Person of the Year: 1862

If you like your history televised, and prefer talking heads (who doesn't) to documentaries, well American History TV on C-SPAN 3 every Saturday and Sunday is the place for you. This past weekend they broadcast a day-long seminar from the Library of Virginia in Richmond, co-hosted by the Museum of the Confederacy, where the assembled audience got to choose the "Person of the Year" for 1862.

  

Time Magazine started choosing its “Man” and then “Person of the Year” in 1927 and has continued doing so since then.  Last year’s conference in 1861 chose Abraham Lincoln. This year five historians presented five different historic figures and the audience voted at the end of the presentations. I think many would figure Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and George McClellan might make it in the top tier. But the other two who were presented were perhaps not so obvious. David Blight, Director of Yale University’s Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition spoke in favor of Frederick Douglass and James McPherson, Civil War Scholar & Princeton University History Professor Emeritus advocated for David Glasgow Farragut.

Frederick Douglass
Unidentified Photographer 1856

Blight stated that in 1862 Douglass was in the fifteenth year of editing the longest running black anti-slavery newspaper ever, originally known as the North Star, was the single most sought after anti-slavery orator in the country, was the author of more than 1000 editorials in anti-slavery newspapers, had given hundreds of speeches and had written two autobiographies. The first The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was by then a classic and best-seller for its time, the second was My Bondage and My Freedom.  Both books had attained true literary fame in the U.S. and Britain as two of the best examples of the American genre in the memoir tradition. He was the most famous and important black person in the world.  Blight pointed out that in 1862 as the scale and purpose of the war was changing that Frederick Douglass, as the most famous fugitive slave in the world was truly a significant figure of his time.

David Farragut

James McPherson, spoke for David Glasgow Farragut, the Union naval officer and captor of New Orleans and lower Mississippi Valley in 1862. In his judgment the capture of New Orleans was one of the most important northern strategic victories of the war, making him as significant a figure as Grant or Sherman in winning the war. He pointed out that his allegiance to the U.S. in 1861 was an open question. He had been born in raised in Tennessee, lived in Norfolk, was married to a Virginian and had brothers in New Orleans, and Mississippi. When Abraham Lincoln called out the militia after Fort Sumter he expressed approval, and moved to New York. Although Farragut was sixty years old in 1861, he had the vigor and ambition of a younger man. He was respected by fellow officers, but was unknown when he was made Commander of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron. In planning the attack on New Orleans, the South’s leading port and largest city, he concluded the meeting with his commanders by saying “I believe in celerity (speed, swiftness)” McPherson pointed out that this was not a word that many Union officers were thinking about at the time.  The victory did help temporarily dampen European interest in supporting the South at the time and so had significance beyond the fields of fire. Farragut would soon be named the first Rear-Admiral in the U.S. Navy and was on his way to becoming its first full Admiral.

Oh, and this years winner was, who else, Robert E. Lee.