the day he died, the number assigned to me now and if mine are not blessed i want them blessed quick. if i can't ever go to the bathroom i won't go. i promise i won't go anywhere else . i'll stay behind these black gates. >> presidentialrecordings, find it wherever you get your podcasts . >> next it's book tvs monthly index program with author and historian allen guelzo. books include gettysburg, fateful lightning and robert e lee: a life. our biography of the civil war general who commanded the army innorthern virginia . >> allen guelzo, let's begin our conversation with your latest book. robert e lee: a life. who was he before the civil war, what was hisreputation ? >> robert e lee was best

known for some things. one n?was the fact that he was the son of a famous revolutionary war hero and that was the famed cavalry commander white horse harry lee. the one who served under washington and who coined fthat wonderful encomium of washington . first in war, first in peace. that was like horse harry. the other thing people would have known robert e lee four would have been his service in the mexican war and especially on the staff of winfield scott. scott's fabulous amphibious invasion, the beginning of veracruz and moving inland to mexico city. lee served in many respects as scott's eyes and ears, performing over and over again feet of reconnaissance for scott, so much so afterwards scott made the confession that for all the honors he had one in that

great campaign to mexico city almost all the credit belonged to robert e lee. those two things would have been what robert e lee would have been noted for before the civil war which taken together don't really do a lot to explain to us what we know about robert e lee once the civil war begins. >> host: will get into that in a minute but henry like horse harry was not a good father, is that correct? >> guest: he was a splendid cavalry commander, especially like horse carrying out light cavalry raids, doing post, all kinds of small jobs. he was very good at that. what as soon as the on revolution was over and he moved back into civilian life , everything went from bad to worse. he made investments in western virginia land that

were the equivalent of buying ski resorts inbangladesh . they all went to nothing. and bankrupted him. he also chose the wrong politics for virginia. for genia was the virginia of thomas jefferson.white horse harry lee was a federalist and in 1813 he was beaten within an inch of his life by a pro-jeffersonian mob in baltimore. and taking both of those together, like horse harry decided other climates were more for two wishes for him so he went to the west indies . he left when his son robert was six years old and robert never saw him again. and i think that is actually a major and traumatic moment in the life of robert e lee that stays with him for the rest of his days.

>> the other thing i wanted to mention from your first answer was you write in robert e lee a life that lead discovered a sense of shame at having been part of the mexican american war. >> guest: yes. for many americans who were part of the mexican war especially that invasion from veracruz to mexico city, the experience they had stayed with them all their lives. you can read many memoirs, officially civil war generals who got their start as civil war heroes who reflected back on it and remembered mexico as a land of enchanting beauty. someplace they always wanted to revisit. and alongside it was a sense of embarrassment that this war had taken place at all. for one thing, in the ethos

of the 19th century republics were not supposed to make war on republics. republics in some sense were supposed to make war at all. they would fight them defensively against aggressive imperial ventures from czars and kings and whatnot t. but the idea of the american public going to war with the mexican republic and beating up on it was a source of disconnect for many of these young americans and the longer they served on this war more than disconnect wait lyon them and robert e lee would finally come to the conclusion i'm ashamed of what we've done e. i'm ashamed at this war. we picked on mexico. we deliberately took advantage and he isn't the only one either. you can find curiously enough the same theme developed in ulysses grant's memoirs. so these two men who will in time almost become the again and again of the civil war had a similar experience and

that was a sense that the united states had done the hi wrong thing in invading mexico. that it was a larger stronger power beating up on a smaller weaker one which should have been as a sister republic encouraging instead of making the object of war. >>. >> host: you said he served under winfield scott, what was his role in the civil war ? >> by the time the civil war breaks out, winfield scott is really too old to take active command in the field. he is the general in chief of the united states army that point but he's really in no shape at his age to have taken taken active direction of the war. he sketched out a large scale strategic plan sometimes known as the anaconda plan for how the war should be conducted but he understood he was passed the time when

he could take active participation in the field. to that end the person he wanted to recommend as the person who should be the field commander for the armies that would suppress this secessionist rebellion was robert e lee. scott never forgot the service robert e lee had tended him during the mexican war and in the years between that war and the civil war, scott develops something of a surrogate father figure to robert lee. he assists in promoting members of the winning family, lee's sons a commission in the family because largely winfield scott arranges it so there's a close relationship this way but nothing more cruelly disappointed winfield scott

and when we came to visit him in mid april 1861 to tell him he was turned down the offer of command and that he would resign his commission in the united states army. it was said winfield scott took to his sofa weaving saying i never want to hear the name of robert elee again . that probably is what apocryphal but it does give you a sense first of all the relationship between the two but secondly the disappointment. that's not experienced when lee decided in fact not to take command another circumstance of scott my have wanted to exercise himself. >> host: allen guelzo, was robert e lee well known in the general public prior to the civil war? whether in the society pages s because of his wife. was there a will he want he back and forth in the press regarding his going to the confederacy ?

>> to a minor degree. robert e lee was not someone who enjoyed the public limelight. he did his level best to stay out of newspapers, to stay out of the columns of people who are writing social matters. he himself will only venture into public view very, very reluctantly. he simply dislikes it. it's something he has no taste for. and people often remark about lee that he struck them as a very aloof, very distant sort of figured. there's a famous passage in the diary of marriage has not , one of the great diaries of the civil war era. she numet lee for the first time before the war at the white silver springs in western virginia r. she met lee there because

that was where he took his wife. she married and was plagued by a joint arthritis and hot springs were a way of giving her some really from the difficulties posed by rheumatoid arthritis but marriage has not met lee there without introduction. she said this man on a beautiful horse came to join us. he looks so distinguished.i was sorry i didn't catch his name and she found out afterwards this was robert e lee . she said everything about him was so fine, perfection. no fault could be found in the man even if you hunted for one. this wasn't because is not admired, she likes lee's older brother cindy smith lee a lot better because smith lee was a very companionable, very fine man about town so not robert. has not said that anybody say

they know his mother? i doubt it. he looks so cold and quiet and grand. that was the image that robert lee chose to cultivate through his life. he did not like being in that public glare and for that reason any discussion that takes place about the possibilities of robert e lee's choice tends to occur only in his immediate environment where he was living in alexandria and in arlington and across the river from washington dc and in a few other places. it's not a matter of national discussion or national attention and largely because robert e lee doesn't want national discussion and attention of himself. >> host: back in march you were quoted in the princeton quarterly as saying if we wish to imperil the american experiment we can find you more sinister paths to that

peril then by forgetting, obscuring or debating who we were. i bring this up with all the memorials to robert e lee being removed and a lot of the confederate memorials being taken down. is that a mistake in your view? >> there's no easy answer for that and i have to confess for my own part i'm at sixes and sevens about this question of statues of robert e lee. i've seen statues not only of lee nmany other people taken down and on the one hand, speaking as a pennsylvania person i tell people look, i'm a yankee from yankee land. i'm the most unlikable unlikely of lee biographers but as such frankly i cannot fathom you put up statues to people who committed treason. we don't have any statues at

