shine. you are invited to participate in this year's cspan's studentcam documentary competition. in light of the upcoming midterm election picture yourself as a newly elected member of congress. ask vicious competitors what is your top priority and why? make a five to six minute video that shows the importance of your issue from opposing and supporting perspective. don't be afraid to take risk with your documented. be bold. amongst the $100,000 in cash prizes is a $5000 grand prize. videos must be submitted by january 20, 2023. visit. visit our website at studentcam.org for competition rules, tips, resources and a step-by-step guide. .. latest book, robert e lee a life, who was he

before the civil war, what was his >> before the civil war, best known for two things. one was the fact that he was the son of a famous revolutionary war hero, the famed cavalry commander light horse harry, when he served under washington, first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen, that was light horse hairy. the other thing people would have known robert e lee for his his service in the mexican war. especially on the staff of general winfield scott. general scott's fabulous amphibious invasion beginning in veracruz and moving to mexico city, lee served in many respects as scott's eyes and ears performing over and over

again feeds of reconnaissance so much so that "after words" scott made the confession for all the honors he had won in the great campaign, the credit belongs to robert e lee. those things would have been with robert e lee before the civil war which taken together don't do a lot to explain what we know about robert e lee once the civil war begins. >> host: henry light horse harry lee was not necessarily a good father. is that correct? >> guest: he was a splendid cavalry commander of light horse carrying out light cavalry raids, doing all kinds of jobs like that. as soon as the revolution was over, they moved back into civilian life everything went

from bad to worse. he made investments in western virginia land, buying ski resorts in bangladesh. they all went to nothing, bankrupted him. also chose the wrong politics for virginia. light horse hairy reliever the federalist and in 1813 was beaten within an inch of his life by a pro-jeffersonian mob and taking both of those things together like horsehair he decided other crimes were capricious. going to the west indies, robert was 6 years old and robert never saw him again.

it was a major and traumatic moment that stays with him the rest of his days. >> >> host: you right in robert ely -- "robert e. lee: a life" that lee discovered a sense of shame being part of the mexican-american war. >> guest: yes. for many americans who were part of the mexican war especially the invasion from veracruz to mexico city, you will read matt rennie -- many memoirs. who reflected back on it. and remember to mexico is a land of surpassing, enchanting, and was a sense of

embarrassment this war had taken place. republicans were not supposed to take war, they were not supposed to make more at all but would fight them defensively. with imperial ventures for czars and kangas. the mexican republican beating up on it. which was a source of disconnect for many of these young americans, the more weight on them and robert ely would come to the conclusion, i am ashamed of what we have done. we took deliberate advantage. you can find the same theme developed in ulysses grant's

memoirs so these two men in time almost becomes billion and gang of the civil war -- the yen and yang, that the united states had done the wrong thing in mexico, that it was a larger, stronger power beating up on a smaller, weaker one, which it should have been as a sister republic encouraging instead of making the object of war. >> host: served under general winfield scott during that war. what was his role in the civil war? >> winfield scott is too all to take active command in the field. he's the general in chief of the united states army at that point, but he is in no shape at his age to have taken active direction in 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 past the time he could take active participation in the field. to that end the person he wanted to recommend as the field commander for the armies that would suppress this, was robert ely. scott never forgot the service robert ely tendered during the mexican war and in the years between that war and the civil war scott develops something of a surrogate father figure for robert lee. he assists in promoting members of the lee family. one of lee absence gets a commission in the u.s. army because winfield scott arranges it so there is a close

relationship but nothing more disappointed winfield scott van when we came to visit him in mid april 18, '61 to tell him he was going to turn down the offer and would resign his commission in the united states army. it was said that winfield scott took to his so far weeping saying i never want to hear the name of robert e lee again. that is probably somewhat apocryphal that it gives you a sense the relationship between the two but secondly the disappointment scott experienced when lee decided not to take up the command that in other circumstances scott might've exercised himself. >> host: allen guelzo, was robert e lee well known in the general public prior to the civil war because his wife, was

there a will he won't he back and forth in the press regarding his going to the confederates? >> guest: to a minor degree. robert ely 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 writing social matters. he himself will only venture into public view very very reluctantly. she simply dislikes it. it is something he has no taste for. people often remarked about lee that he struck them as a very aloof, very distant sort of figure. there is a famous passage in the diary of mary chestnut, one of the great diaries of the civil war, she met lee for the

first time before the war in western virginia. and that is where lee took his wife. mary lee was plagued by rheumatoid arthritis and the hot springs were giving her some relief from difficulties. mary chestnut met lee there without introduction. this man on a beautiful horse came to join us, looks so distinguished, sorry i didn't catch his name, this was robert e lee, everything about him was perfection. no fault could be found in the man even if you hunted for one. this wasn't because chestnut necessarily admired that. she actually liked lee's older brother sydney smith lee because smith lee was very

companionable, very fine man about town, not robert. chestnut said can anybody say they know his brother? he looks so cold and quiet and grand and that was the image robert lee chose to cultivate through his life. he did not like being in that public layer, any discussion about the possibility of robert lee and's choice tends to occur only in his immediate environment, where he was living in arlington, in washington dc. it is not a matter of national attention because robert e lee does not want national discussion and attention. >> host: you were quoted as

saying if we wish to imperil the american experiment we can find few more sinister paths than by forgetting, obscuring or demeaning. i bring this up now, a lot of the confederate memorials being taken down. is that a mistake in your view? >> guest: there is no easy answer for that and i have to confess for my own part i am 6s and 7s about the question of statues of robert e lee. i have seen statues not only of lee but other people taken down and on the one hand, speaking as a pennsylvania person, i am a yankee from yankee land, the most unlikely of lee biographers.

as such i cannot fathom why you put up statues of people who committed treason. we don't have any statues i am aware of on revolutionary war battlefields to general how or general cornwallis, we don't have them there, 1776 we tore down a statue of george iii in manhattan so there's a certain sense in which i can't measure why. people like robert e lee raised their hand against the nation, they had sworn oath to uphold. my father was a career united states army officer. he took that oath. my son is an officer of the u.s. army, he took that oath. i took the oath so it is not

something i am saying lightly and it is not helped by the fact that when lee makes his decision to fight for the confederacy, what he is doing is fighting for a cause wrapped around defense of human slavery and trafficking. on the one hand, why should i feel anything but sympathy for the removal of relics like that that shouldn't be any place but a museum. if someone wanted to erect a statue of robert e lee, tell him as politely as i could to get lost but that hasn't been the whole story. not just statues of robert e lee but wholesale topplings, defacing and this includes

statues of ulysses grant, statues of frederick douglass and abraham lincoln. in my own hometown of philadelphia someone defaced a statue of a prominent abolitionist figure, so much of these seemed an act of irrational impulse, and the top line of statutes, sow how much of it gets done by irrational impulse. i start to have anxiety that we are doing something less considerate, less logical, in 2017 when charlottesville riot circled around the statue of robert ely.

