Longsuffering panelists for bearing with me as i arrived at a workable concept and title. I did have a very clear idea of what i wanted this symposium to be, a blend of wellknown speakers who would discuss what theyve learned about the study of the civil war over decadeslong careers, blended with excellent lesserknown speakers whom you should want well, know well and will want to know well and had them speak about their Exciting New Research and their contributions to civil war scholarship. And i finally stumbled upon a title and a gimmick, using the 2020, 2020 vision, 2020 hindsight, insight, cute idea, i guess. Providing both hindsight and insight into the study of the civil war. With that concept in mind, i want to introduce our new our first speaker, an obvious choice to lead off this conference. Jack davis has been one of the most prominent and accomplished civil war scholars for several generations really. He started as a boy. If i recall correctly, you can correct me if im wrong, his first book he wrote in part as a college student. The book won him the first of four, record four, Jefferson Davis awards. Jack was also the longtime editor of civil war illustrated, the way many of us got to know him and editor of the wildly populated image of war and touch bid fire series, which seems like a lifetime ago. Jacks bread and butter is, of course, the civil war. He has written lively and important works about the other aspects of the American History, pirates of the gulf of mexico, the alamo, texas republic, road republic of west florida and the american frontier. If youre not familiar with those titles, you will want to be. We appreciate jack allowing us to drag him back into the civil war today, to speak on 50 shades of blue and gray, causes and responsibility in a peoples war. Ladies and gentlemen, jack davis. [ applause ] john and i shared the same quandary over titling, apparently. I kind of like the blue and gray bucket list. I thought 50 shades of blue and gray might play on the title of another book and result in a wildly enthusiastic audience, spilling out into the streets of richmond, and youre not even spilling into the center, where he tried to get you to go. Now im going to ask, would you all please move to this row right in the front here . Its delightful to be back here. I always had high regard, indeed, for the American Civil War museum and its predecessor, museum of the confederacy, and for coming here to speak to audiences like this. I also sympathize with john in being apparently sort of third up to host this, since other people werent around and available. He just reminds me of a story i was telling people last night a number of years ago, i got a call from a fellow who was organizing what would be the biggest civil war round table ever to toik place, somewhere up in the northeast and he said on the phone, and i want to get the very best keynote speaker i possibly can. And i was beginning to feel, well, glad you called me. And he said, well, i tried to get ed morris, but he was busy, but i want to get the best civil war speaker i can. My enthusiasm was beginning to wane slightly. Well i tried Jim Mcpherson and he wasnt available either, but i want the very best. And i said no, what you want at the moment is the third best civil war speaker and hes not available either. I will apologize right now for the fact of what a lot of im going to say is in the shape of recommend nivens, but thats what happens when youre asked to look at insights and what you learned from a career. There are those who would maintain i havent learned a damn thing in 50 years, and we call them reviewers. [ laughter ] so ill apologize that a lot of this is rather personal in nature, but maybe ill be able to share a few insights that at least i think ive gleaned. Its kind of sobering, if not slightly depressing, to look back from this year and realize i began my civil war era interests 62 years ago in 1958. I had just shifted from diapers to short pants. I was living in sonoma county, california, on a mountaintop called occidental, famed for three restaurants and nothing else. A summer afternoon at my grandparents place, i was bored, looking for something to read and i stumbled across my grandfathers copy of this h l hallowed ground. I still have that copy of his. It was a magical book to me when i first opened its covers. I knew nothing whatever about the civil war. And the interest really began then. Its interesting to realize now 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 evolved into increasingly serious study in the 1960s, trivdriven in large of an interest in my own family heritage, bloody battleground of western missouri and had multiple ancestors who served on both sides, one of whom died here in virginia, two days before those days of my developing interest all seem so long ago now. Lyndon johnson was president. Man had not yet stepped on the moon. Elvis was still alive. So much time has passed since then, but happy memoryies remai. Thanks to a job fresh out of graduate school as a fledgling editor at the magazine civil war times, i was suddenly thrown into close contact with many of the great historians and writers of the time. Alan nevitz, john baklis, robert utley, glenn tucker, Mary Elizabeth massey, john hope franklin, the great kentucky powerhouse, home and hamilton, tom clark and more. But most especially influential on me was the acquaintance formed with the Great Southern historians belle wiley and charles p. Roland. Theyre all gone now. Bud just last november. Charlie roland is a few weeks away from his 102nd birthday. Which means he will have outlived tom clark who died 16 days before. There is something in the water in lexington, kentucky. I have never forgotten the feeling i had then, 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 