and the officer comes on the plantation. it's february 1863. and he comes on the plantation waving the emancipation proclamation. and he says, i want this man's wife and children, forinda and her children. and the mistress says by what right? and he waves the paper and he says, by the right of the president of the united states of america. and there is this immediate difference in how people are able to leave because now the union army's coming and offering them protection to leave, whereas before they had to leave on their own. so it makes an enormous difference, but i'm not -- i think it just accelerates a military drain that the confederacy's already suffering from. i mean, clayburn writes this thing at the end of 1863. and that's the other thing. as you well know, it's far quicker here in the mississippi valley and the tennessee valley than it is in virginia. yes.

>> i had a question. so in your first book, you talk a lot about how the wealthy class of planners appealed to the yeomanry and convinced them to go to war because of their shared role as masters. so i was wondering once we get into the war and women start to turn, confederate women start to turn on the war, were there class divisions among women, or was there some sort of similar rallying cry for them to say that -- that the men used to go to war, the wealthy class and the yeomanry used their role as masters? was there something similar among the women? or was there class divisions? >> you know, i think it's a pretty predictable thing for me to say yep, there were class divisions. well, you know, in this whole bunch of scholarship, which it sounds like you know pretty well, about women in the civil war, one position is drew foust's position, right? which is that elite slave-holding southern women basically contributed to the defeat of the confederacy because they lost a commitment

to slavery in the context of the war and being the ones responsible for enacting the discipline on the plantations. and i find this very hard to believe. i love drew's work, almost everything she writes, but this i find hard to believe. i mean, the women whose defection from the confederate cause has political consequences i think are the yeoman and poor white women. but then again, we don't really know what their position was to begin with. i mean, who knows what they thought? if you read the political coverage before the war, each side, unionist and secessionist, claims that all the women are with them. you know, it's as if women are a block. and sometimes people still think that. what did the women do? what do we all do? we don't all vote one way or act one way or think one way. you know, it has to do with family and region and class and religion and every kind of thing. so i think that, you know, there were yeomen and poor white women

who were unionists, there were yeoman and poor white women who were secessionist. but what i'm describing, i think, is this kind of almost outside the politics of secession or union. i mean, not always. especially in north carolina it could be aligned with the peace movement. and sometimes these tirades against the confederate government ended up with make peace or we will, you know, make it for you kind of thing. but in many cases, it really is about survival. and this is one of the things that interests me the most, is that political change often comes from necessity. people don't choose -- women don't necessarily choose to be more political. they're forced into it. the government comes in their front door, takes their husbands and sons, 10% of everything in their barn and smokehouse, and you know, the country's swarming with government agents. they have a relationship with this government whether they want it or not. and the question is what do they do? and the correspondence of the governors makes it clear that

they push back. and, you know, one of the most interesting things i saw was correspondence with welfare officials. i mean, they give them hell. they know exactly what they're supposed to get, and they're always saying that these officials are not giving them what they're -- the corn and the bacon and the money that they're supposed to get, and they say -- they write the governor and they say put him in the army. because by the end of the war, being an official of the local government is one of the few ways you can escape military service. so they get really good at hardball politics. you know, quid pro quo politics. but i think it's -- i think there's always a huge difference between -- i mean, i didn't really even write that much about elite women in my book at all because what drew me so much more powerfully was this story of rural women. >> thank you. >> your comments raise a question.

to what extent did the men in the field grasp, or were they in communication with what was going on at home? >> very much so, actually. sometimes the protests of the women followed the collectives of the company unit. you would see huge petitions being written to the governor, in some cases 500 names. in rare cases, but in some cases. and that's how it would be organized, from a military unit. the other thing is that men are -- women on the home front often know more about exemption, for example, than men who are in the army. so -- and this is one thing that i learned, is women are sharing all kinds of information about this new really complicated bureaucracy. like what's the secretary of war responsible for? what's the governor -- so for example, women would write the governor and say would you let my son out of the army? and he'd have to give her a lesson in the division of power

