educator, and most importantly a great person, drew gilpin faust. a few things about this evening. i don't think i have to tell anybody in this audience that doctor drew gilpin faust is the 28th president of the universi university. she's a very distinguished historian of the u.s. civil war in the american south and will be talking about her latest book which has just appeared. it's called "this republic of suffering: death and the american civil war." she's also the lincoln professor of history at harvard art and science. i will go into her background in a minute. except to say that this, we are very grateful to our friends at

c-span for being with us tonight so that her remarks can be covered by the entire country. thank you, c-span, and as always. [applause] >> in the remarks that she made at her installation as president -- that is a 5-dollar cambridge word for inauguration -- doctor faust said these investments have yields we cannot predict and measure. universities are stewards of living tradition. this resonated with me with my colleagues at the national archives in washington because we like to think the same of our institution. we are focused on educational issues at all levels and civic leadership issues at all levels as a key role in our mission to

serve the public. a little word on her background, doctor faust's background. she serves before her current post as the founding dean of the radcliffe institute for advanced studies from 2001 to 2007. she has been held in a number of other academic posts. university of pennsylvania and others, radcliffe, and she's written six books while -- well received. her other achievements, but i want to take a few minutes to talk about her as a person. she began her career in education and public service at the early age of nine. how? she wrote a letter to then-president dwight eisenhower

in 1957 expressing her deep opposition to racial segregati segregation. why should people feel that way because the color of one's skin? please mr. eisenhower, please try with other things except colored people. it's a very eloquent letter. she also has been a remarkable scholar at the very painful subject into that is the subject but she is talking about tonight, the subject of her books. she has come to terms as a scholar with the academic importance of death in american history.

she did say something in an article earlier that i would like to share with you. she said i found myself as a historian returning to the past and in particular to a document i encountered in my last year. this of course was john winters. in 1637 across the atlantic. he wrote a charter for the new beginnings and offered what he considered calling a compass to steer by a model but not a set of explicit orders. instead, he sought to focus on the broad significance of the project on disputed in which they should undertake their share of work. i am, she wrote, to offer such a compass today. one for us at harvard and one

that held meaning for all of us that care about higher education. for we are inevitably as when when barack urged them to be to work together as one. as she prepares to take the stage, let me say a word about the background that she had to deal with if i can find the word. it comes from another massachusetts scholar penny adams and from the wonderful education. adams said basically was that when lincoln and the others got to washington in 1886 in the war began, no one knew what to do.

they knew what the task was to be or when was headed for him. everyone without exception was to learn his business at the cost of the public. indianindeed, stewart and the os could be of no help to the young man seeking education. their education was to cost a million lives, not quite a million but close enough and $10 million more or less north and south before the country could recover its ballot and movement. the history of that tragic war and the deaths it caused was recounted in brilliant form by our current speaker as with great pleasure i invite the president of harvard university, doctor faust to join us. [applause]

>> thank you so much for that very generous introduction, professor weinstein and all of you for being here tonight. it's a great pleasure and honor for me to talk for the first time its publication yesterday about this book, because so much of the deep end at -- depends on materials i was able to use in the national archives. so it seems fitting and proper that i should return to the national archives to say what it all amounted to, all that helped by god, all that advice and wonderful comments and i want to begin by thinking t thanking twn particular. the first is mike who for many years presided over the civil war materials in the archives and got been launched on this project. and the second is trevor plante who is sitting over here who helped me when i was really trying to get this project done

to revisit some of the materials i've already seem to get the boothattogether into and return. if this about three summers ago. and he found a letter that no one had seen before. but then he was just trevor helping me out in the archives. so that is what makes it possible for historians to do history. and what the national archives has within it also makes it possible for historians to do history and for us to think about what the past means to us. what i would like to do tonight is to tell you a little bit about how i came to write the book, the questions that motivated me. then to tell you a little bit about some of the answers that i found it to those questions. and then i want to leave you with two stories, two stories about individuals. stories that as far as i am aware have never been told before. and stories that live here in the treasures of the national archives. stories that i found within the materials i used when i was

doing my research here. they are stories of individuals that stories that illustrate much larger scenes about the work. and so i think we can see reflected in some individual lives much bigger current of life and death and the civil war in america. the idea for this book grew out of earlier work that i have done researching the experience of white southern women in the civil war south. and as i read their diaries and letters and many of those letters were in fact here in the national archives so this is not the first project that i have turned to the national archives to support. many of these letters from white southern women are in the papers of the confederate secretary of war. women would write to the confederate secretary of war mac elite -- war and ask that their

