memories of all of those seminars, mostly about the wonderful students who were in there. extraordinary students who were in there, including some bang there. but i have other memories too, like the time when all of three students showed up. remember that one? there were three students in the class, two of them weren't even princeton, and we somehow managed to pull it off although we filled more of the speaking time than either of us preferred. i always felt a tug for the two of us to try and highlight and defend different interpretations of that period from the end of the war of 1812 to the end of reconstruction. doing so is pretty easy after the missouri compromise. up to the missouri compromise, we were pretty much in agreement. easy. after that, i found myself advancing a much kindlier view than i actually have towards the emerging jacksonian democrats. and jim naturally said nicer things about the national

republicans and the wigs. we always agreed on john c. calhoun. he would be more than happy to point out that for all their pretensions to majorityianism, they were all but wiped out in the elections. and that but for foul weather and harrison's infirmities, the americans might have well reached the 1840s with slave holding texas still an independent republic. i would usually be reduced to mumbling something about george mcduffey and how all the really big southern slave hoerlholders wigs. for those of you in the cspan audience who don't know who george mcduffey was, there are about a dozen books written by people on this panel who can instruct you about all of this. you could also go to google. but given the kind of sites on

google where he might appear, i think that would be a bad idea. but do look him up. in and around 1846 -- sorry. in and around august of 1846, jim and i reconnected. the wilmont proviseo i am happy to say brought us back together again. his learned throughout a great deal about teaching from jim, about crafting the long reading list as well as conducting a seminar. even when the students only barely outnumbered us. about finding the right combination of respect, kindness, and authority to encourage, yet also instruct, vulnerable, yet sometimes also quite emphatic, fledgling historians. mainly, though, he taught me while he taught our students, he taught me vast amounts about the civil war and reconstruction. i tried to not let on how much i was learning but it was vast.

i was also privileged enough to work with a master historian while he was in intellectual transition, and here i'll be restating some of the things that imjudge talki jim talked a. historians can claim a particular period or theme and write about it for their entire scholarly careers, enriching their insight as they continue. so it was for jim's adviser and my own. or they can skip about changing their focus and approach and sometimes changing their minds while illuminating very different periods and pursuing different themes. woodward's friend richard hoffstetter comes to mind. but jim has left his stamp in all of these ways. he is of course associated with the war of civil war and reconstruction.

yet he has moved well beyond that period as well, taking his examination of racial politics, for example, into the 20th century. he began writing about political history and has never stopped, but he also turned himself into one of our premiere military historians, and did so no less during a post vietnam era in which much of the historical profession, military history, was to say the least unfashionable. he has written powerfully about presidents, lincoln above all, but also the military, including the black troops who were included in the northern cause just at the point when it became a revolution to american slavery. through it all, jim achieved greatness while completing the intellectual transition that i mentioned a minute ago. and from which i learned a great deal and still do. i arrived at princeton in 1979 three years after jim had complete the abolitionist legacy, the successor vying to his first book "the struggle to

equality." the first book covered the radical abolitionists through 1860 through reconstruction's demise. the second, how it played out during the long fierce reaction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. and look with the negro civil war, these were landmark books that helped rescue the abolitionists from the intense scrutiny they still suffered amongst professional historians in the 1960s. and they were books i believe that cannot be fully understood outside of the context of when they were being written, books that were more sympathetic to the agitators than those who were in power, agitators who thought that president abraham lincoln moved too slowly and who as wendell phillips wrote won't be flattered, can only be frightened and bullied into the right policy. to simplify drastically, when impractically hear in the

background snic or even dr. martin luther king jr. about the slowness of president john f. kennedy and the treachery of southern white moderates. when i arrived at princeton, though, and through our early years teaching together, jim was working on "battle cry of freedom" and he was working toward what jim referred to, jim oakes referred to, as a broader understanding of the politics of the war. part of that understanding involved a new appreciation of how fully military history, which figures much less strikingly in jim's earlier works than it has in the later ones, but how thoroughly military history was enmeshed with political history, including the history of the abolitionists. but it also involved an enhanced appreciation of lincoln's enormous political skills. his deep hatred of slavery and even his evolving views on race. the abolitionists as it happened did not believe abraham lincoln or pull him to see things their

way so much as lincoln, the political master, who without once compromising his bedrock anti-slavery principles, manipulated the abolitionists to the point where he held the union together so that slavery could be abolished. two quick points i want to repeat in all of this. there was a way in which the study of the abolitionists -- the retrieval of their reputation was too embedded in the civil rights movement era. it was a good corrective but it kind of went overboard. the search began for the most dedicated and inherent racial equality you could find, and you sort of end up with a small group of black abolitionists and maybe john brown, and everybody else was too moderate, weak kneed, not important enough. i think it's difficult to understand what the civil war was all about, why it came to be, because it was fundamentally a war about slavery.

