who would "time" select as person of the year in 1862? co-hosting an event that invited five historians to answer that question. by the end of the day, the audience here in richmond will vote on person of the year 1862. so lots ahead. all-day coverage here on c-span3 on american history tv. and during breaks in the event in richmond, we will take your phone calls, we'll talk to the historians about their selections and also give you a chance to weigh in with your vote as well. now, you can do that on the phone. you can also do that online. if you're on twitter, follow us

at @cspanhistory. specifically today if you want to tweet use hashtag poty 61862. who do you think was the most influential person of 1862? facebook.com/cspan. coming up next, they'll get under way shortly at the library of virginia in richmond to get the program under way. live coverage on american history tv on c-span3.

good morning. hello, everybody. why don't we get started.

good morning. my name is matt thompson, chairman of the board of the museum of the confederacy. and on behalf of the museum and the library of virginia, i welcome you to our 2012 symposium. this is the 15th year of our partnership with the library and we are truly grateful to it for hosting this event and for being a center of education in scholarship in downtown richmond. based on the feedback we received from last year's person of the year 1861 symposium, i think it's safe to say that this person of the year series is becoming a signature event of the continuing commemoration of the asses wa centennial of the civil war. as chairman of the museum, i'm obligated to remind everybody we are a constitution institution. please go to www.moc.org to

become a member, renew your membership, make a donation and also to learn more about our grand opening on march 31st of our $10 million new exhibit, new museum, excuse me, to open. it's a great building. it's going to be a great museum experience. and it's really going to allow us to expand our mission and our reach to people from across the country and the world. let me introduce to you wait rolls, the president of the museum. i hope you have a great day and thanks for coming. [ applause ]. >> good morning, everybody. and welcome to 1862. today we're going to immerse you in 1862. the people in the events of 150 years ago, by the end of the day we hope you'll have enough of a perspective about 1862 to be a per accept active judge of what and who was important in that crucial year.

many of you were with us last year and are familiar with the concept and formula of this symposium. but before i go on and explain a little bit about it for those of you who were not here last year, i want to pay tribute to someone who was with us here last year, and is tragically not with us today. many of you know the name of sarah bars. through her father ed bars. if you studied virginia history you know sarah in her own right. for more than 10 years she worked here at the library of virginia as the editor of the dictionary of virginia biography. for 16 years before that, she was the managing editor of the publications of the historical society. she died of cancer short of her 52nd birthday. we will miss her greatly. sarah's father kicked off last year's symposium with a

typically vigorous speech knotting gustav tutant beauregard. he did not do a great job and he did not finish high in the vote. that is the basic concept for this symposium. the talks you will hear today are speeches nominating candidates for the person of the year of 1862. the person who most influenced events. at the end of the day we will pass out ballots and you will get to vote. as i was last year, i am very pleased that so many of you came to an all day symposium without even knowing who the lecture topics were going to be. and that c-span is interested in not only recording the symposium but broadcasting it live. yes, we are live, without knowing the subjects of the lectures. we thought that not divulging

the nominees in advance would enhance the suspense. and you've confirmed this with your attendance today. we thank you for trusting us to arrange an interesting and worthwhile program and are confident that you won't be disappointed. the person who won last year's vote was abraham lincoln, which surprised a lot of people. abraham lincoln won an election in richmond, virginia? this tells us that perhaps richmond isn't what some people think it is. and it reminds us that the person of the year for 1861 or 1862 is not a popularity contest anymore more "time" magazine's person of the year is a measure of popularity. it is a measure of importance and a means of learning about the year. our panelists will try to convince you, the audience and the voters, that their nominees deserve to be recognized for their importance. without further ado, let's get

on to our first nominee and first speaker. bob, for him and the others you will find a biographer in your programs so i will not give long introductions for the benefit of our live television audience. however, let me say a few things about robert k.crique. he's best known as the proud father. bob the elder was for more than 30 years chief historian at the fredericksburg and response veil yann national park and in that capacity was extremely active as a researcher, a writer, a speaker and especially as one of the country's leading battlefield preservationists. in his so-called retirement and so-called retirement bob will never retire, he has continued his research and writing in occasional speaking.