didnt realize that youthful ambition is for others to say but do not listen to anything Gary Gallagher may say on that subject. But what cant 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. One of the stars of civil war studies, but ive always felt through shared chance i got to go that one better. As i came to know them, my working with them, as their editor, and becoming their friend, those scholars and more all became my teachers. I got to learn in the light of a constellation of giants. An experience perhaps not unique to me but surely one with which few who ares have been blessed. That exposure to their wideranging backgrounds and their interests and theirities feeling about the consequences about the bushwhacker called those lively times. Looking back with the advantage of today, what immediately leaps to mind is how simpler the whole thing seemed to me then, and i think to a great proportion of students of the war era in the 1960s. And an even greater share of the always vast audience of people yearning to learn about it. In 1963, at the midpoint of the centennial, richard armor in his little book it all started with columbus. Some of you may have run across this. The subtitle said it all. Abridged and extremely unlikely history of the United States. According to armor, quote, the greatest general of the north was u. S. Grant, who is not to be confused with u. S. Mail or u. S. Steel. Grnts greatest subordinate was sherman, known for his famous march but, in fact, it actually lasted march through december. The greatest Southern Commander was robert e. Lee and his, quote, most able general was stonewall jackson. When jackson died, it is said lee lost his right arm, which made it very difficult for him to hold his horses reins. You begin to get the idea. This is not highbrow comment, humor. In confederacy, most of the generals were named johnston. And with grant and lee behaved so gentlemanly toward each other, it was decided to call the conflict the civil war. Armors was not very sophisticated wit. But behind the sometimes juvenile plays on words, he did make a point or two about how naively americans would want to approach their civil war. Pung waited by that, he advised anyone who read one book on the civil war could thereafter classify themselves as an expert. As i expect the other speakers today would attest from their own experience, the woods are still full of onebook experts today. They frequently ask you a question after youve given a lecture in which the question goes on longer than your damned lecture. To say that over simplification was a problem over half a century ago is not entirely an overstatement. Several reasons suggest themselves. Much of the more popular literature, and i dont use the term popular as being in any way perjorative or critical. It is written by amateurs, not to say it was badly done but only it wasnt be written by professionally trained and experienced historians. The civil war, being the greatest accumulation of stirring stories in our National Past naturally attracted our greatest story tellers, and they were usually not academics, with the exception of all of your speakers today. Journalists, like bruce kasem, glenn tucker, burt davis, poets like shelby foot, Robert Penn Warren 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 didnt often compromise suspense and drama by delving too deeply into tee baits over the validity of one source over another. They told a great story and, to some extent, they all over simplified to make it less challenging for readers. Neither bruce kasem nor shelby foot ever claimed to be historians. They both called themselves storytellers. Probably the first and most important lesson i learned from the 60s onward was how incredibly complexed 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. To this day, i suspect no one still has definitively explained it and definitive explanation may be impossible as are so many things when human beings are at the helm. I had no idea in 1969 how inextricably interwoven it was, even in the free states in that era, nor how important it was to remain far beyond the cotton fields and the count houses. As appeared over the past several decades illuminated its effects in southern culture society, the arts, literature and more, in ways that were only being thought of 50 years ago. Still, i doubt that anyone has truly encompassed it all. I think i had learned through research and thought and even self examination to balk at easy assignments. At one time i would have stated the south had born the burden of blame for the war. After all, it attempted to secede, which seems like an explicit rejection of the rule by majority thats fundamental to our democracy. Then it compounded that blame by firing the first shots,ly aband search for peaceful resolution. The seceded states and ultimately Jefferson Davis do bear responsibility for opening outright hostilities that seemingly closed the door for peaceful reconciliation, but i no longer confuse responsibility with blame. A word that carries with it the unescapable implication of bad faith and willful wrong doing. And thats because years of study had revealed to me a region whose chosen cadre of leaders were caught in a box because of circumstances not entirely of their own making. Threat to expansion of slavery and the creation of new slave states quite rightly seemed to southerners to imperil the security of the existing slave states and a threat to them put a hazard every aspect of southern political, social, cultural and economic life. Faced with that, what were southern leaders to do . In a specter surely driven by fear and panic, as well as reasoned expectation, their ultimate alternatives appeared to them, to them to be gradual marginalization in the expanding union until