actually written that. >> the scholars bring to light the documents of our past that are frank and open about the racial ideology of the confederacy can make a contribution. i hope people read those and confront what they mean. >> i always imagined the reason the scholars seem drowned out -- i never got my stake, by the way. do you get a stake? i wasn't issued my stake. >> gary has several broken ones. >> you get it when you write about the confederacy. >> that's when you get the stakes. >> the story of the lost cause has been mobilized around a set of political products. this goes without saying, i guess the premise of all this, it's the political projects that have been pervasive over the last 150 years which find useful material in the story of the lost cause that i think propels it forward and makes scholars sometimes relatively marginal in

the conversation, because it's being driven by political projects of huge import. i'm reminded of the film "the birth of a nation." the character, ben cameron, right, ben cameron is a hero of the klansmen. one of the great unknown features of american constitutional history is ben cameron is modelled by a guy named rufus bratton, which is the first case under the 14th amendment to reach the united states supreme court. in early 1872, it gets argued. in a very, very telling moment, the supreme court ducks the question entirely, a man who will be a model in "birth of a nation" to avoid saying anything about the 14th amendment. this is unknown because bratton comes alphabetically after avery. but from the very beginning, the

political project of telling the story of the lost cause has had this political project around the constitutional amendments. >> this sense of theme of what is the appeal of the lost cause is coming up. i agree with everything that's been said. much of it probably boils down to a sort of code for racism, no question about it. on the other hand, we got some literary folks up here and plenty out there. the stories of losers have an appeal. stories about suffering have an appeal. now, the story of black suffering was repressed and suppressed and kept invisible in our history for a very long time and is only now beginning -- still has a very long way to go before it will arrive at the place it deserves, but i hope it's getting there.

people like to read stories about losers. south has claimed that story. so that has a certain visceral appeal, especially if you don't think about it too much. >> well, i think just picking up on what both gary and andy just said, i think it's also important to think about you're alluding to this. we don't just read about it because we want to read about specific people. we don't want to read about how african-americans suffered post reconstruction. it's one thing to think about what the incentive of the lost cause is and why people want to accept it. i think it's also very important to think about the disincentive for accepting not simply that the civil war was about slavery, that it actually wasn't about slavery, it was about the expansion of slavery. that's a very depressing notion, i think, for a nation that premises itself on freedom and liberty.

i strongly suspected if we accepted the academic story, the entire country, for what the civil war was, the premacy, that it would have effects beyond those that are immediately apparent. i think people believe things because they want to and that should never be disregarded. there are very good things for not believing the civil war about slavery. this would take us into all kinds of policy questions about affirmative action. when you really -- and, again, i'm almost ashamed to say this. but as an african-american, i had some sense the civil war was about slavery. i was shocked just how much it was about slavery. it was totally -- again, as an african-american, completely depressing. david in his lectures has that great quote, and i make use of it all the time. i should start sending you a fee or something. >> that's fine. >> we'll talk. >> we should.

because this really, this changed my whole career path, actually, but when you start to consider african-american slaves as property, as you so brilliantly put it, were worth all the property put together in the country. when you start thinking about mississippi and the millionaires who lived there, more per capita than any other country, this is depressing. >> the state of mississippi. >> this is depressing. it will cause you to rearrange how you think about yourself in reference to your country. so if millions of people -- not millions -- hundreds of thousands of people were willing to die for the expansion of slavery and the good guys were only willing to die to not see it expand, it just so happened by chance that we got emancipation. who are we, then? what are we, then? i think it poses deem questions that are hard to get to. >> you've written a stunning

piece about why don't blacks study the civil war more. is it you find yourself back in the civil war, it's not a moment of clean, pretty, jubilee. it's a country freeing the slaves, but it's not just a country freeing the slaves. it's an ugly, terrible, wartime process. >> for everybody. even -- there are -- as an african-american there are these moments of pride, but the, sort of -- i did this writing about how it wasn't tragic, but it is. >> we have argued for two hours it's not about tragedy. >> it's a great conversation. you can't look at 600,000 people died. it's bigger than that and there are other questions there, but even for african-americans, you get the riots in memphis afterwards, and you read about people being raped and everything. there's nothing good, at least in the immediate sense. maybe there's a long term, but it will not make you feel good immediately.