sons would be detailed home and be permitted to help in other ways. and as a comment in those letters there is a very rich wondering if some of the demands and challenges and trauma of the war. that made up the bulk of my research for my earlier book i began to realize that at the heart of these women's experience was death. the loss of their loved ones, the fear of losing their loved ones, the economic consequences of losing their loved, and the impact of death on their families, on their communities and on the nation as a whole. and as i listen to the women telling me about these experiences, i thought about what i have learned reading the history of the civil war into a realized that most of what i had read focused on the pursuit of

the military victory, or perhaps the struggle over southern independent or perhaps on the coming of emancipation. but these were not the topics that appeared at the heart of these letters and of these women's experience. these were not the subjects that loomed the largest in their rendering of their own lives. and so, as i listened to these voices i began to think about what it was they were telling me, and about what the perception should be in for historians. 620,000 soldiers died in the american civil war. there are many ways of thinking about this. it's more than the total of the more metadata from the american revolution through the korean war. that is in comparison to the size of the population six times the rate of death in world war

ii. a similar rate of death today, 2%, would mean 6 million people dead. now, as i begin to think about what it would mean to have 6 million people killed by the war in the united states today, i begin to understand more fully like these women saw that the highlight of their experience. but military death, the 627,000 but has become the kind of accepted number when we talk about the death toll, military death is only a part of the story. there are uncounted numbers of civilians who also died in the civil war in ways that were undocumented from epidemic disease that was spread by movements of population or armies and other population movements as a result of the w war. death from their guerrilla conflict and food shortages and

from what today we might call collateral damage, families that live near battlefields, other sorts of instances of military action that had an impact on civilian lives. so that its proximity, it's actuality, to change scope it became the very most widely shared at the war experiences. for the americans both in the north and south, death was of the civil war they lived through. so i began to wonder given those realities, how did the nation cope with such a loss and how did the individuals themselves cope with such loss? and as i thought about this question i realized it had a variety of levels on which of the considered. from the very most logistical

ones what on earth did they do with all those bodies? how were they prepared or how did they make themselves prepared to deal with that level of carnage. i wondered about the psychological impact of these deaths. and how they understand the meaning of humanity in the face of such destruction. i begin to wonder about the spiritual impact of such slaughter and such death. a poet, confederate soldier and a poet framed this eloquently, i think. he said how does god have the heart to allow it? he represented those that begin to ask questions about the benevolence of god, about the responsiveness in a world where such horror could take place. and then i asked about the political meaning of this level

of sacrifice. how does such loss shape the identity and the responsibilities of a nationstate that has been the cause of the sacrificed and the loss? americans often wrote about what they called the work of death and the phrase itself seemed frightening to me as i thought again and again in the materials that i was reading. and more americans meant to different but closely related things by this. they mentioned the duties of soldiers to fight and kill and die. that was the work of the soldiers and what they were supposed to be doing. but when they talk about the work of death, it also meant of course the impact of the battles consequences. they would look at the aftermath of the battle is the deadline and across the field and they would say they are lies the work of death, there is the work of

death. so work as a concept of a word and is a term incorporated in their mind the notion of both effort and of impact and the relationship between these. the death and war doesn't just happen. it requires action and it requires agents and it requires a variety of kinds of work. this book is about the work that's required of all civil war americans. they have to learn to die, they have to learn to kill and to bury the dead and to cope with the loss of loved ones introduced into the fabric of family and community. they have to mourn and they havd to explain to themselves the meaning of the devastation that

they faced. and then they have to work to figure out the best ways to remember what he had lost. now, this work involved americans individually as they dealt with their own bereavement, but it also involved them collectively as they called her to the meaning more generally. now, let me elaborate on some of the dimension of that work of death. and let me begin with the grim logistical ones, what to do with the bodies. the unexpected and escalating level of destruction that the civil war introduced posed challenges of capacity that produced even broader challenges of value. in the mexican war there is an estimated total of 2,000 battle deaths. the first bull run in the summer of 1861 shocked the nation with

