Know before you go. A title that just did not sing for some reason. [laughter] i want to thank our longsuffering panelists for bearing with me as i arrived at a workable concept and title. I didave a clear idea have a clear idea what i wanted the symposium to be. A blend of wellknown beakers. Blended with excellent lesserknown speakers who you should want to know well and will want to know well and have them speak about their Exciting New Research and their contributions to civil war scholarship. I stumbled on a title and a 2020. Sing the year way of providing hindsight and insight into the study of the civil war. With that concept in mind, i want to introduce our first speaker who was an obvious choice to lead off this conference. The davis has been one of most prominent and accomplished civil war scholars for several generations. He started as a boy, i think. If i recall correctly, his were civil war book, a biography of John C Breckenridge he rode as a college student. Of four awards. Of will find a partial list titles of his civil war books in your program. Jack was also a longtime editor of civil war times illustrated. And editor of the wildly popular the images of war and touched by fire series. His breadandbutter is the civil war but he has also written lively and important works about other aspects of American History. Including the alamo, the texas republic. If youre not familiar with those titles come you will want to be. Allowing use jack to drag him back into the civil war today to speak on 50 shades of blue and gray, causes and of the civilies war. Ladies and gentlemen, jack davis. [applause] share the john and i same quandary over titling apparently. I like the blue and gray bucket list. I thought 50 shades of grey would gray might play on the title of another book and might result in a wildly enthusiastic audience spilling out into the streets of richmond. In i would just be filling the center where he tried to get you to go. Would you all please moved to this row in the front . It is delightful to be back here. I have always had high regard for the American Civil War museum and its predecessor. For coming here. In speaking to audiences like this. I also sympathize with john with being required to host this. It reminds me of a story from a number of years ago when i got a call from the fella organizing what would be the biggest Civil War Roundtable Congress ever to take place somewhere up in the northeast. He said on the phone and i want to get the very best keynote speaker i possibly can. And i was beginning to think well, im glad you called me. [laughter] and he said, well, i tried to get ed vargas but he was busy. I want to get the best civil war speaker i can. My enthusiasm was beginning to wane slightly. I tried Jim Mcpherson and he was not available either. I want the very best what you want at the moment is the third best civil war speaker and he is not available either. [laughter] i apologize right now for the fact that a lot of what im going to say is in the shape of reminiscence but that is what happens when youre asked to look for insights into what you have learned from a career. There are those that maintain i have not learned a damn thing in 50 years and to recall the reviewers. [laughter] apologizing that a lot of this is personal in nature. But, maybe i will be able to share a few insights that at least i think are interesting. It is kind of sobering if not slightly depressing to look back from this year and realized that i began my civil war era in 1958. 62 years ago i had just shifted from diapers to short pants. California out on a mountaintop in a Little Village called oxendine occidental famous for its three italian restaurants and nothing else. On a summer afternoon at my grandparents place i was bored, looking for something to read and i stumbled across my grandfathers copy of this hallowed ground. I still have that copy of his. Whens a magical book to me i first opened its cover. I knew nothing whatsoever about the civil war. He interest really began then it is interesting to realize now that when i was reading that book, there were only 48 states in the union. There was still one self proclaimed though fraudulent confederate veteran living. My interest involved into an increasingly serious study in the 1960s driven in large part by an interest in my own family heritage in southWest Virginia and out of that luddy divided battleground in western missouri. And knowing that i had multiple ancestors on both sides. One who died here in virginia two days before appomattox. Those days of my developing interest seem so long ago. Lyndon johnson was president. Man had not yet stepped on the moon. Elvis was still alive. [laughter] so much time has passed since then but happy remnant but happy memories remain vivid. Thanks to a job fresh out of graduate school, a fledgling editor at the magazine civil suddenly, i was thrown into close contact with many of the great historians and writers of the time. John big lists. Akeless. Mary elizabeth massey. John hope franklin. He great kentucky powerhouse tom clark and more. Most especially influential on me was the acquaintance formed with the Great Southern including charles p rolen. They are all gone now. , just a fewn minutes away from just a few weeks away from his 102nd birthday which means he would have outlived tom clark who died a few days before his 102nd birthday. There is something in the water in lexington, kentucky. I advise you to get some. I have never forgotten the feeling i had been half a century ago on meeting and being befriended by these wonderful, generous people and others of their generation. It gave me a profound sense of wanting one day to be one of them. The hope that one day i could stand with them as one of their peers. The degree to which i did or did not realize that