, but the book is intended for use on the battlefield, and I can't wait to find an excuse to get back to Manassas with it in hand.

Just this past weekend, I took a trip down to Petersburg, another battlefield that I have not visited in nearly a decade. My wife came along for the ride - her first visit. We started our day poking around at the Eastern Front Visitor Center, and then followed the Eastern Front driving tour, getting out of car at several points to follow some of the short interpretive trails. We utilized the Civil War Trust's Petersburg App. I really cannot say enough good things about the various battlefield apps that the Civil War Trust has developed - they are incredibly useful on the battlefield.

Monument to the 1st Maine Heavy
Artillery. In their charge on June 18th,
1864, this unit suffered 604 casualties.

After following the interpretive trail around the Crater, we took a break for lunch. While we had originally planned to continue our tour by visiting the various forts of the Western Front, but the day was quite hot and humid, and we decided instead to spend our afternoon visiting Pamplin Park and the National Museum for the Civil War Soldier. I've always enjoyed the museum here, and thought it'd be a good way to beat the heat. For those have not visited, all guests receive an audio headset to guide them through the museum. As you enter each room, the audio player automatically begins to play an overview of the exhibit. Once the overview is done, you can enter numbers to learn more about any of the displays. Meanwhile, you are also assigned a particular soldier before entering the exhibit area, and as you progress through the museum special kiosks enable you to learn more about the soldier you've chosen to follow, through the soldiers own words and other primary sources. The museum hasn't changed much since my first visit ten years ago, but I still found it as enjoyable.

Outside of the museum, Pamplin Park preserves and interprets Tudor Hall Plantation and the site of the Battle of the Breakthrough on April 2nd, 1865. Tudor Hall was the home of the Boisseau family. Here they interpret not only life on an antebellum plantation, but also Tudor Hall's use as a Confederate encampment during the winter of 1864-1865. Visitors can take advantage of a number of programs and tours offered by living historians. We decided to simply use our audio guides as we traversed the plantation and the Breakthrough Trail, where we explored the Confederate earthworks that were carried by the Army of the Potomac's Sixth Corps, ending the Siege of Petersburg.

To cap off the day, I took some time once again to browse Pamplin Park's bookstore, and located another battlefield guide, this time a Guide to the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, edited by Charles R. Bowery, Jr. and Ethan Rafuse (again). This book features maps by the ubiquitous Steve Stanley.  Also published in 2014 (by the University of Kansas), this guide is a bit different from the Manassas Guide. As part of the U.S. Army War College Guides to Civil War Battles series, it is much more in-depth and designed for the serious student of military history. Clocking in at more than 400 pages, the book features two parts: part one explores the main portion of Petersburg National Battlefield, or the Eastern Front. Part two offers several excursion tours, including City Point, sites north of the James River outside of Richmond, and sites associated with Grant's westward movements and the fall of Petersburg.

At each stop, the book provides a brief overview of events, orienting the visitor and situating the combat in that particular area into the context of the overall siege. After these brief explanations, each stop then provides a series of lengthy battle accounts designed to be read while viewing the terrain. Most of these accounts are from the Official Records, and they are a mix of voices from the strategic and operational leadership of both armies. 

I've enjoyed browsing through both battlefield guides, and look forward to using them on the field.

A Brief Stop in Auburn

This past weekend I traveled to Buffalo for a wedding. The return trip on Sunday afternoon included a detour to Auburn to visit the house of William H. Seward, famed New York politician and Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. I don't think historians have ever truly relegated Seward to the shadows, but in recent years there has been a bit of a renaissance of scholarship, including Dorris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, and just last year, Walter Starh's biography, Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man. The Seward House has had its fair share of attention recently as well, most of it stemming from the controversy surrounding an original Thomas Cole painting that once had a prominent place on the first floor.

