good afternoon, ladies and

gentlemen. it is so wonderful to. see all of you. welcome to this special event at radnor memorial library. thank you so much for coming to the library on such a very hot day and then some. my name is pam sedor and i am a reference librarian here. and as i have said many, many times and you know, jennifer, this the best part of librarianship doing events, planning for you, our readers and now it's time to tell you about one of my partners radnor historical jennifer beacom president of radnor historical and she brought many of her history loving members here with her today and our other partner is main point books. elliot is out there in the lobby and they are our local independent bookstore. and these days most towns are not so lucky to have an indie

bookstore. if the library has readers and the historical society has history lovers and the booksellers have books, then it follows that publishers have, authors. and there has never been a time when to prominent historians and authors of to new books have come to visit radnor memorial library. at the same time. it is our indie bookstore main point books working behind the scenes with publishers and to make this kind magic. this is magic happening for us today. this special author. it then becomes a celebration

where we can strengthen our connections to one another and build community at the same time. now, i know that some readers download books, but today you may be interested in a physical copy of books for the authors sign as a souvenir of this celebration today and. it's now my pleasure to introduce dr. alan siegel. so. on my left, my far left, dr. kelso is a new york times bestselling author, eminent civil war historian and, commentator on public issues he has written for the new york times, the washington post, the wall street journal, and many publications. he is thomas w smith,

distinguished research scholar and director of the james madison program initiative on and statesmanship at princeton university, previously dr. kelso was director, civil war era studies and henry r luce, professor of the civil war era at college. he also taught at eastern university here in radnor township. dr. kelso's, many i can't begin to list them here you all know have won many prizes and three times winner of the lincoln prize. that is just absolutely wonderful. but today, dr. kelso will be talking about his new book, voices from gettysburg letters papers and from the greatest of the civil war, dr. kelso lives

in pennsylvania with his wife, deborah. deborah here today. they have three children, one of whom is in the military and they also have five grandchildren. so welcome, dr. alan. so. and now jennifer beacom president radnor society will introduce dr. john jon grinspan here from the smithsonian and i'll just give you a heads up that the q and a after both authors have presented will follow in not too long from now. okay. and then we'll ask you to come up here to ask your question. if you feel like doing so. so thank you for coming. and here's jennifer. good afternoon, everyone. as pam just said, my name is jennifer beacom.

i am president of the radnor historical. i would like to thank the radnor memorial library. c-span main point and both of our authors for their wonderful partnership in putting together putting together today's event. and i am honored to introduce dr. jon grinspan, the curator of political history at the smithsonian's national museum of american history, which my husband and i visited about six weeks ago, and ironically, we have something the historical has something in common with dr. he's at the museum most days i would assume, and we actually have a piece at the historical society that was once exhibited at the american history museum. it a tapestry that had been created for the centennial exposition. and then when they did the bicentennial here in america, the smithsonian looked for things that had been celebrated there. so we loaned it to them.

yeah. it's a very cool story. part of is got real human hair in it. it's it's really interesting. but more interesting things today. dr. greenspan's book, why wake the forgotten force that elected lincoln and spurred the civil war has been recently discussed in the new york times, the washington post. the wall street journal. and the in the wall street journal was. mr. greenspan's excellent book us realize that public zeal in support of a worthy cause can have positive results. i think that is an important message for all of us to hear today and. the society is pleased to add both authors books to our library collection of over 800 titles. and we are honored to be part of today's discussion. thank you for everyone who's attending. thank for the offer. thank you to the authors and. well, i think the rule, the program, at least as it's vouchsafed to me that i'll talk

a little bit about voices from gettysburg and, then john will talk about the wide awakes. so let me explain in the battle of gettysburg. oh, wait, everybody knows what that is. in fact, there's probably more books written about the battle of gettysburg, not only than any other battle of the american civil war, maybe even more than any other battle in american. but at least one person whose article i was actually reading this morning said there are probably books out there about gettysburg than there were soldiers in pickett's charge. and i don't think that's an exaggeration. there is an enormous literature on the battle of gettysburg so why another gettysburg book? perfectly legitimate question. back in 2013, i wrote a book about the battle of gettysburg. gettysburg or the last invasion, a title that i borrowed from

herman melville, who talked about the invasion of pennsylvania in 1863 by robert e lee and the army of northern virginia as the last invasion of the united states by a force. and that book was a narrative probably longer than it should have been, but still a narrative. and i have to say was was well received on many hands. and it the long shelf of other narratives describing. the battle of gettysburg. those narratives run from at one point the famous comprehensive history written in 1960 by edwin coddington. the gettysburg campaign is something of an earlier text for people who want to read about the battle of gettysburg all the way through extraordinary collection of books that almost the battle down in 15 minutes

segments. so you get a whole volume written about one very small part of the action and sometimes those parts of those actions are given names connected to the battlefield. the peach orchard little round. top cemetery hill and so on. like that. not only books, but but movies. one of the most significant movies appearing in the mid 1990s from the director maxwell simply entitled gettysburg and it ran for 4 hours and it you like it was something of a battle in the sense that you were going to be in for a long siege but it went almost literally from from the first shot of the battle to the very final one. so books movies magazines and of course a visitation to the battle of gettysburg has always been extremely important. and gettysburg is one of those

major historical pilgrimage sites. so again, the question comes with of that attention being devoted to gettysburg, why another book on gettysburg. gettysburg, the last invasion, a narrative. it was built on many, many, many sources. and like other narrative histories of gettysburg. what you're really hearing as a historian talk talk about what the historian has read, talk about what others said long ago about what they if they were participants in the battle. and a narrative does help to organize things helps to highlight what's maybe puts to the background what might not be nearly so important. and sometimes just shoves off into a corner. the stuff that people told that while wasn't true. there are people who published narratives their own. after the battle of gettysburg which have in subsequent been taken as faithful to of what happened only to it turn out that in fact they were nowhere

near gettysburg. one thinks of someone like augustus buell, the so-called cannonier whose narrative of his service, the battle of gettysburg, was regarded for years an extremely valuable contribution from a first person participant. only to have a turn out afterwards that augustus buell wasn't even in the same area code when battle took place. similar thing happened with confederate staff officer, who was known as william swallow. he wrote wonderful articles giving you all of his of what happened at gettysburg. oh, they'd have a turn out that william swallow, first of all, was not his name. and second of all, that he was a first class grifter. so sometimes what the historian has to do, and this is a service to to the reader, is to make some distinctions here. there are some voices you want to hear and some voices that probably are not as important. and some voices that really weren't.

