Refined Research Topic Statement

Specifics
I’m planning to focus on the nature of and rhetoric behind violence in the Pinkertons’ involvement in putting down the Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania 1892, and particularly would like to contrast the Pinkertons’ involvement in putting down labor union strikes with their involvement in the Civil War. The violent suppression of labor union strikes seems to me to be the next major example after the Civil War of Americans fighting other white Americans. While it is highly unlikely that the Pinkertons or Pinkerton forerunners who participated in Civil War espionage campaigns were also around to take part in putting down the Homestead Strike, it strikes me that organizationally and rhetorically, there may be some carry-over from Civil War involvement to putting down strikes. What may be the case is that soldiers at large who fought in the Civil War may have gone on to become Pinkertons (if I find this, then I have hit paydirt), or that at least, as I’ve said before, there is some kind of overlap, given that the Civil War was a pivotal moment in shaping Americans’ understanding of doing violence to other white Americans.

Argument
While I’m really nowhere near ready to make a prediction about the course my argument will take based on my evidence, I do expect that there will be some serious similarity behind the rhetoric that soldiers, for instance, use to justify their fighting and that of Pinkertons and workers fighting in labor strikes. Because of the jarring similarities between the two combatants in the Civil War, soldiers in many cases looked to other defining characteristics in order to justify fighting other American, to define themselves, and to distance themselves from the enemy. Pinkertons and workers seem to me to be in the same situation, and I suspect that this kind of distancing of self from enemy is perhaps a skill perfected in the Civil War, and perhaps even one that Pinkertons who infiltrated enemy camp in the Civil War may have capitalized on.

Significance
I believe that it is always of interest to dissect the reasons why we fight other humans—what drives us to believe that violence is acceptable and even necessary, and the kind of violence we carry out, and against whom. Particularly salient and troubling is violence between people who are, in general, united. Understanding how working men are able to make war on and even kill other working men like themselves is, I think, worth some investigation and reflection.
More specifically, however, I view the Civil War as an essential redefinition of war and violence in the United States. As the first instance of real “total war,” the Civil War set precedents for the major violent encounters that followed it, particularly the wars against Native American peoples in the West and, quite possibly, the violent labor strikes in the latter half of the 19th century. I believe that the Civil War revolutionized the face of violent conflict in the United States, and that the effect of the emergence of total war in America is not limited to what we traditionally consider “war,” but may even manifest itself in domestic conflicts like labor disputes.

Primary Literature
For primary accounts of both Civil War experience and labor dispute experience, I expect that I can look into memoirs and correspondence of those involved—the Valley of the Shadow Project, for instance, is one place I might start looking for Civil War correspondence and diaries. Some accounts of labor disputes, particularly the Homestead Strike, occur in newspaper articles about the strike, and I would like to follow up on those leads and see if I can find memoirs and correspondence from the same people. Other primary accounts could include the contracts with which Andrew Carnegie hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or internal documents pertaining to the Pinkertons. I know that William T. Sherman’s memoirs and correspondence, for instance, are available, and I am considering using them as a way of examining the changing face of warfare in the US, particularly during his “March to the Sea.” Other memoirs that deal with Sherman’s March are also available, and they could complement the Valley of the Shadow Project well.

Secondary Literature
I have a fantastic and huge stack of secondary literature. Some of it is as general as histories—particularly telling the story of Sherman’s March to the Sea or the Homestead Strike. I also have some histories of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, so I can construct a narrative of its involvement both in the Civil War and in labor disputes. Once I’ve established enough of a background narrative, I have an arsenal of articles dealing with more recent scholarship—analyzing, for instance, the role of the Pinkertons in labor disputes as revolutionizing domestic security enforcement and the implications of using security agencies to put down labor strikes. I also have some articles dealing with the phenomenon of Sherman’s March to the Sea as an instance of total war, and the revolutionary implications of this kind of warfare. As of yet, however, I don’t think anyone has synthesized these two areas—plenty of research has been done on labor disputes and their suppression, and even more has been done on the Civil War and the transition to total war, but I think that I’m somewhat unique in drawing parallels between the two, and hopefully that is not because there is nothing there to draw.

Troubleshooting
Of course the major issue will be time and scope. I hope to narrow things down to a small collection of memoirs and correspondence that demonstrates the development of rhetoric behind violence both in the Civil War (quite possibly Sherman’s March to the Sea) and the Homestead Strike. It is possible, however, that I might just limit myself to tracing the role of the Pinkertons in American violence, from understanding their role as spies in the Civil War to all-out infantry forces in the Homestead Strike. While it is my dream that I can find some memoirs or letters or diaries of a soldier who went on to be a Pinkerton, I recognize that that may be a pipe dream, and that I will probably be working with primary sources from different generations of authors who have very different experiences, and that I must be careful to recognize the limits of parallels I can draw from such disparate sources. I also fear that I may rely too strongly on secondary sources, given the fact that most of my primary source will probably not be located in California. However, they are source pertaining to very well known and much written about events, and so I hope that will make accessing them easy.