useful ambition is for others to say but do not listen to anything that Gary Gallagher might say on that subject. [laughter] what cannot be denied is that i had a rare, almost unique opportunity to learn from all of them. I may not have been able to pursue doctoral studies at a distinguished university under the guiding hand of one of the stars of the civil war studies but i have always felt that through sheer chance i got to go that one better. As i came to know them by working with them as their editor and becoming their friend , those scholars and more all became my teachers. In the light of a constellation of giants. Meexperienced not unique to an experience not unique to me but one with which you others have been blessed. Their curiosities and wideranging backgrounds surely help share shape my early understanding of the cause, conduct, and consequences of franky fellow Missourian James called those lively times. Looking back with the vantage of today, what leads to mind is how simpler the whole thing seemed to me back then and to a great proportion of students of the war era in the 1960s. And an even greater share of the always last audience of people yearning to learn about it. Midpoint of the centennial, that oversimplification was satirized by the humorous Richard Armour in his little book it all started with columbus. Ansubtitle said it all unabridged and extremely unlikely history of the United States. According to armour, the greatest general of the north es as grant. His subordinate was general sherman known for his famous march which lasted from march through december. The greatest Southern Commander was robert e lee and his most able general, stonewall jackson. Lost hisson died, lee right arm which made it difficult for him to hold his horses rains. Reins. Most of the generals were named johnston. Behaved grant and lee so gentlemanly toward each other at appomattox, it was decided to call the conflict, the civil war. Armour did not have a very sophisticated wit but behind some of his juvenile play on hows, he made a point about naive americans are towards the civil war. Undulating that come he advised anyone reading just one book about the civil war could thereafter class themselves as an expert. As i expect the other speakers today would attest from their own experience, the woods are still full of one book experts today. They frequently ask you a question after you have given a lecture and the question goes on longer than your damn lecture. [laughter] to say that oversimplification was a problem with civil war historiography half a century ago is not entirely an overstatement. Several reasons suggest themselves. Some of much of the more popular literature, and i dont use the word popular in a pejorative way, must of the popular literature was written by amateurs. It is not to say that it was badly done that only that it was not written by professionally trained historians. The civil war, the greatest accumulation of stirring stories in our National Past naturally attracted our greatest storytellers and they were usually not academics with the exception of all of the speakers today. Journalists like bruce. Glenn tucker. Bert davis. Freeman. Poets like shelby foot. They were naturally drawn by their instincts for drama to take on the task of writing Civil War History. Much of their work is still riveting but they did not often bypromise suspense and drama delving too deeply into the nuances of debates over the validity of one source over another. They told the great story and to some extent, they all oversimplified to make it less challenging for readers. Neither bruce catton or shelby foot ever claimed to be historians. They both called themselves storytellers. Probably the first and still most important lesson i have learned was just how incredibly complex and nuanced and entangled is the story of the coming of the war and the deeper one looks into it, the deeper the search has to go. Onehis day i suspect no still has definitively explained it and definitive explanations may be impossible as are so many things when human beings are at the helm. I had no idea in 1969 how slaveryably interwoven was with every aspect of American Life even in the free states in that era. Nor how important it was to remain far beyond the cotton fields and the counting houses. It has appeared over the last several decades and it has inuminated the effects southern culture, society, the arts, literature and more in ways that were only being fought ought ofars ago th 50 years ago. I doubt anyone has truly encompassed it all. I have learned through thought, research and selfexamination to halt at easy as a nation assignments of blame. At one time, i wouldve stated that the south had poor the burden of blame for the war. After all, it attempted to secede after Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency which seems like an explicit rejection of the concept of rule by majority that is fundamental to our democracy. Blame bynded that firing the first shots and abandoning the search for peaceful alternatives. It is still somewhat challenging to find any high ground in those actions. The seceded states and ultimately Jefferson Davis may bear responsibility for the opening of outright hostile to hostilities that seemingly closed the door to these all reconciliation but i no longer confuse responsibility with blame. A word that carries with it the inescapable imputation of bad faith and willful wrongdoing. And that is because years of study have revealed to me a regents whose chosen cadre of leaders were caught in a box of circumstances not entirely of their making. A threat to the expansion of slavery and the creation of new slave states quite rightly seemed to southerners to them her all the security of the existing slave states and a threat to them put at hazard every aspect