>> it occurred to me, you know, in this present economic crisis we might ought to think back to the period of the time i wrote about it in the battle of vicksburg, we think we had it bad, look at those poor so longs they were eating mule meats and living in caves and these were americans. we were americans. then it occurred to me this is tax day. [laughter] >> they still had it worse than we do. but, you know, before i get into that -- and i haven't had a lot of time to rehearse here, i thought i would have all day to write -- not write a speech but make a speech and what i wound up doing because they told me now i got to be on all these tv shows today and carry me all over these television shows in

atlanta and these are all i have are these notes and that's it and i'll try to get through it. atlanta -- when i came here for the first time, i was in college. atlantic was what new york city to people in pittsburgh or something. i mean, it was the real deal. but i look today -- now, my publisher has got me set up in a place called a mansion on peach tree street, which is one of the more pretentious names i've ever heard but it lives up to the rep that's [laug5nb&hc% >> let me tell you, i got waked up this morning at 8:00 or 7:30 or something by a knock on the door by a lady who spoke a foreign language wanting to clean up my room, and i said, what is it? i've been out at this bones restaurant all night with my friends and here i am at 8:00 in

the morning. and she said well, your signs out. and i said what sign. apparently you punch a button inside your room and a big electric sign comes up and says clean up room. [laughter] >> then they got a tv set in there that is a painting. i mean, it's on the wall above the desk and it says modern painting. and you have to do like punch a button and the painting goes up in the wall and then you punch another button and the tv set goes on. well, of course, i don't know. so i got to call the engineers to come and tell me about all that. [laughter] >> and then i discovered something truly remarkable. they got mirrors in the bathroom that make you look 20 pounds lighter than you are. [laughter] i'mgx kidding you. it's weird. what a cruel thing you have to go back home and discover the truth. [laughter]

>> well, i'm staying at this place. i went in the lobby today and there was a man there who was or looked like mr. netanyahu from the country of israel sitting by himself on the couch. and i started to go over and introduce myself and i said, don't do that. i don't know whether it was or not but he sure looked like him. the hired house was the fanciest place when i used to come to atlanta but i'm so glad to be back tonight to talk about the battle of vicksburg which i'm sure all of are you fascinated with, if you aren't you're fixing to start. [laughter] >> when i was in high school, i had a history teacher -- i'm sure everyone of you had the same history teacher. this guy was named doug barfield and he wound up being a football

coach. he said, you know, what was it, when was when was and why is it important? and vicksburg in the civil war was an enormous confederate fortress along the mississippi river about midway between memphis and new orleans that was important because it reared up about 200 feet on big bluffs out of the river, which is the size of a 20-story building from, oh, five or six miles. bristling with confederate guns and it foreclosed the opportunity of the people in the middle west, up there -- iowa and chicago. all those places out in the midwest that the ship there hogs

and timber down the river and out through the gulf of mexico and sell them overseas. that was one reason. the second reason it was imported because the confederate then controlled that stretch of river so that they could have what abraham lincoln called the hog and the hominy coming from texas and arkansas and those parts of louisiana and oklahoma and other confederate alliances, states over in the west to supply to the armies that were fighting in the east and also in the west. so this was recognized first by abraham lincoln, who got a conference going -- i guess it was called a conference then,

but whatever it was, it was between his military people and some naval people and several of his cabinet and he said vicksburg is the key. if we can take vicksburg, everything else will fall into place in the west. and what he said in the west, he meant the western theater of operations instead of the eastern part of the operations. he is correct. vicksburg was holding everything up. there was no way to get a commercial boat past there because batteries were made into matchsticks. another person who realized this as abraham lincoln recognized it was u.s. grant, ulysses s. grant, who was a moderately disgraced union officer who had

been, so they say -- and i have no proof of this and neither does anybody else but it's probably a good guess, forced to resign from the army for drunkenness. he had gone to west point where his scholarship was questionable. he graduated in the lower part of his class but his equestrianship was superb. he was the best equestrian they ever had. but he found himself in a lonely miserable fort out in northern california, up around the oregon border and he commenced to drinking, and the result was one day his commanding officer said, why don't we settle it. captain grant, you're either going to have to resign or i'm going to court martial you and he resigned and he went back and he failed at everything he did. he failed at being a farmer.