that was when robert e lee became radioactive, and a former student of mine, john rudy who is national park service, we worked up what we saw the decision tree, how do you deal with monuments and statutes. there are moments, the statue is there, that is not true. hungarian revolutionaries, what is the first thing they do? they tore down joseph stalin in 2003 when american forces, one of the first things is the tearing down of a statue of saddam hussein. i'm sorry we don't have a

statue of joseph stalin and saddam hussein, we are better planet without them. and they haven't been around for 150 years or 200 years and there has to be something of a process with some of the latest wave. and the decision tree which basically, a series of 5 questions and moving to the second depending on the answer to the second, third and so forth. there is no guarantee in this decision tree. not intended to produce a certain result but is intended to produce you have thought through this. we have looked at this logically. we have come to this conclusion

as a result of his process and not just on impulse. if at the end of the process we decide the statute should be removed, at least we've done with process. the thing i have been concerned about that endangers our understanding of history is when we respond to these memorials and monuments, a quasi-irrational impulsiveness, that contains the real danger because it is not a difference because that kind of irrational impulse and the behavior of the law and the behavior of the mob is what democracy and democratic societies strive to put distance between. i would rather air on the side

of caution or at least process and the result of process, at least we would have gone through a process in the process is important. >> host: the first line in your book about robert ely is how do you write a biography of someone who commits treason? >> i asked first of all what does the constitution say about treason? how does the constitution defined it? on the one hand it is straightforward. the constitution says treason consists of making or against the united states, and giving aid and comfort to its enemies. i have some difficulty in looking at robert ely at -- robert e lee and not seeing someone who made war against the united states, four years of war against the united states and gave aid and comfort to its enemies. and simply on those terms alone

i cannot avoid the conclusion but robert e lee committed treason. you are saying that because you are yankee. i'm saying that because i am 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'm not coming to write a biography of robert e lee either to put a halo around his head or put a knife in his back. are want to come to robert e lee as frankly and soberly as i can in the most important question is that question about treason. in some respects that poses 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 is easy to write the biography of someone you can easily admire, churchill, how do you deal with people whose lives are committed to find you've reprehensible. you can't not write about them, please pretend they are not there. it is a difficult biography. conscious of the fact difficult biography calls for a different set of understandings and a different set of analytical tools than you might have writing about lincoln of whom i have written a great deal but you have to write and come to write about and with a different set of

understandings. >> after appomattox was there an outcry to jail robert e lee? >> yes. especially after the assassination. in the few days that transpired between lee's surrender, and lincoln's murder, there was a sense the war is coming to its conclusion. we can be generous, openhanded and then comes the lincoln association, this is what we get for being generous, we are dealing with what they are asking us to do and there was a terrific back lash, against

jefferson davis who is still on the lamb and would not be apprehended until may 10th. it is particularly directed at lee. something done about robert e lee and takes the form of an indictment for treason that is entered by the federal district court in norfork, virginia, largely because it is one of the few places in virginia, federal court operating at that point. there have been no federal courts operating in most of virginia, confederate courts yes but not federal courts, this indictment comes from federal court in norfork. and 33, 34 confederate leaders. and the assumption was a trial.

this is where problems began to accrue. the definition of treason, should have gone to trial. there were interesting tripwires, ulysses grant, in northern virginia, it meant, none of those surrendered appomattox, or molested by federal government provided they go to their homes and obey the laws. it is not a get out of jail free card. if you violate terms of parole, the parole had been given by

ulysses grant and when grant gets wind of the fact the new president andrew johnson and his attorney general james speed are toying with the idea of pursuing robert e lee for treason grant feels his own word, his own honor is called into question and quite frankly tells andrew johnson that if you persist in this i will resign as general of the army. that is a threat andrew johnson could not accommodate. no one is higher in the estimate of that moment. heads off the idea of a trial. through the war, a lot of questions dealing with civil

liberties, military tribunals. sounds like guantánamo bay. the same logic governs those cases. the chief justice of the supreme court could not abide the idea there was a parallel jurisdiction to civilian jurisdiction in terms of federal courts. the idea there were military tribunals operating in virginia was anathema. he made clear he would refuse to participate in a federal trial of robert e lee when there were military tribunals operating in virginia and since they were operating, chase refuses to cooperate with the trial. there is another roadblock in the path of the trial and there are number of legal snags that

i won't take anybody into the weeds with unless you are a lawyer and want to go with me. at the end the conclusion was this is not going to be worth the political trouble it will generate. what we will do is enter -- do not prosecute. in fact, in 1868 as andrew johnson is on his way out of the white house he issues a blanket amnesty that dispels the threat of a treason trial but technically speaking it was a real question and lead treats it seriously. lee is anxious that this trial may go forward and if it goes forward he could be in serious danger and not until that amnesty comes down the lee feels the cloud is in large

measure passed over his head but takes it seriously and and and such a drag on them, that weighed on him heavily. and it could have. what it could have resulted and we don't know. >> host: did grant and lee have a relationship after the war? >> guest: not really, no. after the flow of the appomattox surrender, lee will express gratitude to grant for granting the parole for latitude in dealing with lee's army but as time goes by any

relationship forged between the two didn't happen. grant invites lee to the white house in 1869 when grant has become president but the interview only lasts 15 minutes and it is polite. i don't want to say frosty. lee's reputation, with written -- showed no enthusiasm on it. there is a coldness there. cannot be described in any other way. when people press lee in 1870 for his opinion who the greatest union general was he faced during a war, lee's

response is not ulysses grant. is george mcclellan. if that doesn't surprise you nothing about the civil war will surprise you. the grant fashion returned later when doing his around the world tour. the new york journalist john russell young accompanying him put a similar question to grant, who was the greatest of the confederate generals, joseph johnston which is worse and surprising. you almost had the sense that grant was doing a little tit for tat, i will disrespect you but what could have been an interesting relationship between former opponents never develops in that way and if anything in 1868-69, lee will end it's influence more to

