Good afternoon, everyone. Im Peter Carmichael, a member of the Street Department night mist i gettysburg college. Im also the director of the civil institute. It is my pleasure to welcome edward ayres for the rubber bloom lecture. Professor ayres is the tucker boat pfizer of the humanities professor of the humanities and erutissor emmer richmond. At the university of richmond. He also wrote the promise of the new south. An excellent book i read in grad school many years ago. The authorly, he is of the thin light of freedom, the civil war and emancipation in the heart of america, published in 2017. And the 2018 lincoln prizewinner. One of the things he has done throughout his career, he has made a point to speak to public audiences. Evidence that this academics gap between therec historians is maybe a gap, but it is ever so slight. It is close in large part because of academics like professor ayres who also does a Popular Program entitled back story, which you can get on a podcast. Please welcome professor edward ayres. [applause] hello, everybody. Did you have a good lunch . I had five carrot pieces and a bag of m ms. I am fired up. I had the peanut m ms. There is little protein in there. I know you folks have been thinking and working hard about this issue. I wanted to be honest. I wanted to come here and be sincere. I hope youanation and i spun asian. Explanation. It has to be some kind of record. How can it be legitimate . Peter was talking about academics. Is not really challenge anybodys idea of what our lives are like. How can someone think about the same thing for that long . You do think if about something that long, do you learn from it . That is what i want to talk to you about today. It took a long time to get to that. The thing i am talking about is the value of the shadow project. Which i mentioned as a book. A very traditional book. To get away from the computers i have used for my scholarship in the 1980s. It seemed for a brief moment it was a good idea to count stuff and fear of patterns. I have done that in the 1980s. 1990s, computers were. Behind us i had an idea for a modest book. I wanted to study just two counties before and after the civil war. One in virginia and one in pennsylvania. Those places had seen a lot of the war. I chose them carefully. They were nothing special. Virginiasta county, and Franklin County, pennsylvania right next to adams county. It was supposed to be a short book. The idea was to put the story of civil war in humanscale in a humanscale. Integrate all the history its different parts. History, military history, socialist re. Social history. It was intended to talk about the history of the war before its outbreak. Its fighting and consequences, all the way to the 15th amendment. I do not think that stacking up different chapters heres a chapter about women, heres a chapter about black people, here is a chapter about politics actually explains all the way those things work together. I chose the great valley because that is a Natural Channel for the war. It meant the people who had so much in common to their great surprise found themselves killing each other within six months after an election. How could that happen . I could imagine i could do all that in one book for two reasons. Much aboutd not know the American Civil War. Evidence,dea how much how many stories could there possibly be for just two counties . I thought it would be a relatively i had written this other book that ended up being 600 pages long, i was tired. I thought i could knock off the civil war thing efficiently. The main thing was that it was going to be a book. That is what historians do. I figured i could do it again. Through a series of accidents, came to imagine the book as a digital database i would share with schools who were interested in showing what history looks like raw. It does not come to you as a story all shrinkwrapped. It is always millions of pieces of evidence you have to find a pattern. Then i imagined it as something new yet again. A site on something emerged after i started a project called the world wide web. Tooticed how peter happened mention that he wrote a book i read in graduate school. Back at somee point in the future. Web. Site on the world wide within six months of the web, we had the site. Then i saw the future. I knew i needed to make a cd rom because that was clearly the future. We spent years making a beautiful cdrom that came out just when nobody wanted to buy a cdrom except for maybe a coaster. We were building this. I was raising money to pay graduate students. It was. Being used by millions of people years go by. The one thing ive not done is write a book. I finally started writing it. Psalmg with the 23rd theme, i called it in the presence of my enemies. I lucked out when ice when ice sat down to write a book. These counties were filled with great characters who had left wonderful records. Was the only parallel diaries by husband and wife throughout the entire war. In chambersburg. Him with the cavalry with United States army all over virginia writing down in the middle of appomattox. In the middle of what it is like. Collection largest of letters anywhere from a group of brothers and inlaws. There was an article in the New York Times about the valley of the shadows. And a story and wrote to me and said you will not find them because they are filed in the next county because the widow of one of the guys died. When she filed for her pension, she felt it from that county she filed it from that county. The