he was married to a wealthy -- into a wealthy family and they gave him land to farm but he couldn't get that going. and he found up cutting firewood for a living. he became a real estate agent for a while and couldn't do that very well and wound up working at his daddy's store. his daddy was a tanner, meaning he had a business where they slaughtered animals and made skin out of -- for shoes and various other things. and he couldn't even do that. and then the war came along and he applied to join the union army again, and he was turned down principally because of his reputation of being a drunkard. and finally the governor of illinois either took pity or in desperation hired grant, made him a colonel and just in the

illinois militia, which had nothing to do with the united states army, but hired him to try to put together some semblance of a military unit out of a bunch of chicken thieves in two regiments that they had -- they were volunteers who were causing a lot of trouble just by being there. and grant whipped these guys together, and he found -- he had two regiments. well, all of a sudden they gave him another regiment because he'd done well. well, with these three regiments he got himself a division -- not a division, a brigade, a brigade means you get to be a brigadier general. so sooner or later who comes this commission for u.s. grant as a brigadier general and he took his men down in a couple of

fights. he lost both of them but they were basically in the nature of rage. they weren't big fights. down on the mississippi river. because his job was, as he saw it, to somehow as lincoln had said get down the river to vicksburg. he would kill it and we'll have the entire mississippi river valley. we will split the confederacy in two and they'll go a long way to win the war. well, grant took a look at his maps and thought in no way i'm gx&6 get down the river, on the river, because the confederates had these big forts. and the various other ones that were armed with large caliber artillery. he said i'm going to go around them. and he did. he flanked them out by going through fort henry and fort donaldson in tennessee.

and had small almost unremembered bloodied battles but they were bloody and grant hated blood, which is ironic. and i think it probably was because growing up as a boy, his daddy owned this tannery. it was a slaughterhouse and he'd seen all this blood and gore and so he couldn't stand the blood and gore of the battlefield. and he wouldn't go on the battlefield if he could help it and see the dead men there. nevertheless, he didn't have an÷ c conpunktion about taking his troops. he left nashville completely uncovered. he took nashville and then continued down the river on steamboats -- at this point he was on the tennessee river. to a place called shiloh. now, at that point in the war,

nobody had seen anything like the slaughter that went on in shiloh. i think bull run, the first big battle, there were 1700 men killed and maybe tripled that wounded. shiloh was like 8, 9,000 killed and triple that killed and wounded and everybody was horrified. i mean, when it got out in the press that what this war was really about was not some kind of lark that they thought when they went out there to bull run, then people came in their carriages and brought their picnic lunches to watch the yankees whip the rebels. but it was dead serious big

time. well, grant -- he got the blame for that because he got surprised there at shiloh. it was his fault, probably. he didn't expect a confederate to come out but you're talking at this point some big armies coming back, 50,000 man armies, 60,000 men and that's a lot of people and when they see these cuts they could reload these muskets two or three times a minute. that's a lot of lead whizzing through the air. well, it settled down pretty much in shiloh and i'm not going to get into all the details and politics about it. grant basically got fired and then he got rehired. and he perceived it as his mission to take vicksburg. well, how is he going to do it?

he decided he was going to go right down smack through the center of mississippi following the railroad tracks, which happened to end in my old hometown, mobile, alabama, gulf mobile and ohio they ran right through the center of the state. he could supply his army behind him with railroad trains, with the food and clothing and whatever they needed, ammunition.%iq(i but he was foiled in this really by a sabotage of a retched political general who was appointed by abraham lincoln from illinois whose name and my first alzheimer's fit of the night i forget. forgive me, i'll remember in a minute and i'll tell you.