900 killed, and a 2700 wounded. by the battl battle of shiloh il of 1862, yet less than a year later, there were 24,000 casualties including 1700 on each side. the army alone had a 23,000 casualties that included approximately 3,000 killed. it has been said that after gettysburg there was an estimated 6 million pounds of animal and human flesh to be disposed of on the battlefield. when you read about civil war battles and their aftermath, you find a trove that appears again and again. the soldiers right about being able to walk from one side of the battlefield to the other without ever stepping on the ground. stepping on the on the dead bodies that were strewn across

the field. one soldier wrote it paved the earth. there was no regular burial detail. they had no graves registration unit. they had no dog tags or other formal identification procedur procedures. there was no formal next of kin notification and they were very rudimentary services. and the union army, for example there was no regular ambulance service until towards the end of the 1864. so, that's burial was an act of improvisation. the notion of to the victor belongs the spoils was often the reality of civil war battles. the victor would be the one who held the ground. the victor therefore had to grae ground that was so strewn with the casualties of the war and so it became somehow the responsibility of that army to

figure out what to do with those that have died in the battle. a week after antietam a union surgeon reported, and i quote, the dead were almost wholly unmarried and best in arising from it such as debris. the descriptions that often it took days for the dead to be endured. armies would be reeling with shock on the terrible experience of the battle itself to get themselves organized to figure out who is going to bury the dead. it took time and attention that often they didn't have and it took a kind of focus that the soldiers needed in the aftermath of the battle did not often display. it was often quite a lengthy period in our terms that occurred between when a soldier died and when he was buried.

american soldiers north and south related to mass burials usually for the enemy into trenches and sometimes in other improvised ways as well. there is a story of antietam just throwing graves down the farmers well because he had evacuated and wasn't investing in his properties of a kind of desperate unit union trying to get rid of bodies thrown down as well. it is often the case that units that haven't been in the battle were assigned to burial duties. often prisoners of war were given the duty. it is the way of demanding them and am forcing them to confront the often horrible and almost horrible work of burying the dead. at the same time, civilians were usually swarming onto the battlefield to look for with -- look for loved ones and also civilian swarmed the title field

out of curiosity. there was a sense that the battle was a sublime event, that it was a historic event. and gawkers came to see what that meant. often they were horrified by what they saw and they fled from it. but nevertheless, soldiers often commented how having those civilians around just made the realities of dealing with the aftermath of battle all the more difficult. the desperate kinds of measures to which they turned to bury the dead, throwing them into pits like dead chickens as one soldier described in. if lead individuals to become what they had come to. what did this mean about decent burial as a concept to which human beings should be dedicated. what did it mean about their religious obligations and their obligations to their fellow soldiers as well?

so you find really in the face of these terrible realities the emergence of an effort on the part of tens of thousands of individuals to resist this dehumanization that the convention of the mass slaughters in the civil war have introduced. soldiers would try to identify their comrades to record their burial places, to write to their loved ones and tell them the fate of their husbands, brothers and sons. to improvise ways of enduring individuals so that leader perhaps a family member could come back and find the body and recognize it. there are examples of soldiers that would be buried with a bottle into which their comrades had put on a piece of paper their name and any identifying information. and the hope was that eventually

somebody might come back and disinterred soldier &-and-sign the bottle and know who that individual was. soldiers often took very detailed notes about where their closest comrades were buried and they would write down information like an individual was buried underneath an apple tree 100 yards east of the railroad tracks 3 miles out of such and such a town. once again they hoped that loved ones like after the war be able to come back and reclaim the body. families with means tried to, or arrange for and identified the bodies and orange for them to be shipped home. this is the era in which an and -- embalming becomes. individuals diene away from home and under dubious conditions.

families both wanted their loved ones back just to have them in their midst but also to be sure it really was their loved one that had died. soldiers also by the middle of the war began to purchase id badges and a small industry of creating these id badges and you can find advertisements for them as the civil war publications. but the soldiers didn't have to have a purchased badge. they found other ways of making sure they could be identified. writing information about themselves and their addresses on the bible or a testament that they carried with them. one of soldiers have i made sure to carry an envelope with me so that my name would be on that envelope and i could be identified if i was killed. and then there are the legends of the soldiers before engagements that the expert to be especially bloody penning their names onto their uniforms writing their names on pieces of

paper and pinning them onto their uniforms. i was very moved to find in the archives of the law school at harvard a piece of paper that oliver wendell holmes wrote his name on after he was injured early in the war. he feared that he might become unconscious and no one would know who he was. sas a heroso she wrote i'm olivl holmes and he wrote his father's name and address and interestingly oliver wendell holmes kept this piece of paper his entire life which is why it ended up in the harvard archives. but it's a magnificent testimony goes to thboth to the meaningfut holmes attributed to having undertaken to identify himself. but also to the desperation that required someone to turn to a measure like that to make sure that he didn't die nameless and without a sure knowledge being imparted to his family.

