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 MinisterMargaret 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 o