of southern political, social, and economic life. Faced with that, what was southern leaders to do . In a specter surely driven by fear and panic as well as recent expert expectation, the ultimate alternatives appeared to them, to them, to be gradual and marginalization in the expanding union until free totes numbered enough eradicate slavery by constitutional amendment. To forestall that, the alternative was to leave the union peacefully if possible or by violence if necessary. What other door was open to them . I have yet to hear convincingly proposed any course of action that promised a reasonable chance of success between those two extremes. Extinction or secession. Leads to another question from decades of being parlor gamesat if can be amusing, they are ultimately pointless. If they are so incredibly popular. Change thenceived to outcome of the battle of gettysburg in particular or the war itself and a wheeze in favor of the confederacy. Some of these apparently come out of what former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher land. Ed to as cuckoo i was once asked, im not joking , i was once asked if i thought lee could have won the war. The question is always good lee have won the war . I was once asked if i thought lee could have won the war if he had been equipped with the atomic bomb. [laughter] im not joking. Im not joking. It, i knewld have the answer to the question. [laughter] which i will now vouchsafed to you. The answer is no. Lateif he had the bomb, had no b29 to deliver it. [laughter] callinge in my mind lee jeff stewart to his headquarters and saying ok, i want you to take this gizmo and ride like hell towards yankee lines. Light the fuse and well, you wont be coming back. [laughter] but i want you to know that i have written a very nice letter to mrs. Stewart complementing you on how bravely you were vaporized. But yet, there is still a lesson to be learned from these strange and sometimes ridiculous rationalizations to retroactively change the outcome of the work. It they make it clear to me that the wars era, its people, and its conclusion and after effects have such a deep hold on our consciousness and imagination that we will strain both beyond reason in the attempt to recast the story in a shape that make sense to us. Or one that allows us to come away from the war feeling somehow better about it. Episode other there is no other episode in our history that americans have taken such paint to try to change retroactively as they have with the civil war and that says to me a great deal about the psychological hold, the emotional hold, the spiritual hold but it still has on all americans today. A question of what north and south could do in a situation that seemed to admit of no acceptable compromise, my dear friend, the late dr. Richard somers more than 30 years ago said to me with a straight face that such situations where as he put it, an argument for the efficacy of war. War is a good thing because it can settle a question. It sounded almost absurd to me at the time. But then from the point of view that warfare may just be politics carried on by a different means, dick may have had a point. War may not solve overarching problems but right or wrong, italys for the moment, war will produce a solution. At least for the moment, war will produce a solution. I have learned to have sympathy for those leaders caught in the bind even if i do not sympathize with the course they chose. It seems probable to me now that no and geography matter what action they chose. It is important to remember that they did not see it that way themselves. This was no cause for a death wish. They thought they had a strong constitutional case for the legitimacy of secession as multiple failed separatist have shown. It is still alive. Most recently Jerry Falwell and governor john justice from West Virginia has been encouraging western counties of West Virginia to leave and join them. Why would why the hell would anyone want to do that . Blacksburg,to write West Virginia. We will all be californians eventually and i will be home again. [laughter] ludicrous buteem the idea of secession is not always ludicrous to everybody. Moreover, southern leaders believed they could defend themselves militarily if necessary. A giant miscalculation as it turned out. Inre was no evident bases 1861 for them to know that after all, for more than a generation they had listened to northern spokesman insulting condemned them so they can actually ask of themselves why would the yankees fight to keep us in the union when they dislike us so . The disparity between volunteer enlistments in the recent war with mexico between north and south suggested that gun shy noty shopkeepers and wooden make peddlers would not risk their lives or spend their precious gold to fight for anything. 50 years ago, i regarded the outcome of the war as inevitable. It is only over the years that i came to appreciate the marriott of other factors off the battlefield that determined or could determine the outcome. I still believe that there was never a moment when the confederacy proactively could have done something to win its independence but i certainly appreciate now that at any moment during those four years of work, the north could proactively decide to lose it. We have seen conflicts in our own lifetimes that offended in what is apparently precisely that fashion. Remove Abraham Lincolns iron will to preserve the union. Take away the bond he managed to forge with the northern people and soldiery that made them willing to continue the sacrifice through four bloody years and who is to say whether sheer superiority wouldve been enough to outlast the remarkable morale that kept confederates willing to keep making their own sacrifices after it shouldve been evident that they were beaten. One of the underlying