And it was fitting and proper that we come together to commemorate the life and legacy of abraham lincoln. Our first speaker is peter carr michael. I have seen cwi hats around this morning and it is wonderful to see youpjz here. He has a ph. D where he had the good fortune to study under gary gallagher. It was published by unc press in 2005. He is also one of the series editors of unc presses civil war america series, and i know him best through this capacity. He was my editor for midnight in america, and his thoughtfulness, careful attention to detail, and his generosity resources made my book a better bood. Today he will tell us about the war for the common soldier that was released in 2018 as part of the prestigious little field series. A review in the journal concl e concluded it is a poignant book. It brilliantly communities civil war combatants. It will be a valuable work for anyone with a lived experience of the civil war soldier. Please welcome peter carmichael. Good morning. Every time his thoughts drifted to past battles, new yorks charl charl charles hand started to tremble. He could not shake the dark memories of what he had seen and done, but he looked back at the battles with a sense of pride. That was a place that he earned his badge of manhood. Before the war he believed that people didnt have a very high regard for him. Including his family. He once wrote to his wife and said that he thought of himself as the black sheep. It appears its because he had struggles with alcohol. In the summer of 1863 he was drafted into the army of the potomac. His first day he arrived in new york, he hopped off of the train, he was given a blank ket ordered to sleep on the ground. Arriving with the rest, his frustrations boiled over in december when he wrote to his wife. All right. He wrote curse be the day that i saw my name was on a conscript. If it was not for you and my children i would blow out my brains. It takes a man to fill the place of a private. He told his wife that he was no freedom streamer, which of course, abolitionist and no union saver. And the title of the book, edited by katie aldridge. She was going through the attic of the house and she discovered a box stuffed with letters. It was incredible. Her profession is an ultra marathoner. And she did a remarkable jobl. This is a fantastic set of letters. He is not going to write about rations or the weather or his bowel movements to her, his letters spared no one and lincoln was a favorite target. The army are getting six of such work. I think abraham gashed his political throat. The army will vote against him four to one. And by the time he forces 5,000 more in the army, his political death and damnation will be accomplished beyond the hope of salivation. When the election came more than two months after this letter, he became a political camelian. There is no middle policy left for us. He wrote that we have but one chance to choose. First of lincoln and the universal lights of man, let it cost in blood and treasure that it cost to maintain them. Which man is brought nearer to everything. If he is elected today, the war is but childs play for they will see a spirit in the free man of the north that will not be defeated. A spirit that is bound to win. Now, the words would suggest that he became a die hard republican and supporter of old abe lincoln, and i think it is reasonable to assume that he is casting his ballot for abe and that he came to support the hard war policies of the american party. Many stories pointing to him and suggest that he became a republican even half the war. I know very little about his life after the war except that he continued to struggle with alcoholism, and after his vote 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 vote is jonathan wyche. He makes a point that a democratic soldier that voted for lincoln should not be interpreted as a conversion to the republican party. Even if he was not in the line of site, and the organizer of the event invited me here. Even if all of those things were true, i would be here to tell you that jonathan is right. That a vote cannot be interpreted as a switching of party afeeluation. He is Union Soldiers were here, and they were for republican policies. Now jonathan and all of you have red his book, if not, im sure there is some out for sale. How am i doing, jonathan . Huh . Letters and diaries i feel like im breaking up with you, its not you, its me kind of a thing, right . But there is also ample evidence from the letters and breaking this log jam, right . Both sides draw from the same evidentiary base. Im not trying to suggest that the letters were homogonous. We have a large amount of stuff to deal with. That is where it resides, any historian, if theyre diligent enough, they can go through the heavy volume of source material and if theyre patient enough they will find that nugget of information that fits their argument. What to do. 2011 the historian, he hit the me problem right in the bulls eye. His work on soldier studies was tremendously influential. So here is his solution to this issue. I believe that to a great extent, the focus on soldiers is stuck. We pluck something from a diary or a memoir and make claims that it is a substantial portion of those soldiers. If a scholar searches long enough, he or she will find evidence about any contemporary attitude. Regardless of its representativeness. A valid statistics may break a log jam. I had that quote for you to read. There it is, now its gone, were back on track. What is this lincoln thing up here . Whats this about . There is a Little Lincoln on the podium here. Inspiration. All right. Okay. Well, i dont believe that this statistical analysis, i dont think that has broken the log jam. In fact none other than James Mcpherson makes so much a point when he asked the question how does one analyze the thoughts and feelings of some three million men. How does one do it . That is what he asked and his answer was this. They do so by selecting a representative sample that stands as the exact epitome of the whole. I cannot construct such a