>> when people are saying to him, don't take the vice presidency, right now, you are the most, you are a powerful majority leader. don't take the vice presidency. you won't have any power. johnson said power is, where power goes. meaning, i can make power in any situation. i thought his whole life, i said nothing in, in his life, previously, makes that seem like he is boasting. because that is exactly what he had done. all his life. >> sunday night, the conclusion of our conversation with robert

caro on the passage of power, volume four. sunday night on cspan's "q & a." >> this week on "the civil war" historians and authors including, david blight and stephanie mccurry, discuss on going legacies of the civil war, issues and controversies being borne out today. the gilder lehrman center hosted this event. it is 1:45. >> okay. good afternoon, everyone. good afternoon, everyone. i was in a bunch of southern churches recently. you either do it right or you don't do it. you know? welcome. i am david blight, director of the gilder lehrman center for

the study of slavery, resistance and abolition. this is the lecture series, we founded, i don't know, at least, six, seven years ago now in honor of my colleague, david brian-davis in the front row. david was the founder of the center some 13 years ago. and another way of putting it, the center was founded around david's work. which is still where everyone goes to understand, especially, the intellectual history of the problem of slavery in the world for that matter. david was doing a kind of transnational history of this before anyone ever used the word transnational. so, welcome, david. and, we have done this in many different forms. we have had a single lecture. go away people, three, four days in a row. we have had panels. we have had series of lectures

and so forth. some times we produce a book. today we are going to hopefully produce a lot of really interesting hot air. on the subject that has -- i think, some currency. of course, this is the civil war ses q sesquacentennial. a year ago, now, in the spring of 2011, some of you may remember, just about this time, march and april, everyone in the press, from major magazines to newspapers to radio stations, everywhere had to do some kind of piece on -- on -- i don't know, the meaning and memory of the civil war at its 150th anniversary. at that point is members of this panel will remember -- it was often the, the first question from -- from the reporter at -- some newspaper in north carolina, or, connecticut,

was -- so -- was it really about slavery? or -- what about that black confederate thing? it's as though there are some -- resonant quick stories, always, that, they're out there for -- journalists, the press, to grab on to. when they need to. and, of course our job was always to deep thaeen that stor two minutes they would give us. i want to quickly introduce the panel, as quick as i can. this is not a group that is easy to introduce quickly. i want to say we are doing cspan, going to try to keep this on type. we are also streaming live on the yale website, i think. and i am going to introduce everybody and then here is what we are going to do. i am going to offer a very brief definition of legacy. just one attempt at that word,

just briefly. since i asked everybody to talk about legacies before day ask me to define it, i will offer a definition. then i asked each member of the panel to talk two minutes. that's all they get. to declare their favorite, or could be unfavorite, or least favorite, legacy of the civil war and they get two minutes to state it and defend it. and then we are going to go from there. our first guest is immediately to, two people to my right, sorry. a senior editor of "atlantic" magazine and writes for the magazine and now quite prominent blog. he has many fans on his blog as i have learned. in fact, i don't know. at least a few years ago i started hearing from friends, my colleague, one of them, who kept saying you have got to start reading this guy. he is talking about your books a lot.

so, i started reading him. he is the author of "the beautiful struggle" about growing up in west baltimore. that memoir is among other things a father/son story, a riveting father/son story, his father was a black panther and also a vietnam veteran. it is a memoir that seems inspired by -- you can correct this if you want, the era of hip-hop. and, it seems to be in some ways, a search for a kind of nonviolent masculine identity if i could put it that way. in the '80s, '90s when he was on his way to howard university. he is a journalist who worked for "the village voice" and ""time" magazine" "the new york times," "washington post," a lot of papers, also now writing fikttionfik fiction about which he spoke earlier today, and most recently among the other blog he's has

done on the civil war he wrote a piece "why do so few blacks study the civil war" which an undergraduate seminar just read. quickly. one of the most interesting conversations by telephone with him, late last fall, i think about the idea of tragedy. maybe we'll come back to that. andrew delbanco, going in alphabetical order, end of the line. one of the preimminent literary cultural historians. chair of american studies, and professor of the humanities at columbia, he was just awarded national humanities medal by president obama, once called by "time" magazine, america's best social critic, author of many books. whether you wanted that label or not apparently. among many books, i will mention, two, brand new ones, both coming out this year. that's not fair by the way. it's, not, andy nobody should

