I am going to mention five books that i think are especially pertinent to what we will be doing this afternoon. The first is called Abraham Lincoln, redeemer president. It was published in 1998. It is the first of his lincoln books. The emancipation proclamation the end of slavery and america published by simon and schuster. That brought him his second lincoln prize. Lincoln and douglas the debate that defined america. For some reason that did not win the lincoln prize. A new history of the civil war and reconstruction came out in 2012. The fifth title i will mention is called gettysburg, the last invasion which brought a third lincoln prize to alan. The only person who has won three. He is currently working on a biography of robert e. Lee. That will be published and it will be one of the things we will get to today. We are going to talk about his work on the field of civil war era studies. I want to begin with a question relating to the opportunities for people in our field to try and reach a broader audience. He has done courses for the Teaching Company the great courses company. I would like your thoughts about if this is something we should strive to, how effective do you think it is, and what are the yield for this . Allen first of all, let me thank you for the option to be be here. Portunity to especially to will kurtz and everyone here. To everyone who has just made my visit here for the past several days such exceedingly pleasant. Gary you have snuck in some research . Allen indeed. I have been in the reach of many manuscripts, diaries and whatnot. Looking at what people are writing and thinking and saying. With those Tumultuous Times of 150 years ago. I am particular glad to be here on this very very significant and special day. One of the greatest days in American History. I noticed people are starting to look at each other and this is the fourth of july. It is september 22. Gary we did this on purpose. Allen it is the anniversary of the emancipation proclamation. Writing about that back in 2012 for the wall street journal a got me some unusual responses. I got a death threat. That does not often happen to people writing and the wall street journal. I imagine i did succeed in injuring somebodys sensibilities writing about it. In a way it testifies to the fact gary did you say it was a good thing . Allen i did, that upset somebody. I think what it does speak to that there is a large audience trying to understand history. How do we identify as americans . We dont identify ourselves or shouldnt on the basis of a language or on ethnicity, a established religion, of race or anything. What identifies us as americans . Fundamentally lincoln nailed that in the gettysburg address. What identifies us is a proposition. That all men are created equal. The history of how we have unfolded and live with that proposition is really the most important aspect of our identity. When we write about our history we are not doing it for a granite is some read agrarianism. We are looking at a referendum on that proposition. I regard what i have done in the popular press fully as much as the academic respirator, that is two sides of the same coin. How do we explain ourselves to ourselves . That should draw in much more than a academic audience. That is what touches all of us and that is what identifies all of us. If i am writing, for instance, for the journal of the early republic or for Civil War History or if i am ready for the writing for the wall street journal or if i am ready for the washington post. I really regard those as being part of a overall and ever. Endeavor. It is a constant reminder of ourselves of who we are. And what we are dedicated to. That is something that involves more than academics and college students. It really is something that embraces all of us. Especially for historians like ourselves to be able to speak to everybody. We identity as americans. We are speaking professionally but speaking as citizens. There is one and only one identifier of a american. That is that you are a citizen. To be a citizen of the American Republic is in my book the greatest privilege on earth. Gary so many issues of the civil war continue to resonate. We can see echoes of them in our daytoday life. Including responses to some of the current president talking about when president obama was in office. You do not have to look very far. With current american politics to find echoes of the civil war era. Allen sometimes it is more than echoes. There is a oped in the san bee yesterday in which the lead, california is a 21st century state which is mired in a 19thcentury country. Therefore it should separate itself. That is a way of saying california is a entirely different culture from the United States. I thought that is exactly what they were saying in South Carolina in december of 1860. Gary some people are really trying to emulate South Carolina. Allen perhaps shortterm, longterm and did not work out well for South Carolina. It does come back to the fact that it was so often a question that we think are so uniquely modern really have these replication of the rhetoric of 150 years ago. Gary there is almost nothing new, i think. We dont really know anything. Allen these have become the fundamental questions posed by the american experiment. We really are all about the business of debating that fundamental proposition. In a sense it is not a total surprise that the rhetoric and assumptions you hear people strike today will find uncanny and unnerving echoes by those 150 years ago. For the history and what we have to do is signal, this is what the relationships are. Be careful what you wish for. Whether it is the Sacramento Bee or the charleston mercury. Gary when you write the right do you write specifically with more than one audience in mind . Obviously you are reviewed and scholarly journals but do you have one or the other of those audiences more and mind where you not even think about that . Allen i cant say i really think about that. Sometimes i am asked, what