sample of civil war soldiers. The best i can do is to select a quazi representative soft jers whose letters or documents have survived. We have been so deeply influenced by his work, but following in his wake, im afraid that we have overlooked his caveat. Instead we continue to do what . We continue to go down that endless road with the hope that we will find that common soldier. Im not suggesting to you that this has been a fruitless one. We know a lot and we can all, i suspect, agree on it. We can agree that it mattered a great deal to both sides. That the issues of honor and manhood were plmtal. This body matters, but i have some issues with it. I think that the focus on motivation, why me thought, that it has not uncovered life of the rank and file as it was lived. In many cases the sclorship that focuses on soldier motivation, seen what we get instead is we get snapshots, right . These snapshots that create a static view of the common soldier and they reinforce the great myth and that is the dutiful common soldier, right, who pressed forward out of a great sense of on apply gags and this is clear minded in what he did. I will suggest to you there is a different way of approaching this. And that is to make sure that we situate the words of the common soldier within that mans lived or material seasons. When were sensitive of the history of the soldiers, im suggesting that the way out of this is case studies. They call them micro history. These case studies get us out of this problem. When you look at letters over an extended period of time, we can see how ideas and actions were con standly changing and reworked within the flow of events. This minimizes the cherry picking that has plagued the s historiography. It is quite simply this. I think 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 fiscal environment. Also theyre emotional and spiritual worlds. When duo that were going to be able to dig deeper. Now it is sunday morning, early, maybe too early for academic jargon. Bare with me please. Academic jargon that im about to put forward doesnt roll off of the tongue, its called contradictory consciousness. Hang in there with me. The idea was advanced by the scholar tj leers. It is a complex mental and emotional state with historical actors, self described actions not always in alignment with their stated believes and values. Let me give you an example. Members of the rank and file, they might work with the sufficie suffering of their comrades in the field. They might also express their apathy and frustration for the direction of the war itself. They were not enough to guide men through the daily challenging of soldiering. And what it reveals to us is a spontaneous philosophy that we can find on both sides, and a spontaneous philosophy that can best be scribed as pragmatism. Mississippi soldier survived the attack here in gettysburg to be killed on july the third. We want a man of greater flexion possibility of character. A man of rough and ready energy, that knows how to adapt himself to schisms. Adapt himself to circumstances. The worth of an idea depending on its functionality and rationality whether or not it served the cause, advanced for each side toward victory. Let me give you example of the flexion ability of thought. Both sides enter the world with a fairly ridged understanding of courage and cowardace. A man who is calm under fire, a man who does his duty. That notion of courage and cowardice was amended. I can give you an example of that by quoting from a jazz officer that is wreeting abouit comrade that was wounded. This was a joke, but not one that i think many would have lapped at. He recounted that one of his men got shot in the arm. When he was shot in the arm, he turned and yelled here is my 30 days furlough. Just at that, another one hit him in the leg and caused him to drop on the ground and he cried out furlough extended 60 days, but that will do, i dont want any more. We know, and this is something that we could possibly talk about at the end of my presentation, that the world trauma was not part of the vocabulary. Wanting to put ptsd on these soldiers is historical. These men did adjust in time. They understood that there was only so much that a man had to give at a time of combat. And so those adjustments and flexion ability is at the heart of pragmatism. I am going to focus on a couple. I apologize if im speaking quickly, but were still good on time here. They were from louistown, illinois. It is an area filled with a fair amount of antiwar democratics and copperheads. There was a smattering of republicans as well. William standard was a strong democrat. She became a stallworth democrat as well. Their correspondences are quite remarkable. Why it is so unusual, and many of you are aware of this, as you no many soldiers destroyed the soldiers of their soldiers. And the enmy could find it. So it is rare to fend twoway kor ston dense. The letters are truly remarkable. And the thing that really, really struck me is you cant understand and you understand hour households and wives, it is el mental. Here is a classic example of where the source strerl, is available to us has distorted our view of the vifl war past. We have a fair amount out there. But the fact that not a lot of that is available has led us again to do what . Pushing them to the margins. I would say these letters between the stand arounds reminds us of of how vital that linkage is during the war. I will probably say this twice. You will encounter some words that we dont usually use, but to take away their language, of course, is to die lute the power of the racism. The racism that was animated, animated, their political beliefs. It was not a love of union that propelled republican to join the 103rd illinois. He was plagued by financial debts. He was a sheriff before the war and he had a number of lawsuits that were levelled against him. So i suspect that he joined out of final necessity. He joined at the age of 40. That is about 15 jaers older, and i think it is to escape prez tors. He did not trance form into a patriotic sold jury. He