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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  July 25, 2009 2:30pm-3:30pm EDT

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some of the new titles .. back to the period of time i wrote about, the battle of pittsburgh. we think we have it bad, they
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were living on new meat and eating rats and living in caves and they were americans. then it occurred to me that this is tax day. they still had it worse than we do. before i get into that, i haven't had a lot of time to rehearse here, i thought i was going to have all they to not write a speech but make a speech, and what i wound up doing because they told me i have to be on all these tv shows today and carried me all over atlanta, all i have in the way of the speech is these notes, i will try to get through it. atlanta, when i came here for the first time, it was -- atlanta was what new york city
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was to people in pittsburgh or something. it was the real deal. i looked today, my publisher has me set up in place on peachtree street. one of the most pretentious names, never lived up to the reputation. i woke up this morning at 8:00, 7:30, knocking on the door by a lady who spoke a foreign language wanted to clean up my room. i said what is it? i have been at a restaurant all my with my friends but here i am at 8:00 in the morning, apparently you punch a button inside your room and a big electric sign, clean up room.
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then a tv set is a painting. it is on the wall. tumwater in painting and you have to punch the button and the painting goes up in the wall and you can shed another button and a tv set goes on. i have to call the engineers to come in to tell me about all that. then i discovered something truly remarkable. they have mirrors in the bathroom to make you look 20 pounds lighter than you are. what a cruel thing to do when you have to go back home and discover the truth! i am staying at this place, there is a man that either is or looks exactly like benjamin netanyahu from israel, sitting by himself on a couch. i went to introduce myself,
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then, i am not going to do that. i don't know whether it was or not but it sure looks like him. it is a fancy place. the hot house was the fanciest place they had when i used to come to atlanta but i am glad to be back to talk about the battle of pittsburgh -- vicksurh which i'm sure you are interested in. if you aren't, you should start. when i was in high school, i had a history teacher, i am sure everyone had the same history teacher. his name was dunbarfield at the ended up being a football coach which is all right. what was it? why was it important? let me try to answer that question. vicksburg in the civil war, was
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an enormous confederate fortress along the mississippi river, about midway, was important because it reared up 200 feet down the river, a 20 story be of building, bristling with confederate guns and foreclosed the opportunity of the people in the middle, chicago called those places in the midwest, timber and all the products they depended on for their economy down the river through mexico and sell them overseas. that was one reason it was important. the second reason it was important was the army controlled that stretch of river
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so that they could have what abraham lincoln called harmony coming from texas, arkansas and louisiana and oklahoma and other confederate alliances in the west, to supply to the armies that were fighting in the east and also in the west. so this was recognized by abraham lincoln, who got a conference going. it was between his military people, his naval people and several of his cabinet and he said vicksburg is the key. if we can take vicksburg, everything else will fall into
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place. when he said the west, he meant the western tier of operations, the base of operations. vicksburg is holding everything up. there was no way to get a commercial boat passed because of the batteries which are into matchsticks. another person who realize this at the same time as abraham lincoln recognized it was ulysses s. grant, who was a moderately disgraced union officer -- though they say. i have no proof of this but it is a good guest, forced to resign from the army for drunkenness, going to west point, where scholarship was
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questionable. is a equestrian ship was superb. he was the best and equestrian there ever was. he found himself in a loan, miserable for, he commenced drinking. capt. grant, you need to redesign, he went back and failed everything he did, failed at being a farmer, he was married to a wealthy -- into a wealthy family, but he couldn't get that going. he wound up cutting plywood for a living and became a real-estate agent for a while, couldn't do that very well and wound up looking at his daddy's
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store, he had a business where they slow the animals and skinned for shoes and others things and he couldn't even do that and the war came along, and he joined the union army again and was turned down principally because of his reputation as being a drunkard. finally, the governor of illinois either took pity or retired grand, made him a colonel and in the illinois militia, and hired him to try a to put together some semblance of a military unit out of a bunch of chickens thieves and
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two regiments that they had, volunteers who were causing a lot of trouble by being there. he whipped these guys together hand he had two regiments and all of a sudden they gave him another regiment because he had done well. just about got division, the brigade, you get to be a brigadier-general, so sooner or later here comes this commission for a colonel and he took his men in -- they were basically big bites on the mississippi