another way in which soldiers and civilians together begin to work for the assurance of humanity and death in the midst of the war was the creation of cemeteries by the federal government in the course of the war back. gettysburg is one that is probably best known. there were four others elected and established that battle sites. this was the acknowledgment of something new was that the death were not simply the responsibility of their families. also, the responsibility of the nation for which they died. and when you think about the measures that i listed of a few minutes ago, no next of kin notification, no burial units and so forth, you can see that there was a death sentence on the part of the nation at the

beginning of the war and yet it begins to emerge and establishes itself most visibly during the war in the creation of these cemeteries. and yet, still about half of the civil war were never identified. this created in the words of one resident of gettysburg a dreaded devoid of uncertainty for the kin they left behind. there were errors in information and them that were reported today that walked in the front doors of their houses. there were also wives, mothers and children who wondered for the rest of their lives about a family member who never came home. jean michel received a letter after gettysburg from a soldier who described burying a corpse wrapped in a blanket with her son's name pinned but she never saw the body and she was never

convinced it was her son. she wrote i would like to find that grave. it was years i gave up the hope that he would someday appear. i got it into my head that he would make it back to me. this i knew was very silly of me, but i hope whether they are nevertheless. the absence of identifiable bodies left many americans with abiding uncertainty and fantastical hope. illusions that in some measure made their world and durable. as we think about civilians and about their work as mourners, it's important to remember how many of the bereaved didn't have a knowledge about the fate of a loved one. we often talk today about closure. any sort of closure was elusive

for tens of thousands who had no certain knowledge about the outcome of the lives of their lost soldiers. morninmourning is in considerabe measure accepting the reality of death and loss, of coming through a process that enables one to come to terms with the reality of a life and it's very hard to do that when the reality that you are supposed to confront is so uncertain. historians are interested in change. and historians usually find change occurring over decades or even centuries. one of the reason is that it is so compelling is that it accelerates change. not just change in national boundaries or political regimes that change in the fundamental values and assumptions.

a change in aspects of human experience that are not so susceptible to rapid shifts or alterations. we can see in the civil war perko both powerful continuities and significant changes and many assumptions about death and we can see very dramatic shifts in the official policies toward the dead. there appeared a new sense of national obligation to the citizens who have died in the nation's service. sacrifice and the states became inextricably intertwined. citizen soldiers, snatched from life generated obligations for a nation that was defining its purposes and its policy through military struggle. a war that was about a union, citizenship, freedom and human dignity required that the government attempt to the needs of those who died in its

service. execution of these newly recognized responsibilities would prove an important vehicle for the expansion of federal power that transformed the postwar nation. the establishment of the national cemeteries and the emergence of the new civil war pension system to care for the dead and their survivors yielded programs of the scale and reach that was unimaginable before the war. death created the modern american union not just by ensuring national survival that by shaping national structures and commitment. the postwar efforts to secure respectful treatment of the dead come a commitment that the urgency had not committed that have postponed seem inseparable from the principles which the war had been fought. writing in harper's magazine framed it this way.

he said a democratic republic like ours based on the equality of the race and a firming justice for all cannot afford to pass by unheeded however humble those that have proven themselves by fierce and steady warfare at once its best citizens and brave defenders. between 1865 and 1871, there was a massive federal reburial program. they scoured the southern countryside looking on battlefields, roads, villages in search of every union soldier's grave. ultimately, they located and we buried more than 300,000. they made every effort to identify these bodies as they buried them and they succeeded in doing so with 54 percent of the total. they created in the course of

the 74 new national cemeteries. the scale of the effort and its location in the federal government, not in the states or localities would have been unthinkable before the war. it was meant to be an affirmation of the values of humanity that in the war itself had been more often honored in the breach than the observance. now this program was only for union soldiers and that was not presented by white southerners. under the lead of the southern women, another voluntary effort for the south was undertaken. the scale of this effort is remarkable in many ways, too because itobecause it was a pri. just to give you an example in the petersburg virginia 30,000 dead confederates were gathered

