so i took it to jim the next morning. and he signed it "to millard hunter, a fellow scholar of the civil war." and my dad floated back to new hampshire. he still treasures that. jim has also helped me with my work since i've jumped off the tenure track. one of the things i have done in the last decade is make sure that my hometown remembers that they had a very significant civil war hero come from little gennessee, new york. jam james wadsworth the richest man in new york who gave up everything at the age of 53 to enlist in the civil war and he ended up dying after the battle of the wilderness. there really wasn't any

commemoration of him in his hometown. i always joked that if that town had been in the south there would have been a statue before the body was cold. but that was not true in more reserved upstate. so when we started a campaign to get a statue of general wadsworth put on the courthouse lawn where it should be. a courthouse after a statue is naked after all. james mcpherson came and gave the inaugural lecture of our campaign, attended a reception with people who donated and was endlessly patient with everyone. and it was a very important way for us to start our effort. and i'm pleased to say that our courthouse is no longer naked. but i think the most personally compelling example of jim's generosity is that even though as i mentioned i've jumped off the tenure track professionally,

he kept asking me back to do alumni colleges. and when it came time to organize the conference in honor of his retirement, jim asked that i be included, which then led to my contributing to his -- trip. what an act of generosity. but that is typical of james mcpherson. thank you. [ applause ] >> professor -- is associate professor of history and african-american studies at duke university. her work has been so extraordinarily inflew ings ex. i recommend her latest prize-winning book. and recently was abroad i believe in israel with the mcphersons. so thibodia?

>> good morning. it's really an honor to have been invited to participate, and especially because i'm not an mcpherson student, undergrad or graduate. but when vernon e-mailed me -- first of all you can't say no to vernon. and secondly, i really did feel feel quite honored to be invited to say a few words. jim's work and his friendship have been really important to my life as a human being and as a scholar and also his wife pat. we did travel together this past summer in israel due to the hard work of one of jim's students who i see in the back here who organized this wonderful conference at hebrew university. and i've also had a wonderful times with both pat and jim at gettysburg. and my children remembered fond

ly riding and walking that battlefield with him as their leader. so i was asked to talk about his contribution toss african-american history. but vernon has already done that. so at any rate i'll say a few words, as a professor at princeton mcpherson has walked battlefields with countless students and visitors to the nation's civil war battlefields. it is a way, he has said, to better understand military tactics and the outcomes of battles and the importance of military history to the historian record. of late my own work has got me to thinking a lot about battlefields and about walking them literally and figuratively. and offered this opportunity to speak on mcpherson's life in the

academy and in the public sphere, it seemed fitting to reflect on this question of walking america's battlefields. so while my assignment today has been kind of pre-empted, i will still say a bit about his work in the field of african-american history and about walking battlefields. mcpherson is known worldwide as the pre-eminent historian of the u.s. civil war. as a scholar of its battles and soldiers and politics, most people i imagine would not think of him as an african-american historian. but that is where in a sense he began his journey as a scholar. he published his first book based on his dissertation at johns hopkins, a struggle for equality abolitionist and negro in the civil war and reconstructions in 1964. followed in 1965 by the negro

civil war, how american negros felt and acted during the war for the union. it had been by that point some three decades since the publication of w.dubois's reconstructions of 19 -- benjamin kroll's book had appeared a little before in 1953. roland d. rose's rehearsal for reconstructions the port royal experiment appeared the same year as mcpherson's "struggle for equality." his early work thus came at the height of the 60s civil rights struggle, and he has written and spoken eloquently on the impact that this had on his decision to pursue a dissertation topic on abolitionists who he has called the civil rights activist of the 1860s. he pursued this dissertation and the subject despite being told

at the time by leading scholars that it was simply impossible to do this kind of work because the sources did not exist. at the time, some scholars held mcpherson's work as both important and timely. evidence one wrote at the beginning of a revolution still in progress. his effort to draw more attention to black people than the struggle for union and freedom to the role of abolitionists, slaves and black soldiers, also drew visceral reactions of the kind that greeted such scholars as dubois and -- georgia historical quarterly accused mcpherson of taking a leaf out of ab tucker's book and arguing that slaves in particular were restless during the civil war and whenever they got a chance to run away they did so and joined the labor force of the union armies. further the reviewer wrote

