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Civil War and Reconstruction:?Lecture 11 TranscriptFebruary 19, 2008<< backProfessor David Blight:?So what caused the Civil War? Somebody said "slavery." Can I hear a "states' rights?" Can I hear a "conflicting civilizations?" Can I hear "unctuous fury?" Can I hear "fanaticism?" Can I hear "fear?" Can I hear "stupidity?" Can I hear "Goddamn Yankees?"Or Jefferson Davis may have captured the kind of toxin that was in the air, around southern secession, in late 1860 and into this "distracted, sad year," as Whitman called it, of 1861. Jefferson Davis, soon to be the first president--only president--of the Confederate States of America; senator--former senator--from Mississippi; former commandant of West Point; former Secretary of War. He tried to capture what the South was doing with secession with a certain dignified reserve here. This is at the very end of 1860, before Mississippi had seceded, but it's not far away. He said, the South now, quote, "is confronted by a common foe. The South should, by the instinct of self-preservation, be united. The recent declarations of the candidate and leaders of the black Republican Party,"--and southerners made no--missed no opportunity to rename the Republican Party a thousand times, "the Black Republican Party." At any rate, "The recent declaration of the candidate and leaders of the Black Republican Party must suffice to convince many who have formerly doubted the purpose to attack the institution of slavery in the states. The undying opposition to slavery in the United States means war upon it, where it is, not where it is not." That is, the Republicans did not simply oppose slavery in the territories, they opposed slavery in the slave states, and they would not stop until they had obliterated it. "And the time is at hand when the great battle is to be fought between the defenders of the constitutional government and the votaries of mob rule, fanaticism and anarchy." Yes. Davis seemed to think a little bit was at stake, for the South, in 1861.However, after the war, Jefferson Davis wrote what is probably the longest, most turgid, belabored, 1200 page defense of a failed political revolution in the history of language. 1,279 pages is his memoir, entitled?The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. And by the time he wrote that, or published it, in 1882, he was arguing everywhere, on storied, famous, legendary tours of the South, the war had absolutely nothing to do with slavery. Listen to just one passage of that 1200 page defense of his Constitutional Movement. "Slavery," said Jeff Davis, by 1882, "was in no wise the cause of the conflict but only an incident. Generally African-American"--excuse me--"Generally Africans were born the slaves of barbarian masters, untaught in all the useful arts and occupations, reared in heathen darkness, and sold by heathen masters. They were transferred to shores enlightened by the rays of Christianity." Now he goes on, and I quote him. Blacks, said Jeff Davis, had been, quote, "put to servitude, trained in the gentle arts of peace and order and civilization. They increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions of efficient Christian laborers. Their servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches. Their strong local and personal attachments secured faithful service. Never was there happier dependents of labor and capital on each other. The tempter came, like the Serpent of Eden, and decoyed them with the magic word, freedom. He put arms in their hands and trained their humble but emotional natures to deeds of violence and bloodshed, and sent them out to devastate their benefactors." Now I could go on and on with this particular, incredible passage.What you have there in that 1882 passage is the core, the life blood of the Lost Cause tradition. In 1861--and you've read Charles Dew's book on this--in 1861 southern leadership, at least until after Fort Sumter, argued every day and every way that they were about the business of preserving a slave society--a civilization based on slave labor, a racial system ordered by slavery--now threatened by these anti-slavery black Republicans. In the wake of the Civil War, however, so much energy will be exercised, not only by southerners, over time, to try to convince the American people and the rest of the world that this event was not about slavery. In a speech in 1878--like many other speeches he gave in the last third of his life--Frederick Douglass was at that point, 1878, already fed up with Lost Cause arguments about what the war had been about. He was also already, early in the process, fed up with the ways in which Americans were beginning to reconcile this bloody, terrible conflict around the mutual valor of soldiers, and in his view forgetting what the whole terrible thing might have even been about. And at the end of a magnificent speech he gave at a veterans reunion he said this: "The Civil War"--this is Frederick Douglass--"was not a fight between rapacious birds and ferocious beasts, a mere display of brute courage and endurance, it was a war between men of thought, as well as of action, and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield." He went on and on and on then to declare that the war had been about ideas, and he described the difference between those ideas, as he put it, was the difference between, quote, "barbarism and civilization."Now, I'm going to spend this lecture just reflecting with you on, first, secession, because I left you hanging in the air about the various explanations of secession, interpretations over time; and I want to re-visit that at least briefly. And then I want to take you through a little quick survey of the interpretations of Civil War causation over time. It's fascinating to understand how in the past, now nearly a century and a half, Americans have gone through this topsy-turvy, twisting inside out, changing view of what caused that war.But back to secession. I left off with saying I was going to offer you five different explanations. I don't think they're all equal, necessarily, but they're there. In some ways they kind of fold into one another. And I'd already talked about how the preservation of slavery, a slave society, a society ordered by slave labor and so forth, was a principle, if not the principle, purpose of this secession movement, at least in the Deep South, where it succeeded. Remember now, there are still eight slave states that have not seceded from the Union. As of March 1861, when Lincoln was to be inaugurated, the majority of the slave states are still in the Union, not out; only South Carolina over to Texas, the whatever-color-that-is of the Deep South, was the Confederate States of America. Had it remained only those seven states it's hard to imagine exactly how the Confederacy would've mounted a war effort, conducted and created a foreign policy, and managed if the Lincoln government decides on war--or coercion as the South will call it--it's hard to imagine how the Confederacy would've survived, as long as it did. The four states that will join it--we'll come to this on Thursday--do not secede, of course, until after Fort Sumter. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, in their initial secession legislatures or conventions, either did not--chose not to vote, or voted secession down, which Virginia decisively did--before Fort Sumter. And it's only after the firing on Fort Sumter in April of '61 that Virginia will vote secession; and it's crucial, of course, given it's--that it's Virginia, and the size of Virginia, the significance and symbolism and power of Virginia, the geographical location of Virginia and so on.A second explanation of secession though is what I would call the fear thesis; fear of many kinds. And now this is, now, of course, deeply related to the first explanation of preserving a slave society but in some ways this was a racial fear as well. If you look into those secession conventions, and if you look deeply into all those quotations in Charles Dew's book--and he loads them on you doesn't he?--there's an even more immediate kind of racial fear among southern secessionists, that they live on the potential of a racial powder keg, of the potential of slave insurrection over time, especially if the South and if slavery continues to shrink within itself. There's the phrase they kept returning to in Abraham Lincoln's House Divided Speech from 1858. They never let him forget it, that he and the Republican Party, they said, were going to put slavery on a, quote, "course of ultimate extinction." That's fairly clear isn't it? "We're going to make your system extinct--how do you like that?" "Oh, not a problem." Fear of the radicalism, now of John Brown. John Brown had sort of made this equation, that had always been there in the southern mind in vague ways, explicit. If the Republican Party in the North had succeeded in selling this slogan of a slave-power conspiracy, well southerners now, the planter class and the secessionists, are very successful, especially in the wake of John Brown's raid, of selling a mutual or a counter-conspiracy theory. And that conspiracy simply is "abolition emissaries." There are lots of labels it goes by but the idea that if the Republican politicians themselves aren't going to lead bands into the South to attack the South, they will end up nevertheless politically stimulating more and more John Browns to make visitations on the South.All over the rhetoric of secession you find the language of--or the word frankly--of submission; submission, we will not submit and so on. Let me give you just one example. In Charleston, South Carolina, the editor of its most radical newspaper, its most secessionist newspaper, was a man named Robert Rhett, the?Charleston Courier--I'm sorry, the?Charleston Mercury?is what he edited--and he ran a series of articles under the heading the, quote, "Terrors of Submission," during the secession winter. And in one of those pieces Robert Rhett wrote, and I quote: "If the South once submits to the rule of abolitionists by the general government there is probably an end of all peaceful separation of the Union. We can only escape the ruin they meditate for the South by war. The ruin of the South by the emancipation of her slaves is not like the ruin of any other people. It is not a mere loss of liberty, but it is a loss of liberty, property, home, country, everything that makes life worth living." Rhett was full of some unctuous fury, without a doubt.There were southern secessionists who absolutely believed that even any discussion of slavery's future in the U.S. Congress should be suppressed, that they would no longer live in a union that even discussed what to do about the future of slavery. And I would say there's not only a kind of racial fear, a fear of loss of slavery by the planter class, but there's a certain kind of political fear going on as well, and that is the fear that southern polls now had--they'd had this for years, hadn't they? The fear was the growing, or the growth now for them of a kind of minority status, that that Republican Party in the North now had the potential, given the population of the North, this sectional, anti-slavery party, had the potential to really take over the House of Representatives, in huge numbers. Then you get Lincoln in the White House for four years--and what if you get him for eight?--and he appoints the next two, three, four, five members of the Supreme Court. And he can control the diplomatic corps around the world, and even more importantly he can control patronage of the post office system, which in those years, believe it or not, was very powerful; nobody gives a hoot about who runs the post offices now but boy they did then. And what was at stake? And we can see this all over their letters and their diaries, their speeches in secession conventions, was a loss ultimately for the slaveholding class of what James Roark and other scholars have called "planter control." So to say secession is about slavery is accurate, but there are layers beneath it, in what I'd call a kind of fear thesis.A third explanation is what we might call--or a motivation for southern secession--we might call southern nationalism, a sense of southern unity, a dream for some southern secessionists--they were a minority surely over time and they're even a minority, I think, in the midst of the secession crisis--but a dream over time of a southern nation, an independence, of developing their own boundaries and their own potential expansionist foreign policy, where they would no longer ever be dependent on the United States Federal Government, on one compromise after another with northerners. And now to many southern secessionists it would be compromises with people they couldn't even conceive of compromising with, these free soil, anti-slavery, they believed, abolitionist Republicans. These southern nationalists were led by people like Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, William Lowndes Yancey of Georgia, Robert Rhett of South Carolina, James D.B. DeBow, who published the?DeBow's Review, a very important southern magazine out of New Orleans. It was a vision now of an independent southern nation. In fact, Edmund Ruffin was so determined to try to gather the spirit of an independent southern nation that in the wake of John Brown's raid, he got himself to Harpers Ferry and managed to collect 15 or 20 of Old John Brown's pikes; you know, these spear things that John Brown was going to give to slaves after his rebellion. And Ruffin sent one of those pikes to the governor of every southern state. These people were into symbolism.Now, it's interesting that this sense of a southern nationalism, if you like, was born more, I would argue, of fear of an enemy than it actually was of any kind of planned vision of an organized nation. As numerous, brilliant scholars of southern nationalism, from Drew Faust to John McCardell and others have argued--and I will come back to this in a couple of weeks--a southern nation did come out of this confederacy, but it was born almost overnight, and not by a lot of long-term planning. It was born more in resentment and defensiveness of knowing what they were against and who their enemy might be than it was actually born of a thought-out plan of what they were for. And it's also-- there was also a theory at the root of this kind of southern nationalist, fledgling as it was in the Secession Crisis, that--and it's right there in the secession debates. It's rooted in the shrinking south theory, it's rooted in the desire to preserve a slave society--but it's the idea that the South's ultimate welfare would be better outside of the union than in, requiring a certain thinking about how to create a new nation.A fourth possible explanation-- though I wouldn't hang too many hats on this one because it's rather vague; it used to have a lot of purchase among historians--is what we might call agrarianism, the agrarian thesis, the idea of King Cotton ideology, or King Cotton diplomacy, or put more deeply, a kind of Jeffersonian yeoman idealism. This is the vague theory that secession was to protect an agrarian, agricultural, planter civilization. That the South was ultimately--they liked to think of themselves, even the leadership--as a people or a republic of farmers, small farmers. Now the majority of them were small farmers. The real South, this argument was, was not in the slave owning master class but in the men of the soil, protecting a way of life against all that ignoble, go-getter, money grubbing, Yankee individualism. And there's something to this. You can find these arguments all over the secession debates as well. "Separate from those New Yorkers, they're going to take your wallet;" or as the saying went, you could hit a Yankee, he wouldn't hit you back, but he would sue you. This had a real vogue back in--this interpretation--back in the 1920s, '30s, '40s, even into the 1950s and beyond, among historians like Frank Owsley and others. And its spirit, if you like, is there in the Confederate Anthem--not?Dixie, but the other Confederate Anthem, the?Bonnie Blue Flag. You don't hear that as much, but there's a verse in?Bonnie Blue Flag?that the soldiers sang all the time. It goes like this, and listen for its ironies: [sings] "We are a band of brothers, native to the soil, fighting for the property we gained by honest toil." Whose honest toil? Property. Well, for a yeoman farmer that lyric made good sense.And fifth, you can also argue that secession is deeply rooted in some--some have argued this; certainly Bertram Wyatt-Brown has and others--is rooted in this notion of a tradition of southern honor. The thesis that at the heart of the southern planter class, in particular, at the heart of their cohesion, their self-understanding, and their worldview, was a set of values by which men, especially planters, defined themselves, and therefore their society, and when those values were threatened they circled the wagons in defense. And these were the manly virtues, the argument went, of honesty, trustworthiness, entitlement, social rank, the willingness to defend one's honor, blood, lineage, family, and especially home or homeland, to defend one's community against not only invasion but also insult or humiliation; to save face in the presence of one's critics, one's enemies. Nothing could be worse, said the honor code, than public humiliation. Disputes to the man of southern honor were personal, not a matter of law. And there comes a time, the argument went, when to hell with the Supreme Court, to hell with compromises in congress; "this is personal," they said.Now, this one's hard to throw darts at and make it stick. You can see the language in the secession movement--"we must defend our honor, we must defend our society." When is the southern secessionist planter speaking from honor, and when is he speaking from the preservation of the slave society, and when is he speaking from his sense of agrarianism? When is he speaking from a vision of an independent southern national future, is never easy to know, but you can hear it in a James Jones, for example, a leading South Carolina secessionist in the South Carolina Secession Convention who got up at the end of the arguments and he said, well folks, quote, "If we fail we have saved our honor and lost nothing." Now, think of the logic there. Of course he doesn't really know precisely yet what they're going to fail at. If a whole civilization goes down in ashes, if a society will be destroyed at its root, you've lost nothing. Some of these same guys who were so caught up in defense of honor, of course, loved Shakespeare. They especially loved plays like?Henry IV, when Prince Harry is lecturing his soldiers to die with honor, because if you die with honor you've lost nothing. Now, in your more modern sensibilities life usually doesn't equate with nothing. But mix all those explanations up together and fold in a little ambiguity, and you can begin to explain secession.A final parting word though, did the South have the right to secede? Let's just have a show of hands, just to show, just a poll, did the southern states have the right to secede in 1861? Yes? All right. No? Bunch of Yankees. [Laughter] Not sure? You people are honest because this is a constitutional theory that is very old and never ending. But not sure, down here in the front--a teaching assistant is not sure. So, and he's remaining not sure. David Huyssen is a prophet of ambiguity. You got to watch him, he burns question marks on your front porch if you're not careful. [Laughter] I usually save that joke for Unitarians, but I--anyway, never mind. Okay, sorry, sorry. [Laughter]Very quickly though, in 1861, of course, people had to make huge decisions here, not the least of which was Lincoln and his circle of Republican advisors. But Lincoln was very clear on this. We're going to come back on Thursday to this whole question of what Lincoln's policy was there in April 1861 and why he moved with some force against the South. But first of all, Lincoln's view, and the nationalist unionist view of secession, was essentially this. And you can read this closely in your Lincoln Reader, in many places. But it was basically that the Union of the United States, so the argument went, was created by the people not the states. Now I know this gets a little bit like constitutional hairsplitting, but a lot of hairs were at stake here. So you had to split some of them. The Union was created, said this argument, by the people, not by the states. The Union was therefore older than those states that agreed to join it, in the American Revolution and in the U.S. Constitution. "We the people in order to form a more perfect union," some unionists argued, meant secession really is not possible. There was the practical argument against secession. A Union cannot survive, the argument went, if it can be broken at will whenever someone gets upset. I don't like this law and that law; well I like these but I don't like those; I will nullify those and not participate. Hum, the argument is, that's not a good practical way to run a republic.And some unionists--and Lincoln was of course brilliant at this, eventually, as you read his speeches--would argue against secession from a position--sort of civil religion, of almost mysticism. What did Lincoln refer to at the end of that first inaugural? That magnificent phrase about the "mystic chords of memory, from every battlefield and patriot grave, would yet swell the chorus of the Union." That's about music and memory, not about the Constitution. Unionists would invoke the fathers, just like the secessionists will, of course, and those fathers of the Constitution and the American Republic, they would argue, were nationalist. They wanted a more perfect Union, out of a Union that wasn't at all perfect. And sometimes they would even directly invoke Chief Justice John Marshall, the Virginian, the first great Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for twenty-five, thirty years, and the forging of that institution of the Supreme Court into a national institution of cohesion and a certain power.Now, the states' rightists, the secessionists, of course, will argue, "no; no." They will say, constitutionally, the Union, they will argue, is a federal union; federal in the sense that it was a compact, a contract between its founders, and the founders were the states that chose to join it. And they will argue that states voted. In the Continental Congress states voted on the Articles of Confederation, states voted to approve the U.S. Constitution or not. States voted to ratify the Constitution and so on. Then they will go to the Reserve Clause of the Constitution--all powers not given to the Federal Government in the Constitution, in Congress, are, quote, "reserved for the states." That beautiful, wonderful, tortured and ambiguous, but, in some ways brilliant, provision of the Constitution. They will go to the language of experiment in republicanism. They will say the American Republic has been an experiment; it's been a fascinating, wonderful, world historical experiment. But you know what they'll say? It's just failed, and let us show you the reasons why and the way, and let us go in peace; it is our right. They will argue for the right of secession, based on essentially the notion of a contractual theory of government, and that a contract in this sense, they will argue, can be broken. Now as Allan Nevins once said, secession though, after all the constitutional historians and the lawyers have worked it though, is a matter of power, and as Nevins said, who has the most guns.I'll leave that hanging for a moment. We'll come back to secession in the wake of Fort Sumter and the beginning of the war on Thursday. But let me take you through a quick survey of what historians have done with this story over time. I love this kind of stuff, the historiographical debates of historians is probably why some of use become historians-- we like the arguments. Before I leave states' rights though, it's of course a theory that's not going to at all die in the Civil War. Secession may have died; well maybe, never say never, who knows? Kosovo just seceded from Serbia and Russia is making a big stink over it. And I was listening to a Canadian radio station last night--don't ask me why but it's what comes on right after NPR goes off [laughter]--and the Quebecois in Quebec are using the Kosovo model now to rev up once again the possibility of Quebec secession from Canada. So watch out; got to follow this. And there's always threats after some of our elections, somebody's deciding they want to secede, which usually means they just want to move to New Zealand; but New Zealand has strong immigration laws, so don't even think it. [Laughter]States' rights is a theory, I'm going to argue, a theory of the proper relations of the levels of government, how power is distributed between those levels of government. It is a theory of the nature of federalism. But--and I think this is the crucial point and you can argue this, we can argue this forever, and we probably will if we're Americans--but I would argue that the significance of states' rights is always and everywhere in the cause to which it is employed. States' rights for what? A state's right to do what? In the interest of what? Now throughout our history some things have happened first in states. Women's suffrage happened in states first, and then grew over time into finally a federal right to vote for women. There are many other cases. States' rights is not always a conservative or reactionary idea. It is sometimes a progressive idea. One might believe in more local state control--but to what end, for what purpose, to advance what issue, cause, what principle? Just make your list of issues. And where would you start first, for stem cell research, for gay marriage, for or against? Where did the right begin? School curriculums, the right to vote, women's economic rights, reproductive freedom, collective bargaining for unions; and on and on and on. Old-age pensions began first in some states in the progressive era, before we ever had a national Social Security. The Civil War didn't eliminate states' rights. It has this sloganeering power to it that never gets much analysis. Well all right.Now, somewhere on this outline I listed--Well, in the wake of the Civil War, of course, and for that generation, there were unionist and confederate blame laying, interpretations of the war. It's a fascinating collection of writing, there's a lot of it. Much of it is score settling, of course, it's vindication on the part of southerners, it's the forging of this Lost Cause tradition--and I'll speak a lot more about that at the very end of the course, because the lost cause became an elaborate ideology over time, especially a racial ideology. A lot of the debate among the generation that fought the war over what had caused it got all caught up in labeling. Was the war "The War of the Rebellion," which was the official, northern, federal definition and label of the war? This was not called the American Civil War by the Federal Government, it was called the War of the Rebellion. If you go out and look at Civil War monuments on battlefields, put up in the 1880s and '90s, it's called the War of the Rebellion, if it's a Union monument. In the south, it was early called "The War Between the States." It was sometimes called "The War for Southern Independence." It was sometimes called "The War of Northern Aggression;" that sometimes is used now as a euphemism. My favorite label, and it wasn't just southern, but by the 1890s and turn of the twentieth century a label that got into the press and people loved it as a throwaway joke line, was, quote, "the late unpleasantness." [Laughter] You want to start dissolving conflict--we had some late unpleasantness here and slaughtered all these people, but never mind.Now, I'll pass on examples of this unionist and confederate tradition and perhaps we'll just re-visit this at the end of the course, because that's perhaps where it belongs anyway. But by the late nineteenth century, the 1890s to be exact, and into the early twentieth century, one historian, named James Ford Rhodes, and this kind of nationalist tradition in which he wrote, had a tremendous impact on the way the vast majority of Americans would come to understand Civil War causation. Rhodes was a gifted amateur, a gentlemen scholar. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1848. So he was a boy and a teenager during the Civil War, but too young to have fought. But he grew up helplessly fascinated with this event that forged his life, his world. He was very wealthy. He retired to Beacon Hill in Boston, and between 1893 and 1907, a fourteen-year period, he published his seven volumes, a series called?History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. They didn't worry about boring titles in the nineteenth century. That title would never fly though a publisher today, but that's what it was called. Seven volumes Rhodes wrote.Now, on the one hand Rhodes said the Civil War was caused--he developed the sole cause theory, and he said the sole cause is slavery; make no mistake, it's slavery. But it's what Rhodes did with this that is really important, and it is still alive and well in our culture and you can't kill it. He said the war was caused by slavery, it was an irrepressible conflict, but he focused on slavery as a system, on cotton and the cotton gin, not upon any moral element to the story of slavery and/or abolition. Slavery was a national curse, he called it, never a national crime. Slavery was a broad force, almost like climate, it was almost like bad weather, and no one is to blame for bad weather. Southerners deserved, in Rhodes' view, sympathy and not censure. Slaveholders, he argued, should be absolved because they were themselves the victims of this system and therefore the victims of history--a tragic lot, destined to try to preserve a civilization that the world was beginning to pass by. He greatly admired antebellum southern society and civilization, and there's a certain nostalgia in Rhodes' work for my God what we lost, in the great planters world. He rose Robert E. Lee to the status of national hero; he didn't do it alone, there were a lot of people helping him with that by 1900--that's Robert E. Lee who led the Confederate armies to national hero, I just thought I'd point that out.I was in Richmond two weeks ago giving a lecture. A woman came up afterward from New York or Boston, born and raised in the North, and she has just moved to Richmond. Oh, she's just full of enthusiasm and she's the cultural attaché director or something for the city of Richmond now. And I was speaking at this new museum about the Civil War and she came up to me and she said, "I want to know what you think of my idea. I think the first thing we need to do in Richmond is just tear down all those Confederate monuments." I said, "Oh." Oh dear. [Laughter] Oh dear. I didn't even know what to tell her. She said, "If they can just take down that Robert E. Lee statue and then that Stonewall Jackson statute. Just take them down. Wouldn't everything be all right?" I went over in the bookstore, I got her a copy of?Race and Reunion, this book I did on Civil War memory, and I said, "Here ma'am, just start here." [Laughter]According to James Ford Rhodes both sides had fought nobly, both sides had fought well. There was to be no blame, in this historical verdict of seven volumes and something like 3000-and-some pages, in Rhodes' history. Now, this put in place--and I'll leave it there--a kind of nationalist, reconciliationist, quasi-scholarly, popular historical tradition through which most other interpretations of the Civil War causation would now have to pass or breathe or move.And then came Charles Beard and Mary Beard, by the 1930s--early--in the '20s. How to sum up Beard. Charles Beard, the great progressive historian, so-called--and by that label we mean those historians who came of age around the turn of the twentieth century, first decade or two of the twentieth century, and were still writing into the 1950s; some of them even into the '60s. They tended to see the world--especially by the 1930s--they tended to see the world through a frame of the Great Depression. Well the frame of World War One and then a frame of the Crash of '29, and the worldwide Great Depression of the '30s. They tended to see history as essentially a story of economics, essentially a story of capital and labor, of wealth as an engine, or the pursuit of it as an engine of history. Charles Beard wrote a great book, in many ways--we now can look at it and see all kinds of holes in it--a book called?The Economic Interpretation of the American Civil War. He saw the South and the North as essentially two economies--two civilizations, two economies. There are rarely any people in Charles Beard's work, there are economies, there are systems, there are economic forces; there's cotton and free labor, and there's shipping and merchants in the North, and there are planters in the South. There's the telegraph spreading across the North. There are canals and there are railroads. And in his interpretation the South rebelled to try to preserve its economic way of life. And ultimately the Civil War, in Beard's view, wasn't really about any particular ideology--that is, any racial ideology or any pre-slavery or anti-slavery ideology--it was two economic systems living together in the same society, the same nation, and coming into conflict with one another in insolvable ways; forces meeting at a crossroads and they had to clash. Beard is laden with inevitability, as any great economic determinist usually is. He called the American Civil War, famously, the "Second American Revolution." But by that he didn't mean what Bruce Levine and Eric Foner and other, many other historians of well my generation and the generation before have called it, when we've called it a second American Revolution. What Beard meant by that is a kind of great dividing line between an agricultural era and an industrial era.All right, my clock says I'm running out of time. I'm going to leave you hanging on this limb of wondering what the "needless war school" people argued. They thought it was needless, actually. But I want to end with this, as a lead-in to Thursday. Walt Whitman wrote a poem about this year. He called it "1861." And here are just a few lines of it, to give you a sense--I think Whitman, as no one else could, captured what was in the heads of northerners and southerners. "Arm'd year--year of the struggle, No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, oh terrible year. Not you as some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano. But as a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, carrying a rifle on your shoulder, With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands, with a knife in the belt at your side. As I heard you shouting loud, your sonorous voice, ringing across the continent. Year, that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp'd cannon. I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted, year." See you Thursday.