into the cemetery. when you think that the population of petersburg was 18,000, the cemetery was larger than the city's population before the war. the cemeteries were unlike any cemeteries americans have ever seen. they were not churchyards with clusters. they were not guarding the cemeteries meant to inspire you with elevated thoughts about nature and religion and death. instead, they were ordered rows of tombstones almost like soldiers gathered information. and many of them without name. now, let me tell you the two stories that i mentioned at the outset. the first is a story that is illustrative of the power and longevity of hope those. it's the story of a dead union

soldier with a face without a name and it's a story that lives in a box and consolidated correspondence semester genital intimacy of talks that the first day i arrived i was interested in the subject. in 1868 the u.s. master general decided to publish in northern magazines the drawing of a soldier that had died unidentified in a washington military hospital in 1864. the man had arrived in the hospital too late to give any information about himself and he would have been very quickly forgotten if he happened had one on this person the considerable trouble about $360. so, the surgeon on duty in the hospital arranged to have a photograph after his death into the likeness was copied at the behest of the war department. the war department had this

published in a number of periodicals made from the photograph and engraving and the announcements about the soldier also mentioned that he had left not just the money that a type of a young child. letters streamed in from the office. some of the letters may indeed have been from the fortune hunters but when you read the letter the majority displays such poignant desperation it's very difficult to doubt their sincerity. mrs. jenn jennie mcconkey of ils brick at last the utility and suggested the man might be her son who she had heard from in 1862 there was hard to explain the photograph as her son had been childless but he liked children very much so maybe he would have carried this photograph around. a woman in pennsylvania whose husband had left at a prison of

andersonville was in a constant anxiety and she hoped very much to see whether this child would have been someone associated with her. martha wrote that she had been told her husband was shot while he was being transferred from one prison camp to another but she wrote that may not be true. mistakes so often in her. she was encouraged by the picture of her little child because they have assigned who is between three to four years old and he carried a picture for sushi and 50 cents and asked him to please send a copy of the photograph but her 50 cents was returned because the child in the picture wasn't wearing plaid pants. the mysterious soldier was never identified. but he had been a catalyst for

an outpouring from women who represented the many thousands not just of their loved ones but of the kind of information that might enable them to truly born. i think that it's chilling to note the hope that inflicts these letters because what they were hoping for was not a wise husband or son. they were hoping for a dead one to be a relief. they get past the moment for the actual living person had been possible. it was in some information as much as individuals that was missing in civil war america. now, the second story is of a man who perhaps a decade at the end of the war devoted himself to try to end incapacitating uncertainty for tens of thousands of families.

i first encountered him as the unmanned offer of a document called the journey through georgia which located the scattered graves of union soldiers in record group 92 which i think is my favorite. i learned later through my research that this journal was the work of edmund whitman who was a wartime master whose effort locating bodies across the theater became critical in the evolution of the reburial program ended the discovery of more than 100,000 who were relocated. how she undertook this task and has procedures for gathering information for locating graves and discovering identities. he described the enormous hostility of white southerners to these efforts to honor the

union dead. he also described the support of black southerners any of them had been pending union graves and burying northern soldiers throughout the war of no small pair out of their own safety. they held a stewardship and the account of which must be rendered to the spirit of humanity of christian patriotism to the human freedom and progress throughout the world. he saw the undertaking as a kind of secret act honorin sacred ace that sacrificed their lives. as i became more and more interested i began to try to figure out who edmund whitman was. it turns out he went to harvard. he graduated in 1838. he was a schoolteacher and was an abolitionist. he migrated to kansas to combat

slavery in kansas when the state of kansas was in question. he was closely in line with john brown and then he became a quartermaster at the outset of the war back. he regarded his administrations as a fulfillment of an obligation to those who fall on behalf for which he had struggled for so long. edmund whitman was a survivor of the war, but his life was indelibly shaped by his experience. the writer and soldier said that after the war he saw pennsylvania sentenced to life. looking back on the war from the confederacy said that for most of his generation in the south, lights and the war was as he described it pretty much the whole of life has been not

dying. we are all civil war survivors because we all inherited its legacy. i would like to close by reading the two final paragraphs of the book which i think make this point about why we are not all the survivors of this war. we still live in a world of death, the civil war created. we take for granted the obligation of the state to account for the lives of claims in its service. the absence of the next of kin notification of the above registration procedures of official provisions for decent burial all seem to us unimaginable and barbaric. it ended this neglect and established policies that led to today's commitment to identify and return every soldier killed in the line of duty. but even as the civil war

brought new humanities in the management of death, so to introduce a level of carnage that foreshadowed the war of the century to come. so those individuals threatened to disappear into the bureaucracy of the mass slaughter of modern warfare. we still struggle to understand how to preserve our humanity and ourselves within such a world. we still seek to use our death to create meaning where we are not sure any exists. the civil war still defines us. the sense that it is the only end. we still work to live with the civil war dead and the survivors alike have to solve so long ago. thank you very much. [applause]

