logistical problems hampered the movement' he came close to little rock and he finally turned away. and in the process, which is a point i really want to emphasize, somewhere in that final loop toward helena, curtis made a momentous decision. he realized his supply line was more of an incumberance than in anything else. he realized he was landing into the fertile land of delta. not the delta of today with its mass wooded fields. it was low and swampy and lightly populated. but there were enough farms to provide food to keep his army afloat. so curtis made the momentous and extremely risky decision to sever his own supply line and to live off the southern country side as he marched eastward, and

for two weeks in june, 1862, the army of the southwest operated independently of a base of supplies. it fed itself as it moved along. this was the first time in the civil war an army attempted such a maneuver, and it would not be repeated again until 11 months had passed when grant tried the same thing as he moved his army around jackson to vicksburg. grant gets a lot of credit for that. curtis gets no credit for what he did 11 months earlier. why do you suppose? because it happened in arkansas, historigraphy. remember in the civil war. wartime journalists celebrated events in the east, they downplayed events in the west, and they basically ignored

events in the trans-mississippi. when the war ended, historians simply continued that mindset, that attitude, that approach. things are changing now these last 20 years. there's a really good book on pea ridge here. everybody should have a copy. but this development is new, and it's going to take a few decades, i think, before we really begin to grasp how important, how interesting, how significant events were in the trans-mississippi. now curtis was a modest man. a very methodical man. really he had the heart and soul of a civil engineer. he did not like to blow his own horn. he never made much of this revolution in military operations.

but inside, curtis knew what he had accomplished. in a private letter to his brother in ohio, a lawyer, and we know it's private because curtis wrote on the outside of the envelope "private" and underlined the word three times. he told what had gone on and so forth and, he concluded, "i have marched my army further over worse roads than any other general and i have subsisted my army completely in the enemy's country without a line of supply. nobody else has done this." he never lived to write his memoirs.

he never lived to demand that his proper place in history be recognized, and so only now, only today, if the will, the last few years has curtis slowing begun to emerge from the murk of history. and i think to take maybe not the position he entirely deserves but at least a more impressive position than was the case in the past. now, curtis' phrase nobody else has done this also applies to another remarkable accomplishment that also has been ignored until just these last few years. during his march across eastern arkansas, curtis wiped out slavery wherever he found it. six months before abraham lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation in may, june and july 1862 curtis simply took matters into his own hands. apparently when he cut his own ba nok pinocchio, that his

marionette strings had been cut as well and he could make up his rules as he went along and that's what he did. he simply declared that any slave who could reach his marching column would be forever free. well, word spread like wildfire across eastern arkansas. within days thousands, one union soldiers he counted as many as 4,000 people in a single day, thousands of people, men, women, children, lined the dusty roads ahead of the union army. they poured into towns where the federals happened to stop for a night. so as the army of the southwest went toward the mississippi river, it was followed by an immense and ever lengthening tail of people of all ages carrying all of their possessions and one suspects a little bit of old mass's

possessions as well, and accompanied by thousands and thousands of farm animals, sheep and goats. one union officer said, now i realize what the ark must have looked like. in a nutshell, emancipation came haltingly, slowly in the civil war. but it came first on a large scale to northeast arkansas in the summer of 1862. well, on july 12th, the army of the southwest finally marched into helena. this brought to a close one of the most remarkable operations of the civil war. during the first six months of '62, the federals marched 700 miles from raleigh to helena,

across some of the most difficult terrain in the country, and fought and won a major battle against imposing odds. no other union operation at this stage of the war lasted as long, covered as much territory, or achieved its objectives as effectively. the army of the southwest secured missouri, freed union resources for use elsewhere, and dealt confederate arkansas and slavery a heavy blow. few other civil war operations anywhere had such an impact on the course of events. it truly was a campaign worth commemorating, worth remembering, and i'm so glad that so many of you have come out tonight while we've had this little discussion. thank you so much. >> thank you very much for

coming, and you are dismissed. as commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the civil war continues, join us every saturday at 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. and sundays at 11:00 a.m. for programs featuring the civil war. for more information about american history tv on c-span3, including our complete schedule, go to c-span.org/history. and to keep up with us during the week send us questions or comments, follow us on twitter. we're at twitter.com/cspanhistory. thamerican history tv where can find our schedules and preview our upcoming programs. watch featured video from our regular weekly series, as well as access astv's tweets. history in the news and social media. follow american history tv all weekend every weekend on c-span3 and online at cspan.org/history.