people who are challenging ulysses grant politically than otherwise. >> host: we could spend this entire two hours talking about robert e lee and his life but we want to talk about some of your other books. prior to "robert e. lee: a life," your previous book was "reconstruction: a concise history". that came out in 2018. from that book, quote, evenhe strongest measures taken by the us government during the war and reconstruction were deployed less with a view toward subjugating states toward centralized authority and more toward nudging them back into federal government. the great losers were southern blacks. >> i said that in 2018 and it

inclines me to alter or change that. more than little too optimistically. the war would teach them lessons that it would change political minds and all the blood and treasure in the eradication of slavery would open the possibility not only for reunification of north and south but reconstitution of south itself in the image and that did not happen and it didn't did not happen because we did not go about doing this. there was no book you could go to a bookstore entitled reconstruction that would give you a step by step process,

what use the is series of improvisations not all of them well thought out. some inspired too much, a lot of them inspired by budgetary parsimony on the part of congress. that is the thing we see coming out of reconstruction. we did not know what we were doing. the second thing is in the fumbling this is big, an opportunity for the old southern leadership to see political dominance and as they do that, they aim to subjugate black southerners to the same

status they enjoyed before the civil war, to reconstitute a form of slavery without using the term and this reconstitution leads southerners to jim crow, segregation, violent rioting especially the 1898 wilmington, north carolina riot, subrogation this, black people in the south. we can only look back on that, why don't we take it more seriously? grant looked back from his time to the presidency, and we did not impose a military occupation. and impose monetary occupation

over a sufficiently long time to raise up and educate an entirely new political generation. we were too fast and in some cases too optimistic. in a lot of cases we didn't want to spend the time and money. military occupation in the south even at the height of reconstruction the united states military forces used on reconstruction duties in the south never amounted to more than 20,000 troops, 20,000 troops, 3 million union soldiers during the civil war but what do we put into reconstruction? 20,000 and even that number diminishes over time. we would have to do something much more serious, something more along the lines of what we did after world war ii with the marshall plan in europe, the

occupation of imperial japan, reconstructing society from the bottom up. we did not do that. in 1865-1877. as a country we paid and continue that, a serious serious price for that. we learned our lesson in 1945 and yet subsequent efforts have not shown the learning of that. we still suffer from wanting to take military or genetic - diplomatic actions to produce a response and then walk away from them and not want to pay any more bills. perhaps we should have thought before we got involved in some of these things that what was going to be required was more

intensive, more expensive, and requiring a great deal more from our societies and we have been willing to give. that is something we have to bear in mind. the problem posed by reconstruction offers an interesting lesson in what is sometimes called nationbuilding. in reconstruction we did a pretty poor job of it and many people especially black people suffered as a result. >> host: allen guelzo, how broken was the south economically and socially in 1861? >> the impact of the war was worse than the great depression. there had been big sways of military destruction in various parts of the south. in georgia, the destruction in

georgia, and has been grossly exaggerated. those who read john with the wind -- gone with one get the notion that william sherman took a torch, that was not the case. and if armies were traipsing back-and-forth across them in virginia. the south suckers affect -- suffered economically by the loss of capital invested in slavery, the loss of the capital invested in farm implements and farm animals, probably the south's losses amounted as high as in some estimates i have seen $13 billion. that is 18 $65. the south could have recovered much more quickly than if it

had committed itself to trying to re-create the semi feudalism of the system. in a sense the great punishment the south suffers in reconstruction is not union occupation, contrast is minimal. it is self administered. the south decides to walk away from industrial capitalism, from the 19th century transatlantic economy and return to what it had been before the war which was a semi-feudal agrarian state and that will take 80 years to change. in a sense the south became its own worst enemy.

>> host: you were born in yokohama to an army officer and got a masters in divinity and finally into the history aspect. at what point did you find your self fascinated by this era? >> guest: i think i was always fascinated by it or as fascinated as one can be and be conscious. i can remember when i was not more than 5 years old badgering my mother to buy a comic book version of the red badge of courage in the old classics illustrated series. the red badge of courage introduces a major story about the civil war and it had at the back a 16 page insert as a quick comic book history of the

civil war. we are thinking of superman and all kinds of silly stuff. the classics illustrated series was a series -- serious piece of work and this was a serious piece of work that fascinated me. it sent me to my grandmother who as a young girl at the turn of the last century, schools in philadelphia had witnessed decoration day which they called memorial day she had written us old veterans of the grand army of the republic, they would come to the schools like my grandmother, and talk to the schoolchildren about the real meaning of the civil war and for meaning of the civil war was not what those johnny rebs are trying to teach you, it was about the end of

slavery, preservation of the union and that was the understanding of the war that i grew up with. in my case i never grew up with robert e lee having an aura around his head. many other writers about lee wrote as southerners, they wrote about lee as promoting a lost cause and i grew up understanding the lost cause being the story belonged to lincoln, emancipation and preservation of the union. i acquired that interest early on and stayed with land, i am still talking about it. >> host: we will show your

lincoln books in a moment but we want to introduce you to our "in depth" program for january, allen guelzo, historian, war historian is our guest. we want to hear from you, you have a chance to talk with him, may comments, ask questions, here's how you do so, 202 is the area code for all our numbers, 748-8200 for those in the east and central time zones, 748-820 one, in the mountain and pacific time zones you can sell a text to this number, for text messages only, 202-748-eighty nine zero three. please include the first name and your city if you would if you send a text question. you can contact us via social media. or member@booktv is our handle, for twitter, instagram, facebook, etc. . you can go ahead and start making comments, start dialing in, we will get to your calls for allen guelzo in a few minutes. his first book came out in

1989, "edwards on the will: a century of theological debate". "for the union of evangelical christendom: the irony of reformed episcopalians" came out in 1994, then several lincoln books, "abraham lincoln: redeemer president" in 99, lincoln's emancipation proclamation, "lincoln and douglas: the debates that defined america" in 2008, "abraham lincoln as a man of ideas" in 2009, "lincoln: a very short introduction" 2,009 as well and then a look at the civil war and reconstruction in "fateful lightning: a new history of the civil war and reconstruction" followed by "gettysburg: the last invasion" is how allen guelzo looks at that book. in 2013, "redeeming the great emancipator" in 2016, "reconstruction: a 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 1863 which kicked off with the emancipation proclamation. very tumultuous year in our nation's history but i want to quote from your book "redeeming the great emancipator," quote, the emancipation proclamation which was delivered january 1, 1863, is surely the unhappiest of all of abraham lincoln's actions. >> guest: that is the when you focus on. >> host: that jumped out to me. >> guest: that was a deliberate provocative strategy on my part. and i say unhappiest basically because while we log the gettysburg address people still memorized the gettysburg address.