voices. most of the time, though we don't come into immediate with voices from those we are having them filtered by historians. and there is something to be said of getting to the real loam of the historic soil and seeing firsthand what people actually did right. sometimes what people who were participants, i mean, participants in the battle sometimes they wrote is very familiar. there are many first person accounts of the battle which have been printed, reprinted, reprinted, reprinted, rewritten talked about, lectured upon for many, many years. but then there are others which are locked away in archives which have never been published. letters from original participle describing what they saw there. and then there are other aspect the battle which are still

person observations but don't usually into description of the battle because remember, gettysburg is a battle which is fought around and through a town. there are civilians trapped in gettysburg, usually in the sellers of, their houses, all through the battle. they also left accounts, which we tend, if we're writing narratives about the battle not to much attention to because we're focused on the battle and yet the civilian is really even though they didn't wear uniforms or bear arms, they were of the battle of gettysburg, too. what about what they had to say? how can we find out about that a a lot of that kind of work went into the making of gettysburg the last invasion and yet i felt in years afterwards as i would a course on the battle of gettysburg that somehow something was being lost. there was a real pleasure that was being missed, being actually able to deal hands on with the

words of people who had been there, not necessarily through the imagination of a historian. and that what led in a very direct way to the making of voices from gettysburg. because what voices from gettysburg really, really is it is a it is an anthology. it is a collection of first person accounts of the battle organized chronologically, the very beginning of the gettysburg campaign, all way to its conclusion and beyond, because there were many things which happened, after the battle of gettysburg, that are of note, not the least of which was abraham lincoln's famous. the first person accounts and voices from gettysburg actually will go all the way up to 1963, not 1863, 1963, and a gettysburg address given by a man who was an american vice president and soon would a president, and that

is lyndon johnson. so voices from is a way of saying, i've written a narrative about the battle. but let me the historian step back. let me put into your hands the voices of the people who were there at the time. sometimes it's the voices of the generals generals, and sometimes they are making excuses. the mistakes they made. and sometimes it's the ordinary soldiers who cannot believe what have seen. sometimes these accounts are very straight forward. i was here in this unit and did that. sometimes these are harrowing. there are the stories like the confederate soldier comes upon a wounded union officer was clearly dying. what is he going to do for this man who a few minutes before had been his enemy, except with him the last water in his canteen?

those are the stories that and over and over again stuck in my mind when on gettysburg as a project and. it is those stories which make up voices from gettysburg. i provide some brief introductions. chapter by chapter. by chapter. but most of the time my big goal is to step back, get out of the way, to let the voices of those were there. speak to you so that this becomes a kind of book where you have not the indirect experience of reading a historian's description of gettysburg. you have the of actually hearing these people speak to you. they have been long dead. they they they were there 150, 160 years ago. and yet their words survive. and their words are there directly for for you to make of what you like on filtered and

unmediated by me. i think to that there is an opportunity in this book to give voice to a lot of people who really never had a chance to speak, and those especially are the letters and, the papers of participants in the battle that i discovered in archives that i said before, have never been published and never been distributed. so whether they are famous memoirs or whether they are completely new discoveries, these people who are talking to you. this is the kind of book that you can read and, share the experience of the battle with them or perhaps better still, take around on the battle field with you. when visit gettysburg. go from place to place and be able to stand in the same place that one of these voices describes and hear them describe what they are seeing as you are

looking at that very same space. now, 160 years after the battle and i think above all it will be an experience that moves you for understanding and recognize the confusion or the terror, but also the stakes of the battle of gettysburg. i'm not as as a history person very friendly to asking what if questions. john can tell you that historians have a hard enough time establishing what did happen without worrying about what might have happened. and yet a certain element of what if which is here is this table. what if gettysburg turned out a different way? what would we look like today as a country? would we have a country if something had turned out different? if if the dime that turns and makes a difference, had turned in a different fashion on those

three days in july, in 63. i think those are the questions that will be generated. you read through these voices from gettysburg as you learn how people much like ourselves very ordinary people in very ordinary situations found themselves in places they had to do very extra ordinary things and that direct first person experience, i think may be the most exciting kind of history that you can pursue. well, let me turn it over to john to talk about wide awakes. who will keep you wide awake. we'll see if i can keep you wide awake before i tell you what the heck a wide awake is. i want to go back to something. pam, at the very beginning, which is that libraries, books, publishers have, authors and authors have teachers sorry, i grew up in the area in ardmore. i to a friend's central school growing up and, the teacher who

taught me how to read fairly is in the audience today. i can't call him jack briggs but quick round up for mr. brady. and you have any issue with anything in this book please it up with him i'm not to blame. john, can i go? i'm going to i'm going to just intrude on what john is going to say. but i have a teacher of mine here in the. but i will say this one person who was a great teacher, being a teacher for me was my. and in large measure she was the person who first put the hook of history in my mouth. and she had good reason for doing it because and here i'm going to betray, shall we say, my vulnerability. she as a schoolgirl in north philadelphia sat in classes on decoration day. that's what they used to call it, before it became memorial day classrooms, where old veterans of the union army would come and speak to their class in

their little blue jackets and little blue caps about what the civil war was really about. so i had my grandmother who had that experience and was almost like being able to reach out and touch that past of the american civil. so everything i've done about the civil war really large measure, stems from experience. and i think in terms of being a history person, there's almost no experience profound than that sense being able to contact great events and, great people from another time. that's true. so what is it, wide? i, i often think that explain the civil war that if you think back to your first impression of what the civil war was, you probably visualize men in blue and men in gray on a field in pennsylvania or virginia. and that jumps right to middle of the story. and it's a fascinating moment but it doesn't get to the question to me is most dynamic which is how does a political