we are very pleased to have him with us here today to make the first nomination. bob crique. [ applause ]. >> the years do move right along for many decades, my son, a young historian, was introduced as my son. now, almost inevitably i'm introduced as his father. so these things come and go and change. i was instructed by my long-time friend john coskey, that it would be a good idea if i maintained some suspense about who my nominee was. ed bart and others used that ploy last year and john thought it worked well. but i don't see, however, that i can do that. as i look around, there are a lot of friendly faces out there. many of you who know my persona

at all, you know who i'm interested in. you know who i'm talking about. i do, though, at least for starters have a quirky context for you. i'm going to talk about soap sold to philadelphians, yankees in the northeast. and those are both not in the mainstream. was there even a remote chance in the april of 1862 the thomas j. jackson might have served as a text in april of 1862 to sell soap to yankees in the northeast? utterly inconceivable. yet before the summer was over, just a few weeks later, jackson was the main subject of an advertisement by files okay soap. and the advertisers, knowing their audience, even in the

northeast, this was published in philadelphia, they claimed in the american fran logical journal and life illustrated, that was the full name, i suppose with tongue in cheek that stonewall jackson loved their soap. in the field, this is a quote -- in the field they professed somehow to know stonewall jackson nabs okay for soap. advertisers always used popular figures. today if they were selling soap they would use some division star as their model. here are northeasterners using stonewall jackson to sell soap. what an explosion in jackson's public image. that of course is my main thing today. an aside from the phrenology. maybe some of you are young enough that have never been exposed to it.

pseudo science that the bumps on your cranium showed your strengths and weaknesses. and this was one of the eccentric enthusiasms. the library a few miles from here on the boulevard, includes two tprepb logical volumes. one is something like marriage or a guide for choosing a life's mate. you were supposed to feel his or her head and look for the bump that had to do with love, sentiment, music. jackson presumably was concave for music since he was tone deaf. but the fact that it was in the american phrenology cal journal seems to be a footnote. when he launched his epic venture he had no cache whatsoever. just none. public mentioned of him in the valley. usually poked fun at him in the southern newspapers. not the northern ones. they ignored him, if they

mentioned him at all. but in a period of 33 days revolutionized his image and the capacity of the confederate nation to fend for itself. those 33 days began on the 8th of may. when he won the battle of mcdowell after some clever countermarching and extended then through the second of the climactic two days of battle. so from may 8th to june 9th covers 33 days, he went from a virtual nonentity to pretty much a genuine legend. that explosive rise might be compared, just for thought purposes, with the increase in lee's popularity as a southern hero in the south and elsewhere. jackson's companion on the rise to fame, lee, had a very different sort of a move up the wide axis of the public opinion

graph. i compared it once and it seemed to me to be apt to the difference of qaa lie my he shot up with a shrill whistle and perhaps a pipe organ in lee's case. he had found absolutely no opportunity for distinction or activity for many months thereafter. they are ensued the almost unbelievable sits kraoeg all through the summer, the fall and the winter of 1861 and into 1862. george b. mckhrel on and johnston both equipped by nature did nothing, absolutely nothing. they were as full of lass attitude as any major in american history and have been. and during that encrusted epic jackson had no opportunities nor did anyone else. we often think about what if in the parallel universe it strikes me that it would be interesting

to contemplate what would have happened had the northern or southern armies been led by someone with a metabolism facing the other one during the long sits kraoeg how would the war have resulted? it's hard to say. the opening scenes of stonewall's tenure in the shenandoah valley really did not lend themselves to legend building. in a note that most of you may not have heard, in fact, what's pretty interesting, he handled some of his very early orders for the tiny force he commanded when he moved to the valley before he got a bit of reinforcement. he denominated his army, "the army of the month na nonga hail. that's where he was thinking to choose that title. his first venture, as you know, launched new year's day 1862 towards romney, the romney campaign.