least none that i'm aware of on our revolutionary war battlefields to general how or two general cornwallis. we just don't happen there. in 1776 week tour down a statue of george iii in manhattan. so there's a certain sense in which i really can't measure why we do that. people like robert e lee raised their hand against the nation that they sworn an oath touphold . my father was a career united states army officer. he took that both. my son is an officer in the u.s. army, he took that both. even when i joined the national council for the humanities back in 2006 , i took the oath so it's not something i'm saying lightly and has not helped by the fact that when lee does make his decision to fight for the

confederacy what he's really doing is fighting for a cause that's wrapped around a defense of human slaveryand human trafficking . on the one hand, why should i feel anything except a sense of sympathy for the removal of relics like that that treally shouldn't be in any other place but the museum? if someone wanted to propose erecting a statue of robert e lee i would tell them as politely as i could to get lost . but that really hasn't been the whole story because what we've been talking about are not just statues of robert e lee, were talking about wholesale couplings, the facing of statues across the country and this includes statues of ulysses s grant, statues of frederick douglass , statues of abraham lincoln. here in my own hometown of philadelphia, someone defaced

a statue of a prominent .bolitionist figure what they thought they were doing i don't know but so much of this seems to be an act of irrational impulse. and when i see the overall picture of the removal and the toppling of statues this way, i begin to see how much of it gets done by irrational impulse. that's when i start to have hesitations and the anxiety that we're doing something a little less considerate, a little less logical than we think we're doing . back in 2017, when the charlottesville riot circled around a statue of robert e lee charlottesville, that was the moment whenrobert e lee almost became radioactive . and at that time i sat down with a former student of mine

, john rudy who is now in the national park service interpretive officer and we worked up what we call the decision tree c. because how do you deal with monuments and statues? there are moments and on the one hand you simply can't say because the statute is there is sacrosanct. that's not true. i remember 1956, on gary and revolutionaries fighting against the soviets was the first thing they do? they tear down a statue of joseph stalin. in 2003 when american forces arrived in baghdad one of the first things that happens is that karen down onan enormous statue of saddam hussein . i'm not any means trying to sit here and say i'm so sorry we don't have a statue of thjoseph stalin and saddam ouhussein . i think we're a better planet without them but how do we

arrive at decisions for people who are represented by statues that haven't been around for 150 years or 250 years or something like that ? there has to be something more of the process than i have seen in some of the latest wave of statute couplings and so we develop the decision tree. which basically says let's ask a series of questions. and depending on the answer to the first question we can move to the second, depending on the second we moved to the third and soforth . there's no guarantee in this decision tree, no guarantee of a result. it's not intended to produce a certain result what it is intended to produce is we have fought through this. we have looked at this logically. we have come to this conclusion as a result of a process and not just an impulse. if at the end of that process

we decide yes, this attitude should be overturned in fine, at least we've done it with a process. the thing i've been most concerned about and the thing which endangers our understanding is when we respond poorly to these memorials and these monuments purely of a quasi-irrational impulsiveness and that i think contains within it a real danger because not there's not a lot of difference between that kind of irrational impulse and the manager of the mob. and the behavior of the mob is exactly what democracy and democratic societies strive to put distance between. and necessarily so. i would rather air on the side of caution this way orat least on the side of process . what the result of the process might be, but at least we will have gone

through a process and i think the process is what is important the first line in your book about robert e lee is how you write the biography of someone who commits treason. how do you guard against her own? >> because i asked first of all what does the constitution say abouttreason ? how does the constitution define it? on the one hand it's pretty straightforward. the constitution says treason exists of making war against the united states and giving comfort to its enemies . i have some difficulty in looking at robert e lee and not seeing someone who did exactly those things. who made war against the united states and made four years war against the united states and certainly gave aid and comfort to its enemies. and simply on those terms alone, i cannot avoid the conclusion yes, robert e lee committed treason some will

say you're saying that because you're a yankee. no, i'm saying that because i'm reading the constitution for what it actually says. and i cannot avoid that conclusion. so i say this at the beginning because i want people to understand i am not coming to write a biography of robert e lee either to put a halo around his head or to put a knife at his back. i want to come to robert e lee as frankly and soberly as i can and the first and most reimportant question is a question about treason . and in some respects that closes the real challenge of writing this kind of biography not just about lee but how do you write the biography of someone who commits treason ? it's in some senses easy to write a biography of someone you can easily admire. in washington, a lincoln, a churchill.

but how do you deal with people whose lives are committed to things you find reprehensible? and yet you can't not write about them. you can't simply pretend they're not there. so how do you undertake the writing of what i call difficult biography? it's really what i set myself out ras this task to do in writing about robert e lee conscious of the fact that difficult biographies call for a different set of understandings and a different set of analytical tools then you might have in writing about lincoln about whom i've written a great deal but you have to write and come to writing about lincoln with a different set of understandings because his life is very different . >> host: allen guelzo is the oauthor of 12 books.

doctor, after appomattox was there an outcry from the public to jail robert e lee? >> yes, yes. and especially after the assassination of abraham lincoln. in the few days that transpired between lee's surrender of the army of northern virginia and wlincoln's murder , there was a sense that oh, the war is now coming down to its conclusion. we can be generous, openhanded and then comes the lincoln assassination and then it's like saying so this is what we get for being openhanded. this is what we get for being generous. the amount of these people the way they're asking us to deal with them. and there was a terrific backlash against the confederate leadership, against jefferson davis who at that point was still on the lamp. you wouldn't be apprehended until may 12 but all of this gets particularly directed that we.

calls the for something to be done about robert e lee and especially that takes the form of an indictment for treason that is entered by the federaldistrict courts in norfolk virginia . it's in norfolk virginia by the way largely because that's one of the few places in virginia where there is a federal court operating . remember the war has just concluded . there have been federal courts operating in virginia during the civil war. in federal courts yesbut not federal courts . so this indictment comes from the federal court of north. and lee along with some 33, 34 other confederate leaders is indicted by federal courts for treason. and the assumption is this is going to proceed to some kind of trial. that's of course is where the problems begin to accrue. looked at initially just in

terms of the fconstitution's definition of treason, we should have gone totrial . but there were some interesting tripwires in the way. one of them was the fact that at the surrender of appomattox, ulysses grant granted to lee and his entire army of northern virginia april. what did this mean? it meant and this is literally how it's put that none of those who surrendered appomattox will be called or molested by the federal government provided they go to theirhomes and only the loss peaceably . it's not entirely a get out of jail free card because if iyou violate the terms of the parole that all restraints are off the parole had been given by ulysses s grant and when grant gets window that, that the new president andrew johnson and his attorney general james c are toying

with the idea of pursuing robert e lee for treason, grant feels his own word, his own honor is being questioned and frequent frankly tells andrew johnson that if you persist with us i will resign as general of the army. well, that's the threat that andrew johnson could not accommodate. he had to back down in the face of that because no one stood higher in the estimate of the north at that moment then ulysses grant so that was one problem which hats off the idea of a trialch. the other idea is all through the war a lot of questions about dealing with civil liberties have been handledby military tribunals . this sounds like wonton all day but it should because the same logic governs those

cases as governed a lot of those at the end of the civil juwar. the chief justice of the united states supreme court summoned chase could not apply the idea there was a parallel jurisdiction to a federal civilian jurisdiction in terms of the federal courts . the idea there were military tribunals operating in virginia was an.so he made it clear he would refuse to participate in any federal trial of robert e lee while there was still military tribunals operatingin virginia . >> ..