>> it's time to answer some questions. we have microphones on both sides. if you would like to ask a question, please go to a microphone. >> in the opinion of president faust cummock could it have been prevented by the statesmanship in the 1850s with the remedy of emancipation, compensation, given that the economies of some of the yankee states were deeply implicated in the slavery? [laughter]

spinnaker as a whole historiographical literature about was the civil war presentable. can i wonder? i have a microphone. there is a literature about was the civil war presentableto the conflict, and it's something i have to study for my phd exams. it's too elaborate to really go into but one of the things i found is that i've always been troubled by counterfactual questions. go back and redo it over again and see how it would have turned out. i am much more interested in how it did turn out and what the very choices were and how people saw their decisions. whether or not we have had a war i think you can take it out of the moment of decision making on the eve of fort sumter said it is a question that we would have to go through piece by piece.

you raised a number of issues that could have gone one way or another that might have had a different set of influences. and it's just i think more than we can bite off here tonight. thank you very much. >> there's a question there. >> the papers to print lists of casualties and if so, how was that information gleamed and disseminated quite. >> the casualty list was itself an improvisation. and you can find individuals saying that the chaplains and the list? he didn't do it so maybe the captain will do it and then there were agents who came down and saw the representatives of the voluntary organizations to try to put together the casualty list. there were also many casualty lists here in the national archives. but you can find that they were often compiled well after the battles themselves and were incomplete and inaccurate and

were not necessarily the basis for the ones that were printed in the newspapers. so, there was a attempted this to the bureaucracy of the mass warfare. it's a wonderful quote from thomas as he undertook a project at the end of the war to count the massachusetts dead of the war and he talks about the people that were good at the red tape didn't understand military matters and the people that understood military matters didn't understand red tape. and so the reporting of the casualties and other statistics work on something and were difficult to determine the accuracy of. >> madam president, harvard college class of 74. i salute the very first southern civil war historian president, and that meet it absolutely irresistible to ask you how as

president do you feel the civil war is the only major american conflict whose harvard graduates on the losing side are not yet remembered in any sort of memorial on the camp is? [laughter] >> you will find i don't talk about that explicitly, but the arguments that have occurred over whether or not to argue the confederate are arguments that have their origins in the very aftermath of the civil war itself. and you find someone like the writer he is a poet: that he writes about how they should honor the brave. and i have no hostility to the confederate dead and we all need to understand someone who cannot forgive and forget is a person who is not himself and under a

person. on the other side, you have frederick douglass saying it matters what you fought for and death does not erase those differences. and i knew about the conflict that harbor and so forth about whether the southern dead should be included in the memorial hall. but when i was doing the research on the project i was so struck by those arguments taking place that more than a century earlier. i think it would be interesting to have a discussion on those in a historical way to see about the relevance of their question that has been very much in my consciousness. thank you for asking. >> i would like to see that all harvard historians, northern and southern are working at the national archives. [laughter] yes clacks.

>> the colonel mentioned harvard does have a number of institutions that were brought about as memorials to the civil war. not just in memorial hall but also in the soldier's field and within the institutions in the e university and other memorials. how did the smaller institutions, be they municipalities for organizations like the universities, th the re for the war daddy, and is there a split between the north and south was it so cataclysmic for both sides that there wasn't the option to be for the union or thunion orthe confederacy in yor memorial? >> i think we should remember that the loss of the south proportionately was so much greater. economics in terms of individuals and so forth. the south was reeling after the war so it was hard to come up with the funds to build the memorial that the north could

better afford. you can see in the reburial movement where the richmond as they call themselves are trying to come up with headstones, or appropriate digging up the head boards and so forth so it is a much more difficult challenge in the south where people are so strapped financially and otherwise. but there are not commonly shared memorials. there is a kind of soldiers memorial that you could find north and south in the small towns. there was a manufacturer who did the kind of generic soldier and then adapted it for the region to which it was going. and i think that the effort to name is a very important part of both sections. we think about perhaps the vietnam memorial and the impact of the naming of names had. and yet, the naming of names in