next, pulitzer prize-winning journalist tony horowitz on the 1859 harper's ferry raid. he talks about the raid's impact on the abolitionists movement and the civil war. this is about 50 minutes. >> before we get started, i want to thank you all for coming. i'm kate mcginnis white for those of you who haven't met. for most of us, it's a wonderful welcoming to our home here in waterford. to celebrate both the journey through hollowed ground partnership, which is really the result of the work of many in this room, as well as to

celebrate our dear friend and favorite author, tony horowitz. yes, indeed. yes, come on. >> and former neighbor. >> we consider you a current neighbor under the economic conditions and c-span, thank you, he is selling his house. >> you can tour it afterwards. >> we're here today as part of the journey through hallowed ground national heritage areas institute. conversations, engaging both our partners as well as our authors in bringing to the fore the history in the swath the land from gettysburg to monticello. we could not be more thrilled than to have tony with us who has not only been the best-selling authors of confederates in the attic,

voyages long and strange, as well as the chronicle of captain cook's navigation of the globe three times, which he did personally as well. >> not three times. >> not three times. and, of course, his newest "midnight rising," which is about john brown and the events that changed the course of american history forever. tony is also a pulitzer prizewinning journalist. he worked for the "wall street journal" and "the new york times." but one of the things he really want to tell you he is a very, very dear friend. one of the things about tony is he really and truly has a notion that we at the journey like to say that we put people in the boots of those who went before us, in order for them to know, as david mccullough told us years ago, those people who lived long ago didn't know they were living long ago.

tony one-ups it. because not only do our programs try to put students and visitors and teachers into the boots of those who went long ago, tony, as he writes here, wants to get not into their boots, but into their minds. and he's done that with every book he's written, and it transports us to times and places that really challenge us. so we're here today and we'll have a conversation, and then we're going to open the floor to your questions to this amazing man. because you're our friend, we still get to say that you're an amazing man. sometimes we don't get to say that. >> they say you can't go home, but i lived here for 13 years. it still feels like home. there are at least five people in the audience who i don't know. so there you go.

it's the old mom. so good to be back. >> thank you. here in waterford, we're not far from harper's ferry, the subject of john brown's raid. some of us are very curious to understand how this historical landscape has influenced so much of your writing, whether it's been confederates in the attic, or many of the articles you've written. and as we're so dedicated to this historic swath of land from gettysburg to monticello, would first like to open it to about your insight and thoughts about this landscape and how it inspires us. >> i thought you were going to ask something different, which is why i didn't write this book while i lived in waterford. as the crow flies, are we 15 miles from harper's ferry? >> at most. >> i had to move to massachusetts before i thought great book in my backyard, in my former backyard. yeah, i mean, well speaking to

this subject at least, first of all, i wrote, "confederates in the attic," because of what happened 15 yards from here when re-enactors summoned into my front yard in waterford because they were reenacting for a movie here because it's such a great historic landscape. but with this book i think part of what -- drew me to write about it is that harper's ferry is still so intact, really. that it's this incredible mix of natural beauty and historical hauntedness, really, but even more specifically, the sites associated with brown are still there. so you can go to the kennedy farm are brown and his out in tp

to his raid and had this tense, sweaty summer in their hideout with 20 guerrillas and two women in this log cabin pretending to be farmers and entrepreneurs rather than abolitionists. you can then go into harper's ferry and the -- many of the buildings are still there, obviously including john brown's fort as it's now know.urthse where he was tried. i can't think of many stories or many parts of the country where you can have that kind of experience where you cannot just re-live the history through the documents, but actually go to the ground, you know theer history happened, and as i writer, i find that just a huge asset. just to use one example, while researching this book, on the 150th anniversary of brown's raid, i went with park service historian in harper's ferry