lee is anxious this trial may go forward and if it goes forward and he could be in b serious danger and it's not until that amnesty comes down but he feels the crowd has in large measure passed over his

head but he takes it seriously and it worries him and he'll make comments like a lot of myus old friends don't want to be seen around me because i'm just how seen as a drag, they'd be embarrassed to be seen with me. that weighed on him and it weighed on him heavily so the child doesn't actually happen, nevertheless it could have and what the result would have been, we don't know. >> did grant an lee that any relationship afteron the war. >> not really. >> in the immediate aftermath of of that surrender, we will express a great deal of attitude to print raising that parole on his attitude dealing with these army as time goes by any kind of relationship might have been forged between the two, grant invites lee through the white

house 1869 but the interview lasted only about 15 minutes and it's very polite, i don't want to say frosty but it's not fellow met, grant was hoping he could enlist lee and release reputation in support of this initiative of reconstruction but we showed no enthusiasm so they never and there is a coldness would way. people pressed lee in 1870, his opinion the greatest union general was that during the war, these will not grant responses george mcclellan and if that doesn't apprise you nothing

about the civil war will apprise you. i should say the grant return the favor he was doing his around the world to her, the new york journalist john cost the company greatest confederate general francis response with josephine johnston which is even more surprising that there was this grant was a tit-for-tat, you're going to disrespect me find this respect you so what could have been an interesting relationship between these two former opponents never developed in that link and if anything in 1868 and nine, will lend his influence more to people who are challenging politically than otherwisese.

>> we could spend this entire twobe hours talking about robere lee and his life and all that goes into that but we want to talk about your other books by robert lee, your previous book was reconstruction, history that came out in 2018. from that book, even taken by the government the war and reconstruction work deployed less with a view toward getting the state to centralized authority and more for them back to government were southern blacks. >> yes, i said that in 2018 and haven't seen anything since but inclines to change that, what we

hope to optimistically was the world would teach them lessons that change political mind and the blood and treasure expended in the eradication of slavery would open up the ability not only for reunification north and south reconstitution in the image of the north and that did not happen and it did not happen i think in large part because i didn't know how to go about doing this thing called reconstruction, there was titled reconstruction for dummies to give you a step-by-step thing called reconstruction and

improvisations, not all of them terribly well thought out, some inspired too much a lot of inspired by plumbers. so that is the first thing we did not know what it was we were doing, we were fumbling. the second thing that t emerges, in the fumbling, he gives opportunity for the old leadership to once again political, and as they do, to get black southerners status they enjoyed before the civil war in other words, to slavery without actually using the term

and southern states jim crow, segregation i think especially 1898 north carolina rise are people the south and we can only look back on that why didn't we take reconstruction more serious? grant looked on 20 and said great mistake of reconstruction was that we did not impose a military occupation and impose military occupation that lasts sufficiently long time to raise up an entire, we are to fast in

some cases, too optimistic and a lot of cases we just didn't want to spend the time or money because military occupation in the south, even at the height of reconstruction, united states military forces used in reconstruction in the south never amounted to 20000 troops. we deployed 3 million union soldiers during the civil war to the task of reconstruction thousand. ime. we would have done something much more serious, something along the lines of world war ii with the marshal plan in europe with the occupation of imperial japan. we we basically really constructive societies from the bottom up in a democratic image.

we did not do that 85 and i think country we continue to pay serious price for that. we learned our lesson in 19 and yet subsequent evidence that reconstruction have not shown the learning suffer from wanting to take military action or diplomatic actions and have them produce a response and wash hands and walk away and don't pay bills. perhaps before we got what was m going to be required was more intensive, requiring a great deal more from our society we

have been willing to give and it's something that in mind, imposed by reconstruction offers dan interesting lesson and was sometimes called nationbuildingd in reconstruction we did pretty poor job of it and many people have results. >> how broken and. >> probably the impact of the war was worse than the great question, there had been big ways of military destruction parts of the south. one thing especially in this case of georgia all caps construction in georgia by general sherman and has been grossly exaggerated, people who

read his memoirs wrong with the sherman took a tour do everything, that's not really the case they were going so by the laws of capitol invested capitol investment in farm implement and animals from thema cells losses mounted to the sky as i've seen $13 million $1865. yet the south could have recovered more quickly than if it committed itself trying to

create semi- slaves system. in a sense, the great punishment south suffers and reconstruction is not unique occupation, contrast, the real punishment south suffers is self administered as the southt decides what it really wants is to walk away from industrial capitalism, to walk with from the 19th century economy and return to what it had been before w, a semi- futile take te south became its own enemy in reconstruction. guelzo, you mentioned were you born in yokahama, japan to army officer

and then master's and then history aspect, at what point in your life were -- do you find yourself fascinated by this era? >> oh. [laughter] >> i think i was always fascinated by it or at least fascinated as one can be and be conscious. i can remember when i was probably not more than 5 year's old badgering my mother to buy a comic book version of the red badge of courage in the old classic illustrator series and, of course, introduces to a story about the civil war and that particular comic book happened a 16-page insert as a quick comic book history of the civil war and i say comic book, we are thinking of superman and all kinds of silly stuff, the classic illustrator series was a

serious piece of work and this badge of courage was a serious piece of work and it fascinated me. it sent me to my grandmother who as a young girl at the turn to have last century and schools in philadelphia had written on decoration day which is what they call memorial day then and written old veterans of the grand army of the republic, old union veterans, little blue jackets and blue caps and they would come to the schools like my grandmother's school, the george clymer school and they would talk to the children about the real meaning of the civil war and for them the real meaning of a civil war was not what those johnny reds are trying to teach you. it was about the end of slavery, it was about the preservation of new england and that was the understanding of the war that you might say i got at my grandmother's knee and that i

grew up with. so in my case, i never grew up with robert e. lee having an ara around his head. many other writers of lee wrote as southerners i think particularly here, they wrote about lee as promoting the myth of the lost cause and i grew up understanding the lost cause and the real story of the civil war really belonged to lincoln and emancipation and the preservation of the union but i acquired early on and it has stayed with me and, well, as you can see i'm still talking about it. >> and we will show our viewers some of your lincoln books here in just a minute but wanted to welcome you to our in-depth program for january, allen guelzo, historian, civil war historian is our guest. we want to hear from you as

well. you have a chance to talk to him, make questions, ask questions, here is how you do so, numbers 748, 8200 in east and central time zones, 748-8201 in mountain and pacific time zones and you can send a text this number, text messages onlies, (202)748-8903. please include first name and your city if you would if you do send a text question. and you can also contact us via social media. just remember@booktv is our handle for twitter, facebook, et cetera. you can start making comments, start dialing in. we will get to your calls for allen guelzo in just a few minutes. his first book came out in 1989, theological debate for the union of evangelical christiandome

came out in 1984, abraham lincoln redeemer president and lincoln emancipation proclamation and abraham lincoln, man of ideas, 2009, lincoln a short introduction, 2009 as well. then a look at the civil war and reconstruction in fateful lighting followed by gettysburg, the last invasion is how allen guelzo looks at the book in 2013, are redeeming the great emancipator in 2016, reconstruction of concise history came out in 2018 and his most recent from a different point of view robert e. lee, a life. if we could allen guelzo, let's go to the year of 1863 which kicked off with the emancipation