conflict become military one how did years, decades, centuries of conflict over slavery actually spill over into violence warfare? and i think it's a question that is in ways salient today. right. and so when i try to win back the clock to that moment where politics becomes violence, i keep coming to this movement. the white awakes in the year before the civil war broke out, hundreds of thousands of americans were putting on military uniforms marching in the street, practicing drill for this strange political movement called the wide awakes, which was in estimation among the the largest, the strangest and one of the most consequential or mass movements in american political history. the wide awakes were a movement in the campaign electoral campaign before, the civil war, the 1860 election. they were can't grassroots, anti-slavery, youth movement primarily in the north who militaristic symbols and marching to campaign for abe

lincoln for the republican party, which he represented and against what they saw as slavery's assault on american democracy. and they helped kind of unspool a lot of elements of how we get from politics to warfare there. kind of to me, i've been studying them for 17 years and i've always thought it's strange. we don't know more about them because they're a puzzle piece to me that helps us connect dots from the politics of slavery and the fight of the 1850s into the civil war. for one thing, they help explain how abe lincoln and the republicans won that election no anti-slavery candidate ever had a shot at winning presidency before this. and then in 1860, frederick calls it a revolution. suddenly, you have not just a someone who's moderate on slavery, although lincoln's a moderate, but an antislavery party in the white house, not but people who are their aim is to restrain the expansion power of slavery. the wide awakes help us explain how that election was won. i won't engage the what if if

they hadn't existed because they did exist. and when people thought of that election they often thought in the immediate aftermath of this strange movement of young men in the streets with torches, campaigning, the power of slavery in america, democracy. they also help explain, i said, how politics become warfare, how the election of 1860 becomes the fighting that begins in mid 1861. these aren't two separate events. you don't read the textbook explanation of the election, turn the page and get to the civil war as people lived it on. the ground as dr. girls are speaking of, it unfolded from one thing to another and the wide awakes are present all along way they emerge among young people. in the spring of 1860, they this campaign and new and dynamic ways that are kind of thrilling and inspiring kind of upsetting in the campaign. and then they refuse to go away. they continue to march and they to bleed over from a political into a potentially parallel movement as the politics america

darkens, they really us this question where is this line and to me that's the third most important thing about this movement as a puzzle piece they help us act ask where does politics end? where does political speech end and where does political violence begin because of their militarism? because their confrontational approach and because the pushback they get in many places, the union we see right where political turn into violence, turn into violence in the american streets. that leads this civil war. so this movement which is so significant, which is so powerful we have almost no consciousness of today. i mean, did anyone raise your hand if you've heard of the wide awakes before. sorry to put you on the spot, sometimes you get super fans who know so much about them and their great great great uncle was a member. but most people don't. and yet they really are telling to me about democracy and the potential strengths and weaknesses of democracy than almost any other mass we can point to. and they really also help explain what what the push back

was towards the power of slavery in america going into 1860, why people would vote for a guy like lincoln who was relative unknown, why people would support the republican. i think that they often explain the wide awakes their opposition to slavery is opposition to a threat to american. they're not necessarily ready to end slavery tomorrow and they're not as fired up about ending slavery expansion. some other people are. but these young, wide who are 19, 20 years old, the two things they point to are minority rule and the threat to free speech that the slave power a term you may have heard the people who own slaves in america really amounts to 2% of the population. 380,000 people. it's fewer people than live in philadelphia at the time. now, these people live in families who also live in households that, maintain slavery. they're in political parties, support slavery. but the number of people who are enslavers is fairly small, but their power is trimmed back.

five of the nine supreme court justices who decide the dred scott decision says african americans have no rights. we're enslavers. 2% of the population, five of the nine. this is wildly you may have heard about the 3/5 clause in high school. the 3/5 cause means dramatic overrepresented ocean of southern congressmen and, electors. and by the 1850s, there 30 extra congressmen coming from the south. that's there are brawls in congress when there are roll call votes in congress. whatever is on in this increasingly tense environment, there are 30 extra votes and 60 extra fists for the slavery side of the aisle in the 1850s. so it really like minority rule, the largest states in the nation at the time new york, ohio, illinois are all in the north. you have this larger and larger northern majority who is just feeling trampled upon and not are they being outvoted? they feel if they're being shut

down, they feel as if free antislavery speech is under assault. certainly it is in the south just can't publicly criticized slavery in most parts of the south and stay in town keep your printing press running not end lynched i mean people died for slavery even in southern even in pennsylvania throughout, the lower north as well. it's awfully dangerous to express your honest on slavery even well into new england. you have a culture throughout america in these years of something called mobbing, which is basically an angry group, gets together and goes after somebody. now mobbing happens a lot. it happens 1200 times by one count, between 1828 and 1861. those mobs can go after anybody. they can go after catholics or mormons or immigrants but the largest number of mobbing target abolitionists in african-american communities. there's this sense that you can't stand up publicly, even in philadelphia or even in boston, and criticize the power slavery without somebody coming with

torches and bricks. and so the wide awakes get started as a movement to, fight back against that, and they get started in a really unique place. they get started in hartford, which is not what we think as a brawling, bare fisted town. but in the early 1860 election, young people in hartford form a movement calling themselves the wide awake, meaning that they are awake to these these imbalances in american democracy. they put on uniforms, they march in the streets and they take across the nation. it's this mobilized sense of a population, a generation standing up. and within a few months of the founding of the wide awakes, there are hundreds of thousands of wide awakes in the country they spread first to chicago and the republican convention in chicago, and then they bubble up this region alone. there were wide in westchester paley, marion, they start chapters all over 19 year olds, 20 year olds, mostly working class kids. but it's an incredibly diverse movement. there are african-american wide awakes in boston. there are immigrant wide awakes in saint louis and philadelphia,

but they're also anti-immigrant, know nothing wide. in some places, everyone who has a beef with the slave power can kind of come together in this movement and cellular structure and its powerful and symbols make it that can have a really diverse movement there even female wide awake companies at mount holyoke and east chatham, new york. it's broad that it's encompassing henry adams, the famous historian and writer, said that the systematic organization of hatreds is the most powerful force in politics and the wide awakes organized hatred against the slave owners. as this minority that's controlling the government, i won't give away the whole story because it's so amazing. we have a lot to discuss, but they begin and after helping lincoln win the election to bleed into a paramilitary movement, when the actual bloodshed of the civil war starts, when fort sumter is fired, it begins the civil war, without a doubt but no one is killed. the first bloodshed of the civil war is in the streets of baltimore where anti white clubs known as the national volunteers attack. massachusetts troops coming