full and honest diary of a loyal but skeptical and honest former newspaper editor and a stanton. An only letter we have from enslaved woman writing to her husband. The letters from teva diet jedediah from hotchkiss. Hundreds of other letters and diaries on both sides that we found in peoples addicts. Peoples attics. Newspapers in both places arguing with each other everyday. As we go back to the civil war era, people argued about politics a lot and said really hard things about each other. I do not want anybody to be shocked when they understand that this is what politics in america used to be like. It is millions of pieces of evidence. I can see that a story was not convenient and compelling way to explain things, but a story explains things that analysis cannot. Stories body the embody the historical understanding. Ways of saying, that is complicated that does not do it. If you can tell a story, you can show those things happening. In a story, we can see a people of civil war america, some of them never seeing each other, some of them high to i, made each others history. Even before the battle begins. So did the confederacy prod the United States to act in ways it did not anticipate. So to the democrats move the republicans. So did the enslaved people push white people in the u. S. And confederacy to do things they had not planned on doing. Because we so often separate our south, into north and one battle to another, we cannot think that because we are looking only at one part of the story. It took a lot of trial and effort, otherwise known as the runaway hundreds of pages i had written, to come up with somebody left. It was painful somebody laughed. It was painful. As they confront moments like lincolns election or john browns raid. What it meant was i had two men had to master the historiography of the civil war. I had a lot to learn. My earlier books were on crime and punishment in the south after reconstruction. Me forothing to prepare the density and complexity of the historiography of the civil war. As im sure you have heard, a book a week since the civil war has been written about the civil war. 55,000. I did not have to read all of them. Ead a lot of them if like it felt like. Not only did i have to read about northern politics but also the formation and mobilization of armies. The logistics of movement and supplies. Leadership strategy and tactics. All the things you folks already know because i started at the other end of the story. As a social historian, i had to learn all of that. If you have observed it from the time you are young, that is one thing. Trying suddenly to wrap your mind around that. Countiesf my two fought in every major battle of the eastern theater. I had to learn enough about each of those things. If i could see as a word my the way through, everyone in the civil war acted in ways they thought was logical. There is no one yelling and screaming and acting on the spur of the moment. They knew what they were doing they think. Everybody did things for a reason. We can reconstruct if we go into the moment. Thinking, a familiar phrase in my own head. I was thinking Something Different a year ago. The civil war was a different 1861, 1862, 1863 it is a different thing because people are seeing it from different angles. A lot of the surprise game because people did very logical things they knew was going to have a result they predicted. The war itself is a miscalculation. No one said, i vote award to go to four years to kill 750,000 people. No one ever did that. More we can know we can know no one saw the battles the way we present them in our big books. No one saw the battle of gettysburg. That had to be reconstructed. You could not see it. What do we do then . Were with theme and what they could see was on the others i of this wall. Even if you are a general, what they could see it is what what is on the other side of this ridge. Following this demanding technique, ill only made it up to the Confederate Movement in the summer of 1863 when i became arts and sciences at the university of virginia. I had written a bunch of pages. Us from the summer of 1859 to the battle of gettysburg. The battles of manassas and fredericksburg and chancellorsville in the marches on pennsylvania. My publisher said, lets call what you have now a book. You give me the rest later when you have a chance. I am just guessing that if you are the dean of all these people, you are not going to have the time. We did that. I said, lets go ahead and do that. I will do this thing a few years and knock it out. We will have it pretty soon do another series of unforeseen events, i became president of the university of richmond not neil ore the says to i said, being a president sounds interesting, but being in richmond during the anniversary sounds interesting. I helped establish the American Civil War museum. Who has been to it yet . Thank all of you, which is just enough for me to be impressed. And yet to admonish everybody else. If you have not been there, six years i was chairman of the board. Consolidating the museum of the confederacy. It is remarkably powerful. The largest collection of civil war artifacts in private hands in the world in building like a and a story told the way you have not seen it before. I was hoping for some civil war points for that. I cannot write the book. Every summer i would say, three weeks. Im going to make some progress on this book. That was long enough to have the bandages off and get the wound throbbing again. Then it