and say i'm sorry, madam, you've written the wrong official, you really need to speak to the secretary of war. so in some cases, men are writing their wives and their wives are coaching them on what to say to get out -- to get out of service. don't -- so, for example, you see this rash of letters where the men say they think they could be of more service at home to the poor women of the community, and then the women of the community would get a petition and have all kinds of signatures of the poor women of the community to show that we can't do without this man at home, he's a blacksmith or he's a school teacher, he's a cobbler or he's a pastor. and then they would try to get the guy out. but it was often orchestrated between him and his wife. and she would take the -- i guess. we don't really know for sure. how do you get this many signatures on petitions? these are -- the petitions

sometimes had columns, and one side would say citizens' names and the other side would say soldiers' wives' names, which is one of the reasons why women didn't think of themselves as citizens. even though they are legally. so all the men would sign down this side and all the women would sign down that side. but at a certain point, nobody got out. it didn't matter what case you made. nobody got out. but yeah, there's quite a lot of coordination between the men in the unit and women at home. >> thank you very much. very interesting topic. as you mentioned, the confederate congress, as a military necessity, passed a law for slaves to serve in the military. but in your opinion, your research, did you ever see what the rank and file or the southern military leadership thought of that idea? >> yeah. it's a really interesting and complicated question.

the military, on the whole, was more supportive than the politicians and the public, is what i would say. because especially in the east, in virginia, which is where the war was by the time they got around to doing this, what lee said went. and he said do it. so there was a lot of formal support garnered from soldiers, and a lot of it was presented to the confederate congress in the form of, you know, testimonials and they were crucial. they were read in the confederate congress. but even so, senators in virginia had to be coerced, had to be forced to vote for this, even though their legislators were instructing them to do it. so i don't know -- like, you know, bit by bit how much of the military was for it and how much was not. i know that -- i will -- the radical thinking came from the military. so those who were spawning these ideas were clearly in the military. not all of the military, obviously, supported this. when clayburn made this

proposal, he wrote this document in winter quarters in december 1863 and read it to the command of the army of tennessee, all the officers in january of 1864. and there was an uproar. i mean, most of -- he had a couple of allies, a couple of friends, also officers who had anonymously planted things in newspapers previous to this, sort of trial balloons like this. the earliest demands for using slaves as soldiers came out of alabama. places that had fallen already to the union. slavery was dead there. so, you know, might as well use these other guys' slaves to try to, you know, get something. but when clayburn read this to his compatriots, there was a complete uproar and somebody finked on him to davis. who sent instructions that this would be completely devastating to confederate morale and it had

to be deep sixed. and in fact, this document i don't think resurfaced until the 1880s or something in private papers. and that guy never got another promotion. he lasted another year. and he was just -- he was like in stalin's era. he was cut out of the picture. from that point on. so there was -- i mean, what's so interesting about it is davis is so decisive about this in january of 1864. by november of 1864, it's clear he's already considering it. he gets up in his annual message to the congress in november, he makes it clear that if we need slave soldiers, i will be willing to do it. and he actually says to the confederate congress and the confederate people that the status of slaves simply as property can no longer be sustained, that they have to be understood as persons in relation to the state and it's, i think, an incredibly momentous

event to try to trace out how you get from 1860, from his resignation speech in the senate to that. that was kind of what i was -- that's the architecture of the transformation i was interested in. >> okay. well, thank you for your questions. and thank you, stephanie, for your wonderful talk. this week on "the civil war" life in the lorng white house. lincoln white house. >> this week on the civil war, author and architectural historian william seale discusses life in the lincoln white house. he spoke at november's lincoln forum symposium in gettysburg, pennsylvania. this is a little over 45 minutes. >> it's great to be here.