[end of transcript]back to topCivil War and Reconstruction:?Lecture 12 TranscriptFebruary 21, 2008<< backProfessor David Blight:?I suppose every war, the short ones and the long ones, the ones that get televised and the ones that don't, the ones where we get to see the coffins and the ones where we don't, have their romance and their reality. It seems to be an endless--in the face of whatever, modernization of war, media coverage of war, the devastating critique of war as an individual human experience by so many great poets and writers for a century and a half--it doesn't seem to matter what changes or what happens, but youth grow up to be excited about war. Ambrose Bierce once wrote that only--I quote him--"Only fools forget the causes of war." [the quote is actually Albion W. Tourgee's] But then it's the same Ambrose Bierce, one of the most--certainly I think, the unique American writer about the Civil War in so many ways--a kind of bitter, brutal realist who was wounded three times in the war, hit in the head with a shell shot from a cannon, should've died--crushed in part of his skull, which may explain Ambrose Bierce actually--but it's Bierce who also wrote that lovely little line where he said, "the soil of peace is thickly sewn with the seeds of war." Get too much peace for awhile and people get anxious.Americans, when this war broke out, embraced it with a fever, that is, an enthusiasm, an almost indefinable joy, that may be a little tough to understand today or appreciate. It's only in the wake of war, or in the face of real war, of course, that people get reflective. At the end of it all, in Lincoln's Second Inaugural, is this famous passage; and by the way, there may be more book titles drawn from this one page and a half speech than any other piece of prose ever penned by an American; you can just start ticking off the book titles that come out of phrases. The latest is Jim McPherson's latest book of essays called?This Mighty Scourge of War. At some point we will run out, it's only a page and a half after all. "On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago"--this is Lincoln, March, 1865, remembering March 1861--"all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the Inaugural Address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war,"--yeah--"insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it, without war, seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war, rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war, rather than let it perish. And the war came." Well, now that's Lincoln's argument, isn't it? One side would make war, the other side would accept war. We're going to revisit that moment in just a minute, Lincoln's so-called April Policy of April 1861, his maneuvers against Jefferson Davis's maneuvers about the single fort in Charleston Harbor where the Civil War would actually begin. Did Lincoln maneuver the South into the first shot? Always been a question unanswered.Quickly, let me revisit with you--[technical adjustment]--this question of causation. I left that in a bit of abeyance. There was a school of interpretation of this war that it had a tiny, an interesting little revival of late, in the hands of great historians, people I greatly admire like Edward Ayers--and you've read two of his essays for this week, "Worrying About the Civil War--and my colleague here, Skip Stout, in a different way. There's been a kind of a little revival of this notion that the Civil War might have been preventable, that it might have been needless. No one is arguing that as vigorously as James G. Randall and Avery Craven and a host of other American historians did in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, up to World War Two. World War Two is going to really reshape that interpretation and put it on the run. But I wanted to just visit it a moment because it shows us not only the historical interpretations, as will be yours, are influenced by one's own times, one's own experiences, one's own assumptions, one's own sentiments, and how the world shapes us; sometimes it comes out of conviction.The needless war school of interpretation was led by James Randall and Avery Craven. In Avery Craven's case he was a Quaker. But these were men deeply influenced by the utter disillusionment of World War One. They came of age and cut their teeth on history at a time when the world had collapsed into what seemed to be in the end an inexplicable meaningless war. There's that unforgettable scene at the very beginning of?The Guns of August?by Barbara Tuchman. No one reads her anymore. She was at one point the most popular historian in America. She wrote about the Middle Ages, she wrote about world wars, she wrote about all kinds of things. Anyway, at the very opening of?The Guns of August?is a scene where a German general meets a French general, somewhere in the mid- or late-1920s, and the one general says to the other, "Sir, why did it happen?" And the other general says, "I don't know, I really don't know." In the wake of the Bay of Pigs, and before the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John Kennedy gave a copy of?The Guns of August?and ordered every member of his National Security Council and his cabinet to read it. And he quoted that passage, and he said "never will we, never shall we be caught having to answer that question about war." I don't know.In that kind of disillusionment an interpretation that finds sheer politics and fanaticism and aggressive emotionalism, an overblown kind of--what did Randall call it--unctuous fury as the essential explanation of why the war came in 1861, can make a certain sense. There's a beguiling quality to that argument, when we look at the folly of human history and the folly of human nature. That all changed in so many ways in the wake of the Second World War, a war that was all about ideology, all about racism, all about the survival of Enlightenment ideas against fascism and so on and so on; and a generation led by such historians as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and many, many, many others, came to see the American Civil War's coming, when they started writing in the 1950s and '60s and into the '70s, as what they would call an "irrepressible conflict." And this array of arguments, they all get kind of lumped under this heading, irrepressible conflict thesis, began to flow from American historians. Don Fehrenbacher may have captured that interpretation best in a line when he said, "The Civil War came and it was fought to bring"--how did he put it--"to bring great national progress at great national cost." I've never been entirely comfortable with that idea, you know, "well it all had to happen, it was bloody horrible and terrible, and all those people died, but we all got better for it." That never, never, never sits very well with me, especially when you study the memory of the war and the aftermath. But what happened in post-World War Two scholarship--and it's still there, it's still at the heart of how we try to explain this most pivotal event, one of the most pivotal events of American history--is a certain respect for moral questions, a certain respect for ideas, and the notion that politics is sometimes about something.Now that's an utterly horribly streamlined way of saying--you don't find many historians anymore who argue from a needless war perspective, although what you do find is a kind of rollercoaster ride through American scholarship about the Civil War, sometimes deeply influenced by Vietnam and sometimes deeply influenced, even today--some have argued about Skip Stout's book; if you know Professor Stout. He has a remarkable new book out about whether the American Civil War was a just war. And I will re-visit that question at the end, near the end of this course, and use a couple of his arguments. It's a controversial book, it's an interesting book. It's a question we've never truly asked about this good war. Was it just? Does it fit? Does it fulfill the principles of just war doctrine? Can it? Does it matter?All right, but back to April, 1861. Whether it was just, and just why it became so bloody and so prolonged, we're going to take up over and over. But it surely did happen, and it began--I don't know if that map works terribly well, it probably doesn't; it's the best I can do this morning. It is a map of Charleston Harbor, which had the last remaining federal installation, fort, around the coast of the American South still in federal hands by March and April of 1861. The seven states of the seceded South, the Deep South, had begun to seize coastal forts, they'd begun to seize federal arsenals. They seized post offices and they seized federal courts. Now I guarantee you today if you seized a federal court office building, and particularly if you killed anybody in the act, or if you took over a U.S. Post Office--I know nobody cares about post offices because you do everything online. Those people down there on Elm Street, they're such sweet people; the idea of somebody taking over that post office at gunpoint is not a thought. But if you did that today you'd be in federal prison in no time and you could be charged with treason. Now, we can come back to that issue of treason when the course ends and revisit it, if you want, about this war.But by and large every federal installation in a seceded state, the seven seceded states, had been seized by those states, Confederate states, except Fort Sumter. And Fort Sumter was a brand new fort; oh God, it can't be more than 200, maybe 300 yards across in diameter. It had just been built in the late 1850s as part of the coastal fort system. Big, huge, high stone walls, about 20 feet high. It sits out at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, here. It is nearly a mile from Fort Sumter to the tip of the town of Charleston, which is here; from the Battery Park in Charleston to the fort is nearly a mile. You can almost not see it. There is today a monument--I wish I had a slide of it to show you. It's one of my favorite, for strange reasons, Civil War monuments; thousands upon thousands of Civil War monuments. Many of them are so generic you don't even notice them. This one you notice. It's right at the tip of Battery Park in Charleston, where they used to hang pirates. It looks right out at Fort Sumter. It was put up in the early twentieth century. It's a Confederate monument of a winged Roman soldier--I think Roman because the helmet, I'm told, is Roman. He's some combination of a winged creature and a soldier. He's about four times the size of life. He is looking out at Fort Sumter, and the inscription around the bottom says, "To the defenders of Charleston," quote, "Count them happy who for their faith and courage endured a great fight." I'm going to repeat that: "Count them happy who for their faith and courage endured a great fight." On our monuments of this war, almost all of them, you will find almost nothing about what caused the war or even about what its consequences were--almost all of them. It was just a great fight, and the dead are happy.Well, what to do about Fort Sumter? In his First Inaugural of March 4, 1861, Lincoln promised, he said--promised to, quote, "hold, occupy and possess remaining federal property." Now think about it. If Lincoln and the Republicans are going to make a stand against secession--and once he finally comes into office--by the way the day he entered office all that federal property had been taken by those seven states, it's already done; he inherits this situation. Now he could've backed away and continued to try to negotiate--and there was a compromise negotiation under John J. Crittenden, a Kentucky Senator, in Washington, for awhile going on in late February. It never came up with anything new. They were going to try again a geographic boundary out in the West with slavery; although don't forget the Dred Scott decision had declared that illegal. They were going to try to rev up something again about fugitive slaves to satisfy the South. They just couldn't come up with any new ideas. And Lincoln could've tried to continue the whole compromise negotiation conventions, he could have. Or he could've held firm to the Republican position that secession was illegal and impossible and unconstitutional, and had to be stopped. But if he lets Fort Sumter go--there was a garrison there led by a colonel named Anderson--he just lets it go, in effect he's saying, "well, maybe all that seizure of federal property is legitimate, maybe secession is possible," right? It was about the only place he could've taken a stand, if he was going to take a stand.Well, Lincoln was buying time, and he took a whole month of time before he acted. He was hoping for what he called privately, quote, "voluntary reconstruction." He was hoping for saner minds in the South to--a Union spirit in the South to somehow take hold. And there's much been said over the years about Lincoln over-estimating Union sentiment across the South. He may have indeed over-estimated Union sentiment. But there was a good deal of it. There were a lot of frightened people. In the upstate counties of Virginia and Western Virginia and in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia, those unionist pockets of the South were scared about this, because they have to make terrible decisions now. If this goes to war, who do they go with? Can't stay home.Well, Major Robert Anderson had about eighty men. He was from Kentucky. There's some slaveholding in his background but he'll never end up with the South. Commissioners from South Carolina had come to Washington as early as January of 1861 to negotiate that specific fort's release; they wanted it. The federal government had basically stonewalled it. President Buchanan, the lame duck president, tried actually to re-enforce the fort; and by re-enforce the fort I mean send food to the garrison of troops. Between January 5 and 9, of 1861, Buchanan--the only act Buchanan even tried to make about secession, he was just begging to get out of office--Buchanan sent a ship called the Star of the West, full of supplies down the coast of Fort Sumter to feed the men. Shore batteries around the harbor actually opened up fire, and one had a direct hit on the ship, but nothing came of it. Note, it's January 5 to 9. South Carolina was the only seceded state. It wasn't until the 11th?that Mississippi went and then Georgia and then about six others, in the next three weeks.Lincoln's April Policy, if you like, was a process of trying to buy time, and if there was to be war or firing or shooting about Fort Sumter, he was trying to make sure the shots were fired by the South. Now, there were hawks in his administration, there were hawks in the Republican Party who wanted him to act faster. One of them wrote to Lincoln privately and said, quote, "Give up Sumter, sir, and you are as dead politically as John Brown is physically." Newspapers across the North, strongly Republican newspapers, started to print headlines like: "Do We Have a Government?;" "Wanted, a Policy;" or, "Come to the Point Mr. Lincoln." And so on. People were ready now--do something!Now his Secretary of State, duly appointed in great part, as Doris Kearns Goodwin has shown and argued in a recent best-selling book,?Team of Rivals, was William H. Seward, Lincoln's principle rival for the nomination of the Republican Party. Lincoln not only put a few of his enemies in his own cabinet to control them and use them politically--in the end made an absolute best friend out of William Seward--but not yet. Seward was a dove on this. Seward wanted to negotiate. He urged evacuation of the fort and then he said leave the door open to voluntary reconstruction as it might take hold around the South, as southerners might see that this new Lincoln administration was willing to talk. And that isn't all that Seward did. Seward launched a crazy plan to declare war on Spain and France to direct America's attention outward to the world and therefore cause national unity. [Laughter]?Wag the Dog--did you see the movie? Let's just go to war with Spain and France and all those crazy southerners will realize, "oh, the nation is at risk!" Lincoln immediately rejected this idea, although unfortunately it got out there and the foreign ministers of Spain and France needed explanations, thank you very much. [Laughter] Seward also made private promises as Secretary of State to southerners that Sumter would ultimately be evacuated; just hang in there, just wait. When Lincoln found that out he said to Seward--in effect--shut up.Now, Lincoln tried in his approach to Sumter to separate reinforcement of these troops, a military act, from provisions, a humanitarian act, and he wanted to stress the latter. He notified finally southern officials--he never referred to them as Confederate governments, he just notified South Carolina, he said--that he was going to send food and provisions to hungry soldiers. Now who could be against that? He's going to feed some people. He called it "a mission of humanity, bringing food to hungry men," quote/unquote. But the Confederate leadership took this as a direct challenge. And Lincoln did indeed send a ship down the coast about the 8th?or 9th--no 6th?or 7th?of April, 1861, and the prolonged suspense finally came to an end. That one ship was provisioned with food. Now, the truth is there were some arms and some weapons in the hold as well. In the end it isn't going to matter a lot. The Confederate Cabinet met under Jefferson Davis on the 9th?of April and they made a decision that if Lincoln tried to sail that ship into Charleston Harbor they would fire on it.On the 11th?of April Major Anderson, in the fort, was given a chance to surrender by the authorities in Charleston. He refused, and at 4:30 in the morning, in the dark of night, April 12, 1861, about 100 cannon from all around Charleston Harbor--100 federal cannons originally, now seized by the Confederate States of America--opened up and bombarded Fort Sumter for thirty-five hours. Anderson's men hid underground, in dugouts. They'd been well prepared for this. And none of them died in the bombardment of thousands of shells lobbed into the fort. The relief expedition arrived out at the mouth of the harbor during the firing, and it never got to the fort. On the 14th?of April, after the bombardment ended, Anderson was forced to surrender the fort, to take down the United States flag. A brand new Confederate States flag with stars and bars was put up. And then Anderson's men held a gun salute, 21-gun salute, and the first casualties of the war occurred when two of Anderson's troops were killed on a powder keg that blew up because it was too close to one of the muskets. Four Aprils later--620,000 dead and 1.2 million wounded--the flag will go back up at Fort Sumter on April 14, 1862 [should be April 14, 1865]. It'll be attended by William Lloyd Garrison and 3000 freed people. But that's a long way away.The day after the firing on Fort Sumter all across the country the headline was "War." And Lincoln sent an Executive Order, not declaring war--Lincoln's position on this was clear, to him anyway, that no nation can declare war on itself. He'd never accepted secession as legally constitutional or appropriate. But he called for 75,000 volunteers to, quote, "put down a domestic insurrection." And in the Constitution, the President of the United States is given control over the military to put down domestic insurrection. He called it a rebellion.Now, the most important immediate result of the firing on Fort Sumter, of course, was the secession of the Upper South, part of the Upper South. Where's my map? Oh I apologize, I should've had that map right. Well, you remember the map. Four more southern states, slave states, will secede in the wake of Sumter. The most pivotal, of course, was Virginia. But note, Virginia had held a secession convention back in February and decisively voted against secession. After Fort Sumter, in this state of war hysteria and fever and fear, and under now this new argument that what the Lincoln Administration had really done was an act of coercion against the South--coercion--now the feeding of some 80 soldiers in a fort was being interpreted as coercion--okay. But Virginia quickly, overnight, held a new secession convention--actually the State Legislature held it--and it voted eighty-eight to fifty-five--note the vote-- eighty-eight to fifty-five; lots of those "no" votes, almost all of those "no" votes coming from the western part of Virginia--West Virginia didn't exist yet--the western part of Virginia where there was very little slavery, and some of the upper counties of Virginia. April 17th, only three days after the surrender of Fort Sumter, Virginia seceded from the Union. By May 6thArkansas seceded by a vote of sixty-nine to one, in secession convention. North Carolina, on May 20th, voted to--and look where North Carolina is now, it's between Virginia and South Carolina; what are they going to do? They voted unanimously in convention to secede. And finally on June 8th, by a two to one vote of a popular referendum--these were done in different ways in different states--in a popular referendum Tennessee, in a two to one vote, approximately, seceded from the Union.The Confederacy was now eleven states. It would never really be any more than that. But there was great tension about what Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri would actually do. Lincoln is reported to have said that he hoped to have God on his side, but he was certain he wanted Kentucky. Now, there's been a whole flurry of emails recently on the Slavery and History Network of historians online trying to trace that quote, just in the past couple of weeks. And the truth is nobody can actually find it anywhere. It's one of those many, many, many, probably apocryphal Lincoln quotes. He probably said something like it, somewhere, but I just couldn't resist using it; I've used it for so many years. So footnote, might be apocryphal--okay? He did need Kentucky, whatever he said. All of those states were deeply divided about what to do, and what they will do, and the war will prove that, and they will be terrible, horrible places to be, geographically, emotionally, physically in the war. Maryland was horribly divided. Note where it is, it's right above Washington, D.C. Approximately 50,000 white men fought for the Union, in Maryland, in the Civil War. Approximately--I'm sorry, about 50,000 white men in Maryland fought in the Civil War; 30,000 on the Union side, 20,000 on the Confederate side; and of those 30,000 on the Union side, 9000 of them were African-Americans. Kentucky had about 50,000 men fight for the Union and about 35,000 men fight for the Confederacy, and per capita Kentucky produced more African-American soldiers for the Union Army than any other state, 24,000 total. Missouri, the numbers are even greater. In Missouri, about 80,000 men fought for the Union, about 30,000 fought for the Confederacy, and there were about 3,000 that weren't on either side, they were guerillas looking for the best payday--early versions of Jesse James, without ideology. Later Jesse James got real ideology though; that's another story.And folks, especially in those states, this was immediately--you've heard all the clichés about how it was a fratricidal conflict and a brothers' war--immediately it was a brothers' war, and thousands of families, in April and May and June of 1861, brothers and fathers looked each other in the eye and had to decide what they would do. Henry Clay had seven grandsons in Kentucky--three fought for the Union and four fought for the Confederacy. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky--he's the senator of the Crittenden Compromise efforts, in the secession winter--had one son who became a general in the Union Army and one son who became a general in the Confederate Army. Both survived, and I've always wanted to know about Crittenden family reunions; but I've never looked into it. Mrs. Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, who was of course born and raised in Kentucky, had four brothers who all fought for the Confederacy, and three brothers-in-law who fought for the Confederacy. It will lead later to all kinds of charges of--well some charges about treason against her and so on, sympathies for the South and so on and so on. John C. Pemberton from Pennsylvania became a Confederate general and was ultimately the general who surrendered Vicksburg to Grant in 1863. George Thomas was Virginia born, old slaveholding family, but he never resigned his commission and he became known as the Rock of Chickamauga; the Union general who won the Battle of Chickamauga was a Virginian. And these stories go on and on and on. There's the story of Clifton and William Prentice. One of them fought in the 6th?Maryland Infantry, a Union regiment. The other fought in the 2nd?Maryland Infantry, a Confederate regiment. Both were wounded at Petersburg on April 2, on the same day, 1865, in the last week of the war, and they died in cots right next to each other in a field hospital. And the list goes on and on.Now, when people went to war in 1861, what did they say they were doing? What did they say were their aims? What were their reasons? We have thousands of diary entries and letters and editorials and all sorts of things to draw upon. But on the northern side what you find that summer is not only this sense that this will be a short war--and that's a preface worth pointing out--but people would say over and over they were fighting for the flag, they were fighting for the Union, they were fighting for the Constitution, they were fighting to save the Republic, they were fighting to, quote, "save the government." And you keep hearing those phrases and you keep thinking, "oh man, these are abstractions, what were they really doing?" You keep reading and you keep hearing them say the same damn thing.Well, there's a lot of good scholarship on this now that shows us that in 1860s America the U.S. Constitution was important to people. They saw it as a kind of protection; they saw it as a source of social order. They saw the American nation as now something they were directly experiencing; millions were directly experiencing the government as never before in those debates of the 1850s. And as I've said before now, voter turnout just zoomed in the 1850s, to seventy-five and eighty percent, in each general election from 1852 on. Phillip Paludan, in a marvelous book about this, has said that the Constitution and the government, for so many northerners, was like a shield of protection, and that southern secession now was not just a threat to this government, it was a threat to social order itself, and it therefore had to be stopped. A New Hampshire farmer who became a buck private in 1861 said, quote, "The question now is country or no country, liberty or slavery?" There's a beautiful clarity to that isn't there? Now I don't know what he said, after Bull Run or after Antietam, or after Spotsylvania, if he survived. A fifty year-old railroad contractor named Robert McAllister threw down his lucrative job in 1861 and enlisted, at age fifty, quote, "to help us put down this wicked and unjustifiable rebellion. Our country and property is worth nothing if we don't, nor will life be secure." This is all over people's letters. They said they were fighting for liberty; of course, so did southerners.Now, another argument here, and again Phil Paludan has made this better than anyone I think, is he's argued that southerners and northerners have sort of come to view the U.S. Constitution, this document we live under, in different ways; that northerners had come to see the Constitution as a kind of protector, much violated now by Kansas-Nebraska Act, Dred Scott decision, et cetera, whereas southerners had come to see that constitution more as a destroyer, as something to fear, that might, if the wrong people get hold of it, begin to attack or erode their society. There were a lot of people, particularly in the North but then quickly in the South as well, who when this war broke out began to see it in terms of cosmic dualism, good and evil--God was entering history. Right away, Christian America began to interpret this in millennial terms. God had a quarrel with America, people started arguing; and they're going to really be arguing this after the enormous bloodshed of '62 and '63 when they have to try to explain why this is happening. They're going to say God has an appointment with America and he's going to decide whose sins are worse.Now, on the southern side, as I said, people have to make tough choices, horrible choices. Who do they go with? They join their neighbors or oppose their neighbors? Mary Chesnut, the great diarist from South Carolina who indeed kept the most famous diary by a southern woman--there are many of them. She remembered March and April 1861 this way--and here we have another kind of beautiful clarity. "We separated," said Mary Chesnut, "because of incompatibility of temper. We are divorced, North from South, because we hate each other so much." Okay Mary, I get it--divorce papers--you hate us. Walter Nugent, a Mississippi lawyer, who did not own slaves, nevertheless declared in 1861 that without slave labor--now the slaveholder is arguing this--that without slave labor the country would be, quote, in his words, "a barren waste and desolate plane. We can only live and exist by this species of labor and hence I am willing to continue the fight to the last." Well, Nugent hadn't seen any fight yet, but never mind.Well, in the end the South, from the highest ranks of Jefferson Davis on down to buck privates, are all going to say they were fighting for their liberty; everybody was fighting for their liberty. And when blacks get into this thing in '62 and '63, they're fighting for their liberty too. "Everybody," as Lincoln later said, "everybody declared for liberty." Now make no mistake, I love to quote my friend Uriah over there on the stone wall in Woolsey, and I walk--every time--every morning on the way over here to class I go by and I rub my finger on his name for, I don't know, good luck or something; if I teach here long enough it's probably going to wear off. But everybody in the Union Army wasn't a Uriah Parmelee; in fact, the vast majority were not going to free the slaves just yet. There's a story of a Yankee soldier in Virginia in 1861 who encounters a slave woman and he's taken that woman's goods and that woman says, "Well wait a minute, aren't you coming here to help us?" And he answered her and said--. No, the woman says, "We were told you were coming here to help us and instead you steal from us." And the soldier replied, "You're a god-damn liar. I'm fighting for $14.00 a month and the Union." Well there's a beautiful clarity in that too--I ain't here to free you.Oh, I got behind on this outline, didn't I? That's okay, that's actually just fine. When we resume--don't leave yet--when we resume next Tuesday I will talk a little bit about West Point and what happened at West Point when Union and Confederate, or southern and northern men begin to leave. And then we'll begin the war. We'll talk about comparative strengths and so on. But let me leave you for today and the weekend, if you don't mind, with Walt Whitman again. Whitman's opening poem of his immortal collection called?Drum Taps, in a kind of agonizing way may have captured what was in the heads of most Americans in 1861. "To the drum-taps prompt," he writes, "the young men falling in and arming; the mechanics arming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith's hammer, tost aside with precipitation;). The blood of the city is up--arm'd, arm'd!, the cry everywhere; The flags flung out from the steeples of churches, and from all the public buildings and stores; The tearful parting--the mother kisses her son--the son kisses the mother; (Loth is the mother to part--yet not a word does she speak to detain him;). War, an armed race is advancing; the welcome for battle. No turning away now. War, be it weeks, months or years, an armed race is advancing and it welcomes it."[end of transcript]back to topCivil War and Reconstruction:?Lecture 13 TranscriptFebruary 26, 2008<< backProfessor David Blight:?This week you're reading?Hospital Sketches, the short and in some ways extraordinary little novel, written by Louisa May Alcott, based upon her--Louisa May Alcott of?Little Women?fame, if you happen to have grown up on that book, daughter of Bronson Alcott, a famous and extremely eccentric New England reformer and utopian--but she went to war, as a young nurse--couldn't stay away--and she kept her sketches about her experiences of a young woman confronting the horror of Civil War hospitals. This is a photograph of--it is not Louisa May Alcott, I don't think--of one of those young nurses sitting in a Civil War hospital in 1863, probably writing a letter; they spent a lot of their time writing letters for sick or dying or wounded soldiers. I think what you can find in Alcott's novel, among other things--it's almost like a descriptive documentary novel; it's almost like she summed up her diary--is the human encounter, particularly a woman's, a young woman's encounter with what war does to the human body, the human psyche, to human beings.Now, good Lord, it is eighteen years ago, Ken Burns produced--can it really be?--a series on Public Television called?The Civil War, as every opening of it says, brought to you by General Motors. Nine episodes and eleven hours, garnered the largest Public Television audience ever. The estimate was that the first time through about thirty million Americans watched it, and then it's been rerun many, many times. I went to Germany to teach for a year in 1992 and '93, and when I arrived in the Fall of 1992, on German National Television they were running the Ken Burns film series, all eleven hours of it, dubbed into German. And it was weird, because there was one male voice and one female voice for all the voices. And of course one of the tricks, or one of the techniques, one of the quite brilliant techniques of Burns' film was the many different voices he used--Garrison Keillor for Walt Whitman, Sam Waterson for Abraham Lincoln, et cetera--voices that you, in many ways--or Americans in many ways--were comfortable with in their living rooms. They knew Sam Waterson; they didn't know him as well as they know him now from?Law & Order; but they knew Garrison Keillor's voice, and when Garrison Keillor came on every night, it was Walt Whitman. At any rate, I was astonished at the reaction in Germany. There were articles in the paper, editorials and so on and so on. I had one German student come up to me one day, after watching an episode of it and listening to one of my lectures, and he said, "Why were there so many sunsets and moon rises in that documentary film?" I said, "Well…"--he caught me off guard. I said, "Well it's a good question." Probably because Burns is a sentimental filmmaker, and there's a great deal of sentiment in the structure, and in the music and in the mode of that film series. And I defy you to watch one or two hours and not be humming be the "Ashokan Farewell" in the shower the next morning. [Sings] It is a haunting violin. It wasn't, as some people say, written for that film series, it's much older.At any rate, it is assigned in the course, at least major parts of it. You can access it--I'm actually going to assign you episodes two through nine; that's eight out of the nine. If you skip one or two only the gods will know, I'm sure, but they will know. It is all available on the Internet, at Yale, through the Film Archive. How many of you have done this before for courses? Fabulous, you've done this. All right, I checked this morning, the URL--if you can read this; I don't know if you can read this, can you read this? Yes, in the front. In the back? No. How about now? Whoa! yale.edu/clabs--c-labs, I don't know what that--something--that stands for. That's for Macs. They tell me that this is better on PCs, easier on PCs than Macs, and you might have to download a patch to do it on a Mac. True, false? Don't know? Anybody done it recently, in a course? Help? You all raised your hands, you've done this before. Don't remember? That's also easy. Okay, good. Over the next five--including Spring Break week--you're in Jamaica, Spring Break week, you can access Ken Burns' film, you can be humming the "Ashokan Farewell" in the shower with somebody in Jamaica. [Laughter] That's terrible, the best laugh I've had in this course was--[Laughter] You're just like everybody else. At any rate, that's the URL, ladies and gentleman, and then you--you need to use your net ID to access it. If you have any problem with this let us know immediately and we will help you. It is assigned, and we're going to discuss it. I love a final exam question--don't always use it--that actually draws upon it as a source; just thought I'd say that.Okay, there also is in the syllabus this week, of course, a very vague reading--you're reading?Hospital Sketches, which is short, but then it says selective choices or selections from about fifty pages of documents in the Gienapp book and about forty pages of dispatches and documents and letters by Lincoln in the Lincoln reader. We're going to pin that down for you at our lunch today and you'll be fired an email before this afternoon, perhaps--and then maybe individualized by your teaching assistant as to which of those documents you might especially want to concentrate on. But in those two sections of Gienapp and Johnson, if you haven't looked yet--and you should--you get, day by day in some cases, you get Lincoln's orders and dispatches to his generals, his attempt to become the War President, including that first document in that section where Lincoln lays--right after the disaster at Bull Run--he lays out nine or ten very direct orders, all beginning with the word "let": let there be this, let there be that, let there by this, let there by that. And you also find in these documents, especially in the Gienapp Reader, some of those incredibly megalomaniac letters by George B. McClellan. If ever there was a more vain character in American military history, and political history--well there've been a lot of vain characters in American political history, God knows--but if ever anybody left more egregiously vain, utterly self-serving letters and dispatches about his own sense of self-glory, it is McClellan, who by all rights probably should've been court-martialed, but wasn't; that's another story we'll come back to."Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He has loosed the fateful lightning with his terrible swift sword. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." It's possibly the most famous poetry in American music. It's also apocalyptic; some would say purple in its blood. Julia Ward Howe wrote the famous "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in early 1862 while overlooking an encampment, a huge encampment of the Union Army near Washington. And she stayed until sunset and saw the fires, which she called "the watch fires." And she wrote the great apocalyptic paean of the Civil War. We will come back to this question, especially next week, when we deal with the story, the problem of emancipation.At the beginning of this war, as we'll see in a moment, most people expected something short, might even just be a lot of fun, a summer outing, an adventure, a chance to whip some Yankees, maybe shoot a Rebel or two. But if it became very long at all--and that's the point--if it became very long at all, its aims, its goals, its strategies, its purposes would have to change. That's why the thinking people of 1861 feared a long war. Lincoln most definitely and most prominently; he feared what, as he said in his--well, he said it in the Second Inaugural; he said it also earlier in his annual message at the end of 1861--he feared a long, quote, "remorseless revolutionary struggle." Because a long, remorseless, revolutionary struggle would have very different fundamental results. In that Second Inaugural, again one of those famous passages from that speech, Lincoln said all had hoped--that was at the end of it--"All hoped," he said, for, quote, "a result less fundamental and astounding." But because this war will not be short, it will become all out and total, depending on whose interpretation and argument you accept, in terms of what is modern total war--and we'll come back to that question. The results would become fundamental, and transformative. Now we always steal titles from Julia Ward Howe, just like we do from Lincoln. That's actually a photograph of Bull Run Creek. I know it could be a creek anywhere, I know, but trust me, that's Bull Run Creek.There were 523 West Point graduates who fought in the Mexican War, and that war, back in 1846 to '48 had become a kind of, if you like, military primer for so many of them, and the vast majority of those would end up in the Civil War, on both sides--Ulysses Grant, Class of '43; William Tecumseh Sherman, Class of '40; Winfield Scott Hancock, Class of '44; George Thomas, Class of '40; George S. Meade, Class of '35; Joseph Hooker, Class of '30; John Sedgwick, Class of '37; Joseph E. Johnston; most notably Robert E. Lee, Class of 1829, first in his class, later commandant at West Point. They'd all learned a kind of warrior culture, if you like. They all take a very deep and abiding oath. It was a very difficult thing to do for West Point graduates on the southern side, to abandon that oath and go with their states. But of course many, many, many of them did. As Oliver Otis Howard--a West Point graduate, later Union Corps Commander, lost his arm in the Petersburg Campaign and later first leader--head of the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War and for whom Howard University is named--said, quote, "Probably no other place existed where men grappled more sensitively with the troublesome problems of secession." No kidding. Now the numbers of this--there was a kind of a stampede of West Point cadets back to the South, at least to a certain degree. An Ohio cadet named Tully McRae wrote to his sweetheart--this is April 1861: "This has been an eventful week in the history of West Point. There has been such a stampede of cadets as was never known before. Thirty-two resigned and were relieved from duty on Monday, April 22, and since then enough to increase the number to more than forty. There are now few cadets from any southern state left here." In all, seventy-four southern cadets resigned and were dismissed for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance to the United States; but twenty-one southern cadets, from slave states, remained and would eventually fight for the Union. This was a far higher proportion of loyalist than southern students at Harvard, Yale or Columbia. At Princeton not one southern student remained at the college--it's an old southern tradition at Princeton, make no mistake.There are many extraordinary witnesses to these breakups at West Point. Here's just one of them. The cadet, George Armstrong Custer, Class of 1861--that Custer--recalled walking sentinel duty in June of '61 and seeing fifteen defecting southern cadets marching toward a steamboat landing on the Hudson. I quote him: "Too far off to exchange verbal 'adieu,' even if military discipline had permitted it, they caught sight of me as step by step I reluctantly paid the penalty of offended regulations"--that's why he's doing this guard duty--"and raised their hats in token farewell, to which, first casting my eyes about to see that no watchful superior was in view, I responded by bringing my musket to a present." Custer would later be proud of how many southerners he had killed.Now, the next whole section of this course I want to suggest some questions that we want to hope that we leave you with answers for; and you can write these down and hold me to it, if you want. We can disagree about those answers, but that's what history's ultimately for. (1) Why did the North win this war? (2) Why did the South lose it? (3) What did making war, and experiencing it, mean to common soldiers, to officers, to their families, to the women left at home and the women who went to the front? (4) How did the war unleash or reinforce or reshape nineteenth century values and attitudes? When Americans of the 1860s confronted war on this scale, eighty percent of all white males in the American South between the age of sixteen and forty-five will be in the army--eighty percent. In the northern states, fifty percent--a much higher population--of all white males between eighteen and forty-five will be in the Army or the Navy. Can you imagine if we had fifty percent of the American--let's just count the white males--in the United States today under arms, through a draft? A whole lot of you wouldn't be here. (5) What did the war itself mean on both sides? Its cause, its purpose, that developing sense of the reason people fight. What was it about? (6) What were the war's results, what were its consequences? Do wars have meanings that we are obliged to discern? Yes. (7) Why were the slaves freed? How did emancipation come, when it came, the way it came? (8) Was the American Civil War a second American Revolution--yes, no, maybe in between? Is it the wrong term, is there a better one? (9) What is the place of this pivotal, transformative event in America's national memory? And (10)--God I hope we can answer some of these--was the Civil War a just war?Okay, when the war came--back to that little picture of Bull Run in a moment--but when the war came, of course, Americans had to now decide how to fight a war. They had never mobilized for--like they're going to mobilize in this war; although at the beginning no one really had any clue of the scale of the mobilization in industry and resources and transportation and in human power that the war would bring. Let's examine just for a moment this question of Union advantages and Southern advantages, strengths and weaknesses on both sides, at the outset of the war, and even through it. It has a great deal to do with ultimately explaining Union victory and Confederate defeat, although it is not by itself an explanation; the North didn't just win the war because it had more industrial capacity, or as Ken Burns has Shelby Foote say at one point--the star of his film--has Shelby Foote say at one point in the film, "The North fought that war with one hand behind its back." Bullshit Shelby, they really did not fight that war with one hand behind their back. [Laughter] But it helps make a nice explanation, or the beginnings of a nice explanation for southern defeat.There were many Union advantages. Let me just tick off several. First in finances, the North had--most of this in New York City and a couple of other cities--had four times the bank deposits as the southern states, even though most of the southern states had their bank deposits in northern banks. In manufacturing, there were 110,000 manufacturing establishments in the northern states with 1.2 million industrial workers in 1860. The North had four times--oh I already said that, the bank deposits, forgive me. The North--excuse me--there were as many factories in the North as there were