proclamation very tumultuous year in the nation's history but i want to quote from your book redeeming the great emancipator, quote, the emancipation proclamation which was delivered on january 1st, 1863 is surely the unhappiest of all of abraham lincoln's great presidential papers. that was the one that jumped out to me. [laughter] >> that was a deliberate and provocative strategy on my part. and i say unhappiest basically because while we learned the gettysburg, people memorize the gettysburg address which is 272 words and we add ore the second inaugural especially the

eloquent conclusion, charity for all, who can disagree with the beauty of that. then we come to emancipation proclamation, the first word of the emancipation proclamation just puts us off because the first word is whereas. whoever thought of beginning a great document, a great state document with the word whereas because it sounds so legalistic, well, yeah, it is legalistic. in fact, that is one of the problems that people have with the emancipation proclamation that it is -- the language of it is -- is very legal and no one less than carl marks made the observation that the emancipation proclamation reads like a summons sent by one county courthouse lawyer to

another and, indeed, it is that way. it is very technical. it is very legal in its atmosphere and people look at this and scratch their heads and say why. here is the man capable of writing the gettysburg address and perhaps the greatest deed of his administration maybe the single greatest deed of any american president, suddenly dropped back into professional legal listening and then led a number of people to draw the conclusion because he didn't really mean it. his heart really wasn't in it. if his heart had been in emancipation, he could have produced something equally eloquent as the gettysburg address or the second inaugural. and this is what led in 1948 to make memorial comment, probably the comment most and what was

the absence of eloquence and another reason that people are unhappy with the emancipation prochannellation that it's dated january 1st, 1863. why department as soon as the civil war begin. why didn't lincoln pick up his pen and write an emancipation proclamation in 1861. what is he waiting for? nothing happens. suddenly 1863, he decides he's going to issue to emancipation

proclamation. he was trying to evoke more response from the north in support of the war. the emancipation proclamation isn't really a noble gesture at all, it's a work of political strategy. and then the others critique the proclamation because they don't believe he goes far enough. reservations and exclusions, the proclamation will free slaves in the states and then lincoln goes onto explain, border states, missouri, delaware, kentucky and also won't touch slaves in

places in virginia that are occupied by military -- union military forces or in louisiana occupied by military force. these are exceptions. what's going on here? is he going to free the slaves, just free the slaves but instead you get this bill of exceptions. again, people scratch their heads and say, this can't be for real. this can't represent this kindness moral gesture on the part of abraham lincoln and this is a criticism of that sort, have multiplied over the years to a point where, yes, this is why i say that lincoln's emancipation proclamation is unhappiest document because so many people scratched their heads and can't figure out what's going on and in many cases draw the worst possible conclusion. well, let me dispel some of that as quickly as i can. first of all, yes, the emancipation proclamation is legalistic. legalistic in ways the

gettysburg address is not, you know why? because the gettysburg address is simply the dedication remarks that lincoln composed for dedicating a cemetery at gettysburg. you can't take the gettysburg address and do anything with it. the state trooper pulls you over on the turnpike for exceeding the speed limit, you cannot quote the gettysburg address to him. this emancipation proclamation is different. changes the legal status of approximately 3 million human beings and it sounds legalistic because it has legal work to do. this is a document that can be taken to court and had effect. so, yes, is it legalistic, very legalistic, why, it has legal heavy lifting to do. why and this is connected to it, why then at the same time is the emancipation proclamation full

of exceptions? well, largely because lincoln issues emancipation proclamation and says right at the beginning of the proclamation, on the strength of role as commander in chief of the armed forces of the united states. in other words, he's exercising his war powers. you can't exercise war powers against the border states which were loyal to the union. they were not at war with the united states. they had remained within the union. they were states, four states that still legalized slavery but they were not at war with the union. his war powers did not extend there. if lincoln had attempt today emancipate slaves say in kentucky or maryland on the strength of the emancipation proclaimation, you can be sure that at 9:00 o'clock the next morning, slave owners would have been besieging federal courthouses demanding

injunctions which they would have done, those injunctions would have gone to appeals and appeals would have eventually wound up with the united states supreme court and who is the chief justice of the united states supreme court at the moment, robert brook, the author of the scott decision. he would have made emancipation proclamation as lincoln's war powers. lincoln could not afford that happen, he could not afford that kind of challenge going into the federal court system. those british states and occupied areas of virginia and louisiana. what is he trying to do? is he trying to cheat on emancipation? no, he's trying to protect emancipation from a legal challenge that it's not difficult to imagine emerging from chief justice so, yes, the emancipation proclamation has

this reputation, this unhappy reputation but there are serious reasons why it is what it is and when you understand the reasons you begin to understand that abraham lincoln's thinking in composing the emancipation proclamation, the substantially more shrewd than he's given credit for just at first reading. is the emancipation proclamation bill of waiting, it's a bill of cargo of freedom headed toward the port of emancipation. >> host: well, we will come back to the year of 1863 but our phone lines are lit up and we want to hear from our viewers as well allen guelzo. let's begin with jonathan out in los angeles, jonathan, good morning. >> caller: governor, professor

guelzo, his books are fascinating and just tells you that rams will play baltimore in ten minutes and we are watching professor 11:00 o'clock our time. i wanted to ask him one review of his book said that he had written a revisionist history and i'm curious to have him explain what is really meant by revisionist history and in some sense every time a historian writes something, it's revisionist and i would love to hear his thoughts on that, thank you so much for the program. >> jonathan, do you remember what book that was, was it lighting, a new history of the civil war? >> caller: no, review of dr. guelzo's book on general lee. >> host: thank you, sir.

>> guest: well, i think in a sense jonathan has already provided the answer that i most likely to give and that is every time a historian sits down and writes history you are doing revision. no historian simply duplicates what has been said before. every historian comes with new ways of looking at things, new questions that you ask. in my case, for instance, when i'm coming at robert e. lee, i am -- i am interested obviously in lee as the great general of the civil war, the great commander of the confederate armies in virginia. one could not be interested in the civil war and not pay some attention to that. and yet i will be the first to admit that that is not what draws me to lee. what draws me to lee is a variety of other considerations. for instance, robert e. lee was

for years, almost 30 years of his career an army engineer. he was an officer in the corps of engineers and much of his career in the army was devoted to engineering projects. his first project out of west point was to lay the foundations for what is today savannah and he was at the very beginning of that. he was assigned from there to the construction of what was originally known as fort calhoun in the main ship channel of hampton roads and from there he was assigned to st. louis, he was 4 years at st. louis building the water front and from there he goes to fort hamilton in new york and there he's the chief engineer at that post on the tip of long island where today bridge crosses over

to long island. then from there he goes to the mexican war and then after the mexican war it's back to construction. he's building fort powell in belmar harbor. he spends a lot of his life as an engineer. i had to give crash course in engineering in order to begin to understand this and especially the particular kind of engineering that lee spent most of his time doing which is coastal engineering. and that's a sub-specialty within civil engineering itself. i wanted to understand lee as someone more than just four years as a confederate general, i wanted to understand 30 years he spends as a civil engineer. what drives me to that? fundamentally because i'm

trained as an intellectual historian, in other words, historian of ideas or the waylay people think. i took my ph.d in university of virginia. i approached lee with exactly that way with trying to understand him. i want to understand how the man's mind works and to do that i have to understand his profession which was that of an engineer. that's an interesting way of coming at robert e. lee because not many of biographies of robert e. lee spend a whole lot of time talk about career before the army during the civil war. those 30 years don't even take up the first volume. another famous biography of lee

that was written by one of freeman's accolades, the first 30 years to lee in 1861. so purely by the fact that i am historian of something other than military affairs, i am certainly going to come at lee with a very different set of expectations and understandings and that makes me revisionist and i confess to the deed but i confess to the deed that every historian who does this kind of work seriously is going to be a revisionist. .. ..

