If it was funny in 1863, will it seem funny to readers now? The context can make it work, or not. One way I get in a lot of old-time detail is to have people joke or make disaparaging remarks about current events: insult a politician; belittle or be shocked by a cause or political view; etc. Seems a more interesting way to get at these historical issues without somebody giving a speech about them, etc.
In the chapter I’m revising today, “Pen or sword,” Nov. 1863, in Union camp in Prospect, TN, I want to show the Union soldiers’ (grudging, growing) acceptance that the war must end slavery.
So, their reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation from the previous Jan. 1863 is tempered by their reverence for Abraham Lincoln; they can’t simply disaparage or ignore its intended effects.
By the middle of 1863, blacks were joining segregated regiments, with white officers. My Ohio characters would know that the all-black 127th Ohio Volunteer infantry has become the 5th U.S. Colored Troops two weeks before my scene takes place, so I get them talking about it. I researched the white officers: the lieutenant colonel (second in command of a 1000 man regiment) was Giles W. Shurtleff, from Oberlin, Ohio. Oberlin College admitted blacks as early as the 1830’s, was an enclave for supporters of equal rights & abolition. Those might be the characteristics of a white man willing to be officer of black troops. I discover that Shurtleff was in fact an abolitionist — and Latin professor at Oberlin. He headed to Virginia from Ohio in mid-Nov. 1863, commanding a thousand blacks.
ANY HUMOR IN THIS PROPOSITION? I have my guys joke about the likelihood that all those brand new black soldiers following a white Latin professor around probably aren’t going to end up where they’re supposed to be no matter how well-meaning everyone is. Looking at the comic possibilties doesn’t bypass the prejudice, but adds the subtler, growing ability of at least some of the white soldiers to acknowledge that black soldiers have very trying circumstances. The humor helps everyone become more human.
In the same chapter, I’m trying to show that most of the white Ohio soldiers have the prejudices of the time in part because of ignorance of blacks and being not well educated. So when a white soldier dismissively says that a black man (a very clever inventor in my story) can’t invent something a white man wouldn’t have already thought of, I have someone point out to him that it was a black architect that thought up the first Pyramid. So they get in an argument that Egyptians aren’t negroes like in the U.S., but Egypt’s in Africa, etc.
To-day the humor works for me. I’ll have to see what I think to-morrow.
