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 genesseo, new york, james wadsworth, who was the richest man in the north, who gave up everything at the age of 53 to enlist in the army. he eventually ended up dying after the battle of the wilderness, and there really wasn't any commemoration of him in his hometown.

i always joked that if little genesseo 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 without 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. it was a very important way for us to start our effort. 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 jumped off the tenure track professionally, he kept asking me back to do alumni colleges.

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 -- what an act of generosity. but that is typical of james mcpherson. thank you. [ applause ] >> social professor of history in african-american studies at duke university. her work has been so influential. i recommend her latest prize-winning book and recently was abroad, i believe, in israel with the mcphersons. thavolia? >> good morning. it's really an honor to have

been invited to participate, especially because i'm not a mcpherson student, undergrad or graduate. when vernon e-mailed me, first of all, you can't say no to vernon. secondly, i did 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 his students i see in the back here who organized this wonderful conference at hebrew university. i also had wonderful times with pat and jim at gettysburg. my children remember fondly

riding and walking that battlefield with him as their leader. so to talk about his contributions to african-american history, but vernon has already done that. so 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 historical record. of late, my own work has got me to thinking a lot about battlefields and about walking them, literally and figuratively. this opportunity to speak on mcpherson's life and 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 preempted, 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 preeminent 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, struggle for equality, abolitionists and negro and civil war and reconstruction in 1964. followed in 1965 by the negro civil war, how american negroes felt and acted during the war

for the union. it had been by that point some three decades since the publication of w.b. dubois's black reconstruction in 1965 and the negro and civil war in 1938. another had and 10 years before in 1953. willie lee rose's rehearsal for reconstruction, the port royal experiment appeared the same year as mcpherson's "struggle for equality." mcpherson's early work 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 activists of the 1860s. he pursued this dissertation and subject despite being told at the time by leading scholars it

was simply impossible to do this kind of work because his 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 and the struggle for union and freedom to the role of abolitionists, slaves and soldiers drew visceral reactions of the kind that greeted such scholars as dubois and others. a review of the negro civil war and historical georgia quarterly accused mcpherson of taking a leaf out of the book and arguing that black people, 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 armys.

further the reviewer wrote mcpherson made the, quote, extreme statement that perhaps the war could not have been won without the help of the negroes. indeed a review of his work in the georgia historical quarterly had labeled the work an absurd bit of propaganda, based on a perversion of historical facts, that aim ed to show that negroe today, as in 1938 -- to show them that in 1938 they were not in slavery and meek. the most amazing discovery he makes is the long sought-after reason the south lost the war. the negroes revolted and put a stop to it. a reviewer in the virginia magazine of history took umbrage at a similar suggestion. this reviewer willing to concede black people helped the cause of freedom. 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 find, 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, he was there from the begins of the still much-debated topic of who freed the slaves. in the 1960s it is worth remembering, too, 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 documents that 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 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 of servitude but also property, education, nativity, and sex. perhaps it was his account of the gideonites in the sea islands and 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, 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 linking the past to the present. scholars to the public, walking

the public through history in its narrative form and actual grounds. that is perhaps the signal legacy and i wish it extended. i wish there was more walking of battle fields and that these battle fields included places of enslavement during the civil war. less than a week ago i was on one of these battlefields and a plantation in the low country in south carolina which is my home state. where the landscape enchants, emancipation is silenced. in fact, a 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 on the grounds of this place features a project to grow a small plot of sea island rice and sea island cotton. a photograph accompanying the

text depicts black women working the crop. today i asked in reality if 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 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 imagine him walking these grounds and putting 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 julep fantasies but for the war for freedom and democracy that took place here.

where the enslaved women in south carolina that jim writes about in "the negro civil war," who twice a day brought meals to northern soldiers will appear on this landscape alongside the black soldier, he also talks about in that work, who helps to liberate from the horrible pit of bondage ten women -- i mean ten men, six women and eight children. jim, here is a new project for you in your retirement. whether jim takes up this or not is immaterial. it is still a part of his legacy, the legacy he leaves to us and someone must take it up. on battlefields all over the south, black people struggle for freedom and every inch of southern soil became embattled ground and mappable battleground. as mappable as gettysburg or the siege to 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 the subtitle of his book, how american negroes felt and acted during the war for the union remains as urgent as it was nearly 50 years ago when he wrote that book. 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 all sided description of the formal surrender of lee's army that

appears in "battle cry of freedom," whether northern general joshua chamberlain orders his men to shift to carry arms as a salute of honor, while the confederate general gordon leads his men to this formal surrender, mcpherson writes, quote, these enemies in many a bloody battle ended the war not with shame on one's 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 distinguish professor at the city college of new york. he did his phd with legendary

kenneth stamp at berkeley. 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, to the extent jim was my teacher. i never took a civil war class in my life. i never had one as an undergraduate. at berkeley, ken stamp taught a class on civil war and many of his students ta'd for it, but i never did. i never took a civil war class until princeton and was jim mcpherson's preceptor. it was from that point on my conception of myself as a historian changed. it was jim who told me for the first time that i had to read a book called "killer ainngels."