it is after all only 272 words. we adore the second inaugural especially with that eloquent conclusion, with malice toward none but charity to wall, who can disagree with the beauty of that? then we come to the emancipation proclamation. the first word of the emancipation proclamation just puts us off because that first word is whereas. who ever thought of beginning a great document, a great state document with the word whereas? because it sounds so legalistic. it is legalistic. in fact that is one of the problems people have with the emancipation proclamation, the language of it is very legal

and no one less than car on marks made the observation the emancipation proclamation reads like a summons sent by one county courthouse lawyer to another. and indeed it does read that way. it is very technical, very legal in its atmosphere and people look at this and scratch their heads and say why? here's the man capable of writing the gettysburg address, the second inaugural. why when it comes to perhaps the greatest deed of his administration, the single greatest deed of any american president, does he suddenly drop back into professional legal language. that led some people to draw the conclusion that he didn't really mean it. his heart wasn't in it. of his heart really had been in emancipation he could have produced something equally eloquent as the gettysburg

address or second inaugural and this is what led richard hofstadter to make the memorable comment, probably the comment most memorably attached to the emancipation proclamation that the proclamation had all the moral grandeur, and in truth it did. that is one reason people stumble at the emancipation proclamation. it seems so legalistic. where's the great eloquence. another reason, it is dated january 1, 1863. as soon as the civil war began why didn't he write an emancipation proclamation in 1861?

why do we go from 1860 one to 1863? nothing happens in 1863 he decides he is going to issue the emancipation proclamation, he has another agenda than emancipation. trying to enlist the sympathy of the european nations and he was trying to evo more response in support of the more. the emancipation proclamation isn't a noble gesture at all but a work of political stratagem. there are others who critique the proclamation because they don't believe it goes far enough. there is a section of reservations, exclusions. if it were free, slaves in the states in rebellion. that will include the border

states before slave states, missouri, delaware, kentucky, maryland, won't touch the slaves in places in virginia occupied by union military forces or louisiana occupied by military forces, what is going on here? there's a bill of exceptions. and on the part of abraham lincoln, voices of criticism of that sort have multiplied over the years, lincoln's emancipation proclamation, so many scratch their heads and can't figure out what is going on, they draw the worst conclusion.

let me dispel something like that. legalistic ways the gettysburg address is not, the gettysburg address, the dedication remarks lincoln composed for dedicating the cemetery at gettysburg, can't do anything with it. it pulls you over on the turnpike, can't quote the gettysburg address. the emancipation proclamation changes, the legal status, 3 million human beings and if it is legalistic it is because it has gotten legal work to do. this is a document that can be taken in court and had an effect so yes, is it legalistic? very legalistic. why? it has legal heavy lifting to do.

why? this is connected to it. why at the same time is the emancipation proclamation for live exceptions? largely because lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation on the strength of his role as commander in chief of the armed forces of the united states, exercising his war powers. you can't exercise war powers against the border states, they remain within the union. they were states that still legalized slavery but were not at war with the union. war powers did not extend. if lincoln had attempted to emancipate slaves on the

strength of the administration, you can be sure at 9:00 the next morning slave owners would have besieged federal courthouses, which they would have gotten, those injunctions would have gone into appeals, the appeals would wind up with the united states supreme court and who is the chief justice of the supreme court at that moment? roger brooke tani, the author of the infamous dred scott decision, would have made mincemeat of the emancipation proclamation and lincoln's war powers, lincoln could not afford to have that happen, cannot afford to have that kind of challenge going to the federal court system so we rule off the four border states and those occupied areas of virginia and louisiana. is he trying to cheat on emancipation? he is trying to protect

emancipation from a legal challenge that it is not difficult to imagine emerging. the emancipation proclamation has a reputation, but there are serious reasons why it is what it is and when you understand the reasons, abraham lincoln's thinking and composing the emancipation proclamation was more shrewd than he is given credit for at first reading. if the emancipation proclamation reads like a bill of lading, it is a bill of lading for a cargo of freedom headed to the port of emancipation. that is something we can rejoice in. >> host: we will come back to the year 1863 but we want to hear from viewers as well, allen guelzo, let's begin with

jonathan in los angeles, good morning. >> caller: good morning, allen guelzo, all his books are fascinating and tells you my beloved la rams are playing baltimore in ten minutes, watching until 11:00. i wanted to ask one review of his book said that he had written a revisionist history and i'm curious to have him explain what is meant by revisionist history? every time a historian write something it is revisionist. i would love to hear his thoughts on that. thanks for the program. >> host: dear member what book that was? was it "fateful lightning: a new history of the civil war

and reconstruction"? >> caller: it was a review of allen guelzo's book on general lee. >> host: thank you. >> guest: i think in a sense jonathan has provided the answer i'm most likely to give which 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 when i am coming at robert e lee i am interested in lee as the great general of the civil war, the great commander of the confederate armies, one but not be interested in the civil war and not pay some attention to that. and i will be first to admit

that is not what draws me to lee. what draws me to leah's other considerations like robert ely -- robert e lee was for almost 30 years of his career an army engineer. he was an officer on the core of engineers and much of his career in the army was devoted to engineering projects. 's his first project out of west point was to lay foundations for what is today fort polaski in the savanna estuary. he was at the beginning of that. he was assigned from their -- from there to the construction of fort calhoun in the main ship channel and from there he was assigned to st. louis and spent four years in st. louis working on rebuilding the st. louis waterfront. from there he goes to fort

hamilton, and new york, and his chief engineer at that post on the tip of long island where the bridge crosses over to long island and to the mexican war and after the mexican war back to building fort carol in baltimore harbor and then superintendent of west point which was very much an engineering school when he was the superintendent so he spends a lot of his life as an engineer. i had to give myself a crash course in engineering in order to begin to understand this and especially the particular kind of engineering that he spent most of his time doing which is coastal engineering and that is a subspecialty within civil engineering itself. i wanted to understand lee as someone more than just four

years as a confederate general. i wanted to understand the 30 years he spends as a civil engineer. what drives me to that? fundamentally i am trained as an intellectual historian. a historian of ideas and the way people think. i took my phd at the university of pennsylvania under two great intellectual historians, alan coors and bruce cooper. i approached lee with exactly that way of trying to understand how the man's mind works, to do that i have to understand his profession which was that of engineer. that isn't it. that is a revisionist way of coming at robert e lee because not many other biographers of robert e lee spend a lot of time talking about his career in the army before the civil war. in the four volumes of douglas freeman devotes to giving us

the life of robert e lee, those 30 years don't even take up the first volume. another famous biography of lee was written by one of freeman's acolytes actually in 500 pages, the first 30 pages to lee before 1861. by the fact that i am a historian of something other than military affairs i will come at lee with separate understandings and that makes me a revisionist and i confessed to the deed but i confess to the deed knowing every historian who does this kind of work is going to be a revisionist. .. revisionist. .. ..

