Our last speaker is well known to all of you, Gary Gallagher is the third professor in the history of the American Civil War americas at the university of virginia and the founding director of our core sponsor, center for civil war studies at the university of virginia. Knowing that gary was about to retire a number of years ago and move west, i have been writing just about every introduction for him the last few years as if tomorrow the last time we would see him in richmond. I want to apologize to gary for trying to show him the door and kick him out of the state every time he speaks here. Im happy to have been wrong in my assumption that garys retirement would mean farewell and im pleased that hes still a fixture in the commonwealth. Garys contributions to the field of civil war studies are many and varied beyond his own scholarship, writing and ing editing more than 30 books, hes been a frequent contributor and columnist for civil war magazines, battlefield guide, and Founding Editor of the most Popular Series of civil war books in the university of North Carolina presses civil war america series and a mentor to scores of students at Penn State University and university of virginia, students who are now in turn the preeminent scholars in our field. In academia, theres a tradition called the fest trip, books in which students write essays in honor of their mentors. Garys is going to have to be about four volumes long to do it justice for all the students hes mentored in the prominence in the work theyre doing in the field today, a testament to garys work. It seems to me that all of these contributions have earned him above all the right to talk to us about what everyone should know about the civil war. [applause] thank you, john. Im always happy to happy to hear from john coski, once hes figured out im still in virginia and i welcomed his invitation to come and speak at in the years conference but i have to admit that i think the conference got off to a rocky start this morning because jack davis committed several microaggressions against me and i have fond memories of jack earlier when he was writing his biography of Jefferson Davis, he related a story to me i hadnt heard before about Jefferson Davis when he was secretary of war and Winfield Scott when he was general and chief of all United States armies and the two men loathed each other, more than jack loathes Robert Barnwell rep and he told me they had one acrimonious exchange and davis sent a note to scott and scott decided not to reply and he said he was not going to reply. My silence under the new provocation is because compassion is always due to an enraged imbecile. I dont know why jacks behavior this morning made me think about that but it just came to mind while i was sitting outside and trying to gather myself before coming in here and speaking to all of you. John and i discussed several things that i could do today and we decided on what everyone should know about the civil war. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The more i thought about it, however, it struck me as problematical. Theres so much to know about the the civil war and such a vast amount of both factual and interpretive material thats available to anybody who wants to dig into it. I wondered how i should pitch the talk. Should i pitch the talk toward an audience such as yourselves who know a fair amount about the war already or should i speak in terms of what any citizen in the United States should know about the war . And i wondered how in 40 minutes i could do justice to advising anyone about what should be considered a sort of baseline grasp of a seismic event that has been examined so massively and has produced such a rapidly expanding literature. I dont know whether i solved the problem or not but we can chat about that later. Im going to begin by saying that i think the degree of popular ignorance about the civil war and about United States history more generally is quite astonishing and very upsetting to me. More than 30 years of teaching at universities, at penn state, university of texas and u. V. A. For 20 years revealed that far too many students, even very bright students, embark on their Postsecondary Education with really kind of a hopeless muddle about American History. Theyre especially bad on chronology and dont really appreciate the things actually happened in a sequence and often because one thing triggers the next one and then the next one. Theyre not just random things that fall into place and then you go along. There is a chronological reality in history. One affirmation of this sad fact of not really understanding chronology came when one of the students in my civil war class came up to me and suggested that i get on youtube and then he paused and said, i know you dont know what that is but heres what it is and ill help you get on. [laughter] this was a number of years ago. I do know what youtube is now but to be honest i didnt know what it was that morning and he told me to look at something called lunch scholars so i watched a video on youtube and it was interviews with High School Students who were planning to go on to college and they had been asked a question and here was the question. In what war did the United States gain its independence . The most common answer to that among these students, the civil war. Korean war got one vote. More recently, and seriously, we are subjected to incessant babbling on the 24hour news channels as well as in mainline print publications and on social media about how the United States is more divided now than any other time in its history and our earlier speakers today have alluded to this. The pundits and reporters and others who make such observations often while others sitting around a table look at them and nod in agreement, these people betray a breathtaking ignorance of United States history. Ive decided to pull my punches and particularly of the civil war. The ignorance is not a small problem. This is a real problem. I think if americans had a better understanding of our past, of the profound