contemporaries. one is the texas legislature. had the fatal shot not been fired grant and his forces would not have been destroyed or captured behave dawn and well would not have crossed the tennessee. there are no words adequate to express my own on exception of the immensity of loss to our country, the confederacy the hopes of millions of people depend on one head and one arm. after the war was over rather than admitting that the strife had ended because of the bankruptcy or the cause that it was tied in with slavery, the lost opportunity at shiloh fed into the larger idea of the lost cause and it had pernicious effects for the next century. the inability to come to terms not only that the south was outweighed by material resources

and manpower but that generals like grant and sherman were better than southern generals or that people from ohio and indiana were just as courageous as good southern troops. but it became this myth making that had as i said a pernicious effect and that was a ripple of johnson's death at shiloh. about six miles in the battle while this is going on there is a flamboyant guy name lou wallace. he never went to west point. he draws and paints and writes and thinks he's a poet. everybody from west point hates his guts. everybody remembered by state legislatures were being promoted and this guy ended up as a major general. he had a minor role at fort donaldson.

the press loved him. he is there with 7,000 men from indiana and he's there as a strategic reserve. up a little bit farther north on the tennessee river. he has a wonderful plan before the battle starts. he created a special route of reinforcement. he has communicated with another general wallace about a contingency plan that he will be there within minutes. but nobody likes the guy. and ulysses s. grant does not want to work with him. when sherman is reeling and creating this myth of uncle billy from the potential suicide and johnson is rushing to the hornet's nest, lou wallace from 5:00 to 6:00 to 7:00 in the morning is raring to go. grant doesn't get up to shiloh until 8:30 and passes him on a

boat going up river and says we'll get to you. nothing happens. lou wallace is waiting and waiting. not until 11:30 in the morning does lou wallace get the word. what does he do? he gets to the go to the right side where sherman is but it's not written down. grant not knowing about this alternate universe thinks he is going to take the river route. lou wallace thinks he means the road that he has worked at. lou wallace takes off. the order was never written down. is it going to be a big moment in the history of the civil war for the next 40 years. there is no written record of the directive. but lou walt las takes off and makes wonderous progress and within a few thundershower yards of the right side.

lou wallace is going to come around to the rear of the confederate army. you might think that is ludicrous or suicidal but you might also think that could save the entire union cause on the first day by having a movement to the rear unknown to the confederates. people that afterwards said that the confederates would have known. but maybe not. but the problem was right when he got to crossing the bridge, frantic messengers came from grant and said what are you doing? and he said i'm going to the right to reinforce sherman. sherman is all through. you took the wrong road. they made him reverse and go all the way back all the way back a 167 mile round trip. and lou wallace refused to turn the army. he made it make a cart wheel. it took an hour to do. he insists that the proper order

be maintained and he did not get to the battlefield by 7:00 in the evening and the union army was not 40,000 men. it was 20,000 hiding under the cliffs and about to be pushed into the river. and grant was tearing his hair out where is my 7,000 men? the next morning lou wallace did come. general bell came across with 20,000. the union army that was down to 15 was now up to 50,000. they pushed the south back and won. but after the battle was over all this recrimination was directed at grant because people could come down on the tennessee river. it was easy and they could see this horrendous scene of these 24,000 people like insects and destroyed everywhere. there was an outcry of how did the south surprise us? and one of the proper scapegoats

was lou wallace. we wouldn't have had this happen if lou wallace just paid attention. what happened is lou wallace went on the counter attack. he went to the press. henry hallek was appointed the new commander. and before he knew what was happening the three most powerful people in the union army hated lou wallace or was not going to do anything about it. he was demoted and lost command. he ended up at the end of the war with a command to defend washington. but for the next 40 years he died in 1905. he was known as this "what if" person this man at 35 who ruined his career because he couldn't find the battlefield. he went to the battlefield and offered to draw maps and guides

to show that his road was superior. he begged grant to change his memoirs. grant put a footnote. but one thing that lou wallace did do was he spoke and wrote. he was quite a writer. he wrote one about the fall of constantinople. but he hit on something called "ben-hur." if you look at the novel the novel is a thinly illustrated metaphor for lou wallace. judah ben-hur is this energetic charismatic young nobleman. it's not grant who ruined his career but it is gratus. lou wallace is on -- he misses the road but ben-hur hits a roof

tile and his rival it is probably henry hallek tries to destroy lou wallace-ben-hur. and only through perseverance and religion lou wallace found his god. he becomes rich and powerful and the funny thing about ben-hur was the zeal about shiloh not only made him write the novel to get even but gave him this idea that he needed to promote it. lou wallace spoke everywhere. there were 20,000 productions of ben-hur on the stage. later there would be four movies after his death. ben-hur sold 750 a week a thousand a week. in two years it was selling a million copies a year. nobody had seen anything like it. it outpaced "uncle tom's cabin." it was the best-selling fiction