mcpherson had made the "extreme statement that perhaps the war could not have been won without the help of the negros." indeed after review of ab tucker's work in the georgia historical quarterly had labelled the work "an absurd bit of propaganda based on a per version of torqual facts to show them in 1938 they were not in slavery and -- the most amazing discovery the author makes this reviewer wrote is the long sought-after reason why the south lost the war. the negros revolted and put a stop to it. a reviewer in the virginia magazine of history also took umbrage at a similar suggestion by professor krolls. this reviewer was able to see that the black had helped the cost of freedom but at what cost

he wrote. not to them mind you but to slave holders. in leaving the plantation this reviewer wrote black people created hardships for white people. they hurt food production and in some cases forced white people to flee. it was not a good, positive sign, the reviewer wrote. mcpherson stepped up in the midst of this ahistorical work to tell a story of black people's contributions to the war for freedom and union. it is worth remembering, therefore, that he was fair from the beginning of the still much debated topic of who freed the slaves. and in the 1960s, some of its worth remembering too that some of his colleagues placed him like they had dubois at the most radical edge of the conversation. perhaps it was his decision to publish dock dwlumts spoke to the views of black people during

the war. perhaps it was his discussion in 1964 of how the u.s. congress during the war or after the war, i'm sorry, had backed down from a more radical version of the 15th amendment that would have forbidden denial of the vote not only on previous condition servitude but of property and -- account of the gideonites in the land struggle that angered people. many of the things though with which we still struggle are present in his early work. the debate over lincoln, the northern missionaries, the land question, the voting question, the question of the contraband and black soldiers, the commitment of lincoln and northerners to the full freedom of the ex slaves. mcpherson was more of a pioneer, however, perhaps in lincoln the past to the present.

scholars to the public. walking the public through history in its narrative form and on the actual grounds. that is perhaps his signal legacy. and i wish it extended. i wish that there was more walking of battlefields and that these battlefields included places of enslavement during the civil war. less than a week ago i was on one of these battlefields on a plantation in the low country in south carolina which is my home state. where the landscapes still enchants but the struggles of enslaved peoples to help effect their own emancipation is silenced. in fact, while the re-enactor on the grounds tells me a story, a story of how after the war former owners came back and how they worked so hard to take care of black people who had foolishly believed in something called freedom, a brochure of the grounds of this place

features a plan to grow a small island of -- depicts black women working the crop today. i ask if in reality black people are really back on the plantation. i'm told no, the crops are grown by volunteers. but i am now even more puzzled. why then a photo of black women growing the crop today. this is a plantation burned down by federal troops in 1865 and further destroyed by black people who had been enslaved there. how different i wonder as i walk these grounds would it be if james mcpherson conducted a battlefield tour of this plantation. i look out over the ashley river and i imagine him walking these grounds and putting the armies in their rightful places. union, confederate, and the enslaved. i imagine that there comes a time when this too will be hallowed ground, not for magnolia and mint julip

fantasies but for the war for freedom and democracy that took place here, that the women enslafred in south carolina that jim writes about in the kneeing role civil war who twice a day brought meals to union soldiers will appear on this landscape alongside the black soldier he also talks act in that work who help toss liberate from the horrible pit of bondage ten men, six women and eight children. so jim here's a new project for you in your retirement. but whether jim takes up this or not is immaterial. it is still a part of his leg circumstances the legacy he leaves to us. and someone must take it up. on battlefields all over the south, black people strike blows for freedom and every inch of southern soil became em battled ground. a mappable battle ground. as mappable as gettysburg or the

siege of vicksburg. they became archives of slavery's defeat. we may argue today and for years to come about this thing called self-emancipation versus lincoln and the union army as emancipators. but in the end, going back to jim mcpherson, the question that appears as a subtitle of his book, "how american negros felt and acted during the war for the union." remains as urgent as it was nearly 50 years ago when he wrote that book. but perhaps more importantly it is a part of mcpherson's life in american history. it's a part of his rearchiving of american history itself. i recall finally and to close the memorable and of the-cited description of the formal surrender of lee's army that appears in "battle cry of freedom" where the northern