whose papers and letters are easily available in a printed edited provision. if you want to write about abraham lincoln you got the famous eight volume edited by roy bassler the collected works of lincoln. or if you want to write about grant, as ron chernow recently has. you has the 27 volumes of the papers of ulysses s. grant. they are there and easily available and beautifully edited. robert e. lee's different. there is no standard edition of his letters and his papers. and that's a problem because he was a compulsive letter writer. he wrote i would estimate somewhere between 60,006,008,000 letters in his life. but they are not only are there

a lot of them but they are scattered all over the place. little packets of papers here, little packets of papers there. i have access to archives that run all the way from the morgan library in new york city to the huntington library in san marino in california. and at various points in between. and even more maddening is how much lee material services on ebay and auction sites because a lot of lee letters and material distilled in private hands. so there's no single addition of lee's works that makes life easier for a biographer. it also on the other hand, means you're liable to make some very interesting discoveries which i did in the process of this. and sometimes when you're making interesting new discoveries, you're going to revise the conclusions people have come to earlier and that makes you a revisionist. whether it's new tools or new

sources, every historian sits down to work in a serious way is really performing revisionism. the only question is what kind of revisions? is it revisionism which is done in a sloppy and careless fashion? or is it revisionism which is done with care and with consideration of aforethought? i would like to believe i think i might like to believe i am in the second category. that's my kind of revisionism. >> host: judy is in sparta new jersey. you are on with historian allen guelzo. >> caller: thank you very much. i'd like to bring us back to the lost cause and the origins of the lost cause. i am in the middle of your american mind lesson 19, the failure of the genteel elite. and you mentioned books written by charles francis adams and henry adams, and that their

potential origin of the lost cause and was wondering if you could speak more to that? thank you very much. >> guest: sure, sure. judy, the lost cause could be said to have sprung on april 9, 1865 at appomattox courthouse. this is when we issue since last general order to the army of northern virginia sometimes known as general orders number nine. and in that order the army of northern virginia is told that you fought a noble and honorable war, but greater union numbers have overcome that nobility and compelled us to surrender. we have fans to do it with honor. we've conducted ourselves with honor so now we can all go home and believe that what we did was honorable.

that becomes the root of this thing called the lost cause. a lost cause will sprout from there to acquire a number of facets. one principle tenet of the lost cause is that the southern confederacy, the secession of the southern states, was not about slavery. that really what drove the confederates to seed from the union was a concern about states' rights or a concern about terrorists, or a concern about the northern economy and potential dictation i know than capitalism, so on and so forth like that. anything but slavery. so you find in the writings of former confederate like richard taylor in his memoir destruction and reconstruction, he said slavery had nothing to do with the confederacy. that's simply a store cooked up by the abolitionists.

that becomes the first tenet of the lost cause. another tenet of the lost cause is the confederacy didn't really lose the war. the confederacy was simply ground down by the superior weight of yankee capitalism, that attrition not military skill or military genius, simple raw, barbarous attrition was what destroyed the south. the south, in other words, fought until the snow one left standing to fight. the north had superior numbers, that it could turn into the meat grinder and that was, , that accounts why the confederacy loses the war. it doesn't really lose the war. the war was unfair from the start, almost as if you would say that one team fields 11 players, the other team only fields three. guess who's going to win in that game. and then thirdly a lost cause

rests on the assumption that the confederates always behaved themselves with honor and nobility. when the yankees invade the south they behave like vandals. they behave like attila the hun. they rob, they destroy, they rate, they kill. but when lee's army lunches across the potomac into the north it behaves itself. all three of those are as phony as a three-dollar bill. and just to give you some illustrations of this, in that latter point, the southerners always behaved honorably when they invaded the north as opposed to the north did in the south. for one thing the south doesn't 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 that

the confederate army basically helped themselves to anything that wasn't nailed down. they behaved just like the yankees did come which is a sake and they behaved like most 19th-century armies did. what gave this a particular edge was that the confederates wound up something like 500 free pennsylvania blacks -- rounded -- shackle them and sent them down to the slave markets to be sold in slavery. that was a different kind of repossession, shall we say. and that i think caused serious doubt the sole question, 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 even to the whole question of general orders number nine and lee's

involvement in it. lee himself does not actually draft general orders number nine. it's really composed by lee's military secretary charles marshall. we might've been a great letter writer when it came to personal correspondence by he detested official paperwork. and from most of the civil war he will allow marshall to draft his documents. he will make some corrections and lean over marshall's shoulders and he does that with general order number nine. we know this because marshall said so in his memoirs. leave makes a couple of corrections, strikes out a few things that marshall said lee was afraid would antagonize northerners, and then let the order go forward. 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 in his final report to jefferson davis is about how the army of northern virginia seemed to have lost all sense of discipline and cohesion, how would straggled, how it failed, how everything that held the army together seem to come apart. the army didn't seem to be interested in fighting anymore. he's putting a lot of blame on the behavior of his own soldiers. that's very different from the myth of the lost cause. but it's general orders number nine that promoters of the lost cause would prefer to not that final report of lee's. why then do we find northerners like charles francis adams and henry adams appearing to support the lost cause and endorse it? because for adams, both of the adams brothers the postwar north turned out to be a very different world than the one that they thought they were

going to inhabit. it was a very different world than any previous adams, i mean these were adams, one of the first families of the united states. they believed as elites they deserve a certain measure of respect. and 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 laws cause almost as a way of criticizing what they believed northern society has become. the laws cause becomes a weapon for, say, see how noble the southerners were in defeat? see how terrible we northerners are in victory. there is was the complaint of an elite family that didn't feel that, like rodney dangerfield, they felt that it got no