industrial workers in the South; in the neighborhood of 100,000 or so small manufacturing industrial workers of one kind and another in southern towns and cites; the northern states had that many manufacturing establishments. Eighty percent of all industrial capacity in the United States were in the free states. One Connecticut county, New Haven County--this town, and its county--produced firearms valued at ten times the entire southern capacity to produce firearms in 1860. Now the South's going to improve that greatly through the Tredegar Iron Works, in Richmond in particular, and other places. But New Haven, Connecticut produced ten times the firearms as the entire South put together in 1860. Those shells of some of those old factories in this town, that are no longer factories, were gun factories, and man did they get rich during the Civil War.In transportation, eighty percent of all railroad miles in the United States, the former United States, were in the northern states. Of the 470 locomotives made in the United States by 1860, only nineteen of them had been made in the South. The North had the vast, vast majority of skilled mechanics who worked on railroads. The North tended to have uniform gauges to their railroads, three or four feet wide to the track. In the South they had this ridiculous problem, frankly, and they will not solve it very quickly, that the South built its railroads haphazardly, state by state by state by state, at all kinds of different gauges, three and a half feet here, four feet there, four and a half feet there. You'd go into one town with a railroad gauge that's one width but it goes out the other side of town with a gauge that's another width. You had to switch locomotives and switch trains, as ridiculous as that sounds. They found out in a hurry what a misery that would cause. Another northern advantage was simply in manpower--just look at the population numbers. The population of the North was approximately twenty-two and a half million people in 1860. The population of the South was slightly over nine million white people and about four and a half million black people; about 4.2 million of whom were slaves; the other 250 to 300,000 who were free blacks. The northern states produced ninety-four of all cloth in the United States in 1860, ninety-three percent of all pig iron, and on and on and on; boats, ships, it's all eighty, ninety, ninety-five percent in favor of the North. William Tecumseh Sherman was sitting in New Orleans, where he was stationed when secession occurred, and the war broke out in April 1861, and according to his testimony he said to his friend, who had actually been a West Point buddy of his, he warned him and he said, quote, "No nation of agriculturalists ever made war on a nation of mechanics and survived." Yes, it's very prescient, but I don't want you to think that Confederate success or victory was somehow determined at the outset, because of all these economic, financial, industrial advantages.The North had certain political advantages. It did not have to create a government; it already had one, it had a functioning government. Now eleven of those states are no longer going to be represented, they're going to be gone, but there's a functioning U.S. Federal Government. The South has to create that government overnight and it has to create it out of a political culture rooted in states' rights and localism. And furthermore--and I think this is a very important point--the North had a functioning political party system. There were still functioning Democrats in the North, very strong in certain pockets of the North. They will be a genuine opposition party to Lincoln's Republicans during the war. They will make a comeback in the Congress in 1862; they got clobbered in 1860. The South doesn't have a party system; the South has a one-party system--they appointed Jefferson Davis. The South will not hold a general election for its presidency and vice-presidency during this war. Why is that important? Well, when you have a functioning political party system you have a way of organizing power and organizing patronage and organizing loyalty. We'll see this soon, Thursday. One of Jefferson Davis's greatest problems and biggest crises throughout the war is trying to get the southern states to go along with various Confederate federal policies, and in the end he will fail at much of that.Now, the South was not without advantages. Look at the map. You could argue that the South had a great advantage of geography, if they used it well. The South is a huge expansive territory, huge; thousands of--what is it, almost a 2,000 mile coastline, 1,500 mile coastline I believe, if you add up Florida all the way up to Virginia. And when Lincoln announced the call for 75,000 volunteers in April of '61, he also announced a naval blockade of the entire South. Now this will forever be a tricky legal story and an interesting constitutional problem. Lincoln says the southern states could not constitutionally secede from the Union; they were not therefore a legitimate belligerent. He was not in any way recognizing them as a legitimate government, but, oh, by the way, he was going to put a total naval blockade on them nevertheless. Now, foreign countries, especially Great Britain, will look at this and say, "well you may not--secession you may not think is constitutional in your country and you may not call the confederacy a belligerent, but you sure as hell are treating them like one."At any rate, a blockade around that entire coastline will never be easy. And we know that it was very porous in the first year, even into the second year of the war, through 1862 very porous. But the naval blockade eventually was relatively successful, by 1864 and into early 1865. But it's a huge expansive territory. The South had rivers it could use, and it will use them effectively; of course so will the North, once they invade the South. Geography was an advantage to the southern cause, as many military historians have argued ever since, if and when they stayed on the defensive. When they chose to invade the North, as Lee will twice, two fateful invasions, the one resulting at Antietam in September of '62 and the other at Gettysburg in July of '63, he was giving up that advantage of the defensive position, forcing the larger armies of the North to come to them and attack on southern ground, on southern soil. This has always been a debate--had the South remained utterly defensive in this war, could the North have stood it, held out long enough?Thirdly, you could argue that the South has an advantage in its cause or its purpose. And perhaps at first maybe they did, or even later, after a terrible degree of war weariness had set in. The argument is simply that the South didn't have to win the war, they didn't have to conquer the North, they simply had to fight long enough as an insurgent. They were the insurgent, the Confederacy was an insurgency, let's use that term, that's exactly what they were. If they could hold out long enough and force the North into a degree of war weariness, into some kind of economic trauma, they might just sue for peace. After all, the goal of the Confederacy was national independence. Some have said their cause was clearer, less abstract; defense of the homeland, defense of hearth, is in some ways less abstract than defense of the Union or the Constitution or the social order. How many of you want your sons to die for the social order? Well maybe you do, not for me to say. If they had stayed on the defensive--and they know this; this is one of those testy questions about Robert E. Lee's legacy.They had an advantage here now of this new, relatively new invention--thousands upon thousands upon thousands of which were made in this town--and that was the rifled musket. Until the late 1840s and into the 1850s almost all firearms, all muskets were smoothbore. The shell or the bullet or the minie ball that came out of them, came out of a just a barrel that was flat on the inside and it would only go 100 to 200 yards; 200 yards maximum. But with the creation of the rifled musket--and eventually rifled cannon--a rifled musket could hit something as far as 800 years away; it didn't mean you could see what you were shooting at, but it was extremely deadly at 2 to 300 yards now, in a war that's still going to be fought with these hideous old Napoleonic tactics of lining up men by the thousands, arm to arm, elbow to elbow, and simply moving across fields. The defensive position with the rifled musket was a huge advantage, if used.Many have said over and over that the South had superior generalship in the first especially two years of the war, and I don't think there's much question that they did. And then of course some have argued that the South simply had the yeoman soldier--better soldiers, better men, so-called. Now they thought they did, and let me give you a couple of illustrations of that. They thought they did, in their rhetoric and in their war fever of 1861. One young Confederate officer wrote home from the summer of 1861. He said, "Just throw three or four shells among those blue-bellied Yankees and they'll scatter like sheep." So was the theory. "It was not the improved arm but the improved man," wrote Governor Henry Wise of Virginia, "which would win the day." He's writing this in 1861. "Let brave men advance with flint locks and old-fashioned bayonets on the popinjays of Northern cities and he would answer for it with his life. The Yankees," he says, "will break and run." The Yankees won't fight, or so was the theory. Now, I don't know, at times I suppose there was an advantage. There was a certain warrior culture in the South. There were perhaps more hunters per capita in the South than maybe in the North; but don't make much of that one.The South had awesome problems though to fight this war as well, and let me tick them off quickly. They'll have a tremendous problem of supply, as the war gets bigger. Johnny Reb will never be very well clad, never very well fed. Always reliant on captured blankets and captured boots and captured food, and even captured medical supplies at times. In the South they will truly, in a biblical sense, have to make ploughshares into swords. They actually accomplished amazing things in the creation of weapons, of ordinance, of gun powder, of shells, by the thousands, almost overnight. They will also buy a lot from Great Britain, from the French to some extent, and much of that will get in through the blockade in the first two years. They had a huge disadvantage of not having a Navy. They had to somehow create a Navy--and we'll come back to this later when we look at the role of Europe in this. They will go to Britain and try to buy ships, and they will--ironclads, rams, and, ultimately, battleships, that will prey upon and destroy hundreds of Union ships.And then you might say that they had a real political disadvantage--I guess I've already mentioned it--in that they were born of a states' rights impulse, and overnight now they have to try to centralize a government, to fight a highly centralized, coordinated war over a vast thousand mile front. And Georgians are supposed to cooperate with Virginians who are supposed to cooperate with Tennesseans who are supposed to cooperate with Arkansans. And it didn't always work.And last but not least, would slavery be an advantage or a disadvantage in the South's war efforts? To some degree it was an advantage, and thousands upon thousands of American slaves will be put to work for the Confederate military, for the Confederate industry. If you visited a Confederate army from 1861 on, if it was above 1000 men, you would see plenty of black guys, and some black women. If you were on a southern train by 1863, you'd see plenty of black workers on that train, most of them slaves. If you were in a field hospital in Georgia by '63 and '64, during Sherman's March, if you were in a Confederate hospital you'd see plenty of black nurses; about forty percent of all the nurses in Confederate hospitals, from '63 on, in Georgia were slave women. They were impressed into Confederate service by the thousands. So there's an advantage in that. But I think as we'll see next week, slavery ultimately was the Achilles heel of the Confederate war effort, because once the Union leadership--and that's going to happen, it's going to take a year into the war, but that's going to happen by 1862, and certainly '63--will come to see that the only way they can truly win the war is by destroying slavery. And once the Union war effort becomes an effort to destroy the social structure of the South, including its labor system, and an effort to destroy slavery, it becomes an all-out and total war of conquest.Now, quickly, to the extent there was an opening grand strategy, soon to be abandoned, it was this. Winfield Scott, the "Old Rough and Ready," as he was known, the old General of the Mexican War--he's very ancient by now, he's eighty-years-old, he's big and he's fat and he's immobile--but he was the General of the Army and he came up with what he called the "Anaconda Plan." The Anaconda Plan was basically to envelop the South, surround it by a naval blockade, use gunboats to penetrate the rivers down the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri if necessary, from the west, and up those rivers of Virginia and down the coast of the Carolinas, and, in effect, suffocate the South from outside, over time. It might take a year, it might even take two years. The idea here was to surround the South and to force them ultimately to not just see the error of their ways but to see that they had no chance to win. This was a plan now that would not invade the South with major armies and seek major battlefield victories, it was almost a kind of an economic plan to win a war. It would take time, patience and an ever-growing Navy.But the American people wouldn't have it. The northern people wouldn't have it. They wanted an army forming around Washington, D.C. in April, May, and June, 1861, to move, to act. Horace Greeley, the most important editor of the most important newspaper in the United States, the?New York Herald-Tribune, in New York, published that famous headline, "On To Richmond"--or "Forward to Richmond," it said. Attack that Confederate army, stop the insurgency, whip them once, end the rebellion, punish its leaders and get this thing over before the end of summer.Now, the problem here is not unlike--think about it--the problem in the American Revolution. If the British could've ended that American insurgency in the American Revolution quickly, in the first year or two, instead of letting these American armies under George Washington and others keep retreating away from them, and not engaging in any real pitched battles, and continuing to give up their cities, and retreat inland and inland and inland, the Americans would not have won their revolution. As long as the Confederate armies could exist, the Confederacy could exist, if indeed we interpret it as a revolutionary insurgency; and, ultimately, that is virtually how they will interpret themselves. And, hence, we can see that if this war lasts very long, if it lasted frankly beyond one year, it had all the potential of becoming a war of conquest, all out and total, requiring the destruction of the southern infrastructure and southern society.Now, both sides in this war--and I'll get around to Bull Run and the way the war broke out in the west in a moment--both sides in this war will engage in conscription, they will create the draft for the first time in American history. The Confederates were first to do it. The first Conscription Act in American history is passed in April of 1862 by the Confederate Government. It said that all able-bodied men eighteen to thirty-five, later raised to forty-five, would be conscripted into three years of service. They allowed the hiring of a substitute, which led to the charge of elitism, which was accurate. There were brokers and all kinds of dishonest substitutes. One man is alleged to have sold himself twenty times for the bounty that he got paid to get out. There were exemptions in the Confederate conscription--public servants, ministers, teachers, editors, nurses, factory and railroad workers, miners, and telegraph operators. Among the Confederate troops out at the front they called these people "bomb-proof" positions. And then, worst of all, in the Confederate Conscription Law in 1863, they passed what was known as the Twenty Negro Law: if you owned twenty or more slaves you were exempt from service. The reason for that was the deep fear setting in, in 1862 across the South, that if all these white men--eighty percent of white males in the South will be in the Army--and if all these white men left the plantations it would be black men left on the plantations running the place. Any man who had twenty or more slaves was exempt, if he chose to be. This will cause tremendous resentment in the Confederate armies and ultimately become one of the causes of desertion.The Union Conscription Law came later, it didn't come until early '63. It drafted every able-bodied man twenty years of age to forty-five years of age. It had--its exemptions were more limited. You could escape if you could find a substitute and pay $300; hence the charge, not inaccurate, that in the North, this "people's war," as Lincoln called it, this war to save democracy, became a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. Generous bounties were paid if you enlisted, and in the end only about six percent of all the Union forces in the Civil War were draftees. The social pressure in some communities, since regiments were formed locally, was tremendous, especially in the first two years. Approximately twenty percent of all Confederates were draftees and only six percent of Union troops.Now, I only have a few minutes left, and I'm sorry for that, but I wanted to lay out our aims and goals here. But let me leave you with how this first battle of the war actually came; and we'll pick it up there Thursday; it makes as much sense Thursday. Along that creek--you can see the picture here, an extraordinary photograph, actually taken in 1862, of four children, two of them wearing what are probably Union kepis--hats--and seven Union cavalrymen across the creek, as though they're at attention for the photographer. It's a remarkable picture of, it seems to me, the influence of war on the young. But it was along that creek on the 21st?of July, 1861, a Sunday afternoon, that the first collision of amateur armies occurred, and the first major battle of the Civil War came about. Lincoln, under the pressure of public opinion, forced his commander, Irvin McDowell, to move this army, that was not very well trained, it wasn't prepared to fight--they hadn't even been taught how to retreat, which they're about to demonstrate. McDowell complained to Lincoln, he said, "These people can't fight, we haven't learned this, we haven't learned that, we're not ready, don't make us move." And Lincoln said, "I have no choice, you must move." And he wrote to McDowell and he said, quote, "You are green, it is true, but they are green. You are all green alike." Well, thanks a lot, McDowell probably said, and off he marched about twenty miles south and west of Washington to collide with this Confederate army that had been forming now for three months in northern Virginia, threatening the U.S. capital.It was a summer outing. A couple of hundred civilians in carriages, many of them congressmen and their wives and families, got in carriages, packed picnic lunches, went down to watch the battle. They sat on hillsides to watch this spectacle; you stay far enough away you wouldn't see any blood. Oh, there's going to be some casualties but that's--there's supposed to be. They took picnics. Two U.S. congressmen wound up captured and spent the next year in a Richmond prison. It was a crazy battle. It lasted only three hours, and both commanding generals, Beauregard on the Confederate side and McDowell on the Union side, had the same plan, a fake to the right and a move to the left. This was old-fashioned stuff. Now, if they both had managed to pull it off and their men had known what they were doing, they'd have simply moved each other around and the Confederate army could've walked up into Washington. But nothing came off as planned. At first the Union forces took several hundred yards of the field; it looked like, in these field glasses people were using, that this was going to be a Union victory. First clash, a Union victory, send the Confederate Army retreating back into Virginia and end the rebellion.But then as fast as that happened it turned around, and a counter-attack came. It was led by a general named Thomas Jackson, who gets his name at Bull Run, Stonewall Jackson--more on him later. And suddenly these Union soldiers--knew nothing of retreat--they threw down rifles, they ran through creeks and found the first road they could. So they broke ranks, and they retreated, many of them running the rest of that afternoon and through into the evening, back to Washington, D.C. in utter defeat and retreat. It was so bad that the wagons and the caissons of the artillery started running over men. Albion Tourgee, later to become the most important novelist and writer of the Reconstruction era, was badly wounded; he had his shoulder smashed and broken by the wheel of a caisson in the retreat from Bull Run, and would have to leave the war for year; he'll return to it, but he'd never be able to use one of his shoulders very effectively. Bull Run--First Bull Run--was a complete Confederate victory, a Union defeat. The Union Army retreated into the national capital, a shock to the country. The casualties were this: 460 killed on the Union side, over 1100 wounded, and 1300 men missing for the next month; a total of almost 2900 casualties. On the Confederate side, 387 killed, 1500 wounded, and only thirteen missing; about 1900 total casualties.In the wake of Bull Run, Lincoln brings George B. McClellan, this vainglorious but handsome as hell, smart, West Point graduate of thirty-four years-old, to the White House. He'd had a couple of small little victories out in Western Virginia where there'd been a couple of clashes with southern troops, and he brought this gold-sash-wearing young officer to the White House and gave him command of this army that they then named The Army of the Potomac. And the army was being increased daily now with hundreds and hundreds and thousands of troops from the North. And McClellan put them into camp, Camp Brightwood, among others--huge camps--outside of Washington, and he'll start training them, for months and months and months. And the Civil War got longer and longer and longer. And McClellan's not going to move that army for another ten months, nine months, until the late Spring of 1862. Meanwhile, the war is going to break out in the West too, and we'll return to that Thursday.[end of transcript]back to topCivil War and Reconstruction:?Lecture 14 TranscriptFebruary 28, 2008<< backProfessor David Blight:?The person whose writing drew me into the Civil War--and I confess--was Bruce Catton. Have any of you ever read any of Bruce Catton? Ah. It's a dwindling number in the twenty-first century. But when I was growing up Bruce Catton was the great narrative, popular historian--or popular narrative historian--of the Civil War. He wrote some seven books or so, from the late 1950s through the 1960s into the '70s. He wrote them around the time of the Civil War centennial. He was not an academic historian, he was a journalist and a former war correspondent in the Second World War, and the man had a beautiful sense of narrative. This is Catton from his book?Terrible Swift Sword, which is 1862, the year of 1862 of the Civil War. He's trying to capture the situation, the strategic situation, the emotional, sentimental situation, the mood of already war-weary America, a little more than a year into this thing; which is where we're going to go, and a little bit further, in a moment. He's talking, though, essentially, about the most important argument I think we can make about that first year, year and a half, into the second year of the war. Both sides wanted a limited war. Remember that. On the Confederate side they just wanted to fight long enough to make the North or the Federal Government acknowledge their independence. The longer the thing went on, the more dangerous it was, of course, for the Confederacy. They were out-manned, out-numbered, they had lesser resources, et cetera. On the northern side, it was the stated policy of the Lincoln Administration to keep this a limited war; and a great deal more on this next week when we deal with the emancipation story. The whole idea again, for Lincoln, was to keep this from becoming, as he put it, a remorseless revolutionary struggle. That is exactly what it had become by the summer of 1862.And here is Catton's description; I can't do it any better: "There was nobility in the idea that there ought to be a peace without victory. By August of 1862, America's tragedy was that it was caught between the madness of going on with the war and the human impossibility of stopping it. Secession had been a direct result of the outcome of the Election of 1860. To restore the status quo would be to assume that either the North or the South had had a great change of heart, that the North would not again go Republican, or that the South would quietly acquiesce if it did. Neither Mr. Lincoln nor Mr. Davis was going to assume anything of the kind. Each man was fighting for a dreadful simplicity. Neither one could describe a solution acceptable to him, without describing something wholly unacceptable to the other. Neither man could accept anything less than complete victory without admitting complete defeat. Both sides had heard the trumpet that could never call retreat. The peacemakers could not be heard until the terrible swift sword had been sheathed. But the scabbard had been thrown away and now the Confederacy was carrying the war into the enemy's country." Well, "never call retreat" is of course a very warlike language, but this was an awful and horrible war.Now Lincoln, of course--and you've read now some documents on this, and if you've started to watch the Ken Burns film series, which by the way is now up on the Classes Server, it is up on the Classes Server; well no it's up on CDigix but, as Sam Schaffer just informed me, if you go to the Classes Server there is a message--what's it called--under Information?--and under Announcements, it tells you exactly again how to use the URL. Have any of you already tapped in? Okay. Make sure you watch episodes two and three, through the one entitled "Forever Free," maybe by this weekend, certainly by the beginning of next week. At any rate, in that film series you'll see that Burns chose to make George B. McClellan a kind of comic relief--his vanity, his arrogance, his insubordination, his almost incredible, if complex, hatred of Abraham Lincoln, Edwin Stanton and all the leadership of the Federal Government that he was commanding the Army for.Lincoln wanted a strategy in the wake of Bull Run, the disaster at Bull Run that summer, in July. He puts McClellan in charge of the Army of the Potomac, as I said the other day. McClellan takes them into huge encampments all around Washington, DC, and began in August, September, October, and through the fall, to drill this Army, train it. And they came to love him; that is, all these green, young soldier boys from all over the North, and they were arriving now in whole new regiments, week after week after week, all formed in local communities across the North. The vast, vast, vast majority of them had never shouldered any kind of musket in their lives except possibly in a local militia, and only a tiny percentage of them had ever been in a militia. They actually grew to kind of love McClellan at first because he held great parades, great parades. He made them march like hell and train like hell and learn how to march sideways and forward and backward and retreat and do all that stuff. But man, when he held a parade it was cool.They also hadn't seen any war yet. He didn't move the army. Lincoln wanted him to move it that fall, go back into Virginia, go find that Confederate Army again, find it on the right ground somewhere, attack it, end the war. Not going to happen. This young, 35-year-old general was a very cautious soul. "Who would've thought that I would be called up to save my country?" said McClellan. And we have those amazing letters he kept writing to his wife, over and over and over. "I am called to save my country. These buffoons in Washington don't know what they're doing. Stanton is an idiot." And at one point he called Lincoln "a baboon." That actually got into the public. He was also--make no mistake, and it's very important, especially when we get into '62--he was a pro-slavery Democrat. He was the farthest thing you could imagine in the Union Army from an abolitionist. McClellan wanted nothing to do with the remorseless revolutionary struggle. He did not want to move huge armies into Virginia or into the South, into densely populated slave areas, because he did not want to destroy slavery. He saw that as a revolution no army could somehow control. He even wrote that fall to a democratic congressman and said, "You must help me"--quote--"help me dodge the nigger"; which was the way he put it. By January, Lincoln was impatient, to say the least. McClellan caught typhoid fever and was really quite sick for most of a month and refused to even answer Lincoln's messages, at times. This President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, is sending him messages, couriers, and for days McClellan wouldn't even answer him. And then there's the famous message that Lincoln sends in February, I believe, of '62; sends a message to McClellan and says, "General, if you're not going to use your army, might I borrow it?"Let's move out West, as the war is going to break out all over the West, whether anybody wanted it to or not, whether anybody planned it or not. I'll get the outline back up there in case you didn't--sorry--get to see it. I don't know if you can see all this in the back row but I hope you can see enough to understand that what we have here is the region of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and over into Missouri, Arkansas and so on. The war broke out in the West and is essentially a river war, a river war for the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers in Tennessee. Now you only need to look at a map with one eye open to understand how important Tennessee would be in this war. If Kentucky has still not seceded from the Union, and officially will not, and if Kentucky remains any kind of buffer for the Union, Tennessee is where the war is going to be fought, in the West, certainly at first--and it surely was.Now, at first the war in the West was essentially fought with gunboats, little ironclad gunboats, and armies on the land. But the first major conflicts in the West were to try to hold, on the side of the Confederacy, and to take, on the northern side, two forts, one called Fort Donelson and one called Fort Henry; one on the Cumberland, one on the Tennessee River. These rivers were terribly important for transportation now, especially military transportation. They flowed down to Nashville, one of them. The other flowed southward and then into Northern Georgia. These rivers would be invasion corridors, if you like, invasion paths for the Northern armies. They were extremely important for supply and transportation, for the South. And hence these relatively small forts that guarded these two rivers suddenly became the focal point by February 1862. The Union forces that would attack Fort Henry first, and then Ford Donelson, were commanded by a young, only in his early forties, General who had been promoted rapidly from Colonel, named Ulysses S. Grant.Now Grant, as many of you may know--well, Grant has had a huge revival in scholarship in the last, oh, two decades. He was for a long time all but forgotten in American history, partly because his presidency was so awful--and we'll deal with that later on in the course--or in some ways so awful. He got miserably depressed and took to drinking--that part's true--when he was stationed way out in California in the late-1850s. He was a bit of a drunk in those years and he resigned from the army. He'd been a veteran of the Mexican War, decorated, but he quit the army, bored, depressed, and he went back to Illinois, his home--well born in Ohio but he went back to Illinois--and he was working, as the story goes, it's not a legend, in his brother's leather shop in Galena, Illinois when the Civil War broke out. And because he was a West Point graduate and the only one around, they named him Colonel, and he led the regiment that was formed from that area of northwest Illinois, and off to war went Ulysses Grant.Ulysses Grant is a classic example--and I want to give you an illustration of this--a classic example of an American, or an American male, for whom most of the rest of life, business, profession--except for horseback riding, and he was a hell of a horseman-- almost everything else in his life had been a failure or near failure or simply boring. He'd grown up on farms but he hated farming. He's a classic example of how sometimes war, tragically or unfortunately, can make a person. Were it not for the American Civil War you'd have never heard of Ulysses S. Grant. This is Bill McFeely's description; William McFeely who has written the finest biography of Grant I think still ever done, although there've been many since. And he's describing Grant's situation in Galena and how bored he was and depressed he was and so on. And then McFeely writes: "War, the ordinary man's escape from the ordinary. It was a way out of a leather store, and for some men it is much more than that, it is the fulfillment that the world will yield in no other manner. For these men, war appears as a refutation of evil, whether it be the evil of Hitler's threat to Marc Bloch's France or the slaveholders' threat to Thoreau's America, or less exalted but no less real, the evil of personal hollowness. War, for a man like Ulysses Grant, was the only situation in which he could truly connect to his country and countrymen and be at one with them and himself. Grant did not like the vainglory of victory or the drama of high strategy or the blood of battle, and he did not think that all wars were worth fighting, yet some essential part of his being was brought into play only in war. He never celebrated this fact, but neither did he deny it. He knew it was true. Only in war, and possibly at the end of his life in writing about the war, in what would be the greatest memoir of this war, did he find the completeness of experience that when engaged in it so intensely moved him."Well, Grant was a soldier and, not unlike Robert E. Lee, he did enjoy the spirit of battle; I don't think there's any doubt about that. And he moved on these forts, first Fort Henry, February 6, with about 15,000 men on land and a bunch of slow, cumbersome gunboats. Fort Henry was not well defended and basically just surrendered. A week later on the other river, the Cumberland, Fort Donelson was shelled into submission by artillery. This was the second week of February 1862, and Grant famously demanded an unconditional surrender from General Simon Bolivar Buckner, who had been Grant's roommate at West Point. There's a wonderful exchange of their dispatches that you can read if you want to look it up, easy to find. Grant writes to Buckner and says, "Hello friend, you will surrender all of your forces and all of your guns or I will move on you immediately." And Buckner writes back and says, "Well now, well now Ulysses, can we talk?" Grant writes back and says, "No." [laughter] And of course the press will pick this up; U.S. Grant will become "Unconditional Surrender" Grant. The significance of Forts Donelson and Henry were not only symbolic, because the Northern press picked this up, waiting for war--God, months and months and months had gone by since Bull Run. There'd been various engagements. The armies were growing all over the country. Men were going off to war and writing letters home to their mothers, sweethearts and families. Here was some real war and some Union victory and a hero.Most importantly, strategically though, the city of Nashville, capital of Tennessee, had to be abandoned by the Confederates; they could no longer defend it, and they did abandon it. It was partly a strategic retreat and partly out of the reality they didn't have enough people to defend it. And a Confederate Army beginning to grow now--and this is into the spring of 1862--as thousands more southern boys and men would leave those farms, in hundreds of regiments from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas in particular. They will come to join the Army of Albert Sidney Johnston who led the small Confederate Army out of Nashville, down southwestward into Southwest Tennessee, just across the border to the town of Corinth, Mississippi. And it was around Corinth, Mississippi, in the northeast tip corner of the State of Mississippi that a huge Confederate army was assembled.Now, Grant was now put in command of all Union forces, all over Tennessee. Grant, though, had no idea, really, what the Confederates were going to do, and what happened at the Battle of Shiloh was not only the first major horrible, bloody battle of the war, and it would shock the country, but it was a total surprise to the Union forces. Put simply, here's what happened. Albert Sidney Johnston had about 40,000 troops at Corinth, Mississippi, and Grant had at his disposal about 60,000 troops. These are still not the size of the armies that will begin to unfold in the East in Virginia. But Grant had his army split in two, and widely apart. About one-third of it was under the command of a general named Don Carlos Buell, and he was in central Tennessee, Grant's forces were sort of more western Tennessee, and both were slowly trying to move down toward southwestern Tennessee and maybe even into Mississippi to find this Confederate Army, in March and early April of '62.What happened was that Albert Sidney Johnston attempted a surprise attack, and it was one of the most successful surprise attacks by these large unwieldy armies that ever happened in this war. He marched his men twenty miles, most of it in darkness, with all kinds of clothing and burlap used as muffling on the wheels of caissons and wagons; even men were told to put muffling on their boots. And they marched through night in the dark, April 5 to 6, 1862, north from Corinth, across the border into Tennessee, and they attacked a remnant, a sizeable remnant, of Grant's forces that had just reached a place called Pittsburg Landing, or Shiloh Church as it's known--it's a tiny little village. And what happened on the first day at Shiloh was the bloodiest day of the war until that point in time.Grant's troops were literally caught with their pants down. They had no pickets out, they had no idea where the Confederate Army really was, nor especially that they were that close. There are many famous descriptions of this in soldiers' letters and diaries, and afterward by Ambrose Bierce especially, of how this sneak attack had caught them literally around their tents in the morning making coffee, some of them without their pants on. The first day at Shiloh was a complete Confederate victory. It drove the Union forces right back to the river, the Tennessee River, and by the time Grant and one of his other generals, William Tecumseh Sherman, arrived that night they found remnants of this completely defeated Union force hiding on the banks of the Tennessee River, many of them having lost their regiments, lost their command, lost their officers, didn't know where they were. Through the dark of night April 6 to 7, it was especially Sherman and other officers--as Don Carlos Buell's 20,000 men arrived at Shiloh in the middle of that night--Sherman and other officers, literally at times, whipped Union soldiers into order, tried to help men find their units. And when dawn came the next day they counter-attacked across the same fields in savage hand-to-hand combat that all of these soldiers had never experienced and never seen. And by the end of it they completely reversed the first day's action. The Battle of Shiloh took place in an area about a mile to a mile and a half in diameter, and by the end of the second day, as Grant famously put it in one of the very few moments in his two-volume memoir where he ever kind of really broke down and described the carnage, he said, "I could've walked across that field as far as the eye could see and never touched the ground by walking on the bodies." For the two armies in forty-eight hours there were 23,841 casualties; 23,841 casualties.Now, Shiloh strategically was a Union success in the simple fact that the Confederate Army had to retreat back into Mississippi, and did not succeed in re-entering Tennessee and opening up a new front in Tennessee, or taking control of the Tennessee River in that region. But it was truly a shock