kind of school do you have with writing and how do you go about the writing . I can only shrug my shoulders. I never had a writing class. I never had anyone instruct me. I have no better explanation than to simply say i want to explain something to people. I want to communicate with people. I look for ways to do that. I dont really have a better explanation. Gary you have certainly read a lot of good writing. Allen i certainly did. I think i am very good at imitating. It is nothing in my mind that is more complicated than that. Gary i will try to make you more complicated. Did you wake up one morning and say poor lincoln, he just hasnt gotten enough attention from writers. Id better write about him . You wrote about Jonathan Edwards in your dissertation and your early work. How did you get from Jonathan Edwards and religion to Abraham Lincoln . Allen it is a little unusual. Not more unusual than lets say a chest game. A chess game. There are a few strange modes that have to be made. Not too many. I wrote my dissertation on Jonathan Edwards with the determination of free will on 18th central moral philosophy. Gary that is a title made for white public consumption. [laughter] allen they actually did do a second edition. Gary the one with Matthew Mcconaughey really resonated. Allen and the one with nick nolte was george whitfield. I wrote the dissertation which was published by wesley and university press. The problem with free will seems to be really perennial, maybe not the thing you stay up reading about. It had been perennial. I plan to write a followup volume. Bring things to the modern philosophy. As i was working on this project, this was in the mid90s, i knew that Abraham Lincoln had something to say about the subject of free will and fatalism. I had some familiarity with lincolns corpus. I thought it would jazz it up. There is this book of philosophy and to be able to inject Abraham Lincoln would really put some fizz in it. I ended up writing a paper on lincoln and determinism and what he called his doctrine of necessity. He told people he was a fatalist. I wrote that paper read that paper for the Abraham Lincoln association. To my surprise it was wellreceived. A book publisher got in touch with me, would i be interested in writing a biography for Abraham Lincoln . I said no because i had seen a number of writers get swallowed up in a swamp of that subject. The publisher got back in touch sometime later. When i do this biography of lincoln . I said no. Finally a friend of the publisher called me and said look, if you do not do this book they are going to give it to professor so and so. Gary someone you knew . Allen the hand hit the forehead. I got back in charge touch with the editor in chief. Let me do it as a intellectual biography, not just about religion but all of the other intellectual influences. I did not treat him as a political figure but lincoln and the context of the ideas of the 19th century. Having got my hands on the cookie jar so to speak, i really could not get it out. One lincoln book became another book, so on and so forth. You have already gone down the list. I have never actually got back to writing that free will 2. 0. Gary you think there are more elements to lincoln . He has not been a sauce. Exhausted. Allen i think that is entirely true. He was a very complex and complicated individual. People underestimate lincoln because they say he is just the 16th president , just the civil war president. He is just a politician or a lawyer. People in his own time knew and said about them that lincoln was a shut mouthed man. Another who practiced law with him on the circuit for many years that anyone who took Abraham Lincoln for a simpleminded man would wake up with his back in a ditch. I think that may be one of the truest things ever said about him. He was a man of very meager education, extraordinary intellectual curiosity. He would delve into anything. Secretary, in his diary in 1863 he recorded a incident in which haye said the tycoon had a discussion about the elegy, he has unsuspected thebout philology for which t has an unsuspected interests. You think, oh lets look that up. It is the study of language. Lincoln had intellectual in so many different directions, he was not a intellectual. He had curiosities. He liked to pursue them. He once said towards the end of his life that he did with a journal. He was asked what were the most influential books in your life. His reply was very peculiar. He said, butlers analogy, me Bishop Joseph analogy of religion from 1785. As well as john stuart mill, on liberty. Which today still functions as a major text for people thinking about free speech, about libertarian political philosophy. He then added i always wanted to get president edwards, on the will. Gary that spoke to you . Allen it did great. Here is a man who does not simply read the newspapers and do a crossword puzzle. It is a man who has ambition to penetrate some very serious intellectual questions. It is part of lincoln that we miss because we are so impressed with the folksy political act, slapper, shrewd, wire puller. That is what we are most similar with. We do not often see what his closest friends had a peek into. Gary how do you explain his facility with language. We can talk about this with his ability to deal with complicated issues and render them in language that can store or make a point soar or make a point in no way that anyone was able to do. How do you get to the second inaugural with someones background and his education . John stuart mill did not teach him how to do that. Allen no. One thing that would shape d lincoln was being a communicator. In this case he was a trial lawyer. He spends virtually all of his professional life as a lawyer trying courses in county courthouses all across the middle of the state of illinois. He enjoys being in the courtroom. He enjoys being in the state in the front of a jury. This is a jury he has to persuade. In these Little County courthouses a jury would often be summoned by