through town in what looks like a mopping it's really it's not it's not people in a cornfield it's fighting in the streets between basically political factions. and then a couple of weeks later in saint louis actual wide awakes been armed and trained launch their own attack and kill 30 civilians and confederate leading people. the war starts by political in the streets. the wide awakes to push back against and understanding this story really understand how we got crossing that line from an election from politics into warfare and then many of those wide awakes are the first volunteers in the union army in large numbers. and maybe that's a segue way talking about the union army and or something like that. well, speaking speaking of armies, i was going to ask your your cover has very famous image of a wide parade and in it you see a large number of people in this parade the very disciplined their their marching it looks like marching band and their

very strangely and was i was going to suggest describe the outfit of the wide awakes and there and there are posters and their banners and things because they they just don't show i mean they show up with message just in and how they're dressed. i think part of the message actually goes back to what has been happening politically in europe in the years before the war, too. yeah. and then maybe we can talk about union and confederate soldiers. yeah. but there where i go, the wide awakes are started by these guys in a textile and they have free textile. excess textile. so they make capes and they kind of see the power of capes and add martial caps to them and. it moves around from textile to sort of textile store. you can see it spreading to chicago, to all these textiles are one of the biggest businesses in the country at the time. and if you have excess textiles, you can make capes and you can make caps and. they work. they look a little bit like superhero shows. but what they really look like, they look americans trying to look like european soldiers.

they make uniforms for themselves that are not as snazzy as as an lancer or whatever. but they they tap into militarism, that powerful sense of. and on the one hand, militarism signal to people violence. right. maybe guys are ready for war because they're military caps and they're giving themselves ranks and people in the south, north and say, look, they're marching they're training, they're wearing uniforms. they will invade. we need to secede to get from them in their own minds. these 218 year old kids are designing these uniforms. see order as what they're demonstrating. they march in order they drill, they march in silence often they ban drinking and cigar smoking in their rank. they're their physical appearance and their uniforms to indicate that the republican party is party of order. in this time of political. and they're very physical symbols, the open eyes are main symbol. they're awake, aware, they're engage and they're orderly they're not tearing things down

the way it looks like every other political party is crumbling. they're the only organization that seems 1860 to be building something. they see it and they're they're eliciting this, but they're very, you know, capes are wearing and their hats. i guess i'll turn the question back to you. my image of guys in blue and guys in gray it that's not the experience of the average civil war soldier. no, not really. not really. blue and that's sort of the 30,000 foot view because the official uniforms of the union of the confederate were for the union army blue, a code blue pants, a blue hat, and for the for the confederate army. the same thing in gray or after that all similarity and all uniformity begin to disintegrate. because for one thing, you look at the way these these armies were kitted out, what was their model what was their design? the design that was the basis

for both of these armies of the 1860s was believe it or, not france. now we think of cooking as something that you emulate. not too many people have been really eager to imitate the french army in in recent times. in the 19th century, exact opposite was the military nation par excellence. so if you wanted to be taken seriously in terms of of the military, you a uniform that would look french. so what happens in practical terms for these these armies yes. the uniform they're they're equipped with that they're issued it is a blue coat for the union. it's supposed to be gray for the confederacy. but after that, all the similarities to break down. what about the hat they're wearing. you've seen what's supposed to be a civil war hat. this funny looking thing with the round flat and you're

thinking, where did that come from? i know exactly where it come from. it comes from comes from the french armies. cappy it was borrowed shamelessly from the french model and both union and confederate armies did that because if it's french, it must be good. the french army was, was something of a considered as something of the delta force or the special forces of the green beret of the day. so you copy european models and some of these units took the copying of european models to something of what we today would regard as an absurd extreme because there were units which set out to deliberately copy certain aspects of the french military, for instance, the french military in the 1830s, in the 1840s, employed a colonial

quasar ii irregular force called zu obs. today we would look at those uavs and we would say, who would ever show up on a battlefield dressed like that? those uavs looked like a bunch of circus riders. they wore baggy, huge baggy pants, little cutaway monkey jackets, and in many cases a turban that's why there's real military, practical for you. yeah. go into battle with a turban. going to help you a lot but but the union army many union army units and, some confederate army units copied that. why? because it's cool. that's that's what really important military units of europe do and you will find copies of european style uniforms in in every form from oh, let's take an example. one of the most famous units that fight at the battle of gettysburg, the the 83rd

pennsylvania, the 83rd pennsylvania, adopts as its uniform a special kind of advance skirt. sure french unit and they have a little and forwards cap that they where they have uniform colors for both pants jacket which the rest of the union army doesn't have. and then there are other units which german style uniforms because a large component of the union army at gettysburg comes from german immigrants. there were some union army regiments where the officers still giving orders in german at the battle of gettysburg. so they will imitate a variety of european models. and anyone who imagines that the uniform of the union army was uniform, it you you would if you were plopped down in the middle of gettysburg july 1st, 330,

1863 and took a look around the army of, the potomac, the official name of the union army that fought there. it would look like a collection of well, school marching bands from all over country about to do shows. the confederates were even more heterogenous, largely out of necessity. the union blockade of the confederacy pretty sharply crimped any kind of textile production. so by the time of the battle of gettysburg, a lot of confederate units were dressed in what? not much of an improvement over farm clothes. some of them would in fact wear captured material. others, however, if they had a good state government behind them that was willing to put money into the manufacture of uniforms, could actually show up for the battle of gettysburg and pretty natty attire especially if you were from north carolina north carolina did lot of

justice to it. soldiers at gettysburg by them with first class uniforms. but you could have that kind of unit fighting alongside another confederate that looked like it had just gotten out of jail. and that was the kind of heterogeneity heterogeneity that you would find in both of these armies. and no influence was was greater than the influence of european armies and the way the people wanted to look, because that represented professionalism before the american civil war, the united states army was composed of a little bit over 16,000 armed officers and men. 16,000, actually. that's for the whole united states. there really wasn't serious military presence and a lot americans, in fact, prided themselves on we don't need a professional military. we are a democracy. we are a republic. we're not like those