to the country when these casualty lists came back and were published in newspapers, and when the adjutants of regiments--which was the job of an adjutant in a regiment was to record the casualties and send them home. And it was, of course, that site where Grant remembered realizing for the first time--and I had that quote up here the other day and you can read it in Gienapp--where he said, "It was at that moment I realized that this war could never--that the Union could never be preserved without" what he called "complete conquest of the South." That's what Bruce Catton meant about how the scabbard was being thrown away. It was now a war where no one would ever call retreat.Now, back east, back to the melodrama between McClellan and Lincoln. No, that's not the one I want, excuse me. I think you can see enough of this, I hope. Now McClellan throughout that winter kept training, training, and training the Army of the Potomac. And he did train them in to what many military historians still say was one of the most efficient and certainly the best supplied armies the world had ever seen. He would have almost 100,000 troops--he'd have 90,000 in the field--100,000 troops under his command. And he came up with a plan that Lincoln hated; Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, didn't like it; officers around him didn't particularly like it. But it was McClellan's idea. McClellan did not want to invade Virginia from the north. He thought it would be a better idea to sail the entire Army of the Potomac down the Potomac River out into Chesapeake Bay and land on the peninsula between the York and the James Rivers in Virginia, and invade Virginia, toward Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Take the enemy's capital, was his aim here--a strategy eventually that Ulysses S. Grant is going to tear to shreds, and quickly realize, as he was realizing out in the West, that the Confederacy was its armies--not its capital, not a city here, a town there.The idea was to land this huge flotilla of an army on the coast and march it sixty, seventy miles inland and attack Richmond from the east. Now, part of the theory here was that the Confederacy had been fortifying the north side of Richmond but maybe not the east side. Now, it's no surprise folks, if you float 90,000 people down the river and land them on the coast that you might be coming from the east. Lo and behold. But this is where--I don't want to make McClellan into just comic relief like Burns does; I think he overdoes it--but here it is important to understand that generals did have impact on this war. It was not that McClellan had a personal distaste for battle necessarily; those charges that he was somehow a coward and all that, I don't think that holds up at all. But he did not like huge general engagements, he did not want to sacrifice any more men than he had to. And remember, he doesn't want the war to become remorseless.He put the town of Yorktown, on the coast--the same Yorktown where Cornwallis had surrendered to George Washington in the American Revolution--he put Yorktown under siege when he landed, for an entire month, from April 5 to May 4, because McClellan was convinced that he was confronted with far more men than he really was. At one point McClellan actually wrote a dispatch to Secretary of War Stanton claiming that he was facing on the peninsula at least 200,000 Confederates. There weren't 200,000 Confederates under arms anywhere in the South, in 1862. But McClellan was always overestimating his enemy. He hired the Pinkerton detectives. He hired this guy named Lowe with his balloons; this was the first use of balloons in warfare. They'd float these things up in the air and they'd go and they'd float over the enemy and they'd try to count the forces and they'd hope the wind was right to float them back and land them. They were pretty cumbersome, awful; and one time the thing floated and it crashed in the other side of the Confederate troops. He was getting his intelligence from all these new modern ways, and every time he got intelligence it's apparent that McClellan would just start doing some multiplication. Oh, and there's so many stories about this; I'll spare you. He didn't need to put Yorktown under siege for a month, he could've taken it in 48 hours. The Confederates had built a lot of fortifications, huge fortifications, but they didn't have very many men behind it. And where one officer might see one Confederate in a field-glass, McClellan would see five or 10.Given this caution, given this slowness, the Confederate command in Richmond sent the young General Stonewall Jackson with about 20,000 men over to the Shenandoah Valley, here. While McClellan had landed this massive army on the peninsula and it was slowly beginning to move, they send Stonewall Jackson with an army of about 20,000 men to the Shenandoah Valley, where Stonewall Jackson conducted one of the most famous military campaigns in history--and they still teach this in minute detail at West Point. Actually he only had about 17,000 men. The purpose of this was to throw fear into northern Virginia, fear into the capital at Washington, and to keep about 30,000 Union troops in Northern Virginia, that McClellan had left behind. The idea here was that McClellan would move from the east, 30,000, roughly, Union troops would move from the north, and they would crush Richmond from two sides, and the war would be over by July. The Confederates saw this and they said, all right. Jackson spent the period April 29 to June 5, five weeks roughly, marching all up and down the Shenandoah Valley, driving his men to utter exhaustion, twenty and twenty-five miles a day. He fought five major battles, marched 400 miles in those five weeks, fought lots of kind of contact, rearguard actions, eluded three different Union armies or parts of Union armies at various times, threw fear into Washington, kept the 30,000 Union troops all occupied in Northern Virginia and Western Virginia, and then escaped, back down the valley and back to Richmond, by the time McClellan attacked. It was an extraordinary campaign. It made Stonewall Jackson's fame.Now, the first major contact finally between the Union forces and Confederate forces on the peninsula came at a place called Seven Pines or Fair Oaks. It's a place about some six, seven miles east of Richmond. It would be the first major bloody affair for this Army of the Potomac. And I want to describe it for you by simply reading excerpts from a few letters, of a Union soldier, leading up to the moment of his first major battle. And I want to do this in part because we need to understand--and we'll come back to this question a bit later--that what a common soldier out there in the field understands about what is happening is, of course, almost always a blur; it's the fog of war that he sees. I had the opportunity about, oh God, fifteen years ago now, to edit a collection of Civil War letters that were lopped in my lap by a young soldier from Massachusetts named Charles Brewster. Charlie Brewster was a store clerk in Northampton, Massachusetts when the Civil War broke out in April of '61. He was 27-years-old, he felt like a total failure in life. He was not yet married. He had nothing going on. And he enlisted as fast as he could in the 10th?Massachusetts, and he spent that whole fall and winter of '61/'62 in camp. And I will mention Charlie again next week, because Charlie was no abolitionist, trust me, but he comes to realize through this experience that the war has to destroy slavery. It's an interesting model of the average Yankee. But he wrote incredible letters, always to his mother or his sister. He writes this on May--Battle of Fair Oaks or Seven Pines occurred on May 31 of 1862. He knows a big battle's coming. They don't know exactly where or when. It is raining like hell. He's sleeping in the mud on what he calls a rubber blanket. He gets diarrhea that nearly is killing him, and he will almost die of diarrhea twice in this war. But he keeps writing to his mother. And one morning the rain has stopped and he tells her what a beautiful morning it is. "Mother, I wish you could see what a splendid morning this is. The trees are in full foliage and the birds are singing in the trees and the water ripples and sparks at my feet, with the sun shining gloriously over all. And if it were not for the regiment I see before me, each with his deadly end-field rifle on his shoulder, I could hardly imagine that there was a war anywhere in the land."Now, day by day--he writes every day to his mother, long letters. Some of these letters handwritten were fifteen to twenty page letters, and he wrote about 240 of them, in the course of the war. May 22, in a clover field, he says: "Dear Mother, it is just sunset, a most beautiful day, though it has been dreadful hot. I was relieved this morning from my guard duty, at General Keyes' headquarters, and joined the regiment and immediately took up my line of march with them. We came on about two miles, or perhaps not quite as far as that, and bivouacked in this field. It's the best place we have had since we left Warwick. Our small brigade is in the advance and we go out on picket frequently. We do not know anything of what is going on in the world outside of our camp. How I wish I could see a late paper. We've got a rumor that there's been a battle out in Corinth, Mississippi, and that Beauregard and 23,000 men are prisoners, but I presume there is no truth in it. Our artillery had a skirmish last night, in a swamp in the front. We're expecting a great battle Mom, but I reckon that Little Mac will make his dispositions for it and the chivalry"--which means the South--"will take a distant view of his preparations and then skedaddle, as usual. If they don't they will get a terrible licking, though it is reported that they are concentrating everything there and have got 140,000 troops. A contraband"--meaning an escaped slave--"that came in yesterday says that they are talking terrible fierce about burning Richmond, fighting over the ashes. But I think that's all bosh."Thursday morning, May 23: "On picket," he says. "Dear Mother, Captain and myself slept under the same blanket last night and on the ground in front of the muskets, and it was harder than Pharaoh's heart. But it promotes early rising, for it's now 7 a.m. and I've been up for three hours.""In an oat field, Saturday, May 24. I had the best view of the army in motion there that I ever had as they came down a long slope of low hills to the creek and then up the other side, and as we arrived at the top of the latter slope I turned and took a look back and could see the long line, looking like an enormous snake winding back for two and three miles, and bristling with bayonets, and at a short distance the Stars and Stripes and the flags of different states and the guidons, presenting a scene that occurs but once in a great while. It is raining like great guns again and the order has come to pack up and move on.""Oh dear Mother,"--this is the next day--"A large mail has come and everybody has got something but me. I cannot write any more under such circumstances. So goodbye, my love to all. [Laughter] And if you can, any of you, spare time, please write me a letter. [Laughter] Love, Charlie."Wednesday, May 28th. "Dear Mother, Today the sun shines brightly and it is brazen hot. But at half past two this company has got to go out and dig in the trenches for two hours. One thing is very certain, if they do not take Richmond soon they will kill the whole army by this ceaseless exposure and toil."May 31st, the day of the Battle of Seven Pines. "Mother, and now in relation to the coming battle, if anything should happen and I should get killed, you will be entitled to my pay. There is three months due me, but if I should not get paid off before anything should happen, my pay will be in two places; that is from the March"--meaning the month--"there will be fifty dollars per month in the State Treasury of Massachusetts, which I have allotted there subject to my own order. The rest of my pay is drawn from the U.S. Paymaster, as usual." Imagine being his mother.And then it's this letter after the battle. "June 2, 1862, six miles from Richmond. Dear Mother, I presume this letter will find you most anxious, expecting a letter from me. I'm sitting in the hot sun and can write you but a few lines. Oh Mother, I cannot begin to give you any idea of the terrific storm of bullets, shot and shell, that poured over us as we lay behind those pits. We could not get into them for they were full of brine of water, but we lay right behind them in the mud. After half an hour of this the firing ceased and we were ordered forward behind some fallen woods." And then he goes on to describe how they were attacked from the rear and how he heard the bullets flying by him constantly, and how he considers it a miracle that he is alive. And then at the very end of this letter: "I cannot succeed in giving you any idea of battle. But I know this much, that I had no possible hope of coming out alive. And I thought it all over, how terribly you would feel, and all that. But I came out without a scratch. I look back upon it and I cannot think how it can be. It does not seem as though any man that had been there could come out unhurt." Then he begins to describe his friends and buddies who were killed, by name, how they were killed, where they were shot. And he ends, "There are so many incidents crowding my head Mother, that I cannot write clearly at all. And even when I sleep, the minute I get into a doze, I hear the whistling of the shells and the shouts and the groans. And to sum it up in two words, it is horrible."Charlie will survive the war. He nearly died of dysentery twice. He had two horses shot out from under him. He was deeply proud of his commission as a Second Lieutenant and as an adjutant of his regiment. His regiment was devastated. There were so few men left by July of 1864, they were disbanded. He went home to Massachusetts. He couldn't imagine being a civilian. He hated civilians. He re-enlisted to be a recruiter of black soldiers. This racist young man from western Massachusetts, who will freely use the word "nigger," was employed from August of 1864 through the end of the war recruiting black men in Norfolk, Virginia, and his principle job was sitting in an office writing love letters for illiterate black women, to their husbands at the front, whom he thanks for teaching him the art of love-letter writing.Well, the battle of the peninsula ended up in what's called the Seven Days. The Battle of the Seven Days were the battles fought all around Richmond, from June 25th?through July 1st, seven consecutive days; places called Mechanicsville, Gaines Mill, Savage Station, Frazier's Farm, Malvern Hill. They're all little crossroads--they're not even really villages anymore--that are just east of Richmond. It was sustained, day-to-day fighting. Both sides suffered horrible casualties. The result was essentially the fact that McClellan did not succeed in taking Richmond; in fact, on the contrary, McClellan's forces were forced down south of Richmond to the edge of the James River to a place called Malvern Hill where McClellan put his wounded, damaged army into camp for too long. The Battle of the Seven Days saved Richmond, it saved the Confederacy. It also brought Robert E. Lee into the command of all Confederate forces in the eastern theater of the war, because Joseph E. Johnston, who had been in command of the Confederate forces, was wounded on the first day of the Seven Days, and Jefferson Davis put Lee in command. And it was in some ways Lee's aggressiveness in the Seven Days that actually won that affair.And now Lee made the first fateful decision of the war, for him. After many consultations with Jefferson Davis and his other commanders, he made the decision to invade the North. And this was fateful, to say the least, and it will bring us to the first major turning point of the Civil War. I've just run the clock out, I fear. Oh damn. I have two minutes. Let me leave you here. The idea Lee had, and it's not that complicated, is that the war was now devastating Virginia. Richmond was all but under siege. The theory here was take the war to the North, take the war out of Virginia, take the war to northern soil, hopefully get into Maryland. And he believed there were thousands of Maryland men who would come to the Confederate standard, if they saw the Confederate Army. Threaten the capital, Washington, DC; threaten Philadelphia and Pennsylvania; threaten the North, take the war to their soil, to their farms, to their homes. And strategically--and this is where Jefferson Davis agreed with him, although he was very leery about this--a strike into the North that could win a major victory on northern soil and threaten the Union capital, possibly even enforce an evacuation of the Federal capital, might bring the most important thing the Confederacy needed--and they were on the verge of it--and that was British intervention, British recognition and intervention on the side of the Confederacy. I'll discuss that possible intervention more as a piece of how emancipation becomes the result of this Antietam campaign next week.But let me leave you here. Lee decides in the face of a kind of quiescent McClellan to leave only a small force in Richmond, and move north into Virginia and invade the north. McClellan's army, having suffered 20,000 casualties in the Seven Days, is not going to move, and he's not going to move until he absolutely has to. It is the first great daring move of the war. It will fail, but it nearly succeeded. And the reason Antietam is the first major turning point of this war is not just because of the decisive battle they fought on the Maryland side of the Potomac, but because it will be the occasion to allow Abraham Lincoln to do what he'd been planning to do through much of that summer, and Congress had been prodding him to do, which was to announce to the world that this was a war to free the slaves. See you next week.[end of transcript]back to topCivil War and Reconstruction:?Lecture 15 TranscriptMarch 4, 2008<< backProfessor David Blight:?Good morning. I'm going to talk today about turning points, and on Thursday about turning points, and beyond that, probably, about turning points. But let me lay out right now my own sort of selective list, short list, of the most important turning points in the Civil War; make the list and then we will come back to them. Now this is any military historian's, or any Civil War historian's guess, of course. But there's no question that the Antietam campaign of 1862 is a major turning point in the Civil War, and I'll select that as my first. There are things happening before that that are terribly important, like the saving of Richmond, against McClelland's Peninsula Campaign in June and July of '62. But it is this first invasion of the North by Robert E. Lee, culminating in the bloodiest single day of the Civil War; over 5000 dead, 23,000 casualties in eight hours, on fields along a little creek in southwestern Maryland that not only stopped this first major invasion of the North and this threat of a southern army to northern soil, northern resources, and northern cities, but it of course resulted in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which transformed the purpose of the war on both sides; back to that in a second.The second major turning point in the war, militarily, I'd argue, as most people do, was the Battle of Gettysburg in July of 1863 and the day after the three days' battle at Gettysburg. The bloodiest encounter of the entire war, if you add up the three days' casualties of almost 56,000 dead and wounded, in three days--that battle, of course, stopped Lee's second invasion of the North, and we'll come to that in a moment, at least in brief terms. On the day after Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg on the 4th?of July 1863, the kind of citadel river town or city of Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to Union forces, after a siege of nearly six months. When Grant took Vicksburg on the 4th?of July in 1863, it virtually opened up the entire Mississippi River to Union control; it cut geographically the Confederacy in half; it isolated Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas from the rest of the Confederacy. It was without a question, at least in the long-term, a decisive turning point in the war in the West. A third major turning point, I'd argue, is the Fall of Atlanta in September 1864; and we'll come that later on, after the break. A fourth major turning point in the war, politically, without any question I think, is the Election of 1864, the only time in modern history that a republic attempted to hold a general election in the midst of civil war and succeeded in doing it. The re-election of Lincoln in 1864 was absolutely crucial to the prosecution of the war to the ends, the Lincoln administration at least, by then, had determined to fight it. But without the fall of Atlanta, the first week of September 1864, it's not at all clear Lincoln would've been re-elected, and more on that later.And then fifth, you could argue, I would argue, the greatest single turning point in the Civil War, deeply related to these military battlefront affairs, is emancipation. The emancipation of 4.2 million American slaves in the midst of eventually all-out, near total war by the North on the South, to destroy southern society and its institutions, transformed American history, more than just transforming a war. That's the theme of this lecture and Thursday's lecture, and even to some extent beyond. It is those results beyond the battlefield that ultimately it is our obligation to understand. It's important, it's an obligation to understand why the Battle of Antietam turned the way it did, and it's an obligation to understand why Lee is invading the North a second time in 1863, and why that encounter at Gettysburg turned out the way it did. But by then it is a war being fought for something very different, and much, much larger than it had been at the outset.One way into this story is a very simple quotation in one of those interviews held with former slaves in the WPA Oral History Narratives in the 1930s. These were the interviews, over 3000 of them done with ex-slaves, many of them in their eighties, some even in their nineties. A guy named Cornelius Garner was interviewed in 1937, at age 91. He was asked if he had fought in the Civil War, and Cornelius replied to his interviewer, who was a black interviewer in this case, "Did I fight in the War? Well if I hadn't you wouldn't be sittin' there writin' at me today." He then went on to describe a corner of his native Norfolk, Virginia where slave auctions used to be conducted on New Year's Day. "That day, New Year's Day," said Garner, should be kept by all the colored people. That is the day of freedom. And they ought to remember Frederick Douglass too. Frederick Douglass told Abe Lincoln, 'Give the black man guns and let him fight.' And Abe Lincoln say, 'If I give him a gun, when it come to battle he might run.' And Frederick Douglass say, 'Try him, and you'll win the war.' And Abe said, 'All right, I'll try him.'" Now that's a simplistic, homespun explanation for how emancipation came about. Over 180,000 African-Americans will end up in the Union armies. But old Cornelius wasn't entirely wrong.All right, back to Virginia, in 1862. I'll put the outline back up if we need it. I don't know if you can see all of that but I hope you can see some of it. I left you with McClellan's army on the peninsula having been defeated. I thought I'd show you a couple of magnificent Mathew Brady photographs. Photography, of course, had finally come into its own. The Civil War would be the first major event in world history to be photographed on a large scale, and it's in part what made Ken Burns's film possible, especially the use of that camera they now that have that can go into an old daguerreotype type, which isn't any bigger than this, and make it seem like a giant panorama. This is a photograph taken behind Union troops overlooking the Cumberland River in May 1862; that's before the Battle of the Seven Days, that's during the march by McClellan's army up the peninsula. I don't how well you can see that but that's an absolutely stunning photograph of a Union wagon train on one of these makeshift bridges. They would build these things in a few hours, over all these rivers, which in May of 1862 were flooding constantly. It's Union troops crossing the Chickahominy River, just east of Richmond, May 1862.Now, what happened next of course was--and this is where I left you--was Lee's fateful decision to not stay and just defend Richmond; so not just leave the war in Central Virginia. Having defeated or held back McClellan's army, and with a certain degree of confidence that McClellan probably would be McClellan and not move, he decided to invade the North. Now there were all these high-level councils of war in Richmond between Jefferson Davis, Lee and his generals. There were arguments for and against it. But Lee won the day, and the argument, and he went west behind the Blue Ridge mountains and invaded the North through the upper part of the Shenandoah Valley, the goal of which was to not attack Washington, D.C., by any means--I think I have a better map possibly; yes, maybe that helps a little better--not to attack Washington or necessarily to even threaten Philadelphia directly. Lee had no intention of taking over any northern cities. He couldn't do that. He didn't have the resources. He didn't have an army big enough. How would he have occupied them? But what he most wanted to do, the aim of this invasion, was wanting to take the war out of ravaged Virginia; to threaten northern cities, especially the U.S. capital; to try to bring about--and Great Britain was on the brink of this, and I'll come back to that foreign policy diplomatic story a bit later--but Great Britain was truly on the brink of near recognition, at least a kind of quasi-recognition of the Confederacy, and the theory here was that if the Confederate forces could win a major victory, somewhere on northern soil, get into Pennsylvania, do it twice over, live off the land, possibly even force the evacuation of the U.S. capital, that news of that in Great Britain might bring about British recognition of the Confederacy as the legitimate government, and especially give the Confederacy access to its navy, if not even the possibility of ground forces. And by the way, a British force had already been sent to Canada in early 1862 for the possibility of intervention in the American Civil War.Now, there was also a theory here at work that is going to be dead wrong. Lee believed, as did other Confederate leaders, that in Maryland, in particular, there was a great deal of Confederate sympathy and sentiment, and a lot of young Maryland men, the theory was, eager to join the Confederate forces if they could just get out of Maryland. And that marching Confederate Army was going to attract them; at least that was the theory. The problem was when young men actually saw that Confederate Army, they were appalled, because that Confederate Army that invaded across the Potomac River--they crossed the Potomac on September 4 and September 5, 1862--was an army that had apparently remarkable, almost miraculous morale; they were winners. They had just defeated a Union Army with McClellan's whole force still back on the peninsula. The 40 to 50,000 Union troops still guarding Washington, DC were decisively, horribly defeated in the Battle of Second Manassas, the last two days of August, the 29th?and 30th?of 1862. That Union Army retreated once again--fought on the same fields as First Bull Run, thirteen months earlier--retreated into Washington, DC. Washington, DC, on September 1st?1862, was like a giant field hospital. There were some 3 to 4,000 wounded Union soldiers all over the streets of Washington, a broken army, with McClellan's army now retreating back up the Chesapeake and the Potomac and this huge flotilla trying to get to Washington in case Lee actually attacked Washington.But the army Lee had was starving, they weren't very well fed, and they weren't very well clad. Here's one description of a young Marylander who saw the Confederate Army. He said it was nothing but, quote, "a set of ragamuffins. It seemed as if every cornfield in Maryland had been robbed of its scarecrows. None had any underclothing. My costume consisted of a ragged pair of trousers,"--this guy apparently joined--"a stained dirty jacket, an old slouch hat, the brim pinned up with a thorn, a begrimed blanket over my shoulder, a grease-smeared cotton haversack full of apples and corn, a cartridge box full and a musket. I was barefooted. I had a stone bruise on each foot. There was no one there who would not have been run in by the police had he appeared on the streets of a normal city." And there's plenty of testimony in the record, though a lot of young Maryland men came out to see this now famous army of Robert E. Lee, took one look or one smell, as one put it, and went back to their farms. Lee will get almost no real recruits, out of Maryland. What they will do in Maryland, however, is capture several hundred slaves and return them, or take them, to Virginia. They're going to do the same thing in 1863 in the Gettysburg campaign on an even larger scale. Kidnapping was also part of the Confederate army's job.Now, the battle would not have occurred at Antietam except for the famous--and it's true--lost order. Here's what happened. Lee went into Maryland. The Union Army is all around Washington, D.C.; there's really no army up in Maryland to stop him, yet. He divided his army in three parts, three corps, about 20,000, roughly, men each. And they were spread out around Maryland about twenty miles apart, over a sixty-mile stretch. Stonewall Jackson's corps was sent to Harpers Ferry. The other two corps, they were separated, at least by twenty miles in between them, these three parts of his army. One of the cardinal rules of the old manuals they were taught in at West Point was, quote, in the old, in Henri Jomini's?Military Manual of Conduct, it said, "never divide your forces in the presence of the enemy." It's exactly what Lee had done. The problem was that the Union command was about to find out quickly. Lee wrapped orders around three cigars, sent his courier out to the three corps commanders, over the course of more than a day, to deliver the orders. But the orders were lost, and they were found by a private in an Indiana regiment whose name was B.W. Mitchell-- the 27th?Indiana Volunteers to be exact--who picked up this bundle of three cigars, with paper wrapped around it, and he read the orders, and at the bottom it said, "R. E. Lee." And he apparently said something like, "I've heard of him." And Lee was already a kind of budding legend because of the Seven Days and because of Second Manassas. And he gave it to his colonel who gave it to his brigadier-general who quickly gave it to other generals.Lincoln had little choice but to put McClellan back in charge. His commander at Second Manassas had been a general named John Pope, who had been thoroughly defeated and had had a nervous breakdown; seriously, he had a mental breakdown during the Second Manassas battle, and Pope was out of action, to say the least, and he would've been put out of action anyway. So Lincoln puts McClellan back in command, in Washington D.C., and within hours McClellan was delivered Lee's orders, just as though there had been a fourth cigar for McClellan. McClellan looked at these orders; but they were discovered, by the way, on the 13th?of September of 1862. McClellan read them by that night. The orders were basically to have all parts of Lee's Army concentrate, rather slowly, but concentrate toward the area of Sharpsburg, Maryland, which is right here along Antietam Creek. Sharpsburg is a little town, Antietam's a little river. But they were to congregate there within the next, oh, three to four days.McClellan now has at his command about 90,000 troops. If he marched them quickly he had the opportunity to defeat Lee's Army in parts. But McClellan was McClellan. He sat on the lost order for about two days before he decided (1) whether to believe it, (2) what to do about it. Lee quickly discovered that his orders never reached his commanders and he worried, he sent out new orders to concentrate as fast as possible near Sharpsburg. McClellan finally moved slowly from the camps around Washington, up toward Sharpsburg. They encountered each other at a place called South Mountain at the end of the day of the 15th?of September 1862, and a battle of a sort was fought there. It was only a rearguard sort of thing. Lee retreated out of the South Mountain pass, down into this little valley around Sharpsburg, Maryland, which is just above the Potomac River. Now Lee was taking a tremendous risk here, because one of those other rules they'd been taught was never engage an enemy, at least in full force, with a major river behind you. But that's exactly what happened.They fought the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, as I already said, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War. They fought in cornfields, they fought across open fields, they fought along a sunken road, they fought along a famous bridge now known as the Burnside Bridge. I have a couple of photographs to show you. They fought along what's known as the Hagerstown Road, along which 48 hours after the battle one of Mathew Brady's photographers took this awful photograph. These are Confederate dead along that road. There are many, many photographs taken at Antietam. This is another one of Union dead lined up for burial, a line of dead probably 75 yards long. Antietam was in no way necessarily a decisive or strategic victory for either side. I want you to see this photograph because of its irony. You've probably seen this one before. At the end of the day at Antietam there were about 23,000 casualties on both sides, over 5,000 dead. And you may remember back on 9/11, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the estimates were over 5,000 dead at the World Trade Center and people were comparing this to Antietam as the bloodiest day of sacrifice in American history. It turned out not to be the case; nevertheless.What happened in the wake of Antietam was that Lee's invasion of the North had been stopped. Now McClellan missed a tremendous opportunity to press the day. This has always been a debate among military historians, and you can read, oh God, hundreds of pages on this, if you care to. It's always been a debate as to whether if McClellan had followed this up could he have literally crushed Lee's army with the Potomac at his back and in effect ended the war? There surely was that possibility but the day at Antietam had been so devastating to both forces that McClellan did not move; in fact, he did not move for days. It's also true though that McClellan kept in reserve at Antietam, and it was this act, I think, more than anything else, that got Lincoln finally to go out there by October 3 and fire McClellan. McClellan kept about 20,000 of his troops in reserve at Antietam, always fearing that he was outnumbered; he didn't use them. And in a military sense had someone like Grant been in charge at Antietam, it is entirely possible Lee would've been defeated and at least the war in the East ended. But that was not the case. Lee retreated back into Virginia to fight again.This is a Mathew Brady photograph, taken of Lincoln meeting with McClellan. This is McClellan right here. There's also a famous photo of them sitting in that same tent you may have seen; Burns uses it in the series. It was in this meeting that Lincoln went out to meet with McClellan to urge him to move, to push into northern Virginia, to push after Lee's Army in early autumn, while the weather was so good. And McClellan did not move, and a couple of days after that he was fired; and fired for good. Although McClellan will not leave history of course, he will come back to be the Democratic Party's candidate for president in 1864 against Abraham Lincoln.Now it is, of course, in the wake of Antietam that Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. Let me turn to that now and explain why and how emancipation became the new cause of the war. Now, let's discuss Lincoln for a moment, first. The biggest problem with Abraham Lincoln has always been not--that is in how we interpret him and treat him, understand him, use him, which we do constantly. Every president, every American politician, as David Donald once said famously in the 1950s, "has to get right with Lincoln." Everybody uses him. We twist him all inside out and make him say whatever we want him to say. And there's no other American in our history who has been given credit for more apocryphal quotations, than Abraham Lincoln. A little later in the course I'll use a few of them, at the end of--when we get to the end of the war. But the problem with Lincoln is indeed his ambiguity, the reality of his historical ambiguity. There is a puzzling dualism about him. There are two, at least two, seeming incompatible legends, if you want, about Abraham Lincoln. One has him as the kind of awkward, amiable, storytelling, rail splitting, frontier folk hero, everybody's favorite homespun, granddaddy with a corncob pipe, who might just tell you a little raunchy story, and have you chuckling; he's kind of fun. The other though is the towering political genius, the moral leader, the shaper of a nation's destiny, savior of the Union and the Great Emancipator. He never quite asked for any of those.Everybody needs to claim him though. There's a brilliant essay on this by an historian named Scott Sandage. It came out about ten years ago, it's called "A Marble House Divided." It's all about the Lincoln Memorial. A lot of you you've probably been to the Lincoln Memorial. It is America's secular temple. Everybody uses it. The Ku Klux Klan has held rallies at Lincoln's temple. Martin Luther King gave the Dream speech at Lincoln's temple. It's been used by every extreme of American political culture. If you want to claim the nation's attention, go to the nation's temple and claim old Abe, up behind you. He was never very open about himself, never wrote an autobiography, didn't write many autobiographical sentences as a matter of fact; didn't live long enough to do that. He was never an abolitionist. He actually had a lot of personal contempt for radical abolitionists. He didn't like a lot of their arguments and he didn't like their tactics and strategies. He was a genius with language; no, no, there's no question about that. We've never had a president who could use words, who could find the music of words, like Lincoln. He wrote every word and every sentence of every one of his speeches and every one of his great public letters. Jim McPherson even went so far as to write an article saying how Lincoln won the war with metaphors. I don't know whether a metaphor can win you a war. Strongest battalions might be a little more important in the end. Who knows?Is he the symbol, though, of the man who held back emancipation as a white supremacist, or is he the symbol of the man who outgrew his prejudices, and those of his time, to become the emancipator? Or was he just a shrewd politician, kind of finding the middle ground and seeing how the wind was going to blow if he tried this or if he threw up that balloon, or if he tried that? Now there are many ways to reflect on Lincoln. My own favorite expression about him--and there are thousands of these--but my own favorite comes from W.E.B. DuBois, the great black scholar of the twentieth century, who I think really captured all sides of Lincoln in one quotation. This was DuBois, in an editorial he wrote in 1922 in?The?Crisis?magazine. He wrote it at the time of the unveiling of the Lincoln Memorial. He also wrote it at a time when he was fed up with all of the national honoring and celebration of Robert E. Lee. So it may have--that celebration of Lee, which disgusted DuBois, maybe had had something to do with how he wrote this expression about Lincoln. But this is DuBois on Lincoln, quote: "I love him, not because he was perfect, but because he was not perfect, and yet triumphed. There was something left so that at the crisis he was big enough to be inconsistent, cruel, merciful, peace loving, a fighter, despising negroes and letting them fight, and vote, protecting slavery and freeing slaves. He was a man, a big, inconsistent, brave man." I'd argue, my friends, that the most important thing you can grasp about Abraham Lincoln is that he had the capacity for growth. He was big enough to be inconsistent, or as Emerson once put it, consistency's a hobgoblin of simple minds. Remember all that language about flip-flopping in the 2004 election? One of the candidates was alleged to have been a flip-flopper all the time. Well, if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been a flip-flopper we wouldn't have had the Emancipation Proclamation. So here's to flip-flopping. [laughter]Lincoln's early record on slavery is interesting. As early as 