will be too late. he'll be on the ground in an hour. >> what is your name? >> colonel dorman. >> we'll try to get back to you if we can get him right away, sir. >> that was just a portion of a recording released by the national archives this week donated to the archives by the rav collection, a it dealer in historic documents. the audiotape belonged to the late general chester clifford jr., a senior aide to president kennedy, one of two original recordings, one donated and one put up for sale. visit c-span.org/history for a link to the national archives web site where you can hear the full 2 hour 22 recording. this is american history tv on c-span3. this week on the civil war,

a discussion on race and the role it played up to and during the civil war and how the war's outcome and immediate aftermath has impacted racial issues ever since. speakers include yale professor david blithe, edward air, and frank smith who heads the civil war memorial and museum. this two-hour event took place at the johns hopkins school for advanced international studies in washington, d.c. i'd like to just start with -- with david blithe, and then we'll take it from there. >> thank you, joe, and thank you all for coming. thanks for inviting me on this panel. usually among historians, we are fragmented into writing about the south and north, the west, new england, women, black, native americans, whomever. it's great to actually be on a panel called species history. i like that.

it's the human species, after all that's our subject. i've written a great deal about this problem of civil war memory. but all i'm going to try to do is place us somewhere and then just to try to trouble the water a little bit about what we actually mean by civil war memory and why it hasn't ever quite healed, perhaps. there was a speech made by the african methodist bishop in 1905, fanueil hall in boston, the 100th anniversary of the birth of william lloyd garrison, it had a very prominent boston antislavery legacy that this gathering was celebrating. 1905, think of the date, and this is what the reverend ransom said. i quote him -- we would see the wounds left by

the war of the rebellion healed. he already might have been causing trouble by calling it the war of the rebellion. but anyway, healed. but we would have them healed so effectually that they could not be trotted upon made to bleed afresh with unjust legislation. we would have the wounds of this nation bound up by the hands of those who are friendly to the patient so that they might not remain a political running sore. we would have the bitter memories of the war effaced, but they cannot fade while the spirit of slavery walks before the nation in a new guise, we too would have a reunited country. but we would have the reunion to include not only white men north and south, but a union so

endearing so just as to embrace all of our countrymen regardless of section or race. now, i'm not sure you could follow every word and gesture of that quotation by the african-american bishop of the principal protestant church at that time. but he spoke by then from 40 years of a struggle over race and reunion in american culture. ransom was appealing for healing with justice. and he defined in effect in that little quote the tragedy of what had happened to this question of healing and justice. now, i think what happened to civil war memory and really generalizing here, is americans faced -- if you take the first 50 years after our civil war, forget about the next 100 years for just a moment. everyone faced, black or white,

north or south, two profound ideas here. one is healing. and the other was justice. both had to happen somehow. but, given the potency of racial assumptions and power in 19th century america, those two great aims of healing and justice never developed with any historical bounds. now, we know that as kind of an outcome. but we haven't always known why. we might conclude that this imbalance between sectional healing and racial justice was simply a kind of inevitable historical condition after such a bloody transformative war and just celebrate the swiftness of the national reunion and be done with it. but theories of inevitability, whether that's about irrepressible conflicts or irrepressible reconciliations,

are never very satisfying at least to historians. we don't like inevitability because if things are inevitable, you don't really need us. but, anyway, human reconciliation is, of course, a wonderful thing. when tragically divided people can unify somehow around ideas or aspirations or around nationalism or patriotism, whatever binds people after horrifying divisions, that is to be cherished. but sometimes the past shows us reconciliations that also come with terrible costs, both intentional and often unintentional or unseen. the sectional reunion after so horrible a civil war as occurred here in this country was a political triumph of the late 19th and early 20th century. but it was not achieved, perhaps we could say it could not be

resubgugation of the americans. that is the tragedy lingering on the margins and sometimes depending on point of view infesting the hearts of american history from appomattox to at least world war i and really beyond. for many whites, especially veterans and their family members, healing from the war was simply never the same proposition as doing justice to the 4 million emancipated slaves and their families and descendents. on the other hand, a simple justice of fair chance to exercise some basic rights, secure access to land or livelihood, were all most blacks ever really demanded out of reconstruction and beyond. they sought no official apologies for slavery. well, here and there. they sought protection, education, human recognition,