bystanders. You could have almost anyone standing in a jury box. You had to be able to communicate with them and you had to do it fast. If you cannot make yourself clear and make a clear case of things then you were not going to be a functioning and profitable lawyer for very long. He had to learn how to communicate directly with people. His partner of many years once said that was his very real passion. How to make something Crystal Clear to people. He said that lincoln would tie himself up in knots in the office and sit there concentrated how to get a idea easily understood. He was so effective at this certainly on one occasion in his Opening Statement the judge interrupted him saying thank you. Well never from the other side. He made a case so clearly he had not finished his Opening Statement and the court made it seem like he had one. He made it possible to open up the idea and have these wonderfully clear laboratory terms. I think a lot of this comes out of his expenses as a trial lawyer. He put himself to the discipline of logical expression. It was once said by somebody in their autobiography who had listened to the Lincoln Douglas debates. If you listen to them for five minutes you would always take the side of stephen a douglas because he was about passion and about stamping his feet. If you listen to them for half an hour you would be taken by lincoln. Even though he spoke in this high nasal tone of voice, he always a things out like a bait on a hook. If he got that hurricane nora heook in your mouth, all needed to do afterwards was really been was reel it in. He would state the case that it was absolutely irresistible. He had that kind of logic. He was not a man of emotion. A friend once said his head ruled his heart to radically. He was not a man of emotional appeal. He was eloquent in a extremely reasonable way. When you look at the second inaugural it is eloquent but it is eloquent and very logical ways. If we assume, if we understand, if god is like this, if we see this war as the payment, the drawing of blood through the sword, to pay for the bondmans unrequited 250 years of labor, for every drop of blood drawn by the lash. That is logic. You really cannot resist at the end because he has you. Gary it is logic but it is also a daring move on his part. That is not what most of the wanted to hear. How many people would be willing to do that, that is a remarkable speech on many levels. They want to hear that there will be retribution and god is on our side and he will chastise the rebels. They are responsible for everything. He never said that. Allen the great your political operator wrote to lincoln to complement him. Lincoln thanked him for the compliment but he wrote back and said i dont think people are eager to have heard what i have to say. No one likes to be told that god has a controversy with them. But, it was something i thought needed to be said and i was the one who had to say it. Gary it is a remarkable speech on many levels. If you put it alongside the emancipation proclamation, you could not have i think a stronger contrast between this language, this incredibly powerful and which at the second inaugural, and what some people compare to a bill of lading, the emancipation proclamation. Allen but they are two different documents. Gary i know that. Allen [laughter] gary the proclamation has been interpreted by many scholars as not doing what it should do, others saying it is everything. What is your shorthand take on the importance and place of the emancipation proclamation in the much broader story of the process of emancipation . Allen i think it was the single most family effective profoundly effective president ial document ever written. I think that is largely because gary so you think it is important. Allen i would say so. At least moderately. The language of the emancipation proclamation disappoints people, that is why Richard Hofstadter made his quip, the emancipation proclamation having all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading. That made my antenna quiver. A bill of lading is not unimportant if you are involved in commerce. But lets go with the flow. What is the emancipation proclamation . Is it a rhetorical Statement Like the gettysburg address . No. The gettysburg address is marvelous, beautiful prose. But you cannot take it into a court of law and do anything with it, can you . When a trooper told you over on the interstate, dont try reciting the gettysburg address, the trooper is only interested in the statue. The emancipation proclamation is about the statute. It is a legal document. It has to be carefully honed and crafted so that it survives the challenge of the courts, and lincoln knew this. President s are, after all, only president s. And lincoln was keenly aware of the fact that as the president of the United States, he did not have a strictly speaking, the authority to emancipate anybody, at least not under normal circumstances. The war changed the circumstances. As commanderinchief, he may have powers that in times of his he would not have. Lets explore that. In time of war, there are more powers. His emancipation one of those powers . We dont know, lets find out. Who is going to be the arbiter . The federal courts. If lincoln, so to speak, talks off and throws open window and yelled down pennsylvania avenue, free the first thing that is going to happen is slave owners will flock to county courthouses and ask for injunctions and they will get them. There will be appeals, they will go through the courts and they will wind up with the United StatesSupreme Court. Who is the chief justice . In 1862 . Tomey. He has shown himself to be a friend of emancipation over the years, hasnt he . [laughter] allen if lincoln makes one slip in crafting and emancipation proclamation, that would be raw meat. He must craft and emancipation proclamation which treads very carefully about who is free and who is not. That is why there are these exceptions, why the emancipation proclamation does not apply to