and very comfortable to be one among 300 people interested in the same thing. so that's a great pleasure too. i want to tell you what i'm going to do. i prepared some remarks, and then i'm going to join matthew brady and eric causewick and a number of other photographers in going through the white house and describing some of the things that lincoln would have known about it a little later. thank god the powerpoint works. so. buildings provide vehicles for us to better see the people who lived in them. public houses are contrived to send messages and make impressions. royal palaces from ancient times to precolombian mexico to versailles and even asia have been opened to visitors as a means of enriching the public's idea of the person who lives there. the white house has been open to the public more or less since 1801, and crowds flock there to see and imagine president lincoln's tenure. and his tenure has fascinated people for 146 years, since he left. all presidents leave and

theoretically never return. lincoln's departure at the beginning of what might have been a brilliant second term is a tragedy wrapped in crime, an event so perfectly placed in happenstance as to seem written by a dramatist. as time passes beyond those occupants' time in the white house, the details of their lives in the building become more and more interesting. what they ate. who they saw. what purposes and what the premises looked like then. and when those vanished people were in their prime. such material provides the scene and staging upon which the great acts and personal lives were performed. lincoln's white house was the stage and setting of the lincoln triumph and the lincoln melodrama. the stage was a very old house by american standards, occupied

61 years when lincoln took office, or just about 61 years. it was one of the largest residences in the united states, probably the largest, if you could compare it to a private house. george washington had built the white house. the british invaders in 1814 burned it down. surely news that got some way into the ear of a 5-year-old lincoln. james madison and james monroe rebuilt the white house. and except for some new furnishings now and then and innovations for comfort, this is the house lincoln entered to live the rest of his life and on march the 4th, 1861. no president to come would be more closely identified with the white house than abraham lincoln. it is very likely that had lincoln's presidential history not taken place in the white house, there would be no white house today to stand proud as a world symbol of the american presidency. the house was threatened after lincoln's time on many occasions.

already in 1867, the corps of army engineers planned a new presidential mansion called the presidential palace, strangely enough, to be built in the seclusion of rock creek park. president andrew johnson revoewed the drawings, which are lost today, and gave his enthusiastic blessing. general grant came to the presidency in 1869, seeing the white house as historic and a useful feature of the reconciliation of the north and south he espoused. he spoke of the associations of the house, meaning of course, lincoln, washington, and all those associated with it. president and mrs. garfield asked the librarian of congress how best they might restore the house. yet garfield's successor, president arthur, attempted to secure its demolition in 1882. congress and the public rose in opposition to arthur's proposal noisily. no one thereafter dared mention

the demolition, although a series of expansion plans for remodeling were brought forth by the corps of army engineers over the years. none made it. the last try was an ill-fated one in the fall of 1900, expanding the house into a palatial place six times its size. this plan might have worked. though it had its opponents, including mrs. mckinley, who was taken in her rolling chair to see it, the model, and said to all assembled, well, it is very nice, i think, but there will be no hammering while i live here. in 1902, president theodore roosevelt, taking an entirely different point of view, was able to convince congress to fund a restoration of the house. that magic word has sweetened the idea with congress from garfield to mrs. kennedy. what roosevelt wanted was a clear symbol of the modern international presidency that had emerged from the spanish war.

he got a very careful restoration of the outside with the victorian additions, some of which i'll show you, torn away. inside, he got a total modernization. there's been only one change of substance since then, and that was president truman's balcony on the south side. angered at virginia congressman howard w. smith for removing an appropriation that would have doubled the west wing, truman took $16,000 in household funds, the allowance for the household, and built his balcony. this required nothing from congress, not a penny. and it affirmed the president -- that the president alone had real authority over the white house, which of course he does. truman insisted that he had improved the architecture of the building. that was in 1947. in 1948, a campaign button read, "harry, why did you build that balcony for dewey?"

when immediately after his election that year, truman undertook on the direction of the army corps of engineers again, to rebuild the white house. he insisted it was a restoration. and he personally protected the original walls from abuse, insisting that they be saved. a new white house was built inside of them. those floors lincoln had tried went to ft. myers to landfill. truman was no antiquarian, but he deeply believed that the president should remain in the white house. and when the work was finished, he ordered that the room where lincoln's office had been be restyled the lincoln bedroom and furnished with objects lincoln had used. truman was very loyal to those walls. he was walking around with john hershey one day, and they were about to chip a window, a great big window in the blue room, and carry in a bulldozer and a dump truck.