we also have to look at lincoln anew, because under that -- lincoln looks a little bit weak kneed. we forget that abraham lincoln hated slavery every bit as much as frederick douglass did. i know i'm going to get cards and letters for that. but he also loved the constitution of the united states. he did not want to destroy one by destroying the other. and he continued along those lines with the idea that in fact by halting slavery's demise or spread rather he would truly be hastening its demise. one forgets that aside from haiti, gradual emancipation was the norm for emancipation in the 19th century. that's what people looked at. and they thought that's exactly what they were doing, and they would not compromise about that one bit. or at least lincoln and miss

republic his republican party would not do so. this is deeply, deeply important and i think has been kind of shoved aside to the extent to which only the most -- what jim calls the purist idea of the radicalism of equality that comes into play is the only worthy one.st idea of the radicalism of equality that comes into play is the only worthy one.est idea of the radicalism of equality that comes into play is the only worthy one. jim has recognized something about this transition in his own work. looking back in 1994, he observed that had lincoln done what the abolitionists demanded when they demanded it there would have been, quote, no union victory and no 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the constitution. without slighting the abolitionists' contributions, you can now see more clearly the potential disastrous drawbacks of their political naivety. in a profession that was coming to restaurant social movements and organizers more and more as

the engines of social justice, let alone common people, including slaves, mcpherson reminded us that it takes a president and his party to get things done. then the national crisis over slavery, it took a president with a supreme political deafness as well as the bedrock principles of abraham lincoln. i will leave it to jim to tell me if i'm right about any of this, and if so, how he thinks his thinking has evolved over the years. it will be so simple to say that the demarks from the second reconstruction and the advent of more conservative politics in the 1980s was entirely responsible, although i can't imagine that they were irrelevant. what i can say for myself is that listening to jim as well as reading his work had no small effect on the ways i thought about american democracy and many other historians did as well, and of how as i put it ni later book of my own that justice political leaders did not create american democracy out of thin air so the masses of

americans do not simply force their way into the corridors of power. it took political leaders of the caliber of jefferson and lincoln. now of course right here, jim will always remind me that the li lincoln that we both admire was a wig and not a jacksonian, just as i will be quick to remind him of the less savoury things that lincoln did and said while he was a wig, of how we admire lincoln not because he was a wig but because he became a republican. a political horse of a rather different color. of how it was neither the garrisonians nor the wigs but political abolitionists and free soilers who had broken with both political parties, including for a few years the same ex-president martin van buren whom lincoln some years earlier as a wig denounced as of all things an abolitionist in disguise. it was they who truly paved the

way for lincoln and the republicans. history is argument without end. but speaking personally as well as professionally, some of the most profound arguments among american historians today and over the last half century or so are utterly unimaginable without the fortitude and supple intelligence of jim mcpherson. and for that blessing, we are all enormously grateful. thank you. [ applause ] joe holds a distinguished chair at the university of north carolina at chapel hill. his most recent work was a study of lee's army that i highly recommend. and i think he is the premiere military historian of this era. so, joe, with that. thank you.

good morning. i want to thank the audience for coming out here sunday morning to honor my friend, jim mcpherson, and i want to thank the american historical association and vernon burton for allowing me an opportunity to pay tribute to my friend, jim mcpherson. for those of you who don't know jim, he is a very humble man, and i was thinking about this, jim. it could be worse. pat could have provided to kathryn clinton that photograph of you and me wearing skirts in israel. i can just see the title. jim mcpherson, cross dresser. so in that vein i have entitled my talk jim mcpherson, closet military historian. although jim began his career as an abolitionist historian, his greatest contributions i think are to the field of military history, not that his early career was fraught with failure, mind you. it did get him tenure at princeton. but i think it in is the area of

military history that he has made the most lasting contributions. so let me make a few points about some of his scholarship. first of all, of course, "battle cry freedom." 20 years later it is still the single finest volume on the civil war, bar none, no competition. it's an extraordinary exploration into politics, military, diplomatic, cultural, racial, social history. it's an incredible achievement. jim once told me that he was off on math. but if you ever look at the economics and financing of the war, they are absolutely phenomenal. it's a truly extraordinary achievement. i want to focus on two issues that jim raises in "battle cry freedom." first, jim perceives secession as a preemptive counterrevolution. as defined by mayer in his classic "the dynamics of counterrevolution in europe 1870-1956."

