Ok, good evening. I and peter carmichael, professor of history at Gettysburg College and also director of the civil war institute. My guest is noted historian gordon ray. He 20 years ago published the battle of the wilderness with lsu press. This would be the first of 4 volumes to cover the 1864 Overland Campaign. Gordon was the first historian to ever attempt to write a comprehensive history of those operations. Those operations, as you know, covered Central Virginia and ended on june 1 at cold harbor. It really is hard to imagine that anyone will ever again attempt to write such a comprehensive history because what gordon did is truly phenomenal. It is model tactical history, well researched, beautifully written, and above all else, contextualized. As a microstudy of who did what and where. What is really remarkable is that gordon dived into the archives, and so much of tactical history, much about gettysburg, never draws from original manuscript material, which in my estimation, is almost criminal. Gordon he dove into the archives. Just to give you one example, the third volume of his series, an impressive amount of research that included 150 manuscript collections, 55 contemporary newspapers, and more than 500 published histories. Gordon did all of this while having a day job as a lawyer. Gordon graduated from stanford law. He got his educational start at indiana university. Graduated in 1967. I was just up the road in indianapolis. I was one years old when you graduated from college. Just to get some perspective here. You make me feel so young. From there, you went on to harvard and got your in a in history. And then you did sometime in the peace corps as well. It appears in ethiopia. And then i learned by being a carpenter that making a living using your hands is a tough way to go. Definitely. What is remarkable about gordon is he is one of those guys who gets up at 4 00 in the morning, cut some wood just for the heck of it, goes off, runs a few miles, then does some charity work, and then starts his work day. It is able to accomplish in this field of Civil War History with all the other things that you do. Your legal career is very fascinating. I saw on your website that you were in the United Attorney Office in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Yes, during the 1970s, i was assistant District Attorney in washington. And he writes briefs. One was on the cia attempts to overthrow the joe, and you also wrote a brief about the fbi it tends to discredit Martin Luther king one was on the cia attempts to overthrow fidel castro. I did not leak anything classified deadeye . We are going to have a freeflowing conversation about his work, the Overland Campaign, and of course, i want to give the audience an opportunity to have a crack at him as well. So lets begin. Why did you decide to write a book about the wilderness when there have been two very good histories on the battle . One was done and then i can 60s, one in the 1980s. You are practicing law in Northern Virginia. Why write a book . I had a deep interest in the civil war. As i have told many people, my dad was born in 1901 and a little town in southern tennessee on the alabama border and grew up with confederate veterans. I have always had a deep interest in the civil war. When i was a kid, we would drive around to the battlefield. Of course, that was before they were as welldeveloped as they are now. That was a couple of centuries ago, before you were born. [laughter] in any event, in the 1970s, i was a federal prosecutor in washington. I decided i needed to get into some other endeavor. I started to go down to the battlefields in Central Virginia and got fascinated with the big idylls between grant and lee in may and june of 1864, started to look for books on those battles, and there was virtually nothing. Like you said, at that time, there have only been one study that was done. It looked at the official report, regimental histories, no archival work or background. It looked like there had been a whole lot of battle culminating in this huge fight at gettysburg, and Something Else happened and lee surrenders at appomattox a year later. It was that Something Else that i found so fascinating. The big titles between the two vermeer generals premier generals from each side. Here is an overview map. All of you should have it in your packet. It covers the Overland Campaign, gets us all the way to cold harbor and beyond. This is what gordons worked so brilliantly has captured and analyzed. Lets just go ahead and get to the actual fighting itself at the wilderness. Often, people see the wilderness as a leader less leader less leaderless battle. It was a growth area filled with dense underbrush, limited visibility, broke up formations, disrupted communication. When someone says to you that this was a leaderless battle, would that be an accurate description or assessment . No, it was a very well thought out battle, although what was going to happen was thought out very shortly before it happened. Its the first time grant and, of course, lee had a chance to really oppose each other. Grant realized that lees army had to be defeated, and this was the best chance to do it. The army of the potomac new force to just above the river. We offer a new grant as a general that would do headlong assaults, but what the Union Commanders decided to do was a turning Movement Across the river, downriver from lee and come back at him, negating the confederate defenses. Unfortunately, when you cross the river down from where lee was, you go into this tangled area called the wilderness, which had been for a stint in colonial times but by 1864 was second growth. It had been cut down for smelters of various types, and it was a terrible place for a big army like the one grant was with, like the army of the potomac, to fight a smaller army like lees. The terrain was terrible. Infantry could not really see where other soldiers were. Artillery would not have any clear targets, and the union and cavalry would be useless because there were just a few winding trails to this wooded forest. Commanders decided they would stop and spend the night in the wilderness before moving on toward lee. They made a miscalculation. They figured they could spend the night safely before