the collective works of lincoln. or if you want to write about grant, you have the 27 of the papers of ulysses s grant. they are there and easily available and beautifully edited. there is no standard edition of these letters in these papers. that is a problem because lee was a compulsive letter writer. haywood wrote i would estimate somewhere between 6,008,000 letters in his life. only there are a lot of them but they are scattered all over little packets of papers, papers

there, i have accessed archives that run all the way from the library new york city to the huntington library and california. at various points in between. even one, how much material services on ebay and auction sites, there's a lot of lee letters and material. letters and material still in private hands. there is no single edition of lee's works that makes life easier for a biographer. on the other hand are going to make some very interesting discoveries, which i did in the process of this. sometimes in your making interesting new discoveries, you are going to revise the conclusions people come to earlier that makes you a revisionist. of its tools or sources down to work in a serious way is

really performing visual is in. is it what's done sloppy and careless fashion? with consideration aforethought. i would like to believe i am in the second category. cracks judy in new jersey you are on with historian. cracks yes, thank you very much. i like to bring us back to the last call on the origin of the last call. i'm in the middle of the american minds the failure of the genteel elites. and it mentions books by charles francis and hillary adams. the potential origin and i was one if you could speak more to

that. thank you very much. cracks judy, the lost cause could be said to have strong april 9, he 65 the appomattox courthouse. this is when lee issues his last general order is sometimes known as general orders number nine. and in that order the army of northern virginia is told he fought a noble and honorable war. but greater union numbers have overcome that nobility and prepared us to surrender. we've managed to do with honor with conducted ourselves with honor so now we can all go home and believe what we did was honorable. that becomes the root of this thing called the lost cause. the lost cause will sprout from their to acquire a number

of facets. one principal tenant of the lost cause is at the southern confederacy of the secession of the southern states is not about slavery. that really what drove the confederates to succeed from the union was a concern about states rights or a concern about tariffs or concern about the northern economy and potential dictation bite northern capitalism so forth and so on things like that anything but slavery. we find in the writings of former confederates here is his memoir destruction and reconstruction. slavery had nothing to do with the confederacy with a simply a story cooked up by the abolitionists. that becomes the first tenant of the lost cause. another tenant of the lost cause is that they confederacy

did not really lose the war. the confederacy was a ground down by the superior weight of yankee capitalism. that attrition, not military skill or military genius simple raw barbarous attrition. that is what destroyed the south. they fought until there is no one left standing to fight. at superior numbers and that accounts for why the confederacy loses the war doesn't really lose the war, the war was unfair from the start. almost as if you would say one team field 11 players the other team only fields three, because who's going to win in that game. and then the lost cause rests on the assumption that always behave themselves with honor

and nobility. when that yankees invade the south, they behave like vandals. they behave like attila the hun. they rob, they destroy, they rape, they kill. when lee's army lunges across the potomac into the north it behaves itself. all of those are as phony as a 3-dollar bill. and just to give you some illustrations of this southerners always behave honorably when they invaded the north one the south does not invade the north all that much. but when the army of northern virginia comes into pennsylvania in the summer of 1863 every record on the ground shows the confederate army basically help themselves

to anything that was not nailed down. they behave just like the yankees did. which is to say they behave like most 19th century armies did. what gave this a particular edge was the confederates wound it up something like 500 that shackled them and sent them down to the richmond slave markets to be sold into slavery. that was a different kind of repossessions always say. that caused a serious adult the whole question like we behaved honorably. there is not a whole lot of honor in capturing defenseless and innocent people and enslaving them. but let me take this back to the whole question of general orders number nine and leaves and involvement in it. lee himself is not actually

drafted general orders number nine. it is really composed by police and secretary charles marshall. lee might have been a great letter writer when it came to personal correspondence but he detested official paperwork. and for most of the civil war he will allow marshall to draft his documents he will make some corrections and lean over her shoulders. only it makes a couple of questions strikes out a few things when lee does sit down to write a document this way, which is his final report to jefferson davis, he tells a very different story. the story he tells and as a final report to jefferson davis is about how the army of northern virginia seem to have

lost all sense of discipline and cohesion. how it straggled, how it failed, how everything that held the army together seem to come apart. the army did not seem to be fighting anymore. he's putting a lot of blame on the behavior of his own soldiers. that is very different from the myth of the lost cause. but general orders number nine that promoters of the loss caused would prefer to not the trial report of leaves. why then did they find northerners like charles francis adams and henry adams appearing to support the lost cause? the adams brothers, the post war turned out to be a very different world than the one they thought they were going to inhabit. was a very different world than any previous adams.

this is one of the first families of the united states. they believed as elites they deserve a certain measure of respect. the postwar society with its energetic embrace of expansion, of industrialism, showed no particular inclination to pay respect to great families from the past. and the adams is turned to the lost cause almost as a way of criticizing what they believe northern society has become. the lost cause becomes a weapon for saying see how noble those southerners were in defeat? see how terrible weight northerners are in victory. theirs was the complaint of an elite family that did not feel, like rodney dangerfield, they feel they had gotten no respect. and so they use the lost cause to try to buttress their own

claims to that kind of respect. not that they succeeded, not that they got it. that was part of their strategy is wi-fi the adams brothers embracing the lost cause. not because they love the lost cause. charles francis adams fought against it in a massachusetts regiment. but because it became a handy stick to beat their fellow disrespectful northerners with. >> steve, thank you for holding your own with historian alan. >> caller: thank you so much but i so appreciate your appearances on c-span. you always have words of wisdom. you are the voice of reason. the question i have is recently you are on c-span discussing your biography of late you discuss potential implications and potentially

leading to a settlement with the north of the united states. i know there's always a risk for historians to play the what if game, you had when i thought very brilliant observations about the political impact that would have had with respect to world war ii. i thought it would be very helpful for me and the audience to hear your review and perhaps expand on that again. i think it has profound implications for many of the discussions we are having today. >> thank you steve. steve, thanks for that. i start off by asking a particular question of people. what kind of world would we be looking at or if lincoln had not been reelected in 1864, if the confederacy had achieved

its independence. and as much as i dislike what if questions, i have encountered people who've made there are so many contingent factors that go into the making of historical events. asking what if almost becomes a fantasy. people have fantasy leagues for football, baseball and sometimes i think their people have fantasy leagues for history. on the other hand, there is at least some limited consideration for the what if question. if only because it let's us see the possible alternatives are not necessarily good ones. sometimes people ask me, what do you think the turning point

of the civil war was? was the most important moment of the civil war? what was the moment that won the civil war what was the hinge of the civil war? and i surprise them when i tell them appomattox courthouse. what they're expecting me too see as antietam, gettysburg or something like that. no appomattox courthouse. and they think wait a minute and i put my finger at that partly as a rhetorical gesture but also partly to illustrate the fact it could have been differently especially through abraham lincoln. if for instance lincoln had not been that seems to me at

least there is no question about that if not mcclellan himself and certainly his party and if this negotiation had begun no one is going to back to shooting war they'd been too much bloodshed. there is too much awareness of tumescent exhaustion. people in the north would not have elected mcclellan they anticipate an extended work beyond that. so had mcclellan been elected there would have been negotiations. it would have ended and no other way than with confederate independence. if confederate independence had occurred, there are a number of really unpleasant things that i think were very likely resulted.

