answer. i think modern black america the legacy of the civil war. it is impossible for me to think of my existence without the civil war. i grew up in a household that was infused with political struggle of african-americans. i didn't know it at this time. it is quite clear that political struggle dated back to the civil war. my father, as david mentioned, was a black panther in baltimore. the most -- probably the 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. even more importantly than that, when you think about this in a sort of bigger way. when you think of african-americans as an entire

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

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

of distorts it in a way that i don't necessarily think it all would. my answer, not to be flip. i hope i'm not being flip is me. i'm the most important legacy. it all boils down to me. it is all about me at the end of the day. i think it is the presence of african-americans in the united states. >> okay. john wit. >> i want to observe that this is the david brian davis lecture e was one of the great inspirations for me. as a junior in college right down the way i started thinking about some of these things in a seminar he taught. i am enormously grateful to be here today. thank you. two candidates. we are allowed two. one, this draws on what we have just been talking about. the legal and constitutional history of the united states

since the civil war is organized in large part around the reconstruction events & on going battle to find out what the amendments that follow the civil war mean. many of the contests that are candidates for the legacies find one of their principle forums in the courts and in social movements that are claiming to articulate the true meaning with many different views of what that might be. 13th amendment, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude and giving congress the authority to enforce t the 14th amendments, giving citizens privileges and immunities and giving the congress power to enforce. the 15th amendment, banning discrimination in voting. these are the constitutional amendments of our history. much of what's gone on since then in the law and

constitutional law in the supreme court are a series of arguments about those amendments. this is played out in areas like affirmative action, race discrimination, brown versus board of education and its prodigy any. it goes way beyond that. the number of different features of american law that are shaped and cannot be understood otherwise, except through these amendments. it knows no bounds. your handgun rights which you now have, you didn't a couple of years ago but now you do, are run through the 14th amendments. there are no connecticut handgun second amendment right absent the 14th amendments. rights that were only before the civil war held by individuals as against the federal government. most criminal procedural law is the result result of the 14th amendment. the list goes on and on. this is a huge legacy of the civil war, one that's fought out all the time. just seven years ago, nine years

ago, justice o'connor, normer justice o'connor said she hoped that maybe in about 25 years questions of affirmative action in higher education admission policies might be able to be race blind as a matter of constitutional mandate. i think when she said that, what she meant was maybe in 25 years from then the battle over the civil war would at last be over. it turns out the supreme court is probably going to end that next year. they just granded certificated shi ory. secondly, the beginning of sustained moral and legal and military deliberations on what it means to be a great power. we see in the lincoln administration for the first time in american history many i am aware of, sustained thinking and deliberation and debate

about what it means to exercise the huge power that comes with an industrialized military force. this ranges from lincoln's extraordinary just war deliberations in the fall, summer and fall of 1862, to the elaboration of a code of rules of engagement that purport to be international law, which are still with us today in the international law that we have from the hey conventions and the geneva conventions. and are right now being argued about in federal courts in washington, d.c. virtually every week. in the coming weeks, the federal district court for the federal court of appeals for the district of columbia will decide a case in which the parties are right now arguing about the legacy of the civil war and the question about -- and their central question is whether or not the expansions that lincoln and his administration made in the military authority to take

over territory that had once been exclusively the territory of the civil courts ought to be an authority for military commissions for the 21st century. so the legacy of the civil war and these questions about the united states as a military power, moral questions, legal questions, and military strategy and tactics question is really palpable as an important part of the conversation, i think. >> i don't need to define a legacy at all. i think we just did since i forgot to. i am going to go in the order that these were raised and get us all to weigh in on this. andy, your point about how does one understand how americans find compromise, find a middle ground? you reminded me immediately one of the things robert penn warren wrote about 50 years ago in his little book, legacy of the civil war, was that he believed the civil war gave us prague matt

tichl. prague matt tichl may be a little older than the civil war, his whole point was that this era of such terrible bloody extremes, horrifying extremes, brought about in america and louy min nonhas written about this. brought about in the next generation, a philosophical outlook or temperament we have come to call prague matt tichl, ala william james and others. is that gone? can that kind of thing truly be defeated? we think our current word is polarization. it is a nice word, isn't it, for political deadlock, political hatred, political civil war. is prague mamatism dying now?