and he said, stop, you'll not. and he insisted those be taken down. the bulldozer and the dump truck were taken down, taken in and rebuilt and dug the cellars beneath the white house. so he was very serious about those walls. i have studied and written about the white house for 30 or more years. when asked last spring to speak about the white house to this group of lincoln experts, i concluded that what you would want from me is details about the white house as lincoln knew it. that is what i want to do this morning. i will talk about bathrooms, painted walls, the use of rooms, anecdotes, but most of all, i hope i can impart to you some of the feeling of what the white house was like when lincoln lived there. i will be pedantic in my approach. i promise. i won't apologize. after all, the life for which we remember lincoln took place in this house. with lincoln, we are lucky to have photographs. the first full photographic coverage of the white house is

1867, probably an event in advance of that new house they planned. the only set that i know of is at the eastman house in rochester. but i'm sure they were published. so they're bound to be somewhere else. some of these pictures you will have seen, and some you will not. this is a recent picture of the south front. it shows jimmy carter's purple magnolia. see how big it's gotten, how long it's been since jimmy carter. but that was his purple magnolia. the building itself is stone. it's aquia creek sandstone, which is a terrible material, but it was close by. it was called free stone in its day. and the commission that built the house in the 1790s looked everywhere for stone. washington wanted a stone house. and he insisted on the stone house. well, they could only judge a quarry by sounding with a steel rod in those days or iron rod. they didn't have what we have today.

so the commissioners thought they were going to run out of stone. and it is a light kind of batter-colored stone. and president carter instituted a cleaning of the house, of the walls because the paint wouldn't stay on them, and 20 years later, it was finished in the clinton administration. it went on and on and on. but during that time, i had the privilege, i guess, of taking a garden hose and shooting it at one of the cleaned walls, and the water just went down in the stones like a sponge. so it had to be painted. it was built by scots, from scotland, brought from edinburgh and the highlands. we know a lot about them. they had all worked directly or indirectly for the adam brothers in the stylish restrained neoclassical style. washington didn't want any of that. and he wanted all the carvings. it was carved, carved, carved, and very out of style for the builders. but their custom in edinburgh was to whitewash buildings when they finished them. and the whitewash got in all the

nooks and crannies. and the rest would eventually wear off. so when there was a freeze, the little hose wouldn't hold water. so it wouldn't crack. so they whitewashed the white house in 1797, when it was just about finished on the outside and it was called the white house when it was whitewashed. but it was actually painted. not till after the war of 1812, when it got a permanent paint job. and it got painted. by lincoln's time, there were 30-some-odd coats of paint on the white house, and lincoln had the south front painted. the south front that you see in the illustration and that you're going to see here is the only complete wall left after the british fire in 1814. now, the porch wasn't there. but that wall did survive the fire. most of the rest of the house had to be torn down. and they reused a lot of the stones and things. this is an image taken we think in 1862. the grounds of the white house

were 18 acres. had been intended to be 85 by washington when he built the house. jefferson cut it down to 18. or 15. and it's 18 today. that fountain was installed by b.b. french, who did a dummy for it in town in his own yard. he never could make the wall work real well. but it's a terra-cotta thing with dolphins on it that was on the back lawn. it was there from buchanan to right after lincoln. they tore the fountain down because it wouldn't work and the one you just saw on the first image was built in 1873 by grant. two of them, one on the north, one on the south. they still function, although they're electric powered now. so the south front here was considered the private part. now, if you'll look at