book in american history until "gone with the wind." it created a nexus between the drama, the novel, the movie and popular advertising. there were towns and books with advertisements for ben-hur. if you follow what lou wallace was doing it is the precursor of "star wars" or "terminator." lou wallace was reliving shiloh again and again and again and again. and he said just to give you an example of what a strange man he was this is in 1885 where he is the best-selling author in the history of american letters. no one wants anything to do with

this guy. stilled prose, thinly veiled allegory. but to american people, it was really for most people the first time they thought it was an acceptable thing to read fiction that was not religious. it created an idea of an american frontier family reading literature. sort of the popular pulp best seller. shiloh and its slanderers, ending by finally solace in ben-hur. i have reputation and others fear now to keep me afloat. in 1900, 38 years after the battle when he is a celebrity he says the awful battle of pittsburgh landing comes home more directly than to most of those engaged. and the lies that were told

about me to make me the scapegoat to bear off the criminal mistakes of others. think of what i suffered. shiloh in other words is responsible for ben-hur for the zeal to promote it. and ben-hur is the first example of a phenomenon that we recognize today of the popular novel and movie and icon of popular culture. i'd like to give you another example. there was a fourth person there. he was a different man than lou wallace. as the union army was being pushed into the tennessee river and it was getting late one man in the southern side and only one man realized what was happening. lou wallace was pulling in but he hadn't quite gotten there yet. sherman was back pedaling. but there was nathan bed fort

forrest. the most brilliant military commander on both sides. but he was a colonel and an odious man. he made a fortune in slave trading. he was from the lower classes of the south. people associated slave trading with a lack of breeding. i don't think he was literate. he could barely write or read. he was supposed to guard a small river. but just as shiloh turned a suicide boo into a hero or a majestic man into the south's excuse for losing or just turned a 35-year-old major general into the best-selling novelist of the 19th century, shiloh in three incidents changed this lowly colonel into one of the most important figures in american history. he didn't do what he was supposed to. he left lick creek where he was guarding horses and the flank of

the southern army and went right in on the hornet's nest. his men rode into the fire. they survived and were instrumental for cracking the hornet's nest. he had this mind that was amazing. he sized up the battle and said there are 10 or 15,000 of these union soldiers left. we have the nucleus of the army who were going to push them off the cliff into the tennessee river. lou wallace was pulling in. buhl was on the other side of the river. he said it's now or never. if we beat these people the reinforcements will not come across and he stalked the battlefield at 7:00, at 8:00, at 4:00 in the morning. he went to general polk. he tried to get the entire southern command who was convinced they had won this

victory. they brought this army undetected and battered the north and all they have to do is push these few remnants. and this lowly colonel with term grammar, couldn't read. was trying to get the aristocratic class and the successors to johnson to do something and they did nothing. and the next morning, forrest alone realized the battle was over. when 20,000 freshman joined the remnants of the northern army they had a larger and fresher force and they plowed back into the south. there is a third incident and one is that in the final rear guard action as the army was leaving the battlefield on the third day. they were leaving the battlefield, nathan bedford forrest took it upon himself to make sure that the army was not

pursued. they were so shattered psychologically and grant was unsure of what had happened. the first second of the battle sherman was now of course puffed up and he was the only man pursuing. as he went after the southern army he had a whole and nathan bedford forrest charged straight into sherman with about 300 men. sherman had three times that number. the first line fled. the second line fled. forrest kept charging. all of his fellow tennesseans were gone. and he was all of a sudden right in the middle of several dozen union soldiers. they were yelling kill him knock him off. one ran up and shot him through the hip. his leg went numb. his horse was hit and bleeding

to death. we don't know this is true. i doubt it could be true but everybody who was an eyewitness said it was true. he picked up a union soldier with one hand and put him in front as a human shield and it was like achilles on the battlefield. he threw him down and rode off into his destiny. and the northerners said who is this man we can't kill with puny weapons like guns. after the battle was over there was outcry in is south. the battle had been so miraculously fortunate to them win and they had sent messengers back at the night sunday night saying we have won the battle. and to lose johnson and to lose this battle and to close down the western theater somebody had to pay.

and there became this mutual recrimination. it was beauregard's fault. it was hardy's fault. there was one person who was nobody's fault. it was nathan bedford forrest who was the bravest man on the battlefield. he was made brigadier and given command in the tennessee theater. and for the next three years he was quickly came in the words of sherman that devil forrest. and he embodied the lightning mobile raids of southern cavalry. he tied down 10,000 union trohi. he cripped the assault on atlanta. and unlike the rest of the southerners he never surrendered to a union army. he said i'm going

in the -- after the war the slave owning class had lost there was one man, a pop ewe list who embodied the average working southerner who never lost and was defiant and became. and during the period of reconstruction in 1866 and 1867 there was a suspension of habeas corpus. and no one defined this better than forrest. the man who almost single handedly on a horse kept the southern cause alive. look what he said. this is in 1867 with a

