We come to gettysburg every november to commemorate the life and legacy of abraham lincoln. Our first speaker this morning is peter carmichael. Peter is the professor of civil war studies and director of the Civil War Institute at gettysburg college. I have seen some cwi hats around, wonderful to see them. He has a phd in history from penn state university, where he had the good fortune to study under gary gallagher. He is the author or editor of five books, including last generation Young Virginians in peace, war, and reunion, published in 2005. He is also one of the series editors for a civil war series, and i know him best in this capacity. He was my editor and i can tell you his thoughtfulness, careful attention to detail and generosity with sources made my book a better book. Today, he will tell us about his most recent book, the war for the common soldier, which was released in 2018 as part of the prestigious littlefield series with unc press. A review recently concluded, it is a poignant book, full of pathos, which bears out carmichaels themes and illuminates the mental struggle and coping mechanisms of civil war combatants. It will prove a valuable work for anyone concerned with the lived experience of the civil war soldier. Please join me in welcoming peter carmichael. [applause] peter good morning. Crowd good morning. Peter every time his thoughts drifted to past battles, charless hand started to tremble. He had passed through the ordeal of the Overland Campaign with his comrades of the one 47th new york, and even though he could not shake the dark memories of what he had seen and done, he looked back on the battles in the wilderness of spotsylvania with a sense of pride. That was a place where he had earned his badge of manhood. Something that had eluded him before the war. He had believed people hadnt had a high regard for him, including his family. He once wrote to his wife, he thought of himself as the black sheep. It appears that was largely because he had struggles with alcohol. In the summer of 1863, he was drafted into the army of the potomac. His first day in the army, he hopped off the train, was given a blanket, ordered to sleep on the ground, and woke up the next morning, wrote a letter to his wife, explained to her he needed to get out of this fix. [laughter] peter arriving with the rest of the army of the potomac outside culpeper that fall, his situation did not improve. His frustrations boiled over in december when he wrote to his wife let the force be with me, technology is not my friend. He wrote, cursed be the date so my name is a conscript and down to be the hour i came as a draftee. I think sometimes if it were not for you and my children, i would blow out my brain scared dam the south, damn the war. He loathed his officers and was incredibly blunt. He told his wife, any damned fool can be an officer. I am pretty certain he considers himself to be nonpartisan. He told his wife that he was no freedom shrieker, no abolitionist, and no union saver. In fact, the title of the book, edited by katie aldrich. She purchased a house in monroe county, new york. She was going through the antic of the house and discovered a box stuffed with letters and it was charlies letters. Her profession is a ultra marathoner. She came to this without any professional experience and did a remarkable job. It is a fantastic set of letters. Esther, charless wife, she knew that any letter would not be a boring read. He was not going to write about rations, the weather or his bowel movements. His letters spared no one. Lincoln was a favorite target. Old abe will have to make peace, he wrote, for the army is getting sick of such work. I think abraham has gashed his political throat until there is no use trying to save his life. The army will vote against him 41, and by the time he forces 400,000 more in the army, his death and damnation will be accomplished beyond salvation. A little more than two months after he wrote this letter, he became a political chameleon. There is no mental policy left for us, he wrote, we have but one chance to choose. Of lincoln and the universal rights of man, let it cost of blood and treasure what it made to maintain them. Or mcclellan and another compromise with the devil by which man is degraded and brought a little near to the devil and everything. If lincoln is elected today, the war with johnny reb is but childs play, for they will see that there is a spirit in the freemen of the north that will not be defeated, a spirit that is bound to win. Now, his words would suggest that he had become a diehard republican and supporter of abe lincoln. It is reasonable to assume that in casting his ballot for abe, he came to support the hard work policies of the republican, including emancipation. Many historians would point to him and suggest that he became a republican even after the war. I know little about his life after the war except that he continued to struggle with alcoholism. I can tell you that after his boat for lincoln, he still believed that emancipation and the employment of black troops was not the best course of action. The person who reminds us to look at the soldier in 1864 was caution is none other than jonathan white. He makes the point that a democratic soldier who voted for lincoln should not be interpreted as a conversion to the republican party. Even if jonathan was not with in my line of sight and the organizer of this event, who invited me here and has a lovely wife who i met yesterday, i would still be up here to tell you that jonathan is right. A vote for lincoln from a democratic soldier cannot be interpreted as a switching of party affiliation. Am not going to summarize his book for you, on monday there is a panel devoted to the election of 1860 and 1864, and i will let him talk to you about the details. I will use jonathans own words to summarize his argument. I argue actually, it is jonathan arguing. I argue that Union Soldiers are more likely to vote for republican candidates during the war because of their hatred of copperheads than support for republican policies. Now, jonathan, i am sure all of you have read his book, and if not, im sure some are for sale how is that . [laughter] peter you will find ample letters and diaries from soldiers that support jonathans argument. But i feel like i am breaking up with you now here is the but it is not you, it is me. [laughter] peter but there is also ample evidence from the letters and diaries of Union Soldiers who were also democratic that they did in fact make the conversion to republican policies and believed earnestly in them. What could be done to break the scholarly logjam . Both sides of the argument draw from the same evidentiary base. Im not trying to suggest that soldiers letters were homogenous, they are not. The problem resides in the fact that we have an oceanic amount of source material to deal with, and thats where the challenge resides. Any historian, if they are diligent enough, they can sit through this heavy volume of source material, and if they are patient enough, they will find that nugget of information that will fit their argument. What to do . 