general joshua chamberlin orders his men to shift from order arms to carry arms. this is a salute of honor. while the confederate general john b. gordon leads his men to this formal surrender, mcpherson writes "these enemies in many a bloody battle ended the war not with shame on one side and exultation on the other but with the soldiers salutation and farewell. it's that kind of salutation and farewell with no shame that i think mcpherson walking the battlefields of the south would bring to us. thank you. [ applause ] >> james oaks is a distinguished

professor of graduate studies of humanities at the university of new york. he did his studies at berkeley and like jim mcpherson is a winner of the lincoln prize. thank you. >> thank you. i'm going to start on a little more personal note than i'm used to by emphasizing the extent to which jim was my teacher. i never took a -- i never took a civil war class in my life. i never had one as an undergraduate at berkeley. ken stamp taught an undergraduate course on the civil war and many of his graduate students t.a..ed for it but i never did. i never took a civil war class until i got to princeton and was jim mcpherson's preceptor. and it was from that point on that my conception of myself as a historian changed. it was jim who told me for the first time i had to read a book

called "killer angels." it was jim who told me i should read shelby-foot's gigantic three-volume narrative of the civil war. from then i went on to devour all the books that bruce cat tin and others have written. it was jim who took me on my first battlefield tours of gettysburg and vicksburg. jim and i and pat and deb went to andersonville together. everything i think, everything i think about the civil war is filtered through jim mcpherson. we share a kind of fundamentalist approach to the civil war in understanding this was a war about slavery from the start. but the truth is, i went to princeton as thinking of myself as a southern historian. and i left princeton thinking of myself as a civil war historian. so you can imagine my surprise when a year or so ago a

prominent publisher came up to me and suggested that, well, it's almost 25 years since "battle cry of freedom" was published. maybe it's time we need a new synthesis and maybe you should write it. and i was shocked. first of all, 25 years? has it really been almost 25 years? it seems so fresh in my mind. second, why? why do we need a new -- why would we even need a new synthesis? has there been that much new scholarship? do things really have to change that much if you did rewrite it? but also i thought if i had 25 more years to study the civil war i don't think i'd know as much about the civil war as jim knew when he got out of graduate school. and even if i did know as much as jim knew and knows about the civil war, i don't think i'd have as much energy as jim has

to be able to write that book in what's the five years between the previous one? and even if i did know as much and have as much energy, i don't think i would have the capacity to synthesize the history of the civil war so brilliantly as jim does in that book. the social history of the war, the political history, the military history, the economic history. on tax policy in the north and the south that always struck me as extraordinary because it could sound like an extremely boring topic. but jim, not only does he explain in a few pages with extraordinary lucidity the difference between the way the north funded the war and the south funded the war but why they funded the wars differently

and the enormous consequences of that fact that they funded the war so differently. and then the way he handles all the way through. it's part of a broad story and it all the way through. so i thought to myself when this publisher made this invitation, why bother? who could do something like that?

it did get me thinking, what if i were to try it? how would i book i wrote be different? we are fundamentally fundamentalists about the civil war. there would be, of course, new scholarship. i don't think that would change things too much but it would be there, i suppose. it would probably be less emphasis on the conflict of cultures between the north and the south, not because i don't think the north and south were consult really distinct but because i think the civil war wasn't a conflict of cultures and because cultural conflicts and differences are ubiquitous. i live on the upper west side of manhattan. the easiest way to get a dinner conversation going is talk about vast differences of people who lives on the upper east side and upper west side. and you could probably get statistics to demonstrate that the difference is real. that wouldn't be there. the biggest difference really has to do something thavolia mentioned in her talk. jim really is a product of a particular era of a civil rights movement era. his work was inspired by that. it comes out of that moment in american history. where was i was 15 years old when richard nixon was elected.