militaristic monarchies in europe. so there was a sense that when wide awakes adopt these uniforms, there's a certain little frisson of of discomfort for many people that this is somehow stepping out of a proper american identity to adopt these uniforms. yeah, you see it from their opponents the democratic party, even the legitimate opposition, not people who are planning to secede in a little while, write newspaper articles and letters. the editor saying, when is it okay? when did it become okay to march in uniforms to the polls or call yourself an army or patrol the polls with your militaristic club and saying this is the beginning of the this is just going to spiral and it does spiral immediately as they're criticizing democratic political clubs in philadelphia throughout throughout the north formed their own clubs and in brooklyn. they call themselves the core formers because they're going to put out the wide awakes they come up with names all around the country and these these

political clubs the south certainly become basis of the confederate army the minutemen in in charleston help fire on fort sumter the minutemen who are formed saying they're going to fight the wide awakes in saint louis our army within a couple of months. so this this back and forth is really going and these militaristic symbols army click with people and they are as you say, with the uniforms drawing from europe. well that a lot of the wide look to garibaldi in italy mazzini in italy revolutions going on in europe for if not democracy fought for greater liberties against imperial ism and they're drawing from them and many of the prominent wide awakes fought in the revolutions in 1848 in germany and prussia out throughout central europe, they lose those revolutions, they move to philadelphia or st louis or cincinnati and they going for antislavery. it seems like the next logical movement to fight for there is an international conversation about rights, about liberties, about democracy going on across

the atlantic. back then, it's not it's not as isolated as just people within within our hemisphere or, within our nation. the the appearance of these wide awakes is is also something of a departure, not only because the uniforms, but simply for the fear that many people seem to have had about mobbing and mob actions. as i remember lincoln in particular in 1838, the first really famous speech he gives the lyceum speech there. he wags his finger very energetically at the idea of people turning out on the streets and performing mob actions because he says that's the of democracy soon as you let mobs start to rule then democracy starts to evaporate because when you have mob rule then people who love ordinary orderly lose heard and they'll turn to some dictator to bring

order back into their lives. turn to a napoleon bonaparte older, they'll turn to caesar or alexander. great. and for lincoln, there's this interesting conjunction. and i'd like you to talk about this here. you have on the one hand, lincoln always deploring mob mob actions is something that happens in the south. and yet here are groups of organized young republicans in very military formats looking very militaristic. what does lincoln think about that? yeah, well, lincoln in particular and all the republican leadership, it's actually a really big bind to have a large number of enthused mass supporters marching in the street. you know, when you run a political campaign through, the accepted methods in the 19th century, which is going to the saloons in the barrooms and talking to people and winning over voters and counting noses. as lincoln says this, this is the way you run a campaign. and these 18 year olds in uniforms, they just show up.

seward was lincoln's presidential rival and then ally william henry seward complains constantly that wide awakes and upstate new york just show up outside his house the middle of the night with torches, with oompah. they show up at susan anthony's house. they just show up wherever and serenade and march around and doing it out of enthusiasm. they're fired 18 year olds, and that's how they show how excited they are. it's really hard for the republican establishment in general to to navigate this flood that they have they have hundreds of thousands of supporters who are really crossing lines, potentially of acceptable political engagement. so do they pull them back? do they keep them going? will these young people scare off moderates who they need to win the election? and lincoln is lincoln particularly cagey? he he can't really campaign. he's presidential nominee. you don't really campaign unless you stephen douglass and you're going to break all the rules. so lincoln is in springfield he's getting letters from wide awake, telling him he's an honorary awake. he's a member of their club. they make his an honorary wide

awake. they invite him to their rallies. but he he for the one thing he really can't for just decorum come out to publicly say i love these wide awakes but he doesn't even in his private writings share too much love of the wide other political leaders like william henry come to really like the wide awake charles francis adams. they love charles gives speeches to the wide awake. he always expects to give a speech wherever he goes lincoln doesn't even as private writing say too much positive stuff about the white awakes. and he does say a few. you know we win elections by counting noses, by speaking people on the ground. we don't win elections. they're basically silly parades after the election, when the wide awakes are potentially morphing into a paramilitary force when their people talking about arming, escorting him to his inauguration. lincoln is lieutenants, people like john hay, his young secretary, and william atwood, who organizes his trip to the east. they put out statements to their friends in the wide awake parties, basically away.

you can you can support our party but now you're going to do more harm than good because this moment the war and the conflict is going to be four union and scaring away the middle ground is worse than anything. lincoln essentially risks his life. he he could go to washington with tens of thousands of wide awakes protecting him. he goes with two people he knows that they're assassination threats, which eventually are realized, but sees potential danger in the wide awakes. they might scare away democrats in the they might scare away moderates. they might get states that have not yet seceded to secede. if lincoln is seen marching around with guys in black on the capitol, i mean, that's what mussolini does generations later. but it crosses lines for lincoln. and so very quietly seems be pulling the reins on them. but doesn't ever on paper say go away. he takes their support, he takes their votes but he he seems to rein them in in a in a way that shows real courage and restraint. i think how about how he behaves in 1863 as the armies are coming

north, abraham lincoln has responsibility that he never really seriously anticipated and that is being commander in chief. now, of course, the constitution stipulate that the president shall be commander, chief of the army and navy when called into actions and also the militia when called into actual service. and yet nobody had less in the way of. real practical military experience. he'd been in the militia and the illinois and back in the 1830s during the blackhawk war, but uh, in that occasion he really did nothing more than just kind of run aimlessly around the countryside, never really saw any action. and the party to which he belongs for first part of his life, the whig party is a, is a party which really champions itself as being the non militarist party, the opposition, the democratic party whose head is jackson, the victor of the battle of new orleans.