dennis frai and other sort of demented pilgrims and we marched the exact route that brown and his men did on march 16th, 1859. it was a cold rain, which apparently it was on that night, behind a horse-drawn wagon and we went the five miles into harper's ferry to the engine house. it was what re-enactors call a period rush. that sort of time travel high you get from, you know, leaving your own time zone. and we weren't wearing uniforms or carrying weapons or any of that. we had the horse. the horse was good. but, you know, that's the kind of thing you can do in the hallowed ground that, you know, most of american history sadly is -- you're going to hear traffic roaring in the distance. you're going to -- whatever. you're going to have all kinds of modern intrusions that are going to make it very difficult to recapture that history. so i think, yeah, actually i've

got two books out of hallowed ground. it's a special place. >> you know, you remind me of something that's important to remember, and that is that history is not actually compartmentalized. that this entire swath of land has been formed by every generation that has lived with it. as this is presidents' weekend, i'm mindful of the fact we have president jefferson who lived at monticello, president madison, of course, president monroe, all of whom owned slaves, all of whom each, whether it was jefferson trying with the declaration of independence or madison with the constitution or monroe and others, each had to address slavery. it was a pressing issue from the beginning. >> right. >> can you share with us your insights into what you've seen as this very bloody example that john brown felt that he had to live as a result of the failures

of our society over the years to actually wrestle this down? i'm not blaming them, because we know in context it's easy to look back and say morally how could they have ever? in fact, they could have never created a country under the circumstances had they tried to address all the problems they were grappling with with the founding fathers. but i'd love to -- i guess two questions. first, you're back with looking at a perspective, what is the legacy of not addressing a really critically morally imperative issue early on and what led to john brown? >> what really struck me during this project is that john brown is born in 1800. both his grandfathers fight in the revolution. his great-great-great whatever puritans are in new england. this is still a new country at this point, and they feel very connected the to the revolutionary generation.

this is still an experiment. there's very much this sense that, you know, we need it to make this -- we need to fight to make this work. with slavery, i guess what struck me most of all, i will blame them, but i won't blame the individuals specifically. i'll blame the whole country. i think too often when we look back at pre-civil war america, we think of the south as a sort of society apart. this sort of strange or maybe this is the view in the north. this sort of futile remnant that was clinging to plantation slavery, this aristocratic system that was destined to wither away as the country modernized and became industrialized. also kind of "gone with the wind" sometimes quite romantic view of this seemingly doomed

world. when you immerse in the diaries and letters and news reports of this era, as you said, they don't know their living history. they can't see what's coming in the future. you see things entirely different. slavery was completely of the fabric of this whole country. just to give a few examples politically, 13 of the first 16 presidential elections are won by slaveholders. it's not until 1852 that we have a major party ticket that doesn't have a slaveholder on it. the slave-holding south largely controls the supreme court. it's the period between the nation's founding and the civil war. slavery in the south wasn't a world apart. they were really driving the nation in many ways. economically, cotton by the civil war is roughly three quarters of the nation's exports. i mean, this was the oil of its

day. the whole country was hooked on it. our northern mills are churning out shoes and clothing largely for slaves. the value of slaves alone was greater than that of the nation's railroads, industries and banks put together. so, you know, i'm sorry, but this whole sort of terra image of this doomed romantic world simply isn't accurate. we, as a nation, were all culpable in this. we were all dependent on this system of forced labor. so i think that's, you know -- when you talk about the continuum, this is a story, yes, that begins, well, in jamestown in 1619, but really with the revolution and then the constitution where they sort of fudge the slavery issue. one of the most remarkable things about the constitution is

they don't mention of word slave or slavery in the entire document, even though it comes up in the very first article. so right from the beginning, they were aware that we have a contradiction here. we were creating a nation that's ostensibly pledged to liberty and equality except for this huge exception. right from the start. essentially brown and harper's ferry is the end -- well, not the end, but a piece of this much longer story. >> let me ask you this. i mean, what i love about all your books is that you really do get into their minds by actually traveling in their footsteps and seeing it. i mean, for james cook you literally sailed on a ship like his, like captain hook's all the way around the world and worked on the top of a 100-foot mast to get into his mind. for "confederates in the attic," i really have to tell you.