icy roads and rampant illness turned that into a nightmare. it was bitter cold. it wasn't as cold as they ought thought it was. there's a good new book about weather in virginia that pins that down. but it was bloody cold and bloody horrible and it was a hard time. the troops thought jackson was crazy. you've heard this. you'll hear it again. they did. one of them writing just after things in june admitted the troops are finally able to forgive him. the trip over to romney which led us to believe him quite lunatic. the mute any against jackson that ensued at that juncture in which the troops did not want to be at romney, did not want to be out in the cold, resulted in a communication to the confederate war department here in richmond that asked that they be ordered back despite jackson by the secretary of war. this wound up in the hands of

the unbelievable secretary of war benjamin and not much more efficient at this kind of thing superior jefferson davis. and without going into the merits of the case from those people's perspective, there are two points i want to make for you. number one, that mute any was more broadly based than is generally known, number one. number two, it seems to be a beautiful illustration of his complete lack of standing before the valley campaign. number one, it is well-known that william w.loring, of no particular talent. he was imbedded tolliver who owed by the same denomination for his net merits. i've always b hindsight after the war when jackson had become absolutely legendary.

he had been his sworn enemy wrote a whole chapter hemming jackson's glory. the reflective glow of the hero now to whom he had been so opposed during the war. in addition to them, everybody knows about loring and tolliver. in addition to them the original document sent off had the signatures of if not every, virtually every field officer of all the regimens under them. the very first one on that list, if it matters, the first one physically, the top of the list of field officers was sam kwrl v.volkerson. some of you may recognize him as jackson's favorite colonel. he was destined to be killed a few hundred yards from him. his favorite field officer.

i doubt that he knew that fukerson was at the top of the list. so this mute any against jackson was not only deeper than it seemed but probably more significant about his standing in the army and out. think, too, about the prospect, had all the army, the general officers, the field officers, had they been as disgusted with jackson in june for some reason as they had been in february. had they indicted a similar complaint to the war department here in richmond, would it have gotten any attention even at the bureaucratic wailing walls here in richmond where people were always expected to do that sort of thing? no one would have paid it any mind at all. so there is a gauge to you as at of the degree to which the 33 days in may and june revolutionized jackson's image. turner ashby, whose dashing exploits made him into something

of a cult hero, genuinely believed jackson was incompetent and perhaps unbalanced. he told a friend in the confederate congress, i have saved the army from being utterly destroyed by jackson. he obviously believed that. it was not so. ashby had not embraced any 69 concepts of organized disciplined modern war. and when he wrote to the war department, he said jackson is trying to force knme to turn th into regiments. the war department said of course the more the better, but you have to organize them when they reach ten into regiments and the regiment there is to brigades. ashby proceeded to ignore them. but what ashby and his friends

were blaming jackson for was for understanding what they themselves could not understand, and that is the mid 19th century warfare was infinitely more than a medieval joisting tournament. all all were amused by jackson's businesslike persona no matter what he was doing. his array of eccentricities. they doubtless heard about such things as jackson writing to his friend suggesting that all of the stills in the south should be dismantled and the copper used for the war effort. such a notion it hardly needs to be mentioned is outside the southern mainstream. the general was not entirely within his supporters. even at the depth of the romney

crisis. his fellow lexingtonian is really the man who persuaded him to withdrawal his recognition otherwise we would have never heard of him. in the aftermath, people writing after the war almost all of them have said that they recognized of course jackson's innateive jean plus from the beginning. i ran across recently a newspaper account of the 85th birthday celebration of an old woman in virginia, lived up the potomac above harpers ferry a little bit. she was having her 85th birthday and will they interviewed her and she said the greatest moment of her life was when as a little girl during the romney campaign, she handed stone wall jackson personally a slice of bread well buttered. she wasn't talking about a hard fighting frontier general. she was looking pack at someone