reasons that i see a spread of broader understanding of the marriott causes of an and influences that produced the work the of and influences that produced the war the rejection of sources. Todays post modernist and deconstructionist academic dogmas maintained there is no such thing as an authoritarian source authoritative source and that all narratives are of equal value. This is, as any sane person knows, complete crap. [laughter] but come ironically, almost exactly the same approach to sources prevailed generations ago. But then, it was just called carelessness when writers did not think to ask questions about their sources but used them indiscriminately as if one was just as authentic as any other. It would be simplistic to say that half a century ago the customary attitude towards a source was that if it was in print, it could be used. But that is not that far off the mark for much of what appeared as Civil War History. Particularly during the centennial years. I somewhat shamefacedly confess that in my very first book which i finished writing at age 24, some 49 years ago, it does seem a day too long, i used sources that today i would not use. I took at face value any number of accounts from memoirs and , that today i would seriously question or today declined to use. I have not yet learned better. The learning came fast. I will never forget the rule of that theyll widely passed on to me. He had a keen grasp of human wiley passedl on to me. He had a keen grasp of human nature. Jack, he said to me, never trust a diary. Think about this yourselves, any of you that keep diaries although that is a lost art now. Anyone that writes a diary does it in the full expectation that some day, someone else is going to read it. As a result, the diarist will consciously and sometimes unconsciously present him or herself in a way that they wish to be seen by others. Memoirs are even more untrustworthy because they are written years after the fact, subject to failing memory, subject to the quest for self justification after the fact and subject to the influences of later events that may change what is and not is acceptable to have believed or done years before. His injunction served me well i think. I have framed a subsection of it that i modestly refer to as davis first law of history. Replay stated it is that the accuracy of a diary or memoir is inversely proportional to the importance of the position held by the writer. I think that sounds very scientific. Cap to buy a common soldier in the field, the diary may yield useful information if employed judiciously. If the diary is that of a leading general or worse, that of a politician, or worst of all, a president , it is next to useless except for comments on dailyather and the regularity of the diarist which every diarist wrote about in those days. The old saying goes half of it aint true and the rest is lies. , a growing awareness of the fallibility of many an old standby source encouraged to historians to spread their research and at than ever before. Tremendously enhanced by advances in Computer Technology that were barely thought of in the 1960s when i was getting started. The first efforts were stumbling and controversial. Some of you may remember them. S. Called cleo metric the application of punchcard Data Processing to formulate conclusions had a brief fad as things often have brief fads in the academic world. But it produced endless charts and statistics which do not make for riveting reading. Things that virtually drove every bit of interest and drama out of every story where they othered and yet, capabilities of Computer Technology as yet unthought of held vast promise. In those early days, historians were using newspapers but as a rule, only in limited volume. And you can imagine why. The contents were only to be found by leaving through the actual bound and unbound papers in the archives or by blowing out your eyesight for weeks upon weeks on microfilm and microfiche readers. I still remember my First Encounter with the charleston mercury from the 1860s in the library here at the museum of confederacy. I spent days going through that until i was cross site. Cross eyed. Library and archive budgets were so low, there was not very good light. It was a considerable encouragement for blindness. What is happened now . Im sure many of you are aware of this and most of you are using this. Newspapers are ignored because of the difficulty of using them but im convinced it is not the press that the temperature of a population is to be felt more than anywhere else and that is where Public Opinion was most influenced in that era. Now, this relatively recent explosion of optical character recognition programs applied to digitized newspaper images is revolutionizing research and opening an incalculable amount of research to researchers though can now work from home at their own pcs. It also applies to the growing mountain of digitized manuscripts. And it brave new world really is brave. I am not ashamed to say that every book i wrote prior to the year 2000 wouldve been better and more authoritative had this technology been available then. It is a useful and i think a humbling reminder that no matter how much you may think you have found, there will always be much that you missed. Indeed, one primary lesson i have learned over the years is that the historian ought to carry on his shoulders the knowledge that of in any narrative of produced, chances are that only half of the real story is there. The rest is yet to be discovered. Hence, davis second law of and sally fromin personal experience, within about 30 minutes after your book or article comes off breast, you will stumble onto a host of fantastic sources you did not know about before you wrote the book. It is just always going to happen. No one finds everything. Lesson learned