in the political arena? it may not be among reflective college professors. >> i don't want to take us away from our topic. it is my hope that we are lumbering unwittingly, unconsciously half blindly into some kind of middle ground that we'll find whether we are exactly looking for it or not. that's probably an expression of completely groundless faith. look, you raised so many questions. for me, one of the features of the civil war is that we're mesmerized by it because we can -- we can't imagine death and terror and destruction on such a scale, at least not on the homeland territory. now, in fact, it turns out to have been a preview, a pretty good preview of the 20th century in some of the ways that have been mentioned. the invention of total war or an

ideology based on racial hierarchy versus an ideology in theory versus racial dignity. we saw that fought out in the 20th century. in some ways, one could conceivably make the argument that all of these catastrophes were as a result of the failure of a pragmatic spirit of compromise. the republic collapsed and we all know what happened after that. so i think one thing that one can gain from a study of the civil war is a sense of what the stakes can be. we are in a moment where the stakes seem very high to a lot of people. we are waiting to see whether the supreme court is going to strike down what i think is a middle way compromise on health care, right? on the one hand, there is a large faction in our country that believes a single payer system run by the government is the way to go.

on the other hand, there is a faction that believes the private market is the way to go. what we have is an effort to find some middle ground. it looks like it is going to come apart. the cost of that in my view will be quite high. it won't be on a scale of the cost of the civil war. so studying a world historical event as a number of people at this table have accurately described it and seeing from one perspective what is the cost when the political process doesn't work is a sort of sobering reminder to us of how suddenly catastrophe can sort of sneak up on us. that is not to deny all the positive statements that have been made about the legacies of the civil war. i mean, without it, it wouldn't be the united states. there wouldn't be a united states with free black people in it as a very significant part of the culture.

it wouldn't be all of the other things we take for granted. so, in retrospect, it doesn't look like a catastrophe. it looks like a great leap forward. for those in the middle of it, it didn't feel so good would be my suspicion. >> gary? on this issue, in your book, union war, you make a forceful case for the fact that millions of northerners fought this war to save the union, the united states. in fact, i've never read a book on the civil war where the term united states was used as much. i know you well. it is quite explicit on your part. are you in any way as a thoughtful historian that has to live in the present concerned that there is a death of prague ma matt tichl? the ultimate aim that a cohesive

republic is endangered based on your study of what union meant in the 19th century? do we have a language of union anymore? >> i am not so sure. another thing we don't have. this plays off what you were saying. i don't think we have much of a sense of the civil war or anything else in our history. i think an indication of that is the sort of hysterical treatment of everything that happens now. it is the worst. there has never been anything like this. we have never been as divided as we are now. there has never been a problem with immigration if you are now. the only way you can believe that is if your historical memory goes back to last thursday. if it goes back very far, you know we have been through far more traumatic things than we are going through now. it would be helpful to have the historical con text in mind and equip us better to deal with what we have in front of us now instead of having this

armageddonlike view of what's going on. i think the loyal white population, the free states were 98.8% white according to the 1860 census. that's something we need to remind ourselves of when we think about the past. the past is a different country in many ways. demographically, it was. they are almost all white. most of them, alas, did not care much about black people. most of them embraced emancipation as a tool to preserve the union, i believe. i think the evidence is very strong on that. they had a collective sense of what the union meant. i don't think that we have perhaps that strong a sense now. i don't think we should all have a poly anna notion of what the united states is and stands for. i think it helps to have some common sense of what the project is about. i'm not sure we have that when we listen to candidates.

>> rick santorum declared this the most important since 1860 in gettysburg. >> there was a battle there. >> sure, ta-nehisi. >> one thing that just occurred to me. there are people with much more historical knowledge. being someone who does quite a bit of political analysis, i agree with the notion of a really brief historical memory. i think it was newt gingrich who said that, about 1860, which lends this kind of intellectual veneer. somehow when newt says it, it really means something. i wonder if part of this is not the price of seeding the historical memory to a certain section of the country. one of the things i noticed when again i started making my journey back into the civil war, outside of people who are actually historians or writers, the civil war belongs, the public memory, to a certain group of people. when you do that, the rest of the country says, okay, that's for them. that's not for us.