my view begins with the civil cl war memorialization of the war and the recognition of the importance of the individual that is embodied in that. and that was very much shared north and south. so there are differences. >> deborah, radcliffe 67. >> when it was still radcliffe. [applause] [laughter] kind of a complicated question, but when i heard about your work i was wondering why did the death and the civil war have such an impact? we are already in a society where people die young of diseases. i guess my question is if the civil war had happened in the middle of -- in the middle of the 18th century or earlier than that with when a lot of peopled from other things, whether that level of death creates the kind of a end where it wasn't so

awful and then it was awful again in 1865? if my question isn't making any sense of -- >> partly it is the demographic realities that you're asking about. and then there is the nature of the death. similar americans used a lot of words to say this death is different. they talked about ordinary death before the civil war. they talked about death peculiar conditions of the civil war period. how is it different? in the 19th century, individuals were under threat of survival when they were small. when they were infants. but if they got through the earliest years of their life, they were likely to live through to middle age at least. and so, with individuals in their 20s, that was not a time o30s or young adult. those people were not supposed to die. then there's a statistics i quote in the book individuals

five times more likely to die if they went in the army tha then f they didn't. so he increased you are a young man from increased the likelihood of death very dramatically under the circumstances in the civil war. so, that seemed wrong to people. even though infant mortality still was quite high. and what we call the demographic transition has not -- didn't really occur until the end of the 19th century. the kind of longevity, the kind of early life survival doesn't happen until later. we nevertheless have patterns that are violated by the nature of the civil war death. the second part of what i would say is i think people were also horrified that human beings were doing this to each other. although most of the death of the civil war was the disease. they later became president of whom it was said that he never got overseen and who would die because of your.

what does it mean to be human and what are the conditions? it was the kind of death as well as the numbers and the departure from a good death that often was unidentified, anonymous and terrible. >> like you mentioned in your presentation i'm a former president of the abraham lincoln and to toot. here in washington we are about to get the treat of a brand-new open link in sight when the opened the cottage which we think of as the home where lincoln went to escape the misery of downtown washington. i raise it because people are now going to learn that when he

was out there he was right next to the cemetery. about 20 or 30 burials a day took place on that cemetery. i wonder if in your research you came across anything that dealing with their own perception of death because or just in general we all associate with a major speech he gave at gettysburg the cemetery was something that he lived next to every day during the warm months of the year. i think that we better go do some more research. thank you for giving me that. stomach we have four more people waiting to ask questions. if you would like to purchase one and have it autographed. what's the one with the next question. >> i'm from cambridge county.

you talked a lot about the impact i wonder if you can briefly addressed the impact because then those numbers also skyrocketed but as you said from disease and if the reaction to them was different or whether it was just sort of incorporated into this whole mess that was sort of taken place in people's minds. >> some civilian deaths seemed directly associated with the war, for example when the famous death of wade so she seems in some ways a casualty of the war like a soldier. other deaths are of children from epidemic disease, long street brought his children to richmond from one diseased environment into another where they were exposed to academics for the army camps near richmond. no one knew quite how to think of that battle.

was that just childhood disease, do you blame the war? i think it depends a little bit when we can look back and say there are these different kind of deaths that came as part of the war but it did seem to a general sense of loss and a vulnerability and a centrality of death and it was shared very broadly from the military deaf and civilian as well. that's a really interesting question. >> tom adams harbored 63. it was a very thought-provoking presentation into some of the questions. a question memorializing the word. i understand someone from georgetown and to this but when they built that it was a deliberate color scheme and not so much to honor the confederate soldiers as to emphasize the sort of take on that.

the question i wanted to ask was about the impact of this tremendous difference between north and south and i was so impressed i talking about the women of petersburg having to dig up all these bodies and bury them. talking about the veterans administration is kind of the founding of the welfare state or the forerunner of it and i just wondered in your view of a southern historian, does this experience impact on how differences between north and south and the whole attitude towards the government collects. >> it did not escape that this tremendous amount of energy and governmental capacity was being invested exclusively in the north. a contribution as you describe it for what the role of the state might be. but i think it had another impact as well, which is i think the efforts undertaken by the southern women to locate the dead and bury the dead and the ceremonies that went along with

