Examples of Completed Entries for the SHD Database

  • Episode Title: Aaron Shoveler's Draw
  • Episode Narrative:
    Fashion was illegal then. The free black man Aaron Shoveler had gathered with Cass, a worker at the Central Railroad, and their friends Jim and Charles, enslaved men on neighboring farms. They met after work one May evening to play a "fashionable" game until the early hours of the morning. As Aaron played his hand, William Craig and his lieutenants burst into the house, waking Jim's sleeping wife and upsetting the table. Craig's salary as Augusta County's chief of police was paid for just such disturbances as these: social interaction between slaves and free residents of Virginia often raised eyebrows, especially if these meetings permitted men and women of color to assume luxuries not often associated with their station. At the sight of the officers, Shoveler and Charles fled. Shoveler, whose large frame and scars betrayed his physicality, punched officer Fifer in the face in his unsuccessful attempt to escape. For their crimes, Jim and Charles received five lashes, the free blacks Aaron Shoveler and Cass, twenty each. Shoveler was handed over for further indictment for assault, though Fifer wasn't certain the free black man meant to hit him.

    Whether this was a formative experience for Shoveler is unknown. What is known is that Shoveler went on to become a key player in the transition of black men into the public sphere after the Civil War. As a trustee of the Methodist Episcopal church, he sought simultaneously to establish an independent black congregation while working within the codes of deference and the local networks that bounded black autonomy even during the Reconstruction era. He addressed the black community at public meetings in the crucial run-up to the election of 1867, when black Virginians voted for the first time, and he was nominated to represent Augusta County at the Republican Party state convention.

    At the heart of this narrative is the tension between the debasement that slavery and the racial codes brought to every black man and woman before the war, and their constant pressure against dehumanization within that system. Cracks always existed in the exploitive legal and social structure. Interactions across the color line were not nearly as smooth in Augusta County as historian Melvin Ely found them to be in antebellum Prince Edward County, Virginia, but some of the fluidity he encountered there surely did exist across the Blue Ridge. In the midst of the brutality of the antebellum South, some notions of justice can be read between the lines of the newspaper: Officer Fifer, even after suffering Shoveler's fist, didn't accuse the free man of color of intending to assault him. After emancipation, Shoveler was able to establish himself as a businessman, church builder, and political actor.

  • Date: May 15, 1857
  • Episode Location: Augusta County, Virginia
  • Event Keywords: African Americans, Arts/Leisure, Church/Religious Activity, Crime/Violence, Government/Politics, Race Relations, Slavery
  • Episode Scope: Local
  • Episode Citation: Augusta County, Virginia, Free Black Registry; Staunton Spectator, May 20, 1857; Valley Virginian, May 30, 1866; Staunton Vindicator, August 2, 1867, all accessed in Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia (http://valley.lib.virginia.edu); Marvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 456-468; Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003) 20-21.
  • Episode Title: News of Lincoln's Assassination Reaches Richmond, Virginia
  • Episode Narrative:
    News of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln took two days to arrive in Richmond, Virginia. On April 15, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, fatally shot Lincoln during a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, D. C. Booth then fled to the Virginia countryside, while the president lapsed into a coma for several hours before dying. Reports of the murder took several days to make their way to the ex-capital of the Confederacy, when Clara Shafer noted in her diary on April 17 that "the shocking news of the assassination of Lincoln in the Theatre at Washington arrived here to-day." Besides the death of the U. S. president, Clara also noted that Booth was suspected of the crime, and that Secretary of State William Seward had also been attacked. She did not, however, dwell on the news of Lincoln's death, soon moving on to record other events in her diary.

    For many white Southerners like Clara, the murder of Abraham Lincoln was simply one of many shocking events during April 1865. Two weeks earlier, Robert E. Lee and the Confederate government had abandoned Richmond--after a long siege by Union troops--and fled southward. Ulysses S. Grant and the U. S. Army pursued the Confederates until Lee finally surrendered on April 9, 1865, effectively ending the Civil War and dashing all Southern hopes of separate nationhood. The news of the defeat of the Confederacy, and the surrender of Lee's army in particular, hit Confederates like Clara hard. What would the future hold, white Southerners were left to wonder, now that they had lost the war that had wrought such devastation in places like Richmond? Clara, for her part, fretted in her diary about what Union soldiers would do to the inhabitants of Richmond when they took control of the city, worrying most about the black troops. The news of Abraham Lincoln's death did not breathe new life into Confederacy, as Booth had hoped it would. For Clara, as for many, it was instead simply one of many appalling events that seemed to stack on top of one another during the last few weeks of the American Civil War.

  • Date: April 17, 1865
  • Episode Location: Richmond, Virginia
  • Event Keywords: African Americans, Crime/Violence, Government, Politics, Health/Death, Race Relations, War
  • Episode Scope: Local, State, Regional, National
  • Episode Citation: Clara Shafer Diary, Mss. 12456, Special Collections Library, University of Virginia; James McPherson, Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, pp. 482-83.

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