i wonder about the implications of that. >> who does it belong to? >> pretty much belongs to white southerners with con federal sensibilities. that's been my experience. i don't think that is, in fact, true. whenever you visit the battle parks, that's the expression you get. it is really not for you. it is for another group of people. i thought it was just me as an african-american. the more i think about it, i think it is quite bigger than that. i wonder if you decide the historical memory isn't for you, how are you able to call upon it when you think about politics? >> steph? >> i read something you wrote about this that really struck me, that resonated with me. it has to do the with the problem i have feeling vested in the compromise of 1860. it is extremely difficult to teach. you are supposed to think compromise is the desirable outcome. >> who were you rooting to for

in 1860? >> you talked about the middle ground. the middle ground was upper south unionists who would have sold people into slavery into the indefinite future just like the people who joined the confederacy. it is hard to back them. they are bargaining with seward over shutting down the show so that there is no threat to slavery e is going to give away the store. lincoln won't let him. so compromise is impossible. you have to feel that how could you normally back compromise in that particular context. you wrote about this a little bit when you were talking about how an african-american narrative ruptures the story. i can't really feel very comfortable with that story myself. they are not my guys. i don't really want them to win. compromise is not the solution in this case. there is no way that it anybody understood a scenario in 1860 or

1861 by which slavery o would have been eradicated and totaled except the scenario we had, war and state-sponsored emancipation. they only ever do it, doesn't matter what country it is, almost all come when they want soldiers for the army. it is a military emancipation policy in the union and a military he enlistment policy in the confederacy i find the whole idea of the middle ground and a political compromise in 1860 deeply troubling. it is very hard to write a narrative around that without disturbing that assumption. once you disturb it, it is hard even to teach that period for that reason. >> do you think that's generational at all? just think back to the david donald generation, great civil war historian started writing in the '40s and was part of that generation that was wishing there had been more after a

compromised culture. >> if only the politicians hadn't been so bumbling. >> david was trained by james randall. >> blundering generation. >> as our -- our generation -- that's always a troubling phrase to use around anyone, isn't it in but let's just say people of our ilk. that we've been -- have we grown up appreciating conflict? that is, understanding historical change as conflict, not -- >> i certainly do. that's a yes on my part. >> okay. okay. andy? >> you know -- one can't disagree. this is -- i find myself in a difficult paradox when we get into this topic. but i guess it's a place that i choose to be. we make promses all the time. right? we're compromising with all kinds of unconscionable behavior

because of the clothes we wear, because we walk down the street as free people in a country where millions of people are incarcerated, in many cases way beyond what i think any rational, moral analysis would lead us to conclude they ought to be. and there are people in this country who speak with just the same passion that stephanie just spoke with about other issues on which they feel that any kind of compromise is off to give away the moral ground completely now. we may not agree with them. certain issues like abortion, for instance. i don't mean to presume what people think about in this room. but we have to recognize -- >> they use john brown as their model. >> absolutely. so we have to recognize that there are people in this country and there are fellow citizens, and they have the same free speech rights that we have, who believe that there are issues right now that we are blind to and that we're selling our souls by not acting against. they may not -- they may be international issues rather than national ones.

but, you know, i think we need to take the view seriously. it might help us to feel a little bit more how complicated it was to be an american in -- not by 1860, but in the decade that led up to the situation of 1860. >> even by 1860, there are hard truths we need to come to terms with, with the civil war era. one is, nobody is talking about a compromise relating to the institution of slavery itself. the place they're trying to compromise is on the extension of slavery. that's where the argument is. no one's arguing -- no one beyond what would have been considered the abolitionist fringe is arguing for emancipation in 1860. what the civil war is a pluperfect example of is how wars rage out of control bringing consequences no one could have anticipated. end of slavery in four years. no one could have anticipated that. absolutely no one. the only reason it happens is because 3 million men take up arms and that makes many things

possible. >> seems we have stumbled on, with david's gentle guidance, another legacy, which is that -- >> i can't remember them all. >> -- which is the civil war experience frames both a powerful impulse toward moral modesty about our passions and about our views and objectives and political ends. that's the lesson of robert penn warren's pragmatism. it's edwin wilson's lesson from the war. it's louis manan's. i was just teaching this morning oliver wendell holmes jr. injured three times in the war, shot in the chest, shot in the neck, ball's bluff, antietam and chancellorsville and comes out of that experience -- and went into the war as one of the maybe relatively few abolitionist officers and comes out of the war convinced that his moral passions and the moral passions of his colleagues were foolish mistakes. so it frames our moral modesty. >> the passion itself was the problem. >> that's right. but it also frames the passionate social projects that people have engaged in ever since.