despised lincoln and he wrote this, not long after his enlistment. Im truly sorry that i was so full hearted not to take your advice and stay home and run my chances of the draft. I see they will pass a law that will not leave an abled bodied man at home in the north. They want to take all of the white men and kill them off to avoid the niggers. That is a chanlassic point of cherry picking. He wrote at length about the inhumanity of war that christians should not be killing each other. I want to be sensitive to all of us, right . We try to make sense of the letters and we have to make choices in terms of what we believe are the principals that drove these individuals, right . That shaped their understanding of the world. Here is a great example of it, this is certainly an important point, but there are other aspects that other perspectives that standard hand that i have giveen due attention to. Just 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 in the physical and sensoring world of the army, and it was extraordinarily important, but it reminded him of his own confinement. The english drumming frayed his nerves, it drilled into him that he was no longer the master of his own body. Nothing arouses us but the tap of the trump. Were trumped a out of bed, then to breakfast, then guard mounting, then dinner, and dress parade, and then to supper, and then to bed again, in fact we despise the sound of the drum. So again, none of this aroused his patriotism. He knew that he entered an alien world when he joined the army and that that world would present the eye with lewd sights, pollute the nose with smells, and as his story reminds us, union and confederate volunteers lost their senses when they doctored the ranks. Both sides worried that would be the first step to losing ones independence as a man. Again, i want to make the point to claim that standards opposition temperatures entirely to the vicious racism. To understand how they thought, not just what they thought, we must account for the Natural Environment and the sensory world and how it affected a soldiers outlook and with their 103rd illinois entered in the fall, he discovered he had more to fear from the heat and the swamps than he did the confederate soldiers. He said it is very warm down here. So hot at about noon that a man can hardly live and in fact many were perishing, not from the heat, but from sickness. Walking into a hospital to see some of his failing comrades, he said they were pail and sinking fast and utterly helpless. He could not imagine a worse place to die. And he says it is the inaudibluating smells of death that reminded him of the degeneration of the world himself. He walked into camp and his blood did not improve. He said they were addressed in his clothes and caps. He felt they were confined and that this was a punishment that he equated to ensavement. He neared the breaking point in the fall of 1863, he confided to his wife that it is extraordinarily open in his emission that his emotional state was unraveling. Everything is a perfect drag with me. My body is well but my mind is almost racked to pieces. What a confession. This idea that soldiers close themselves off to their family members, that they became hardened and toughenned, it is not what evidence suggests. How vital it was. I am perfectly disgusted with this war. I long to see the day come where i will be free and not suggest to any military rule. A man is better off in jail than a private in the army. We need to submit to the rule of men that are not capable to rule dogs and they have no feeling for a man whenever. They might say that what he has is a bad case of nostalgia. When you dig deep, you will see it is more than just home sickness. The idea for standard and others was that the world they once knew was a world wrecked by war. When they had nostalgia, they were imagining that recreation, the family values they treasured, and so we see Something Like that that is not necessarily a political, but it is just the opposite. If you want to appreciate his rage toward the lincoln administration, it is inseparable from the nostalgia he felt in mississippi. He had many other dilemmas that he had to face. That being how to survive in the field when the army did not pay the men on a regular basis. Time and time again and on both sides, i found that these men, what was their preoccupation, it was scraping back in an army that violated its covenant, covenant to do what . Take care of the range and file. That did not happen. It was that situation for standard in the ranks that reminded him of the struggles that his wife was enduring. I mentioned to you that she had financial troubles. Financial troubles that he left her when he joined the army and so she found herself getting up about 5 00 in the morning working in the feeds to come home that evening and to have to cook dinner for them so they can make ends meet. Particularly for one, she was frustrated with that. I was speaking for everyone in education right now, i would like to know her assessment module and all service well, right . Thee fantasized about william deserting, they talked about him getting captured on purpose. They will understand the war and again, his political take on this conflict i should note they thought about fleeing to california. How about that. That is not the one there you go, there is william. Im sorry. When i come down i think i will bring a box of hoop skirts and you a pair of boots and enough calico to make you a pair of britches. And then she concluded by saying what do they look after when they inspect . I would like to know if any of them have the gray backs, lice, of course, or the clap down there. I discovered many cultural gaps with my students these day, none of them knew what the clap was or they pretended they didnt. So i dont know what he said to any of this as well, but it was financial issues. That troubled him, but he changed in the course of the war, and we can challenge that again by looking at the long history. And when we look we see that in fact he became a very good sold jury. He had deep