♪ we are live from richmond, virginia. this is the library of virginia where all day today on "american history tv" on c-span3 we're going to bring you a forum that seeks to answer the question, if

"time" magazine had been around in 1862, who would "time" select as the person of year? the library of virginia co-hosting an event that invited five historians including david blight 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 @cspanhistory. specifically today if you want to tweet use #poty1862. on facebook we've posted the

question -- who do you think was the most influential person of 1862? facebook.com/cspan. we'll look at some of those throughout the day as well. 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. i'm 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 and 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 sesquicentennial of the civil war. now, as chairman of the museum, i'm obligated to remind everyone that we are a member-supported institution. to learn more about the museum and our activities, 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 museum to open in april --

appomatox. 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 waite rawls, 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 and 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 perceptive 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 ten 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 virginia historical society. sarah died of cancer recently just short of her 52nd birthday. we will miss her greatly. sarah's father kicked off last year's symposium with a typically vigorous speech by pierre gustave toutant beauregard as person of the year 1861.

he did not do a great job and the general 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'll pass out ballots and you'll 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 this 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 any more more than "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 crick. for him and the others you will find a biography 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. krick. today he's best known as the father of robert e.l. krick. bob the elder was for more than 30 years chief historian at the fredericksburg and spotsylvania national military 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 reservati preservationists. in his so-called retirement and so-called retirement bob will never retire, he has continued his research and writing and occasional speaking. we are very pleased to have him with us here today to make the first nomination. bob krick. [ 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 longtime 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. i don't see, however, how i can do that. as i look around, there are a lot of friendly faces out there. any of you who know my persona at all, you know who i'm interested in. you know who i'm going to talk about. i do, though, at least for starters have a quirky context for you. that is this. i'm going to talk about soap

hygienic abetting soap sold to philadelphians, yankees in the northeast. and number two about fhrenology. and those are both not in the mainstream. was there even a remote chance in the april of 1862 the thomas j. jackson, already known by then as stonewall, might have served as a text in april of 1862 to sell soap to kwainke ya 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 franological journal and life illustrated, that was the full name, i suppose with tongue at least

some way 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 drug-addled star as their model. here are northeasterners using stonewall jackson to sell soap. what an explosion in just a period of a few weeks in jackson's public image. that of course is my main thing today. an aside from the phrenology. maybe some of you know about phrenology, the pseudo science that the bumps on your cranium showed your strengths and weaknesses. and this was one of his eccentric subenthusiasms.

the library a few miles from here on the boulevard includes two phrenological 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 had a concavity for music since he was tone deaf. this has fallen out of vogue, but the fact that it was in the american phrenological journal seems to be a footnote. when jackson 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 kind of ignored him, if they mentioned him at all. but in a period of just 33 days revolutionized his image and revolutionized 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 fainting and extended then through the second of the climactic two days of battle on june 9th. so from may 8th to june 9th covers 33 days, he went from a virtual nonentity to pretty much a genuine legend. and 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 between a calliope he shot up with a shrill whistle and perhaps a pipe organ in lee's case. jackson of course had earned his famous stonewall at first

manassas very early in the war but had found absolutely no distinction or activity for many months thereafter. there ensued, you well know, the almost unbelievable skitzkrieg all through the summer, the fall and winter of 1861 and into 1862. george b. mcclellan and johnston both equipped by nature did nothing, absolutely nothing. they were as full of lasitude 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 that long sitzkrieg 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, but is 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 monongahela." had you haird heard that? that's an awful long way from winchester, virginia. 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 wintry blast and rampant illness turned that into a nightmare. it was bitter cold. it wasn't as cold as they ought thought it was, it turns out. there's a good new book about weather in virginia that pins that down.

but it was plenty cold and plenty 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, quote, the trip over to romney which led us to believe him quite lunatic. the mutiny 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 unbelievably maladroit 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 mutiny was more broadly based than is generally known, number one. and, number two, it seems to me 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 fomented this. he was no particular talent. he was imbedded by tolliver who owed by the same denomination for his net merits. tolliver, i've always been amused, in hindsight, after the war when jackson had become absolutely legendary, tolliver, who had been a sworn enemy, wrote a whole chapter hemming jackson's glory 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 here to richmond has the signatures of if not every, virtually every field officer of all the regiments under them. the only ones that weren't signing are the ones who weren't there. the very first one on that list, if it matters, the first one physically, the top of the list of field officers was samuel v. fulkerson of the 37th virginia. some of you may recognize him as jackson's favorite colonel. he said so a couple of times. fulkerson was destined to be killed a few thousand yards from here, gainesville mill. when word came to jackson, he actually shed tears. his favorite field officer. i doubt that he knew that fukerson was at the top of the list. so this mutiny 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 grade officers, had they been as disgusted with jackson in june for some reason as they had been in february and 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 for you as you think of that, 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 as the campaign was beginning that jackson was incompetent and perhaps unbalanced. he told a friend, ashby did, in the confederate congress, quote, for the last two months i have saved the army from being utterly destroyed by jackson.