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river. because his job was to somehow, as lincoln had said, get down the river to vicksburg and kill it and we will have the entire mississippi river valley, we will split the confederacy in two and that will go a long way toward winning the war. grand tot took a look at his ma there's no way i can get down a river because of the confederate forts. he said i am going to go around them and he did. he went through fort henry and tennessee and had small, almost and remembered bloody battles but they were bloody. grant hated blood which is
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ironic. growing up as a boy his daddy owned this tannery. he couldn't stand the blood on the battlefield. he wouldn't even go on the battlefield. nevertheless, he didn't have any compunction about committing his troops, for donaldson, that left nashville uncovered. he took national and continued down the river, on the tennessee river, to a place called shiloh. at that point in the war, nobody had seen anything like the slaughter that went on in shiloh. i think bull run, the big battle and who -- there were 1700 men
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killed and crippled. shiloh, 8,000 killed, and everybody was horrified when it got out in the press that what this war was really about was not some kind of lawyer, when they went out to boron core people came and brought their picnic lunches -- grant got the blame for this because he got surprised at shiloh. it was his fault, probably. he didn't expect the confederate to come out but you talk about
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50,000 man armies, 6,000 men. when they shoot the gun they can reload two or 3 times, that is a lot of lead going through the air. it settled down pretty much in shiloh. and won't get into all the details. grant basically got fired and rehired. he perceived it as his mission to take vicksburg. how is he going to do it? he decided, he decided to go through the center of mississippi, the railroad tracks which happened to end in mobile, alabama. they ran through the center of the state. he could supply is army behind
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him with food and clothing, he was foiled in this, really, by a sabotage of a wretched political general who was appointed by abraham lincoln his name, in my first alzheimer's fit of the night, i forget. i will remember in a minute. i want to say mccullough, something that started with an m. whoever it was, he goes to lincoln and says mr. president, i want your job next collection, and i am going to raise an army
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from the midwest. you got it, fine, smart man, he is reading my book. he was a senator, lousy political generals most of them got themselves appointed. they weren't trained military people. i see and matt out there who is a trained engineer, are you an engineer? he is not trained. why are you doing this? lincoln did this because he thought it would help the war effort if he got these gentlemen behind him. so he went to raise this army, beating grant to vicksburg,
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grant knows nothing of this, he is a reasonably nice if person, he got the word of it when he was halfway down the state of mississippi, so being a politick general, he said this is not going to happen. with his brigade, back to memphis, all those people sent to be in your army, you take them, you take vicksburg down the river, i am going to continue down the center of the state. this sounds like a good idea accept the confederates are not
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sitting there like dummies. with the assistance of a mississippian and west point graduate, an excellent cavalryman, he said i think what we should do is sneak up on grant from behind, we are going to send him back to memphis where he came from. so he took two thousand cavalry men. grant was well below the little town of holly springs mississippi. grant had railroad car after railroad car in mississippi, where house after warehouse of all this person melia that is needed to keep the army down and
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going, clothing and shoes and ammunition and all of that. said the general stock up on those people and told the commander of the union garrison, in his underwear, had him arrested and put him in jail, but he took all of these things he needed to pursue his trip through mississippi, either stole the more burned them and went to meet with general nathan bedford forest. the problem was, on the way back up out of their, their was no way that general grant could inform general sherman of this
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crisis so general sherman proceeded down the river thinking general grant was going to meet up with him when in fact what general sherman met up with when he got to vicksburg, the north end of that win sneaking through the backdoor, was of the confederates who had been released by general grant's departure, and general sherman's people got slow. it was unfortunate for general chairman but he was mad about it and he said the attack was repulsed and it was my fault. that is what he wrote in his report. grant has a problem. not the least of which, general mcclaren who by now had arrived in memphis looking for his army and got the same reaction as
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abroad dumped at the altar on her wedding day, he raised an army that went down the river and got beat. he decided to the troublemaker and he was a troublemaker until grant had to fire him. but grant's problem is he found himself with an army on the wrong side of the river. he is on the louisiana side of the river. he had to get across it but there was no way through it. there were endless swamps. south of it, there were these huge confederate fortifications, and vicksburg, what to do?