free states numbered enough to eradicate slavery, to forestall that, their alternative was to attempt 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. But that leads to another question after decades of being at this. What if parlor games can be moussing, theyre ultimately pointless, yet theyre so incredibly popular. Almost without exception, theyre conceived to change the battle of gettysburg in particular or the war itself, always in favor of the confederacy. Some of these apparently come out of what former Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher referred to as cloud cuckoo land. I was once asked, i am not joking i was once asked if i thought lee could have won the war . Apparently there are no other generals or armys out there, except all those guys named johnston. I was once asked if i thought lee could have won the war if he had been equipped with the atomic bomb. Its true. Im not joking. Im not joking. [ laughter ] as luck would have it, i knew the answer to the question. Which i will now vouch safe to you. The answer is no. Even if he had the bomb, lee had no b29 to deliver it. [ laughter ] i picture in my mind lee calling y jeb stewart saying okay, beauty, take this gizmo, ride like hell to yankee lines, light the fuse and well, you wont be coming back. [ laughter ] but i want you to know, ive written a very nice letter to mrs. Stewart, complimenting you on how bravely you were vaporized. But yet theres still a lesson to be learned from these strained and sometimes just ridiculous rationalizations to retroactively change the wars outcome. They make it clear to me that the war era and its people, and especially 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 state that makes sense to us, or one that allows us to come away from the war feeling somehow better about it. Theres no other episode in our history that americans have taken such pains to try to change retroactively as they have with the civil war. That says to me a great deal about the psychological hold, the emotional hold, the spiritual hold that it still has on all americans today. Presented with the question of what north and south could do in a situation that seemed to admit no acceptable compromise, my dear friend, the late dr. Richard summers, more than 30 years ago, said to me with a straight face that such situations were, as he put it, an argument for the east offic efficacy of war. It sounded absurd at the time. 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, at least for the moment, war will produce a solution. I have learned to feel empathy for the southern leaders, even if i dont sympathize with the course they chose. Inde indeed, it seems probable to me now that slavery and geography doomed them, no matter what action they chose. Of course, its important to remember that they did not see it that way themselves at the time. This was no cause born of a death wish. They thought they had a strong constitutional case for the legitimacy of secession, as multiple failed separatist movements since, right up till today, have shown. The idea of secession is still alive. Most recently Jerry Falwell and john justice of West Virginia have been encouraging them to leave the mother state and go join them. Why the hell would anybody want to do that . Its long enough just writing out blacksburn, virginia, now i have to write out blacksburn, West Virginia, and soon theyll join with californians and ill be home again. [ laughter ] the idea may seem ludicrous but the idea of secession is not always ludicrous to everybody. Southern leaders believed they could defend themselves militarily if necessary. A giant miscalculation, as it turned out. But there was no evident basis in 1861 for them to know that. After all, for more than a generation, they had listened to northern spokesmen insult and condemn them. So they could naturally ask themselves, why would the yankees fight to keep us in the union when they dislike us so . Furthermore, the disparity between voluntary enlistments in the recent war with mexico between north and south suggested that gunshy yankee shop keepers and, you know, wooden nutmeg peddlers wouldnt risk their lives or spend their precious gold to fight for anything. 50 years ago, i regarded the outcome of the war as virtually inevitable victory for the resources and the overwhelming manpower of the north. Its only over the years that i came to appreciate the myriad 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 war, the north could proactively decide to lose it. And we had seen conflicts in our own lifetimes that have ended in what apparently is precisely that fashion. Remove abraham lincolns iron will, to preserve the union. Take away the bond that he managed to forge with the northern people and soldiering that made him willing to continue the sacrifice through four bloody years. And whos to say whether sheer industrial and manpower superiority would have been enough to outlast a remarkable moral that kept confederates willing to keep making their own sacrifices after it should have been evident that they were beaten. One of the underlying reasons, for what i see as a spread of broader understanding of the myriad causes and influences that produce the war is the fact that since i got started in this arena, historians lay and professional, have use of or rejection of sources. Todays postmodernist and deconstructionist academic dogma maintain theres no such thing as an authoritative source and therefore all sources of all kinds and all narratives are of equal value. This is, of course, as any sane person knows, complete crap. But ironically, almost exactly the same approach to sources prevailed generations ago, but then it was just called carelessless, when writers didnt 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 cu