a helping hand. the rub, of course, was that there were so many warring definitions of just what healing was supposed to mean in the south, and the nation's collective psyche, if you want, had never been so shattered. and that is even part of what collective memory is. as lucid as the notion is a kind of collective psyche. in the wake of our civil war, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions of any sort through which to process memories either of slavery or of the experience of total war, which, of course, so many white southerners had faced more than anybody. defeated white southerners and black former slaves faced each other on the ground, in the south, seeing and knowing the awful chasm between their experiences. often tragically unaware of any path that would somehow lead to

their racial reconciliation. yankee and confederate soldiers, however, would eventually find a smoother path, never easy, but a smoother path to bond the fraternalism and mutual glory, the mutuality of soldiers. as is always the case in any society trying to master the most conflicted elements of its past, healing and justice in this country from our civil war had to happen in history and through politics. and americans have had to work through the meaning of their civil war the only place we can -- in the politics of memory. and as long as we have a politics of race in the united states -- i don't see it ending at least today, maybe tomorrow, not today -- then we are likely to have a politics of civil war

memory. in my five minutes that may be left, i wanted to borrow, if i can, from robert penn warren, as only he could do it. he's the subject of one of the four chapters in this new book. robert penn warren not only wrote "all the king's men" one of the greatest novels about american politics and i think one of the greatest civil war novels in american letters, he wrote that wonderful little book at the centennial of the civil war in 1961 called "legacy of a civil war" which was first written as a kind of meditative essay in "life" magazine. it was robert penn warren's own personal and therefore unique and peculiar take on the meaning and memory of the civil war and there are plenty of things in it we could fuss over today. but he gave us two metaphorsslo. if we're trying to think about

especially the north/south side of this equation. one he called the great alibi, the other he called the treasury of virtue. the great alibi was warren's name for the lost cause tradition. at least the way it had become a set of excuses for every grievance and resentment that animated white southerners. the confederacy had only lost the war, the saying always was, because the north had superior numbers and resources. the sigh saying drawn from robert e. lee's address. southerners had never really fought for slavery only for home, independence, sovereign rights, and so on. they had been occupied and exploited by greedy and dangerous radicals during reconstruction, a regime of corruption and misguided attempts by radical republicans

to exploit and take over the south. now, the treasury of virtue on the other hand, which was warren's label for the north, was this idea that after the civil war the north could always, new englanders -- he hated thoreau, didn't like emerson either. northerners could always fall back on the simple fact that they'd won, their cause had been righteous, that somehow the world had approved of the end of slavery, that they had saved the union, saved the country and reinvented the country. and indeed this treasury of virtue became for northerners a kind of form of yankee pride. it always there when you needed it to scowl at or hold the south in scorn. and warren actually loved skewering both sides.

i saved some of the worst things he said about the south and even the worst things he said about the north. he said this about yankees with their treasury of virtue. when one is happy and forgetful, facts get forgotten. but i think that sticks frankly to the whole of the country in a way we've treated civil war memory. what warren was really after in those two slogans, those two metaphors, great alibi, treasury of virtue, is reminding us, as he did in virtually everything he wrote, brilliantly i think everything he wrote on this subject, is that we think with myths, we think in myths, we live in myths. myths are the stories we tell ourselves we're living. myths are the great narratives we come to believe in, the stories we want to be part of, the narratives that explain our

presence and any given presence political position or situation. myth works on different levels. it resides in our imagination, it floats in the air we breathe, it makes folk music of the stories we inherit at home. and, for the northerners, the treasury of virtue and phrasing that could equally apply to the great alibi, lies open he said, quote, on a lectern in some arcane recess of his being ready for his devotional perusal. the civil war is a form of devotion in some ways, devotion to stories, devotion to symbols, devotion to deep, deep forms of myth for millions of americans. we've made great, great strides. as ed and frank can attest in the history we've written about

the memory, but it still sits there on that lectern kind of open for us. i think i better stop there because my 15 minutes are up, and i look forward to our discussion of this whole topic. [ applause ] [ inaudible ] >> give me five minutes. i'll take it back. i was going to compare the tea party to the secessionists, i'll wait on that. >> i'll give my time to you. >> does that mean you haven't finished your remarks? >> no, i'm ready to go. now, as you've heard already in the introduction, david and i are both historians. i want to speak in a different register right now. not really of our voices. i've always admired his deep bass, and i have that high, lonesome sound. to think about what history might look like in practice.

