In 1929, Henry Ford sent a questionnaire across the country to men and women aged 75 years or older that asked about their childhoods in the early 19th century. Over 100 people responded with detailed accounts of their lives and so collectively created a wealth of memories of one of the most transformative periods of American history.

Historical Resources intern Christine Driscoll has written a series of guest posts on the 1929 questionnaire.

In the 19^th century, politics and campaigns were the focus of debate and discourse in small towns. Naturally, the election of 1860 was particularly exciting as the future of the Union seemed to hang in the balance. Those who saw Lincoln speak recalled feeling an instant connection. At the same time there was vicious contention – some did not believe Lincoln would even survive the election. As it turned out, Lincoln survived, but the Union did not.

Although the 1929 Historical Questionnaire did not explicitly inquire about the Civil War or life during the Civil War, it made an enormous impact on the children in the frontier of Michigan – financially and emotionally, as prices for food increased and fathers or brothers went to war and sometimes did not return. As children, their memories were shaped by what affected them. For instance, one woman recalled that only three days into the school term, the teacher quit to enlist in the Union Army.

The bulk of responses came from Midwestern states and consequently few responses contained any mention of slavery. Virginia Parsons was one of the few respondents born in the South, and her family moved to the North deliberately to leave the environment in which women and children were kidnapped and sold.

Mattie Ford Swope, whose family owned slaves, remembered some men deviously took advantage of the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation:

When the Negroes were freed they were told that they must pay so much to obtain their freedom and I recall plainly how Northern men would set up a little office and how the negroes would line up even down the road to try to get a chance to purchase their freedom. My mother told our people that they need not pay, that Abraham Lincoln had issued the command that they be free. Those men may have been Southern men for all I know but of course we thought it could not be.

As we went through the questionnaires, we hoped to find a response from a person whose memory of slavery would be the most accurate – someone who was born a slave. As we neared the last box of responses, we were certain we wouldn’t find one until a man named Dave Williams began his response with “I was born a slave.”

His letter describes the same things as other children of the period –his childhood home, meals, games they played, and the chores he had. Unlike other children though, his chores were not the duty of a child helping his family, but forced manual labor for the plantation owner.

Most respondents were too young to participate in the Civil War and so only remember their fathers or uncles serving in the Union Army (anyone that wrote of the war and service came from the North). Mary Crook’s grandmother followed the news very carefully while her sons were in the service and held the opinion that “General McClellan ought to be shot.” Although young men were eager to sign up, it was a far more difficult decision for fathers, like Mary Crook’s, to leave their families and farms, especially on the frontier where the head of household was desperately needed. Dorothy Wait remembered her family’s solution.

Soldiers were formed into companies everywhere and we did not know how soon our home would be broken up. The men in our community, who were liable to draft, formed a pool and paid in fifty dollars each so in case they were drafted they could hire a substitute.

The respondents’ perspectives of the Civil War as it happened was limited by the news they could gather in their rural, agrarian towns. Few knew of slavery firsthand and even fewer saw any actual combat. Instead, the children from the west vividly remembered the altercations and conflicts that took place in their small spectator towns when Union Supporters and Southern Sympathizers clashed. Frank Barker witnessed a confrontation between two men at the general store when he was a small child:

An old “copperhead” came in and inquired for the letest [sic] news from the war front. The clerk had a brother in the ranks, and naturally was keen for all the news that could be gained, and replied to the questioner that the latest report was that the South had won a great victory with a heavy loss of life in the Union army. This was good news to the old copperhead and his reply was “good enough for them. If they want to go down there and fight for the wooleys, let them take what they get.” Instantly the clerk leaped over the counter and grabbed the old man by the beard with one hand, and held a cocked revolver in the other hand against his head, walked him to the door headed toward home, and told him, with a swift kick in his rear, “you toddle, look neither to the right or the left, and if ever I see you again I’ll shoot the life out of your worthless old carcus.”

Martin L. Armstrong remembered a Sexton threatening men who wanted to take down the Union Flag:

I remember during the Civil War, on going to church one morning a nice Flag was floating from the top of the church, some went to the Sexton to get him to take it down, his reply was, Gentlemen I would not give much for the life of a man that would attempt to take that Flag down.

The tension between those who believed the South should have been allowed to secede and those who believed in preserving the Union erupted again when Lincoln was assassinated. John McMillan Powers recalled going into the town of Battle Creek after it happened:

From the balcony of the Battle Creek House was hanging a rope, with a noose in it, and I was wondering what caused all these things and the crowd was still yelling and hollering. When the excitement quieted down we found a man who could tell us the cause of it, and he said: “That man in the grocery store, when the news of Lincoln’s murder came, says “I am glad of it, I am glad of it. He should have been killed long ago.” The crowd immediately got a cannon and put a blank cartridge and blew out the store door which he had locked up after he discovered the meaning of the words he had used.

Following Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson became President and the process of Reconstruction, which aimed to build a new egalitarian South, was dismantled. Living in the North, few, if any, respondents noticed this change. It is only brought up in Dave Williams’ response to question 15, an open-ended question that asked the respondent to record what they wanted to pass on for posterity. Williams, who was born a slave, did not write about slavery but disenfranchisement:

After we were set free it was several year before we were allowed to vote, the white people said we had no right to vote and caused much trouble. Often negroes were turned back at the poles [sic], or persuaded to vote like the white man wantid [sic] them to vote.

The Civil War has been the subject of countless books, films, and other works of art, but these will always be secondary sources of information and far more comprehensive in their scope than the war was for most Americans. It’s interesting to read about the war from the perspective of someone who lived in the same town that you do, 150 years earlier. More than 100 men and women from all different kinds of backgrounds wrote about their memories of the Civil War in the Historical Questionnaire.