crises that we have encountered and overcome as republic, they could put our current controversies in better context and calm down just a little bit. There would be fewer shrill predictions of doom, less inclination for people to set their hair on fire or to go to def con one immediately in any discussion. I think just a few comparative examples will illustrate the striking difference between the divisions in the civil war era and the ones were coping with now. Today we get to watch prominent actors use award ceremonies as a platform to express unhappiness about current political leaders. On april 14, 1865, the youngest member of the most celebrated actors in the United States expressed his unhappiness with Abraham Lincoln by shooting him in the back of the head. Today, in congressional hearings and other venues, politicians posture for the cameras and direct what they think of clever rhetorical barbs at their opponents. I just wish they could hear thadius stevens and their children compared to thadius stevens. Thats what we see now. On may 22, 1856, congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina walked into the United States Senate Chamber and beat senator Charles Sumner of massachusetts into a bloody pulp upon on the floor of the senate because in his crime against kansas speech, sumner alluded to one of brookskinsman as someone who embraced, quote, the harlot slavery as his mistress. Recent elections have provoked posturing about how texas and california in the wake of victories by barack obama or donald trump respectively might break away from the union. As you heard someone allude to today, theres talks about parts of virginia going over to join west virginia. I find that vastly amusing but we hear that kind of talk now. The crucial word in all of these instances is might. California might, texas might, parts of virginia might. November 1860, after Abraham Lincolns election, seven deep south states might not break away, they actually broke away and between april and june of the following year four more joined them and established another republic in north america. Americans at that time faced a reality, not the prospect, that the political system established by the founding generation had failed to manage internal fractures and had positioned the United States and the newly established confederacy to embark on open warfare and the scope and fury of the ensuing combat should underscore for all americans the utter inappropriateness of claims that were more divided now than ever before. Four years of war produced at least 620,000 and maybe 700,000 military dead. Thats between 6. 5 and 7. 3 million dead in the United States, 2020. The key of the slaughter lay in the institution of slavery with especially in regard to whether it would be allowed to expand into federal territories in the antebellum period created a series of crises that eventually proved too much for the americans to deal with in any kind of peaceful way. They proved intractable. Americans should appreciate that no political issue in 2020 remotely approaches slavery in the mid 19th century in terms of potential divisiveness which bodes well, i think, and the talking heads of the 24hour newscasts should know this, for the longterm stability of our republic. Theres nothing lurking in modern United States social and political circumstances that comes within, i dont even know what marker to use of what slavery did in the mid 19th century United States and that should make us feel good that we are not there and that were here. Before sharing my thoughts regarding basic things american should know about the civil war, it really is impossible. I could just sit here and list things you should know about the civil war until you literally drop and you should know all those things. I had to pick some and i know youll disagree with some of them but here we go but before i get there, i just want to talk for a few minutes about how difficult it is to try to get a handle on what we should know because of the sheer mass of material that awaits anyone who engages with the civil war. These are two societies that are overwhelmingly literate engaged in really important events which means people wrote about them and you have millions of soldiers away from home that had to write letters home and people at home wrote letters to them. They created a body of evidence unprecedented in United States history and a huge amount of it still remains. One collection has just come to the university of virginia, 40,000 soldier letters. One collection, 40,000 that no one has ever had access to. Its very hard to keep up with new work. It comes out at such an intimidating pace. Books appear at a rapid rate. Theres three major prizes just for books in Civil War History. The lincoln prize which is supported by the Gilder Laraman institute. Tom watson Brown Institute and the john now book prize, all big prizes that go to books in the civil war era history and the prize for the center of Civil War Research from the university of mississippi goes annually to the best first book on the civil war so you might think of the wily silver prize so you have all these books but also tremendous information coming from other sources. There are two professional journals in our field. Civil war history and the journal of the civil war era. The civil war monitor occupies middle ground between hardcore academic journals and more popular journals, civil war times, which jack davis edited back when his hair was brown, and americas civil war which is the second and not as popular of the two. Jack published the first thing i ever put into print when he was editor of civil war times. When i was a little boy in colorado i looked up to the older people like jack and i which made his behavior this morning all the more soul crushing but im not going to focus on that. [laughter] jack. Trying to find the best of the enormous older literature and deciding what it tells us about central themes in Civil War History can pose even greater challenges than trying to get a handle on the newer work and