is that historians of earlier generations and many of todays al have great apology owe great apology to the vast army of historians that were referred to the wrist genies. Was like a punishment when someone at the archives had to room 203 for the afternoon because people had to sign up for limited periods of time for the microfilm readers. That is the only place you could get your hands on the early censuses. Most of them are genealogists. Every one of them expected the archivist to know everything about what was in the room and the archivist should really know something about their ancestor in particular. If the archivist did not, they would proceed to bore the living hell out of them. Every family has several genealogist. The stereotype was always of a sweet, powder faced, blue haired septuagenarian in a pastel set, he usually pink. Icap inc. Sweater right out there next to you, i see a pink sweater right up next to you, al. Trying to prove the qualifications to join the daughters of the mayflower. Meanwhile, these poor archivist listening to what is coming from this person wishing they could pull their brain through their nose and and this. [laughter] failing to take into account the ingenuity and the industry they applied to scanning sources that in that day conventional historians often ignored or did not even know about. How many of us then wouldve imagined the appearance of ancestry. Com . It is on the verge of becoming an empire of sorts. And the host of lesser known Online Sources engaging tens of millions of us around the globe on a daily basis making instantly and cheaply available to us online resources that once required costly and timeconsuming travel. The civil war historian, and historian, certainly the civil war historian today who ignores the techniques common to the genealogists does so at full hearty peril. Full hearty peril. Hardy. L. Even the personal stories of the men and woman of the civil war era. Moreover, all across the studies , the last halfcentury has forced us to confront the ever deepening subtleties and the facts behind the narratives we have composed. I learned early on that you cannot take the historian out of the history. Try, ouruch we may conclusions and our judgments on people and affairs of the past will inevitably be tinted by our own perceptions, our preferences, our prejudices, and our personalities. We are forgiving to those past persons whose actions and characters we find appealing. For a century and a half to my robert e. Lee got almost a free ride from historians of all shades because of the universal respect felt for his demeanor and conduct during trying times. Even though there was some aspect of his personality that might have come in for some criticism if they appeared in the lives of his contemporaries. Jefferson davis is aloof and his prickly personality made it easy for historians to overlook some more admirable traits and praiseworthy actions on his part. Biographer is still commonly make the mistake of falling in love with their subjects, exaggerating their third strengths and minimizing exaggerating their strengths and minimizing their faults. I have done that in the past. Distorting the portrait they present. We must ever guard against that in ourselves but we will never be rid of it entirely. The same is true in the reverse. There are some people whose lives have important lessons to offer despite the fact that they were unlikable and odious. I found i was able to feel empathy and some respect for Jefferson Davis in the course of writing a big come along biography about him but i am confident his personality wouldve made it difficult if not impossible for us to be friends. I spent two years on a biography. F Robert Barnwell read South Carolinas selfproclaimed father of secession. Even when i strained, i could not find positive things to say about him. He was humorless. A blatant hypocrite. A bigot. A colossal liar. Almost certainly a physical coward. And a man whose only consistent loyalty was to himself and his own ambitions. I have never dealt with such an unpleasant and unlikable character well, i have known gary for 30 years. But [laughter] was atting that aside, he man of significance. Not gary, red. [laughter] day when imy the kept the last key on the typewriter. He was dead. I had him buried and gone. When i finished the final chapter i said to myself my god, im glad that son of a bitch is dead. Man appearedd the that is not a very unbiased attitude. I still think i was fair to him, even maybe fairer than he deserved but because of my own visceral reaction to him, i can never be certain. History is an art after all, not a science. Areeven the sons of bitches a necessary part of the picture. Satire oversimplifies to be sure. Richard armour had seen enough by 1963 to put his finger on something. Scholars were interested in looking behind the stereotypes. No one was paying much attention to the scholars. Many of whom were still hidebound by 19th century assumptions and regional cultures. The stories remained what they had been for quite a long time. And then came vietnam. To getdenly, we begin some kind of an idea about how it could be possible for americans to come to blows with each other on american streets. Suspecthe problems i would be a peacetime historian it is just not possible to feel and convey the primal emotions felt by people in such times of consuming national and cultural crisis. Hence, we tend to intellectualize and rationalize explanations as substitutes for true understanding of the reasons people are. People act. Maybe the civil war was in efficacy. That there was no way to deal peacefully with something that momentous. Of the truisms that historians often repeated from a halfcentury ago was that the war and its result made us one nation again, this time indivisible. It seemed then and