publish two books in one year. one "abolitionist imagination" i read in manuscript, a probing, provocative essay about the reputation of abolitionists four being responding. soon to be reviewed in the new york review of books. then the book called "college" what it was, is and should be, which andy was interviewed about on connecticut public radio yesterday if any of you happened to hear it. probably prominently known for biography of" herman melville. if you are fryi he wrote "the death of satan" which is a book about american culture. edited "the portable lincoln" et cetera. et cetera. commonly writes for the new york

review of books. gary gallagher in the middle of our lineup, is the professor of the american civil war, the university of virginia. he taught for years at penn state before going to uva. gary grew up in colorado and california. he went to -- garage wraduate st texas. i don't know what it is, maybe the texas hook that makes neo-confederates he ought to be one of them until they find out he is not. at any rate, for years he edited a series with the university of north carolina press which has produced some of the best books we have about the civil war era. several of which he wrote himself. he is the author, editor of 30 books. i will just mention a few. the confederate war. the book called "causes won, lost and forgotten how hollywood and popular art shaped what we know about the civil war." he is the hollywood expert on

this. lee and his generals in war and memory. particular favorite of mine if you work on memory. and just recently "the union war" which my graduate seminar read and took apart as graduate seminars usually do yesterday afternoon. who knows what question maze come from them, gary, watch out. gary, i will also say is one of the most sought after speakers on the subject in the united states. and his lectures are on line, or, in many different places electronically. if you want to look for them. stephanie mccurry, between andy and gary. taught for some years at san diego state and at northwestern and has been at the university of pennsylvania now as professor of history, for, eight, nine, maybe ten years by now. she was born in belfast. her family emigrated to canada. she went to high school in canada. and then came to the u.s.,

graduate school. did her ph.d. at suny-binghamton. one of the most imaginative historians on matters of gender, race, class, among other things about southern history and american history. her first book, called "masters of small worlds" about households with multiple prize winning book and still rests on almost everybody's reading list and graduate reading list. stephanie writes books that end up on graduate reading lists. her newest book "confederate reckoning, power and politics in the civil war south" won frederick douglas book prize which our center sponsors a nother prize winning book. and stephanie and i have done many things together in this business, recently a conference in israel last summer which we managed to scheme and get ourselves invited to, which was in jerusalem, a conference,

comparing the american civil war with other civil wars. that was an interesting comparative moment. finally, tfrom the yale law school. he is actually from philadelphia and a phillies fan. >> it's true. >> he is the allen duffy class of 1950 professor of law at yale. they say he teaches torts and other things. he is really a constitutional historian and a great one. several books, patriots and cosmopolitans. hidden histories of american law. accidental republic. crippled working men. destitute widows. and the remaking of american law. and now, forthcoming. >> yeah. >> very soon. lincoln's code, the laws of war in american history. this is a panel i put together to try to get obviously different perspectives on this huge problem of what is a civil war legacy.

so i am going to ask andy to go first. andy. two minutes. your favorite civil war legacy. >> thank you very much. delighted to be here. i will try to say two things in two minutes. david gave us a little bit of a head up. we had a chance to think about this. what popped into my head when he asked me, a memory i hadn't thought of in a while. when i was 10 years old, grew up in a suburb of new york from a, a more or less liberal, democratic family and i had a friend, around the corner who was in a pretty strongly republican family. and we began to become aware that something that we now call the civil rights movement was under way. and we found ourselves in a conversation about it. and he said to me, at one point, the trouble with black people in those days of course the term was negros, was that they're not

grateful for having been freed from slavery. and even to my 10-year-old ears at that time there was something off about that statement. and so the first thing i would say just to keep it scary succinct, i think one of the legacies we deal with is that sentiment is still around. that is, what -- who bears what responsibility for what happened in those years? what does it mean to be a full-fledged member of our culture? of our society? those questions still are obviously unresolved, and i'm sure we will be talking about that as the the afternoon goes on. and unfortunately, there are still a lot of people in this country who could agree with that 10-year-old sentiment. the second thing i wanted to say because i am an unabashed presentist, those who know my work will know, i can't help but

think of the past in terms of the present. i think we are in a, in an era where -- where the current president of the united states and a number of other people are rather desperately trying to find some middle ground on which we can proceed forward into a collective future. so i find myself when i look back at the era of the civil war, trying to imagine what it would have been like to be a person looking for the middle ground. in a situation that retrospectively, it is very clear to us, there was no middle ground. but -- though i am not really a bonafide historian, exactly. i think one of the cardinal principles of thinking about the past is that one wants to remember that the people one writes about in the past, did not know the future. they were living ignorant of the future. one of the things i have tried to stress mine recent work is --