>> i was going to say that one thing that really strikes me about the way we write about the american civil war when you read a lot about other civil wars is we don't write about the trauma of civil war. this romantic story isn't just out there in the popular version. we as scholars have our own investment in the redemptive purposes of this war so we can have a triumphalist tone about this war that's really difficult to explain, and i think the cause of that in scholarship and popular history is that the normal focus on the suffering and trauma that goes along with civil war, just thinking about contraband camps as refugee camps, for example. using a word that puts them in other wars where there are huge numbers of displaced people. yes, the slaves are being free but first they have to survive

the war. they are being brutalized by their masters, their mistresses. and there are a million other stories about human trauma. another thing about this as a lost cause is that there is two versions of the love of the lost cause, crudely put, at least two populations for this. one is the people for whom it's an ancestral history. >> mm-hmm. >> that's still out there and difficult to deal with when you encounter it in public settings. >> mm-hmm. it's about honoring my great-great-grandfather. >> exactly. that's difficult. but if that were the only population for the lost cause, we wouldn't be in the trouble we're in. there is another in california that is just using it as a metaphor for conservatism, what they regard as opposition to the over reaching of the federal government. these things are different, but

that's part of the reason why the lost cause continues to appeal. there is a cast to it which is why people who have no familial connection with the confederacy somehow identify with that cause and the experience of defeat and powerlessness that came afterwards. >> it's a formula that can fit a lot of causes. >> it's not just an ancestral attachment. >> just wanted to comment on one of the difficulties in coming to terms with the civil war, it seems to me. progressive-minded people, which is a somewhat self-serving description but describes most people who consider themselves liberal, left-leaning people, like the outcome of the civil war, obviously. the outcome of the war was the end of slavery.

>> it was a good war. >> it was a good war in that sense. but those same people, myself, generally speaking have not seen a war we liked. that is, the idea that there could be a war that begins to contain slavery but evolves into a war to kill and end slavery scrambles the mind. we talk about the mission shift in war, and once you release the gods of war only bad things happen is our general view of modern history. >> this is good mission creed. >> great phrase. so what do we do with that? i've asked some of my colleagues of the iraq war because they thought there really were weapons of mass destruction there. most people in our world were against it. and yet retrospectively we're for the civil war. that's a confusion we haven't resolved.

>> david, i can't help saying i don't think most of the men who volunteered and put on blue uniforms would have been the war was about the extension of slavery. they would have said it's about preservation of the union. that meant something to them that we have lost. to them it had a very specific meaning. they saw slaveholders as oligarchs. they believed that small d democracy was at stake. they didn't believe it existed in the south because of the oligarchy rule there. they believed there was a larger project in north america, saving the handywork of the founders and chastising the oligarchs. they also looked across the ocean and said, democracy hasn't worked anywhere. the resolutions of the late 1840s failed everywhere. democracy is in retreat. if it's going to be saved anywhere, it has to be here, and if these oligarchs can destroy

the nation because their candidate wasn't elected in an election no one said was crooked, they didn't like the result then the oligarchs, anarchists and monarchs will be able to say we told you. >> we all thought lincoln said it, and then. we capture who is still very widely held among the white loyal citizenry. so i can't even give credit for going to war, most of them, to limit -- the democrats certainly didn't. 45% of the north are democrats. they're not on board with anything. >> it's that other democratic party in that other century. >> when does it become, though, like a semantic question, because if the thing that's threatening the union is the extension of slavery, you may be for union but the thing that's

actually fighting against is the expansion of slavery. >> they would have said the thing threatening the union is the class in the south decided to dismember the union just because they didn't get the president they wanted. >> didn't they dismember the union? >> yes. those are two different things, why you fight to save the country and why you fight to succeed. those really are to my -- two different questions. >> there is a military dimension to the lost cause. i think an application to the user stories are popular stories. i believe i'm right when i say there is an underpopulation of union-side reenactors. >> yes. >> and this is not a coincidence. i think it's not strange. i think that in the era of modern industrialized warfare doesn't provide opportunities for heroism. heroism on the battlefield is unavailable after the rise of certain forms of weaponry.