so the civil rights movement borrows on the language of the abolitionists. the women's rights movement of the 19th century borrows powerfully. so we have all of these social movements that organize themselves around the wolmodels abolition as the one great relatively, relatively pure example of extraordinary social reform in our country. but also we're called on to be modest at the same time by the same events. >> i want to make a quick argument arguing for why slavery is just a little different. if you look at a state like south carolina or mississippi, when you're talking about the majority of the people who lived there are enslaved. i think slavery's a -- i guess i'm just going to go here. i think it's a particular kind of violence when you talk about the selling of people, the selling of people's children, the division of families. i think that's a little

different than peta, and i guess i'm being presentist right now, but whenever we talk about pragmatism inevitably we're talking about a compromise between two sides who have power. but i don't think we should ever lose sight of the fact that there are a great number of people who have absolutely no power and also i think belong in that debate. >> it's an irrefutable point, and the tricky place i find myself with, and i talk on this topic and it's slightly fascinating to me that we've come so quickly to this topic. nothing i'm saying should be misunderstood. i think at least by me or as any kind of defense of or sympathy for slaveholding or any kind of reduction in our sense of the heinousness of the crime of slavery. but -- and it's very difficult to go here but you know, i once heard someone speak about

comparative calamitology. we have one of the greatest historians of slavery right here sitting in the front row, which makes me even more nervous. slavery is clearly one of the great crimes in the history of humanity. but there have been other great crimes. the gulag. the holocaust. we didn't intervene in time to stop the holocaust. what we know about stalin retrospectively, what we know about mao retrospectively, we didn't intervene. and i think one of the answers to david's questions about why the david donald generation was lacking for compromise and middle ground, that was the policy of the 1940s and 19 50s. it was a containment policy. we chose, maybe because we didn't have the power, we chose not to intervene in horrors -- you know, i'm not -- a higher scale, a lower scale, but horrors that were bei ing perpetrated against millions of people. we chose not to intervene because we believed that by full

containment they would eventually be eradicated. and that's what lincoln believed in the 1850s. containment would eventually lead to the end of slavery. now, that's not how it worked out. so it turns out we could say he was wrong? well, he was wrong sort of but he was right sort of because the containment policy drove the country to civil war and that unleashed the power that brought slavery to an end. i'm just a little uneasy about saying in retrospect it was clear that military action was the only option and that all the times we've refrained from it ever since have been okay. >> and the fact that american slavery was indeed in the end bludgeoned out of existence by great violence, of course, as with all these legacies. let me move, though, to a combination of stephanie and gary's ideas. the story. this beguiling, powerful, irresistible story that caught

you as a sxid caugkid and caugh kid. and stephanie, the idea why doesn't the confederacy just go away? it was only four years, they had a nice flag. just go away. what is it that makes the civil war story, the narratives that we draw from it so powerful, enduring, troubling, and why is defeat more interesting? >> well, i think you and i learned something -- >> i know you raised it and didn't want to have to answer it, but now you do. >> i think you and i learned something about this when we were in jerusalem last summer, about what it is like even if you think you don't have a sentimental or romantic approach to the civil war. by being an american historian of the civil war, you can be sure that you do. and we were told that repeatedly in the room in jerusalem. we didn't -- we thought we were the outliers in this. >> we were against that romance. how dare they? >> we don't vault the story in the way you mean. but it turns out to historians of other civil wars we look

crazily in love with our civil war, even as we're documenting its horrors, its costs, its limitations. and to historians of african civil wars, the spanish civil war, the civil fwhar war in yugoslavia -- >> in ireland. remember we had the paper -- >> in ireland they look at us -- who else not only commemorates but celebrates their civil war, and, in fact, reenacts it. >> who puts robert e. lee on five postage stamps? >> no. >> well, since he died, yes. five united states postage stamps. there's no other loser in a civil war who ended up on five postage stamps. >> even one. >> even one. >> so -- but i do think that we have to be really careful, which is you know, there are so many eerie echoes of the civil war in political quarrels of our own time. you know, rick perry threatening secession, various kinds of nullification threats. sometimes you feel like you're hearing, you're just hearing these echoes, these strange