that some decent people who -- who were appalled by slavery, but couldn't see a way out of the in pass were trying to find a middle ground. and, in fact, that is a fair, i think, description of what lincoln was trying to do for a certain period of his career and many others. so -- i find myself thinking abut that about that a lot. that is a personal, intellectual legacy of the period. and i will stop there. thanks. >> thank you. my graduate seminar, may have spent half the period, i think discussing what was good presentism, and bad presentism. came out of your book, gary. they loved it. but it was -- >> at least andy and i can get into a discussion. >> i hope so. i hope so. >> stephanie. >> i want to be a little bit contrary and say that, i think there is a distinction for me as a historian of the civil war

between historian legacy, how i think about the most important historical legacy and what i might think of as the most important living legacy. memory is history, but the memory of the civil war is not the history of the civil war. it is the history of reconstruction, of the jim crow south of the civil rights era, resistance to it, the lost cause all of those things. but the history of the war has to do with events and their meaning in that time and place. and it requires us, as historians to go back to the documents, to the historical record, and see what those events, what caused those events, and in time and place, and consult the record of 1860 to 1865. for me the questions that that brings up, that, still require urgent answer are -- are, you know what kind of -- a country the confederacy wanted to build. what was secession for. these versions of the questions of the causes of the civil war. so the history of the war is to use contemporary evidence from the period to talk about the

causes, the dynamics, the consequences. so to me the historical legacy and the living legacy seem at odds. the civil war was, you know, in many ways, the simple waste to understand it, i think, was to me at least it was a profound crisis of legitimacy in american democracy. a war that tried to resolve by military means, a political, to settle, something that could not be settled, legislatively or lectu lectures, about human bondage and the power of the government to restrain it in a democratic society. that was the heart of the fight. and the way that was setted was definitive, the confederacy was beaten into total, unconditional surrender. to me the most important historical legacy of the war has to do with -- with the profound and lasting significance of confederate defeat. and it's really easy to forget that -- in all of the disappointment of the postwar

period. the violence, the dice disappointment, violence, the postwar period you can lose sight about what was profound about what was accomplished. after the failure in pro slavery nationalism. after they were beaten. slavery could never be reinst e reinstatreinstat reinstated in life. and -- in the total and uncompensated emancipation of 4 million african-american men, women and children. and in other words the most important historical legacy to me is the simple fact that because they were defeated. slavery was gone and it would never come back. but that doesn't answer the question of the living legacy. and there to me, may be not surprisingly, since i write about the confederacy, is -- the most important living legacy to me, shocking and bewildering at the same time, is the never

dying power and appeal of the c confederate taken up. retoad. -- retold. i have idea. just as valid as the 100 in the room. i will say, slave holders have been the beating heart of american conservatism. that was true in the period between the founding and the civil war. and i aim person who thinks it is just as important to think of the power of conservatism in american life as the power of radicalism and progressive forces. in that sense it shouldn't surprise us that confederates, quest be cape the very template for every other conservative subsequent conservative protest. but how confederates, people openly convicted in public opinion of treason, and thoroughly defeated retain the cultural power and the speech

rights to do what they did remaur remains one of the most important historical questions. david has written a lot about this. it is bewildering how they manage to do it. many postwar societies struggled with the problem of memory. but usually, like in franco's spain, victors dictate the terms, they gag the opposition, and the defeated people, struggle to keep alive a buried, censored and publicly disgraced version of their civil war. in the united states there were no treason trials, there were no systematic ateptempts at politil repression and suppression of speech rights. where did the defeat read taun such power not just to keep alive their version of the war but to commercially peddle it. and to do that from the moment the war ended, if not before, and to find a red and even expanneding audience for that,

what they thought of as hero ix script, the confederate epic, even up to 150 years after the ancestr ancestral, that, ancestral class of pop had been forced into surrender. so that question about the contrast between democracy and fascism in its treatment of a defeated enemy looms really large but not clearly in my mind when i think about the living legacy of the civil war. which is, the troubling question of why treason and defeat seem to make a better story. >> i think we got to come back to that one. gary. awe calling down the line. i am going to keep this very short. i think we are going to have fun this afternoon. i will mention two legacies very quickly. >> you are allowed two. >> one is the very large number of people who are drawn to the civil war. i will suspect some in the room fall under that category the i