so pickets charge. it would be useless to be on the union side. but to be a confederate side reenactor is to see through the triumph of heroism in the face of national and industrial slaughter. there is a key to that story >> what about black reenactors? >> what do you think about that? >> oh, yeah. >> those guys are interesting. >> my favorite experience of black reenactors was in 1997. the 100th anniversary of the unveiling of the shaw memorial. the great augustus thomas mass. boston held an extraordinary conference around the anniversary. scholarly conference for two and a half days with papers

on this and that and this and that, but the people who stole the show were about 100 black reenactors who took over the event in a way. they had a panel of five different black reenactors discussing what they did and why they did. it turned out almost all of them started after the movie "glory." >> "glory" is a watershed. >> you have written about it. then they formed regiments and units. during the ceremony in front of the memorial, not only did they reenact the march of the 54th in front of the off and on meant, did formations, it was moving. one of them stood in front of the monument during the ceremony and kept doing an about face for an hour and a half although he was on the monument. it was kind of a street theatre unlike anything else i've ever seen.

he got a standing ovation. he got a greater ovation than colin powell got for the keynote address. and it was a pretty good talk by colin pall, by the way. this is complicated. i've done shows in the south, charleston, south carolina, where we dedicated a monument to the first memorial day and a group of black reenactment actors were there. these guys are serious. i no longer crack jokes because of this experience. but it also says something about my own attitudes, doesn't it? black reenactors are the good war. all the con federal reenactors -- eh. but if you talk to them, there are different kinds of them. some of them are out just to drink beer on the weekend. some want the authenticity rush and others want to find the past because they don't like living in the present.

there are a lot of reasons people do this, but black reenacting -- i think we can all -- >> is it on the rise, do you think? >> i think we reached a moment in the '90s when doing this was available for african-americans in ways it hadn't been before. people discovered black soldiers. >> i was in gettysburg on november 19 last year. and reenactors march in gettysburg, thousands of them. they got the biggest response by far from the crowd when they went by. >> they're cool. >> they are. >> they've become really cool in reenactment circles. i wanted to talk to john about liberty and the common good. actually quotes from yesterday's speem court. but i want to lob one more question first. this came up in my undergraduate seminar two days ago at great

length. what do you think the internet is doing, will continue to do, the sheer ubiquity to the internet to not only this aspect of historical consciousness, but memory, generally. >> i don't want to get in trouble here. i saw excerpts in this piece gary wrote. >> i wasn't going to say he wrote a piece about you bloggers. >> i would love to see it. there are two aspects. the first it has really created a widespread audience for the kind of lost causes we've heard denounced up here. that's the bad thing. >> black confederate. >> that's it.

there you go. it's all over. i think it's gotten a kind of legitimacy on the internet that it might not have otherwise. i think the internet is a huge part of that. i'll talk about it from my experience, and that is this. i was always someone who considered themselves somewhat of a history buff. even though i dropped out of college, i kept history as a primary interest of mine. it was what most of my reading was about. i took a break around 2008 after my first book came out, and i was greatly looking forward to this moment where i could begin reading again as a fan and not someone who was writing a book. i was so happy about that. >> god, i can't even remember that. >> no one told me you were going to lose that and it was all going to be about your work. i went back and read an autobiography about ida b. wells. i read another book about reconstruction. read another book about it. the civil war started to loom a little bit larger. at that point i was blogging. one of the things i do on the