it's something started with a m. it doesn't matter. whoever it was, this guy goes to lincoln and says, mr. president, i want your job next election, and i'm going to raise an from the'ñ midwest. [inaudible] >> you got it. general mcclerran. they had a lot of these political generals. banks had been a senator. and general butler -- all these guys got themselves appointed -- they weren't trained military people just like i see a man i know is a trained engineer. you got an engineer who's not trained, you know, good heavens! why are you doing that? but lincoln did it because he thought it would help the war effort if he got some of these

general behind him. so he went to raise this army with the specific purpose of getting 60,000 men from the midwest, bringing them down the mississippi and beating grant to vicksburg. well, grant knows nothing of this 'cause he's, you know, a reasonably naive person. although he's a good general. but he got the word of it when he's about halfway down in the state of mississippi that this is going on and so he also being a politic general from whatever he learned at west point said this is not going to happen. he sent general william sherman with his brigade back to memphis, and he said, sherman, go on back there and all those people that the general is sending down here to be in your army, you rank them. you take them and you take vicksburg down the river. in the meantime, i'm going to

continue down the center of the state. so this sounds like a good idea except for one thing, the confederates aren't sitting there like cardboard dummies. they have plans of their own. and one of them -- they concocted with the assistance of general earl van thorne who was a mississippian and a west point graduate, excellent cavalryman, and he said i think what we should do is to go and sneak up on general grant in his rear, meaning his behind, his posterior and we're going to send him back to mississippi where he came from and that's what the general did. he took 2,000 cavalrymen, 2500 and on a wide sweep rim there and grant was well below holly

springs, mississippi. grant had railroad car after railroad car in holly springs, mississippi and warehouse after warehouse with all this paraphernalia that is needed to keep an army of 50,000 men going such as food and clothing and shoes and ammunition and all that. and general van dorn snuck up those people and he caught the commander of the union garrison in his underpants, and he had him arrested and put him in the jail that he took all these things that general grant needed to pursue his trip down through mississippi and either stole them or burned them. and then left and went up and met with general nathan bedford forest and that put general grant out of business.

the problem was because on his way back up out of there to meet up with him, he cut telegraph lines, there was no way general grant could inform general sherman of this crisis. and so general sherman proceeded down the river thinking that general grant was going to meet up with him when, in fact, what general sherman met up with when he got to vicksburg to the north end of it, he intended to kind of sneak in the back door was all the confederates who had been released by general grant's departure. and general sherman's people got slaughtered and it was unfortunate to general sherman but he was mad about it and then he said he attacked chickasaw bluffs and it was my fault is

what he said. it's what he report. well, grant has then got a problem. not the least of which is general mcclernan had been looking for his army and was like the same reaction as a bride left at the altar on her wedding day, meaning he raised this huge army going down the river who had gotten beat. general mcclernan was a problem until grant decided to fire him. grant found himself at this point with an army on the wrong side of the river. he's on the louisiana side of the river and vicksburg is obviously on the mississippi side of the river and he had to get across there but there wasn't any way to do it on

account of there was just endless swamps north of it. and south of it there were these huge confederate forifications with artillery and there was vicksburg itself with a big fortress. what to do, what to do. well, grant tinkered and he came up with some reasonably innovative plans. the first thing he did was to -- he organized a canal-digging enterprise. vicksburg is located on a hairpin turn in the river. so you got a big thing out there that points like an accusing finger going to louisiana. grant is going to cut vicksburg off of the river. he's going to dig a canal across this big old point and make the

mississippi river divert itself so that vicksburg becomes irrelevant. that was a big project. and he set all these union soldiers who were -- who had nothing else to do except steal and so forth. and he confiscated the slaves in the plantations over in louisiana. and he set them working on that except the problem was that the -- what they call yellow fever began killing people at such a rate it was worse than a constant 24-hour battle so this ultimately did not work out. so anyway, he then came up with another notion with the romantic name of the moon lake expedition. it was a lake about 200 miles north of vicksburg called moon lake, and he figured if he could blow the levee up there --