was time for orientation and welcoming kids. I joked about, i became in hors doeuvre avore. I basically lived at cocktail parties. I did that for eight years. I have no regrets. I did the meantime, i knew that if i got hit by a bus, one of my finishought be, i never the valley of shadows. It was not as at the world was waiting. I wanted to honor it is not that funny. They might have been. [laughter]. My wife was waiting peri people had worked so hard to build the valley of the shadow. It was finished in 2009. The university of virginia nailed down every link and file. Ed has not been touched and i 10 years touched in 10 years. It shows we can make these things in the Digital World that will continue to work. In 2015, i finished up the presidency and went up into the country. I wrote the light of freedom. People have been nice about it. The most generous reviews using euphemisms as longawaited and even a couple, eagerly awaited rather than the inexcusably delayed or ridiculously overdue. A thin light flows unbroken presence. I have seen other multivolume works of history in the civil war sections of every barnes noble civil war section in america. You won both of them because you want to see the full story you want both of them because you want to see the full story. I thought i would reflect on what you learned from thinking about a thing over 30 years. How has our understanding of this for changed since first decided to tackle the subject . I do not have to tell you about the revolution in Digital Media that has unfolded since the days we had to make every single tool. There were no pdf files. That didnt exist when we began. No newspapers online. No ancestry. No google. No amazon. There was a howling wilderness. It was a hard sell for a long time with people skeptical of this internet thing. Then a few of my friends in the civil war business were like, be real historian. Be a real historian. I may tell you a story that will be in the new book edited about civil war graves. They asked me if i would be interested. I said, i would like to look into my own familys history but following up on the only two leads i had, which are two gravesites. Thein the mountains high in high in North Carolina. The first one came from a plastic confederate North Carolina flag that unexpectedly appeared on an ancestors grave on time. I memorized the graveyard as a kid. I was that kind of a kid. I went there one day and saw this plastic fly. There was a d statute a detachable strip with a url on it. I followed the url. And wrote back quickly said, you are a great uncle your great uncle was in the home guard of North Carolina. Hose remain guys in they said you should be very proud. He went from north from western North Carolina through east tennessee to southwest virginia to saul bellow to get salt to bring back to the community. Today ofbout 180 miles straightline. I cannot imagine what was when everything was falling apart to do that. I thought that was interesting. The countyll about in North Carolina. I asked my grandfather why we never talked about the civil war growing up. He said son, we shot each other. That turned out to be the case. The two ancestors i had were on the confederate side. From the same mound community, he enlisted early in the war the same mountain community, he enlisted early in the war. A great uncle of mine had compiled a genealogical packet including a transcription of a letter that his older brother wrote back home about watching him die in this hospital. I said i would like to conduct exhaustive Archival Research and find out who this anonymous young man was. I want to find out where he was buried and tell the story of the Research Takes to find out such a thing. You wrote me back four minutes later to say he had already found the grave on ancestry and had a picture of it online. Research that would take a long time and would have given me something to have written about took no time at all. That is part of this digital revolution. We can now know more about the civil war than we possibly could when the valley of shadows began crawling out of the primordial ooze of the Digital World of the 1990s. We have a whole new landscape to explore. One reason it took us 14 years, there is so much evidence then we can possibly imagine. People sometimes say, have a new what there is to learn . We have barely begun because of this digital revolution. The valley is still around having survived all the meteors and Climate Change those decades of the Digital World. I have to admit that noncommercial and scholarly innovation, it is not moved as fast as i dreamed. We do not have digital books to take advantage of that. Doing interesting and useful things. There is the kind of promise we see. I am still involved. I want you to take out to check out a couple things. Peter mentioned back story, which is a podcast. The other thing is american digital, which is a palace of American History. Digital atlas of American History. , i amher is called bunk from buncombe county. My title is from henry ford who says history is more or less bunk. The whole point, no it is not. It is a realtime cure ration of everything written about the United States every day in all media. Check it out. Bunk history. Org. After 30 years, we are still at the beginning of that revolution. It is going to be fascinating to see where it takes us. The civil war is undergoing its own changes. I was disappointed and a little surprised actually to see i did not settle every issue associated with the