do. i grew up. i am from los angeles. i lived there in southern colorado. the civil war has nothing to do with los angeles and southern colorado. it captivated me. as a young person. and i have been in a rut now for more years, well you can guess how many years, just with a glance. a very long time. and it's such a stupendously expansive topic that there is endless opportunity to go in different directions. it never becomes stale. never becomes boring. the sheer size. importance of the issues. they don't get more important. the questions are not more important at any point in american history than questions at issue during the civil war. and the cast of characters. of course is very difficult to beat. a president in the united states who wrote his own speeches. didn't last two hours. think about that for a minute. there is a lot going on that simply engages people. and always has. i think the most obvious, long

term legacy of the civil war. so stunningly obvious we don't think of it often. as a guild, we want to place everything into world context. what does it mean within a world context. quick naval gagzing. most important outcome of the civil war, the american republic maintained its status as a single -- increasingly, powerful republic. and went forward in a way -- that economically, militarily, and culturally, it, it wielded, and, an enormous amount of influence which would not have been possible had the confederacy succeeded. had the confederacy succeeded you would have had two republics in north america. we love canada. two in north america that were vying for a greater part on the world stage. but those two together could not possibly -- have wielded influence that the united states wielded. and it did that and has wielded

and continues to wield for good or for ill. but it does -- because, the united states triumphed during the civil war. and the confederacy did not. i think that's the greatest legacy. >> so union victory was important. >> i do believe it was. i do believe it was. yes. some people don't. >> no, i know. >> some times they send you e-mails. i got one last fall. wishing that i would develop a case of virulent pancreatic cancer. because i am mean to the confederacy. virulent, the virulent kind. >> they're right. but the prescription is terrible. >> i'm finished now. >> good. good. >> the best way for me to illustrate this. i don't have a particularly objective answer. i have a subjective answer. >> none of us are subjective.

>> all right, i think it is the most important legacy. my favorite. it's virtually impossible for me to think about my very existence without the civil war. i grew up in a white house that had political struggle. political struggle of african-americans the i didn't know it at the time. it is clear the political struggle dated back to the civil war. my father, david mentioned was a black panther in baltimore. the most, probably most radical wing of the civil rights, black power struggle. my parents met there. had they not met there i would not be sitting on this panel today. so it is very easy for me to say that -- in the most subjective way. but i think even more important low than that when you think about this, in a sort of -- when you think about african-americans, the entire

people. what i didn't understand until i started taking this path back in to history is there very much was another option on the table. that is black people not being here at all. black people being recolonized, leaving for africa, the caribbean, some other yet determined part of the united states would have you. the fact that not just the slaves were free and the slaves remained here, i think had incredible consequences for the country. i mean we can talk about the obvious good. when we think about freedom struggles of various groups, we think about, women, when we think about the current marriage equality struggles. all this dates back to the civil rights movement. which itself dates back to the civil war. one of the most stunning things i came across mine recent study -- was when you start studying the women's rights movement, you see how many of the folks started out as emancipationists, sorry, abolitionists, excuse me. you hear some one say something

like looking into the rights of slaves i gained deeper insight into my own rights as a woman. that is a mangled quote. basically the essence of what she said. it is impossible for me to picture america today, without picturing african-americans as a political force, without picturing african-americans as a cultural force. what is america without jazz? without its popular music? when you think about the questions our president is facing right now. why does the majority of republican voters in mississippi regard him as a muslim. i think all that goes back to the civil war. and the difficulty of -- of accepting african-americans as full americans. as full citizens. as full participants in our lecture. that causes a great degree of problems where it is not even obvious. when you talk about -- putting in place policy that, presumably is for all of america. but when you see

african-americans at the forefront of it, it's sort of distorts it in a way that i don't necessarily think it always would. so, my answer not to be flip, i hope i am not being flip, is me. it all boils down to me. all about me at the end of the day. in due seriousness, it is the presence of african-americans in the united states. >> okay. wow. john? >> i should start by observing that this is the lecture and david davis was one of the great inspirations for me the as a junior in college. right down the way that i started thinking about some of these things in a seminar he taught. i am enormously grateful to be here today. so, thank you. two candidates, allowed two. one, this draws on, what we just -- just been talking about. the legal and constitutional history of the uniteat