the man the whigs sneered at as the military chieftain. now the whigs said, oh, we're not like, you know, the democrats are all in the military stuff because the democrats really are just kind of claws and aristocrats. they want to be monarchs, but we whigs, we're different. we're peace loving. we're all in favor of democracy and civilian life. and the whigs tried to draw that distinction. well, lincoln is a whig, and he tells these jokey stories about his service in the black hawk war. how he he never. he never bent bayonet, but he sure bent a rusty old musket. or he talks about how he never really had to shed blood, except from the. and he talks about military parades, especially militia parades, talks about them having contests for, their uniforms that whoever the longest string of salami on his uniform would

win a prize and and they would carry banners with mottos like will will fight till we run and will run till we die. not exactly heroic statements. so now suddenly lincoln finds himself president of the united states, and he's got to command these armies. and he has generals, he has professional military people to serve under him. but oh, my. oh, yes, great. of american military history like. irwin mcdowell, amber rose burnside, joe hooker, these are reminiscent of long strings of philadelphia phillies over the years. so so. so when you look at the people who are serving under him you're not really looking at military geniuses he has to give direction to this war and this is not easy for him to do makes

mistakes in his role as commander in chief and he tries to compensate for them by borrowing books from the library of congress about military and military tactics. he rather had the impression that you could a general the same way you became a lawyer, that if you read enough books on the subject, that you would learn what. you do know and i'm sorry it doesn't work that way. it wasn't until 1864 when he brings ulysses grant east to take command, that he finally says, i could step back from being the of an army and and just let grant win the war, which he does. but it did also mean that he had to recognize at the same time that were an awful lot of very ordinary people making, very tremendous sacrifices in uniform. a lot of lives were being those lives sometimes were the result of a lot of clumsiness on the part of the generals. so when it comes to gettysburg to deliver that address on the

19th of november, 1863, who were the people he talks about? not the generals not the commanders he talks about they fought here the ordinary soldiers living and dead who struggle here. they have hallowed this ground far above our poor power to add or detract. and that struck a wonderful of reconciliation between the fact that yes, there's a war on have to be a war leader. i to command soldiers and there have to be generals we've got to be sorry we've got to win this war. but yet at the same he's able to blend that with a very democrat radical understanding of who the soldiers were and what the war was about. because the war really about the preservation of this thing we call democracy, i mean, over and above all the other things that we can talk about as being causes of the war. but lincoln sees it gettysburg

as this this war, this battle, this kind of a final exam for democracy, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure to our democracy is just experiments. because when you think about it all right, we create this republic. in 1776 and we think for a while that's the wave of the future. the french imitate in 1789, tear down the bastille and get rid of the king france, and then then it all spirals downwards. and by the time we get to 1860, all the monarchs are back on their thrones in europe, in fact, monarchy looks like it's the best way of running human. the only exception to that rule is the american democracy and how the american democracy going to blow its brains out and do it over slavery. and so lincoln has to ask the question, is this war a test

whether this thing called democracy it really works? we today think of democracy as the default position of societies. they didn't think then and lincoln, if the american democracy goes down in 1863, the whole possibility goes with and yet he said look what has happened here at gettysburg ordinary people not aristocrats not not from some aristocratic sitcom ordinary people who are buried in cemetery clerks, shoemakers. they made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of this called democracy. and from that, he concludes, there really is something of consequence there is something transcendent about this thing. we call to mock or see that people are willing to make that sacrifice for ordinary people who are not whipped in the wind

or bludgeoned into for it, but do it voluntarily, he said. if we will imitate example, if will dedicate ourselves as, they dedicated themselves to the ultimate, then yes, yes, we will have a new birth of freedom. yes a government of the people by the people, for the people not perish from the earth. so he had to find a military solution to democracy. but far from that being a contradiction, lincoln and this was the great thing of what he does at gettysburg or lincoln, in fact, draws them together, wraps them around each other and makes both of those things support themselves together. yeah. we're going to have you have one of these. i do not have time now and. oh, so. all right. before i invite anyone in the audience to come up and ask a question, dr. kelso and dr.

greenspan will be taking questions up here at the microphone. and but i do want to thank jon grinspan for book wide awake. and thank dr. alan siegel's, but also his book, voices from getting and you're so prolific, you've the name so prolific. i'm thinking that you're the facebook that we have. okay. so i want to thank you all. but anyone have a question? thank you all for coming. it's been wonderful. thank you, steve, this is. how hot was it? it gettysburg. that's the question. but not as hot as it is here today. temperatures during the battle range from the mid seventies to the mid eighties, were they in wool, though? were they. well, people are going to say yes. while they were fighting in wool

uniforms. and people think that's an automatic sentence to a sauna. actually, when you think about it, wool breathes. it's not really anything close to being as oppressive, you might think. and i say that from from experience, having done a modest amount of civil war reenacting in a wool uniform on some very battlefields, and it's not nearly as as oppressive as you think. so the overall at gettysburg was not. not exactly. oh shall we use the word clammy it? it was a summer in pennsylvania. what is unusual is the fact that from day to day the weather, the first day of the battle of gettysburg is actually overcast. there was drizzle in the morning. it had been a very wet month before that for rain. but there's drizzle the first day and then overcast first through the day. second day is much clearer.

but the the battle generates its own weather because with all the of gunpowder, enormously large. what you get is the creation of clouds of this heavy, whitish gray smoke from the weapons that that almost acts like a bank of london fog on the battlefields so sometimes we have this image and sometimes we get this from television in the movies that everyone is has a clear view of everything is the battlefield and everyone's shooting directly at everyone else that's not happening at gettysburg. actually, there are stories about and see some of these and voices from gettysburg about officers having to get down on their hands and knees to see the smoke, to see the targets they're supposed to be shooting at. so it's a very complex and the the inner remus amount of smoke that is created by the fighting on the third day of the battle can actually be seen from miles

away. there's there are people there, civilians have gathered on what's called the indian lookout near emmitsburg, maryland, just below the pennsylvania maryland border. and they're gather that they can see this enormous pillar of smoke rising from the gettysburg battlefield almost looks like like a mushroom cloud. so you but it's slow motion. it's not like hiroshima. you if were observing that today, you think you were looking at something fairly close to modern warfare you're not. but the immediate visual environment and the immediately immediate experience of whether at gettysburg it was it was not like a clear open day for recreation. it was actually very to see great distance, such as during the battle because of what was going on there.