lee would be able to moving toward them. As one of the Union Commanders wrote, this was the first misfortune of the campaign, a total miscalculation. What we need to understand is the federal army wanted to get out of the wilderness. It was lees favorite hunting ground, and the main reason is that the environment owned he soldiers, owned the army and may be a way that other battles did not. We all know that any civil war, the terrain was critical, decisive. But this is a fiendish place, right . Is a place that owns the soldiers and certainly makes it difficult once the fighting begins. We should note that the first day of fighting takes place on the orange turnpike and then to the south on the orange plank road. They are almost two separate battles, and it was about a mile or so cap at yawns between those two sites mile or so gap that eons between those two sites. Lee actually had a welldeveloped battle plan that he put together within a few hours. When he realized grant had stopped, lee decided to attack. Stalemate them, he would be forced to fall back to richmond and petersburg. The war would become a surge. That would be the end of it. Lee came up with what would probably be the most daring plan of his career. He took his army and sent 1 3 of a down the orange turnpike, 1 3 of it down the orange plank road, planning to pay in the army in place with these two small forces to pin the army in place with these two small forces, then fanning to drive them back across the river, like hed and the year before if grant figured out that lee divided his army into three pieces, he could focus on any of those three pieces and wipe them out. Extraordinarily risky. Lee was willing to take the risk because the other alternatives were pretty grim as well. Sheer audacity. The armies got locked down into a fight. I would like for you to talk to the audience about the challenges of writing history. Among professional historians, they have a very uneasy relationship with military history, especially the kind of military history that gordon writes, getting troops on the ground. Many feel it is history that is soulless, chessboard. It is extraordinarily complicated. Could you give us just one example of engaging the source material, trying to bring in that human voice, and trying to make sense of the chaos of fighting within that environment . The way i usually proceed is when i was trying to figure out what happens in any place in that wilderness, lets say, was to start with a unit, collect all the material that existed, everything printed, all of the official reports, archival material from across the country, and a lot of newspaper reports. Newspaper material is one of the most underrated sources for the civil war. Soldiers were riding home every day. Most regiments had somebody who was the unofficial correspondent for the county that the regiment came from them and they were sending information back to you can collect this now. It is in archives across the country. I put it in folders and figure out here is how the union forces were lined up. Here is what happened to these men. And then to figure out who they were facing, you look at the confederate equivalent. You might see one of the Union Regiments captured the flag of the Confederate Flag regiment. It is laborious, but you can work through that and put together the big, tactical picture. As you alluded to, there is a fascinating human story. Like at spotsylvania courthouse, there is the big attacks there. It turns out that the man who spurred the ultimate confederate assault that capture the bloody angle at spotsylvania courthouse was a 40yearold epileptic from charleston, who left letters behind and who other people in his regiment wrote about. I was able to figure out who was in his regiment and i talked to their descendents. Some of them had letters that had never been put into archives. It is bigtime detective work, but its a lot of fun. Let me ask you about the newspaper accounts. We all approach historical documents. We like to assume that document is a clear window into the past, that we can find the hard truths, that the author of that document is being forthright and there is an authenticity to it. With newspaper accounts in particular, northern and soldier southern soldiers often wrote within the trope of honor, duty, bravery, heroism. So, how did you engage that uniform, cultural facade question mark and im not suggesting that some of these men didnt behave in that way cultural facade . And im not suggesting some of these men didnt behave in that way. How do you deal with that . Collect resources, read through them all, use your best judgment. Im a lawyer, so i can figure this stuff out. [laughter] lawyers know all. A little higher . [inaudible] the problem was civil war material is letters home people have axes to grind, people want to make their cells their buddies and themselves look good. The battles are written from a point of view. All the reports after the war read sort of like, how i could have won the war if theyd let me do it. All you can do as a historian is get the accounts together, read through them all, see if there is a common thread. The soldiers, both sides, by 1864, theres a growing sense of alienation or estrangement from the homefront. Then, the soldiers unwittingly contributed to that alienation by writing letters that they helped create the divide. It becomes quite a chasm by the latter stages of the war. The image that i just pulled up is a sketch of the burning of the wilderness. It is the most enduring image of the wilderness. For anyone who has done some reading about the battle, this is probably the image that comes to mind. Im curious about how your research conforms to a positive perception about the fires in the wilderness and about this picture. I think this sketch is very accurate. There were two places in the wilderness where there were massive fires. In that field called songbirds field saunders field. There are vivid accounts from several different men about how they tried to rescue soldiers before the fire got to them, but the men on the other side would shoot them down so they couldnt make rescues. There are accounts of soldiers killing themselves before the fire got to them and some gruesome accounts of when the fire