coming of the civil war in my first book. People are still writing about that even though i figured it all out in 2003. People keep having their own ideas and arguing about them. One of the goals was to explains session explain secession. How the crisis of the union proceeded on both sides from one step to the next, leading to an outcome no one predicted or desired. It is not that a conflict over slavery was unavoidable, but conflict but the conflict did not have to follow the cores i did. Follow the course it did. We are in such a rush to explain it with quick answers that we lose the moment. This may be because of living in virginia. It took virginia longtime to decide to secede. After South Carolina and the seceded,p south states they are forcing us and leaving us defenseless. Virginia says we are not going to be like South Carolina. We are going to send delegates from every county to richmond to debate this. Who werehe delegates sent were sent there to save the United States. Againoted over and over not to leave the United States. The guys from Augusta County were on the cutting edge of voting to stay in the United States. I do not want to ruin the story for you. They do not. They wereed overnight loyal confederates. They sacrifice and lead the confederacy all the way through. How do you do that . How do you argue for the union one day and represent the Confederate Congress the next . That is the sort of thing i think we need to make room in our imagination for rather than rushing a story along. For the north, michael was to give credit to the northerners who mike cole was to give credit to the northerners who took a stand. Not Just Economics or states rights. People had to risk their careers, their reputations, theirrages marriages to say we cannot let slavery expand across the country. By a blanket explanation, we explain nothing. People had to fight against each other. The leaders of the republican party, especially lincoln, are more impressive when we understand what they were up against. It is an amazing fact. 1 more exactly democrats vote for lincoln then had voted for him in 1860. That is how much immobility there is in the northern electorate even in the midst of the greatest crisis of the United States. Does that diminish lincoln . No. It shows what he was up against. Nearly half of white republican men would not support lincoln. My interpretation bill on several foundations of scholarship. Toldtates of abolitionism showed how people without power, women sign these petitions. Like people pushed the leaders of the nine states. This showed the speed with which identity formed and there power they wield it. Even in wartime, the confederacy did not speak for all white southerners. Starkry history showed distinctions between supposedly there and in seven ways of toing war would have make a to account for place and time. Studies show that the lines between what between regular warfare and carrillo warfare were blurred and guerrilla warfare were blurred. Soldiers actually had thoughts in their heads. Carmichaelster young though he is shows there were thoughts in peoples heads. Looking at the border between the north and the south, at places where people worried at the beginning, are you trying to water down the differences . Why dont you look at a really northern place like boston and a release of an place like charleston . Virginia is the largest slave state. Pennsylvania has one of the is oneion states of the Largest Union states. Lets dont do that. Lets look at people who are in the middle of everything. The heart of america as i call it. Sure youought, are you are not trying to water it down . Slavery was slavery right up to the point where it could not be. Slavery in virginia was not for fading away. Everything in the state was organized to protect. It showed here in Franklin County there were abolitionists, but there were also slave catchers. Slavery was not diluted by the boundary but in some ways emphasized. By the boundary the differences that matter were not soiled our crops are whether or cities or industry or culture or religion. It is that one side had slavery and the other did not. It is not that they were different cultures in society. Emphasize deep and overlapping context. All the contexts are changing the others. Thate had thought for sure god wanted to save the United States until they joined the confederacy. Then they were not so sure he had that is what he had in mind. That is how radically these things can change. I use the phrase deep contingency. I do not mean that like finding some quarters wrapped around cigars as a contingent moment. I mean everything is contingent on everything else. Everything is connected. Understand to warfare, you have to understand politics. A lot of the schedule of bottles and the consequence of bottles is understandable only through the prism of political life. During those days when i was traveling as president and found myself in la guardia with another delay and i would start thinking, i cannot wait to see what happens to all those people. I would write down an idea in the margins of an American Airways magazine and put it in my pocket. Get home and it was not. Thought, what goes from gettysburg to reconstruction . I lucked out in volume one. All those in credible letters and diaries. Are soin the civil war thoughtful are so thoughtless that they know home and stop writing letters to each other. They go home and start writing letters to each other. I have already said im going to explain