seems today that americans could ever be so divided to ever go to war with each other. That is the sort of thing that happens in other places. We are ruled by habits of peace and pop and compromised. If we do come to blows, there will not be great numbers. I dont know that im entirely certain of that any longer. The experience of vietnam and how violently it polarized significant segments of our a disturbingded number of echoes. Thankfully, the memory of vietnam is one confined largely to remnants of generations for home the Midnight Chimes may not be too far distant but the phenomena that produced that memory is all too alive and flourishing. The issues at hand may be different but the evil specter of a rational polarization is much the same of irrational polarization is much the same. Rather than challenge ourselves with serious thought and introspection. Carl bernstein of watergate and all the president s men fame a america month of being engaged in what he called a cold civil war. The issues have changed. They are different now. ,bortion, Capital Punishment statues, gun control, a pipeline of virginia. But what they all have in common is that no one is listening. Violence is lurking on the perimeter. Sameroader argument is the it was in 1860, however. What is my identity . What will i allow to define me . Where do my loyalties lie . To home or what do i owe allegiance . In this tense and seemingly critical hour, can i afford to give reason a chance over irrational emotion . The content of the arguments today and in 1860 is different but the conduct of the argument is increasingly the same. I dont mean to suggest that we are going to have another civil war. But this is right. Contrary to popular mythology, burke never wrote that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. It was invented by his biographer. Say twoart mill did years after the close of the civil war that mad men need nothing to encompass their ends nothing more to encompass that good menn should look on and do nothing. I think i have come to understand and appreciate that the leaders of the Southern States that attempted to depart the union were no more bad of the then the son bitch than the fact that the northern politicians were good people. They were normal people. They were brutal, charitable, and like most mammals, when driven into packs by fear and excitement, they revealed that they were capable of doing things in groups that they would never have done as individuals. Ancient cliches notwithstanding, history rarely repeats itself. Human beings, however, rarely failed to repeat themselves. Lessons may be learned from what came before but they are all too soon forgotten. Of the essence of human nature today just as it was in that generation rushing towards fort sumter. What ire perhaps is think may be the greatest lesson i have drawn from a halfcentury and more of a career i have been so extraordinarily fortunate to be able to enjoy. To the past tok explain the present. I look to the present to understand the past. If you want to know how that works for me, ask me 50 years from now. Thank you all very much. [applause] we have time for questions but with the stipulation that we will bring the microphone to you so please wait for the microphone to get to you. Raise your hand. People on each side to bring the microphone to you. Jack, i call on you as an educator of note. Jack davis that is your first mistake. [laughter] comment if you well on the continued draw of this catastrophe of 150 plus years ago among todays College Students in places like Virginia Tech and uva. Elective course in civil war leadership is always full at the university of virginia. What draws these young people to their exploration of this event . Talkdavis people will every dozen years or so about the sudden surge of interest in the civil war. The sudden surge began during the war and never went away. It just has some peaks and valleys. Always there has always been some draw to it. It is our story. It is us against us. It is influenced by things like film, popular literature, popular drama. People are influenced speaking as a parent, i cannot believe i am saying this, but people are often influenced by their parents. [laughter] werent but that is another matter. It comes from all over the place. Virginia tech they conducted the only two semester civil war course in the country. By the time he retired come he was teaching the grandchildren of people that were in his class in the 1960s. The difficulty in all too many campuses today is even being able to take the one semester war,e because the civil while it has always been popular among the general population, it is not always been popular among the Academic Community for a host of reasons that says more about the Academic Community. He maintained that the two lowest people on the totem pole in every in any History Department was the western history professor and the civil war professor. Davis third law of history that im codifying for you in this moment, so right about this in your diary tonight right after you write about your the place on that the totem pole where the western history or Civil War History historian stands is inversely proportional to how much more his books sell than the other members of that department. There is a great deal of academic jealousy. There has always been a tendency to look down on civil war historians and this also applies to military historians. These are just silly Little People that play battlefield boardgames and probably pull the wings off butterflies and other stuff and dont get them riled up and they wont cause trouble. That is just and academic conceit. That is universal. It does not just happen here. Some place in the world, no matter what your field is, it is probably looked down on by someone else. Think about yourself. If you