ill use as my example here a 1,022 page book titled, a title that will grab you catalog of the library of Lieutenant Colonel john Paige Nicholson relating to the war of the rebellion privately printed in 1914. It is 1,022 pages long and all it does is list the books in his collection. Thats a century ago. That massive tome includes thousands of items he collected in the half century following the end of the war and he excluded he didnt include anything relating to lincoln. Theres no lincoln books in there. He didnt include anything relating to the navy and he also avoided as he put it scurrilous books. I dont know how he determined that. But if he included those three categories maybe it would have been a 1500 page catalog that came out in 1914 and in the century since, nicholsons Library Catalog appeared, many, many thousands of additional books now crowd the shelves in the parts of libraries that deal with the civil war and some topics as you know receive constant attention. There was a bibliography that came out in 2004, a long time ago now, that included 6,000 titles on gettysburg. 6,000. Thats the right response. I got a wow from about the middle of the room there. 6,000 titles. That was 2004. Weve had nine biographies of William Tecumseh sherman since the mid 1990s. I mean, William Tecumseh sherman is an interesting dude but nine . Thats a lot. And lincoln and grant have gotten an enormous amount of attention. Grant is enjoying a renaissance in terms of attention and soon there will be a musical within the next couple of years and thats going to really be fun. [laughter] gary maybe it will include a scene on when grant played des demona when they mounted the play, when the United States army was preparing for the war with mexico. Walt whitman came to mind as i considered what i would say today. He famously predicted that the real war will never get into the books. You read that constantly. By that, whitman meant the real war of the common soldier. He was specifically talking about common soldiers, as he put it, the actual soldier of 62, 65, north and south. He said the seething hail and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors will never be written, perhaps must not and should not. Indeed, he said, the the conflicts interior history will not only never be written, in practicality, minutia of deeds and passions, it will never be even suggested. Whitmans observations, i think, inspire writers who search for a novel way into a very crowded and popular field. How are you going to find something new to say . The best way would be to find something that we havent understood before, one of whitmans things that we dont really understand. Many authors strive to illuminate what they consider neglected or ignored elements of the real war. Im convinced that a great deal of the real war has gotten into the books. In fact, has been in the books for a long time. Gifted historians have produced a corpus of scholarship on the civil war era that together with the massive testimony bequeathed by participants from Abraham Lincoln to friedmans bureau workers to common soldiers to women diarists behind the lines, you can go on, they give us bountiful options of firsthand testimony. Its incredible what you can find and it keeps coming up, things that are new. From the late 19th century through the first 2 3 of the 20th century, historians primarily dealt with three things causation jack talked a lot about that this morning. They talked about high politics and they talked about conventional military operations and those are three topics that remain essential to any basic familiarity with the broader subject but over the past half century the literature has become much richer and more expansive and youve had examples of that given to you by all the speakers today. We know far more than previously about whitmans common soldiers, about women in the United States in the confederacy, about African Americans in the process of emancipation, about white unionists and other dissenters in the confederacy, about guerrilla operations, about the conflict in a global context and increasingly about the american west, the real west, the west, the transhundredth meridian west. Scholars have contributed to the dark side of the conflict, brutality, atrocities, cowardice, vicious activities and physical and psychological wounds that left some veterans profoundly damaged. As the field of civil war era history has become complex, theres a tendency to place new subjects as close as possible to the center of the story and to question many long accepted analytical frameworks. The traditional juxtapositions of north versus south, slave holders versus nonslave holders, United States versus confederacy, have come into question, as has the fouryear time frame that typically delineates the subject in the minds of the popular readership for the civil war. Many scholars now insist that the war, if youre really going to look at it, has to include post appomattox events including reconstruction, the west and native americans and the world all brought together, all brought together in a far more inclusive and geographically varied long civil war. Not one dominated by events that transpired east of the Mississippi River and especially east of the appalachians in the Eastern Theater between 1861 and 1865. All of of this is wonderful news for the field of Civil War History and it means that theres something for people to do as we go forward. If there werent, we would just have one book. If youre interested in the civil war, youd buy the civil war book and read it and then many people would be out of jobs. Everyone who has spoken to you today, for example. [laughter] gary out of of this welter of writings, old and new, i believe its possible to identify what i will term four foundational elements of the real war. To continue with whitmans phrasing, if not his narrow meaning regarding common soldiers. These foundational elements stand out, i believe, clearly in the historical evidence and should be apparent to us as they were to the people who