reconstruction. How my going to sustain that story . Thingsone, i had all the in volume two, i had gettysburg, for wegner, the fighting of the valley in 1864, the election of 1864, appomattox. I had terrific eyewitnesses. Did i have equally strong evidence when the soldiers went home . I have good stuff for emancipation, battles over reconstruction in north and south. I was amazed i did. This was good luck. The postwar years were just as dramatic and interesting as the war years. It turns out that historians are arguing about that so there are things for me to get into the conversation about. Theou stop your study of civil war with appomattox, you can understand the civil war. If you cannot understand the consequences of it, you can understand what the work is about. You youerstand if have got to be able to see how it was embedded into the larger story. How do we understand the war if we do not understand what was won and what was lost . It was not a straightforward result. It was cascading actions, large and small, by the powerful and powerless. History came in sudden moments of confrontation and conflict. I was honest with you before about why i am an unreliable witness. I went to Andrew Johnson elementary school. One of only two in america. Can this hillbilly understand reconstruction . I was in a position to say, it is too easy to say Andrew Johnson was an idiot, sure. That he was racist, yes. There was a lot more going on. I had my students go online and say, what you think about reconstruction . They came back with the same answer. We are teaching our students reconstruction was a failure. ,rom the left or the right people are sitting say failure. People are saying it was a failure. Just calling it a failure does not seem adequate. Here is what we found. , thepponents of freedom opponents of reconstruction fought so long and hard during and after the war that the u. S. Government, the u. S. Army, and a small majority of white northern andlation was empowered forced to destroy the roots of slavery and put a new Constitutional Order in its place. Hout confederate recession confederate secession, emancipation was impossible. Without the war, emancipation was politically impossible. Without that violent resistance to the freedom of the people they held as slaves, there would have been no radical reconstruction. Is one paper put it, the white south had committed the colossal suicide of World History. Is reacting to things that came before. The northern democrats who opposed republicans at every step all the way through reconstruction strengthen their support for emancipation. Against the attention of southern republicans for free people. Republicans said if we do not pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, the gains of the war may be lost. I may have given up two sons for nothing. They mobilized Political Support that would not of been there been thereot have before to enact those laws. Slave people in the south and allies in the north played a critical role. Else youovia someplace munroo come four fort is someplace else you need to go. Because of the beginning of the unraveling of slavery, the United States was led into emancipation in a way that was not foreseen. We see in retrospect it was the fate of slavery that gave the war its shape and duration and meaning even though slavery went unmentioned in reams of newspapers and thousands of letters. It is a fact that soldiers did not scream for or against slavery as they rushed into battle or as they rode home. Yet, they were fighting for or against slavery because their countries were. Let me give you an example of the way the north and south venerate each others history. Republicans were very frustrated with president Andrew Johnson. Iny created a commission 1866 to explore what was going on in the south. They invited a range of people including robert really and other confederate leaders to testify. The commission interviewed several people from stanton including john brown baldwin, a former unionist turned Confederate Congressman. Argued that to lead to leave the United States was profoundly wrong and misguided. He said, if there is a war, lets guess where it is going to be. Virginia will become the flinders of america. Sure enough, they had seen virginia devastated by the war. Now, he is going to testify to the republicans about what it means. He had gone to plead with president lincoln in april of 1861 immediately before fort sumter to say, give us some more time. The chips already left. The commissioner asked, was there a longer combination aimed to overthrow the government . Baldwin assured him he knew of no one. Insaid, i have been intercourse with all of the violent men of virginia. I would know if there was any such combination. Everyone accepted secession had been defeated in the government of the United States was once again the government of virginia. Away asked was that all of us be able to vote again. We accepted it and shook hands. Let bygones be bygones and move forward. Asked about republican plans to reno fire the nation, baldwin warned that an amendment of the constitution would plant a root of bitterness such has not been known even in the bitterness of war. Roould Congress Place the neg on the ground of political equality, it would not only open the door to the suffrage of women, minors, and foreigners and negros. He said, if you do this, youre going to be talking about giving women the vote. You see what he is leading with. It is also serving as the wedge andore trouble