it was a movement to protect the status quo before the revolution. jim perceives the revolution being the inauguration of abraham lincoln and the rise to power of the republican party. so it's a kind of preemptive first strike. jim places the american civil war in a global context, something that historians have previously been reluctant to do. instead, they like to overemphasize american exceptionalism but this global context is a wonderful addition to the field. second, jim introduces the concept of contingency to challenge existing interpretations about why the north won and why the south lost, and also to buttress his own assessment of why the north won and why the south lost. jim believes that the union victory was by now stretch preordained, that at critical points in the war things could

have gone differently. at four critical junctures, events went in federal favor and that enabled them to win the war. since then, others have applied contingency to other historical fields and events, and my friend ed ayers has taken contingency and developed it into a concept that ed refers to as deep contingen contingency, discussing the layers of consequences to contingency. but the bottom line is that content time of contingency helps us to understand the human elements of war. and how nothing in life is certain. the second great contribution in military history is jim's exploration of soldiers' motivations. and here i'm referring to two books. although we had tackled the subject to some degree, jim approached it with vastly greater systemizization and sophistication. first in what they fought for

and second for cause and comrades, jim chose letters and diaries from a sample of over 1,000 soldiers who largely reflected the demographic background of civil war soldiers. what emerged was a much more complex portrait of motivations. in the course of the book, jim skillfully draws on john lind's analysis of combat motivations in a study of french army. lind proposes and jim embraces initial motivation, sustaining motivation, and combat motivation. now more than a decade and a half old, these two volumes have the most balanced and accurate portrait of civil war soldiers motivations that exists today. now a third logical study to tackle is try by war, which is jim's book on abraham lincoln as commander in chief and it vastly

exceeds the previous standard by t. harry lincoln and his generals. t limitations on time, what i'd rather talk about, and it is of course the standard book now on lincoln as commander in chief. but what i'd rather talk about is a relatively obscure essay that jim wrote. it was published in a slender volume called, "is blood thicker than water." the essay is entitled ethnic versus civil nationalism in american civil war. in it, he traces southerner perceptions that they were a distinct race from northerners. he skillfully demonstrates that the argument is sheer myth, devoid of sub constastantiviati. but he does argument distinct ethnic. they use it to demolish any ties with the old union that reluctant secessionists might have had.

he also notes that because southerners believed they were fighting a distinct and inferior race, that spirit of ethnic nationalism enabled them to detect federalists as invaders, a lower form of human being, and therefore it reduced the angst they may have felt when slaying thousands of thousands of their former countrymen. thus it became a factor in the level of brutality that the war engendered. i don't know if jim would consider himself a military historian, but in fact in my opinion he is one. thank you very much. [ applause ] and now i guess i should introduce jim mcpherson.

>> well, i think i need to begin by explaining joe's remark about wearing skirts. [ laughter ] >> that can't be left just hanging in the air. joe and i were part of a group of americans who travelled to jerusalem last may and june to participate in a conference of international conference of scholars on civil wars, especially the american civil war, but the other civil wars in comparative context. and during the course of it, our host, yale sternhill, gave us tours of israel and jerusalem. and one day we walked to the top of temple mount, the very holy site for all three major religions at the cross roads of the middle east in israel, to judy wasylycia-leie judaism, ch