resentment for not the copperheads, because he was very sympathetic to them, actually, but to republicans who were not doing their part to stay back home. So the pride that he felt as a soldier, it did soften some of his views, but he never made that conversion. In fact he got very apg ri, and i dont have a quote for this, i will read this to you all. He got very angry when a letter came to him aes his republican relatives on his wifes side did not even inquire about how he was doing. In a rage he wrote back and said i think that manual, that is the relative, i think he could have said a word or two in anns letter to me or newt, but he can kiss my ass, and if mine is not black enough i will bring him a nigger wench when i come home and he can kiss her ass. He is a vile racist and so is she, but this racism was part of how he made his decisions. He seriously looked into becoming an officer of a usc regimen. God help those poor men if he ever got that job, but he didnt get it. And it would surprise you even more that he wrote well, i am a very good abolitionist while im in the army. Mr. Standard voted for lincoln, right . But, if you read the entire letter, he wrote at the end i plainly dont like abrahams ways any more than i like the war and i would be glad to be out of it. So what is to be made of all of this. I dont think jonathan could find a stronger find than standard to advance his argument. Jonathan as we know believes these soldiers votes for lincoln out of the hatred for copperheads. Here is an example of where he voted for republicans that stayed home, and this is the punch line to all of this, and out of pragmatism. As these other men realized, maybe again, they loathe li lincoln, but they know this is the surest way to bring this war to a successful conclusion. And that will get him back to illinois and back to jane. I just want to say one other thing. He wrote about republicans that werent democrats, he said they miss in the same quill. And so to conclude with this, how do we understand the significance of standards vote for lincoln . I want to argue very forcefully that any ballot cannot be seen as a transparent window into his motivation. And i baeg of all of us as we are having elections looming, it will come upon us before we know it, that the thinking that we see time and time again with our journalists, and i dont care if it is fox, cnn, or msnbc, theyre all doing a great diswas a to our democracy. Its making people one dimensional. I suspect a man that voted for trump in mississippi is different from the man that voted for trump in louisiana and the list goes on. And this vote in 1864, this vote, again, not a transparent window into soldier motivation, but rather it has to be situated within the long personal history. A history that shows that for all men being a soldier was never a state of being but always a process of becomes. Like all soldiers, adjusted to the grounds of war, his sense of duty and his identity without card to any abstractions. The calculations of soldier loyalty were far more complex than nitting together statements and motivational factors or moral into some express of identity or nationalism. To persevere and survive, soldiers were constantly remaking themselves as circumstances dictated. Standard made that point to jane in his final letter just weeks before he was mustered out of military service. Perhaps you will hardly believe me if i tell you that i have seen the time since i have been in the service that i had only one shirt and that one so full of gray backs that i could pick them off by the dozen. And no socks, and the ass of my pants out. My heart was almost gone. But i tried to keep my head above the water. And i am still alive and kicking. Thank you. We have some time for questions, and please make sure you ask a question when you come to the mike. Hi, pete. Yes. Great lecture. Salient point which we try to make to students all of the time. Im glad that you spoke thoroughly to that. It is a future question. When were talking about not cherry picking, and have all ths rich information, what about now and what suggestion do you have to those who will be documenting this time and people are digitizing . Its not captured on paper. Its not going to be a traditional type of historiography work. Im going to give you a copout answer and say im a 19th century historian. So good luck to those in the 21st century. Youre exactly right. There will be challenges. But, you know, im quite certain that there will be ways in which even those sources that we all know seem so fragmented to us, and well be able to find ways to bring that context there. So i have no idea what that possibly will look like. And it certainly is beyond my payscale to try to imagine that. Ill say to you that youve asked a very good question and it certainly will be a challenge for scholars. Great lecture. Thank you. Yes . I wonder if in the course of your research you looked at the literature of our soldiers, u. S. And foreign in other combats and if so, what commonalities and differences did you find, or do you find between those literatures and civil war . I think thats a fantastic question and some scholars have already is by eric dean jr. , here is the book title. Shook over hell. To cite deans book, he is correct to suggest that civil war soldiers did not suffer from ptsd is absurd, right . But that label, ptsd, has a very specific context again, right . Thats not the context of the civil war. The words that civil war soldiers often used were broken down. Broken down. Thats what you would apply to an animal that youve driven into the ground on a frm, right . Broken down, physical, emotional, spiritual, completely collapsed. I go back to dean. He has poignant examples from men who were xhet edcommitted t they called an asylum in the state of indiana and family members who had to commit their loved ones, theyre heartbreaking stories. A man in andersonville and his daughter said whenever he met somebody, that he would immediately start speaking about his andersonville experience, and then he would take them behind