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grant tinker and came up with an innovative plan. the first thing he did was he organized a canal digging enterprise. vicksburg is located on have been turned on the river. you have a big thing that points like an accusing finger. he is going to cut vicksburg off, take a canal across this point, make the mississippi river diversion itself so vicksburg becomes irrelevant. that is a big project. all these union soldiers who had nothing else to do except steel
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and so forth, he confiscated slaves at the plantations and got them working on it. what they called my asthma, yellow fever, began telling people -- killing people, this did not work out. so then came up with another notion, with the romantic name of move lake expedition, it was a lake 200 miles north of vicksburg, the levees of the size of where i am standing to down there.
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the river goes up like that. so you could be driving along, there's a great big steam ship going by. you don't see the steam ship, just a pile of dirt. if you blow the levee, you let all the water in, the water has got to go somewhere. moon -- and this route goes through this river or that river down to the red river. and then come up. they. that levy. the result of that was all of a
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sudden they got these cyprus trunks. abraham lincoln send these underwater saws and they tried that to make it work. but all you had was general mcpherson and his staff around moon lake on a steamboat enjoying themselves with some confederate senators, plan number 2, what are we going to do? again, 300 miles north of vicksburg. the river flows 10 miles north of vicksburg into the
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mississippi. blow that levy, blow this levy, 50 tons, looks like niagara falls and all of a sudden all these huge steam ships, are rented and is 600 men. fifty of these steam ships out of the mississippi down this for tax, somebody here, it flooded 800 square miles of the mississippi river delta. everything swept away, chickens on the roofs of houses, flooded everything. they continued on this route
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which was 300 miles from vicksburg. somehow they think they could get a whole army down the river and the confederates wouldn't find out about it. they did. and it wound up, unsettling chopping sounds behind them as though people were building trees across their escape route. but they continued on down until they ran into a fortification name for the confederate commander of the vicksburg army of 40,000 men, who happened to be a philadelphia yankee and happened to be a confederate lieutenant-general who fell in love with a lady from west point
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from virginia. she somehow persuaded him to go south. but unfortunately he did not have combat experience but was a pretty smart guy. the problem was in decision. that they are, these enormous yankee gunboats, 180 feet long, hard with great big guns. and ford pemberton was just a little bit of sand. this rifle is a cannon, a big gun, as opposed to these smooth
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little things, you shoot this, it is going to go. the federal army, or navy, rather, ran into a buzz saw because they were at the wrong end of utility pumped. the guy that for pemberton, the confederates, up to here in water. it wreaked havoc on these ironclads that the union had. ..
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>> and the, i can say that on tv i guess. grant decided, they have a new plan, the thing called steel bioto vicksburg, and they can get around and deer creek and this creek and that creek. they will send another army under sherman up there, a smaller army of 15 or 20,000, something like that.
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well, it is that to be one of the strangest naval expeditions ever, because the flooding that had been unleashed by the blowing of the levee up there have left whole forests under water. view of that these huge gunboats the size of this room floating over roads and houses and trees that were taken up and so on. steaming over these things and going up to these little creeks but then when you would give up to the narrow creeks, he would have overhanging branches and the smokestacks on these things would hit one of these and it was shallow and depth with all the creatures who were trying to escape from the flood, wild cats, rats and there's, every imagined kind of thing, the snakes. this sailors went out with friends to try to sweep these things over, but some refuse to
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leave and it made for an interesting trip, because they had these things on there. [laughter] and, of they finally got through all of this-- may be 150 miles in there and of course the confederates in new they were coming and set up-- here again the sound of axes, and that supporter who was a naval commander, they have got eight of these enormous ironclads up there. the confederates captured as, we have just got to change the entire course of the war down the mississippi river. they wound up in some area, where it looked like some grass was growing. admiral porter asked a slave, who was by decided that think,
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what is that? he says that as willows, sir. the willows that would make baskets out of them. he said he can go through that like an eel. admiral porter proceeds to go through and get stuck so tight he can get out of it, because those things, those willebrand is it all and the propellers and everything. about that same time the confederates opened up with dwell worth rifles from the indian mounds of the candy binka web site to try to free themselves. well, sherman is way back there with his people and the gunboats are leading the way, so porter, beh admiral says stelzer german become lindbeck click and sherman proceeds in a jared like march across the swamps, candle lit, where even the drummer boys had to pull their guns over their heads because they were up
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to your in water. 20 miles in one day, and got there and fended off the confederate attack. all of a sudden, the water started to recede, and then there was a huge rush of water with logs and everything that came in there. all of the boats were lifted above all of this. it turned out that was the second levee that had finally blown. some days before they had led eight or 10 feet of water down through this and it left these unions back out of the thing. it was a very strange thing. reading about it from the official records, and all of the participants, almost indescribable. but that is what happened. [laughter] well, alright.