1837 he was one of only two representatives in the Illinois Legislature to vote against a resolution declaring the right of slave ownership; he was twenty-eight years-old at that time. He has one two-year term in the House of Representatives. During that term, which was the Mexican War, he found himself appalled at the slave trade in the District of Columbia. You could go visit slave auctions, as I've said before, I think, two or three blocks down the street from the capitol. He called that slave market, quote, "a sort of Negro livery stable where droves of Negroes are collected, temporarily kept and finally taken to Southern markets, precisely like droves of horses." He also said during that same term, "If the Negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that all men are created equal and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another." At the same time Lincoln though was a Henry Clay Whig. He was a supporter of the Compromise of 1850. He believed in compensation to slave owners as a way, a hope, of setting up some kind of gradual emancipation plan. And he believed, as Henry Clay had founded it, in this idea--at least he did for awhile--this idea of colonization, of sending blacks either to Africa or to the Caribbean or to Central America.I don't have time to stop on those fabulous Lincoln-Douglas debates where you can find every extreme of Abraham Lincoln. I was once given an assignment in a junior seminar as an undergraduate. Old Fred Williams at Michigan State sent us to the Lincoln Collected Papers and he said, "Your assignment is to come back with one passage demonstrating that Lincoln was anti-slavery and believed in emancipation and come back with one passage showing that he was a white supremacist." Now, growing up a Lincoln lover, and I thought "oh, dear." That's like you've been raised in a certain religion and somebody says go read the Bhagavad-Gita or read the Koran or study Buddhism for awhile. I did that too for awhile; I didn't learn much but--. [Laughter] And sure enough you can find all those extremes in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. We also know, of course, that he was a free soiler and he's most famous in the South, of course, for that language of "putting slavery on a course of ultimate extinction" in the House Divided speech, and elsewhere. But once the war came, the imperative about what to do about slavery was a huge and delicate and terrible political question. And this is the Lincoln that will be forever debated and it'll be debated next year like it's never been debated because it's the bicentennial of his birth next year, and as I've warned you, it will be raining Lincoln books and you will have to dodge them next year. [Laughter]Now, after the war broke out immediately some slaves began to come into Union lines. The first were at a fort in Florida, and then as early as May 1861, some slaves began to come into Union lines, handfuls, near Fortress Monroe in Virginia. And there was a Union commander there, a political general, a former Democrat, before the war, and anything but an abolitionist, Benjamin F. Butler, who nevertheless when these slaves came into his lines, he realized, no, wait a second, the Confederates are over there using these people to build their fortifications, maybe we could use them to build our fortifications. So why don't we confiscate them and call them contraband of war? They're property under the law, call them contraband. And the name stuck, of course, and that name will end up in poetry and in song, and even in a law or two; contraband property. But, at the outset of the war, in the summer of '61, fall, winter of '61/'62, into the spring of '62, the first year of the war, the official policy of the Lincoln administration and of the Union forces, across the land, the official policy, was called denial of asylum. It meant that any slave who escaped into Union lines, the officer in charge and command of that unit had the responsibility to return that slave to his owner, if the owner--this was the impossible kicker--if the owner was loyal to the Union. If that owner was not loyal to the Union and was in the Confederate army or something, then yes, you could admit that slave to your lines as contraband of war.Now, of course if this had only been a trickle of people here and there, coming into Union lines, possibly this could be enforced. But it wasn't enforceable. How's that Union commander going to go out and figure out, hey, mister enslaved person, is your owner loyal or disloyal to the Union? That slave is probably going to say, "He's a Confederate, what do you think?" And, of course, most were. Now, Congress took the lead before Lincoln ever wrote an Emancipation Proclamation, although Lincoln was thinking about this and working on this all through that summer of 1862. Congress took the lead. Now this was a Congress, remember, that is now dominated by the Republican Party. You got eleven southern states out of the Union. They don't have any senators, they don't even have members in the House of Representatives. This is a northern Republican majority, significant majority. Now, they're going to run into trouble in the fall congressional elections of 1862, and they're going to lose some of those seats because of what they're doing now. Congress took the lead; it passed an Article of War in March of 1862 which said that fugitive slaves must be admitted to Union camps. It didn't say what their status would be, it didn't define anybody. It left their legal status vague. It just said any escaped slave must now be admitted.Now, the reason they did that is because this denial of asylum policy had caused chaos in a lot of Union units. A brief example. Remember this guy Charles Brewster whose letters I read from the other day; this guy from Massachusetts whose letters I edited and so on? Well Charlie Brewster, this racist from Northampton, Massachusetts, 28-years-old by now, nevertheless in the late fall of 1861, he took a runaway slave who was 17-years-old and named David, into his personal care--he made him his personal servant. This is after Brewster got his commission as an officer. He even wrote home to his sister, several times, asking his sister to send stocking caps, socks, an old pair of pants. He even named the shirts that he wanted to put on his David; it was as though he was dressing him. And Brewster was determined never to send that kid back to slavery. But down came the orders, by January, early February 1862, that all fugitive slaves within their camps must be returned to their owners, if those owners came to the Union lines to retrieve them. And the fugitive named David had his owner waiting at the camp. There was a near mutiny in the 10th?Massachusetts, which was Brewster's regiment, between those soldiers who wanted to protect these fugitive slaves and free them, in effect, and those who did not. And this went on in hundreds of regiments. Brewster was threatened with court martial and being run out of the Army if he didn't give back this fugitive slave. His compromise was that he took this young David out into the woods and he said, "Get out of here, run. I'll just tell them you ran away." And that's what he did.By that spring, Congress decided any fugitive slave who escapes to Union lines must be accepted. In April of 1862, Congress, on the 16th?of April--and this was a very significant law--they passed abolition, the end of slavery in the District of Columbia. They gave $300 per slave in compensation to those owners of slaves in the district. The District of Columbia in 1862 had 3,100 slaves. They also put up, I think the figure was about $300,000.00 in that bill, where they provided for the possible colonization of blacks voluntarily to foreign countries as a result of emancipation, a policy the Lincoln administration now was supporting. Then third, in June of '62, Congress, by majority vote, sort of threw a great deal of American history on the dust heap and they abolished slavery forever in the Western Territories; arguably the single most important cause of the Civil War. A stroke of the pen, in June of '62, they ended slavery, in spite of the Dred Scott decision. Now, remember what the Dred Scott decision had said. Here was Congress passing a law in direct opposition to a Supreme Court decision. It's an argument for not having too many civil wars, you see, because Congress might end up doing anything in the midst of a civil war, and they surely did here. And then finally, on July 17, 1862, Congress passed what was called the Second Confiscation Act. There'd been a First Confiscation Act passed back in August of '61. Even in the First Confiscation Act--and by the way, these were acts authorizing Union forces to confiscate Confederate property. Even in the First Confiscation Act, back in August of 1861, slaves were mentioned as property; their status was still very vague. But in the Second Confiscation Act, July '62, the law explicitly freed slaves of all persons, quote, "in rebellion," anywhere; any slave of anyone supporting the Confederacy. It did everything the Emancipation Proclamation will later do and then some. It was in some ways more extensive because it included all parts of the South, including those Border States that had not seceded from the Union.Now, with Congress already having done these things, by July of '62--and by the way, this is all during the Peninsula Campaign, down in Virginia. The Second Confiscation Act was passed in the immediate wake of the Seven Days battle. Lee is deciding to invade the North. Lincoln, as you may know the story--if you've read?Team of Rivals?by Doris Goodwin you know it-- would hang out at the War Department. He'd go there for some solitude. He had a private little office there. He began to draft an Emancipation Proclamation as a legal brief, a legal document, and he kept it in a locked door of a desk at the War Department. Supposedly there was one or two guards that knew about it; I'm not sure about that. But he was beginning to draft an Emancipation Proclamation probably as early as June, certainly by July of '62. The pressure now mounted from every direction. He secretly held meetings with a delegation of Delaware, and a delegation from Kentucky, trying to convince them to institute gradual emancipation plans over time with compensation to slave owners that would free slaves over a 35-year period. This was Lincoln the gradualist, this was Lincoln trying to condition public opinion. Delaware at that point only had 1,800 slaves. There were far more slaves in the District of Columbia than there were in all of Delaware. But the Delaware delegation that came to the White House to meet with Lincoln told him unequivocally no, they weren't going to touch slavery for fear of what it might ignite.Lincoln waited and waited. He was attacked by Horace Greeley in the?New York Herald Tribune, as you know. Read the famous Greeley letter in the Johnson Collection. This is the famous passage in August of '62 where Lincoln said, "I will save the Union by freeing all the slaves; or I will save the Union by freeing none of the slaves. My aim in the end is to save the Union." But read that entire letter, not just that quote, I'm going to leave that to you; read the entire letter, because he's actually honest on both sides of the semicolon. Look for his semicolon, and judge both sides. He's a crafty cat, you got to read him closely. Lincoln needed a battlefield victory, he needed some kind of battlefield success, and he gets that of course with Antietam. In the wake of Antietam, five days afterwards, 22nd?September '62, Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. That preliminary Emancipation Proclamation said that slaves in the United States, in the states in rebellion, would be freed on January 1st. There was a carrot and a stick. The stick was emancipation and conquest, if the Union forces could ever do it; and the carrot was in effect he invited the Confederate states to throw down their arms, give up the war, come back to the Union, by January 1st. They're not going to do it, of course, but he was hoping; or was he hoping?I'm going to leave you with this. Back in Virginia there was a young slave, twenty-two years-old. His name was John Washington. He'd grown up Fredericksburg, Virginia. Had a white father whom he never knew, a slave mother named Sarah. She taught him to read and write. He grows up an urban slave with lots of skills, highly valued, probably a brilliant young man. He got hired out five times in the late 1850s and the first year of the war. He married his sweetheart in January 1862 in the African Baptist Church in Fredericksburg. And he chose his moment of escape at the first appearance of Union forces along the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg on the 18th?of April, 1862. He left a narrative that he wrote after the war that I had the great good fortune to have lopped in my lap and have recently published a book about it. And in that narrative he tells this remarkable story of the day of his escape. He even drew a map of Fredericksburg of the day of his escape, including a glossary of sixteen sites and buildings and crossroads on that map, as though he wanted the world to see as well as hear his story. And John tells this story--he's twenty-two years-old--he tells the story of all the white people evacuating Fredericksburg and his mistress, Mrs. Tolliver, is literally packing her china and her silver, and she says one day, "Now John, you'll be with us tomorrow, you'll be with us tomorrow." She's assuming his loyalty. And he says, "Yes Misses, yes Misses, I'll be with you tomorrow." And then his next scene is he's got a hotel where he's been hired out as a steward, almost like an assistant manager, and he describes all the white people fleeing the hotel and fleeing the streets of Fredericksburg, and he says he took the twelve workers up on the roof of the hotel--and the hotel was called The Shakespeare, I kid you not. He takes all the black workers up on the roof of the hotel where they could see across the river and see what he called "the gleam of the Yankees' bayonets." And then he brought them all back down into the kitchen and he poured a round of drinks, and he held a toast, and the toast was "To the Yankees." And then he instructed his fellow workers, he said, to get out of there. "But," he said, "don't get too far from the Yankees."And then John Washington walked two blocks down to the river, he witnessed the formal surrender of Fredericksburg, he saw the bridges being burned by the Confederate forces, and he walked one mile up river, and he said he crossed the river at Fickland's Mill; and the old stone ruins of that mill are still there. So I know exactly where he crossed the river. He got into a rowboat, he crossed, and that night he slept in the camp of the 30th?New York Volunteers. A captain in that regiment named Ladd, l-a-d-d, formally freed him, he said, based on the law that had just been passed by Congress forty-eight hours earlier in Washington, freeing the slaves in the District of Columbia. John Washington spent the rest of that summer as a camp hand and a guide for the Union Army, all the way through Second Manassas. He dated his arrival in Washington, D.C. as part of the first great wave of freedmen into the capital, as September 1. And by the following year I found him in a City Directory record, living at his first address on 19thStreet in Washington. He had his wife, his newborn child, his mother and his 68-year-old grandmother living there with him. Apart from, beneath, next to, underneath this great military and political story, thousands and thousands of John Washingtons are freeing themselves.[end of transcript]back to topCivil War and Reconstruction:?Lecture 16 TranscriptMarch 6, 2008<< backProfessor David Blight:?The first formally recognized or organized black regiment in the Civil War was known as the First South Carolina Volunteers. It was organized entirely and exclusively among freed slaves, along the Sea Islands of South Carolina. It had an amazing non-commissioned officer whose name was Prince Rivers, a man who'd been a slave yesterday but a free man by 1862, and whose white commanding officer, Thomas Wentworth Higginson said, "in another land, in another time, he could command any army in the world." Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an abolitionist from Worcester, Massachusetts who ended up the colonel and the commander of that regiment. Nearly 1,000 freed slaves were recruited among the roughly 35 to 40,000 former slaves along the Georgian/South Carolina Sea Islands. Higginson went on to write a great book about it called?Army Life in a Black Regiment, and among the remarkable descriptions he left in that classic is this description from Thanksgiving Day 1862; so it's November '62. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation is in place but the final Emancipation Proclamation hasn't quite happened yet. It was actually the first formally, legally, federally recognized Thanksgiving Day; so decreed by Abraham Lincoln. And Higginson had his headquarters in an old plantation house. He looked out of broken windows, at this abandoned plantation in the Sea Islands, through what he described as "the great avenues of great live oaks," and he observed that quote, "All this is a universal southern panorama, but five minutes walk beyond the hovels and the live oaks will bring one to something so unsouthern that the whole southern coast at this moment trembles at the suggestion of such a thing, a camp of a regiment of freed slaves."Almost two years later one of those freed slaves named George Hatton wrote a couple of letters from the front. George Hatton was a former slave. He had lived part of his life in Washington, DC, part of his life in Virginia, North Carolina; he'd been around. He was at this point, by April of 1864, a non-commissioned sergeant in Company C, First Regiment, United States Colored Troops. They were in camp New Bern, North Carolina, and he sat down to write a letter to reflect upon the circumstance that he found himself in. Hatton, his fellow soldiers, and their families had lived generations as slaves. And this is what he wrote. He says, "Though the government openly declared that it did not want the Negroes in this conflict, I look around me and see hundreds of colored men armed and ready to defend the government at any moment. And such are my feelings that I can only say the fetters have fallen, our bondage is over." A month later Hatton's regiment was in camp near Jamestown, Virginia--and he didn't miss the irony of being at Jamestown, the founding site of Virginia. And into his lines came several black freed women who all declared they had recently been severely whipped by a master. Members of Hatton's company managed to capture that slave owner, a Mr. Clayton, the man who had allegedly administered the beatings on these women. The white Virginian was stripped to the waist. He was tied to a tree and he was given 20 lashes by one of his own former slaves, a man named William Harris, who was now a member of the Union Army. In turn, each of the women that Clayton had beaten were given the whip and their chance to lay the lash on this slaveholder's back. "The women were given leave," said Sergeant Hatton--his words--"to remind him that they were not longer his but safely housed in Abraham's bosom and under the protection of the Star Spangled Banner and guarded by their own patriotic, though once downtrodden race." In Hatton's letter he once again felt lost for words to describe the transformation he was witnessing. "Oh that I had the tongue to express my feelings," he wrote, "while standing on the banks of the James River on the soil of Old Virginia, the mother-state of slavery, as a witness of such a sudden reverse. The day is clear, the fields of grain are beautiful and the birds are singing sweet melodious songs while poor Mr. Clayton is crying to his servants for mercy." That's a revolution, described in the words of a former slave, words that were trying to capture the transformations of history at the same time his actions were trying to transform history. Words.Now, we will forever debate in this society the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation. Over and over and over again we debate: did it really free anybody? Why did it only free the slaves in the states in rebellion? Why was Lincoln so bloody legalistic in this document? Was Richard Hofstadter right when he said it had all the eloquence of a bill of lading (which means a grocery list)? Why was it written like it was a legal brief in court, here and there laced with some remarkable phrases? Why was he so careful not to free the slaves in the Border States that hadn't left the union? And on and on. But I think we should make no mistake, the Emancipation Proclamation is a terribly important American document. Emancipation is not just the story of great documents, as I'm trying to argue, but this one's important.The second paragraph reads--and this is, by the way, Lincoln's own handwriting; this is a facsimile of the original; he wrote some three or four originals--"that on the First Day of January in this year of Our Lord, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Sixty-Three, all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States"--God, is this legalistic--"shall be then"--this is not legalistic--"then, thenceforward and forever free. And the Executive governments of this United States, including the military and naval authority thereof"--the Army and Navy are now bound to do this it says--"will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom." Actual freedom. Now, yes, it was a limited document. It didn't free as many slaves as the Second Confiscation Act had legally already set in motion. That's true. But this is the most important thing to remember about the Emancipation Proclamation. Most black folks didn't care about the details of it. What they cared about is that the United States Government had acted and said they were going to be free.There were at least four immediate and visible effects of the Proclamation, once it went into effect on January?1. Every forward step of the Union armies now would be, whether some of those officers liked it or not, a liberating step. Secondly, news of this Proclamation, whatever the details and the fine print, would spread like wildfire across the South, and it would bring about--there's no question--it will bring about increased activity, increased flight, increased movement toward Union lines by freed people, where they can do it. And there's all over the record we have testimony of Confederate soldiers themselves, of Southerners, white Southerners themselves saying they first heard about the Emancipation Proclamation from their slaves. Third, it committed the United States Government in the eyes of the world--and that's terribly important when we remember that Great Britain was on the verge of recognition of the Confederacy--more on that a bit later in the course, of how that foreign relationship and the problem of Civil War diplomacy is being managed by the two governments, Union and Confederate. And fourth, on the second page of the Emancipation Proclamation--or is it the third--in another very legalistic paragraph Lincoln formally authorizes once and for all, although it's already begun to happen, the recruitment of black men into the Union Armies and Navy, and it authorizes a formal process now to recruit black men to the Union uniform. And before the war will end about ten percent of all Union forces will be African-American-- approximately 180,000--eighty percent of whom were former slaves, from the slave states.Now, in that fall of 1862, Frederick Douglass put down his cudgel that he'd been beating Lincoln with for a year in his editorials--and he beat him bitterly at times. At one point in late '61 he called Abraham Lincoln the most powerful slave catcher in the world. That was Douglass's opinion of that denial of asylum policy which said fugitive slaves escaping Union lines had to be returned if their owners were loyal. Douglass, like many others, saw the nonsense in that policy early on. Douglass finally put down the cudgel and he said, with lovely irony, "It is really wonderful," said Frederick Douglass, "how all efforts to evade, postpone and prevent its coming have been mocked and defied by the stupendous sweep of events"; its coming meaning black freedom. And I'll just say lastly, add a fifth to that, emancipation transformed the purpose of the war. Emancipation more than anything else will make the Civil War a war of conquest, a war of near totality, on both sides, and it meant now, now that this was going to be a war of conquest on the South's social and economic institutions, it meant it would probably only end in unconditional surrender.Now, it's a complicated story as to how this'll be enforced, of course. And I strongly urge you to read certain of those Lincoln documents in the Johnson reader, and more importantly, to read at least that greatest hits selection I provided in the reading packet of the documents on emancipation; which,?by the way, come out of a book called?Free?at?Last, which is itself a 500 page collection of the greatest hits of the documents of the American emancipation, which are now published in five volumes, all of which are in the National Archives. But one of those Lincoln documents I don't want you to miss, I said the other day, was the James Conkling letter. It comes in August of '63. One of the reasons that letter is interesting is that it shows us that though Lincoln could be one crafty politician; and whether emancipation will ever truly succeed in this war, of course, depends on the Union winning on the battlefield. It really depended on all those deaths at Gettysburg and at Vicksburg and so many other horrible places. And yes, it's true that large, large numbers of those Union soldiers who died didn't necessarily believe they were fighting to free slaves, nor did they even want to. But sometimes history is ahead of anyone's basic human, individual motives, isn't it?But in this Conkling letter, so called, it's a public letter that--Lincoln mastered this presidential art of the public letter more than any previous president and it was his version of the news conference, which didn't happen in those days. It was his version of an exclusive interview with Anderson Cooper, or whatever the hell it would be today. He wrote letters aimed at certain newspapers which would then be reprinted across the country. This was a letter to James Conkling, Congressman from Illinois, of his own party, who was opposing emancipation, who was at least wary of it and worried about it. The great worry about the emancipation policy, of course, was that white Northerners would not accept it, that white northern soldiers would thrown down their arms and say, "I ain't fighting to free the slaves. I'm fighting to preserve the Union, thank you very much." Lincoln had that great fear himself. But God, read that letter. It's one of Lincoln's--it's Lincoln the ironist; it's also Lincoln the persuasive lawyer. On the second page of it he says to Conkling--he's really saying this to white northerners now, because this letter got published everywhere--"You dislike the Emancipation Proclamation," he says, "and perhaps would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional. I think differently. I think the Constitution invests its commander-in-chief with the law of war, in time of war. The most that can be said, if so much, is that the slaves are property. Is there, has there ever been any question that by law of war property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed?" So there's that argument. Whatever you think of the morality of this, folks, slaves are property of the enemy; I'm taking their assets. It's a legal argument.Then you go to the next page--he's also beginning to make there an argument, if you read that part of the letter carefully, it's an argument for total war, to unconditional surrender, and he's trying to condition public opinion for this. Then you go to the next page. "You say you will not fight to free Negroes. Some of them seem wiling to fight for you. But no matter, fight you then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the Proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to free Negroes." All right, crawl into your cul-de-sac and say you're only fighting to save the Union, but here's another way to save the Union. And then he goes on. "I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the Negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever Negroes can be got to do as soldiers leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union." It's almost as if he's appealing to Conkling's racial self-interest; does it appear otherwise to you? And then Lincoln says, "But Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made must be kept."Okay, blah, blah, blah, lots of words, right? Words, words, words, words. Yes, but meanings are almost always somewhere, somehow embedded in words. Now, as I said, now every forward step of the Union armies is going to be a liberating step. And I want to show just a quick map here to illustrate something. And I can zoom in on that. I hope you can see the colors here to some extent. The simple point of this map is this. It's a map that shows the conquest of the South by Union forces, it's the movement, generally speaking, of Union lines into the South in what becomes now, by '62, '63 and '64, a war of conquest, West and East. But I want to especially stress that the most important factor in when and where a slave might attain his or her freedom; the first factor had everything to do with where the armies went. It was proximity to the war that made emancipation possible in northern Virginia in 1862; Sea Islands of Georgia, South Carolina, '62; around the whole New Orleans region in '62; but not possible at all in southern Georgia until after the war was over; not possible really at all in the southern half of Alabama until the whole war was over; not possible at all in parts of Mississippi until the whole war was over. Hence, that's why the large majority of American slaves were not actually within Union lines or technically free, in any way, until the war ended.I'll make one other point about this. There's a nice book by a historian named Stephen Ash. It's called?When the Yankees Came, and it's all about the process of Union occupation of parts of the South. He goes in and studies towns in Tennessee and towns in northern Georgia and towns in northern Virginia, and tries to understand, so what happened when an area of the South, an area of the Confederacy, came under Union control? And he divides the South usefully here; and it's very useful in understanding how emancipation actually happened on the ground as a human, sometimes brutal, ugly, chaotic, painful process. He divides the South into what he calls three regions: one, the "Confederate frontier"; the second he calls "no-man's land"; and the third he calls "garrisoned towns." Now that's pretty easy to understand. If you think of--just take Tennessee, up there in the middle. By 1862 Nashville became a--it was the capital of Tennessee--it became a garrisoned Union town; that is, it's occupied, its resources, its railroad, its everything, were taken over by the Union forces. And then there's the so called no-man's land, the region say between a Nashville and where the Confederate forces were, the land between the armies, which of course fluctuated a great deal back and forth. And then lastly he calls it the Confederate frontier, or at times he'll call it the Confederate hinterland, that is the land behind the lines that was never taken by Union forces, the land behind the lines where Confederate resources, relatively speaking, remained intact. They're still producing cotton crops, in the summer of '64 and the fall of '64, and they're still planting in the whole southern half of Georgia and the whole southern half of Alabama, by and large, right on into 1865. But where you happen to be geographically was the first important factor of where and how emancipation might occur, in proximity particularly to the armies.Now, a second factor that would determine when and if slaves would be free was the character of the slave society in any given region. Were they in a densely populated slave region like the Sea Islands, parts of the cotton belt? Or were they in sparsely populated areas? And again, it had to do with geography. Were you in the Lower Mississippi Valley, huge concentrations of slaves? When Grant's forces move down the Mississippi and eventually take Vicksburg by July 1863, this entire region--in fact it is in the Lower Mississippi Valley; this is why some people argue that the war, the Civil War was really won and lost in the West. And I'll engage that argument after the break when we talk about Union victory and Confederate defeat and the various debates among historians trying to explain this. A lot of people have argued that the war is won and lost in the West because of the great significance of the Mississippi Valley, which had become the great cotton kingdom of the world.And when Union forces truly conquer the Mississippi River by the summer of 1863, there are thousands of slaves coming into Union lines. The reason that Grant and Sherman and other officers in the West began to create these things called contraband camps, for freed slaves, is because they didn't know what to do with them. And there are these amazing dispatches written by Grant, to the War Department, saying what am I going to do with all these people, how do I feed them, where do I put them? What is their status, what are they legally? And eventually that's why you get the largest contraband camps anywhere. The largest ones were not in Virginia--although there was a huge one around Washington, DC--the largest of them were in northern Mississippi at a place called Corinth. You can see it on the map right here. There was a huge contraband camp at Memphis. There was eventually one in Cairo, Illinois. All up and down this region, this is where conquest really happened first and the true disruption of southern society and the beginnings of the destruction of plantations. It will lead even to the beginnings--it's going to take another year for it to happen along the East Coast, but it begins in '63; even in '62 but especially '63--where many plantation owners in Louisiana and Mississippi started refugeeing their slaves. They would flee their plantations in the face of the Yankee armies, often going west toward Texas, sometimes just further inland, or wherever they could go, and they would try to take their slaves with them; it was called refugeeing them. And often what that meant--I'll cite some examples of that after the break. There's a famous diary memoir by a southern woman, Kate Stone, who kept a diary of her plantation called Brokenburn. At any rate, she left with some hundred-and-some slaves to try to get out of Louisiana over into Texas. By the time she got there half of them were gone, and she kept wondering why. Gee, why would they leave, what happened to their loyalty?Then thirdly, the third factor that would determine when and how and if a slave became free was, indeed, what policy was actually being enforced, at any given time, by those Union troops, or for that matter by the Confederate troops in terms of freeing the slaves or not freeing the slaves, taking them into their lines or not taking them into their lines, and establishing some kind of legal status. And then the fourth factor, of course--and this one you can't measure; you can know it when you read it and you see it and you hear it, and there's so many wonderful documents that demonstrate it--the fourth factor in when and how American slaves became free was their own ingenuity, their own initiative, their own cunning, their own bravery, their own willingness to risk everything, to try to get to something called freedom. And not knowing what that freedom would be when they got there -- would they be employed? Would they have shelter? Were they going to be able to feed their children? Could they get their wives and husbands out with them? What about women with three children, where would they go, what would their status be? Would they actually have any rights?We learn so much about this--and please in the reading packet have a close look. I included some of those documents from the contraband camps where these superintendents of the contraband camps were all asked a series of questions. They were asked things about the motives of the slaves that escaped into their camps. They were asked to describe why had these people come. They were asked to describe their physical conditions. They were asked to describe what they thought, what they felt, what they said. And all these superintendents of all these contraband camps are just stunned at the way that black folk keep coming, in spite of the hardships, half clothed, half fed--if that. And they're stunned at the religiosity of escaped slaves. These superintendents write back and they say, "These people sing and they worship all night long--strange." But almost to a man, these superintendents of contraband camps when asked what were the motives, they simply fall back on the most basic of things. They say things like, "They wanted their freedom."Now, emancipation also would depend, here and there, on a whole lot of other factors, but again they come under these categories I've already given you--the close proximity to the war. Now, for example, when the war moved into Georgia in '63 and '64, when Sherman invaded northern Georgia and the war really went to the deep hinterland, the heart of the southeast, Confederates were all ready--and they were already doing this in Virginia, they were beginning to do it out in the West, they surely did it in the city of Mobile and other Confederate held cities--Confederates had begun to employ or impress their slaves into service, thousands of them. About 3000 slaves were put to work in Mobile, Alabama, building its fortifications. Slaves, hundreds upon hundreds of slaves, were put to work building fortifications of Richmond. An estimated 5,000 slaves were put to work building the fortifications all around Atlanta, by late '63, to try to stop Sherman's advance. Very often they were hired out; that is, they were supposed to be paid--or their owners were supposed to be paid--for their service. They were used as teamsters and nurses and cooks and boatmen and blacksmiths and laundresses and so on and so forth. If you saw a Confederate Army from 1862 to '64, you'd see hundreds of black people. Well, and as those armies moved, sometimes those slaves had opportunities to flee. In the wake of battles, on any scale, some slaves would always flee. They were often used as the burial crews, on both sides. They were also hired out--and this was really significant in Virginia--to the ironworks in Richmond. The Tredagar Ironworks at one point employed almost 4,000 slaves who tended to be hired out from the western parts of Massachusetts and the northern parts of North Carolina.That movement of people, movement of slaves, on this scale had never happened in the South, and in the midst of that movement. Linda Morgan wrote a fine book on emancipation in Virginia and she showed this for the first time, that all this movement of hired out slaves to Richmond--and other small ironworks, by the way, over in the Shenandoah Valley--meant a certain percentage of them began to flee, and escape, further north. They worked on railroad crews. It was estimated that in northern Georgia, during Sherman's campaign against Atlanta, that about forty percent of all the women working as nurses in Confederate hospitals all over the state were slave women. That means they'd been taken off their plantations, their farms, or out of their domestic situations, wherever they were, and put to work in the hospitals. So the point is, movement of the armies meant movement of slaves as well, and that moment of freedom, that moment of escape, that opportunity might come when you would least expect it. And that American slave had to make a choice, every time--do I go and risk everything or do I not?Let me tell one little story amidst that. It's the other half of this book I just did. This young slave named Wallace Turnage. He was born on a little tobacco farm in North Carolina in 1846, Green County, North Carolina, sold by his indebted owner to a Richmond, Virginia slave-trader named Hector Davis, who was one of the largest slave-traders in the United States and kept enormous records. He spent about six months in 1860 working in the three-story slave jail/auction house in Richmond. His job every day was preparing the slaves in what was called the dressing room, to take them out to the auction floor. And one day he's simply told, "Boy, you're in the auction." And he was sold to an Alabama cotton planter named James Chalmers. Seventy-two hours later by train he found himself on a huge cotton operation near Pickensville, Alabama, which is right about there, right on the Mississippi border, a plantation with about eighty-five slaves. And the narrative he left