The house was built in 1816 by Elijah Miller, Seward's future father-in-law. When William married Frances Seward, her father consented on the condition that the couple would continue to reside at the house. William called this place home for the rest of his life, though he was absent from it frequently and for long stretches of time. During his political career Seward traveled the world and rented homes in Albany and in Washington, but his home in Auburn was the only one he ever owned. For her part, Frances Seward rarely left Auburn, choosing to remain there rather than joining her husband in Washington.

If you are ever traveling through this area of New York State, this house tour is worth allocating a few hours. The visitor experience at the Seward House mirrors traditional historic house tours. Aside from a few areas, the house is only open to tours guided by museum staff and volunteers. We arrived  a bit after 1:00 p.m., and had some time to kill before the next tour of the house began at 2. We headed down to the basement of the house where a small but extremely well-done panel exhibit told the story of the Seward Family and the Underground Railroad. Seward cultivated a national reputation through the 1850s as one of the preeminent antislavery voices in the Senate, but less well known is that Seward backed up his rhetoric with action. Despite significant political risk, solid evidence reveals that the Seward family assisted fugitive slaves seeking to escape to Canada, and harbored at least two fugitives in their home at Auburn. Seward also sold property in town to Harriet Tubman. The exhibit also discussed the rest of the Seward family's positions on slavery, particularly his wife Frances and daughter Fanny. Frances, raised as a Quaker and educated at Emma Willard in Troy, New York, was even more radical than her husband when it came to slavery.

At two, our tour began, and a college student from Washington College in Maryland led us through the various rooms of the house, beginning on the first floor with the drawing room, library, and an expansive dining room. Recounting Seward's status as an excellent host, it was easy to imagine the dining room filled with cigar smoke and tumblers of brandy while Seward cultivated important political connections. The house is filled with an amazing collection of Seward family artifacts. Many of these pieces are original to the home, but many more also came from Seward's home in Washington. Included are several original portraits and other paintings created by Emanuel Leutze, a friend of the family, and the painter of "Washington Crossing the Delaware."

The second floor of the home included several period bedrooms, and two rooms set up to display various family artifacts, one room called "The Alaska Room," the other called "The Civil War Room." Some of the incredible items featured in the Civil War Room included uniforms worn by Seward's sons during the Civil War, the New York State flag carried by William H. Seward Jr.'s regiment, the 9th New York Heavy Artillery, portions of the bloody sheet from Lewis Powell's assassination attempt, and pressed flowers from Abraham Lincoln's coffin, given to Seward by Mary Todd Lincoln. Meanwhile, the Alaska Room contained several masks related to the native cultures of Alaska, and a gold ring, one of only five made from the golden spike that connected the Transcontinental Railroad.

The hallway of the second floor also contained a very unique feature. In this space Seward himself numbered and hung nearly two hundred portraits of noteworthy individuals. I believe the guide said that Seward had personally met all but two of those pictured. Lincoln's portrait Seward hung as number 66. Significantly, Seward hung his own portrait as 66 1/2, a symbol of how close the two became, or perhaps how close Seward came to the Presidency in 1860.

This stately home tucked away in upstate New York contains some incredible treasures related to one of the most significant political figures of the 19th Century. If you happen to be in the area, it's well worth a visit.

News and Notes: New Exhibit at the New York State Military Museum

I've arrived at a very busy time of year for my day job, but I'm trying to keep up with some posts here and there. I'm currently at work on a new post (potentially multiple posts) related to the 15th Massachusetts monuments at Gettysburg and Antietam. I should have something up later this week.

In the meantime, I discovered the other day that the New York State Military Museum in Saratoga is hard at work developing a Civil War exhibit which should open next month. They even gave a sneak preview to Wayne Motts, CEO of the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg. According to The Saratogian, Lance Ingmire of the New York State Sesquicentennial Committee has been the driving force behind the exhibit, which will feature some incredible pieces, including the coat worn by Elmer Ellsworth.