experienced and wrote about the war. Familiarity with them provides an excellent starting point for anyone seeking to understand the era of the civil war. This isnt all you need to know about the civil war but if americans would grasp these four things about the civil war, i think theyd be at a very nice starting place to have some sense of what went on in the mid 19th century and ill start with number one, is im going to talk about four. Lets start with number one. The first thing everybody should understand is that the real war erupted over slaveryrelated political issues between the north and the south and retained that internal focus from the firing on fort sumter in april 1861 to the confederate surrenders in april and may 1865. I cant give a talk on any subject relating to the civil war anywhere in the United States at any time without someone raising i might be talking about whatever and one of the first questions is its usually a statement the civil war wasnt really about slavery and what do you think about something else. If you take slavery out of the picture, slaveryrelated issues out of the picture, we wouldnt be here today. There would be no civil war. There would by in secession, there would be no fort sumter, there would be no three million men under arms on, and on. And once we accept that we can move forward and accept other things we need to know about the civil war but if you airbrush slavery out of the picture, there is no civil war, period. And why do we think that . Everybody at the time knew it. In his second inaugural address, lincoln said everybody north and south knew that somehow the institution of slavery is what brought us where we are right now. Somehow everybody knew it mainly because it was so stunningly obvious to everyone that you would have had to be a 20 watt bulb not to be able to figure out what was going on. Now, im not saying that the world didnt watch what was going on in north america. When i say its internal were working out internal issues during the civil war. The civil war isnt about the world although the world pays attention to whats going on here and americans both north and south certainly were aware that the war might have potential effects throughout the rest of the world especially in the transatlantic world but the conflict was preeminently an american war that would decide the fate of the republic bequeathed by the founding generation and what that republic would look like Going Forward. What was it going to be like Going Forward . A much diminished republic because the confederacy succeeded and established its independence which it certainly could have done. The idea that it was a hopeless fight from the beginning is a postwar construction. Of course the confederates could have won the war. Of course they could. They didnt go to the war knowing they were going to lose. Hey, ive got a good idea. Lets fight a war and lose 30 of our military aged white men just to make a point to the yankees. No, thats not whats going on in the states. And i dont have time to talk about that so im just going to move on. And im moving on right now. Whats at stake is what is going to happen to this republic that the American Revolution that made possible. People in the United States, north and south, were consumed with thoughts about the American Revolution. Everybody wanted to be right with the founders. Everybody wanted jorge on their side. Hes the big guy. The confederates put him on their great seal. Everybody in the United States is all over jorge. Who gets him . We all want him. The question is, whats the republic going to look like coming out of this . It is an internal fight. A reporter covering the grand review in washington in late may, 1865, put it this way. He said, not he, she. Her name was adams. She said the marching soldiers are citizens who know the value of their country and their government. They saw the danger menacing, they made heroes of themselves, they have averted the danger, have given a progressive interpretation to the old constitution and are now quietly disbanding to go home and be citizens again. That gets not only what the war is about but it gets at something americans dont understand now. This is not on my list but it should be. We dont understand what the concept of citizen soldier meant in the mid 19th century. This is a republic, it. We dont have a huge regular army. We dont have a huge regular Standing Military force. In a crisis, citizens put on uniforms, pick up arms and go do their duty. That is what happens. And jorge is the man there, too. Hes the the perfect example. General and chief of all the colonial armies. He takes his uniform off and goes home and gives up power. Thats what you do in a republic. Hes not cromwell. Hes not caesar. And that is the model. Citizen soldiers meant everything. A republican broadside from the election of 1864 touched on similar themes. It said the war would decide whether the nation lives or dies at the hands ofetrators. Hands of traitors. If the union or government is not maintained, the nation is disgraced before the civilized world. Thats how they viewed it on the union side. The greatest longterm impact of the war showed dramatically, the question is, is the nation going to be what it was or will there be a couple of nations. The greatest longterm impact showed dramatically in the 20th century when the United States, by then a great economic and military power made possible by Union Victory during the war, wielded unmatched influence on the world stage. Its interesting to contemplate what world war 2 would have looked like if there hadnt been an american classus in north america. My second foundational framing element is that conventional armies decided the wars outcome. Heres where many will roll their eyes and think i live in bruce catten world and i want to follow the armies around and i dont want to appreciate other elements of the war but i actually think if you dont understand the importance of the conventional armies and that they decided the wars outcome, you cant understand the civil