the right-hand side, there is a wing. jefferson added two wings to the white house to incorporate all these things you needed. the white house, some of the previous servants' quarters, wash house. they were never finished. they were still there in lincoln's time. the one on the right had things for the garden, the yard, and the little fire engine. and then on the left, particularly because i'll show you an interior in a while, is the original west terrace, which the west wing is now at end of. it was an l-shaped thing. and on top of it, if you can see it, is the green house. which was moved from another location in the grounds when the treasury building was expanded. so that was relatively new when lincoln went there. and it was the old orangery they called it had built quite a collection of palms and fruit trees and things like that. the purpose of these things was fruit trees in the winter when people were sick for juice. but it became more of a conservatory with that little

connector between -- and it was summertime in the winter. and the family particularly loved it, particularly mrs. lincoln liked to go there. and she got in some trouble there too. so you see the house is a full three stories on the south. on the north, it's two stories, because it's on the edge of a bluff or a ridge that runs clear to the capital. so you enter on what you see here is the second floor. and the ground floor today was the basement then. that's where the kitchen was and the meat rooms and some of the servants stayed there. there were rooms on the top behind that balustrade for servants, but they never liked to stay there and never stayed there because of the fear of fire. it's hard for to us imagine how huge that house was to people then. but it was enormous. and you weren't going to jump if there was a fire. so they lived in the basement mostly and were in and out and there was an area way around the other side of the house that served the kitchen and the kitchen carts that came in.

the north was more the business front. now, this portico was added in 1829 in advance of andrew jackson's moving to the white house. the one on the back, which is really a porch, but it's called a portico, it doesn't have a pediment, was added a little earlier by james monroe. so this was the front that everyone thought of. security is an issue here. as you'll notice the little iron fence. it was a rather formidable size. it fenced everything but the driveway. you couldn't just go anywhere you wanted to go. and these plantings in front were a security issue. in 1854, franklin pierce was convinced by the metropolitan police to stop coming out on the portico between the columns and making speeches. in those days, they'd call the president out to make a speech. a big crowd would get drinking and all in a big event. and they'd come call the president out and they all had these great voices and he'd go out and make a speech. the metropolitan police got upset about it. so they began making the speeches, they began screening

in front, and then the president would go to the middle window on the second floor behind the columns and that window would be open. there was a little corridor there. they split a bedroom to make a little corridor there and they would surround the window with lights, just as they did with lincoln in his last speech. and there were little lamps that had candles in them. and the president would speak from there. and the object was if there's any trouble, they could pull him out of the way and no one could shoot at him. so that is what that -- and it was used frequently. there was a little garden in the middle. you see the gravel path. not much to it. it had a lawn, a little bit of a lawn. this is where all the great events took place. the people came in the carriages. they entered under this portico, which never really works that way. the rain gets all over everyone. but it's there. so here on the left of your picture is the east room. those three first three windows. the stair hall is the next window going toward the right.

and that contained the stair going upstairs to the office because lincoln's office was on the second, as all the offices were before 1902. on the left side, or east side of the second floor. and then, of course, the entrance hall with the door and the next -- the little porter's lodge, which is still used for the same thing. they call them ushers now. and then the last windows were -- two windows were for the family dining room and the last one was a pantry. so on the other side, the state rooms face, which you will see, the lincolns' living quarters were on the right-hand side of the second floor. and there were seven rooms. of course, the famous picture of lincoln taken with john hay on the right and nicolet, george nicolet on the left, they were later to write the great history of abraham lincoln which to their great surprise became very popular, serialized in century

magazine, and confirmed much of the lincoln image. here early in the war, general scott, who couldn't stand up very easily, and lincoln are reviewing the volunteers in april 1861. a sketch by alfred waud showing the volunteers marching down pennsylvania avenue in front of the house with the little tent built for the dignitaries. this would happen again and again during the civil war. it was always just around the fence, much more protected than we usually think of the white house being. these alfred waud sketches are wonderful. alfred and william waud of course. i don't know where all the originals are, but there are many, many copies at the library of congress. we're going to hear from ellsworth later. but i wanted to tell about him in the white house. he actually went from illinois as you know, i'm sure, with the lincoln family. and he was a very precocious character and young, and they thought he was wonderful. and he moved into the whit