levees, i don't know if you all have been to mississippi, but the levees mostly or the smaller ones are about the size of where i am standing right here right down there. they're that big and the river, you know, goes up when it get hot, it goes up in these levees like that so you can be driving a while and look up there there's a big old big steam ship going by. not always because the level of the river falls. you don't even know it's there. anyway, if you blow the levee is you blow a hole in the thing and you let all the water in and the water is going to go somewhere well, grant figured it's going to go into moon lake, and then in about a 5 or 600-mile route it's going to go through this river and that river and finally down to red river which is way down by baton rouge some 100

miles away which is below vicksburg and then come up. well, they blew that levee. the result was instead of rising, the river fell. the result of that was that all of a sudden they got all these old cypress trumps and how are we going to go get rid of them? and lincoln sent these steam underwater saws and they tried all that to make it work. it didn't work. general mcpherson, who was in charge of it and his staff tooling around the moon lake on an old steamboat with a regimental band every night enjoying themselves with the wine of some confederate senator'ssjz house that they occupied. plan number two, what we'll do. ìc% vicksburg.

there's a pass. there was a river that flows about 10 miles ultimately -- ultimately 10 miles north of vicksburg into the mississippi. well, they could blow that levee and maybe get at them that way and they do that and they blow this levee with about, i don't know, 50 tons of dynamite. it looked like niagara falls. and all of a sudden it sweeps all these steam ships containing each regiment -- a regiment is 600 men and 50 of these steam ships go swirling around down the mississippi down this vortex. of somebody's river here or somebody's river there. and the main result it flooded 800 square miles of the mississippi river delta. i mean, there was nothing --

cows and everything was swept away, chickens on the roofs of houses. it completely flooded everything. and so they continued on this route, which was about 300 miles in vicksburg somehow thinking that they could get a whole army of tens of thousands of men down the river and the confederates wouldn't find out about it. they did. and they wound up hearing unsettling chopping sound behind them as though people were felling trees across their escape route. they ran into a fortification called fort pemberton.

john c.pemberton who happened to be a philadelphia yankee who happened to be a confederate lieutenant general who had gone to west point but fallen in love with a lady in virginia and she somehow persuaded him or he was under the persuasion to go south. pemberton, unfortunately, did not have combat experience but he was a pretty smart guy but the problem of his was indecision. i'm getting off my point. there they are at fort pemberton, these big enormous yankee gun boats that were 160,+ 80-feet long armored with great big guns. and it was just a little old

spit of sand with some cotton bales around it and they had some rifles that the british had sold them. it was a canon, you know, a big gun but the thing as opposed to these smooth things where you can't quite tell where it's going to go, you shoot this and they are going to go there. the federal army -- navy, rather, the preceding army ran into a buzz saw because they were at the wrong end of an artillery ftzu these guys at fort pemberton, which was up in here the water. the guys are working the guns knee deep. but it wreaked havoc on the ironcl ironclads that the union had. every time it would hit it would

loosen the bolts and send this debris flying. they called it splinters and one bolt would kill a man. so -- i mean, it was really harsh business and the navy commander wanted to get out of there and ultimately he did.xul% but not before another confederate army man sent word at one of another one of these deltas and flood out the confederate fort at fort pemberton. in the meantime, grant, doesn't know what's going on because there's no way to have a telegraph and all he knows he's got a lot of people up the creek without a pallet. they don't like that i say it on tv. [laughter] >> but grant decided -- they gog a new plan called steels bayou