endo will disloyal to the government of the United States and all causes that have been combined together. Whatever you do in washington, do not pass this amendment to the constitution. Gentlemen of the north, you have no idea what you are doing. Mass ofot have a 300,000 or 40,000 suddenly emancipated negros in your midst. Theatronized both commission and his fellow white virginians. He said, we must let the public feeling of the white man mature. They must have time to make of their minds. If you attempt to force the battered, it will bring about an enmity between the races. Baldwin said the black people, lack the persistence of purpose, or the intellectual vigor to rise to anything of intellectual equality. He thought they would get along very well as service inferiors because black people he said where the best and kindest people i know of. The only thing that could put them in danger would be some Aggressive Movement from outside. Men called before the ted states senators saying did not pull any punches. Should run the things in the south. You do not know what we are doing. He says, heres the thing. These are my principles. We must control black people. This is just what the committee was looking for. The witness from agusta county embodied the white south arrogance. Lecturing the senator and congressman on a limited understanding of black people and white people in the south. The commission came up with a word for this attitude. Hat they called rebelism they said the great danger facing the United States is rebelism, the undiluted and unconquered sense that they were not wrong, merely beat. Of 1866. In february by june of 1866 after thousands of such conversations including race massacres in memphis and new orleans, republicans put forward the amendment. Aboutans were divided this. Some thinking it went too far. Something it did not go far enough. It unified the party behind the success that he behind the necessity of that moment. It passed congress in my before the states for ratification. Andrew johnson vetoed one bill after another. Republicans overrode the vetoes. War of and said, a never disgraced the history of any country of any age. Were indistinguishable from those of the south. They are saying that black voting and the federal military presence in any step toward equality of rights forever get americans are a travesty. An editorial expressed to greater discussed with johnson, his allies of the south and democrats of the north. They spoke of black southerners in new terms of respect. You will see that the amendment bears the marks of this moment. There are the things you know about equal standing before the law. Nore are also things that debts incurred in rebellion will be repaid. It has the marks of 1866 all over it. That is the way history moved throughout this era. It is the way history still moves as reaction and counteraction. When i decided to explore the civil to explore the civil war all those years ago, some people who knew my earlier work were surprised. I thought up the idea, it ended in the early audience century. It seemed to make sense i would continue that story. I had come to see that the struggles of slavery, war, and reconstruction were more important than events closer in time to us. The struggles of the 19th century defined the very structure of our time. The great legacies and problems facing us. Problems of inequality and justice and power. The events in virginia the last few years have unfortunately proven me right. It has become increasingly clear that if we hope to understand ourselves and our way forward, we have to understand the era of the civil war and its consequences. I take comfort in knowing that so many talented historians and disseminate people who care about that history continue to continue to push our understanding to help us understand what we will always struggle to understand. Thanks very much for it i look forward to talking with you all. [applause] you cant possibly have believed all of that so, lets see who wants to talk first. They come up to the mark phone or it i am ready. Jack, from richmond virginia. Given the great advances in the digitization of the great bulk of so much history, is this going to help our secondary School Educators and students who will arrive in the fall at colleges and universities throughout the United States to grapple with the fact that as one student to a lotsir, we have more history than you did. [laughter] is this going to help . Can there educators help them get their arms around important issues in American History, especially . Well, that is what i am trying to spend my life trying to figure out. In all honesty, the way we teach American History now first of all we are teaching less. What we are teaching out his nonfiction, nonliterary text. Nobody wants to neglect our history emma but because we have had our eyes on other prizes, we have allowed the history of our country default aside. In the standards of learning in virginia, because the clock is ticking, they feel like they have to teach the civil war quickly. The standards of learning say that the American Civil War grew out of a conflict between an industrial and an agrarian society. And that lee and lincoln were different kinds of men. He said why do you offer him the command of the United States army . Faced with constraints, rather than taking advantage of these new opportunities to show kids what history is, a record of everything that happened before today and it is as interesting as you are and