us, which was discovered and lopped into my lap a few years ago, the extraordinary narrative he left, is the story largely of his five attempts to escape in the midst of the war, from the age of fourteen to seventeen. He was one passionate--half-crazy, one might say--no doubt traumatized--teenage slave who just couldn't be controlled.He ran away four times into Mississippi, the second two of which, certainly at least, he was always trying to get up to northern Mississippi to get to the Union armies, which he knew had controlled the whole northern tier of Mississippi by late spring 1862; in fact three of his escapes over there were really--. He would always go up the Mobile and Ohio Railway Line. And one time he was at large for four and a half months, hiding in other slave cabins and hiding in woods and forests and gullies wherever he could hide, and he was always captured. He was trying to actually get to Corinth, and the big contraband camp in Corinth, and he almost made it on his fourth try. He kept being captured by slave patrols, Confederate patrols and so on. His master would always come after him because he was so valuable. He'd been sold, by the way, for $950 the first time, out of North Carolina. He was sold for $1000 to old Chalmers in Richmond. And Chalmers now got fed up in early '63 of constantly trying to retrieve this kid, and he took him down to Mobile, Alabama and sold him at the slave jail in Mobile in the spring of 1863 for $2000. That's about the price today of a good Mercedes-Benz; well as opposed to a bad Mercedes-Benz, I'm not sure what that would be.And Wallace's fifth and final escape attempt, the one that succeeded, came after a vicious beating. He'd been beaten many more times than he could count and he'd been put in neck braces and leg chains and ankle chains and wrist chains and every kind of--he'd experienced about every kind of brutality slavery could wreak upon a teenage kid. One day, he crashed his master's carriage and the master got so angry that he took him to the slave jail, hired the jailer to give him thirty lashes with the ugliest whip they had, this contraption they had that would make you bleed on every lash. At the end of it he's standing there naked, bleeding, and his master says, "Go home." And instead of going home he put his clothes back on and he walked right through the Confederate Army, a garrison of 10,000 troops, where he was no doubt simply mistaken for yet another black camp hand, and at dusk he just crossed through the Confederate camp and he walked out of Mobile. And his final escape is a three-week trek, which he narrates in remarkable ways, a three-week trek down the western shore of Mobile Bay for twenty-five miles through a snake and alligator invested swamp, now known as the Fowl River Estuary. I've been there, I've seen the alligators and the snakes, from a large ferry boat.And he describes one day praying especially hard when he got out to the tip of Mobile Bay, and the tide brought in an old rickety rowboat, and he tipped over the rowboat, took a plank of wood and he just started rowing out into the ocean. And in quite dramatic form he--which is no doubt a little embellished--he describes how a wave is about to swamp his little boat, and he hears oars, and the oars were a Union gunboat with eight sailors. They said, "Jump in." He jumped in. And he said as he sat down in their boat, he said the Yankee sailors were struck with silence as they looked at him. And I don't know if that's true or not, but I don't doubt it, they probably were struck with silence, wondering who he was and how he got there. They took him to a Sand Island fort and clothed him and fed him, the first kind acts by a white person that seventeen year-old Turnage had ever experienced. And the next day they took him to Fort Gaines on Dauphin Island, which is the big, beautiful sandbar island out at the mouth of Mobile Bay, and he was brought before the Union commander of all forces in the area, Gordon Granger, who interrogated him, probably because they wanted intelligence about Mobile, and Granger gave him two choices. He could either join a black regiment that they were forming at that very time in the Gulf region, or he could become a servant to a white officer. And Wallace chose the latter; didn't tell us why but probably because he'd had enough suffering. He'd seen enough of his own war with the Confederates. And he served out the war for another year as the mess cook for a captain from a Maryland regiment whose name was Junius Turner. And Wallace was with that regiment in Baltimore, Maryland in August of 1865 when it was mustered out.He lived three years in Baltimore and then moved to New York City where he lived the rest of his life, until 1916. But by 1870 I found him in a census manuscript living in the 300-block of Thompson Street in what you and I call Greenwich Village. He got his mother, his four siblings, somehow, out of North Carolina, and they were all living in a tenement house, surviving, as part of the first generation of a black working class, former slaves, in a northern city. He lived till 1916. He's buried in Cyprus Hill Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The point of all of that is that these slaves escaping were real people, with real names, real family, real hopes and desires. And those who--some of those who survived told us what it meant.Now, the war, of course, raged on, and at the end of the day--this is a photograph, by the way, taken in 1862, I believe, in Virginia. The photographer simply called it "A Group of Contrabands." The war raged on. And of course in the spring of 1863 the Union armies will invade Virginia again. I'll come back to lots of this after the break when we get back to the military history and try to explain how the Union side won this war. They'll fight a horrible battle at a place called Chancellorsville, near Fredericksburg in May of 1863, which will be another smashing victory by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, over a Union Army commanded by Joseph Hooker. It will give Lee his occasion for his second invasion of the North, the riskiest of all, which will lead him up through northern Virginia, across into Maryland, and eventually all the way in to Pennsylvania, and will lead to the fateful battle at Gettysburg, the first three days of July, 1863; arguably the most important military turning point of the war.But it is in those same first six and seven months of 1863 that this war has now been transformed into a war of unconditional surrender, a war of all out attempt, at least, all out mobilization at home, and conquest in the South. It is during this period that black soldiers are being recruited. The 54th?Massachusetts, the famous regiment from Massachusetts about which the movie?Glory?was made, was recruited that winter, and spring, of course, and marched off to South Carolina to its fate in May of 1863. They will reach their fate at Fort Wagner within a week of the Battle of Gettysburg back up north.But just as a way to take this out today, go back with me to January 1st, 1863, the day the Emancipation Proclamation actually went into place. I said at the outset that for most black folk they didn't really care about what actually the details or the words of the document were. The point was that now somehow the United States government was sanctioning emancipation. And go back with me to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. This is Higginson's description of Emancipation Day. On Hilton Head Island, in South Carolina, near Beaufort, South Carolina, he was given orders to read the Emancipation Proclamation to the people, to the freedmen. And this, by the way, became a policy throughout the Union Army. Thousands of copies of the Emancipation Proclamation were given to Union officers who were ordered to spread it around the South.Higginson not only spread it, he held a ceremony. They build a little stage. And this is his description of what happened. He's describing the scene: "All this was according to the program," writes Higginson. "Then followed an incident so simple and so touching, so utterly unexpected and startling that I can scarcely believe it on recalling it, though it gave the key note to the whole day. The very moment the speaker had ceased, and just as I took and waved the flag, which now for the first time meant anything to these poor people, there suddenly arose close beside the platform a strong male voice, but a little cracked and elderly, into which two women's voices instantly blended, singing, as if by an impulse that could no more be repressed than the morning note of a song sparrow. 'My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.' People looked at each other, and then at us on the platform to see whence came this interruption, not put down in the program. Firmly and irrepressibly the quavering voices sang on, verse after verse, 'my country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.' Others of the colored people joined in. Some whites on the platform began, but I motioned to them to be silent. I never saw anything so electric. It made all words cheap. It seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed. Nothing could be more wonderfully unconscious. Art could not have dreamed of a tribute to the day of jubilee; it should be so affecting. History will not believe it. And when I came to speak of it, after it was ended, tears were everywhere. If you could've heard how quaint and innocent it all was. Just think of it, the first day they'd ever had a country, the first flag they'd ever seen which promised anything to their people. And here, while mere spectators stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words, these simple souls burst out in their way, as if they were by their own hearths, at home. When they stopped there was nothing to do but to try to speak. And I went on. But the life of that whole day was in those unknown people's simple song." Have a good spring break.[end of transcript]back to topCivil War and Reconstruction:?Lecture 17 TranscriptMarch 25, 2008<< backProfessor David Blight:?Today we're going to take up a question that has been for the past, well, nearly 20 years, probably the most active--to many the most stimulating aspect of Civil War scholarship. How did the Civil War affect civilians? What were the social impacts of such a massive experience? How could you mobilize societies on this scale without profoundly changing people? What did it do to gender relations? What did it do to the meaning of race? We've already begun to deal with that question in some depth, how this war would transform the Constitution, transform American political culture, transform the lives of African-Americans--and more on that in time. But, of course, social history won the revolution in American history. Oh, somewhere back in the '70s and '80s everybody wanted to be a social historian. When I arrived at Amherst College circa 1989 to teach there was something in the--what was known as--the Pioneer Valley, the Five College Consortium--a Social History Working Group. And I remember asking, can you give a paper if it's not social history? And the answer was "sure."Social history won a sort of methodological struggle over how to do history, what is the meaning of the past? And you all know that by now, whether you think about it that much or not. Social history brought us the history of women. It brought us a revolution and scholarship in the study of African-Americans. It brought us a revolution in the study of class. It taught us how to study social groups in historical time. It's taught us how to study ordinary people. But--and then I'll get off this historiographical high horse--it's remarkable how much Civil War historians, focused as they were so much on an event, focused so much as they were so often for generations, as many put it, on headquarters, the headquarters of generals and of thousands of dispatches they wrote--because those were the sources--or the headquarters of the government, the president, commander of the armies, focused so much on an event from headquarters.A social historian came along in 1989. He wrote a, well, it was a relatively short little essay in the?Journal of American History?that became the title essay of a book of essays that came out a year later. It was by Maris Vinovskis, a numbers crunching, hard-boiled social historian who used to argue "if you can't count it, it ain't history." He wrote a little essay, he said, "have social historians lost the Civil War?" His answer, of course, was yes, and he showed, very carefully, by looking at few New England towns, that old tradition of studying in microcosm New England towns--which Colonial American history had been doing for a generation or two--he showed that there are all these towns all over New England, small and relatively large, that had lost half of their men between the age of 18 and 45, in four years of war. He went to some local records and he discovered some of those towns had lost 60% of their male population. He looked a little closer and he saw that the whole idea of occupations in those towns got completely redefined, at least during the war years, because the men were all gone. He started to count widows and count orphans. And, by God, you could count these things. You could measure how many widows were there in Newburyport, Massachusetts, how many widows were there in Bangor, Maine. You could count it. It stimulated a small revolution in scholarship, and it runs unabated as we speak.And in some ways, the most important kind of history done on it is two kinds. It's the kind of new Women's History you're reading in Drew Faust's book,?Mothers of Invention--a wonderful title. I don't know if any of you remember the old song by that title but it's worth thinking about. There's an irony in there somewhere. At any rate, you get a book like Drew Faust's, which stands on the shoulders of other books like it, but a book that went and read thousands of Southern women's letters and diaries to try to understand "how did this war affect Southern white women?" And she has many answers to that, including the somewhat bold argument at the end of that book that it was women, in part--an argument that has been tested by other scholars and even backed off from a bit by Drew herself--but she ends the book at least with a suggestion that the sheer weight of the burden of the war on Southern white women and the thousands upon thousands of letters in which they express that to their mates, their husbands, their brothers, their sons at the front, that it was, in part, Southern white women that made the South give up the war.And the other part of that Social History revolution has been of course among military historians themselves who discovered ways--the ways had always been there, and there were pioneering works on this as early as the 1950s by a scholar named Bell Wiley who wrote two thick volumes, one in 1954 or '55, one entitled?Billy Yank?and the other entitled?Johnny Reb. And lo and behold what that was, was the beginning of a tradition of studying the common soldier, his experiences, his terrors, his horrors, his stomach problems, his dysentery, his disease, his death. And above all, influenced greatly by the field of Psychology and influenced greatly by the rise of gender history, male military historians went to those common soldiers and began to study their values, their ideas, their sense of manhood, their sense of the idea of courage, what that meant in the 1860s in a mid-Victorian society like the United States. And when the set of values by which men, young and old, defined themselves as men collided with modern total war, what did it do to them? And of course 'they', being the male military historians of the 1980s and '90s, were themselves greatly affected by the experience of the Vietnam War.Now, with that little bit in mind, let me suggest something that is timeless about this question of the social impact of war, and then I'll get on to the substance of how the war affected southern society, northern society, and the like. These are excerpts from letters from a soldier in Iraq. His name is Juan Compos. They're actually emails. Juan was twenty-seven years old. He wrote this to his wife on December 12, 2006. "Hey beautiful, well we were on blackout again. We lost yet some more soldiers. I can't wait to get out of this place and return to you where I belong. I don't know how much more of this place I can take. I try to be hard and brave for my guys but I don't know how long I can keep up. You know? It's like every time we go out, any time, a bump or sounds freak me out. Maybe I'm just stressing. Oh hopefully it'll get over. You know, you never think that anything is or can happen to you. At first you feel invincible and then little by little things start to wear on you." That letter goes on and on, ends of course with tell his eight year old son "hello." Tuesday, October 3, 2006: "Mood, gloomy. The life of an infantryman is never safe. How do I know? I live it every day. I lost a good friend of mine just two days ago to an enemy sniper. The worst feeling in the world is having lost one of your own and not being able to fight back. The more I go on patrol the more alert I tend to be, but regardless, the situation here in Iraq is that we are never safe. No matter the counter-measures we take to prevent any attacks, they seem to seep through the cracks. Every day a soldier is lost or wounded by enemy attacks. I, for one, would like to make it home to my family one day. Pray for us, keep us in your thoughts, for an infantryman's life is never safe." December 15, 2006: "My only goals are to make it out of this place alive, to return to you guys and make you as happy as I can." Sergeant Compos was killed in the spring of 2007 by an IUD.This is a letter from the front by Charles Brewster, dated May 15, 1864. There's a timelessness to what soldiers write from war and there's a timelessness to its social impact. Brewster, as you may remember me telling you, was that soldier from Massachusetts, lonely and confused, feeling worthless, joined the Union Army, the 10th?Massachusetts, in April of 1861 and served out the entire war, and managed to survive, and wrote 260 quite incredible letters. This is the middle of the Spotsylvania campaign, arguably the worst constant daily trench warfare of the Civil War. He's the adjutant of his regiment and therefore he has to record all of the casualties, just like Sergeant Compos describing, in his war, sort of one a day. But this was war that was killing people by the dozens. He sends his latest report. "Our regiment suffered terribly in the fight the other day losing six officers wounded and eight men killed, plus thirty-four wounded that we know of, besides probably a good many that we do not know of, and from twelve to twenty taken prisoners. This makes a grand total of thirteen officers killed and wounded and twenty-four men killed, 135 wounded and forty-six missing, making 218 officers and men in twelve days. The regiment is reduced to 150 muskets and at this rate there will be none of us left to ever see Richmond." That regiment would, by the way, within about a week and a half of that, be mustered out because they had insufficient men to serve.But he ends this letter with what he describes as the most terrible sight he ever saw. "We're encamped on a splendid plantation and the corn and the wheat is growing finely, or rather it was before we came. But I am afraid the crops will be very small this year down here. We have not seen our wagons since we started and I'm getting sadly dilapidated. My rear is entirely unprotected. I have worn the seat of my pants and drawers entirely off. The most terrible sight I ever saw was the Rebel side of the breastwork we fought over the other day. There was one point on the ridge where the storm of bullets never ceased for twenty-four hours and the dead were piled in heaps upon heaps and the wounded men were intermixed with the dead, held fast by their dead companions who fell upon them, continually adding to the ghastly pile of men. The breastworks were on the edge of a heavy oak woods and large trees, eighteen inches or more in diameter, were worn and cut completely off by the storm of bullets and fell upon the dead and wounded Rebels. Those that lay upon our side in the night when the trees fell said that their howlings were awful when these trees came down upon them. When I looked over in the morning there was one Rebel, sat up, praying at the top of his lungs, and others were gibbering in insanity. Others were groaning and whining at the greatest rate, while during the whole of it I did not hear one of our wounded men make any fuss, other than once in awhile one would sing out 'oh' when he was hit. But it is a terrible, terrible, terrible"--three terribles--"business to make the best of this." Oh, it doesn't really matter what war you're talking about. Charlie Brewster's descriptions could have been along the Somme in World War One, they could've been somewhere in the Battle of the Bulge of the Second World War, they could've have come from Da Nang, and they could've come from the north of Baghdad, as it always says, or near Basra or outside Mosul.So what is tragedy? What is tragedy in relation to war? How do we understand tragedy through this prism of the social impact of war? I think you only ultimately really do understand it by leaving headquarters, by leaving the generals' dispatches, by leaving even Abraham Lincoln's magnificent prose and trying to see it through ordinary eyes, ordinary women, ordinary men. Tragedy is one of those words that we, especially Americans, tend to use haphazardly. It's a pet peeve of mine, but it's probably just my problem. Every plane crash is a tragedy, a car accident is a tragedy, we stub our toes and we call it tragic. A tragedy is something we ought to see through the Book of Job, we ought to see it through Shakespeare's characters. We ought to see it--we ought to go back at least as far as Euripides and the Trojan women. What does Hekuba do in the Trojan women but sit in a ghastly scene of an utterly destroyed city? All of her men are dead and she sits wailing to the sky, on a stone, crying, "How can this be?" That's tragedy. We should see tragedy through Hekuba, or all those women in Drew Faust's book. Tragedy can be raw, it can be pointless, it can be utterly unbearable, it can be a dead-end with no exit. Sometimes it is just seemingly faded horror. But sometimes tragedy, throughout its literary history, and then therefore how we tend to use it, tragedy can also be affirmative. It can even be cathartic, and we sometimes can find ways to make it redemptive. It should never be treated with triumphalism. It requires a certain mood.Rebecca Harding Davis, a wonderful American writer who experienced the war, left us this quite amazing little description of what I would call a simple picture of tragedy. She was in a tiny Pennsylvania town, doesn't even name it, and it's 1864, and she describes a scene she witnessed at a train station. I quote her. "Nobody was in sight but a poor, thin country girl in a faded calico gown and sunbonnet. She stood alone on the platform waiting. A child was playing beside her. When we stopped the men took out from a freight car"--Davis was on the train, forgive me--"the men took out from a freight car a rough, unplanned pine box and laid it down, baring their heads for a moment. Then the train steamed away. She sat down on the ground, put her arms around the box, and leaned her head on it. The child went on playing." We don't know her name. We don't even know what town.Between 1862 and 1863 life insurance policies in America doubled, or the purchase of life insurance policies doubled. Between 1861 and 1865 only two books were published in the United States on anything resembling the idea of the afterlife. During the war, as utterly consumed as Americans became with death, they weren't writing yet about heaven. But between 1865 and 1876 no less than eighty books were published on the idea of afterlife, of a heaven. Americans, as never before, were trying to invent a heaven. And the best selling book in the United States in 1868--and it was for a few years after--was a book by Elizabeth Phelps called?The Gates Ajar. It's a bizarre but fascinating book about what heaven actually is and what it looks like and what you do when you get there and the compartments it has and the rooms it has and who you'll see, especially all those dead soldiers.?The Gates Ajar?was a massive bestseller, rivaled?Uncle Tom's Cabin, at least for the first year. All right, I'm going to leave you there for the moment. And one should never use?The New York Times, a first draft of history, as a historical source, but I just did it. So anyway. Gosh.Now, the Civil War as social history. Well, the people who really, really started this, of course, were Charles and Mary Beard, writing back in the 1920s. It was Charles and Mary Beard in their economic interpretation of--or in their famous book, their big book,?The Rise of American Civilization, who said this; and this is the challenge in some ways to all those who would refocus from the event itself onto the social process or onto ordinary people experiencing the event. The Civil War, the Beards wrote, I quote, "was a social war, ending in the unquestioned establishment of a new power in the government, making vast changes in the arrangement of classes, in the accumulation and distribution of wealth, in the course of industrial development. The war was a social cataclysm in which the capitalist laborers and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South." Now that's a fairly clear interpretation, or judgment. The Beards went on then, in the next paragraph, actually, to call it the Second American Revolution; and I quote Beard, "in a strict sense," he/they said, "the First American Revolution." The Beard's revolution in the Civil War was a social economic revolution. And they made an elaborate argument for how this war transformed the economy, transformed the nature of the government and transformed forever the relationship of labor and capital. But was the Civil War ultimately a victory for big business over the agrarian South? It's been a question we've debated over and over and over and over. We stopped debating it for quite awhile, frankly; that debate seemed like an old fossil. When I was in graduate school, nobody wanted to be a Beardian anymore. We were all going to be cultural social historians. But it's very interesting how the debate has come back. Was the Civil War largely a clash of economic forces, destined to over--was one force, either free labor or slave labor, going to overwhelm the other? The Beards in?The Rise of American Civilization, in its 500-odd pages, almost never mention the word slavery. To the Beards, economic forces were these inanimate forces in the world, they kind of operated on their own; there wasn't that much human agency.Did the Civil War explode industrial growth or did it actually slow it? You can get arguments on both sides. The best research now shows us that the war itself was not necessarily the single most important engine of America's great industrial expansion or the birth of the American Industrial Revolution. There's plenty of scholarship now that shows us that that revolution is much older than the Civil War, that the real launching pad of American industrialization, or the launching period if you want, to find it you got to go back at least to the 1830s and probably the 1820s. You can begin to measure this. GNP in the United States--which I guess we call GDP now, don't we, is that right? It used to be GN; is it GDP now? Gross domestic product--was about 1.62 billion in 1840, it was about 2.4 billion in 1850, and on the eve of the Civil War in 1860 it was about 4.1 billion. So GDP had more than tripled from 1840 to 1860. That shows us that there's an industrial revolution already happening. There were 9000 railroad miles in 1850 in the United States. There were 21,000 in 1860. The 1850s is a great launching decade of industrialization. Now I'm going to give you a counter-argument to that in just a minute.There are two economists named Claudia Golden and Frank Lewis who have estimated, estimated the actual price of the American Civil War; they put a price tag on it. The cost of lives lost, and of wounds, that reduced productivity--these are their variables and their factors--the cost of lives lost and wounds that reduced productivity, as well as property destroyed, and factoring in government expenditures to fight the war, which were humongous--and I'll state some of them in a moment--Golden and Lewis concluded that the overall cost of war was about six and a half billion dollars to fight it. In today's dollars that would be about 145 to 150 billion dollars, today, to fight the four years of the Civil War. This amount would've allowed the--this is Golden and Lewis's argument by the way; this is what economists can do with history if they so wish--this amount would've allowed the Federal Government--that 145 to 150 billion--it would've allowed the Federal Government to purchase and free all four million slaves in 1860 at market prices, give each family 40 acres and a mule, and still they'd have had three and a half billion dollars left over for reparations for former slaves. That's Golden and Lewis's argument. I notice it didn't get much of a rise out of you. But it's an interesting set of numbers. History, of course, intruded. During the war years, the war retarded economic growth in some sectors but in the long run, especially in northern cities and towns, and especially with the mass mobilization now stimulated by the Federal Government, the war expanded the economy like nothing ever had before, so fast. It just depended on where you lived.But stop for just a moment now with all these measures or numbers in your head, if you can, and just ask for a moment what can social history measure and what can it not measure? It can measure very important things, and I'm going to give you some more numbers in a minute. Social history can measure demographic change. It can measure death, disease and casualty rates. It can measure industrial production. It can measure loss of civilian pursuits. It can measure the number of women who enter the workforce. It can measure government expenditures. It can measure budgets. It can even measure the basic social impact on a town, a locality, a community. And we now have a number of these wonderful micro histories of southern towns, northern towns, Midwest and so on, during the war. But how do you measure other social factors? And this is one of those questions that makes history endlessly necessary, useful, interesting, and attracts some of us fools to live with it forever. How do you measure despair? How do you measure loneliness? How do you measure the dislocation and fear of widows? How do you measure the suffering of soldiers from wounds and disease? How do you measure the loss of a sense of home, of dislocated worlds? How do you measure nationalism, patriotism? Sometimes we can find some measures of that, in morale studies. How do you measure the psychological damage of combat on the human psyche? How do you measure the fracturing of marriages and relationships by war? How do you measure home front worry? How do you measure the ways war tests and changes values, sentiments and morality itself? How do you measure the social and moral consequences of killing people? How do you measure femininity, manhood, patriarchy? How do you measure what it meant to become free? You don't, but you do study it.Now, let me give you one other example, or maybe two. Social impact. Let's go to one of those Southern women. She gets some mention in Faust's book because she wrote one of the great diaries and later memoirs that she then revised. This is not Mary Chesnut now, the one so often quoted in the Burns' film series. This woman's name was Kate Stone. She wrote a great--well she kept a diary that eventually was published as a book entitled?Brokenburn, which was the name of her Louisiana cotton and sugar plantation. It's an amazing book because you can sort of follow the impact of this war on her psyche by following her through the years and then after the war as well. I'll pick her up right at the end. The war's all but over and she records this in April, 1865. She has now moved over to Tyler, Texas. She has refugeed her slaves, as the phrase went. She's abandoned her plantation because the Union armies took it in the Red River Campaign. She's lost half of her slaves. She's lost two brothers in the war and a third one has come home stone silent, he never speaks; battle fatigue, shellshock, post-traumatic stress, who knows? They didn't have a name for it then. But he never spoke. Her silent brother was around. Two of them are dead. "All are fearfully depressed," she writes. This is April '65. "I cannot bear to hear them talk of defeat. It seems a reproach to our gallant dead." And then there's some sort of last gasp bravado, and she hoped that, she said, "the thousands of grass grown mounds heaped on mountainside and in every valley of our country would still rally the South to be free or die." What bravado in a diary.And then a month later, mid-May 1865, she opened a journal entry with a definition, and it doesn't get any better than this, of the South's immediate fate, and especially the fate of women, living in this kind of now physical hardship and personal isolation. She opened the entry with three underlined words. "Conquered, submission, subjugation are the words that burn into my heart, and yet I feel that we are doomed to know them in all their bitterness." She looked ahead, she began to reflect about her class and her race, and then she said they, the white plantar class of the South, would now become what she called slaves. Quote, "Yes, slaves of the Yankee government." She feared the quite specific what she called unendurable fate of blacks ruling over her. "Submission to the Union," she went on, "how we hate that word. Confiscation, Negro equality, or a bloody unequal struggle, lest we know not how long." And then in July of '65, rocking a baby in a chair in her arms, and singing all the songs she could remember, she found she said, quote, "The war songs sicken me. The sound is like touching a new wound. I cannot bear to think of it all. I forget whenever I can." Well it's fascinating to follow Kate Stone through time, though. She did all right. There weren't many men around but she finally met one. There's an incredible entry where she says she started going to social events and at one of them people were dancing and she couldn't bear to dance, it just didn't seem right. But she finally did. She met a surviving Confederate officer, married him in 1869, lived out a life, had four kids, and became the local head of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in her town in Texas, and lived until 1907. Kate Stone did better than most.But Southern society went to war and paid an enormous price, of course. Civilians. Civilians were ultimately, in some ways, the strength behind the armies. This war was, to some extent, lost on the home front, for the South in particular. Having said that, you can say on the other side in some ways it was won on the home front in the North, because of industrial production, because of sheer numbers and resources. But it's worth remembering here that the Civil War happened to Southerners more than it happened to Northerners. Only a small portion of this war was actually fought on northern soil. The Confederacy failed ultimately to solve the problems of the home front. Just think of a list. And this is not to condemn them, this was their challenge, this is the risk they took, this is what they risked was secession in 1861. The problems of the home front they could not ultimately solve in the midst of this massive, enveloping thousand mile front war, surrounded by a naval blockade: money supply; transportation; agriculture, agricultural production; developing small industry; creating a national bureaucracy that could be efficient; maddening shortages of foodstuffs, clothing and about everything else it takes to keep armies in the field; class frictions; social disintegration; and last but not least slavery, what to do about slavery, particularly once it comes under pressure in 1862 and then after the Emancipation Proclamation which announces the purpose of the war now is to destroy slavery. What does the Confederacy do? We will come back to that, directly, in terms of the Confederate Government's policy on a kind of emancipation late in the war, in '64 and '65.The South did undergo some rapid economic expansion, remarkable economic expansion. In fact, if you read the sections on this in Jim McPherson's?Battle Cry of Freedom?as background, he has some glowing things to say about just how effective the South was in producing cannon, for example, at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. They had 3000 slaves working in the largest industrial plant anywhere in the southern states by 1863, producing, by and large, their own weapons. The naval blockade of the Union Navy was not very effective at first, but it was ultimately crippling, by the latter part of the war. The estimate is that about five out of six blockade runners, these ships running the blockade, got through between 1861 and '62, but by 1864 and '65 only about one of every two attempted blockade runners ever got through. There was widespread devastation of staple crop agriculture in those parts of the South where the Union armies moved in. Charlie Brewster just described those cornfields of Central Virginia. A Union Army near Southern crops meant the crops were gone in twenty-four hours. In one of the world's greatest agricultural economies, people began to go hungry by late '63 and into '64, bringing about major bread riots in cities like Richmond, Charleston, South Carolina, and other places. With more than a half a million white men leaving agriculture across the South, it seriously reduced productivity, and then as slavery began to dissolve, slowly but surely, this of course disrupted production, at least in about a third of the South's agricultural land.The occupation of Louisiana, for example, early in the war, as early as '62, brought the sugar industry to the edge of extinction, and by the war's end only about fifteen percent of Louisiana's 1,300 sugar estates were operating at all. The great sugar plantations of Louisiana were in almost utter ruin by the end of the war, especially after the Red River Campaign of 1864. Tobacco was in shambles as the Union armies moved through Kentucky and Tennessee, quite early in the war, and rice along the coast of South Carolina was devastated by Union occupation as early as '62 and '63. And then there was the South's decision, Jefferson Davis's decision, to engage in a cotton embargo; that is, they took cotton off the world market--and we'll say more about this when we deal with questions of Confederate defeat in terms of their foreign policy. But the policy by 1863 of the Confederate Government was to take cotton off the world market--trying to pull an OPEC, trying to do with cotton what the OPEC countries in our lifetime have tried to do with oil--pull it back, make the world demand it, and maybe make the Brits come in on your side. It totally backfired and it was a total economic disaster for the South. The production of cotton in the Confederate states went from about five million bales in 1860 to about one-quarter million in 1865.Now, Confederate fiscal policy was also a disaster. Not until 1863 did the Richmond government enact any kind of comprehensive tax law. Taxing was not very consistent, from the federal level, with the way the Confederacy was itself born. Even then when they tried to pass a comprehensive tax law, the Confederacy derived in the end only about seven percent of its revenues from actual taxation. The rest came from borrowing money from abroad, sale of bonds, which was about twenty-five percent of their budget, impressment of provisions from Southerners themselves, about seventeen percent, and in the end about fifty percent of all money in the Confederacy and its foyers of existence was printed paper money which became inflated at ridiculous rates, rapidly.Now, so much more could be said here, especially about this dissolving institution of slavery and how it affected the South. But let me spend the last five minutes on the North, which is a very different story. It's a more successful story, it's a more progressive story in the literal sense, and it is rooted in a particular kind of political vision that that Republican Party brought to the Federal Government. Before the Civil War, the Federal Government did little more than deliver the mail, by and large--that's about all it did. It collected modest tariffs and it conducted foreign policy; but by the surrender at Appomattox, a great deal had changed in four years. Thousands were poised to spread across the continent with the Transcontinental Railroad. Businesses had begun to operate on a national scale with massive new marketing plans and full-time marketing people. Higher tariffs would bolster domestic manufacturing. Individuals experienced the nation state and gave it their allegiance as never before. An array of new national taxes were passed. The currency was nationalized. The Federal Government distributed public lands, chartered corporations, and would enforce black freedom with state or national authority; and States' Rights, at least for the time being, was dealt nearly a death blow, temporarily.War enabled the Republicans to pass sweeping visionary legislation borne of a certain worldview, and that worldview basically is captured in what the economists of the time, political economists of the time, like Matthew Carey and others, called "harmony of interest." This is the idea that in a capitalist economy you could bring labor and capital into harmony if you kept labor free and the economy free all at the same time. It was the belief that labor and capital could be friends. It also depended on an activist interventionist federal government, and that is exactly what the Republicans created, in part out of necessity of the war and in part out of the fact that they actually believed in it. And it's going to bring about a great deal of constitutional innovation and economic experimentation. Here's what they did. In finance, in agriculture, in taxes, in building railroads, and in emancipation--at least those five major categories--the Republican Party transformed the United States Federal Government.They began by first selling war bonds. The Treasury needed money to fight the war. The cost of the American Civil War to fight it, just for the Union Government, by 1863 was approximately two-and-a-half million dollars per day. That's more than the Federal Government had spent in some decades before the Civil War. Now that's a financial revolution. How are you going to do it? How are you going to produce all this money? They began selling bonds to banks and financiers. In 1862, about 500 million dollars in bonds were sold at six percent, payable in five years. Buy a bond, support the war. The government then chose, hired, invited, from the private sector, the Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, enlisted him to lead this federal bonds financing program, and he did lead it, aggressively. The whole idea here was economic nationalism, to invest the citizen in the fate of the Union by making them pay for it. And it was in 1862 that the Federal Government for the first time created the Greenback Dollar, the paper dollar, which actually revolutionalized American currency. Financial markets went up and down during the war, depending on battlefield success or failure. But by 1863, they were financing a war, companies were making profits and the Federal Government could pay its bills. It worked. The total national debt of an annual two-and-a-half billion was absorbed by the general population, and it was celebrated as what the Republican Party called a people's triumph.Now, I'm running into that wall of time, God help me. Let me leave you here, with this. Now, the North has enormous advantages, of course, in resources and population and industry and transportation, and on and on and on. And it had those New York bankers, once they could convince them to stop being anti-union and [become] pro-union. But what came out of this was a revolutionary set of legislation that only wartime could probably have produced; the Homestead Act in the West, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Morrill Act of 1862, which was the Land Grant College Act, which created agricultural colleges across the country, by federal money. In fact last week I gave a lecture at my alma mater--at Michigan State--and just outside the lecture hall where I lectured was a copy of the original handwritten Morrill Act. I know you don't care but I did [laughter] because Michigan Agricultural College was the first land grant college, and they always reminded us of that every time--every year at Freshman orientation. And really, frankly to understand--and I'll leave you here--to understand how Northerners, the Republican Party, Lincoln himself and at least the majority of those Union troops came to support emancipation, the freeing of black people, by federal authority, you need to see it in the context of all else that this Republican Party was doing through the Federal Government. They were using government now as the engine of great social experimentation and change; granted, so much of it out of necessity, some of it out of will. I'm going to return to this story a little bit on Thursday as we move toward the question of why the North wins this war.