my adult life has been shaped really by a rising and deepening tide of conservatism. i don't look around and i never looked around and saw radical movements rising all over the place. i saw the opposite. that i think would shape the difference between the way i would frame the history of civil war and the way jim d the civil rights movement and abolitionist movement have a symbiotic relationship in the historiography. the '60s generation turned to abolitionism as a precedent. the freedom writers were new abolitionists. jim redefined it and made it relevant so is ceased to merely be a struggle to get slavery abolished and a much broader struggle for equality, racial equality. i'm more to think of it as a

movement to abolish slavery with relationships to the question of civil rights, but fundamentally oriented towards that particular moment. for jim, then, the logical conclusion of the abolitionist movement, the abolitionist legacy as the second volume of the study of abolitionism is the founding of naacp. whereas for me it would be the end of the logical conclusion of abolitionism would be the 13th amendment. i think all of that difference between where he comes from and where i come from would shape the way we think about the sieve war, particularly origins of the civil war. that generation of the '60s and since the 30s through the 1950s to focus, find anti-slavery

origins of civil war and trace the movement of the abolitionist into politic, into the liberty party, free soil party into ultimately the republican party and see the continuities between those two party movements. whereas jim's generation tended to drive a wedge between abolitionism and i tend to see convergence over the course of those decades. that's probably where i would write a different kind of book from the one jim wrote. in battle cry, the origins of the civil war are not traced really to the anti-slavery movement. he traces a line from hamilton federalists anti-slavery to

whigs to republicans. i would trace from abolitionist, liberty party, free soil party, republican party. jim was different in one critical way that i don't think is fully understood. for jim the abolitionist legacy was fundamentally a historical question. it was about tracing actual historical significance of abolitionism into post-war struggles over civil rights and land and labor and voting rights all the way up to the founding of the naacp. it was a historical -- fundamentally a historical question. for other historians of that generation abolitionism was a study of precedence for liberal activism. as much as jim might have thought of it that way also he was really interested in the historical question not going around looking for radical precedents.

that meant as the abolition movement got narrowed to most radical and the search for purest and greatest of radicals, jim moved in the other direction. in his later scholarship, because he never was mesmerized by that cult of true radicalism i call it now, he was open to a broader understanding of the origins of the civil war, one that embraced abraham lincoln and the republican party rather than dismissed him as part of what frederick douglass called in his great 1876 about lincoln the great movement to destroy slavery in the united states. and so we see in his later work another shift in the direction of his scholarship toward an increasing understanding of how broad and how difficult and how

important that struggle finally was, which is another way of saying 30 years later we are still in fundamental agreement about fundamental questions of what the great struggle of the mid 19th century was all about. thank you. [ applause ]

>> sean currently holds george henry davis 1886 american history professor, that is jim's chair. he's an award winning public intellectual, most of us go back farther enough remember him primarily on the 19th century. i remember him when he was a premier social -- back to the mainstream, ronald reagan, bob dylan and popular music. >> i wanted to thank vernon very much for putting this together and everybody else who had a part of it. this is a wonderful occasion and i'm very proud and honored to be part of it. what i'm saying kind of repeats what has already been said but with a different angle, certainly an angle of my experience with jim mcpherson. for a quarter century i was privileged to be jim mcpherson's teaching colleague at princeton. i have him to thank directly for that as he was the chair of the search committee that hired me. i've never tried to thank him properly for that, because i couldn't possibly do so, so great is the debt. but i also have the privilege to share the classroom with him on numerous occasions. someone mentioned preceptorship

at princeton, basically like having a t.a. back in the way old days of princeton, very distinguished senior scholars would actually be the t.a.s for recently hired assistant professors. it's like having in the civil war if you put raw recruits in charge of the generals. it was sort of strange. it was an extraordinary experience, try to teach american social history in one semester, which is insane in itself. jim as my preceptor, he was already quite distinguished was gentle but firm in telling this raw recruit just how crude some of his lectures actually were. i've never forgotten that. both the lessons historically but also the lessons as we've all been saying of jim as a gentleman. most often we taught at a graduate reading seminar, history of united states from 1815 to 1877