it matters so are giving it in the total packets. Heres what you need to learn. Is it a, b, c, or d. Tariffs, states rights, slavery, or culture that caused the civil war . New project called new American History. We are trying to give direct the two teachers to use in whatever time they have come a Digital Tools to show some of the toanded humanity of history if you only have three minutes, here is a cool map that shows the way people voted in the election of 1860. They will see it is not red states and blue states, but the south was divided at the north was divided. There were decisions to be made. It is not just that the politics and we have broken, not fallen from the days where Martin Luther king was a great person and now there is nobody in charge. Instead, he chose people they always struggle. People have never known. I dream is that we get these tools directly to teachers and they will know how to use them. They will figure out, i have a whole day to do the civil war, instead of hand documents canned documents, like those thatmats at restaurants, is the way we teach history. That is not the way it could be. Instead, read this entire page of this newspaper in 1861. Look at all the things. Teachers can do that now if they get just a little bit of help. Here is the paradox. We have this new bounty of ways of teaching. , but ourof new sources imagination is not expanding at the same rate. So, thank you for that. What else to be have . Pat from prior, washington. I have been told over and over again that tariffs were the real reason why the civil war occurred and yet when i looked in your book, what causes civil war i could not even find the word tariffs in the index. Mr. Ayers i will say two things about that. One, it in a simpler time and age, like back when i was teaching Peter Carmichael [laughter] i would use tariffs as an example of something that was so boring that students would turn away. Suddenly, they dont seem very boring. Now tariffs that is what it is and what they can do. Debates ord all the you can go through and search for what they talked about. Tariffs, i happen to know art mentioned 86 times. Slavery is mentioned 1432 times. The point being is not to diminish this. Were there issues of the economy and the power of the federal government . Yes. Were there issues of the rights of the states . Yes. The point is not to dismiss any of those things we used to think, but tariffs are just a small part of a larger debate over what the future of the country was going to look like. Thank you. Mr. Ayers youre welcome. Chuck greene from lakewood, ohio. I was wondering what you thought of the current status and scholarship of the failure to redistribute land to slaves after the war and what that might have portended for the future. Henry louis gates has written about the wealth gap, but i like your comments about how scholars have either ignored or not ignored the impact or lack of redistributiond more Economic Justice would have had and its legacy for today. Mr. Ayers you will be shocked to know that a, we disagree and our minds. E nobody agrees it was a panacea that it seemed at one time. There was a small part of the south that the planters have been driven out of that was occupied on the Atlantic Coast and Mississippi Valley where that would have been feasible. The great majority of enslaved people never came within a breach of the United States government. There were places like in the middle of alabama, or in southern virginia that are still intact after all that. So, i think that scholars now would say it was a lost at thenity to give some very same years of the homestead act is giving away all this land to that white people in the west, why could it not have been done in the south. People do realize the lack of goes from one generation to the next and the consequences of not some sort of support for people coming out of slavery with nothing but the shirts on their back, nothing. But by 1910 come over half the black farmers in the upper south have managed to buy land. So, part of this is if we do justice to africanAmerican History by seeing what they do themselves as well. That is in the face of every kind of opposition. Unfortunately, 1910 was the peak of that and it declined. So others are pointing outcome, it is not just an original sin and 1866, but it has been replicated in lots of different ways and when other times redline, when wealth acquisition has been squelched among black people. In general, people dont look on this as one lost moment, it just happened then it could have been great. But there was a rationale for the federal government to give people who were trying to be farmers. But, it was seen as taking away land from white people brothers and taking away from american indians. So, that sounded harsh, didnt . Hopefully there is a another question that doesnt lead to a depressing answer. Hi, i teach high school. My question for you, one of the challenges we are faced with is both reconstruction and the prelude to the civil war are barely touched on in our state curriculum. When im teaching the civil war, i have a day to cover everything leading up to the war and maybe a day or two to cover reconstruction. Im facing students who have almost no background knowledge at all. What advice would you have for how i can come in such a short span of time with students who dont have the background knowledge, make that meaningful and help communicate why it is important they look at reconstruction . Mr. Ayers i have heard people