respect. and so they will 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, but that was part of their strategy which is why you find the adams brothers embracing the lost cause. not because they particularly loved lost cause. charles francis adams had fought against it in the massachusetts regiment but because it became a handy stick to beat their fellow disrespectful northerners with. >> host: steve, laguna hills california thanks for holding. you are on with historian allen guelzo, thank you so much. professor, i so appreciate your appearances on c-span. you always have words of wisdom and you are the voice of reason. the question i have is, recently you on c-span discussing your biography of lee and you discussed potential implications

and potentially leading to a settlement with the north and balkanization of north america or the united states. and i know there's always a risk for historians to sit and play the what-if game but you and i thought very brilliant observations about the geopolitical impact that that would have taken with respect to world war i and world war ii. i thought it would be very helpful for me any 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. >> host: thank you, steve. >> guest: steve, thanks for that. i start off, i start off by asking a particular question of people. what kind of world, what kind of world would we be looking at if

pickets charge had succeeded? or if lincoln had not been reelected in 1864? if the confederacy had achieved its independents? and as much as i dislike what if questions, i've encountered people who sometimes make a small career out of doing what is what if history and always think there are so many, there are so many contingent factors that go into the making of historical events that asking what if almost becomes a kind of fantasy. people are fantasy leagues for football and for baseball, sometimes i think their people are fantasy leagues for history. on the other hand, there is at least some limited consideration for the value of the what-if question. if only because it lets the see what the possible alternatives might have been, and the possible alternatives are not necessarily good ones.

sometimes people ask me, what do you think the turning point of the civil war was? what 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 and i surprising when i tl them, appomattox courthouse. what they are expecting me say is antietam or gettysburg, something like that, not appomattox courthouse. in the think wait a minute, that's where the war ended. yeah, and i put my finger at that harley as a rhetorical gesture but also partly to illustrate the fact that the american civil war could have ended very differently through much of its duration, and especially right up to the reelection of abraham lincoln. if, for instance,, if lincoln

had not been reelected, if george mcclellan had been elected 17th president of the united states, then it seems to me at least that there's no question but that if not mcclellan himself, then certainly his party, would have moved as quickly as possible to open negotiations with the confederacy. and if these negotiations had begun by 1864 nobody was going to go back to a shooting war, there had just been too much bloodshed. there was too much weariness, too much exhausted. people in north would not have elected mcclellan because the anticipated an extended war beyond that. so if had mcclellan would've been elected the wood of the negotiations and it would've ended in no other way than with confederate independents. and if confederate independents had occurred then an number of

really unpleasant things would i think would very likely have resulted one is that the united states would've continued to dissolve into secessions because once you have a successful secession there's no reason why there shouldn't be more. and it would not be difficult to see the pacific coast going off to its own west coast republic. the northwestern nn the great lakes area hiding off itself into its own independent republic. leaving, let's say pennsylvania, new york and new england as the united states to become a kind of useless and balkanized tiny republic. what would've ensued between was made worse because no luck with the united states be this

gigantic free trade zone. there would have been trade wars. the result would've been balkanization. and if there had been that kind of balkanization what would've been the result when it came to world war i and world war ii? with the event the united states to intervene in either of those? no. and the result of that, the result of that is not pleasant to contemplate. another possible result of confederate independents as a result of negotiations would've been the rendition of fugitive slaves. during the course of the civil war, we estimate that summer between 200 and may be at the upward point maybe 500,000 southern slaves fled slavery and either found some kind of home in the north or founded in

contraband camps as they were called or founded in union uniform, found some kind of refuge that way. at the end of negotiations, the confederacy i think almost certainly would have required rendition of those fugitives. which is a genuinely horrible thought, , so horrible that we almost think we can't imagine that. oh, really? if the price of peace, 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 of fugitives at the end of the revolution and at the end of the war of 1812. i see no reason why they wouldn't have been a summer demand, probably would not event entirely successful but it

wasn't entire successful if the revolution of the workweek and 12 either. that doesn't mean demand would not of been made and in some cases met. so there's another unhappy product of a confederate victory. and then do would be the confederacy itself. the confederacy would have seen its future line in expansion,, the creation of a slave empire, not just in the confederate states themselves but in imperialistic expansion into the caribbean, to cuba, to the other islands of the west indies, to central america. in the decade before the civil war there had been a variety of what were called filibustering expeditions. basically these were mercenary expeditions headed by infant by americans to topple local governments in nicaragua or panama, places like that. there were almost all night and financed by southerners.

in a postwar environment where the confederacy was independent, that kind of filibustering would've become foreign policy and you would've seen the aggressive expansion of a confederate slave empire in large parts of the western hemisphere. these are not conclusions i think we can look at with any kind of ease or calm, and yet i think that they are the answers that would come to a what if question. in the years after the civil war, a veteran of the union army oliver wendell holmes sat on the united states supreme court as one of the most famous justices of the supreme court. sitting on the bench with him was in louisiana who had briefly served in the confederate army, and this was edward wright

edward white. every year in the anniversary of the battle of antietam, holmes would present white with a red rose. white's response? my god, if we had one. and i think that come in that same stricken tone of voice, is what we have to say is the answer to that what if. >> host: "in depth" you had a long association with gettysburg college, live in the area or have an intimate knowledge of the area. can you get a good sense of the battle by walking the battlefield of there? >> guest: all the time, altai. the battlefield, battlefield, a gettysburg is such a wonderful place to walk, to visit, to meander, to analyze, to think about. and sometimes of course the

temptation to second-guess. that always comes. you wander around that marvelous battlefield and you, in my mind anyway, you come to the central location of pickett's charge smashed against the union defenses and you think, this small, this small plot of ground may be the most hallowed of hallowed ground in the north american continent. it is a marvelous and magical place to be in, to walk around it, yeah. yeah, i have never lost an interest, i've never lost a a thirst and walking around the battlefield of gettysburg. >> host: bob, nashville, tennessee. bob, good afternoon you are on with historian allen guelzo on booktv. >> caller: good afternoon. i teach history at tennessee state university here in

nashville, and teach survey courses, and i've seen and shown in class many times films that you are in, that you are commenting, in which you are commenting. and i point out to the students that this guy looks and sounds exactly like frasier crane. i mean -- [laughing] >> caller: kelsey grammer is kelsey grammer were a history professor he would use you as a model. like you, i had a grandmother who i was born in 1953. she was 70 when i was born, and she was born in 1883. she used to tell me these stories that cheered as a child of how the yankees came and they buried the silver so the yankees would steal it and so forth. that brings up something that

you see as a theme in movies from gone with the wind to the boy about the looting of the south. in fact, in glory and makes it look like they are organized criminals and taking everything not just food or whatever they need but, of course, stealing silver items or whatever, gold, whatever the plantation owners owned. i've never really seen anything written about that. i was wondering if you have any knowledge about the scale, that sort of thing? >> guest: well, armies are armies, and since the days of, the battle of nebuchadnezzar, armies descended upon the areas they are invading like locusts,

and they simply eat up, take up, steal. that is what armies do. when an army comes into your neighborhood, all law is set aside. this is one of the horrors of war. and and i use the word horrors deliberately. i'm the son of an army officer, the father of another army officer, and a want to tell you frankly i have in my lifetime know many officers and the army officers who are most dedicated, the most serious about their calling are also the ones who i can call the most sincere and dedicated pacifists. because they are the ones who really understand what war costs. they also understand that war can never be entered into but reluctantly. because what will happen in the environment of war is never anything to be enjoyed.