mutual recognition and reconciliation after centuries of conflict and distrust are going to have to be built by hand. the big symbols, the big conversations that we need will have to be accompanied by symbols and conversations that are face-to-face, one-to-one. we will need c-span and the national newspapers and conferences, but we'll also need communities across the nation to reckon with their own place in the dramas of slavery and war and emancipation and their consequences. now, while no american community is free from implication in those dramas, though many would like to think they are, some places are more implicated than others. my city of richmond, virginia, would seem to be at the center of that. no matter what else may happen in that place, it will always be the former capital of the confederacy, it will always be one of the former centers of the

domestic slave trade, it will always be at least a former shrine of the lost cause. just as the united states will always be a nation at whose foundation the constitution made a bargain over slavery and whose courts for a century after emancipation obligated segregation. if the nation is to be reconciled, richmond, new york, washington, boston, charleston, and montgomery need to take responsibility for their own legacies. now, richmond has already stepped up in some heartening ways. wrongs of centuries cannot be fixed in a few years, the beginning can come during this centennial where we are fortunate, suddenly to have people paying attention. david and i were commenting on a group such as this is used to dealing with ongoing conflicts in the world to suddenly find ourselves in the spotlight because an anniversary is a time for a reflection. so i feel a certain sense of urgency that we make the most of this time. so let me tell you a part of the

story of richmond in the last couple of years and let me begin with a confession. when i left charlottesville for richmond in 2007, although my life's work for 30 years had been thinking about this, i did not do the simple math that would've revealed that only four years after 2007 we would be here. and sesquescentennial, and i was not ready when they came to me and asked if we would host the first event in the nation on the success kwi centennial of the civil war back in 2009. i barely knew how to do my day job as a new president, but i agreed because i felt like you know, how could richmond shirk that responsibility to step up and deal on with that? so after i signed up, i looked around nervously. really is my new hometown and the nation ready for this conversation? the evidence is contradictory, confusing. on the one hand, public commemoration and acknowledgment of the role of african-americans

in the war is visible in a way that was unimaginable 50 years before. national parks had been working for decades, the movie "glory" dramatized the story about the 200,000 african-americans who fought for the union. on the other hand, a recent poll shows that more than half of americans think the civil war was fought over states' rights. and the younger people are the more they are to think that, which is sobering for us who have written history books and taught classes because no historian has argued for a very long time that was the case, and yet this myth that david referred to is doing our thinking for us. the assumption that i'm skeptical of the virtue of the north so therefore it must have been a quest for states' rights for the south. you're still seeing fourth grade textbooks in virginia coming forward saying there were many black confederates because the internet said so. i guess we're making progress in

some ways. on the other hand, some of these things we saw back 100 years ago or 50 years ago are back with us. us. back on the centennial, the subject of david's book, things were a lot clearer. there's not really much doubt about what the centennial and its official manifestations was all about. it was about reconciliation. it was about healing between north and south at the expense of african-americans. virginia established the most active commission in the united states, spending $1.75 million, much for a new building in richmond. it looked a lot like a ufo with a big dome and a department store. and outside you had what every

civil war site needs, a mercury space capsule because it was about the reconciliation. it was about the cold war, it was about north and south coming together. and inside you could get the latest technology. princess phones playing recordings about what you were seeing. and somebody recently gave me a medallion from the centennial, well preserved in some little girl's box in the back of the closet. she's happy for me to have it now that she's grown up. and the medallion nice and hefty says "let us have peace" with grant and lee and it says consciousness of duty faithfully performed was the theme. doesn't really matter what -- whatever that means, that's a lot of letters. consciousness of duty faithfully performed whatever you may interpret that to mean north or south. now, despite the investment, the centennial faced awkward challenges from the beginning. because virginia had just fought the fight over massive resistance, actually closing the schools in the late 1950s rather

than have black children and white children go to school together. and all the materials from the centennial from virginia, there was no mention of black people at all. black people were relegated to the shadows of the story in general. and then, of course, as we all know in what a great irony of american history, in exactly the same year of the centennial were exactly the years of the civil rights struggle, and so that you had the anniversary of manassas, gettysburg and atlanta at the same time in washington and burmingham. and nobody could miss that. the confederate battle flag was taken out of its cases by segregationists to be waved in rebellion against the civil rights struggle. and as a pace of black freedom struggles quickened, struggles slowed. 5,000 came to appomattox in 1965 because the civil war seemed irrelevant by the time it