would finally reach an injured man, they would hear the pop of the cartridges as they exploded. The same thing on the second day of fighting down on the orange plank road. There, as a matter of fact, the union earthworks were built largely out of wood. A lot of union accounts talk about how, when the tendon federate when the confederates attacked, they would come bursting through the flames like so many devils. It fits a lot of the scene you been developing. These are not battlefields that soldiers came back to after the war. They didnt like to go back there. You come to gettysburg and this place has a monument, two or three every square inch, it feels like. You go to the wilderness and there are only two or three that were put there by veterans. Recently, there were some, but none back then. I know you did a nice piece on the spotsylvania monument years ago. Let me do a followup. One of our faculty members somewhere out in the audience has written a very good book called ruination, an environmental history of the war. One of the key questions shes interested in is how soldiers thought about their power to destroy nature. Here again, the wilderness is different. The environment is striking back. These men werent trying to set fire or fires or to destroy nature. This is what happens when you have a lot of shooting at each other. It underscores your other point that i havent thought about i hadnt thought about before. Because it was such a wicked place and so foreboding and dark and sinister, they could not recreate in their minds are for the public the kind of heroic war that i think is easy to do here at gettysburg. Bruce sort of painted that picture very vividly in one of his books in the 1960s. He pointed that out that after gettysburg and some of the battles in open fields, people had a sense of flags flying and sun shining. When veterans talked about the battle of the wilderness or spotsylvania courthouse, it was more like men underground in caves, stabbing each other with knives. Just horrible. I worked at the wilderness as a college student. I was always struck by the fact that, when people came, they were most interested, where were the fires. It is like gettysburg, where is the bloodiest spot. I dont know what to make of that. Im certainly not going to be dismissive of that kind of interest. How do you write about war and capture the savagery without without going too far and turning war into just some great horror . That appeals to peoples darker side. It seems that it is something that does connect with folks. This was a horror. And this was a these were armies really trying to lees army trying to stop grant and grant determined to win. This was allout. Do you have an obligation as a historian to elevate it, to move it beyond these descriptions that are so bone chilling . Oh, yeah. How do you do that . How do you draw deeper meaning . I try to look for accounts that were left by people who were thoughtful and who can talk about some of those vivid scenes. I think, if theres one thing i feel i did in a lot of those narratives about the wilderness, spotsylvania, cold harbor, i think i brought home what it must have felt like. It was horrible. You have a touch for understanding the soldiers experience. I think that is what makes the book so interesting to read. Thank you. I think individual soldiers had very little idea about what was going on. They were there in a few acres of woods, fighting for their lives and the lives of their friends. They were getting orders. The woods were on fire. Everybody was shooting and there was noise and smoke and a nightmare. Thats the way it comes through. We have the end of the wilderness, roughly 17,000 casualties for the confederate side. 17,000, 18,000 on the union side, 11,000 on the confederate side. Grant is brilliant at taking a draw and turning it into a victory. May 7, we have this defining moment for grant and the army at the potomac. Can you describe it and tell us why it is so important . He took more than hooker had taken at the battle of chancellorsville the year before and not very far away. There were wagers among the soldiers of the army at the potomac whether they would retreat like the other like the other generals had done, whether they would go to fredericksburg and try another route, or whether they would move south. Of course, grant decided, the morning after the end of the battle of the wilderness, that he would shift south to the little town of spotsylvania, about 10 miles south of the wilderness, putting his army between lee and richmond. His hope was that lee would leave the wilderness. The night of may 7, as grant starts to ride south, the union accounts are vivid. Men who wear their talk about throwing their hats in the air and shouting and clapping, because grant didnt give up. They now had a general who was going to give up to continue the fight, who viewed this stalemate only as a tactical reverse, not as the end of the campaign. Here is a guy who thought longterm. It is like the bloodshed of the last three years was going to have some meaning. This, in my mind, was one of the major psychological turning point for that army. This bond between the rank and file and grant is on display here. There is a fair amount of turmoil still at the army high command, the relationship between grant and george meade was never really acrimonious, but it was an uneasy relationship because grant was giving meade a fair amount of discretion at the wilderness and even in spotsylvania. That relationship did not always produce sufficient results. Lets turn to our spotsylvania map. The red marks the confederate line. This in the center of the map is where the confederates blunted the union advance coming out of the wilderness on may 8. Once the union advance was halted, the line spread to the southeast all the way down to the po river on the far, lefthand corner of the map, and extended to the north and east. You can see how the confederate line takes the shape of a big bulge. We will talk a little bit about lee. We havent really mentioned lee at all here. There is the idea that lee had prescience, that he could anticipate his adversarys next advance. We supposedly saw that on many battlefields. We saw that, according to some, after the wilderness, that lee