which is next to vicksburg. they can get around deer creek and that creek. and they'll send another army under sherman up there. a smaller army of 15, 20,000, something like that. well, it's got to be one of the strangest naval expeditions ever because the flooding that had been unleashed by the blowing of whole areas, whole forests under water and you got these huge gun boats the size of this room floating over roads and houses, trees that was taken up and so on. steaming over these things andé going over the creeks. and the narrow creeks, they have overhangingw#e branches and the smokestacks on these things would hit one of these and it would shower the decks with all the creatures who were trying to

escape from the flood. wildcats and rats and bears, you know, every imaginable kind of -- snakes. and the sailors went out with brooms to try to sweep these things over but some refused to leave. and it made for an interesting trip because they had these things on there.h8ñ they finally -- they got through all of this maybe 150 miles in there and, of course, the confederates know they're coming. and set up and they hear again the sound of axes and admiral porter who was a naval commander, they got eight of these enormous ironclads up there and if the confederates

capture us it will change the outcome of the war and he was very frightened about it and he ended up in some area where it looked like some strange grass was growing. and admiral porter asked a slave, who was by the side of the thing, what is that? he said oh, that's willows, sir. and willow, we make baskets out of them when the water dries out. they say you can go through that like an eel. admiral porter goes through it and gets tight that he can't get out of it. those things with little willow branches get all in his propellers and everything. and about that same time, the confederates opened up with rifles from the indian mound and they can't go out and free themselves so it's a serious deal now. well, sherman is way back there with his people and the gun boats are leading the way.

so porter sends back and the admiral sends back come backub0 quick and sherman proceeds in a strange druid-like march candle lit where the drummer boys had to hold the drums over their head because they were up to here in water and they marched 20 miles in one day and got there and fended off the confederate attack. and all of a sudden the water started to recede. and then there was a huge rush of water with logs and everything came in there and all the boats were lifted above that. that was the second levee that they had finally blown some days before that left about another 8 or 10 feet of water down through this and it let these union back out of the thing.

it was a very strange thing. reading about it from the official records and all the participants -- i mean, it's almost indescribable but that's what happened. [laughter] >> well, grant is mad. we've tried all this stuff and we're laughingstocks. he told the admiral porter, the navy man, he said you got to get us out of this place where i can move my troops down the river south -- away from vicksburg and potter agreed with that and they did and they ran the batteries which they considered not a smart thing to do and these were big guns the confederates had out there. and they did it at night and they even it got some transport ships through by tieing them on the sides of the you're classes,

you know, at least away from the side of the guns, at least to start transporting troops and they went to a place called hard times. they wanted to transport from there but it was under water from all this flooding and they went south from there a little bit. and for some reason, grant picked general mcclernan, his political enemy to lead this expedition across the river. mainly because he was the only one:, of grant's major general who actually agreed with it. i mean, sherman was aghast. he said we'll all be killed. this is crazy. you can't -- we can't do this. you have no -- you have nothing to eat on the other side of the river. and various things like that. and mcpherson didn't like it either. but anyway, mcclernan -- his problem was he had just gotten

remarried and he had this young wife and he decided to bring her along on this expedition. with all of her baggage and servants and slaves. it was in missouri. so this delayed the landing for a day or two but they finally made the landing and they had a fight there at a place called port gibson. mcclernan's people failed. and of course pemberton, the confederate commander at vicksburg was expecting grant to attack him there at vicksburg. and grant surprised him. he didn't attack him at vicksburg he sent his army to jackson, mississippi, which is the capital and led by general william sherman which is apparently the first of his urges. he burned the city down.