and a question you, john, in 1860, what the voting age and, what were the requirements to be able to vote, especially if you were a new immigrant. that's a great question. so the voting age until. 1970s, essentially everywhere is, 21 years old, many of you probably remember when that changed over? some people were allowed the ground to vote younger or if they knew someone who was running the polls, it was friendly to them. there's all these accounts, especially out west of of or on civil war battlefield, not battlefields, but civil war armies people were being allowed. if you're a soldier, maybe you'd get to vote. the way you voted back then is it's a how it worked in most of the 19th century. there's box, there's a poll judge. newspapers usually would print up ballots. government didn't print ballots at all until really 1887, 1890. in most states. and so what happens is either you cut the ballot out of the newspaper yourself or you go to

polls and vote hustler is pushing ballots on you and they're trying to get you to vote for my candidate right. but what if i think you're going to vote for the other candidate? what if you come up and you have a thick irish accent and i assume you're an irish democrat? i'm a republican. i might try to intimidate you away from voting threaten you if you're to vote, make it as unpleasant as can to deter you from voting. it's really not much these are run by the parties, by the newspapers on the ground. there's not much registry and some states start to register. but a lot of it is communities. people would say, i know you. i know you were born 20 years ago because i remember your mother was pregnant during the last flood, whatever. and this is people contests election since we have these great accounts in congress of people saying i wasn't allowed to vote because my cousin's brother checked the cemetery and he said that my mother after i was born and all this convoluted way of getting a sense of who's 21 who has been resident resident for usually five years

sometimes. there are claims that new immigrants given the right to vote in an fraudulent way or in a kind of ginned up way to get votes for immigrants in areas where those immigrants would vote for one party. but those claims are often made by people who are explicit anti-immigrant voting. so it's really hard get a sense of who's the who's running all the fraud in 19th century america. there's definitely widespread voter fraud on the ground. one scholar estimated 1/10 to one quarter of votes were fragile in a number of elections. but it's hard to tell who's because of the nature of partizan shape. it's hard to tell who's really lying and, who's accusing the other side of lying and there's all sorts of bigotries that go along that it's even harder later. reconstruction when african-americans tried to vote and voted in large numbers, but are risking their lives to go cast a ballot even though you know up to 800,000 african-americans vote in the election. the civil war make ulysses grant the president. each one of those is hard fought, but it's also unusually

to arrive to vote in philadelphia or in new hope or wherever. in the 1860s, 1870s. it really takes a long time for them to tighten up this regime. do you want to add anything that. yeah. one of the things i enjoyed about your book was, how you focused on that process, because when i was doing work on the lincoln-douglas some 15 years ago, one of the things that i discovered this was something of a surprise was that none of the rules that we usually expect to apply for. elections were even thought of in in these times, whether for 1858 or for 1860, there was next to nothing in the way of what you would call voter registration. no, no, i mean each party had a rough list of who its friends were, but there was no official registry of voters until reconstruction. reconstruction is what really brings voter registration in for the first time. so people could show up at the

polls. and if they not recognized as being local people, then a judge of elections might challenge them. but all they had to do was to take an oath swearing that, oh yeah, i'm legit and they could vote. so you have a situation, for instance, in 1858 when lincoln actually accuses his opponents of using irish laborers on the illinois central, using them on election from going from station to station on, the illinois central and voting over and over again. which which reminds you of mayor daley's old rules about, you know, voting, voting early and often. yeah, well, you know, there's illinois. i wonder where he got that from petition this this kind of what today would call voter fraud is was was rampant in those times and the proof of it of course is in the newspapers the day, election day, because we read those newspapers, everyone's

accusing everyone of voter fraud, voter intimidation and so on like that. when you show up at the polls, there's no ballot there, as we would normally think of it. sometimes i hear people talk about, well, lincoln was not the ballot in a number of southern states. well, nobody was a ballot in any of the states. because you brought a ballot with you that, as john says, you cut it out of the newspaper because the newspapers were all partizan sheets. there's no such thing. no one had ever heard of journalistic objectivity. newspapers were always party or i want to say organized, but actually they were not much more than party newsletters. you'd cut the ballot out of there for your party or you'd show up at the polls and there be a party worker who would a ballot all ready to give to. and you take that and you put that in the ballot box and that was that that was how voting took place. we would look at it today and say, this is. this is utterly out at sea.

there's no control, there's no regulation. and to that, i can only say, yeah, there. so so what i was going to say is we sometimes look in the almanac and we see these very precise numbers about presidential elections before the civil war. and i'm thinking. yeah, right. so there are two ways of looking at it and there's the bad old days way, which is that of these numbers are trustworthy these elections are drunken and silly and violent and the voters don't often even who they're casting about for. on the other voter turnout for eligible voters is 80%. people turn out casting your first vote at 21, your virgin is a ritual you would go if had the right to vote with your father and, your uncle and your whole community would be there. and they would sing songs and it would be a rite of passage. so there is a good in a they built culture that was great at getting people to engage but terrible at being upstanding and above the board. people that involved elections. yes election won't once made the

the comment that elections are the celebrations of democracy that elections were everybody turned out and had the possible time they could and there fireworks and there were bands playing so elections election for the at the same time as they were so loose and out at the ends nevertheless they were the moments that americans came together and sometimes they were the rare moments when you get large numbers of americans doing the same thing on the same side. i mean, they're not going to major league baseball stadiums, whether they're coming to elections, election boards, elections for americans. before the civil war are like a taylor swift concert. yeah, that's what we do. we. we do. we have time for one more question and you else. oh, sure. i'm carrie. i'm curious with all your with the letters, which survive, i

mean, was the postal service confederacy reliable? and then the letters, i assume, go family so many times they most of them were eventually thrown away. but somebody in cases decided to give it to a museum. i mean, how do you deal with this? and like you're looking at a very small percentage of the letters that were ever written right? well, one of the great things you might say about civil war is how many of them were literate literacy rates in. and this is one thing americans prided themselves on over europeans and was taken as a mark of democracy to were literacy rates especially in the northern states could extend as high as 90% and this is the 19th century we're not not talking about easy of my weekly reader we're we're about very high literacy rates. and what's more here's one of the untold success stories of civil war. the postal service's postal

services of, the union and the confederacy were simply unbuilt movable, efficient. the post office on the union side is run by montgomery blair on the confederate side, john reagan and of them are very long serving cabinet members in those they do a marvelous job of getting communication back and between soldiers and their families at home so that what the american civil war provides us with as a gift is an extraordinary volume of communication, not just from highly literate officers. you might expect from the napoleonic, but ordinary people in the ranks now. yeah, a lot of these do get thrown out. a lot of we have no way. of knowing how many what i find both and consoling is how many of them survive.