[end of transcript]back to topCivil War and Reconstruction:?Lecture 18 TranscriptMarch 27, 2008<< backProfessor David Blight:?I want to start with what many Americans therefore do with it. Some of you in this room may have grown up Civil War buffs, like I did, I confess. There are millions of Civil War tourists. It has this enduring--the military history in particular, the battle history--has an enduring, eternal hold on our imagination. But this is a first for me. I just got this email, well, a couple of weeks ago, from a woman named Nicki Blackburn in Charleston, South Carolina; has her photograph on it. She's a real estate agent, a pretty real estate agent. [Laughter] And she wanted me to know as a Civil War historian that she and her firm have put a twenty-four hour webcam on the Calhoun Mansion near Battery Park--on the cupola of the Calhoun Mansion--near Battery Park in Lower Charleston, which looks out directly onto Fort Sumter, a mile away, so that you can dialup on the Internet and watch Fort Sumter twenty four hours a day. [Laughter] I've experienced a wide variety of bizarre phenomena about the Civil War with reenactors, at sites and so on and so on and so on. And if you're on C-SPAN enough believe me, you get every kind of late-night, crazy American writing to you. But that's a first. Twenty-four hours, webcam, Fort Sumter. I don't know what the hell you're supposed to see. [Laughter] Maybe there are ghosts of Confederates that come out at night, and if they have the right kind of night vision…God I don't know. But she's serious! I'm sorry.All right. In 1863, on the beautiful little hilltop cemetery on the south edge of the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania--a small, sleepy town with a large population of German immigrants, a couple of little shoe factories, a crossroads town, a market town--they had a cemetery in this beautiful setting. And, over the archway, or as part of the archway into that cemetery that would soon become famous, there was a sign that read, quote, "All persons found using firearms on these grounds will be prosecuted within the utmost rigor of the law." Irony makes the world go 'round.Okay, today I want to take up with you at least the beginnings of the question of Confederate defeat and Union victory. We're going to focus in particular on battlefronts. There are numerous reasons, explanations, causal interpretations for Confederate defeat and Union victory that have flowed forth in Civil War scholarship for years. And we began to have a new kind of heated argument about it, at least in books, about 10 years ago, in part because of a series of two books by historians named Hattaway and Beringer. They wrote two big tomes. One was entitled?Why the North Won the Civil War, and the other was entitled?Why the South Lost the Civil War; not very subtle titles. And they were the ones who posited, more than anyone ever had before, in a much more sophisticated way--and I want to come back to that, and it's part of exactly what's at stake in these two wonderful books you're reading, or have read, or are about to read, by Drew Faust and Gary Gallagher. Gallagher's?Confederate War?and Faust'sMothers of Invention?take up this question of the so-called loss of will. Did the South lose the Civil War because it ultimately lost its will to sustain the fight? There are many sides to that argument, and I'll take it up in a moment.I want to do--[Technical adjustment]. Well anyway, the Civil War, as we've said many times, is the first great photographed event of American history. There are thousands of photographs. We'd have had thousands more if people hadn't destroyed so many of them. And, of course, Ken Burns's film series is in part--in great part--reliant on those photographs, and he and his cameramen, of course, they have cameras now that can take right inside almost these old daguerreotypes and tintypes and make them live in ways that they didn't at the time. But that's an image of soldiers at the front, smoking a pipe, petting his dog. It's an officer whose wife has come to the front, of course. It's winter quarters, near Culpepper Courthouse, Virginia, 1863. They always built these cabins with these chimneys. They built thousands of these, with barrels on top; those are their chimneys. Since I've been discussing this question of mobilization, there are many, many images in the war, from the war, that show this kind of industrial might of the North. There's incredible photographs of the James River landings in Virginia by 1864, and just as far as the horizon can see supplies, the materiel piled up all over the wharves. This is an image in Virginia of the wagon trains of the Potomac, Army of the Potomac, by 1864, thousands of wagons. This is mobilization for total war. And I just for the sake of reality want to show that also photographers, like Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner and their troops of photographers--it was Gardner in particular who went to Gettysburg after the Battle of Gettysburg and photographed so many of them, so many of the dead. This is a soldier, a Union soldier, killed at Gettysburg. It became a kind of macabre fascination, especially in the North where these photographs were often displayed publicly. Brady first started doing it in '62 and early '63, and hence that famous comment by, I believe, George Templeton Strong who said it was Brady who brought the war into people's homes, into their living rooms, if they went to witness these photographs. Now, more on that perhaps at the end.But go back with me now to this question of Union victory, Confederate defeat. We're not going to end the war today, that's next week, and we're going to take the war today through 1863, and major military turning points where you can begin to make an argument, from this point forward. From this point forward, it would be very difficult for the Confederacy to win, although not impossible, as we'll see in 1864. Now on any list--and I'm going to just give you a list out front and then we'll kind of take up some of them--but on any list of why the North wins and why the South loses, of course, are these elements: One, resources and numbers. It goes without saying in a world of war that is becoming more industrialized, more modern in its weaponry and, to some extent, its tactics--although that's one of the reasons, of course, casualties in this war were so ghastly because they were fighting with much more modern weapons, repeating rifles and of course the rifled musket that could actually hit something at 800 yards and it could be deadly at 2 to 300 yards. Think of that, 2 to 300 yards. You could hit something and see it. But they were fighting with old tactics, line upon line, shoulder to shoulder, double ranks. If the front of the rank fell, the second rank was supposed to be there, and they were supposed to have loaded their rifles in time to be up front while the other ones went back and reloaded again, and that a veteran soldier in this war could load his muzzle loader--you had to load the minie ball and the cap, back here, and then with your ramrod--a veteran soldier could do that without pressure about three times a minute. Of course under the pressure of battle and being shot at and the cacophony of sound and the terror and fear a soldier went though, sometimes they couldn't perform that. And all over battlefields in this war they would find dead soldiers sometimes with a rifle they had loaded three and four times, and never fired. They just kept loading. They'd sort of lose their minds.But in a war that is now fought with such weaponry--and it's going to depend on industrial production--there is an argument that this war was won by the North in the shoe factories of Lowell, Massachusetts, or the gun factories of New Haven, or the gun factories of Springfield, Mass, in the sheer productive--or on those railroads of the North, which was so much better, more efficient, than the railroads of the South. There's certainly an argument for that. Now, that handwriting was on the wall from the beginning of the war. In a lovely old book that David Donald did once called?Why the North Won, he quotes on the first page of the book a newspaper in Lynchburg, Virginia, summer 1861; the Battle of Bull Run hasn't even happened yet, and all this fury for war. The editor of the?Lynchburg Virginian?wrote, quote: "Dependent upon Europe and the North for almost every yard of cloth and every coat and boot and hat that we wear, for our axes, scythes, tubs and buckets, in short for everything except our bread and meat, it must occur to the South that if our relations with the North are ever severed we should"--they'd already been severed--"we should in all the South not be able to clothe ourselves. We could not fill our firesides, plow our fields, nor mow our meadows. In fact, we should be reduced to a state more abject than we are willing to look at, even prospectively, and yet all these things staring us in the face, we shut our eyes and we go in blindfold." Man, was that prescient. One of the most remarkable facts about the American Civil War--and James McPherson makes a big deal of this in?Battle Cry of Freedom, over and over--is that despite their lack of the industrial productivity in relation to the North, it is amazing how long the South held out and amazing how close they actually came to winning their version or definition of victory. The North had more banking, more labor capacity, everything.Two, an argument has always been made that the North in the end had superior political leadership, i.e., Abraham Lincoln. Now a lot can be made of this, and a lot has been made of this, in book after book comparing Lincoln with Davis. And there's no question that as an executive, as a leader, as a politician, as a manipulator of people, in terms of an acumen, even a genius for politics and organization, Abraham is about as good as we've ever had. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, smart and brilliant man that he was, a long military career, long service in the Senate, the War Department and all else, was nevertheless not a very good executive. He always had one foot sort of tied in the States' Rights tradition, and that other foot now, really where his soul was by 1862, '63, '64, was in trying to create a nation, a centralized nation state, doing all the things that the States' Rights tradition said he should not. He was not in the end a great war President, in part, some have argued, because he would have preferred to be on the battlefield and not in an executive's role.He listened to those generals who were his friends and didn't tend to listen to those who were not. He often made sort of leadership mistakes such as the time he personally went out West--I'll come to that in a moment--during the, just before the great campaign for Chattanooga, in late summer and then the fall of 1863, for the possession of this terribly important strategic crossroads in southeast Tennessee, to the gateway into the Deep South, the crossroads of two great southern rivers, the crossroads of the two main east/west southern railroads and so on. He goes out there in the wake of the fall of Chattanooga, when Braxton Bragg's army had to retreat south, and he goes to the whole--there'd been terrible dissention in that Confederate Army. All the generals wanted Bragg fired and Davis goes out personally to the camp and gathers all the generals around him, with Bragg standing there, and asked all the other generals whether they thought they should have a new commander. And to a man they basically all said "yes," in front of their commander. And then Davis re-appointed him. It was one of the most bizarre decisions of the war. Bragg was a disaster. But this is the sort of thing that--and Davis and Bragg went back years and they were old friends. And Davis made some strange decisions. But Davis also was handicapped tremendously, politically, by this States' Rights tradition.And I would argue one other thing; and it's really a third reason you can put on this long list of why the North's going to win this war. The North had an existing political culture, it had an existing political party system. Now we can argue that that political party system was greatly divided, and it was. By '63 you've got what are called Peace Democrats. The Democratic Party in the North is beginning to argue for a negotiated peace, an end to the war; a divided America, a Confederate States of America and a United States of America. And in 1864 they're going to run McClellan on that platform--and we'll talk about how pivotal the '64 Election was next week. But you had an existing party system that could organize politics, that could organize dissent, that could channel opposition, and it also gave Abraham Lincoln the cudgel or the whip of partisanship. He could build enough of a coalition to sustain not only the war effort but also to pull off some of that remarkable legislation that I started to talk about last time, especially economic legislation, that really in some ways, for awhile at least, transformed the American central government.Fourth, one of the principle reasons the North's going to win this war is that it does ultimately, through some remarkable diplomacy--especially by Charles Francis Adams in London, the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, grandson of John Adams, son of John Quincy--the fact that in the end the Union government succeeds in keeping Great Britain ostensibly out of the war, at least militarily, mostly, out of the war, is absolutely crucial to Union victory. Had Britain--had Lee won at Antietam--and this is what McPherson means, and many other historians were really doing this before Jim was, but he's made it his own argument--that you can't understand Union victory and Confederate defeat without dealing with all kinds of contingencies, moments in the war. If this hadn't happened then, that can't happen; if that doesn't happen then, that can't happen. And so putting your eggs in any one basket to explain this, or for that matter anything in history, is a bad idea. But one of those contingencies is if Lee wins at Antietam, succeeds in moving further into the North, threatens Northern cities, and the British government formally recognized the Confederacy and formally sent British troops to fight with the Confederacy--rather than just in a sense sending them a shadow navy, which was helping the Confederacy, and building them ships--could've had a very different outcome to this war. If the United States had had to fight a second front, in Canada, against the British, just imagine the possible outcomes. So, a very important factor.Fifth, much has always been made about the so called, in the end, superior military leadership of the North, in the end. And we'll deal with this much more next week, and a little bit today, when Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and General Thomas and a few others actually finally become the principal leaders of this entire, ultimately coordinated West and East strategic effort against the South, you can argue--although I think too much is often made of this--you can argue that in some ways Grant won the war. There are books that literally argue that, that want to give Grant in so many ways credit for Union victory, and that will argue--and I'll come back to this next week--that in some ways, as great as Robert E. Lee was as a battlefield commander, as daring as he was, the risks that he took, the ability he had to somehow see a terrain, to see land, to see the possibilities of a landscape and how to move huge numbers of men through it, and the way that he could inspire through a quite amazing level of charisma his officer staff--there's a lot to the fact that Robert E. Lee himself had a lot to do with sustaining the Confederate war effort as long as it lasted. And Gary Gallagher's going to make a pretty big deal of that in your book?Confederate War. It's just worth remembering that Gallagher's source set by and large is the officer corps of Lee's army. It's a fine book but you got to remember where his sources are coming from. These are Lee's lieutenants that he's quoting over and over and over, and they become about as loyal to a military commander as anyone has ever been in American history.And then sixth, or whatever number I'm on--and we've dealt with this a good deal already, we'll come back to it later--the policy of emancipation, the transformation of this war into far beyond its original limited aims, into a war that will become a war of conquest. A war, as Lincoln comes to define it in late '62, and it's absolutely clear in '63, has to be a war to the ultimate aim of the unconditional surrender of the South, which means a war on their resources, on their society, on their transportation systems, and on slavery--their labor system, their greatest source of wealth--and war on their cities, the people; or as Sherman will say, he wanted to make Georgia howl.All right, now that's a short list. Now fold into that this theory--it's a theory--that in the end, you add all this up--resources, political leadership, military leadership, the policy of unconditional surrender, emancipation, keeping Great Britain out of the war, diplomacy and so on and so on, and battlefield victories, as I'll point out in a second--you get this argument for the loss of morale, loss of will. Now, this was fashioned by historians really who cut their teeth on the Vietnam Era. And they argue that there are plenty of examples throughout history of insurgencies like the Confederacy--that's what it was, it's a big one, it's not just a little guerilla army pecking away at oil lines--but they argue that there are many cases in history. And the most obvious one in the 1970s and '80s to Americans was North Vietnam, which held out for a generation, really two generations, against the French Empire and then against the United States of America, the biggest military machine in the world. They lost three and half million people, and they won. So suddenly through that experience, through those eyes, some American historians began to look back at the Civil War and say, "You know what? Well wait a minute here, why didn't the Confederacy hold out even longer?" Yes, there were bread riots, there was some starvation, there was a hell of a lot of desertion, but maybe that's telling us something. That in the end it wasn't just Marse Robert and his loyal men, it was the civilians behind the war, it was the home front.This is what Drew Faust went to all these women's diaries to try to test, and the argument essentially is that the South didn't have a sufficient degree of nationalism, of an emotional psychological devotion to a historic nation state that they would do anything to save and preserve, in the ways, let's say, that the Germans did to the absolute bitter end against the Russians and the Allies on the Western Front in the Second World War. Beringer and Hattaway love the example of Paraguay; nobody knows anything about the story of Paraguay and the way it held out against Brazil, I think it was, as an early twentieth century example. And there've been other kinds of guerrilla insurgencies over the years. At the bottom of this argument was why didn't more Confederate forces, rather than surrender, go off and form guerrilla bands? Why didn't the American Civil War end the way so many civil wars end--they never quite end? A band of twenty men here and 300 there, going off into the hills, supplying themselves somehow, forming a kind of alternative insurgency that never quite dies. You read a lot of lost cause literature by the late nineteenth century and you would almost think that is what happened. But it didn't happen. And Beringer and Hattaway have also argued that, in part, the South, once it begins to lose the war in '63 and '64, that it was Southern Unionists that began to come to the fore, that there were large--and there were--large pockets of unionism, people who didn't really support the Confederate war effort, in western Virginia and western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, upland Georgia, in those hills that Sherman's Army begins to move through and discovers there's some white folk around who want to support him. In fact, Sherman was much kinder to those Georgia whites than he was to those Georgia blacks who tried to gain freedom by coming to his army. More on Sherman's racism next week.Now, in the end this is an argument that what the South lacked was a deep mystical emotional level of nationalism. Well that's been countered, that's been countered by numerous historians. Drew Faust is one of them, in an earlier book called?The Creation of Confederate Nationalism. She's been joined, or she actually joined a whole group of historians studying this idea. It's been one of the recurring, fascinating questions about the Civil War, and the question is essentially what kind of nationalism did the Confederacy actually develop? After all, it only lasted four years. The question really is, was there a confederate nation or were they just a band of states that came together in military defense of homeland? Well there are arguments on all sides of this. And I'll just say a couple of things. I think those--and it's Drew Faust, it's John McCardell, numerous historians. The weight of the best argument, I think, is that the South did indeed, rather quickly--and there's a lot of lessons in this historically--develop a serious level of this mystical kind of nationalism. They developed an ideology that they said their nation was based on. They said right up front, at the beginning of the war, Jefferson Davis, speech after speech after speech, he said the Confederacy is the logical vessel of the American Revolution; what the Confederacy really was was the carryover of 1776. 1861 was 1776. That George Washington, they will argue, was the founder of the Confederacy. That true American democracy was in this resistance to centralization. They created seals and songs and images and heroes and paintings, poetry, all over the place. They used religion, the same kind of millennial Christianity. The same kind of theory of a divine providence that Northerners are praying to and arguing for is the same kind of millennialism that Confederates are going to argue for. They're going to say that they are the chosen nation. All over the place, among Southern clergy, that argument is put forth, especially early in the war.And then lastly, slavery. It is in some ways almost amazing how much Southerners began to defend slavery and the ways they began to defend slavery, during the war, and the ways that they began to link it to their nation, the Confederacy, of how the Confederacy was put into this world to perfect slavery, to improve it, to show the world that this slave society, this system, this biracial system where one race is the labor and the other race is the educated, to show the world the possibilities of that. They even developed a whole variety of traveling Confederate minstrel groups. Minstrelsy had been primarily a phenomenon of the North. Often the audiences were largely white working class, but during the war suddenly you had these Confederate troops of minstrels, all over the place, and new songs and new poems were written that were tied now to the sort of fate of the Confederacy. I'll just give you one example. There was one minstrel troop known as--these were whites in blackface, keeping morale up. One of them was called Lincoln's Intelligent Contrabands, and one little verse ran: "I'd rather work the cotton patch and dine on corn and bacon than live up North on good white bread of abolition makin'." And it gets worse and it goes on and on. And the story or the argument of all these Confederate minstrel songs and the poetry they're based on is that black people don't want to be free. They don't want anything to do with this free labor nonsense, they want to stay where they are.Now, I invite you to read Gallagher and Faust on this. And Gallagher's going to make a pretty aggressive argument against the loss of will thesis, and he's going to argue that Confederate nationalism ultimately resided in those armies, the armies that stuck it out against almost unbelievable odds. All right, but in 1863 the war had major military turning points. And let me take you through some of that, well the three major ones, with some dispatch. But these are, on that short list of I believe five major turning points in the Civil War, I mentioned Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Well, kind of add to that, if you would, the fall of Port Hudson, only a week after Vicksburg out on the Mississippi, and then the ultimate fall, final fall of Chattanooga to Union hands by the fall of 1863.Now, some maps are in order. The Confederacy won a major victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville near--[technical adjustment]--just west of Fredericksburg the first week of May 1863. This was yet again--you'll remember the whole, the previous year, a year before this, McClellan had invaded the peninsula up toward Richmond, the Seven Days Campaign and all the rest, defeated, retreated. Lee then invaded the North. He's going to do exactly the same thing in the summer of 1863, in the wake of what was truly, without a question, a decisive victory at Chancellorsville. Lee held a Council of War in Richmond with Davis and other generals. This time, of course, Stonewall Jackson was not there; he was shot and killed by his own men, after the battle, at night, of Chancellorsville. He lived about a week. That little house where he died and they amputated his arm is a shrine today. If you want to see some Civil War weirdness go to the Stonewall Jackson shrine. And if you ever saw the movie, if you ever endured the movieGods and Generals, all 4? hours of it, which I did because I had to write a review of it, you know that they took almost a half hour to have Stonewall Jackson die. [Laughter] I'm sorry, for those of you who are Stonewall Jackson fans. It's just quite remarkable. But at any rate, Lee lost a terribly important commander then, there's no question about it, and it will always live in Southern lore--what if Jackson had lived? Or what if he'd had Jackson at Gettysburg? What if he'd had Jackson at Cold Harbor, wherever?At any rate, Lee went to Davis and said, "Let me invade the North again." Davis was a little cautious because the first time it didn't work and he almost lost the war a year ago. James Longstreet, now second-in-command to Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia, had another idea, and Longstreet almost always did. And there's a whole debate in Civil War military history about just whether Longstreet should have been listened to throughout '63. Longstreet's idea was to take at least two divisions, if not an entire corps of infantry, as many as possible--20,000 men--and move them out West, because Longstreet worried that the war was being lost in the West. And you know what? He was right on that. But Lee said no. And always in Civil War scholarship there's been this question, did Lee ultimately lose the war because of his obsession with Virginia, his home state, his homeland, in not allowing Confederate troops to be moved West? Well they weren't moved West, not at this point in time. All over the war now, even though Lee had won this major victory at Chancellorsville, the Confederacy was potentially hemmed in, potentially. So Lee's response to this was daring, and had he won at Gettysburg decisively we wouldn't be--well I don't what we'd be debating; I'm not sure I want to know what we'd be debating. But Lee did decide to go West, up over into the Upper Shenandoah Valley and invade this time all the way into Pennsylvania, which he did in June, 1863.Lincoln's Commander of the Army of the Potomac, now seriously defeated, was a general named Hooker. Hooker resigned on the 28th?of June 1863 and was replaced by a general named George Gordon Meade, only three days before what would become the greatest battle of the war. What Gettysburg became was in some ways an attempt by the Union armies--[technical adjustment]--it's an effort by the Union armies, blue here, of course, to catch up with Lee's army as they invaded up into Pennsylvania, and to stay between Lee's army and Washington DC. It's in some ways a replay of what had happened just the year before. Now, they actually ended up meeting at this little town of Gettysburg almost by mistake; they hadn't planned that. Lee wanted to move all of his troops into Central Pennsylvania. The whole idea here was to live off the land and the rich farmland of Pennsylvania, to take the war out of ravaged Central Virginia, relieve Richmond, and Lee believed, tap into the war weariness of the North and possibly even reinvigorate British intervention. There wasn't a lot of likelihood at that point, but he hoped at any rate that there might be some possibility. It was a great calculated risk. Had it worked, who knows? It did not.They collided near Gettysburg because a group of Confederate infantry were marching toward the town from the West on July 1, 1863, because they'd heard there were shoes in Gettysburg. And they were confiscating, by the way, everything--cattle, hogs, food, everything they could take from Pennsylvania farms. And rather than tapping into war weariness in the North, what Lee accomplished was to stimulate resistance in the North. Nothing like an army invading your land and stealing your animals to cause you some consternation. Lee's army also took scores of free blacks, living in southern and central Pennsylvania, and shuttled them quickly back into the South as slaves. And when this got into the press it also had an effect on Northern morale. The first day at Gettysburg--and I can't go into the kind of detail I'd love to here, and I know some of you would like me to, although I'm going to invite those of you who are military history enthusiasts to an evening session, perhaps next week, perhaps the week after, on a Wednesday, if anybody wants, where we can go into more detail on this and you can open your veins and get a really good shot of military history, if you'd like. [Laughter] And if you OD, that's your fault.The first day at Gettysburg was a Confederate victory, almost a complete rout. It's actually nighttime that stopped it. The second day at Gettysburg, if you look at this map over here, you'll note that the Union battle line--the Union Army barely got there in time, by the second day, to actually oppose Lee's Army. They had marched all day. Some of these Union troops had marched 30 miles in a day just to get there. But the second day at Gettysburg were attacks, massive attacks, on the two ends of the line, the left flank and the right flank of the Union armies, which were both very high ground. How many of you have been to Gettysburg? You know Little Round Top and Culp's Hill then--large hills. Huge battles were fought on those hills on July 2, 1862, with huge numbers of casualties, especially for the Confederates. By the third day, Longstreet urged vehemently that Lee retreat, a strategic retreat, and move south, southward, and then toward Washington and threaten the U.S. capital, but to choose other ground to fight on because of the way these hills and ridges were set up in front of them. Longstreet counseled a kind of strategic defensive move. They are on enemy's land, enemy territory. Every day is a total risk here, and they've got a real problem with their supply line. But Lee said no, his blood was up, and there's evidence all over the dispatches, Lee wanted to win there, he wanted to fight. And I'll come back to this question next week about Lee's own psyche for war and what they said happened to his eyes when it was time for battle.So, on the third day at Gettysburg he ordered a concentration at the center and it became the largest military assault of the war, the largest infantry assault of the Civil War. It's known as Pickett's Charge because it's named for one of the three Division Commanders who led it, George Pickett--who hid behind a barn through the whole damn thing, by the way--while two of his brigade commanders were killed, and all of the thirteen colonels in his brigade were killed or wounded. So Pickett's Charge, the charge of 13,000 men, for one hour, across a wide open field, slightly rising toward a ridge, lasted about one hour, and almost exactly one-half of those 13,000 men were killed or wounded and never got back to the ridge they started from. It was Lee's greatest mistake in the Civil War. He knew it. He rode out in the middle of this field when the thing was over, as the men were straggling back, those who survived, and he kept going up to them and saying, "It's all my fault, it's all my fault, it's all my fault. Please help me." He even offered his resignation to Jefferson Davis a couple of weeks later, but of course Davis wasn't going to take it.The great significance of Gettysburg is many things, it's several things. It's the greatest battle of the war in terms of its sheer scale. Casualties were ghastly; 28,000 casualties in three days--that's dead, wounded and missing--on the Confederate side. One-third of all the men engaged were dead or wounded at the end of it. On the Union side there were 23,000 casualties; that's one of every four. My guy, Charlie Brewster, whose letters I edited, was actually held in reserve. They didn't even get there in time. The 10thMass was brought out to be burial crews, and his letters about the fields at Gettysburg are just quite--almost unbelievable. There's a particularly poignant letter where he--they always rifled the pockets of the dead--he rifles the pockets of a dead Confederate soldier and in his pockets is a letter, a love letter home. And he reads that letter and he quotes from it, to his own mother, and then he buries the guy and saved the letter. And this was his job for about three days in a rainstorm, burying Union and Confederate dead. It is the carnage at Gettysburg, the vast number of dead, 56-odd-thousand casualties overall, that forced the United States Government to create to the first national cemetery which would be created at Gettysburg, and that's, of course, why Lincoln went there the next fall to give the Gettysburg Address.Now, but strategically it's hugely important. Lee had to retreat as fast as he could. The great problem now for the next week was whether Meade, the Union Commander, would follow this up and push like hell, in spite of how badly hurt his army was. And Lincoln was sending dispatch after dispatch to Meade, "Please move, you've got them in your"--Lincoln was saying things like, "You've got them in your grip. Destroy them. The war will be over, the war will be over." And Meade didn't move for three days, and Lee's Army escaped on the 13th?and 14th?of July, on a pontoon bridge they hastily managed to build; what was left of Lee's Army managed to get across the Potomac River and back into Virginia to fight again. Gettysburg's a major Union victory, but it could've been even bigger.Out West--and terribly important, you could argue even more important--were the sieges and the capture of two major places, I guess you'd call them fortresses or ports, along the Mississippi River, Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Vicksburg was laid under siege--Vicksburg had been brought under siege for months by a Union Army Commander, by Ulysses Grant. They had even at one point tried to alter the course of the Mississippi River, with the biggest military engineering scheme the world had ever hatched. And it didn't really work. That's a big river -- don't mess with it. But finally Grant was able to put Vicksburg, in the spring of 1863, under siege, mostly from the east, and it was especially under complete lockdown siege from May 22 to the first week of July, in which time the civilian population of Vicksburg that was left, and a roughly 30,000 garrison of the Confederate Army, began to starve. The civilians were living in caves because much of their housing was destroyed by artillery bombardment. On June 28 the Confederate Commander John Pemberton received a petition from his own troops, signed by lots of them, which said in part, quote, "If you cannot feed us you had better surrender." And so Pemberton sued for--he didn't sue--he asked for surrender terms. He met with Grant on the 3rd?of July, the same afternoon as Pickett's Charge is happening in the East--they don't know it--and Pemberton surrendered 30,000 Confederate troops in the blink of an eye, on July 4th, 1863.Central Mississippi would within weeks be abandoned by Confederate forces and the whole of central and northern Mississippi would come under Union control. And that is, by the way folks, the most densely populated slave region anywhere in the South, and it is the escape of slaves now, by the hundreds and then thousands, into Grant's lines, that forced his hand in the creation of numerous contraband camps all over northern Mississippi and Tennessee and even down the Mississippi. A few days later, on July 8, at Port Hudson, down the Mississippi, just north of Baton Rouge, a second fort surrendered. It too had been under siege since May. And when Port Hudson surrendered, the Mississippi River now was completely in Union hands and Union control. On the 16th?of July a merchant steamboat tied up in New Orleans, having successfully traveled from St. Louis all the way down the river, unharassed at all, by Confederate guns, and Lincoln famously wrote his memo or telegraph to Grant saying, "Now the father of waters again goes unvexed to the sea." It's terribly important because if you just look at a map you realize now, that by controlling the entire Mississippi River and the region around it, you not only are sowing havoc into Southern society, freeing slaves, confiscating land and property, controlling the South's greatest seaports, but you've cut the Confederacy in half. And one of the Confederacy's largest supply lines was through Texas. They were actually being supported, to this point in time, by the French through Mexico; well, that was a supply line that never worked terribly well.Now, the clock is running out on me. That's okay because what happens at Chattanooga doesn't happen--that's the end of 1863, which is a nice place to pick it up next time. But let me leave you with this. Across the South this was horrible news, and especially when Chattanooga's going to fall in the fall, it's even worse news. And these kinds of expressions now came from Southern leaders and privates in the Army and women at home. And here comes your loss of morale thesis. On July 28th, after the fall of Port Hudson and Vicksburg and the debacle, the disaster at Gettysburg, the Confederate Chief-of-Ordinance, Josiah Gorgas, wrote into his diary. Quote: "Events have succeeded one another with disastrous rapidity. One brief month ago we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania threatening Harrisburg and even Philadelphia. Vicksburg seemed to laugh at all of Grant's efforts to scorn. Now the picture is just as somber as it was bright then. It seems incredible that human power could effect such a change in so brief a space. Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success. Today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction." The war isn't over. And I'll argue next week the Confederacy still could have won its version of victory in 1864. But those battlefield successes of '63 were handwriting on the wall.[end of transcript]back to topCivil War and Reconstruction:?Lecture 19 TranscriptApril 1, 2008<< backProfessor David Blight:?It used to be said that in the old wars fought by the Irish clans that they had an agreement. I don't know if this is true, but I love the idea, that no matter how much they slaughter themselves with broadswords and knives and whatever else those maniacs used, that they should always spare the poets. Don't kill the poets, because the poets had to be left to tell the story. Most great poets don't go to war, they write. This week you're reading a great poet, E.L. Doctorow, a poet in prose, a poet in fiction. Doctorow, as some of you must know, is a famous American writer for his historical fiction. Much of his fiction is often very historical and you'll find, if anyone takes the time some day, that large chunks of the monologue you hear from William Tecumseh Sherman in this novel is directly out of his famous memoirs, and then every now and then Doctorow will embellish or add a few lines. Most of the people in this book were real people, but there are some invented. In some ways, possibly the most brilliant inventions in this book are the slave characters, or the freedman characters, and what Doctorow does with them through this sort of anguished crucible of all out war. Look especially for those journeys into Sherman's own mind, Sherman's psyche, those meditations of Sherman's on death. Page 88 and 89 to be exact is, I think, an unforgettable mediation by Sherman on the meaning of death and just what it means and why he in some ways enjoys it.Herman Melville wrote a whole bunch of poems during the Civil War. He was one of the poets spared. He wasn't very famous yet, as you know, for?Moby Dick; that was to come later. Maybe our greatest writer of the nineteenth century; also wrote a lot of poetry, and he wrote almost all of his poetry during the Civil War, as did, by the way, Emily Dickinson. Don't know if any of you are Emily Dickinson fans, but Emily, the Belle of Amherst, wrote between 900 and 1000 poems in her life, and fully two-thirds of them in the four years of the war. She became obsessed with the idea of the war, and if you read her closely enough it's all over her wartime poetry. She became obsessed with death. Our greatest death poet was, of course, Whitman; more from him later.But one little piece by Melville, because it's about you. This was Melville's meditation in poetry on the death of college students in the war. It's called "On the Slain Collegians." It's timeless, it could be about any war, although collegians don't go to war anymore very much in America. "Youth is the time when hearts are large and stirring wars appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn to the blade it draws. If woman in sight and duties show, though made the mask of Cane, or whether it be truth, sacred cause, who can aloof remain that shares youth's ardor, uncooled by the snow of wisdom or sordid gain? Woe for the homes of the North and woe for the seats of the South, all who felt life spring in prime and were swept by the wind of their place in time. Oh lavish hearts on whichever side of birth or bane or courage high, arm them for the stirring wars, arm them some to die, Apollo-like in pride. Each slay his python caught, the maxims in his temple taught. The anguish of maternal hearts must search for balm divine. But well the striplings bore their faded parts, the heaven all parts must assign. Never felt life's care or cloy. Each bloomed and died an abated boy, nor dreamed what death was, thought it mere sliding into some vernal sphere. They knew the joy but leaped the grief. Like plants that flower 'ere comes the leaf which storms lay low in kindly doom and kill them in the flush of their bloom."The casualties in the Union Army alone, the Army of the Potomac, Grant's army, from the first of May through the end of July 1864, in this horrible war of attrition and the stalemate it produced in Virginia, the casualties in that one army in about two to two-and-a-half months was 66,000 men. It is the largest loss of life in the shortest period of time in all of American military history. How did it get to that? Why did the war go on, and on and on? Well let's begin with Grant and Lee, these two great warriors around whose names, symbols, actions, decisions a good deal of the war would hinge in the final year. Grant, from his successes in the West--fall of Vicksburg, siege and fall of Chattanooga, the victory at Chickamauga--came East, appointed by Abraham Lincoln as General of the Army. Congress actually revived a special rank that it hadn't used in years called Lieutenant-General, just for Grant. He came East and was appointed head of all Union Armies, on any front anywhere, in March of 1864, winter '64. He was wined and dined at the White House and wined and dined in Congress. They had to keep telling him to put on a decent uniform.There's a lot of truth to this idea of Grant the kind of humble plebian. He had after all been doing nothing but work in his brother's leather shop in Galena, Illinois when the war broke out. But, boy, did he have a nose for war. He was a great horseman. They said he could canter like nobody else and gallop like nobody else, and he loved his horses. Been to West Point. About the only thing he really got good grades in at West Point were painting and drawing. He nearly failed some of the military science courses. Some of his biographers have actually made a big deal out of that, that because he hadn't studied hard in Jomini's Manuals, those manuals of combat tactics and strategy, that he was therefore freer to simply invent as he went. I don't know. This war made Grant at the same time he made the war. He may have been, as many of his--and by the way there's been an industry of Grant biographies in the past 10 to 15 years; he's been rediscovered after a long period in our history when he just vanished and the country forgot that "oh, by the way, the Union won the war and there was that guy Grant." There are far, far, far more monuments to Robert E. Lee on the American landscape than there are to Ulysses Grant. I'll try to explain that at the end of the course.His casualty rates in this last year of the war were ghastly and horrible, and it nearly led to a sufficient level of war weariness across the North and disgust and just an overwhelmed kind of spirit that it was entirely possible by July and August of '64, if certain events hadn't quickly followed, that the North collectively would've given up the war and sued for peace. But Grant developed essentially a strategy of victory, and here's what it was. He did it in conjunction with William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, the previous General of the Army, Henry Halleck, and most importantly with Lincoln himself, and that strategy was basically this. It was first to determine that Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, was not to be the objective of the war in the East; taking an enemy's capital not that important. Secondly, Grant grasped, as did Sherman, the political character of this war, that this was now a war to be won or lost in public opinion. Because it had become all-out, because it was now a war upon people, upon resources, it depended deeply upon morale and the will of either side to somehow see it through. Third, Grant, and Sherman especially, determined that this would now be a war on Southern resources. The destruction of slavery, of course, becomes a major part of that. And one of the great ironies of the war is that Sherman never, ever, for a day, wanted to free a slave. As he told his officers, "ain't gonna be no niggers in Uncle Billy's army." Sorry, that's what he said. He wasn't into having black soldiers; in fact there were no black soldiers who actually served in Sherman's army in Georgia. There will be thousands upon thousands of freedman following his army, and it will force him to a situation of a recognition that will it or not, he's crushing the spirit of the South to destroy slavery, and ultimately kind of admits it. Look for that in Doctorow.In the East the object of the war now was to be Lee's army, to fight Lee's army anywhere, on ground especially, that the Northern troops could somehow choose to try to spring Lee out of his trench works, that he would build everywhere they would stop, and to simply kill as many Confederates as possible to force the South to quit. It was to be a war on an army, not for a strategic capital. Now strategic crossroads and rivers and so on would be important, but the object now was to destroy the fighting force of the South and its fighting will. And in the Western part of the war--and there were actually five major armies now that Grant was to try to coordinate; an army under Nathaniel Banks out in the far west that Lincoln wanted to go into Texas with, and they never really got into Texas. What Grant wanted eventually--excuse me one second--what Grant wanted was the army under Nathaniel Banks in Louisiana to move east, to take Mobile, the last remaining great southern port and then come smashing right through the Deep South across Alabama into Georgia, as Sherman's army, as we'll see in a minute, was invading northern Georgia, toward Atlanta, and sort of just invade the whole middle heartland of the South until the South would give up. And in Virginia, Grant took battlefield command. He didn't have to, he could've stayed at his desk in Washington, but it was quite decidedly not his style; he went into the field as the Commander of the Army of the Potomac.Now, on the other side, in Robert E. Lee, the South had without a question--we've said this before and there's so much been written on this you can't count it all--the South had a great general in Lee, a daring general. In spite of his tremendous defeat at Gettysburg, where he actually did tender his resignation that Davis didn't accept and couldn't accept, Lee was already a legend. His men saw him as almost God-like. He was beautiful, they said, he was gorgeous, he was handsome. No one ever looked quite like Lee in a uniform with that curly white hair. There's a brand new biography out that I recently reviewed by a woman named Elizabeth Pryor; it's just won the Abraham Lincoln Prize. There's another lovely irony, a book on Lee wins the Lincoln Prize; that's reconciliation. [Laughter] It's called?Reading the Man. Sounds like a title of a porn movie or something but--[Laughter] Sorry, scratch that Jude. [Laughter] But she did the book from Lee's voluminous letters. He was a tremendous letter writer, throughout his life.Lifetime officer, son of Light Horse Harry Lee of the American Revolution fame. His father had been a total scoundrel. He had a brother that was an even greater scoundrel. His brother, and probably his father, had fathered children by slave women, had abandoned their homes, their wives, their families. He came from a very, very difficult, sordid but aristocratic, famous Virginia family, and he went to West Point just like his daddy, and he became an officer in his early twenties. He spent his twenties, his thirties, and his forties spread all over the United States, largely as an engineer. He was a great engineer. He helped build the first bridge across the Mississippi. He helped redirect rivers in the lower Mississippi, and on and on. He spent probably two-thirds of his life, up until the Civil War, away from home, away from that mansion that sits today in Arlington Cemetery. Arlington House was Lee's home. He inherited it by marrying into it. He married a Custis; he married into the family of George Washington, the extended family of George Washington. And, of course, it is Lee's own home, Arlington, that before the war even ended the United States Government confiscated. Lee's wife, to say the least, never got over this. They confiscated Lee's home and converted it into the largest national cemetery in the country. If you ever go to Arlington, go to Arlington House, or at least remember that that was founded to bury the thousands and thousands of Union dead killed by Lee's army.At any rate, he may have hated war in the abstract but his biographers have taken us into Lee's psyche in some useful ways. I won't cite all these many biographies but some of them have really shown us a complicated man of great daring and audacity and aggressiveness. He always wanted to be on the offensive. He hated being entrenched. He hated being on the defensive and he clearly saw war as an emotional or psychological release. "I think a little lead properly taken is good for a man," he said. That was in the Mexican War. He didn't say that during the Civil War. Surveying the field of slaughter at Fredericksburg in December of '62 he said, famously, "It is well that war is so terrible so that we do not grow too fond of it." He appeared to change in battle. His eyes would be like fire, people said. An English journalist observer in the Battle of the Wilderness, a horrible battle fought in dense woods, observed this of Lee. "No man who at the terrible moment saw his flashing eyes and sternly set lips is ever likely to forget them, the light of battle still flaming in his eyes." And there are lots of people who said that about him. The debate about Lee is essentially, among historians at least, is essentially whether he bled the South to death, so to speak, with his aggressiveness, his two major invasions of the North and the cost that meant to the Confederacy, or whether he was the true military genius of American history and only through that offensive daring did the Confederacy survive as long as it did. Or, only through his devotion and his maneuverability of huge numbers of men across difficult landscapes did the Confederacy survive as long as it did through 1864 in his struggle against Grant's Army, which outnumbered him at times two to one, in 1864 and 1865. But he hated being on the defensive now in 1864. "I will strike that man a blow in the morning, I will strike that man a blow in the morning," he would say sometimes at night in his camp, even if he wasn't planning to do it.Now, the Campaign of 1864, the pivotal--in so many ways, decisive, despite the fact that it becomes a horrible stalemate--the decisive campaign of the Civil War in everyone's hopes in the North, a campaign once again that would only be one summer, was launched in April and May of '64. But it wasn't going to end that summer. It would end in a horrible stalemate and a siege of the city of Petersburg, just south of Richmond. And the war, of course, would not end until the following spring, four Aprils into the war. But here's roughly what happened--and by the way I refer you here to the Ken Burns film series, and there's of course a very good reason that Burns decided in this nine-part film series to give two whole parts to the year 1864. I have my own little criticisms of that film series which I'll be happy to share with you at some point, but I thought it was actually quite brilliant the way he just makes you agonize to get out of 1864; I mean, God how long must 1864 last? Because that's actually the way the country felt.In the Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864, the two armies basically collided just west of Fredericksburg in a densely, densely wooded area that was known at that time as the Wilderness. They essentially just bumped into one another because there were only two roads that went North, South or East or West through this area. And they fought it out in woods for two days. It was a totally disorganized battle. Often men would only fire at what they saw other weapons firing, because they could really never see their enemies, and hence sometimes killed their own men. And the most horrible thing about the Wilderness, of course, as you perhaps have heard, is that hundreds, if not thousands, of wounded ended up being burned to death in the woods because the woods caught on fire in several places and the wounded could not be retrieved. Soldiers on both sides laid down at night in makeshift trench works along roadways and listened to their comrades scream as they were burning to death in the woods and could not save them. In two days of a really thoroughly disorganized slugfest in woods, Grant's Army lost 18,400 casualties, dead and wounded. Lee lost about 11,000, dead and wounded. And it appeared that Lee had once again--for what, the fourth time now?-- stopped a Union Army invading into Virginia, and that that Union Army would probably have to retreat back out of this densely wooded wilderness, get up north of the Rappahannock, regroup again, again, again, as the Army of the Potomac always had. And yet what happened was, of course, Grant never intended to stop no matter what happened. He had the obvious advantage of manpower. He had tremendous resources behind him.Although that manpower was risky, because that very summer the three-year enlist--they weren't up by May but they were going to be up in June--the three-year enlistments, from '61 to '64, the great mass of the Army of the Potomac had been in--those who had survived, the veterans, the real soldiers--had been in for three years and their terms would be up. How in the hell to get these men to re-enlist when they were enduring this? And the government came up with three and four-hundred dollar bounties, they came up with thirty day furloughs here and there, percentages of regiments sent home. They'd do anything to get these guys to re-enlist. And Lincoln called for 500,000 more volunteers, a half a million. Now they will actually eventually get almost that half million men, but the problem, as the Union armies realized that summer, is that these new soldiers, brought in by being paid bounties and all sort of other things, were terrible soldiers. And Grant counted by July and August of these new recruits that about three of every four became deserters the first time they faced combat. So that manpower was not a certain thing, but Grant just kept moving.And there's a famous story. It's the night of the second day, it's the 6th?of May '64, and most of the Union Army is camped along a roadway, a North/South roadway. They've just fought the two worst days of the war, if they've survived. They're depleted. Woods are burning. They expect any moment to all have to retreat north. And there came Grant with just a few members of his staff cantering down the road, heading south. He didn't stop to say anything to anybody. He didn't even tip his hat; probably spit from his cigar. And as they saw him moving South, they began to realize they weren't retreating. And for about a mile and a half along this roadway these scarred soldiers started to get up and scream and holler, at the top of their lungs, for Grant, for Grant; they were going South. And they did.The rest of this terrible campaign would be an attempt by Grant now to outmaneuver Lee, to try to keep moving left, Grant's left, to try to get around Lee's army, to move faster than Lee, if possible, and ultimately to cut off Lee's supply line, either to Richmond or further south from Richmond, and if possible--forget about taking Richmond--but to try to cut off Lee's army from the rest of the South, and if possible with Sheridan's army in the Shenandoah Valley cut him off from the West. So when Grant gets accused of being a butcher that summer, there's some truth to that. But it really was a war of maneuver, maneuver, maneuver. They collided--actually the first attempt was to see who could get first to this crossroads called Spotsylvania Courthouse, and at Spotsylvania they fought for about six, seven consecutive days. This was the rehearsal for World War One. Everywhere the army stopped they dug the deepest possible trenches they could. And at Spotsylvania, indeed, Lee's army got there just before Grant's army and they built this incredible trench work that was in a U-shape, and for about six days Grant's army just made one frontal assault on this after another, and it produced these horrifying scenes of the dead and wounded, three and four deep, in these trenches, day after day after day, most of it fought in rainstorms. At Spotsylvania, when you add it all up--they first encountered each other on the 8th?of May and they didn't really stop fighting there until about the 19th?of May--Grant's army lost almost 30,000 casualties; Lee's army almost 20,000 casualties. And yet Grant just kept moving and kept moving, left and south, left and south.And then Grant, the first week of June, would make his greatest mistake of the war, and he admitted it. It's the only place in his great two-volume memoir when he used the word regret, and he really regretted Cold Harbor. At Cold Harbor, Grant had misinformation. He somehow did not understand how much of Lee's army had actually concentrated in front of him and somehow he mis-saw the landscape. He didn't realize that Lee's army on each flank had a river, and those rivers were pretty high, it was May/June, and there was no way to flank him. So he just made, on the 3rd?of June, the largest frontal assault attack of the war. There were 50,000 Union troops engaged in this, and Grant's army took 7000 casualties in a half-hour. And many of the men--and they'd been fighting now day after day after day, and God only knows what fatalists soldiers become in that circumstance. They were asked before the attack at Cold Harbor to pin their names and home addresses on their shirts, at least much of the Union Army was. And they did. They had no dog tags in that war. They were told to pin their names on themselves so they could be identified when dead. And I believe Burns uses this story in the film. There was one Union soldier who etched into his diary, "Morning, June 3rd, I died today at Cold Harbor." And he did.This stopped Grant's movement. It protected Richmond. It meant that the war would now go on and on through that summer. Rather than attempting any more assaults on Lee's forces, which were now constantly digging trenches, digging trenches, digging trenches, all around the eastern side of Richmond, Grant kept moving south. And this time he got to Petersburg faster than Lee, or at least most of Lee's army, and by mid to late June they put the city of Petersburg, just some twenty-five miles south of Richmond, under siege. And Petersburg would--and you can see many of these great photographs in Burns' film series. Photographers went crazy in '64 and '65 photographing these giant trench works, these trench cities that were built around Petersburg. There would be a quick attempt to break the siege at Petersburg in what is known as the Battle of the Crater--quick in the sense of about a month after. Grant's army concentrated all around the east side and the south side of Petersburg. They were always trying to cut Lee's supply lines off, either west or south, and never managed to completely do it until the next spring.But you may know the story of the Battle of the Crater. Some coalminers in the 48th?Pennsylvania went to their Colonel, who went to his General, who went to General Burnside, who went to Grant and said, "We can dig a tunnel, 500 yards, under the Confederate line, and we'll fill it with tons of dynamite, and we can do it with ventilation slats, we know how to do these things, and we'll blow the Confederate line to smithereens. Let us do it." And at first Grant and his staff said, "No, no, no, no, this is too crazy." They sat down with him, they convinced him they could do it, and they did it. Five hundred yards of a tunnel, they ventilated it, the Confederates on the other side. And the lines in some areas here were never more than 150 to 200 yards apart. They actually did hear some digging, we're told later, but they didn't know what the hell it was. And then they dug a counter-trench at the end, inside, or a tunnel. They put in four tons of dynamite, fuses. You to this day can see the openings of that tunnel and you can still see the suppression in the landscape where the crater was. And on July 30,1864 they blew it up, and they blew up an area of the Confederate line about 200 yards long. Men's bodies were simply exploded into the air. It's the opening scene of?Cold Mountain, if you've seen the movie. Not bad, it's one of the best parts of that movie actually. I thought Nicole Kidman was badly cast; I don't know about you. [Laughter] When you're suffering and you haven't got enough to eat and you're laying in the snow you can't look like Nicole Kidman, I'm sorry. [Laughter] It ain't right. But the problem was the Battle of the Crater became a Union disaster. Instead of exploiting this as they should have, and been far, far more organized--they should've managed to get around this crater--actually they didn't even understand how big this gigantic hole in the ground would be--a huge hole in the Confederate line had been exploded, hundreds of yards wide. But Union troops started marching into the hole--I'm not kidding--and within an hour or two, as Confederates regrouped, in sheer shock, they said it was just like picking out fish in a bowl, and they stood all around this giant hole in the ground. And 4,000 Union troops were killed in the Battle of the Crater, which turned out to be a Union disaster.Now, out West. Where's Sherman? There he is. Can we see this? Now, the other major campaign of the war that of course will ultimately lead to Union victory--and I won't get us quite to the dead-end of the war today by any means--but it is, of course, William Sherman's Atlanta Campaign through northern Georgia, the fall of Atlanta by September of '64. The campaign lasted all that summer. At the same time this stalemate sets in in Virginia, around Petersburg, with these thousands of casualties. And you must try to, if you can imagine Northerners standing in post offices and telegraph offices all over the towns of the Midwest, New England, waiting for casualty reports, and the adjutants of regiments writing the lists. Standing in a small town post office and a telegraph comes through with a list of the dead; a dozen, two dozen, three dozen, men, from a town that only had 1000 people. It was beginning to destroy Northern morale.And things weren't that much better in Georgia, or so it seemed, throughout that summer. Sherman finally outmaneuvered General Joseph Johnston's Confederate Army, toward Atlanta, won at Kennesaw Mountain in two days in June, late June of '64, and essentially put Atlanta under siege in July and August, and kept trying to get around, around, around--especially to the left, to the east and south--Atlanta to cut off the supply lines to this biggest city in the heartland of the South. He finally succeeded, at great cost, when Atlanta fell on the 4th?of September in '64. And the fall of Atlanta is in some ways, both strategically and in terms of morale, one of the most important little turning points of the war, that has a huge impact on the political situation and the Election of '64 about to occur--more on that in a second.It was then that Sherman, based on this strategy of conquest, destruction of resources and war upon people, made the decision, really quite quickly, to launch his march to the sea. It took him a couple of months to organize it but from November 15th?to Christmas Eve--that's about five weeks--Sherman's army marched 285 miles from Atlanta to Savannah with 62,000 troops. They were almost unopposed. General John B. Hood's Confederate Army, that had surrendered--in effect given up--Atlanta, had retreated south to fight again. And Hood's idea, but actually without Jefferson Davis's approval--well if Sherman was going to invade toward the East, toward the sea and destroy Georgia, Hood took an army of about 30,000 men and invaded back up into Tennessee, hoping that Sherman would stop and come after him. Sherman said, "Let him go." It was a kind of a game now, of time, resources, destruction, and who would give up. "We are not fighting a hostile army anymore," Sherman said, I'm quoting him, "we are fighting a hostile people. His aim and objective now was the civilian population, and Americans had never made war on civilians quite like Sherman would in Georgia. "We cannot change the hearts of those people," Sherman wrote of the South, "but we can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations will pass before they will ever again appeal to it." Now up in the Shenandoah Valley, Philip Sheridan's Union Army, under similar orders, to make war on society, gave a simple order to his officers; and most of that army was cavalry. His order was put in the starkest of total war terms. He said, quote, "Leave them only their eyes with which to weep." This was now savage war.To win the war with fear was Sherman's goal, to win it with destruction and to win it with maneuvers. Freed slaves swarmed behind Sherman's army. He hated it, he didn't want them to be there, he didn't know what to do with them--what the hell am I going to do with this people? First it was 5,000; 10,000; 15. He had 25 to 30,000 refugee slaves tailing right behind his army; it was about half the size of his whole army. Follow that in Doctorow. Sherman didn't always play kindness or niceness with them. At one point his troops lifted up the pontoon bridge across a river and scores of freedmen trying to get across with him drowned in the river. Sherman's attitude was "the way it goes." They made it by Christmas Eve to Savannah; just before that into Liberty County, just south of Savannah. And to this day in Liberty County, Georgia, there are plenty of people around--I have a former student who lives there and runs a historic site--who will tell you, "This is where Sherman turned left." Okay. And you think, well okay, there must've been a left turn sign or something, this is where Sherman turned left. I'll also never forget the time I was doing research in the Caroliniana Collections in Columbia, South Carolina, and I don't remember exactly what I asked for in the Archives--I spent a good week there--I don't remember. Oh, it was records about the state capital and the buildings. I wanted to know about the ruins and destruction, and I asked for this stuff, and the archivist, who was a woman, looked up from the desk at me and she said, "Don't have it. Sherman burnt it." [Laughter] Okay, thank you very much, I won't be able to look at that stuff apparently.Now, if you follow the purple line here, of course, you realize that this is the destined, this is the route of Sherman's--this is about 280 miles from Atlanta to the sea. It would give us some of the best songs of the war, marching through Georgia. It also gave the Civil War its anti-hero, its principal villain, of Union victory, some say the architect of total war--that's a little too much to lay on Sherman. But it was now a war of conquest and destruction. He did not destroy Savannah but when he got to Charleston--well actually much of Charleston he didn't have to destroy because it was being destroyed already by Union gunboats and artillery from around the harbor. But the city he did destroy was Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, which was burned to the ground, as, by the way, was Atlanta. Now, Sherman would always say these were just fires that broke out because of extensive shelling. That was not the case in Columbia. They burned about everything that was standing in Columbia, and then they kept moving north; north, north into North Carolina. And I'll come back to that later because the final, final surrender of the Civil War, of course, came in North Carolina, not in Virginia.Now, before we get to Appomattox--I'm going to save the Siege of Petersburg, the lifting of the siege and the march to Appomattox and the surrender for Thursday, because it makes a perfect segway back into wartime reconstruction plans, because the nature of that surrender at Appomattox has a great deal to do with the kind of reconstruction ideas and plans that were boiling as early as 1863 really, out of Congress and from Lincoln himself. And let me just end with this little story. I mentioned that Sherman made it to the sea at Savannah, marched part of his troops up to Charleston, took Charleston, the seedbed of Secession and all of that, although actually Charleston didn't fully fall to Union hands until February of '65. It had been bombarded throughout the last eight to nine months, as I said, from Union ships and guns all around the harbor. And if you've ever been to Charleston, that glorious, beautiful colonial city, that Caribbean city, as it looks, with all those mansions about fifteen to twenty blocks up from the harbor, you must imagine it almost completely in ruin by early 1865. All the white people evacuated and abandoned the city, and the only people left principally were slaves, freedmen, thousands of them, and they in effect took over the city.The first Union regiment that marched up Meeting Street in Charleston was the 21st?USCT, a colored infantry, a black regiment, and they accepted the surrender of the city from its mayor. And then they began to hold ceremonies, the black folks of Charleston, they began to hold ceremonies all around the city. They held a parade in late March--or was it early April--of '65. They had this huge parade where they had two floats and they had, on one float, they had a little slave auction occurring, a mock slave auction with a woman with her baby being sold away, and on the next float they had a coffin labeled "Slavery," and it said "Fort Sumter Dug its Grave, April 12th, 1861." And then they planned one more ceremony, and--oh and by the way, the war, when it finally, finally, finally ended, they held an extraordinary ceremony on Fort Sumter. They crammed about 3000 people onto the little island. All kinds of dignitaries came. Now General Anderson--not the Colonel who had surrendered the fort four years ago--came and raised the U.S. flag, four years almost to the day that they had taken it down. William Lloyd Garrison was there from the North, the great abolitionist who wept uncontrollably when he heard a small black children's choir sing?John Brown's Body.And the very night of that ceremony, which was the 14th?of April, they held a banquet of a sort in a building that had a roof on it, back in Charleston, and that was the very night, of course, that Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theater in Washington. But the black folks of Charleston had planned one more ceremony. That ceremony was a burial ceremony. It turns out that during the last months of the war the Confederate Army turned the planter's horse track, a racecourse--it was called the Washington Racecourse--into an open air cemetery--excuse me, prison. And in that open air prison, in the infield of the horse track--about 260-odd Union soldiers had died of disease and exposure--and they were buried in unmarked graves in a mass gravesite out behind the grandstand of the racetrack. And by the way, there was no more important and symbolic site in low country planter/slaveholding life then their racetrack.Well, the black folks at Charleston got organized, they knew about all this. They went to the site. They re-interred all the graves, the men. They couldn't mark them with names, they didn't have any names. Then they made them proper graves and they built a fence all the way around this cemetery, about 100 yards long and fity, sixty yards deep, and they whitewashed the fence and over an archway they painted the inscription "Martyrs of the Racecourse." And then on May 1st?1865 they held a parade of 10,000 people, on the racetrack, led by 3000 black children carrying armloads of roses and singing?John Brown's Body, followed then by black women, then by black men--it was regimented this way--then by contingents of Union infantry. Everybody marched all the way around the racetrack; as many as could fit got into the gravesite. Five black preachers read from scripture. A children's choir sang the national anthem,?America the Beautiful, and several spirituals, and then they broke from that and went back into the infield of the racetrack and did essentially what you and I do on Memorial Day, they ran races, they listened to sixteen speeches, by one count, and the troops marched back and forth and they held picnics. This was the first Memorial Day.African-Americans invented Memorial Day, in Charleston, South Carolina. There are three or four cities in the United States, North and South, that claim to be the site of the first Memorial Day, but they all claim 1866; they were too late. I had the great, blind, good fortune to discover this story in a messy, totally disorganized collection of veterans' papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard some years back. And what you have there is black Americans, recently freed from slavery, announcing to the world, with their flowers and their feet and their songs, what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a second American Revolution. That story got lost, it got lost for more than a century. And when I discovered it, I started calling people in Charleston that I knew in archives and libraries, including the Avery Institute, the black research center in Charleston--"Has anybody, have you ever heard of this story?" And no one had ever heard it. It showed the power of the Lost Cause in the wake of the war to erase a story. But I started looking for other sources, and lo and behold there were lots of sources.?Harper's Weekly?even had a drawing of the cemetery in an 1867 issue. The old oval of that racetrack is still there today. If you ever go to Charleston go up to Hampton Park. Hampton Park is today what the racecourse was then. It's named for Wade Hampton, the white supremacist, redeemer, and governor of South Carolina at the end of Reconstruction and a Confederate General during the Civil War. And that park sits immediately adjacent to the Citadel, the Military Academy of Charleston. On any given day you can see at any given time about 100 or 200 Citadel cadets jogging on the track of the old racecourse. There is no marker, there's no memento, there's only a little bit of a memory. Although a few years ago a friend of mine in Charleston organized a mock ceremony where we re-enacted that event, including the children's choir, and they made me dress up in a top hat and a funny old nineteenth century suit and made me get up on a podium and make a stupid speech. But there is an effort, at least today, to declare Hampton Park a National Historic Landmark. See you Thursday.[end of transcript]back to top ................
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