war. They waged some of the most famous and costly campaigns in American History. We all know that. But operations carried out by the principal armies on each side, that is in the western theater on the union side, you have the awrms of the cumberland and of the ohio and of the tennessee and the Confederate Army of tennessee and here in the Eastern Theater you have the army of the potomac and the army of Northern Virginia those are the armies that shaped the political ebb and flow in both nations. These are two democratic republics at war. Politics matter and what the armies are doing profoundly affected politics. They lifted or depressed civilian morale and in the end proved decisive. Abraham lincoln touched on this. Ill quote his second inaugural address when he invited the audience to join him in gratitude for what the United States armies had accomplished. The progress of our arms upon which all else chiefly depends he said and he knew the people in the audience understood what he was saying, is as well known to the public as to myself, he said, and it is i trust reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all but the key clause is upon which all else chiefly depends. Decisions on the battlefield powerfully affected virtually every other aspect of the conflict and ill give just two examples and ill use a richmond one since here we are. In july 1862 george b. Mccullinsinexplicable retreat after his victory had enormous consequences regarding the issue of emancipation. As mccullen hunkered down along the james river below richmond, lincoln decided it would take a harder war to defeat the rebels. In december 1861, the president expressed a wish the war could be won without degenerating into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle. After the seven days, he moved closer to abolitionists and radical republicans who demanded seizure of slaves and other property belonging to rebels, a revolutionary step by any definition. On july 22, lincoln informed his cabinet that he intended to issue a proclamation of emancipation july 22, 21 days after mcclulin retreated following his victory. Aneat itum isnt the key battle regarding the emancipation proclamation. Thats not the key battle. Its the seven days. Thats the battle that pushed lincoln to make the decision. Anttum is just the occasion to make it public. The seven days is the key battle. And five days before, congress put the finishing touches on the act. Radical republican senator Charles Sumner tied passage of that act passed on july 17 to Union Failure in the seven Days Campaign and ill quote him. The bill of confiscation and liberation which was at last passed under pressure from our reverses at richmond he wrote this august 1862, is a practical act of emancipation. The seven days, what happens with those two armies on a great battlefield, have seismic consequences in terms of pushing the United States more in the direction of emancipation. My second example is the election of 1864 which brought overwhelming republican success, as you know, and guaranteed that emancipation would remain on the table. We all know the democrats won in november 1864. Nobody would have emancipation was dead if the democrats would have taken over. And the depth of that inconceivably bloody summer of 1864, it seemed likely that the democrats would gain control of government in the november elections. Lincoln certainly thought so. You know about his famous blind memorandum which he had members of his cabinet sign on august 23 and this is what lincoln wrote in that memorandum, quote, this morning as for some days past it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the president elect as to save the union between the election and the inauguration as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards. We dont win, were not sure were going to push this war on through is what lincoln said. He didnt think they were going to win. What happened . Between august 23 when me had his cabinet sign that, over the next two months, Public Opinion in the loyal states shifted from deep gloom to optimism about prospects for defeating the rebels and heres what happened. William Tecumseh Sherman captured atlanta at the gij of september and phillip h. Sheridan won at the Shenandoah Valley at third winchester and at fishers hill and cedars creek, october 19, and those two sets of victories gave republicans a smashing victory in the november elections. Before moving on from military affairs im going to add that my comments about conventional armies and why we need to recognize this doesnt mean that guerrilla warfare was unimportant. I would never say that. It is important. Vicious guerrilla activity developed in many parts of the confederacy and in especially missouri and kentucky among the loyal slave Holding States and it created vast misery for civilians. Bedeviled political leaders and produced longlasting bitterness. You cant explain the vicious little thugs like the james boys after the war and what they did without some understanding of what went on during the war. A lot of the famous, the hollywood famous desperadoes after the war cut their teeth with some of the most famous of the confederate guerrilla bands that operated in that part of the war during the war but guerrillas who probably constituted between 2 and 3 of all the men under arms, operated on the margins both geographically and in terms of their influence on the broader course of the war. Theyre there. Theyre doing things. We should understand them, but theyre not driving the bus. Theyre around. We need to be aware of them. Third thing that we should understand is that the civil war ended in the late spring of 1865. Clear indications of this fact include the surrender of all Confederate Military forces, the dismantling of the confederate state, the restoration of the union and the destruction of slavery. Quickly followed by the rapid demobilization of a million citizen soldiers who were under arms in may 1865. The largest army in the world, in the western world, in may of 1865, was the United States army, in place at the moment of victory. These are huge outcomes that underscore the unequivocal termination of a war that had the verdict of the battlefield been otherwise would have established a second powerful republic, an overtly Slave Holding Republic in north america. For the mass of loyal citizens in the United States, the war, first to last, was about restoring the union. We wish it were otherwise. We wish that Union Emancipation were equal goals by the end of the war. They werent. For the massive white northerners and the northern states in 1860, 98. 