one is the united states would have continued to dissolved in secessions. once you have a successful succession there's no reason you should not have more. and it would not be difficult the pacific coast hiding off the northwestern states the great lakes era the great lakes area. hiding off itself into its own independent republic. leaving what would say pennsylvania, new york and new england as the united states. to become a useless tiny republic was no longer with united states business antic free trade zone for their meat trade wars.

and if there had been that kind of what would've been that results when it came to world war i and world war ii? for there been a united states to intervene? no. and the result of that that's only one possibility. another possible result confederate independence as a wrinkle result is the rendition of fugitive slaves. during the course of the civil war we estimate somewhere between 200 and maybe the upward 500,000 flood slavery in either found some kind of home in the north or contraband camps as they were called. or founded in union uniform.

found some kind of refuge that way. at the end of negotiations they confederacy almost certainly would have required rendition of the fugitives. it was genuinely horrible thought. so horrible we think we could not imagine that, oh really? if the price of a piece, if the price of bringing home your father, your brother, your son, was the rendition of those fugitives, i wonder how many white northerners would have walked on that? my guess is not many. after all we demanded rendition at the end of the revolution. i see no reason why there would not of been a similar demand. they would not of been entirely successful but there's not an entirely successful revolution. that would not mean the man had not been named in some cases met.

so there is another unhappy product of a confederate victory. and then there would be the confederacy itself. the confederacy would have seen its future at lying and expansion the creation of a slave empire. not just in the confederate states themselves. but imperialistic expansion to the caribbean, to cuba, to the other islands of the west indies. to central america. in the decade before the civil war there been a variety of filibustering these are basically mercenary expeditions funded by americans to topple local governments and nicaragua, panama places like that. there almost led and financed. in a postwar environment where the confederacy was independent that kind of

filibustering would have become foreign policy. he would have seen aggressive expansion of a confederate slave empire. these are the conclusions you can look at with any kind of ease or calm. and yet i think they are the answers it would to a what if question. veteran of the union army lieutenant seriously wounded sat on the united states supreme court. so one of the famous injustices of the supreme court. sitting on the bench with him briefly served in the confederate army.

white's response, my god, if we had one. and i think in that same stricken tone of voice is what we have to see is the answer to that what if. >> had a long association with gettysburg college, you live in the area had intimate knowledge of the area. can you get a good sense of the battle by walking the battlefield up there? >> all the time, all the time. battles feel that gettysburg is such a wonderful place to walk, to visit, to meander, to analyze, to think about. sometimes of course the temptation to second-guess, that always comes you wander around that marvelous

battlefield and you come, in my mind anyway to the central location smashed against the union defenses. and you think of this small plot of ground may be the most hallowed of hallowed ground. in the north american it is a marvelous and magical place too be in, to walk around it. i've never lost an interest,t, i've never lost a thirst and walking around the battlefield as gettysburg. >> bob in nashville tennessee, you're onss with alan on book t. >> thank you, good afternoon. doctor kelso, i teach history at tennessee state university here in nashville. i've seen shown in class many

films the you are in in which you are commenting i pointed out to the p students that this guy looks and sounds exactly like frasier crane. [laughter] kelsey grammar doing history professor, he'd use you as a model. like you, i had a grandmother was born in 1953, she was 70 when i was born. she was born in 1883. she used to tell me these stories she heard at a yankees game, the yankees wouldn't steal it and so forth and that brings up something you see as a theme in movies from gone with the wind about the losing of the

south. it makes itou looks like there organized criminals and taking everything, not just food but stealing silver items, gold, whatever, i've never really seen anything written about that. i was wondering if you have knowledge about the scale. >> well, armies are armies. since the days of the babylonians and nebuchadnezzar, armies descend upon the areas they are invading like locusts they simply eat out, take up, steel, that's what armies do. when an army comes into your

neighborhood, all law is set aside and it's one of the horrors of war. i use the word poor or deliberately, i'm the son of an army officer and the father of another and i want to tell you, i have in my lifetime known any army officers. ... ... . they are really the ones who understand or cost. the also understand work cannot be entered into but reluctantly. won't happen in the environment of war is never anything to be enjoyed. and when i see or become a species of entertainment, that

is when i had the uncomfortable feeling there is such a thing as war pornography. so while i have written a great deal about the american civil war and about war itself , i am not a military historian. and i approach the subject of war with a certain degree of hesitation and caution. knowing that the costs and imposes on people are simply beyond definition. it has been said or is one of the four of the apocalypse along with famine, plague, yes it is on that same level. so 19th century army and our civil war misbehave they are in some sense not doing

anything different and even have done in our own time. while we are reluctant sometimes to admit it even our own forces have in modern warfare misbehaved. that is on the sad eventualities of war. that does not move her hands together and say nothing we can do about it. we must simply always understand war is a great calamity. and that even when the result of war is a victory the price to be paid for is always a great and terrible price. >> i'm sorry doctor go-ahead records of just going to add, so this is the way i think we approach even our own civil war.

remembering these sacrifices. remembering all that was lost "in the cauldron" of war. and all that it cost. the costs are more serious than in almost any other kind of human event. >> if you have a question or comment for our historian, for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones, if you can't get through on the phone lines. text message 2027488903. that's for text messages only. please include your first name and your city. rich in orange, california text to you. i really enjoyed your lincoln reveal and the coffee table life lincoln and intimate portrait book.

i'm currently reading a 36 page bibliography and 82 pages of notes. the acknowledgment sections -- section includes a mention of your use of 4 by 6 cards. is that how you assembled and crafted the 434 pages of text? >> easy answer to that. yes. i in fact have right beside me here a box. both 4 by 6 cards or the next project that i'm working on. -- for the next project that i'm working on. that in some ways i suppose is an old-fashioned way of collecting one's research. but it's one that i pitched in to very early and have stayed with. i often say that -- when i'm in the middle of a project, i read, i read, i read, i note, i note, i note accumulate the 4 by 6 cards, boxes of them and finally

it is like water building up behind a dam, there comes a moment when you just sense okay we're there. that's the moment when i compare myself to a mississippi river gambler, who spreads out all the cards and starts putting them in piles, all right? here's this subject. here's this subject. here's this subject. and i sort them out that way, and in some respects, the sorting process itself is the beginning of writing. and when i sit down and write, what i'm really doing is taking all the appropriately-sorted cards and moving through them in the order that i have created with them. so that's my technique, a little old fashioned, i suppose. but that has allowed me to accumulate tremendous amounts of resources this way. and i can go back to these cards over and over again, with that. now perhaps the question is also why 4 by 6, why not 3 by 5?