it was jim who told me i should read the gigantic three-volume narrative of the civil war. from there i went on to devour the books 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 about the civil war is filtered through jim mcpherson. we share a kind of fundamentalist approach to the civil war, an understanding that this was a war about slavery from the start. but the truth is i went to princeton 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, 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. 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 scholarship? do things change that much if you did rewrite it? 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. even if i did know as much as he knew about the civil war, i don't think i'd have as much energy jim has, to be able to

write that book in the -- what's it, 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 war as jim does in that book, the social history, the political history, the economic history of the war brought together so seamlessly and so beautifully in those pages. two examples, they seem trivial with me. there are four or five pages in the "battle cry of freedom" that struck me a as extraordinary. it can sound like an extremely boring topic. 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 the fact that they funded the war so differently. and then the way he handles all the way the war so differently. and then how he handles the problem of class conflict behind the lines, as it were, especially in the south. he absorbs it. he brings it in. it's part of his story. it's not the story. it's part of a broad story, and it's all the way through. so i thought to myself when this publisher made this invitation, why bother? who could do something like that? but it did get me to thinking, what if i were to try it? how would a book i wrote be different? we are after all fundamentally first fundamentalists about the civil war. of course there would be new scholarship. i wouldn'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 the south were culturally 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 east side of manhattan, and the easiest way to get a dinner conversation going is to talk about the vast differences of the people who live on the upper east side and the people who live on the upper west side. you can get statistics probably to demonstrate that the differences are real. so that wouldn't be there. the biggest difference has to do with something mentioned before. jim really is a product of a particular era of a civil rights movement era and his work is inspired by that. it comes out of that moment in american history. whereas i was 15 years old when richard nixon was elected, and 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. and that i think shapes -- would shape the difference between the way i would frame a history of the civil war and the way jim did. so the civil rights movement and the abolitionist movement have a symbiotic relationship in the his tory og ravi as a precedent for the civil rights movement. the freedom riders were the new civil rights. and jim was part of that new era that defined abolitionism and became a much broader struggle for equality, for racial equality, and i'm more inclined to think of abolitionism as a movement designed to abolish

slavery, with relationships to the question of civil rights. but fundamentally forming it 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 the naacp. whereas for me it would probably be the end of the logical conclusion of abolitionism would be the 13th amendment. but i think all of that difference between where he comes from and where i come from would shape the way we think about the civil war, particularly origins of the civil war. that generation of the '60s and all the scholarship on abolitionism since then reversed a trend that had been going on since the '30s through the 1950s to focus -- to find the anti-slavery origins of the civil war and to trace the

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

but jim was different from that '60s generation in one very, very critical way that i don't think is fully understood. for jim, the abolitionists legacy was always fundamentally a historical question. it was about tracing the actual historical significance of abolitionists into the postwar struggles over civil rights, of land and labor, and of voting rights all the way up to the founding of the naacp. it was a historical -- fundamentally a historical question, whereas for other historians of the era it was a study of precedence, of precedence for radical activism. and as much as jim might have thought of it that way, was always really interested in the historical question, not going around looking for radical precedence.

and that meant that as the abolitionist movement got narrowed down to the most radical in the search for the purist and the greatest of the radicals, jim moved in the other direction. and in his later scholarship because he never was mesmerized by that cult of true radicalism, as i call it, he was open to a broader understanding of the origins of the civil war and embraced abraham lincoln and the republican party rather than dismissed him as part of what frederick douglass called in his great 1876 speech 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 that 30 years later, we are still in fundamental agreement about the fundamental questions of what the great struggle of the mid 19th century was all about. thank you. [ applause ] fittingly and proudly currently holds the george henry davis 1886 professor of american history at princeton. that is jim's chair. he is an award-winning public intellectual. most of us that go back far enough remember him primarily on the 19th century. i remember him when he was a premiere socialist story and now he is helping to bring back mainstream. has written as well about ronald reagan and more recently bob dylan and popular music.

i wanted to thank vernon very much for putting this whole thing together and everybody else who had a part of it. this is a wonderful occasion, and i'm very proud and honored to be a part of it. what i'm going to say this morning kind of repeats some of what's already been said but maybe with a different angle. certainly the angle of my own experience with jim mcpherson. for a quartier century, i was privileged to be his teaching colleague at princeton. have i him to thankly for that as he was the chair of the committee that searched for me. and i have never been able 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 many occasions. someone mentioned the preceptorship program at princeton. but back in the way old days of

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