8 white. 98. 8. African americans lived in the slave Holding States in 1860. For most white people, it is a war for union in 1861 and its a union for 1865. Most of them embrace, even Many Democrats embraced emancipation before the end of the war but as a tool to help achieve their larger goal of union rather than as a great moral imperative that they should have embraced, we would have had them embrace on their own. I often have people come up, students, read something about Abraham Lincoln and they say i think Abraham Lincoln was a racist and i say, sit down, take a sip. Everybody in the mid 19th century was a racist by our terms. Start with that as your baseline and now lets talk about Something Interesting and you wont have to be surprised all the time. I think im not going to say that part. I was going to but im not going to. I dont think that most people at the end of the war, most loyal citizens who are overwhelmingly white in the loyal states, even if you throw in the loyal border states, its 95. 5 white, they didnt believe their check list was completed. Union, check, we saved it. Emancipation, check. That means that wont be a threat to union Going Forward. They do not have a third thing on their list. Third thing, equal rights for African Americans, for the freed people. That is not on their list at the end of the war. The other two are on, check, check, its over, send the boys home is their attitude at the end of the war and nobody wanted to go home more than the boys. They also thought that they had finished everything they needed to do. I will quote a member of the 77th illinois infantry, william wily who had been in since august 1962, in the deep south most of the time. They were mustered out in mobile july 10, 1865, and on that day he wrote this in his diary. This was a day that we have long looked forward to when we could feel that our work for which we enlisted to do was done. And ill quote one other person, an officer who addressed his soldiers. This is a little bit later in the summer, theyre getting to go home. And he said, comrades, hes speaking to them in atlanta. Comrades, the war is ended. Your career as soldiers is over. You go home as citizens, citizen soldier concept again, to reap the reward of your campaigns. I rejoice with you that our country is intact and united, our government stronger than ever and that the necessity for our Armed Service no longer exists. Seems to me he thinks the war is over. William wily certainly did. This notion of citizen soldiers, let me double back a little bit. This is why black military service was so important. What is the most Important Service that a white male can render to the nation in a democratic republic military service in time of crisis. The black men who put on uniforms thus staked exactly the same claim to citizenship as the white soldiers staked by doing the same thing. Thats why lincoln and others said, you need to give the vote at least to black veterans, at least to black veterans. You cant ask them to risk their lives for the republic and then tell them they cant vote at the end of the war. 80 of the men who were in uniform in may 1865 were home by that november. 80 . And one year after that there were 11,000 left of the more than one million citizen soldiers who had been under arms. Its a very fast demobilization and that tells me that they thought the war was over. And theyre moving into another phase. Confederates accepted the reality of their defeat, as well, in may 1865. Theyre not happy about it. Theyre bitter about it. They accept it reluctantly but they abandoned at least as a realistic project any largescale resort to arms to protect their slave holding society. Thats over. Four years showed that is not going to happen. Ill quote one North Carolina woman who put it this way in the wake of appomattox. The vulgar yankee nation exults over our misfortunes, places its foot upon our necks and extolls its prowess in conquering us. They have their ability to enforce their detested oath among with every man amongst us. Robert garlic hill, confederate bureau of war, wrote in his diary the abolition of slavery immediately and by military order is the most marked feature of this conquest of the south. He said, man you mission after this fashion will be regarded here after when it has borne its fruits and the passions of the hour has passed away as the greatest social crime ever committed on earth. I think hes pretty invested but he said United States power is such that former confederates knew it was over. He said i found virginia submitting to a military government, population generally taking the amnesty oath and all idea of further resistance abandoned. Having made a case for the wars ending before the summer of 1865, i have to add that im not saying that it isnt important to place the war within a spacious 19th century context. Of course it is. It didnt happen in isolation. Its connected to things that came before and it shapes things that come after, shapes them powerfully but you can shape things coming later and you can grow out of things coming before but there still is actually a war and it begins at a certain point and i argue that it ends in may or early june 1865. Anybody trying to grasp the centrality of the war to the larger story of American History you have to engage with much more than that. Then you have to engage with everything before and after and all of its longterm racial and constitutional, social and commemorative effects. Youre at ground zero for