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now, grant at this point, he is mad. we have tried all of this stuff and we are laughing stocks. he told the admiral porter, the navy man, he said we have got to get out of this place where we can land my troops. i can lend my troops down the river south of vicksburg. porter agreed to that and they did. they ran the batteries which was not considered a smart thing to do because there were big guns up ahead there. they did it at night and they even got some transport ships through by putting, tying them on the sides of the ironclad, the lay side away from the guns, enough for transporting troops. so, they went to a place called hard times. he wanted to transport from there but it was under water from all of this flooding so they went south a little bit,
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and for some reason, grant fig to general mcclennan, the political general, to leave this expedition across the river. mainly because mcclerkan was the only one of grants major generals that actually agreed with that. sherman was aghast. he said, we will all be killed. this is crazy. we can do this. you have nothing to eat on the other side of the river. and various things like that. mcpherson did not like it either, but anyway mcclellan, 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 for baggage and servants and slaves. so, it delayed the landing for a day or two, but they finally
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made the landing and they had a fight in a place called fort gibson, could confederate general was killed there. mo cornyn boss people prevailed and he got them all across, finally, sherman and mcclellan and of course pemberton, the confederate commander at vicksburg was expecting grants to attack cam derrek fix burd. grants surprised him, he did not attack a matt expert. he continued on to jackson, mississippi which is a capital led by general william tecumseh sherman which is apparently the first of his-- he burned the city down. not only that he went back and burned it again, but ultimately, general pemberton was forced out of his sanctuary there, his
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fortifications and the expert to go fight a battle. in the meantime, and this fight was complicated. it is not like it was so simple. oh, lord. jefferson davis recognizing, now we have a problem. boone pemberton was defeating grant to this that the other he said it was fined. now he is in serious trouble. jefferson davis lived in vicksburg. it was his hometown. he knew what was going on. solis finally started sending troops and the sent them under general jay e. johnson. johnson's problem was he was a great defense of tactician but he would not fight. one of the interesting things that i found when i was researching this, i found a little vignette about johnston back when he was right out of
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west point and he was noted to be a great bird shot, wing shot. one of his buddies took him on a quail hunt in virginia, and he noticed that every time they covey would flush, johnson would not shoot. the son was in my eyes or, he brambles around. he would only take the perfect shot. which is an interesting character trait, because that is the way he behaved in battle the entire civil war. grade on defense, but on the offense he would wait and wait and wait and in atlanta that man retreated and retreated and retreated. if they hadn't fired he would have treated all the way to cuba.
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[laughter] they selected john jay johnson to be the lead for general pemberton and they sent him 30,000 people. johnson sent them away. anyway, the ideal thing obviously to get pembleton in johnston hookuped together. hell, they outnumbered grant. but it did not happen and the result was that the confederates in the union fought a battle, a very vicious battle at champion help. it is not very well-known, but the participants, it was one of the hottest battles and the worst. not in terms-- that is the problem with the civil war. the more dead, the sexier the battle. i don't care about all of that. pembleton was forced to retreat within the defenses of the expert on the east side, the backside which is just as formidable as the river side because the terrain was so
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caught up. it was ravines and bamboo and swamps. it was where bears live. faulkner rhoda story about it, called the bare. as a matter of fact, a story i like to tell, teddy roosevelt when he was president in 1905 went down there on a bear hunt to that land around vicksburg because there were so many bears, and they went and they chased there all day through the woods, and they finally found an old bear. the bear was so tired that he could not even the climate tree. the jason with the dogs and on horseback and so on. one of the handlers said, there is that there, go ahead and kill him. roosevelt said no, i am not going to kill him. that there gave us a fair chase, let them go. the press got wind of this and it became known that the president of the united states, teddy roosevelt, had saved the
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bare. a man called morris mitchell who lived in brooklyn, and he thought so much of this, he devised out of cloth and cotton a brown bear, and a patented it, and the call that a teddy bear. he sent it to the president of the united states and believe it, moore's smigel-- they never worked a day in their life again, ever. [laughter] eight is still patton did. teddy bear. but leave it to say that grant getting up there to vicksburg was a tough deal. but, he chased pembleton back into his fortification and then he said we have got to be the army here, these confederates. we are going to go ahead and take them and he attacked them with his old army, 40 or 50,000
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men. the confederates had gotten a second win that said, we were not done yet. a few days later grant attacked him again and he was not satisfied the first time. he had to go twice, with the same result. then he settled down to a siege. acg is a weird thing. a seiges like what they used to do with the catapults and all of that. see testbank going on since pre-biblical times. you basically starve the people out. there's some weird stories about seiges. sometimes the china mint would take one of these big gold catapults and he would throw dead bodies at the people inside the place. the people in england, there was a place which is a version of a catapult.