and that not only that he went back and burned it again. ultimately, general pemberton was forced out of his sanctuary there, his fortifications in vicksburg to go fight a battle. now, in the mean -- this fight is complicated. gettysburg is so simple, oh, lord! [laughter] >> but jefferson davis recognizing now we have a problem. when pemberton kept wiring back we've defeated grant up the creek and up this, that and the other, he's fine. he was not fine. now he's in serious trouble and jefferson davis for heaven's sake lived in vicksburg. it was his hometown. he knew what was going on. he finally started sending troops and he sent them under j.e. johnson who was one of the most underrated generals of

confederacy. he was a great defensive tactician but he wouldn't fight. one of the interesting things that i found when i was researching this, i found a little vignette about johnson back when he was right out of west point and he was noted to be a great bird shot, wing shot. and one of his buddies took him on a quail hunt in virginia and he noticed every time his dogs were work and johnson wouldn't shoot. well, the sun was in myize brambles around. he would only take the perfect shot. which is an interesting character trait because that's the way he behaved in battle the entire civil war.

great on defense but on offense, he would wait and wait and wait and in atlanta, that man retreated and retreated until if they hadn't fired, he would have retreated to key west and then gone to cuba. [laughter] >> well, they selected general j.e. johnson to be the army of relief for general pemberton. and they sent him 30,000 people. and johnson sent them away. are you scared of sherman? anyway, he got -- the ideal thing, obviously, get pemberton and johnson hooked up together. hell, they outnumbered grant. they would have done their deal. but it didn't happen. the result was if the confederates in the union fought a battle, a very vicious battle at champion hill. it's not very well known but the participants said that was one of the hottest battles and worst slaughters. not in terms of -- that's the problem with civil war stuff,

the more dead, the better, the sexier battle. i don't care about all that. but anyway pemberton was forced to retreat on the east side and backside which were just as formidable as the roadside because it's so cut up. it's like ravines and bamboo and swamp. i mean, it's where bears live. i mean, faulkner wrote a story about it called the bear. as a matter of fact, a little story i like to tell. theodore roosevelt when he was president in 1905 or '6 went down there on a bear hunt to that land around vicksburg because there was so many bears and stuff and they went and they chased the bear all day through the woods, and they finally found the old bear and the bear was so tired he couldn't even climb a tree that they had chased him with the dogs and on horseback and so on.

one of the handlers said, there's the bear. go ahead and kill him. he said no, i'm not going to kill him. he gave us is fair chase and let him go. well, the press got word of this and it became known the president of the united states, theodore roosevelt, had saved the bear. and there was a man called morris mitchell who lived in brooklyn, and he thought so much of this, he devised out of cloth and cotton -- i don't know what, a brown bear, and he patented it and he called it a teddy bear, and he sent it to the president of the united states and believe me, morris mitchell family -- they never worked a day in their life again, ever. [laughter] >> it's still patented. [laughter] >> teddy bear.

but leave it to say that -- getting up there to vicksburg was a tough deal. but he chased pemberton back into his fortification, then he decided well, we got to beat an army here, these confederates. we're going to go ahead and take them. he attacked them with his full army, 40, 50,000 men and terribly repulsed 'cause the confederates had gotten a second wound and said we're not done yet. and a few days later, grant attacked him again. he wasn't satisfied for the first time. he had to go twice and the same result. then he settled down to a siege. the siege is a weird thing. the siege is like what they used to do with the catapults and all that. the siege has been going around since the prebiblical times. you basically starve the people out. there's some weird stories about sieges. sometimes a chinaman would take

one of these big catapults and he would throw dead bodies with people with the plague inside. the people in england -- there was a device of a version of the catapult and some people in london redid it for the heck of it a few years ago and they were able to fling a damn grand piano 100 acres away. a siege was big business but now it's in grant's time and artillery. and they would tunnel in the olden times and hope that the whole thing would collapse, you know, the walls but now you've got explosives. grant's people started a tunnel and they got to tunneling -- if the confederates could hear

them, you know, they had a water thing that you put through something in the ear and they could listen to them and they started counter-mining that. it's essentially the same thing. at this point vicksburg is like a precursor to world war i. i mean, you've got two armies, stalemate, doing everything they can to get at the other one. and finally they sent off this mine, the union did, of so many barrels or tons of dynamite in it. it blew up and it blew up all sorts of terrible things. i mean, on the union lines there were field kitchens and confederates and parts of confederates and it blew across the union lines and a live man who had been working as a counter-miner and he was a slave and had been down there in the pits, he was alive.