commemorative effects here at richmond. You have more of the confederate landscape here than anywhere else in the United States. Many of the profound questions with which the civil war grappled remain present in some form. We still talk about a lot of the same things. Relative power of Central Government and states. What can states do what, can Central Government do the. They would say order of biracial society, we would say Multiracial Society that is equitable to everybody and so forth. The last of the four things americans should know is that 12 years of reconstruction functioned as a long coda to the war itself centered on a clear central issue, how 10 former Confederate States would return to the reconstituted union. Tennessee is exempted for the most part from reconstruction. And how that process would affect freed people in terms of their Political Rights and in terms of the questions of social and legal equality. And those are inextricably tied together. How the former Confederate States get back into the union and what happens in terms of how do you deal with four million newly freed people, citizens, residents in the United States. Reunion played out as a tortious process that lasted three times as long as the war did, marked by widespread violence and determined effort by exconfederates on political and social fronts to establish white supremacy. They couldnt reinstitute slavery but settled on a watereddown version of what slavery provided, a social structure in which white people exerted legal and social and economic control over millions of African Americans. The jim crow era should be viewed as the most obvious expression of the confederate generations response to a war that ended in utter defeat and destruction of their slavery based social system. I think anyone who grasps these four things about the civil war has a good start toward gaining a general understanding of the real war, what i would call the real war, when a lot of this has been in the books for a long time. We add to it. We understand more about it. But you could get the outlines of this for a long time and ill just reiterate. Im not suggesting these are the only four large framing elements that anyone should be aware of. Im out of time. I cant go on and on. I can but i wont. [laughter] gary but i have to add as my own coda to this. Theres one other thing that i hope everyone will understand about the American Civil War and that is, and jack talked about this and john talked about this. I think weve all talked about it in one way or another. Is that however complicated you think some part of the civil war was, it was far more complicated than that. I have been at this not nearly as long as jack. [laughter] gary who really is the best looking 92yearold i know. The one thing in my many decades now of studying the bare bones roster of thingsk about the civil war. nrin a few quiet moments, maybe with the help of a niceco nrglas of mer ot, or nq imagine eager students inco]in h schools across the United States really diggin nr into these things that iveninrni tad about today andxd niarguing abot them and tryingnini to come to nininithose momits are rare. nicwiandni they never linger. 3p onimaybe i should just settlr centurynrnrco the civil war took nnrxd or being happy if theynicr understand that not a singlenrco time did george washingtonnrnrfp implore his fellow citizens to emulate the example ofco coabram lincoln. Xdninrfanifaxd pnrnrnrcoco[appt clock is right. T coxdnicoconinr we do have 1 maybe a few more. Im sure there are nrquestions and we cant go ont nixdxdok7wn and we cantedo ont nixdxdok7wn ell nr nri r. Tend to say things that i get fo. And so i decided not to qay some things i wanted tonr say. Timeh imixdcow3d time. I spent too much time talking about jack davis here to get to some of my important points. Its his fault. I was going to talk aboutnrnrcon terms of complexity nini fah deal with the commonni soldier jp p h about a typical common soldier. I spoke with suzanna before she left. We want to know whatsninrni the typical common soldier experience. owell, there isnt a typical common soldier experience. Weve had a lo 1 of combat and discussions about how combat, w3nrof course, leftl kinds ofi]ni nmarks on civil r soldiersniconr as would be truen place. obut we cant theres not a universal template for common soldiers. Tmnicothere were 600 union regs that nrlpniniq no co war. Potomac, just the second corps, had 35 of the 100ninit nininifan regiments that suffered the q more than a third of them are in the second corps in the army of ahe potomac. Suzanna mentioned the texas om brigade today. M of getting shot. 3 c1 dying of diseasenr which she sad is the opposite of the usual 2 . 9 nisameni thing is true of the ih brigade. Faniniconinrwe know ihe name is gallagherd eqv c h might will put blue paint on ] goal. conit youni get a chance at that anttum and pretty sooncoco there arent any left and theco brigae is tiny. ;p ninininrnrs7thereti not a e for soldiers andninre1t nrn9thf thenr complexity. Students want, which way is it . U v a simple dichotomy. Thing is to open up with questions and that meant anything like, what do you think about sociology as a study, or what did you think of the game, or whatnot. Anything . First question, was just to get your thoughts on uva sports 2019. No, no. Where are not and glass. This is actually a civil war related event and cspan is here. Second question dont hold your breath, theyre not going to repeat. You talked a lot in class, and you talked a lot today about history and memory, and id love for you to expand on that in this team. Thats one of the hardest things, and thats number six of things i want people to understand. Understand the difference between history and memory. They are certainly related. One comes first. This is another thing were chronology matters. Something happens, then you remember it and you often remember it in different ways and people remembered the civil war in different ways. Former confederates, freed people, white northerners. There were different