he obviously believed that. it was not so. ashby, whose profile included all sorts of daring-do and galloping about, had not embraced any of the concepts of organized disciplined modern war. and when he wrote to the war department, separately to the complaint of his congress friend, he said jackson is trying to force me to turn my companies into regiments. what an autocratic and novel notion that is. he said, i have the prermission to raise all the companies i can. the war department said of course the more the better, but you have to organize them when they reach ten into regiments and the regiments into 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 that mid 19th century warfare was infinitely more than a medieval jousting tournament.

ashby and others were all 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, a congressman, suggesting that all of the stills in the south should be dismantled and the copper used for the war effort and also the sobriety 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. john lecher, his fellow lexingtonian, is really the man who persuaded him to withdraw 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 native genius 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. old woman was having her 85th birthday and they interviewed her and she said the greatest moment of her life was when, as a little girl, during the romney campaign she handed stonewall jackson personally, i'm quoting her, a slice of bread well buttered. well, she wasn't talking about a hard-fighting frontier general. she was looking back at someone who had become a legend and things were very different by then. once jackson had succeeded, the 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 immense crisis but compounded many times over, manifold 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 b. mcclellan and joseph e. johnston were doing nothing so capably, living up to their birthrights. in the west, things were happening and they were all bad. ft. henry, ft. donaldson. on the upper mississippi, everything was going bad, and suddenly here was someone in virginia, a virginian who was succeeding. you have seen the compilations, they 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 not far from us where by this point there were federal troops in profusion laying siege, not literally, but besieging the confederate national capitol, the soldiers here wrote about it from afar and started to wish they had jackson instead of their own leaders. here's a fellow in the brigade writing home at the time, middle of may, the news of the gallant achievements of stonewall jackson has been received enthusiastically here and our commanders here -- this is heading toward one of my light motifs, one of my heavy motifs, the impact on people, their attitudes 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 our side who is ascending the ladder of success. this fellow is in toombs' brigade. compared to toombs, anybody would be a military genius for sure. but he's not reflecting in that flow. he's wishing he had jackson. so all across the army down here, far from the valley, 11th virginia, first corps, first and last, not jackson's, he is the man. i wish we had the whole army filled with jacksons instead of the leaders we have. and the enemy soon would be shipped from our soil. literally thousands of such accolades exist. i've spent my whole life finding them, copying them, accumulating them. they grow redundant pretty quickly. the most strike one of all that i have found is dated from just a day after first winchester by a member of the 1st maryland. it had been writ large at front

royal and he had been there. 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 at least pretend that defeated southerners after the war created their here rows, ex post facto, because they needed heroes and that the wartime heroes meant far more to them after the war than during the war. the question of whether these confederate leaders, lee and jackson, 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 insupportable people waxed frantically about those and other successful confederates at

the time. an example is james cooper nisbitt. some of you will recognize his name. he wrote a pretty good book, "four years on the firing line." wasn't published until 1914 which is more than a little late. it is full of the usual enthusiastic accolades for jackson and others. and there's not much question but that someone writing in 1914 would say that in chattanooga, tennessee, no matter who he was and where he had been. but nisbitt also wrote home at the time, wrote home while still on the battlefield and here is his letter which probably is more these yas tick than his post-war memoir. 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.

james coop eer nisbitt was feelg in 1862 just like he was 52 years as an old man in chattanooga. at least as significant, perhaps more significant, than jackson's apotheosis in southern, confederate, eyes was his impact 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. they really did. a new york lieutenant who had been up and down the valley, he was with shields' column, not with the more westerly one, he wrote on june 12, the guns of port republic have been silent for all of 72 hours now. he wrote home, he said, this jackson is a man of decided genius, the new york lieutenant, and no one in our army is fit to co