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and some people in london we did it. just for the heck of it a few years ago, and they were able to flying a grand piano through the goalposts of a soccer field. 100 yards away. so, i mean a siege was a big business but of course now is replace by artillery but they also had tunneling. they would tunnel in the olden times and hope that the whole thing would collapse, the walls but now they have got explosives. grandpas people started a tunnel and they got to tunneling in the confederates could hear them. they would put something to the year and they could hear them. they started countermining, what they call that. it was essentially the same thing and at this point vicksburg was like a precursor to world war i.
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you have got two armies at a stalemate, doing everything they can to give up the other one. and, finally they setoffs this mind, the union did of so many barrels are tons of dynamite, and it blew up and it blew up all sorts of terrible things. it toward the union lines, confederates and parts of confederates but it also blew across the union lines and of all things a live man, who led been working as a counter minor and he was a slave who would been down there in the pits. he was alive and he landed in a union. and they ask the man, how far do you think you got blown? at this point everything is all blown up. they change the typography of expert. he said, about 3 miles i think which is probably not so.
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[laughter] but there was an iowa regiment, maybe it was wisconsin, they put a man in a tent in charge 50-cent for people to like him. general mcclellan saved him from this and made it his valet or cook or something until the end of the war. this is the kind of thing that went on. there was very bad stuff going on there. the union had the river filled with these mortars ships, with great big 13 and boys, like that. someone said a show was the size of a full grown calpirg coday and night, the ships would be sailing into vicksburg and the citizens of vicksburg, to living in caves because it is so silly there they could dig caves in to the-- but at the same time that would protect them from the big old mortar, the normal goings on
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or the findings of the union every hour shooting hundreds of these big gold cannonballs from their positions and they were trying to get the cops-- tops of the confederate fortifications. they lived for a while on dead cows and things that were killed by these shells, and whatever food they could get but after a while they ran out of food. some of the troops, they discovered that there was a lot of bamboo thickets there. they discovered, bamboo shoots were delicious. i don't know what they called them. they call them some kind of blossoms, they called them but anyway they began to run out of food and ultimately, the dogs and cats began to disappear, and then they had of course the army
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had artillery but they finally get to where most of the artillery was subeight cummins to lead the mules. one lady, i am going to quote for the best i can, they have rats hanging, so they were eating rats. dew of go to whole population that is starving, there's nothing you can do. you can't escape the of the way because grant is out there. there was nothing to do but to surrender and that is what the general pemberton did finally on the fourth of july of 1863. he went out to meet grant, aunt grant gave him a reasonable deal. heim let him marched down up there and these cliffs, fighting in march down with their flags,
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and their guns and put them in stack them neatly in a pile and then marched back and got what they called for a role which was to say you were not going to fight against the union any more until you exchanged whatever they did. that was the same day coincidently that robert e. lee began leaving gettysburg. now, the fourth of july, 1863. there have been an excellent time to stop that war. because there was no way that militarily this out 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
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fall, that coming fall, maybe mcclellan-- nally get into what ifs, but what ifs are fun. if davis then net bunch had just said, you know we gave you the doggone good shot. the killing ought to quit here. then do it. two more years, until 1865 and all of the destruction-- here in atlanta. everywhere, i know when i was a kid i used to see the blackened chimneys after driving up here two of land. they were still there. but, rationality is not that the mobile always. i think what it was, they
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somehow were equating arrogance with pride that mate hate seem respectable and did you hate, you are not thinking straight. you are not thinking right. now that is just speculation. but, the battle of vicksburg, at taken with the battle of gettysburg. lee when up north with 17,000 guys and came back with 15,000 less, still a viable army. pembleton scolari was captured. the mississippi river valley was gone forever. all of the western states were cut off. i mean, if they had gone to lincoln, lincoln would have cut them a deal. he was ready to get that war over with.