foundation of the ku klux klan. they would have been like any other failed white group. the order of the white camellia. there is a bunch of southern groups trying to recapture southern pride through racial solidarity and resentment at freed blacks. they were all pretty much a failure. but one of them the ku klux, this clan people rumored they offered it to robert e. lee and lee said ask forrest. but there was one man that everybody thought embodied the bitterness and the grievances of the southern poor. these were poor white people who created this myth that they couldn't survive with these uppity blacks and scalley wags who had kept them down. this white supremacist group was

different than the other ones. it didn't have the aristocracy or the plantation it had this new image that people were ghosts and they were calvary men and who better to emblemat emblematic, so they got sheets and got on horses at night. look what he said, this is at a time when there's no habeas corpus and there's thousands of union troops in the south. he said, i can assure you fellow citizens, and he wrote this to a newspaper. i for one want no more war. i don't want to see any more bloodshed nor do i want to see any more negros waging war upon us. i will not shoot any negros as long as i can see a white

radical to shoot. but if they send the black men to hunt the confederate soldiers whom they call the ku klux. so he was absolutely defiant. he had lost all of his fortune, he was poor, but to the southerners, he galvanized what would have been just another white supremacist group that probably wouldn't have had much success, but there was something about the ku klux klan that p l appealed to the populist group. and this man had-would plague american like for the next century, because the secret of the ku klux klan, wasn't that it was racist, there were a lot of

other racist organizations, and it wasn't that it was violent, there were a lot of other violent organizations, but it had this myth that it appeals to people that were the victims and poor and were the victims of northern capitalists and northern industrialists and nathan bedford forrest played on that, he was literally the creator in some sense of the ku klux klan, that career started at shy low. let me just try to conclude that i was trying to do in this book. and that was to look at-batal and to say yes, wars have strategic consequences and there is an art of war that has tactics, but there's also something different. there's something about time that's compressed with lives on the line, that create ideologies

and experiences that galvanize people for the rest of their lives, either for the survivors or the families of survivors. although the book had very little on 9/11, i had five pages on on it. i said whatever your own feelings are on it, i do think that many of our ideas about war and peace and culture were changed on 9/11. i don't know quite -- i don't know quite why one battle becomes more important than another. i understand strategy plays a role. i know normandy beach is important because of that. but there's other strange factors as well. one of them perhaps, you take teddy roosevelt away from san juan hill, nobody knows about

it. 215 people were killed at little big horn, 1 million were killed in the siege of lennengrad. so 9/11, we in fresno, i live about 30 miles outside on a farm and we have two skyscrapers sort of, and on any given day, there were skyscrapers that worked. had those been eliminated, terrible to even think about it, it would not have the same repercussions on american culture and life. this was 20 acres, almost two kilo tons of constructive force in the nation's artistic capital, in the nation's literary capital, people who write our books, people who write our homes, people who dictate what our portfolios are

going to look like, people who craft the federal reserve, all of the people who could see this happen, this will have ripples that will emanate through generations, it will have an affect on art, i don't know if people take a piece of metal and twist it and say it art, it will make a seriousness about literature that we may have lost. and a lot of ideologies and i admit that most of you wouldn't grow with me, but we lhad a slumber in american life and we thought that all cultures might be equal, we saw that the taliban killed women, they were a completely different culture. but a subordinate culture. if there is a subjective standard that allows us to make

a judgment, it also i think shattered ideas of pacifism, the great path of the enlightened is that if we just could extend education and as evil people we could agree that there's not necessarily evil in the world and we saw that osama bin laden was wealthy and that the united states had worked with kosovo and somalia and kuwait and the old question what did we do to deserve that, it came to many of us absurd to even ask. we asked is it sane to go after someone in a time of war in the name of peace. all of americans are going to disagree with the the particular administrations. i think most of us pretty much had an idea of prosperity, cl glibness, effectiveness with the

economy we were all upset pro or con about florida, but whatever we think about, there will be -- 9/11 will be a dividing line, for those who are critical of the president, now we're cowboys and unilateral, if you support the president and their reaction to 9/11, you will think that, no, there was a series of towers, bombings in yemen and -- it created a dangerous complacency and we had lost the classical idea that the greeks would call deterrence and now we're slowly remaining it as bitter and brutal as that can be, whatever your political views, i think 911 then will turn out to be just as important as shiloh. i want to conclude just by

reading the last page of the book, but if history demonstrates that lexington and concord, ft. sumner and pearl harbor all turned america into a different nation in a matter of minutes, then why should we be any less immune from the blood letting on september 11. why would not the destruction of the world trade center and the bombing of the pentagon not similarly usher in another culture. the desolation of athens, itself. and the miraculously greek counter response. millions of the an anonymous have had their lives weighted in ways we cannot grasp with a single battle with all it's

dreadful killing insidiously warps the friends and the family of the fallen, twists the vets and the aspirations of the ordeal and ends the accomplishments of the dead and also the ripples of battle are immune from and they care little about what people like us write or read. in or outside the dominant west, they simply wash up on us all as we think in ways that cannot be fully known until centuries after we are gone, thank you. [ applause ] >> be happy to entertain any comments. >> do you see through history that there's any common threa