and they survive sometimes not only archives, but they'll survive private collections and sometimes those private collections will only just surface. yesterday, one of the examples that's in voices from gettysburg is a letter from a captain in, the 28th pennsylvania named named james solomon. i came upon this letter a year before the book was was finished, and i came upon it because i was asked, give an evaluation of a collection of letters that been in a particular family in this case, the solomon family ever since the civil war. and i thought this would be a fairly routine business of down and looking at a few letters the collection was. 350 letters. how is the handwriting the handwriting was very clear. very, very legible. hundred plus four diaries.

and none of this had been seen by anybody outside the family since 1865. and i was the first person looking at i spent several looking at it, came up to eat lunch, my wife and she said afterwards, i just had this total blank stare. my face like are, you won't believe what i've just seen. so one of those letters and he wrote three of them captain solomon, three of them from gettysburg, with a permission of the family i reproduced one of them invoices from never been seen before. so when we think sometimes that all this let all the all the possible things that could be said or published about. gettysburg must have been said or published banish that at once because. any one of us could walk out tomorrow as as i did with that solomon collection. any of us could walk out tomorrow and find some new and untouched source of original

civil war material that will just light up the sky so. the possibilities do not end, just with the publication of this book. believe me, they go on and they go on for all of us and. what a remarkable tribute. all of those ordinary americans of the 1860s, whether they were in union uniforms or in wide awake capes, what what a gift they give to all of us by way of introduction to the lives that they led at that very critical in the life of our country. and the one i've gotten to. why do you think we've heard so little about the white folks. oh, you guys want to leave and asking me this?

we don't want to leave. yeah. all right. we can talk all that like i've never heard. i'll give i'll give my hunch. and then i'd be interested to hear alan's opinion. so the why two weeks were really famous for the rest the 19th century, and they held reunions, campaigned. and the people who in the white awakes fought in large numbers the war, and then became president. senator was congressman. and the if you think about it late 19th century president. it's usually a who was a republican fought in the union army had a beard it was a wide awake basically a lot of these people came from the same population that inherit the country after 1900 or so they die this people stop talking about them. and there are a number of reasons. one, the war happens, the next and is a more overwhelming if you're a wide awake in 1868 and fighting gettysburg in 1863. gettysburg is the thing you're going to tell your grandkids about. i'm not trying to equate the white race, but there's something the wide awake that is exciting and. also troubling that they're

standing up for what they believe in, to fight for democracy, against slavery. but they're marching in the streets at night with torches and uniforms. and we've seen marching with torches in the last four years. and it's ominous and it's upsetting. and i think it's always been a harder story to tell and a harder sell if you tell the story of 1860 as lincoln who many people love, lincoln there's a good reason for our respect for lincoln. it's easier than talking about this mass movement of people who are talking about war against slavery the democratic party, whatever their causes are, it is more ominous or something a little creepy there and inspiring at the same time. and so i think it's been a story to tell. but my second question was my eyes aren't. but seeing that cover. talk about the capes. i can't help but think of the kkk. yes, right. and they feed the same idea of we're going become an army and. yeah. or the nazi folks. and yeah, people see often their pictures and say it reminds them

of nuremberg or something like that of a mass march and they come the kkk fascism. all these things have a similar genesis in this big public nationalist moment in the 19th century, and they go different directions. right. but we saw charlottesville marching with torches is striking for very different causes, very different. it has a public impact. and that's what mass movements want to do, whether it's anti neo-nazi, whatever it be, it catches the eye the wide awakes happened upon seeing that worked for movements too but it is troubling lot of people they see these guys with torches and capes and it looks not honest, abe. it doesn't look like the story we wanted to tell ourselves. so i think it's easier to leave them on the sidelines. additionally, they're mostly grassroots, working class kids who aren't commanding national attention at the time, it was a little harder to tell their story, but their diaries are everywhere. their letters everywhere. we have their capes, torches. we know they existed and think

it's a fun. but as i said earlier, puzzle pieces are kind of explained so much. do you have a hunch on this one or something? really? i would just add this. when we talk about the wide awake, we're talking about a political organization, political movement. these are not people who are as awake, engaged in pitched battles. they don't attack people. and that's less dramatic. so we don't write about things like we'll write a great deal about john brown and his raid on harpers ferry. john brown didn't have any or his people. there were no wide awakes there. but nevertheless, so much of the attention will go to brown's raid. there's an element of trigger pulling much more exciting than people marching in the street. and yet the people marching in street, they're striking. these wide awakes in particular are, striking again that that very delicate balance between organization which can become a mob and doing it for a

democratic purpose and we often see and we sometimes, i think, are tempted to think that any kind mass organization like that can only be bad and. there were people who made that argument. democrats made argument. what think the wide awakes are showing us and what showing us in the book is that you you can organize and you can march and it can be for good. and i think that there are moments when that has to be said too when when there are moments like the march on washington in 1963 when you think what happened on the pettus bridge. yeah there were people marching there too. they were organized they were disciplined. but were doing it for good. you can something like that and you can make it evil. plenty of examples that and you were right to point that out. you can also make it for good. and a lot of that is going to depend on the hearts and the minds of the people who are part it and who are its leaders. because at the end of the day

you can take anything and pervert it for evil you can take elections and pervert them for evil elections are supposed to be the hallmarks of democracy, but you can use elections to pervert the soviet union had election forms all the time. what did that. well in the catalog of human behavior once said the line of evil runs through everyone and everything. and it is people who must make the decision. will we do this for good, or will we do this for evil? that's where the real struggle is. not whether you're wearing a cape or not wearing a cape, what really makes the difference is what comes out of the heart and you can take something and make it the worst possible result imaginable or you can also make it something that will produce the greatest good. and it all comes down to the

motivations and the hearts and minds of the people who are involved in that moment that that, it seems to me, is a much more exciting story to tell than about guns and cannons, because that's really about us. to. two new books, wide awake voices. thank well, good afternoon. welcome to the kentucky's old statehouse. the old state capitol. i'm scott alvey the executive director of the kentucky historical