This museum is a pretty neat - though small - institution that is located in an old armory in downtown Saratoga Springs. I've gone through several times, but it's been a while. I look forward to checking the Civil War exhibit out this summer, and I'll definitely provide a full review when I do. This marks the second major exhibit on New York State in the Civil War over the past few years. Last September the New York State Museum in Albany opened An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War.

"They Walked Through Blood" at the Museum of the Confederacy

The Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond opens a new exhibit today on Pickett's Charge. Entitled "They Walked Through Blood," the exhibit will feature a number of incredible personal artifacts and remembrances of soldiers who participated in the charge, the swords of all three brigade commanders in Pickett's division, and eight battle flags from the division captured in the charge. The exhibit will be on view until September of 2014.

The Civil War Monitor Catches up with Met Curator Jeff Rosenheim

Following up on my review of the Met's new exhibit on Civil War photography - you can view a nice interview with curator Jeff Rosenheim over at the Civil War Monitor. Worth a look.

Photography and the American Civil War

I have always found that April is a great time to visit New York City, as spring arrives there a few weeks before it stretches northward to Cooperstown. On a trip to the City this past weekend, in addition to enjoying the beautiful weather I also managed to make it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its Photography and the American Civil War exhibit. I have looked forward to seeing this show for quite some time, and it did not disappoint. We arrived at the museum in the middle of Saturday afternoon. For those of you who have never been to the Met, the middle of a Saturday afternoon in springtime is probably not the best time to go. The place was packed, and Photography and the American Civil War seemed like the exhibit everyone wanted to see. In the first few rooms I had to move slowly in a line from photograph to photograph. Luckily, this exhibit is a large one, and I found that as I proceeded, museum fatigue set in amongst other visitors, creating a bit more space.

Utilizing an impressive array of over 200 photographs, Photography and the American Civil War analyzes the role of the camera during the Civil War, and explores the personalities and artistic contributions of some of the most prominent men behind the camera. I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of historical content in this exhibit. As someone interested in history and admittedly a novice when it comes to art, I often wish art museums would add more historical context to their exhibits. While the focus was most certainly art, the exhibit also contained a nice narrative structure that explained how the emerging medium of photography helped to shape the way Americans experienced, understood, and remembered the war. And while art museum labels are notoriously skimpy on details, no one could complain about the brevity of the labels for each photograph in this exhibit. Each of the more than 200 photographs had its own unique story. For that reason alone, one could spend hours immersed in examining each individual image. Most of these photographs come from the Met's own incredible collection, while important loans from public and private collections round out the show.
 
Photography and the American Civil War was a well designed exhibit. Canvas lined the walls in many of the rooms to replicate the feel of an encampment and Met curators imposed an effective thematic structure to the layout of each gallery. The first few rooms introduced the process and types of photographs, and explained the growing importance of photos to Americans of all classes. These rooms also showed the importance of images to the election of 1860, introduced visitors to Matthew Brady and his Washington Gallery manager, Alexander Gardner, and displayed photographs of Fort Sumter taken days after the start of the war. The next section featured a vast number portraits of all types and sizes. This room contained images of famous generals, unknown privates, women, and enslaved individuals. One particular image that caught my eye was a portrait of a Confederate officer with his enslaved body servant standing behind him in what appears to be a Confederate uniform. The caption explained that this portrait was one of only a handful of photographs known to exist of a slave in Confederate uniform.

As you advance through each room of this show, you begin to understand the importance of the camera to the way people experienced, recorded and remembered the war. In addition to the famous battlefield landscapes and death studies, other subjects received equal attention - including portraits, homefront images, ruined city landscapes, and gruesome photos of wounded soldiers taken for medical documentation. Throughout the exhibit visitors are introduced to the men behind the camera, and the exhibit attempts to engage the visitor in thoughts about what these cameramen were trying to convey. The show highlights the work of many photographers, especially the men who went to war under the employment of Matthew Brady and later Alexander Gardner. The works of Timothy O'Sullivan, James F. Gibson, and John Reekie receive a good deal of attention. Most of all though - the second half of the show focuses mostly on four individuals: Alexander Gardner, Andrew Joseph Russell, George N. Barnard, and Reed Brockway Bontecou.