>> we were wearing shorts that day, and when we got to the top we were required to cover our legs so we had to rent skirts. and as a consequence, of course, there were several photographs and joe i think that probably this will be on the jacket of our next book. let me take this opportunity to thank all members of the panel who have been friends of mine as well as in some cases former students for many years, even decades. i am most appreciative of the work they have done to put together the volume, the struggle for equality, of essays in my honor. but also to organize this conference. and especially i'm grateful to vernon, who i think almost single-handedly with many hours of effort put together the pieces of the conference and the

pieces of the book. and also jerry, who is sitting here in the front row, who was an essential part of that process as well. i was reminded by some of these talks of things that i had forgotten or never known. i had not really understood that i was the bob hope of the civil war. and i had forgotten that review in the georgia historical quarterly that was cited of my first book. i do remember all of the tours of gettysburg that i had given for undergraduate and graduate students at princeton and alumni over the years, including the first one that judith hunter went on when we walked the climax of the battle, the picket pedigrew assault, and judith turned to her friend and said

that by this point halfway through we would both be dead. and her friend said, well, i think that's the point. and that really brings up another point, which is that i have learned as much from my students and colleagues, including all of these people on the panel, as they have learned from me. and that's one example, probably an odd example, of having learned something of great importance to me. when i have done tours of battlefield sai battlefields, especially gettysburg and that climactic moment of gettysburg, people i have taken on those tours starting with princeton undergraduates and graduate students back in the 1980s have stood on the edge of spangler's woods there looking across the nearly mile of open ground against cemetery ridge that the confederate soldiers were being

asked to attack on that fateful afternoon of july 3, 1863, and they have asked me how could anybody walk forward into what they knew was going to be a hail of lead and iron with their chances of coming out of it pretty slim. and that question lingered in my mind over those tours. and it was really the origin of the book that joe talked about in his presentation, "for cause and comrades". the study of combat -- of the motivation, initial sustaining and combat motivation of civil war soldiers. and that was because of a question that i was asked repeatedly, giving battlefield tours. and there are many other examples of the way in which questions from students or comments by students or colleagues on questions that i have raised.

have motivated will kinds of studies that i have done ever since graduate school, when of course all of you probably in this audience have had the same experience. in graduate school, you learn as much from your fellow graduate students as you do from either the books you have read or the professors. and that was certainly true of me back in my graduate school experience at johns hopkins from 1958 to 1962. one of my fellow students from those days, charles due, is in the audience this morning, and i learned a great deal from him, from david hackett fisher, who has also remained a lifelong friend since those days in graduate school. so beginning with that experience half a century ago now, more than half a century ago, right on down to the present.

i have learned as much from colleagues and fellow students and students as i ever have taught them, i think. let me just briefly comment on what has been the trajectory of my career as an historian. almost all of the presenters this morning have made some observations about that. and i want to just summarize that very briefly before we open this up to questions from the audience. i went to graduate school without really having a very clear idea of what i would wind up writing a dissertation about, and making a career of. this was during the early years of the civil rights movement,

and as you've heard this morning, these were the years that c. van woodward had labeled the second reconstruction of the south. and so that was a focus of the graduate seminars. and much of the reading that we did in the late '50s and into the early '60s. and i did two of my three graduate research papers during the first two years at johns hopkins on reconstruction. one of them was a study of alabama during a key part of the reconstruction period in that. the research for that was done mostly in the library of congress or the johns hopkins library, not in alabama itself, and woodward encouraged me to expand that into a dissertation because this was a time when -- and it was a fairly exciting time when not only students of woodward but others were looking at the possibility of revising

the dunning, the classic dunning interpretation of reconstruction. many of the studies of reconstruction in individual southern states had been done by the students of william arch bald dunning in the early 20th century. and he would have been very happy for me to undertake a study of alabama during the reconstruction. and i began outlining what i might do with that. but at the same time, two other things were going on. one was of course the sit ins in greensboro, north carolina, starting in 1960. the spillover in baltimore, which was a border state city at the time. the schools had been integrated. under the leadership of david hackett fisher's father, who was the superintendent of the baltimore school system. but many other facilities in

baltimore and in other parts of maryland were still segregated. this still was the jim crow era, although it was the end of the jim crow era. and of course the civil rights movement had generated a lot of hostility and violence in the south, especially in 1961 during the freedom riders, going through alabama and mississippi. and i began to think twice about whether i wanted to go down and spend six months or a year in alabama county courthouses in the state archives driving around the state with a car with a northern license plate during those year. but more important in the decision that i -- the fairly important decision that i made was the context of the civil rights movement with these northern activists, black and white, traveling through the south, trying to bring about change in race relations in the south, and