i can't get enough on a 3 by 5 card. i need the 4 by 6. so the 4 by 6 has become my standard procedure, and it's on the 4 by 6's that i record all of what i regard as the important material that i've been encountering as i work through it. >> so how many 4 by 6 cards for robert e. lee, a life, and where are they stored right now? where are the finished ones stored? >> there are three boxes of them that are stored in the back room behind me. you can't see it. but they are there, all marked robert e. lee. they are there with the five boxes of 4 by 6 cards on gettysburg. another three boxes on lincoln's emancipation proclamation. i think you get the idea. there's a lot of boxes full of 4 by 6 cards back there. >> jim in california. jim, please go ahead with your question or comment. >> thank you for taking my call,

and professor, thank you for a wonderful discussion. just your thoughts, please, on the issue of reparations, especially because you are an expert on reconstruction, and what is the little medallion on your suit? [laughter] >> the little pin is the james madison program's logo because i'm part of the james madison program at princeton university. it is one of the hats that i wear there. i do the initiative on politics and statesmanship for the james madison program. but yes, all right, that's the pin. now -- >> and that's based at princeton university; correct? >> and that's -- yeah, right. the initiative and the james madison program itself are all part of princeton university, especially the department of politics at princeton university. >> thank you. >> now, focusing on that, you're going to have to remind me, your first question?

>> reparations. >> reparations, thank you. the question of reparations usually comes up -- i can almost clock this -- usually comes up about every 15 years. and most recently it came up in an article written by nicole hannah jones in the wake of the 1619 project. and just before that, by [inaudible] coates, and both of these were passionate arguments on behalf of reparations. passionate though they are, i have some questions and some hesitations here because on the one hand, the payment of reparations is something which seems to be normal. we have in fact engaged in reparations payments for a number of groups, which have suffered harms and wrongs at the hands of government, so i think particularly here of the german government dealing with the israeli government.

i think of our dealings with those who were unjustly assigned to near concentration camps during world war ii. i'm thinking here of the japanese americans. you know, reparations agreement there. reparations are in a sense part of the whole justice system of equity jurisprudence. so what about reparations as it is promoted by nicole hannah jones, by tom coates and by a number of others running back over many years? first of all, i think we have to work with the definition of what reparations we're talking about. are we talking about reparations for slavery, or are we talking about reparations for subsequent segregation and discrimination? because those are really two

separate categories. and sometimes i think that coates, in particular, wants to faze them together and talk about them as one, and i don't think that's quite so easy if only because the harm that is done, the tort, for instance, if i can use legal language is an entirely different tort. what are we talking about? reparations for segregation, or are we talking reparations for slavery? most often the discussion is about reparations for slavery. and here's where we start to run into some difficulties. reparations for slavery, again, looks like the plank, ten feet wide over -- and the plank is ten feet long. it looks like it will work, but you put weight on it, and things start to fall down. the first thing you want to ask is, well, who should be paying reparations? here's where the question starts to get difficult. should it be the united states

government? well, why? because the united states government did not hold slaves. the united states government in fact did not pass slavery or enslavement legislation. the united states government had a fugitive slave law, but that was not the same thing as an enslavement statute. it was the states that had enslavement statutes. we sometimes forget this. slavery was a state-based matter. not a federal government matter. so should the federal government be paying slavery reparations? all right, here's a major question then. how can it since it was never involved in the owning of slaves? all right. what about the states? maybe we should single out those states which were slave-owning states. let's single out alabama, for instance, as slave-owning state. then the state of alabama should pay reparations. okay, but let's also remember

that there were a number of other states that we don't think of as slave states which actually legalized slavery for far longer than alabama. alabama legalized slavery from the time that it was a territory until the civil war, so we're talking 50, 60 years. my own home state commonwealth of pennsylvania legalized slavery from the time it was founded in 1683 all the way up into the 19th century. so if the state bears responsibility, then the state of pennsylvania should bear much more responsibility for paying reparations for slavery than alabama, which as soon as i've said it, it simply does not seem to make a whole lot of common sense. didn't pennsylvania in fact fight to end slavery in alabama? didn't pennsylvania on its own

merits move to emancipate and eliminate slavery? yes, it did. but if we're just talking about the state basis for reparations, then how can you evade the fact that pennsylvania actually has more guilt over time than alabama? and yet the oddity of that i think would jar many people. then you have a question of well, if you can't easily settle, who is going to -- what entity is going to pay reparations? does it come down to individuals? what about the descendants of slave owners? should they pay reparations? well, one of the difficulties is that many slave owners, the descendants of many slave owners today are simply not in the same economic position that their slave-owning fore bearers may have been. they may be truck drivers. are they going to be able to pay reparations any meaningful way?

should they? then the other thing that's connected with that is to whom do you pay reparations? well, obviously you think the answer should be the descendants of slaves. yeah, well, that will eliminate, for instance, some important segments of black america today, who are not the descendants of slaves. i think of someone like colin powell. colin powell was not a descendant of slaves. how then do we deal with large numbers of black people who would be excluded from a reparations settlement that way, and is that fair? that then leads into a related problem, and that is then in many cases, so many slaves were themselves the offspring of the slave holders. among the many crying injustices of slavery was the fact that slavery was a system of sexual

oppression, and that slave owners raped and misused their female slaves and the offspring of it were multiracial or biracial. well, if you are the descendant of a slave, the irony is you may also be the descendant of a slave holder. in fact, studies that i have seen estimate that on average -- and this is an on average figure, genetically speaking, black americans are anywhere between 20 and 25 percent white by descendant, and that surprising and shocking statistic is itself a testimony to the widespread sexual exploitation that occurred under slavery. if you are a descendant of both

a slave and a slave holder, to whom are you paying what? so there's a serious and critical problem there. how do you make that determination? i think the final problem that has to be confronted by reparations is, what about the civil war? it is estimated that the civil war cost somewhere between 650 and 850,000 lives. a mean has been established more or less around the figureover 750,000 -- figure of 750,000, but that's a mean, and statistically there are variations in that. of those civil war-related deaths, something on the order of 330 or 350,000 lives were lost in the union cause. these were people who were

fighting and dying to end slavery. and their lives are a price that were paid to end it, which is something that lincoln captured in his second inaugural, when he talked about the price of the war and how this war was a judgment that was inflicted on both north and south, for its complicity on slavery, and he said that every drop of blood drawn by the [inaudible] is being paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword. what is the value of those lives? how do we compute the value of those lives, including the life of abraham lincoln himself? how do we compute the value of those lives and reckon it against the reparations bill? i don't know how to do that. but i also know that you can't

not take that reckoning into your decision making, about reparations. if all that reparations is about is getting a check, then my concern is that we have forgotten about the civil war itself. and i have heard people say -- i was at a reparations conference at columbia university a number of years ago, where someone frankly stood up and said all i want to know is who is going to write me the check? if that's the only consideration, then we have forgotten about the civil war and the lives, black and white, that were lost in that war, to eliminate slavery. so i ask what is the reckoning for that as well? these are questions which do not have easy answers. but these are the questions i think which have to be asked if what we're going to eventually come up with are honest answers.