A Harvest of Death, by Timothy O'Sullivan, was one of the images featured from Gardner's Sketchbook of the War.

Gardner takes center stage, a fact I enjoyed immensely. Nothing annoys me more than when museums identify photographs taken by Gardner and his corps of cameramen as Brady photos, especially when those photos were taken after the Gardner/Brady split. In this exhibit, the history of Gardner and his relationship with Brady is explained early, and the Scot is given his rightful due as perhaps the most important photographer during the war. The exhibit devotes an entire room to Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War, published in 1866 and featuring 100 photos taken by Gardner and cameramen such as O'Sullivan, Gibson, and Reekie. Many of the labels here quote extensively from Gardner's own captions, and discuss how Gardner's Sketchbook utilized his photographs and captions to craft a narrative of the war that matched his own bias.

Another room focuses on Andrew Joseph Russell, the only photographer who also served in the Union army. A captain in the 141st New York, Russell was employed by Herman Haupt, and was eventually detached from his regiment to serve in the United States Military Railroad Construction Corps. Much of his work focused on Union engineering and transportation, but he also managed to capture other scenes, including incredible photographs taken just hours after the 6th Corps had captured Mayre's Heights during the Battle of Chancellorsville.

George N. Barnard's Battle Ground of Resacca, GA No. 1

In the section of the exhibit on George N. Barnard, visitors were asked to compare and contrast his work with that of Alexander Gardner. Both photographers published a collection of their work after the Civil War. Barnard's was Photographic Views of Sherman's March. Due to the pace of Sherman's advance through Georgia, Barnard did not have the opportunity to capture as much as he wanted along the route as the army's official photographer. To remedy this, Barnard traveled back across the route during the summer of 1866. While Gardner's work often included shots of individuals and groups and battlefield wreckage, Barnard often focused on landscapes devoid of any human life. For example, Barnard captured the wreckage of the Battle of Resaca by photographing shattered trees. He also superimposed clouds into the sky in his photographs. And whereas Gardner framed his reader's interpretation of his photographs by preceding each with his own caption, Barnard chose to let his photos stand on their own, publishing his own commentary separately.

Perhaps the most powerful photographs of the exhibit were contained in the room devoted to work of Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou. Here visitors saw photographed soldiers with horrific wounds. Bontecou captured these images and collected them as a medical teaching album. Many of the photographs feature hand-drawn arrows indicating the path of a bullet or projectile as it entered and exited human flesh. Around this gallery the curators placed quotes from poet and nurse Walt Whitman, explaining that the "real war will never get in the books."

I could comment on many other facets of this exhibit, but I am afraid I still could not do it justice. If you live near New York City, or happen to have an opportunity to visit, this exhibit is well worth setting aside a few hours for. Jeff L. Rosenheim, the Met's curator of Photography, along with the rest of the curatorial staff, has put together an excellent exhibit. Photography and the American Civil War remains on view through September 2nd.

Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War

This past week I made an extremely brief, 24-hour stop in Gettysburg. While there, I managed to stop by Musselman Library on the Gettysburg College campus, to see Lincoln: The Constitution, and the Civil War. I apparently made it just in time, as the exhibit closes soon.

As the introductory panel indicates, the exhibition explores Lincoln's relationship with the Constitution in three areas: his policies toward secession, slavery, and civil liberties. The first panel asks the visitor to consider three questions: (1) Was the "United States" truly one, or was it a confederacy of sovereign and separate states; (2) How could a country founded on the belief "that all men are created equal" tolerate slavery; and (3) In a national crisis, would civil liberties be secure.

The first version of this exhibit was the Constitution Center's first originally produced feature exhibit back in 2005. In collaboration with the American Library Association, the Constitution Center later developed a traveling panel show of the exhibit, which has traveled to libraries around the country since 2009. Gettysburg College's library, fittingly, is one of its last stops.