the house and he had recreated a model of andersonville, and he would take people around. Right. So again, i also remember this fellow i met some time ago when i was 20, 30 years ago when i lived in richmond. I met an elderly man who remembered ford stuart and he said walking by the old soldiers home and at night you could hear these men, right, screaming out from their nightmares. So no one is suggesting that these things didnt happen to these men but their culture was very different from our culture, their medical understanding of their bodies very different. When he wrote that he he thought about battle, his hands started to shake, thats the only person ive ever encountered who is connected a memory to a physical, right, reaction, to battle. Certainly scores of other men had those issues. I remember indiana soldier after the second lane attacks wrote to his wife and said all he could do is stare out the window and think about the war but he couldnt really focus and that he couldnt keep his hands straight when he was writing, but he never, ever wrote to his wife. I think its because of what i saw and what happened. They still had a difficult time making that linkage. Ill leave it there. Yes . Steve gase from sioux city, iowa. Liked your book. Draw way more attention regarding how to look at soldiers letters, think about those questions, pragmatism and contradictory consciousness. You get an a for the class. You already read my book or i would give you a free book. Provides a framework to a bunch of related things in soldiers letters and so on. And second when you have more time, if you have 15 minutes, i would love to sit down and visit with you about related projects. Quick question, you talk about case studies. Describe what you think aan appropriate, meaningful case study would look like from an historical methodology point of view but potential outcomes for contributions. So my case study approach was one that came under a fair amount of criticism from my readers, and i think they were on very solid grounds of their concerns. I didnt have a solid methodology behind it. I wanted to make sure it reflected the geographical of men on both sides and social securityiological. Poor soldiers and illiterate soldiers who left us bodies of correspondence. Thats not possible. They spoke their letters often to lit rate men. Thats what i wanted to have. What was the deciding factor, i wanted a set of letters that would extend over a period of time so that i could see the many faces of soldiery. So i didnt have any elaborate criteria for why i picked the men that i picked. Im not trying, again, to claim thoo these men are the common soldier. As i keep suggesting, again that pursuit im not sure where it gets us. But i know when we drill down and look at the life of an individual man that we can see its a pin hole. Thats how you should see it. Its a pin hole within that bigger world and thats the bigger world of culture, bigger world of military discipline. So we can learn a great deal not just about that one little person, right, but we can learn a great deal about the entire world that all of these men inhabited and then this is the final point. The one i tried to do on battlefield when i give tours, when i give talks. The way to approach the common soldier, what that methodology looks like is that we should remind ourselves and remind our audiences and remind our readers that we want to recover the stories of historical actors who occupied the same physical space at same time, but drew very different meanings from it. Last one . One more. Quickly here. Yes. You talk about the onedimensional political outlooks and what came out. And given the tragic failure of reconstruction and the success of the confederacy in virtually destroying the birth of reconstruction or the development of reconstruction, and were here as lincoln friends and schars or whatever. Right. But recently, the governor of tennessee proclaimed Nathan Bedford forest day. Nathan bedford forest, for those who dont know, was a millionaire slave trader who, as a confederate general, killed can you get to a question . Yeah, i am going to give it. Just a minute, jonathan. So anyway, killed several hundred Union Soldiers and their white officers and was the founder of the ku klux klan. Yet today, where is our message about lincoln . Yes. Im glad you brought up forest. And i would say we differ just a little bit here. I think times have changed radically. When i started doing this, i was 19. It was 1985 and that last cause perspective prevailed. Times have changed. You certainly can find what i believe are more rear guard actions that we see these neo confederacy rise to the top. Here is my final point which will lead into a nice segue. Armys of deliverance, lets not lose sight of what those armys did. Despite the counter attack by former confederates, they could not do two things. They could not break up the union again and they could not enslave africanamericans again. So the price in blood, right, that the northern armys paid, i think in the end that it was, in fact, worth it. And i think the political outcome of reconstruction verifies that. Thank you again so much. [ applause ] were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Tonight, from our american artifacts series, well show you a reenactment as living history enthusiasts row across the Delaware River at the spot where general George Washington and the Continental Army crossed from pennsylvania to new jersey on christmas night in 1776. American history tv tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspan3. Every saturday night, American History tv takes you to College Classrooms around the country for lectures in history. Why do you all know who lizzie boreden is . And raise your hand if you had ever heard of this murder trial gene harris, before this cause. The true meaning of the revolution was in this transformation that took place in the minds of the american people. So were going to talk about both of these sides of this story here, right . 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