say reconstruction happens over winter break and it also happens between volume one and volume two, right . I teach the second half of a u. S. Survey class. It is depressing. I would start with the 14th amendment and think about, this is the most important amendment every in the United States and its enduring consequence where did it come from . Thats the reason i use it as an example today, because it is an echo of what is going on today in which one party is pushing the other to do different kinds of things. So, i would say, because we cant reconstruct, so to speak, all of the offense and we focus way too much on Andrew Johnson. I think i would maybe begin with what would it mean to become free with nothing . How would you make a life . What would you need . What could the federal government do to help . If you do that, you could see what they did do, which was remarkable you would see what schoolteachers, black and white, did do. You would see what black people themselves did do to form their own churches, and schools and things. Rather than beginning with it as a failure, i would begin with how were people coming out of slavery able to make for themselves with these resources . Kids dont really want to be beaten around the ears with the sense that a, everything is never, and b, we are going to make any progress. Postemancipation African American and the United States is the most successful postemancipation society in the western hemisphere. So rather than thinking of it as a failure, think, what were people able to make out of this . That is what i would do. Thank you. Frederick, maryland. On that topic, how can we better reach the africanamerican and other Diverse Communities to make the civil war more relevant to their experience and engage their interest in the gettysburg battlefield . Mr. Ayers first of all, include them in the story. Inichment, when i left there the bearingd see down on a spirit i suggested to might fellow public historians that we come up with a different sesquicentennial. Lets call it, civil war and emancipation. Just by putting those two stories in the same frame, it turned it from being a white story to being a shared story. Again, if we imagine that the pivot of the war, its outcome, whatever its intention and that being the destruction of the largest and most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, and all of World History turns around what happened there, what happens is there is a separate nation explicitly committed to was a monopolyry over the worlds single most soluble commodity. What is World History look like if that is the case . Ironically, it battlefield like gettysburg so beautiful and powerful, which is occupied by lack landowners by black landowners, would be to remind all of us what was at stake. I think we tend to forget. Especially those who listened ease and see the markers were especially in virginia. We have formed the edges smooth from handling so much. I dont hear people talk about someonet buffs, why is who is interested in that central defining moment in American History a buff . Importance, its drama and you say there is a place for everybody in the story. But i think it is a problem. When the civil war is branded as , we arepossession depriving it of a lot of possibilities. This goes back to the question about all the new sources here. You can see the way that hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were in an interaction with the United States army all along now. New book by my friend amy taylor who i did help teach. [laughter] major prizes purchased speaking later and she already spoke and she was awesome. [laughter] i guarantee it. Prizes. R prices half a million parrots of his aboutids who want to know reconstruction, how many know they were in refugee camps like we see today. We need to step inside the formulas that we use and the habits of thinking and hope the camera back and make it a little more strange. What was really going on . We note the north and the south and the names of the generals. We need to forget the secrets of the battles because there werent a sequence until they were already over. Lets put ourselves back in the moment and pull the camera back and say why in the world did this matter . It matters for two reasons. One, it saves the longest lived democracy in the world and it destroyed the system of slavery. We had to put both of those flores both of those stories together to stand to understand either one of them. When we do so, i think africanamerican people will feel welcome into conversations in a way they sometimes might not. Another question . If not, thank you so much for having me here today. [applause] we have a little bit of time. Concurrent sessions. Hess will be here at 3 00. This is American History tv on cspan3. We are live today from pennsylvania for the annual Civil War Institute summer conference hosted by gettysburg college. After this break, we will be back with Lincoln MemorialUniversity Professor earl hess people talk about the tactics, terrain, and trenches in the 1864 atlanta campaign. For the next 10 minutes, our cspans citys tour takes you on the road to feature the history of dan american city. Continuing our special look at detroit, we learn more about the cities role in the history of the underground railroad. Ight ited midn was often the last stop in america before canada. We visit the Second Baptist Church to learn about its role in the journey to freedom. Detroit is known as the gateway to freedom. There is a statue