you trooped around more battlefields with more bloated bodies to get into the mind of the re-enactors and those. with john brown, given all that you've done and know about this man, what was the most profoundly riveting thing, once you get into his mind, that you found compelled him to this lifelong ambition of ridding slavery from this country? and with his preparation to die for it. >> right. yeah. i mean, the wonder with this story is, yeah, i went to the places where the history happened and walked in his footsteps in kansas and harper's ferry and other places, but we also have his letters and we have his writing and the letters of all of his family. these were wonderfully literate people, and brown, though not a well-educated man, had a wonderful writing style. thank god his handwriting is

legible, which i learned is not the case. there's one character in the story where you just simply can't -- you can turn it upside-down, you try all those tricks. you open your eyes and close them. you still just can't read it. brown's letters are -- have a kind of spare eloquence, and so you feel you can really understand this man, both from his own writing and from what other people said about him. i don't think there's any one well spring to his sort of ferocious abolitionism and animus toward slavery. this isn't a sort of epiphany, though, he claims so. there's a long letter talking about his childhood, and he claims that it's the site of seeing a slave boy beaten with a shovel when he was 12. i'm sure that contributed to it, but i think it went much deeper.

his father was an early abolitionist, and he was a staunch calvinist and part of that faith was a belief in bearing witness to an opposing sin in yourself and others, being almost a sort of moral policeman, and slavery certainly was the great collective sin of that day. and i think it came partly from john brown's temperament. most abolitionists of this era are really pacifists, and they believe that the way to fight slavery is through education and moral uplift. john brown is something -- nothing galvanizes him more than bullying goes unanswered throughout his life. he can't stand cravenness in the face of evil. he's someone who wants to punch back. and i think there's this temperamental part of him as well, that he looks around and sees the nation really being bullied by the slave-holding

south throughout his life. and he wants to stand up to it. so i think that's part of it, too. so i wouldn't say there's any one experience or any one part of him that results in this militant abolitionism. >> you know, some suggest -- and you addressed this in your book -- that he knew when he had only 18 men, to go in and take over an armory, which washington himself said, in then virginia, that it was not going to be successful and his ultimate goal was to be a martyr. what is your opinion about that? because what -- it was frederick douglas who set up a historic college that while john brown didn't end the war that ended slavery, he was the war that ended slavery. so if you could share with us your thoughts on whether or not he knew ultimately that it was going to be more successful to

to be a martyr than to actually gain access to the arms. >> right. this is kind of the $60,000 question about john brown. what exactly is it that he intended? because he changes his story. you know, kind of a spoiler alert here. you know? john brown attacks harper's ferry, hoping to seize the 100,000 guns and begin this sort of rolling campaign of liberation across the south. he fails. so that's the spoiler alert. but i speculate in the book that because we can't know absolutely, that i think he had sort of two plans. that in his own mind, this was sort of a win-win. either he would succeed in this rather scheme of a small guerrilla band inciting this war of liberation, or he would die in harper's ferry as a martyr

and essentially bring on the great conflict that he believed was necessary to extinguish slavery. in that sense, i think he was triumphant. he saw where this was leading, that only bloodshed could end this, and that he would spark this either by a successful guerrilla campaign or by an unsuccessful one that so shocked the nation and stirred the conscience of anti-slavery northerners that, you know, a great war would result. it didn't happen exactly in those terms, but in that sense he succeeded. >> so it begs the question, what do you think would have happened if he had not planned the raid, failure or success, and under any definition with the rest of american history? >> all right. it's one of those great what if's. one of those great what if's.

i've toyed with it. again, we can't know. obviously, you can't have lots of fun with this. you can't be wrong. in my own view, abraham lincoln would not have been elected president, which was the final spur to secession and then the civil war. i think john brown's raid and lincoln's election were kind of the one-two punch that drove the south out of the union. it's a slightly complicated story, and i won't spell it all out. but the raid occurs in the early stages of the 1860 campaign for president. their campaigns were nothing like ours today, but at this stage, lincoln is really a second or third tier candidate in the republican field. the raid does several things. first of all, it significantly tarnishes his opponents in the republican field, particularly william seward, the front-runner, who comes to be too closely aligned with the