spent 15 years of your life writing your dissertation on the history of the study of the circulatory system of celery , and the only person that buys a copy is your mother and she will never read the damn thing, how do you feel about someone that knocks out the 1000th book about the battle of gettysburg and it sells 50,000 copies. You would not be human if you did not feel some jealousy. The great thing is that it is almost born into us and you cannot travel east of the mississippi without running into it everywhere. Highways ands and in the statuary. No one will eradicate the battlefields. It is a must impossible for us to escape it. Im sorry, i went on too long. Anyone else . Excuse me. Me, i have some difficulty getting up. Im older than you are. Jack davis it cant be. All, thank you for being here and secondly, i want to congratulate you on having the strength of character or and the good sense to be associated with Virginia Tech [laughter] no deference to dr. Gallagher. School, i in graduate had bud robinson and he was one of my advisors. Bud was known for a lot of things but he had a way with history and he talked to me and some other students at one point about the civil war in particular being like an onion that you continually peel. He had a very insightful view of that. He said one thing about that onion is the more you peel it, the bigger it gets. You will never finish peeling the onion if you do your due diligence. As i get older and the more i read, the more i find out just how ignorant i am. I am one of those people that as a child grew up near petersburg and thought if i went to the crater a few times, that i knew everything i needed to know about the civil war. Fortunately, ir found out i was not correct. Theuestion is as we peel onion, and it is disturbing to me as i get older how narrowminded some people are about the subject of the civil war, it is such an intriguing subject as most people here will attest to, one thing that is a concern to me is how do we, as historians and individuals, encourage people to do more in depth studies of the black experience in the civil war . Im not just talking about just in the north. But in the south. And the blacks in the Southern States and their involvement in the confederacy and what their tributions were and how how do we pull people more into that and get away from the ofgular view or dimension the black experience and the participation and their role in that conflict in that part of American History. What can we do, what can scholars do, what can historians do to encourage people to want to know more, whether to be comfortable or not . Jack davis the short answer is fortunately, more of that is going on all the time. More the story is the scholars we have today, the more they are likely to open up avenues that may present some challenges and interest to potential scholars in the future who may want to write on this or learn about it. Always found, regardless of the subject matter in history, that if you can interest a student in the idea of Discovery Research is about as close as we can come to getting the feeling of Christopher Columbus unless we are terrestrial, if we are astronauts, that is another matter. But everyone can feel the thrill of discovery and youre looking for something and you find it. 50 other people may see it before you but they were not looking for a because it was not important to them. I dont know how else to have beent except i lucky enough to have dozens of eureka moments. I have been looking for something and lo and behold, it was something that was better. It is the search, the quest that can be very exciting. Universally has certainly been opened up widely but it is still a field that is wide open. You have all heard of the underground railroad. There was also something that did not have a name and i called it the underground telecast telegraph. How did news get from one plantation to another . Somehow word got around. Even as restrictive as the plantation system was. There is a mystery and in there is intrigue and curiosity and host of other ingredients that i think can make people want to look. If you make them want to look, they may not find everything they are after but it will open up things for them and for the rest of us who want to know more and give a more comprehensive already have of the black experience, north and south, east and west. Differentget 100 answers to that question from 100 different people and i dont know that anyone would be more correct than the other. Of course though, mine is the correct one. [laughter] two comments i would like to make and get your reaction. First, my belief is that it is unfair for people to analyze and basically criticize the confederacy as a hole. As a whole. I think it should be divided into regions and separate states because each state may have had its own reason for seceding. The hotheads in South Carolina, georgia, mississippi and alabama , their articles of secession specifically said it was to preserve slavery. Virginia was reluctant to secede and i do not believe that their purpose or main purpose was preserving slavery but they are put in with the rest of the confederacy when people analyze it. My second thing is i am of the belief that the biggest mistake in the whole war was lincolns troops throughch virginia. Had he started with the ones who actually rebelled and had aggression against the United States come i dont think virginia wouldve ever come into the world because he couldve finished it down there with the guilty parties and frankly, their attitude carrying forward until the 1960s. They were hotheads. They should never have been allowed in the United States in the first place. [laughter] jack davis South Carolina is responsible for an awful lot. No question about that. [laughter] i just dont think there wouldve