2011, a historian hit the methodological problem in the bullseye. His work on soldier studies is tremendously influential. His work from 1985 is the first book to take it seriously the ideas of the common soldier. It is not James Mcpherson, which is important, it is joe. Here is his solution to this methodological issue. I believe to a great extent, civil war scholars that focus on soldiers are stuck. We pluck something from a diary or memoir and make plain that his opinion represents most or a substantial portion of soldiers. If a scholar search is long enough, he or she will find evidence to justify equally any contemporary attitude and any argument the scholar may pose regardless of its representativeness. Valid statistics may break the scholarly logjam. I have the quote for you all to read, there it is and it is gone. [laughter] peter we are back on track. What is this lincoln thing up here, what is this about . There is a Little Lincoln on the podium up here. Inspiration. [laughter] peter i dont believe the Statistical Analysis has broken the logjam, i think it is impossible find a representative sample, and no other than James Mcpherson makes such a point in 1997. He asks the question, how does one analyze the thoughts and feelings of some 3 million men who served in union and confederate armies . How does one do it . The answer is simply this modern pollsters do so by selecting a representative sample that stands as the exact epitome of the whole. Mcpherson writes that the best i can do is select a quasirepresentative group of soldiers whose letters or diaries have survived and read those documents with a discerning eye. Historians, all of us have been deeply influenced by mcphersons work, and that is a good thing, but in following in his wake, i am afraid that we in fact have overlooked his caveat about representativeness and instead we continue to do what . We continue to go down the endless road with the hope we will find that common soldier. Im not suggesting to you that this search for the common soldier has been fruitless. We know a lot about the common soldier. And i suspect we can all agree upon that they were deeply ideological and political. We can agree that slavery mattered a great deal to both sides. We can agree that they had issues of honor in manhood, that they were elemental to how these men understood themselves. But obviously i have some issues with this, because i think the focus on motivation, why men fought, that it has not uncovered the life of the rank and file as it was lived. In many cases, the scholarship that focuses on soldier motivation, it disconnects soldier thoughts from the lived reality of those men. What we get instead is snapshots. These snapshots create a static view of the common soldier, and those snapshots reinforce the great myths of the civil war, and that is the dutiful common soldier who pressed forward out of a great sense of obligation, and he is clear minded and what he did. Im going to suggest to you there is a different way of approaching this, and that different way of approaching this is to make sure we situate the words of the common soldier within that mans lived conditions or material conditions. That we are more sensitive to that, and more importantly, we are more sensitive to the long history of these individual soldiers. I am suggesting that the way out of this is case studies. Historians call them micro history. These case studies get us out of these methodological conundrums, out of the methodological conductor because when you look over an extended period of time, you can see how ideas and actions were constantly changing and reworked within the flow of events. This case study approach minimizes the cherry picking that has plagued historiography. My second recommendation, and i will be honest, it is the purpose of my talk, it is quite simply this. I believe that when we approach the study of the common soldier, that we should seek the totality of that mans experience. What i mean by the totality of that mans experience is that we have to situate the writings within the physical environment, as i mentioned, but also their emotional as well as spiritual worlds. When we do that, we will be able to dig deeper into the inner life of the rank and file. It is sunday morning, it is early, maybe too early for academic jargon. Bear with me please. Some are frustrated with antiintellectualism when an idea or concept is put forward and dismissed. The academic jargon im about to put forward it does not roll off the tongue, it is called contradictory consciousness, and i can see some restlessness already in the audience. [laughter] peter hang in there. It was advanced by a scholar. It is a complex mental and emotional state with historical actorss selfdescribed actions not always in alignment with their stated beliefs and values. Let me give you an example. Members of the rank and file might extol the bravery and suffering of comrades in the field, but in the same letter, they might also express their apathy and frustration for the very purpose and direction of the war itself. What contradictory consciousness reminds us of is that abstract ideas were not enough to guide men through the daily challenges of soldiering. And what contradictory consciousness reveals to us is a spontaneous philosophy that we can find on both sides, and a spontaneous philosophy that can be best described as pragmatism. Minnesota soldier, first minnesota, philip hamlin, survived the attack at gettysburg only to be killed july 3. He wrote shortly after first manassas, we want a man with greater flexibility of character, of rough and ready energy who knows how to adapt himself to circumstances. Adapt himself to circumstances. That is the core of pragmatism. The worth of an idea dependent on its functionality, its rationality, whether it served the cause advanced each side toward victory. Let me give you another example of the flexibility of thought revealed in pragmatism. 