While I am usually most interested in viewing exhibits to see unique artifacts, I found that this panel show laid out its themes very clearly and in a concise manner. It was also visually appealing - the designer did a great job of choosing compelling images to draw visitors in. Finally, I enjoyed the way the exhibit encourages us to consider difficult questions. For example - in the section on civil liberties, a panel draws intriguing connections between issues Lincoln grappled with and modern-day hot button topics:

How far could a president stretch his war powers without violating the Constitution?
What were the appropriate limits of dissent in wartime?

Lincoln wrestled with those issues then; we still debate them today.

The exhibit concludes by looking at Lincoln's legacy. It utilizes the powerful words of the Gettysburg address to show how Lincoln left the nation a set of ideals relating to equality, democracy, and freedom, and it asks viewers to consider whether the nation has been faithful to that legacy.

While the panel exhibit by definition lacked artifacts. The library did a great job of adding complimentary artifact displays on its own. Alongside this traveling exhibit on the first floor of Musselman Library, viewers could view a bronze bust of Lincoln's head sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, and an exhibit of Civil War period sheet music from the library's special collections archive. There was even a rather interesting exhibit of Lincoln-themed bookends on loan to the library from a private collector. In all, it was certainly worth a side trip.

As an aside: in doing a bit of research I came across an educational game that the Constitution Center designed for students to go along with the exhibition. The game puts students in Lincoln's shoes and asks them to consider his most difficult problems and make their own choices. You can find that game here.

Exhibitions: The New York State Museum's "An Irrepressible Conflict"

An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War opened in September 2012, and will remain open through September 2013.

Today I finally got a chance to stop by the New York State Museum in Albany to take in An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War. The show opened back in September, and will remain on view until September of 2013. The exhibition takes up 7,000 square feet of space in the museum, and features an incredible array of artifacts drawn from the collections of the State Museum, the New York State Library and Archives, and from institutions across the state. These artifacts are the great strength of this exhibit, and are worth the visit on their own (admission is free by the way). In an introductory panel, Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer tells us:

The story of the state’s crucial role in winning the Civil War and ending slavery has never before been fully told through the artifacts of the era. Together, those assembled for this exhibit show why New York—even then, even in the crucible of military and social revolution—was truly the state of the Union.

One of my favorite documents in the exhibit, an officer's commission for Philippe Régis Denis de Keredern de Trobriand, a French aristocrat and poet who had emigrated to the United States. He of course commanded the initial forces who held the Wheatfield at Gettysburg on July 2nd. This commission was part of a section detailing the wartime service of New York's immigrant population. Foreign-born men made up 30% of all New York soldiers during the war.

Bust of New York Native William Henry Seward.

The show divided into three basic themes, Antebellum New York, The Civil War, and Reconstruction & the War's Legacy. The section on Antebellum New York was clearly the strongest section, and perhaps the exhibit dwelt too long on this pre-war period. As I looked at the layout, it appeared that this one section occupied fifty percent of the floor space. The curators chose to start their story by discussing slavery in New York, and the fight within the state to emancipate its slaves and outlaw slavery in the early nineteenth century. The section then goes on to give a nice overview of the state before the war, and how it was rapidly changing. It covers the transportation revolution, the influx of immigrants,  the Second Great Awakening and the rise of the abolition movement. It also highlights prominent individuals in New York during this period, such as William H. Seward, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, John Brown, Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The first section ends with a discussion of the election of 1860 and New York's divided views on slavery.

Section Two focused on the four years of war, and each year received its own sub-section. Within these sub-sections, the curators attempted to tell the story of the war from many different vantage points: they highlighted famous New Yorkers and famous New York regiments, discussed the role of New Yorkers at important battles, delved into the economic impacts of the war with regard to the production of war materials, and touched on other topics such as medicine, conscription, emancipation and New Yorker reactions to emancipation, the wartime service of New York's African American population, wartime politics, and much more.