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a hell of a lot better deal than what they got, which was 100 years of economic poverty, and i am just about at the end, but when i was a little kid you could see the poverty in the south, it was impoverished because of this. so, that is the what if. but, i tell you it was a fun thing to write that book because it is a good story and a lot of stories with then the story. if i tried to explain all of this, lord knows, i would not design any books. [laughter] why do we do that and let me just say thank you. you have been a good audience, an attentive audience in if you have got any questions, i think we have still got a few minutes that we could do that. how many minutes of lagat?
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[applause] >> thank you. do you want to ask questions of myself? >> was of hard to transition from history or fiction to non-fiction? >> the question was was it hard to transition from novels? no, no, you are a writer, you are a writer. they are different in so many ways, that you know you start out-- i always start out with a sigh, i don't know why. i say okay, and i know it is going to be a while. you don't just do this stuff like that. it is going to be a couple of years longer.
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and people ask, what is your favorite book that you wrote? i say, if you have 15 children, which would be your favorite child? you love them all. you love different things and some of you don't-- udall love as much and some of them you love more, but those questions, they are hard questions to answer. i will just give you my answer, that is all. >> i was curious, first off i like all of your books. >> you will be paid later. [laughter] >> obviously vicksburg is much more important battle and much more crucial but what you think it is. all of the press? that is what everybody thinks of coming gettysburg. >> let me ask you this question.
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can everybody hear the questions that are being asked in the back of the run? it is because that sells. gettysburg was a story of such immediate heroism and horrible slaughter and makes you wonder what on earth-- when i was in the army, i know what it is like to have to order meant to do things like that, but when you are ordering hundreds-- tens of thousands of men, do know that there is a good chance that probably a third of them, 25% are not going to come back alive. how do you get those people to do that? i think gettysburg is one of those cataclysmic encounters, or during the napoleonic wars,
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world war ii. it was like there were naked out in the open and those people went, and they were going to die. so, there is a, a great tragedy to be told there, where vicksburg was lower. just as many people were probably killed in the battle of the expert as gettysburg. it just took them six or seven months longer. yes sir. [inaudible] >> grant had the benefit of one of three confederate couriers. >> i am having a little bit of trouble hearing you. >> you alluded to the battle of-- i read accounts were grant had the benefit of three confederate terriers stopping back in giving him the opportunity to read marching orders that were related to
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pemberton. i wonder if you might speak about the espionage might give affected this encounter and maybe other encounters in the civil war? >> i have breadstuff to that effect and i don't know that i can give it the credence of it is questionable. it is not in the official records that i can find, and that is what i based my stuff on, what they called the official record which is 128 volumes of doorstops size and it is what they collected as a labor of love from all of the army's, every scrap that was still left after the war. the united states government collected it in printed it in the general printing office, and you hear a lot of things. that may be true, i don't know, so i just kind of figure five don't know what, if i don't feel comfortable with it, there are
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many big toys out there. >> thanks to ted turner you are in my bedroom every other night. [laughter] it is true. i would like to know if you consider yourself more-- or more for skimp and you think like this arbitrary because of your last comments about 1863 that could have ended the war. [laughter] >> i am sorry, i did not quite understand. >> do you consider yourself-- or "forrest gump"? >> you know, when you write fiction, you are going to be all the characters all at once. you have to be. and, it is actually a very good question. i don't know, but i never
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thought of it that way. when you write a fictional character you are going to have to get into that person's skin and beat them for as long as they are talking. so, i don't know. i guess i would say lou tenet banned because her "forrest gump" was an idiot. [laughter] what time and we got? 9:00. some of these people are going to get left. one more good question. >> this is the first time i have never been to something like this and i am here because of you. your books, i love reading your books. the question i have is, you have written about so many different battles and different wars, so i have to assume you are a research junky of some kind.

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