and he landed in the union lines. and they asked the man, well, how far do you think you got blown 'cause at this point everything is all blown up. they changed the topography of vicksburg. he said about 3 miles, i think. which was probably not so. [laughter] >> with you there was an iowa regiment -- maybe it was wisconsin where they grabbed a man and they put him in a tent and charged 50 cents for people to look at him. [laughter] >> general mcclellan saved him and made him his valet or cook till the end of the war. this is the kind of thing that went on. there was bad stuff going on because it was the wisconsin artille artillery. the river was if you would with his mortar ships and somebody said the shell was the size of a full grown hog. well, day and night, they're shooting these things into

vicksburg and the citizens of vicksburg, rich or poor, took to living in caves 'cause it's so hilly there they could dig caves into this and trade them up. but at the same time, that wouldn't protect them from the big old mortar but protect them just from normal goings on and the union was every hour was shooting hundreds of these big old canon balls from their positions and they were hitting the tops from the fortifications which it went over and landed it in town and they lived for a while in dead cows and things that were killed by these shells. and whatever food they could get. but$hz after a while they ran o of food. some of the troops they discovered that a lot of bamboo thickets there. they discovered what the damn chinaman had discovered. the bamboo chutes were

delicious. anyway, they began to run out of food and the dogs and the cats began to disappear. and then they had -- of course, the army had mules to haul the artillery around but they finally got to where most of the artillery was fixed and they fixed to eat the mules and one lady wrote in her journal, i'm going to quote her the best i can, she said martha said they have rats hanging in the market. they were eating rats. and, you know, you got a whole population that's starving. well, there's nothing they can do. they can't escape because the army is there and they can't escape because grant's out there. there was nothing to do but to surrender and that's what general pemberton did finally on the fourth of july of 1863.

went out to meet grant and grant gave him a reasonable deal. he let them march down off the -- they were up on these cliffs fighting and marched down with their flags, which was real important to them and their guns and put them -- stacked them neatly in a pile and then marched back and get what they call parole which is to say you weren't going to fight against the union anymore until you exchanged whatever they did. and that was the same day i coincidentally that robert e. lee began leaving gettysburg. now, fourth of july, 1863. it would have been an excellent time to stop that. because there was no way that militarily the south was going to win it. jefferson davis was a trained

west point officer and former secretary of war for the united states government. he knew that, i think. he may have believed that there was a political way to win it, which would have been if lincoln had not been reelected that fall, that coming fall, maybe mcclellan would have been elected. we're getting into what-ifs but they're fun. if davis and that bunch had just said, you know, we gave it a doggone good shot, we ought to quit here, didn't do it. though he had two more years till 1865 and all the destruction. i mean, here in atlanta, everywhere. sherman's march to the sea. i remember when i was a kiddie used to see the blackened chimneys driving up to atlanta.

they were still there. but, you know, rationality is not fathomable always. i think what it was -- they somehow were equating arrogance with pride that made hate seem respectable. and if you hate, you're not thinking straight. you're not thinking right. now, that's just speculation. but the battle of vicksburg, taken with the battle of gettysburg, gettysburg was the nature of a wade. lee went up north with 60, 70,000 guys and he came back with 15,000 less, still a viable army.

gettysburg -- i mean, vicksburg, pemberton is no longer was counting. the mississippi valley was no longer there. it was cut in two. i mean, if they had gone to lincoln, lincoln would have cut them a deal. he's ready to get that war over with. hell of a lot better than what we got, which was 100 years of economic poverty. i'm just about the end but when i was a little kid i mean, you could see the poverty in the south was impoverished because of this. so that's the what if. but i tell you, it was a fun thing to write that book because it's a good story and a lot of stories within a story. grant drinking -- if i tried to explain all this, lord knows, y'all would run off and i wouldn't get to sign any books. [laughter]