memories of the civil war so you have to be able to juxtapose to the best you can a reconstruction of what happened with how different groups of people remembered and explained what happened. And the memories often trump what actually happened because we behave according to what we think is the story of what happened and we get that from various places in popular culture, from relatives, i dont know if it happened in your class. It happened in almost every other class. I would say something, someone came up after class and said i really liked your lecture but youre wrong because my uncle who knows everything about the civil war, i told him what you said last time and he said he cant believe you have a teaching job and he wanted me to tell you that youre completely wrong about that but i really like your class but youre completely wrong about that because my uncle knows everything. Well, you hear things from your uncle. You watch gone with the wind. Gone with the wind has more to do with shaping how americans understand the civil war than every book written by everybody such as myself for the last 70 years. Its just true. We have to accept that, whether or not we like it its true and because ted turner loves it, its on all the time. Its the gift that keeps on giving. Hollywood has a real influence on people watched gods and generals and people watched matthew mcconaughey. People complain but how awful his commercials are. Theyre not nearly as awful has his movies about the civil war. I thought, this has gone on 12 years and he hasnt washed his hair yet, how could this be possible and all the women are falling for him . That didnt ring true to me. I thought even in jones county mississippi, he would have washed his hair over the course of 12 years. Some things are yes . You talked about jim crow and i have been reading theres no such person as jim crow. Where did that name come from . How did it get associated with that period and it seemed to apply to the south as well as areas to the north. Gary it comes out of the min minstrel tradition and jim crow is in parts of the north, not just the south. Some have argued there are instances of jim crow legislation earlier in northern states than former slave Holding States but the heart of the jim crow is in the former slave Holding States and remained in place into most of our lifetimes. Not your lifetime but most of our lifetimes. I drove from colorado, i was born in l. A. But grew up in colorado. My mother and grandmother and i drove east to see Civil War Battlefields when i was 14 and in the summer of 1965 and that was my first exposure to sort of the remnants of jim crow at that point. It was getting very late in jim crow but it was still, i saw a couple of fountains, white fountains, colored fountains. I had never seen that in colorado and im not saying colorado gets off the hook, im just saying i hadnt seen it there. So it stretches well into the second half of the 20th century but its in place lie the late 19th. inaudible its all tied together. Reconstruction is partly working out a system whereby the white south will be allowed to order its own society to the degree possible without interference from washington, d. C. Ok, weve given up on being a separate nation. Were not going to do that anymore. You leave us alone in this way and we will just concede that were not going to be as powerful in national politics, president ial politics, as we used to be. When you look at who the early president s are, four of the first five are from virginia and then you have jackson and then you have taylor. Its overwhelmingly either slaveholders or members of the Democratic Party who were what would be called dough faces, northern men of southern principles. Whens the next southern president of the United States after the civil war . Woodrow wilson is sort of a southerner in a lot of ways but its a long time before the south southern power in Congress Comes to reside in sending people to congress, keeping them in congress and they chair powerful committees for a long time. Sam rayburn running the house, Lyndon Johnson running the senate in the 1950s. Theres real power there but not like it was before the civil war. I was curious, are there any books of yours that jack might recommend . Gary you mean jack davis . Yeah. Gary i dont know. Wed have to find somebody to read them to him probably. [applause] [laughter] gary i will plead guilty. I have a whole shelf of jack davis books in my library, honestly and truly i do and ive actually read most of them. I havent read all of jacks books because hes prolific beyond belief. Jacks a wonderful historian and you know that i think that but i dont know that hes read any of mine. I think it was back in the 1990s you published a couple of lists of the top 100 civil war books. Gary i did. Now, 20some years later, how different, with all the new scholarship coming out. Gary i published two lists of 100 titles each in maybe 1990 and 1991 that if youre interested in the civil war and looking for something to read and put them in categories. I actually had an occasion to go back about three weeks ago and look at those lists and some of the classic firsthand accounts would, of course, remain on those lists but other than that, it would be carnage on those lists, it really would. Theyd be very, very different and i would have new categories. Categories that in 1990 didnt even really exist in terms of how the literature has unfolded. Its an incredibly rich it is an incredibly rich field. Incredibly rich. This is the sign that its over. Thank you very much. I was a wonderful way to end the day. I want to thank my colleagues and all of you for coming out for the program. And to cspan. You will be able to see it on television as often as you want, i think, and you all, be safe getting home. We look forward to seeing you next year and at many events before that. Thank you again. [applause] our next speaker tamika nunley, is assistant professor of history in American Comparative studies at oberlin
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