who had become a legend and things were very different by then. once jackson succeeded, 23rd, 25th of may in 1862, he was almost instantly a southern hero. that is a function of a nervous reaction to success at a time of crisis, but com pounded many times over by the fact nothing had gone well for the southern confederacy. since the 21st of july, the success at the first battle of manassas, nothing had done well. nothing had happened in the orbit where george mcclellan were doing nothing. in the west, things were happening and terp they were all

bad. suddenly there was someone in virginia who was succeeding. the compilations are everywhere from the civilian diaries, from the soldiers letters about how the world had changed when jackson started to succeed. good news had been in miserly short supply and now it was everywhere viewed with more importance than it really deserved from the somewhat secondary theater of the shenandoah valley. down here in richmond whereby this point there were federal troops in profusion laying siege, not literally, but besieging the confederate national capital p about the soldiers here wrote about it from afar and started to wish that they had jackson instead of their own leaders. here's a fellow in the brigade writing home, middle of may, the news of the gallon plant achievements has been received enthusiastically.plant

achievements has been received enthusiastically. this is one of my heavy motifs, the impact on people, hair attitude toward leaders. our commanders here when compared with jackson are quite unpleasantly commented upon by the rank and file. jackson is the only general on on our side who is ascending the ladder of success. compared to tooms, anyone would be a genius for sure. but he's not reflecting in that flow. he's wishing he had jackson. so all across the army down here, 11th virginia, first corps, he's the man. i wish we had the whole army filled with jacksons instead of the leaders we have. and the enemy should not would be shipped from our spoil. literally thousands of such accolades i spent my whole life accumulating them, they grow

redundant pretty quickly. the most striking one of all is dated just a day after first winchester by a member of the fix maryland. first maryland had been writ large and he wrote in an undated letter, may but with no date behind it, general jackson, my earthly god, well, that's going a little far, but it tells you what's happening. to become popular in the kind of anti-confederate writing currently in vogue to claim or pretend that defeated southerners created their heros, and that the war time leaders meant far more after the war than during the war, that lost cause business does not stand up to examination. the question of whether these confederate leaders deserved it is subjective enough that you

can make your own call. but the notion that they were not heros at the time is just utterly monday sense. just in-supportable people waxed frantically about those and other successful confederates at the time. an example is james cooper nisbitt. some of will you recognize his name. he wrote a pretty good book. wasn't published until 1914 which is more than a little late. it is full of the usual enthusiastic being a low kads for jackson and others. but there's not much question but that someone writing in 1914 would say that. but nisbitt also wrote home at the time, wrote home while still on the battlefield and here is his letter which probably is more enthusiastic, he said like old frederick the great, jackson

fights to win. he makes his fights at the right time and the right place. we are ready for what we all feel that whatever he does is all right. we love the old fighting cock. he obviously was feeling in 1862 just like he was 52 years later as an old man in chattanooga. at least as significant, perhaps more significant, than jackson's a both's owe sis was his impact on the mind set of the enlisted men among his foes.sis was his on the mind set of the enlisted men among his foes. they should not would be encouraged to buy soap and feared him mightily by june. a new york lieutenant who had been up and down the valley, he

wrote hope and said this jackson is a man of decided genius. and no one in our army is fit to compete with him. now, whether that was true or not, whether the lieutenant from new york had appraised jackson's merits properly, is a pretty subjective thing to judge. but that he thought that and that his comrades thought that was incredibly useful in the form of a shf fulfilling prove pes city. they were expecting to be beaten by this fellow the next time. in june down here near richmond when they came down here, of course, a federal who was captured asked who someone riding by was. they said that's stone wall jackson. he said is that devil here? betraying the attitude. an indiana soldier, a hoosier,w jackson. he said is that devil here? betraying the attitude. an indiana soldier, a hoosier,