and when i see war become a species of entertainment, that's when i began to have the uncomfortable feeling that there is such a thing as war pornography. so while i've written a a gret deal about the american civil war, and about work itself, i'm not a military historian. and i approach the subject of war with a certain degree of hesitation and caution, knowing that the costs that it imposes on people are simply beyond definition. it's been said that war is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, along with famine, the plague. yes, it is on that same level. so when 19th century armies in our civil war misbehave, they

are in some sense not doing anything different than armies have done from time immemorial, and even have done in our own time. and though we are reluctant sometimes to admit it, even our own forces have in modern warfare misbehaved. that is one of the said eventualities of war. that does not mean we put our hands together and say nothing we can do about it. it simply means let us always understand that war is a great calamity. and that even when the result of war is victory, the price to be paid for it is always a great and terrible price. >> host: i'm sorry, doctor --

turned to ice is going to add, so this is why i think that we approach even our own civil war. let us do it remembering, remembering the sacrifices, remembering all that was lost "in the cauldron" of war at all that it costs. because the costs, the costs are more serious than in almost any other kind of. >> host: 202-748-8200 if you live in east and central time zone set of question or comment for historian allen guelzo. 202-748-8201 for those of you in the mountain/pacific time zones and he can't get through on the phone lines you can try a text message, 202-748-8903. that's for text messages only. please include your first name and your city. rich in orange california texts into you, dr. guelzo, i really

enjoyed your lincoln revealed in the coffee table life, lincoln and intimate portrait book. i'm currently reading lee, a life with its 36 page bibliography and 82 pages of notes. the acknowledgment sections, section includes a a mention f your use of four by six cards. is that how you assembled and crafted the 434 pages of text? >> guest: easy answer to that, yes. [laughing] i in fact, have right beside me hear a box of four by six cards for the next project that i'm working on. so that, that in some ways i suppose there's an old fashion way collecting one's research. but it's one that i pitched in two very early and have stayed with, and often say that i read, when in the middle of a project i read, i read, i read.

i note, i note, i know it. i accumulate these four x six cards boxes and boxes and finally what are billy got behind a damn? there comes a moment when you just sense okay, we are there. that's the moment when i i coe myself to mississippi river gambler who spreads out all the cards and starts putting them in piles, right? here's the subject, here's the subject, here's the subject, and i sort them out the way and in some respects the sorting process itself is a beginning of writing. in a 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. so that's, 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 cars

over and over again. with that in view. perhaps the question is also why four x six. why not three x five? i can't get enough on a three x five card. i need the four x six. so the four x six have become my standard procedure and it's on the four by six that i record all of what i regard as the important material that i have been encountering as a work through it. >> host: how many four by six cards for robert e. lee a life and where are they stored right now? >> guest: 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 four by six cards on gettysburg. another three boxes on lincoln's emasculation proclamation. i think you get the idea. there's a lot of boxes of four by six cards back there turn

>> host: jim is in caliente california. please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: thank you for taking my call and professor thank you for a wonderful discussion. just your thoughts please on issue reparations. especially because your expert on reconstruction. what is the little medallion on your suit? >> guest: the little pen is the james mattis and programs logo. because i'm part of the james madison program at princeton university. it's one of the hats 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 is based at princeton university? >> guest: right. the initiative and the james madison program itself are all part of princeton university especially the department of

politics at princeton university. >> host: thank you. >> guest: focusing on that, you're going to remind me your first question. >> caller: reparations. >> guest: reparations, thank you. the question of reparations usually comes up, i can almost clock this. use comes up every 15 years. most recently it came up in an article written by nikole hannah-jones in the wake of the 1619 project, and just before that by ta-nehisi coates. in 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 governments. i think particularly here of the german government dating with the israeli government. i think of our dealings with those who are unjustly assigned to near concentration camps during world war ii, i'm thinking here of the japanese-americans. there was reparations agreement there. reparations are in a sense part of a whole justice system of equity jurisprudence. so what about reparations as it is promoted by nikole hannah-jones, by ta-nehisi coates, and by a number of others running back over many years? first of all i think we are to work with the definition of what reparations we are talking. 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 coats in particular wants to face them together and talk about them as one other don't think it's quite so easy if only because the harm it is done, the tort come for instance, and if i could use legal language is an entirely different tort. the first question i ask is what we talking about, reparations for segregation or reparations for slavery? most often the discussions about reparations are for slavery. and here's will be start to run into some difficulties. reparations for slavery again looks like the plank, ten feet wide over a chasm ten feet deep, ten feet wide and the plank is ten feet long. it looks like it will work but you put weight on it and think start to fall down. the first thing you want to ask is, well, who should be paying

reparations? here is 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 statute we sometimes forget this, slavery was a state-based matter, not a federal government matter. so should the federal government be paying slavery reparations? here's a major question. how can it since it was never installed in the owning of slaves? what about the states? maybe we should single out those states which were slaveowning states. let's single out alabama, for

instance,, as a slaveowning state. 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 legalize 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, the commonwealth of pennsylvania, legalize slavery from the time he 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 simply does not seem to make a whole lot of common sense.