limped to a close after a voting rights act and civil rights act in the same years of atlanta and appomattox. virginia in the south had changed in profound ways following the centennial. now the ninth wealthiest state in the country, i'd like to thank everyone in this room who contributes to that with your taxes. arelosely balanced, voting for president obama in 2008, people all over the nation and the world now come to virginia, 60 languages spoken in the local schools. so virginia stepped up in 2006, organized really the largest and most active sesquicentennial commission in the country. and it's important to know this is not a celebration. there's no joy to be found in a war that caused the deaths of over 620,000 americans, divided families, tore apart a nation, and left cities in ruins. rather, it is a commemoration, it is a solemn remembrance of the americans, men and women, children, black and white from the north and south, who lived, fought, and died for that which they believed. so i decided, you know, okay, i'm willing to get behind such a thing. that commission seems to be

stepping up in a way i would hope. and david was there, historians talking about america on the eve of the civil war, and we had 2,000 people from 26 states show up on a thursday for a whole lot of talking. >> in the basketball arena with jumbo trons. >> exactly. >> the only historian's conference ever with a jumbo tron. >> exactly. >> exactly. nice segue. and the memorable event in that session was when on the three jumbo trons, one of our colleagues showed a single page of an account book from a single slave trader in richmond in 1859 and showed on that page $2.3 million worth of business in dealing with the sale of men, women, and children. and the response was magnified to 2000, the response you just had here, oh, that's so -- and we told those folks that in today's dollars the slave trade in richmond was $100 million a year. and people came up to me for weeks after and said i just had

no idea. you know, i didn't know the slave trade was of that scale. and people turned out -- even though we now think of virginia as sort of being the mid-atlantic, in 1860, it was the largest slave state. 500,000 people, and not far from where we're sitting right now, slavery was firmly entrenched. people who heard those facts about richmond slavery were willing to think a little bit about maybe we needed to broaden our vision. now, fortunately, there's a wonderful set of allies in richmond. the virginia historical society. the library of virginia, the history center, the national park service, the cultural museum, the slave trail commission, the campaign to reclaim the african burial ground, hope in the cities. and all those people had been doing great workday in and day out for years to tell this story.

and yet the city was gun shy. we'd been burned by struggles over the public memory of slavery and of the civil war. dare we rip off the bandages off the healing. even though it had not healed the way we thought it should, we'd stop talking about it. people would stop talking about those kind of fights. dare we start this up again. and all the people who were the caretakers of the history of virginia said, we have no choice. that memory's there all along, it's not stirring it up, it's bringing it to life. so here was the message, though, that we told ourselves. this was not just the 100th anniversary of the civil war, it's the 150th anniversary of the most important thing that's ever happened in this country, even though there's no national holiday for it, which is the end of perpetual bondage for

400 million people. not written into the commissions, not a part of the mission, but these two things were inextricably linked. we have no question but to talk about how those two things are related. now, the challenge on that is that you have to persuade people that it's worth ripping off those bandages. and a lot of african-americans said i don't want to talk about that anymore. i'm sick of seeing the statues, sick of talking about this, let's move on, and a lot of white people said i don't want to hear about political correctness or anything, we've got it settled, why would you want to stir this up? the city's moving forward. so what we found, though, is that, no, we need to talk about it. and we staged conversations all over the city at community centers and african-american churches, at virginia commonwealth, and hundreds of people came to those conversations to talk with each other in an honest way about our

history, what we needed from it, what we owed it. and they came with lots of different degrees of enthusiasm and skepticism. people are hungry to talk about this in a constructive way. we're sick of the myths, the same stories that have locked us in the past, we need to bring them back to life. we found that the cultural center wanted to talk about it, the asian chamber of commerce wanted to talk about it. the seminary wanted to talk about it, and all of those conversations people realized that we have to talk about this if there's actually going to be any genuine healing. and they've also discovered that knowing what actually happened matters. that facts and proportion rather than just mythology are essential. and you found there's no literal way to argue with the fact of 4 million people becoming free. you can argue about why it happened, how it happened, but

what we came to understand is that everyone's opinion is not credibility. people need to bring in evidence of what they're saying. and the purpose of our work is not to make everyone feel okay about what they imagine to be their past, their heritage. the point is to tell the truth. we do not study the past on behalf of our ancestors but on behalf of ourselves and our children. [ applause ] >> i have one minute left. i want to acknowledge i beat david. >> well, thanks very much. my name is frank smith, and i'm the founder and director of the african-american civil war museum and memorial here in washington, d.c. i'm pleased to be joined in this discussion of conflict prevention andol