The final section, Reconstruction and the War's legacy, very briefly looked at the complicated legacy of Reconstruction, and how the war affected New Yorkers in later years. It highlighted veteran efforts to memorialize their service, and brought the story of the Civil War into the 20th century by highlighting the efforts of New Yorkers in the Civil Rights movement, and acknowledging the history of the Ku Klux Klan in the state.

Beyond its rich artifact collection, the exhibit does have some other strengths. While I am no exhibit designer myself, I did enjoy the show's look and feel. I particularly liked the use of wall color to clearly delineate each of the three major themes.

On the other hand, I also noticed some major weaknesses. In an effort to tell a broad story, the exhibit failed to go into great depth on any particular subject, and it also spent an inordinate amount of time on prewar themes and events. The building of the Erie Canal from 1817 to 1825 seemed to received more space than the New York City Draft Riots, the largest civilian insurrection in United States history. The controversial election of 1876, which featured New York's Democratic Governor Samuel Tilden and brought about the end of Reconstruction, earned just one sentence in the entire show.

The exhibit did not have much of an exploration of what life was like for New York women on the homefront. It also lacked any analysis of why New York soldiers chose to fight. Each topic that was explored, such as the role of specific regiments in major battles, or New York reactions to Emancipation, seemed to only scratch the surface before moving on to another topic.

I also found a number of small factual errors increasingly annoying as I went through the exhibit. At first I felt nit-picky. But the more they piled up, the more I began to question the depth of research that went into the exhibit. A few examples I noted:

• In its Gettysburg sub-section, the exhibit uses a large print of one of the most famous Civil War photographs, Timothy O'Sullivan's A Harvest of Death. The caption reads : "This photograph of Union troops killed on the first day at Gettysburg was taken by Timothy O'Sullivan, employed by Matthew Brady." The location of this photo is far from certain as discussed in the work of William Frassanito. While this mistake did not bother me much, identifying O'Sullivan as an employee of Matthew Brady did. While earlier in the war O'Sullivan did work for Brady, by Gettysburg he was working with Alexander Gardner, very much separated from Brady's studio, and in competition with it.
• Another label indicates that Grant received command of all Union forces late in 1863. This did not occur until March of 1864
• A label discussing Phil Sheridan's career read: "General Grant gave him command when he consolidated all of the Army of the Potomac's cavalry into a single corps." This of course happened long before Sheridan arrived in the east, and Joe Hooker was the one who consolidated the Army of the Potomac's cavalry into one corps in the spring of 1863.

All of these I realize are nit-picky details. Yet I would expect more of a major exhibition - and these readily identifiable errors led me to question the depth of research conducted.

One final critique I have is that the exhibit is in no way interactive, and I saw little effort made to improve the overall learning experience for children or for individuals who are hands-on learners. At the very least, the curators missed an great opportunity to allow visitors to engage with incredible materials available at the museum, as well as at the New York State Library and Archive. I know the State archives have phenomenal resources related to New York's regiments and soldiers, and I know that they have a good deal of this information readily available online. A few simple computer stations at the end of the exhibit would have allowed visitors to explore more information about particular regiments, or even look up an ancestor who may have fought for New York during the war.

The Battle Flag of the 11th New York, better known as the First Fire Zouaves. Their first commander, Elmer Ellsworth, was the first officer killed during the Civil War.

I found myself comparing this exhibition to two others that I have seen: the New York Historical Society's New York Divided show back in 2007, which focused on New York City in the Civil War, and the Missouri History Museum's The Civil War in Missouri, which I saw in 2011 but is still currently on view. The quality and significance of the artifacts brought together for An Irrepressible Conflict equaled or exceeded these two exhibitions. And yet, I found the New York State Museum's show lacking in the depth of the story that it tells. Perhaps if the curators had narrowed their story and approached their main themes by focusing on a handful of engaging New York personalities who experienced the war, they might have had the ability to tell a richer story.

Despite the weaknesses, the show is well worth a visit to the New York State Museum.