been a civil war as their was now had they not invaded virginia. It is like knocking down the hornets nest. Nest and then 75 of the war took place in virginia. If you forgive me, i wont address the second one. That is a what if and we could debate it for hours. But there is no question, there never was a solid south. You are quite right. Each state had its own motives. Stated one motive, but probably there was Something Else underneath. Virginias reasons first so seating virginias reasons for seceding are related to South Carolina. Carolina, which does everything that virginia did first [laughter] the same reasons as virginia. But you are right. They should not be treated as a whole. They may have all had a series of concentric circles. They may have had overlap in which some of the same issues were driving all of them, but they all had their own separate motives. That is one of the reasons why you have the border states, particularly kentucky and choseri, but they not to succeed because certain things were as important to them as they were to South Carolina and georgia. In the course of someone having a chat about the civil war and a 40 minute lecture about the war, it probably will deal with the south as a unified bloc simply for the sake of time. But there never was a solid south. There is not a solid south today. So you are quite right. Thank you very much. I was really impressed when you talked about peoples emotional reaction to the war. There is this field of study called emotional studies, which i am learning about. One of my frustrations in talking to people about the war is that they overestimate the impact of emotion in driving peoples actions. They think that they can look at policies or look at numbers, and they feel like they understand why people were motivated. For example, there were tariffs. And we know that people did not like tariffs, and so there might have been a reason why there was a war. But it seems to me like nothing motivated southerners with than slavery, which was bringing up emotions of fear, pain, anger, disgust. One thing i tell people is if you want to understand why people did things, do not just look at numbers. Look at what moved them emotionally. We do enoughis, do in terms of the way we teach the as ao emphasize emotion factor in peoples behaviors, as opposed to just saying there were a bunch of slaves so that is why people in the south wanted to fight for them . Slaves, but all the emotional things that were involved in relating to slaves and losing slaves, or maybe slavery itself was not the problem, but the emotions themselves. The same for the north. It may not have been about preserving the union. Maybe they were angry that they felt that southerners were traitors who needed to be punished. There is anger driving their reaction that cannot be accounted for by pure logic. I mentioned how inextricably intertwined i love those two words together slavery was in every facet of life within the slave states, but also outside as well. To the point where slavery ofelf was part of the makeup a southern sense of him or herself. Even if they did not own a slave themselves because they are part of an economy and a society and a culture that cannot escape the influence of slavery on it. 16, you have arrived if you got a car. If you are a young man coming of age in the south, how have you arrived . Of by owning 10 or 20 acres land, but by owning a slave. It is a sign of status. It says something to the community about what they want them to think of you. Classes dealing with the civil war ought to involve social psychologists and others in those disciplines to help explain it. When ites to own comes down to his values. People will not compromise on values. If you say it is sunny outside and i say it is not a mobile can step outside and received consent this. And we will not argue about it. But if you say abortion is a good thing and i say abortion is a bad thing, i can guarantee you we will never agree because that gets into our bedrock values as human beings. And our values are where our emotions come from. But you are absolutely right. I think i can comment for myself. One of the problems with being a peacetime historian is we cannot viscerally understand or feel the emotions that are driving people with their values in time of crisis like that. That is another great example of how much scope there still is out there for younger people. To me, everybody is younger people now, except gallagher. [laughter] to pursue these new avenues and to explore and have the thrill of discovery, and all the while illuminating ever more this incredible picture of our past. I think that is enough. Thank you all very much. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] the peoplere about and events that shaped the civil war and reconstruction every saturday at 00 p. M. Eastern, only on American History tv here on cspan3. Next on the presidency, Abraham Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer revisits the second inaugural address delivered six weeks before his assassination and generally considered to be one of the most iconic speeches in American History. The New York Historical society hosted the event. We are honored to welcome Harold Holzer back. Back to New York Historical. He is the Jonathan Stanton director of the roosevelt house policy institute at hunter college. He previously served as chairman of the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial foundation and cochair of the u. S. Lincoln bicentennial commission, appointed by president bill clinton. He is the author of numerous books, including the 2015 prizewinning lincoln and the power of the press. And his most recent, monument man. He served as chief historian for New York Historicals 20092010 exhibition, lin i
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