>> so why don't we do that. and let me just say thank you. you've been a good audience, attentive audience. if you've got questions i think we've got a few minutes where we could do that. how many minutes do we got. >> you got a few minutes. >> well, tu. [applause] >> do you want me to ask questions of myself? [laughter] >> was it hard to transition from history or fiction or nonfiction? >> the question was, was it hard to fiction to novels, no. i mean, you're a writer, you're a writer. they're different in so many

ways that, you know, you start out -- i always start out with a sigh. i don't know why. and i say, huh, okay. 'cause i know it's going to be a while, you know, you just don't do this stuff like that. it's going to be a couple of years or longer. and, you know, people ask me, what's your favorite book that you wrote? i say if you had 15 children, which would be your 15 child? you love them all and you love them in different things and some you don't love as much and some you love more. but those questions are hard questions to answer. i mean, i'm not sure -- i'm going to give you my answer. yes, sir. >> yes, i'm just curious, first off i like all your books. they're excellent. >> you'll be paid later. [laughter]

>> i'm kind of curious obviously you think vicksburg is much more crucial to the civil war but what why do you think gettysburg had all the press. that's what most people think of. >> let me ask this question, can everybody hear the questions being asked in the back of the room? i think -- well, you know, it's because death sells. i mean, gettysburg was a story of such immediate heroism and horrible slaughter and it makes you wonder what on earth -- i mean, i was in the army. i know what it's like to have to order men to do things like that but when you're ordering hundreds of thousands -- well, tens of thousands of men, you know there's a good chance that probably a thirdiy of them, 25%- 20% are not going to come back

alive, how do you get those people to do that and how do you do it? and i think gettysburg is one of those cataclysmic encounters -- more than than napoleonic wars, more than world war ii -- i mean, it was right there naked out in the open, and those people went and they were -- they were going to die. so there's a great tragedy to be told there where vicksburg was slower. just as many people were probably killed at the battle of vicksburg than gettysburg. it just took them six or seven months longer. yes, sir. [inaudible] >> i've read accounts where grant had the benefit of one of three con fefed. --

>> i'm sorry having trouble hearing. >> you alluded to the battle of champions. i read a chapter where grant had the chance of three confederate couriers giving him the chance to read to orders related to pemberton. would you mention or speak the way espionage might have affected this encounter or maybe otherñ encounters in the civil war. >> i've read stuff of that affect and i don't know that i can give it the credence of it is questionable. it's not in the official records that i can find. and that's what -- i kind of base my stuff on what they call the official record, which is 128 volumes. it's about doorstop size and it's what they collected as a labor of love from all the armies, every scrap of paper that was still left after that war, the federal government, the

united states government, collected it and printed it in the general printing office, you know, you hear a lot of things. that may be true. i don't know it. so i just kind of figure if i don't know it -- if i don't feel comfortable with it, there are many big stories out there. >> thanks to ted turner, you're in my bedroom every other night. [laughter] >>ó!x it's true. i'd like to know, do you consider yourself more a lieutenant dan and more forest gump and do you think life is so arbitrary and that could have ended the war?me÷zd >> huh? i'm sorry. i didn't quite understand -- >> do you consider more lieutenant dan or forest gump? >> do i consider myself

lieutenant dan or forest gump? you know, when you write fiction you're going to be all the characters at once. you have to be. it's actually a very good question. i may be both. i don't know. but i never thought about it. but when you write a fictional character, you're going to have to get into that person's skin and be them for as long as they're talking. or thinking. and so i don't know. i mean, i wouldn't -- i mean, i guess i'd say lieutenant dan 'cause forest gump was an idiot. [laughter] >> what time we got. 9:00. some of these people -- one more good question. >> first of all, this is the first time i've ever been something like this and i'm here becausf