pennsylvania in fact, did fight to end slavery in alabama. didn't pennsylvania on its own merits moved to emancipate and eliminate slavery? yes, it did. but if we're just talking about a 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 descendents of slave owners, should they pay reparations? well, one of the difficulties is that many slave owners, the descendents of many slave owners today are simply not in the same economic position that their

slaveowning forebearers may have been. they may be truck drivers. are they going to be able to pay reparations in any meaningful way? should they? the other thing that's connected to that is, to whom do you pay reparations? obviously you think the answer should be the descendents of slaves. yeah, well, that will unlimited, for instance, some important segments of lack america today who are not the descendents of slaves. i think of someone like colin powell to call about was not a descendent of slaves. how then do we deal with large numbers of black people who would be excluded from a reparations settlement in that way and is it fair? that then leads to into related problem, and that is a many cases so many slaves were themselves the offspring of the slaveholders. among the many crying injustices

of slavery was the fact that slavery was a citizen of sexual oppression, and that slaveowners rate and misused their female slaves, and the offspring of it were multiracial or biracial. well, if you are a descendent of a slave, the irony is you may also be the descendent of a slaveholder. in fact, studies that i've seen estimates that on average, this is an on average figure, genetically speaking, black americans are anywhere between 20-25% white by descendent, and that surprising and shocking statistic is itself a testimony to the widespread sexual

exploitation that occurred under slavery. well, if you are a descendent of both a slave and a slaveholder, to whom are you paying what? so there's a serious and critical problems there. how do you make that determination recs so i think a 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. i mean has been established more or less around the figure of 750,000, 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 would pay to end it can 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 of slavery. and he said that every drop of blood drawn by the lash is being paid for by the drop of blood drawn by the sword. what is the value of those lives? how do we compute the value of those lives that were sacrificed, including the life of abraham lincoln himself? how do we compute the value of

those lives and reckon it against a reparations bill? i don't know how to do that. i also know you can't not take that reckoning into your decision-making about reparations. if all that reparations is about is giving a check, then my concern is that we 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 for someone frankly sit up and sit on want to know is who is going to write me the check. if that is the only consideration, then we forgotten about the civil war and the lies, black and white, that were lost in that war to eliminate slavery. so i ask, what is -- 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 our honest answers. >> host: we are talking with allen guelzo here on booktv. david in mechanicsville virginia you are on. >> caller: thank you. good afternoon, professor. i'm a native pennsylvanian. i'm born and raised in chambersburg, graduate of virginia military institute. i happen to marry a young lady whose great-grandfather was in the army that burn my home town done. so you can imagine i have mixed feelings about the rebellion. however, there's some questions that have been bothering me over the years and i will just share them with you. my first one was, , was j buchan a homosexual? was thaddeus stevens murderer?

was secretary of state in an necrophiliac? now, , 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 ron as a third-party candidate? and if not, was andrew johnson a true third-party president? thank you. >> guest: well, my answer to that is going to be a classic. yes and no. 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 been going on for three years and especially by the summer of 1863, 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 as like three years of war had been just about enough and had gotten is next to nothing. that meant that the leaders of the republican party came to lincoln and said we're going 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, wants to see the war brought to a successful conclusion? what you do is you rename the republican party. so when the republican party comes again before its convention in baltimore in the early summer of 1864, it as a new title. it calls itself the national union party. and while they renominate abraham lincoln, the republican nominee from 1860 as their presidential nominee, also select a democrat, in this case a serving democrat, andrew johnson, to run as vice president. 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 as vice president hannibal hamlin of maine who had been a longtime democrat and it 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 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 refuse to go south, who stayed in the senate, a lifelong democrat and one who represents what it always been a democratic state. tennessee was a state of andrew jackson. on the other hand, during the war lincoln had appointed johnson to be military governor of tennessee, and johnson had done a reasonably good job, not perfect but it done a really 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

tennessee ends promising them i will be your moses, i will lead you to the land of freedom. well, republicans are that and they thought if what we're trying to construct is a ticket that's going to appeal to democrats, andrew johnson was our man. so johnson gets a 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 all practical purposes the leadership of this national union effort is still the republican party. who was keeping 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. and is johnson a third-party candidate? well, no one would've thought that at that point because johnson, despite his long career as a democrat, seem to be uttering all the appropriate republican noises. so it goes forward that way. lincoln is reelected and johnson is elected as his vice president. at that point the whole national union thing disappears because they got reelected. that's the last we hear of it. it is the third-party yes, but only in the sense of using a different name for pr purposes. is it a third-party? no not really because it's not a different party than it was before it simply a strategy for recruiting democratic votes. >> host: four minutes left with our guest allen guelzo. every "in depth" guess we asked

for the favorite books andhat they're currently reading. here are his answers. favorite boo, harry miller, jonathan edwar, john gardners on ficon this hollowed ground, diel walker howe, the political culture of the american wigs. hay jaffa, crisis of the house divided, and james boswell, life of johnson. currently readingosh horowitz devore asked prophecy in the next fate of black assical music. lost in thought, the hidden pleasures of an ielctual life, and four threats, the recurring crises of american democracy. we had time to discuss some of those but we all have a couple minutes left and we want to get james, ohio in here. >> caller: well, good afternoon. i hope you can have a clearly. of course i had my muted.

professor, first of i want to associate myself with an early comment from steve from about 50 minutes ago. you are as as a retired teacr myself let me just say you are like the very model of thoughtful analysis and what used to be called ratio summation, and above all, contextualizing the 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've happened if tickets charge had succeeded, i think another thing that popped into my head, i got a lot of thoughts like your four by six card stack up, canada and mexico might of gun 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. he says that it beginning of a chapter perhaps all wars are in some way or another the product of miscalculations. i i guess maybe a good way to wd this up, lets you want to talk about the instrument that -- >> host: do you know what, you have ten and we only get 30 seconds for allen guelzo. go ahead and finish up. >> caller: was there -- that led to the civil war? [inaudible conversations] truly do 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 more. and they miscalculated by assuming that foreign nations would come to the rescue and intervene. at every moment they miscalculated, and no one criticize them more than that then robert e. lee. and even on his way to the surrender ceremony at appomattox he pointed this out turkey said, this is how i i knew, this isw i always knew that this would end. >> host: you mentioned your four by six cards at your side for your current project which is what? >> guest: it is another book about abraham lincoln. so i'm returning to some original turf. >> host: we will close with this text from al in newburgh, new york. who plays the bass? that's in the background. tragic i do. i was a music major my first year in college, a composition major actually. i discovered which is sometimes

painfully discovered your first year in college, you just don't have enough talent. 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: professor allen guelzo 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. >> there are a lot of places to get political information, but only at c-span2 you get it straight from the source. no matter where you are from or where you stand on the issues, c-span is america's network. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. if it happens here, or here, or here or anywhere that matters, america is watching on c-span. powered by cable. >> c-span now is a free mobile

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