>> we're talking on book tv. david in mechanicsville, virginia, you're on. >> thank you. good afternoon, professor. i'm a native pennsylvanian. i'm born and raised in chambersburg, a graduate of virginia military institute. i happened to marry a young lady whose great grand father was in [inaudible] army, who burned my own town down. as you can well imagine, i have some mixed feelings about the rebellion. however, there are some questions that have been bothering me over the years, and i will just share them with you. my first one was james buchanan a homosexual? was thaddeus stevens a murderer? was secretary stanton a

[inaudible]? i'm not asking you to answer those questions, but i do have a question i would like you to address, and that's related to the election of 1864. did lincoln run as a third party candidate? and if not, was andrew johnson a true third party president? thank you. >> well, my answer to that is going to be a classic. yes and no. [laughter] and the reason i will put it that way is, in 1864, lincoln is facing a reelection, which has some serious odds against him. the war has now been going on for three years. and by the summer of 64, what has he got to show for it? the confederacy is still fighting. lee is still defending richmond. sherman has not taken atlanta.

blockade runners are still getting through the federal navy blockade. for many people, it looked like three years of war had been just about enough and had gotten us next to nothing. and that meant than the leaders of the republican party came to lincoln and said, we're going to have to do something desperate. lincoln is very, very eager to draw as many democratic votes as he possibly can to the side of his republicans. he's not sure that if they run just on the strength of republican votes, that they are going to win because there are many people who are so dissatisfied with the course of things that they will shift those votes. so how do you appeal to the democratic voter who doesn't particularly like republicans or republican policies, but nevertheless who wants to see the war brought to a successful conclusion? well, what you do is you rename the republican party.

so when the republican party comes together for its convention in baltimore, in the early summer of 1864, it has a new title. it calls itself the national union party. while they renominate abraham lincoln, the republican nominee, from 1860, as their presidential nominee, they also select a democrat, in this case a southern democrat andrew johnson to run as vice president. now, in a sense, in 1860, the republican party had already done something like that. in 1860, they nominate lincoln for the presidency, but they nominate his vice president hannibal hamlin of maine who had been a long time democrat and had only just come over into the republican ranks because of his opposition to slavery. so you have a certain foreshadowing of that in 1860. but in 1864, it becomes

explicit. and lincoln is nominated as president on this national union ticket, and his vice president will be andrew johnson, the only senator from a confederate state who refused to go south, who stayed in the senate, life long democrat, and one who represents who had always been a democrat state. tennessee was the state of andrew jackson. on the other hand, during the war, lincoln had appointed johnson to be military governor of tennessee. johnson had done a reasonably good job of it. wasn't perfect, but had done a reasonably good job of it, certainly far better than some of the other experiments lincoln had made in appointing military governors for occupied areas of the south. in fact, johnson himself had addressed delegations of black tennesseeans, promising them i will be your moses. i will lead you to the land of freedom. well, republicans heard that,

and they thought, if what we're trying to construct is a ticket that's going to appeal to democrats, andrew johnson is our man. so johnson gets the vice presidential nomination, and the posters go up, i have a copy of one of them, national union ticket, and you see abraham lincoln and andrew johnson. now, for practical purposes, the leadership of that national union effort is -- it's still the republican party. who was kidding who? but it is representing this very aggressive pr effort on the part of republicans to make a bipartisan appeal, to democrats. so they run as the national union party. is it really a third party? no. it's really the republicans carrying a sign with a different name on it, national union ticket. is johnson a third party

candidate? well, no one would have thought that at that point because johnson despite his long career as a democrat seemed to be uttering all the appropriate republican noises, so it goes forward that way. lincoln is re-elected, and johnson is elected as his vice president. at that point, the whole national union thing disappears because they got re-elected. and that's the last we hear of it. so is it a third party? yeah, but only in the sense of using a different name for pr purposes. is it a third party? no not really because it is not a different party than it was before. it's simply a strategy for recruiting democratic votes. >> four minutes left with our guest. every in depth guest we ask for their favorite books and what they are currently reading. here are his answers. favorite books perry miller,

jonathan edwards, john gardner's on moral fiction, bruce canton, dishollowed ground, daniel walker howell, the political culture of the american wigs, harry jaffa, crisis of the house divided and james boswell, life of johnson. currently reading joseph horowitz's dvorak's prophesy and black classical music, lost in thought the hidden pleasures of an intellectual life and suzanne metler and robert lieberman's, the recurring crises of american democracy. i wish we had time to discuss some of those. but we only got a couple minutes left and we want to get james from ohio in here. >> caller: good afternoon. i hope you can hear me clearly. of course i have my tv muted. professor, first of all, i want to associate myself with an early comment of steve from

about 50 minutes ago, you are as a retired teacher myself, let me just say you're like the very model of thoughtful analysis and what used to be called [inaudible], and above all, contextualizing. i know some people probably get on you for lengthy answers, but context is everything. i've been to gettysburg three times. i have your book on my table with a few others, even though i was a science teacher. but gettysburg is a magical place, and it will hook you if you go once, you will want to go back, i think. in your counterfactual dominoes that you did about what would have happened if the charge had succeeded? i think another thing that popped into my head. i've had a lot of thoughts like your 4 by 6 cards stack up, canada and mexico might have gotten a little piece of the united states if it had been balkanized as you suggested.

another book i'm reading is "the coldest winter" on the korean war, and the author says at the beginning of a chapter, perhaps all wars are in some way or another the product of miscalculations. and i guess maybe a good way to wind this up, unless you want to talk about the instrument -- >> host: you got ten seconds. then we have 30 seconds from the doctor. go ahead, finish up. >> caller: was there a big miscalculation on the part of the southern leadership that led to the civil war? >> host: you have about 30, 40 seconds. >> guest: the answer to that is very direct, yes. they miscalculated utterly. they miscalculated that they had the resources to carry on a war. they miscalculated that the north would respond, by refusing to admit the rebellion and making it war. and they miscalculated by assuming that foreign nations would come to their rescue and

intervene. at every moment, they miscalculated, and no one criticized them more than that than robert e. lee. even on his way to the surrender ceremonies, he pointed this out, he said this is how i knew, this is how i always knew that this would end. >> host: you mentioned your 4 by 6 cards at your side for your current project, which is what? >> guest: it is another book about abraham lincoln. i'm returning to some original turf. >> host: we're going to close with this text from alan, new york, who plays the bass that's in the background? >> guest: i do. i was a music major my first year in college, a composition major actually. i discovered what you sometimes painfully discover your first year in college. you just don't have enough talent. [laughter] so i had to do something else.

and that's what i've been doing right up to this moment, but i still play it. >> host: the professor has been our guest for the past two hours talking about the civil war era and some of his 12 books. we very much appreciate your time. >> senate members continue their district and state work periods this week. the senate will be back on monday, at 3:00 p.m. eastern. lawmakers are expected to debate several of president biden's federal reserve nominees, incluing to serve as vice chair. also lisa cook who if confirmed would become the first black woman to serve on the fed board. when congress returns, we will have live coverage of the house on c-span. watch the senate on c-span 2 and on-line at c-span.org or our free video app c-span now. >> c-span brings you unfiltered view of government. our newsletter word for word recaps the day for you from the halls of congress to daily press

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next, book tv's monthly in depth program with author and professor. his books include hopes and prospects, consequences of capitalism, and the forthcoming notes on resistance, a collection of interviews on the pandemic, the environment, and economic inequality. ::