those efforts became the source of the lost cause movement and contributed to the important ways of the ideology of continuing southern resistance and continuing southern nationalism and all that kind of ideas that got caught up in the lost cause movement. the statements made in the commemorations of the dead and the magnolia cemetery for example in the gettysburg dead are brought back. the women felt they could safely make. under the political conditions of the radical reconstruction for example. the girl walking through

gettysburg field have encountered a soldier that had been engaged before he went off to the war and said are you still searching for your fiancé. i have a lot of experience of stories of people who have. do you have any perspective on the phenomena? [laughter] >> i found his experiences in the late 90s in the national archives. ' bush. >> what were kept in the work camps such as andersonville? >> the andersonville story is a very interesting one because there was the union of prisoner who was charged during his imprisonment to record the gravestones and the burial, not the gravestones but the burial places of the dead. after the war he elected to be

known that he had copies which he wasn't supposed to do and he kept a record of it. so this came to clare barton who brought it to the attention of edwin on the secretary of the war. and he established a mission that included clare barton and others to go down to andersonville to see if they could use that list to identify the graves of andersonville. and they in fact did use the list is identified a very large percentage over 12,000 of the dead in an excursion in the summer of 1865 immediately after the war back. so once again, there was a kind of improvised way of turning up a very wide identification of the dead and andersonville. >> doctor faust, a couple more things before we close off the evening. first, i noticed a number of you indicated your harbored identities when you talked.

yay all of 67. [laughter] [applause] and this is a one-time offer to all of you out there that would like to ask a question. too late. [laughter] we have a wonderful essay by walt whitman on the death of abraham lincoln in which he says how long since the dark and chirping saturday 15 years be gone by hart has entertained the dream in which to give of abraham lincoln's death his own special memorial. etc. is that a bit of poetry, something in the state of human connection of all of this work that you've done wax. >> there's a lot of poetry, what is perhaps the best known and arguably the most powerful.

emily dickinson also wrote a very eloquently about this in the context of the war. it's been argued by some that she wasn't writing about the war. i completely disagree. but if you look at the kind of metaphors that she uses it is infused with guns and battles and so forth and so i found those very memorable as well. melville also wrote a book of poems about the civil war and i think that's the piece of poetry that i will try to quote accurately in response to your request is very closely related to the last words i read to you at the end of the book. melville talked about a ripple of death of which the slain offers are. and that has been very much in my mind always as i've thought about the ripple that we all face and those that have gone before us often.

[applause] this is a special presentation that i'm going to make to doctor faust and my two friends don't know about this but i wonder if tom were the turning of the board of the foundation of the national archives would join me on the stage please you will see why in his second. >> these are not originals. the letter to president eisenhower. >> my letter because it went to the president. it was preserved. [applause]

>> and to the master of the telegrams to lincoln, this is one that you perhaps would want to explain to people the significance? >> this was a message to the president of the united states, abraham lincoln to the senate of the united states dated february 29, 1864. he and a you can see as with all of lincoln's documented his handwritten on the head of the executive mansion in which he says i nominate ulysses s. grant as the service to the lieutenant general of the army of the united states. it was right to the point.

it is the first time that any individual who has commissioned a lieutenant general in the united states army since george washington and that is the linking document. then he had this great several months later in august of 64 when grant was down outside petersburg and was kind of worried about his relationship with his boss and he was being called butcher grant confederate troops were again marching northward and lincoln knew that there was an election coming up a few months later and he expected to lose. lincoln was going through some telegrams not addressed to him and the telegrams office of the war department. and he saw a message from grants to general, the army chief of staff complaining about this. and he said -- i'm sorry.

go ahead. grand steps up and responds and says i have seen your dispatch unwillingness to break the hold where you are. neither am i willing. hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choke as much as possible. abraham lincoln. [laughter] >> now, trevor -- this is a unique occasion because it is the discovery of the missing letter. [applause] in the surprises i wish that i wore a suit. you have to let me in on it next time. [laughter] urged this is just to put up quickly in the context it is after the victories in the 1863

in gettysburg and vicksburg. this is the day that lincoln is actually notified of the victory at vicksburg and what he does is quickly writes a note to the general who is the general in chief. july 7 of 63 he says major general, we have certain information on the fourth of july. now that the genera general can complete his work so gloriously promoted this far by the literal or the substantial the rebellion will be over. yours truly, abraham lincoln. >> they can wrap up and then believe that the war back will be over but the same day we know that he is expressing his thoughts on the matter and then the daily barrage of the telegrams saying