1861, both sides enter the war with a fairly rigid understanding of courage and cowardice. There would be no gray area. A man who was courageous was a man always facing the front, a man who was calm under fire, a man who does his duty. That notion of courage and cowardice during the course of the war was amended. It became more flexible, more attuned to circumstances. To give you an example, i will quote from a georgia officer in 1864, who is writing about a comrade who got wounded. This was a joke and they all laughed at this, a joke that i suspect not many would have left at in 1861. This soldier recounted that one of his men got shot in the arm. He then turned to his comrades and yelled, here is my 30 days furlough, and just at that moment another ball hit him in the leg, causing him to drop on the ground. He then cried out, furlough extended 60 days, but that will do, i dont want anymore. [laughter] peter we know, this is something we could possibly talk about the end of my presentation, that the word trauma was not part of the vocabulary of these soldiers. That our tendency to attribute ptsd to these men comes from a good place but i think the diagnosis is almost always ahistorical. What we need to understand is that these men did a just in time, that they understood there is only so much that a man had to give in a time of combat, and those adjustments and that flexibility dictated by circumstances is at the heart of pragmatism. I want to give you an example of pragmatism and how it shaped wartime politics as well as political loyalties. Im going to focus on a couple, william standard and jane standard. I apologize if i am speaking quickly. Jane and william standard were from williamstown, illinois in the western part of the state, and area filled with a antidemocrats and copperheads. There was a smattering of republicans as well. The family was somewhat divided. William standard was a strong democrat. His wife jane came from a republican family and during the war she managed to shed those beliefs and became a stalwart democrat as well. Their correspondence is quite remarkable. It was recently published under the title infernal war. Why it is so unusual is because it is hard to find twoway correspondence because many soldiers destroyed letters from loved ones in case they were captured. It is rare to find twoway correspondence. The letters from jane are truly remarkable. I will quickly make this point. In writing this book, it took a fair amount of time to do. Many things i thought i knew about the soldier experience were challenged. The thing that really struck me is you cant understand these men and less you understand their households, wives and families. That connection is elemental to fully appreciating how the rank and file made sense of the war experience. Here is a classic example of where the source material i should say what source material is available to us has distorted our view of the civil war past. The fact that we dont have a lot of access to womens letters we have access, i dont want to diminish that but that a lot of that is not available and published has led us to often push women and the household to the margins. I would say these letters between the standards reminds us of how vital that linkage between women and men were during the war. Now jane and william, they are hotheaded people and prone to using colorful language, i will probably say this twice. We will encounter some words we dont use and i am reluctant to use in a public setting, but i do, because to take away their language is to dilute the power of the racism that was animating their political beliefs. I want to make it clear it was not a love of union that propelled william to join the 130 illinois in august of 1862. He was plagued by financial debt. He had been a sheriff before the war and had a number of lawsuits that had been leveled against him. I suspect he joined really out of financial necessity. He joined at the age of 40, about 15 years older than the average enlistee, and i think to escape creditors. He did not transform into a patriotic soldier. A diehard democrat, he despised lincoln and wrote this not long after his enlistment. I am truly sorry that i did not take your kind advice and stay at home and run my chances at the draft. I see the abolition congress will pass the conscript law, and that will not leave an ablebodied man at home in the north. Their policy seems to be to take all the white men and kill them off for the sake of freeing a few niggers. I dont feel Like Fighting to free niggers at the expense of my life. That is an example of me cherry picking, because in the same letter, he wrote at length about the inhumanity of war, and that christians should not be killing each other. We try to make sense of these letters and we have to make choices in terms of what we believe are the salient points or principles that drove these individuals, that shaped their understanding of the world and it is hard to do. Here is a great example. Even in this one letter, there are other aspects, other perspectives i should say, that standard had that i would not give attention to. Again i want to make the point that i think it is also a mistake to reduce the motivation of democratic soldiers to racism alone. His words have to be situated within the physical and sensory world of the army and the sounds of soldiering were important to standard and reminded him of his own confinement. The endless drumming frayed his nerves. He could not stand the monotonous tones because it drilled into him that he was no longer the master of his own body. Nothing arouses us but the tap of the drum. We are drummed out of bed in the morning, then to breakfast, then to guard, then to dinner, then italian drill, then dress parade, then to supper, and to bed again in fact we despise the sound of the drum. [laughter] peter again, none of this aroused his patriotism or soldiering instincts. Standard and he had entered an alien world when he entered the army and in fact that that alien world would present the eye with horrid sites, pollute the nose with horrid sense and to the ear with horrid sounds. Union and confederate v