blog is i always talk about what i'm reading. so there would be these kind of faint references to the civil war and one day someone said, you should really check out -- this was just an anonymous comment -- you should really check out james macpherson's "battle cry freedom." i can't even give words to what happened after that. in short, i'm here largely because of the internet, and it's a weird thing because for most of my career i was a print journalist. but the internet offers a kind of, obviously, interactivity. if it's a properly curated conversation, the crowd is much smaller than you think it is if you clear the way. people can tell you what you're wrong about, what you're right about, and they will be

intelligent. i came to most of your works through the internet. some guy e-mailed me and said i should read this guy david blight. it was on the internet. it blew me away. this was recommended to me by the crowd. we have a very different relationship. i don't have to presume to be right. they can be right, they can be directing me, i could be taking a seminar from them. so i think this sort of democracy of it, for me is extremely, extremely, extremely exciting. it's not the usual position that a writer finds himself in. you don't usually get the opportunity to go somewhere and say, hey, i don't know anything about this, why don't you tell me. but you can do that on the internet. that's been intensely liberating for me. it's been path-altering in a way i never expected. >> any points you want to make on the internet or do you want to pass? >> can i just say --

>> can i just say i hope all of you guys blog? i really, really do, because i just to want add this really quick. one of the big, big problems and one of the my great frustrations is the wall, like j store. i have some access to j store and that really, really helps, but most people do not, and there are so many exciting things. >> we need to get you a library card. >> there are so many exciting things you guys are doing, and a lot of it isn't even that hard to read. but getting it out to -- because that's the rap on historians. it's so hard to read. it's not that true. >> it's true sometimes. >> sometimes. but getting historians to the public, that's really been something that i've really, really enjoyed so i hope you guys take up the cause yourself. >> if the firewall comes down, we'll have a test of that and we can't afford that test. >> right, right. >> i was just going to say, i know it's sort of a very, very predictable whining, but i'm curious about your perspective on this and those of you who spent more time blogging and things.

when you do a piece for like the "new york times" website. i did one on the confederate constitution, for example. they blew the production values. you couldn't even read the thing. they had this cool idea that they should have a manuscript copy of the confederate constitution, and there is a fiction that it's a copy of the u.s. constitution, which it is not. so i wrote an introduction and these little hyperlinks explaining what the difference was in each place where they significantly changed the constitution. you can scroll over the document and these links pop up and i get to explain what words they changed and what difference it made. that was a really, really cool thing to do. but the conversation that went on after it was one of the most polarized conversations i've ever seen in my life, and it wasn't encouraging, it was really kind of disturbing and it didn't seem to make anybody think anything except they were right to start with, that all the academics are left wing morons and elitists, and the

confederacy, there really was a fine -- this was a fine constitution for a fine country that we're making it up about slavery. even though you're going through the thing, the word slavery appears in the confederate constitution, it does not appear in the u.s. constitution. they write a clause saying their own congress can never, ever write a law limiting the right of property and slaves which comes to bite them when they want to enlist men in the army. they can't free them. they've tied their own hands, which is why they have to go begging to the states. they do not have a clause that says the states have a right of cessation. these are interesting things. but the conversation that ensued was really, really vitriolic and polarized. there was no middle ground there at all. >> it's free. i just got called about a piece i did on slate.com, just another yale giri -- geriatric professor

which i take issue with. >> the problem is -- and this is not you guys' fault. the problem is we've taken the notion of democracy a little too far, and it has not gotten into people's heads on the internet yet that you really should curate your comments. you should have a goal. it's not just an open space for people to spout off. >> keep telling them that. >> i have a blog, i'm hosting a space. i would not let you come into my house and insult one of my guests. i would ask you to leave. that's what would happen in my space. if you want the space to be elevated, you have to treat it that way. that's our fault. we haven't quite gotten it through our heads that we should commit resources for it. i'm sorry that happened. it happens 99% of the time. >> there are a hundred other legacies we could take up here, but let's take a few questions. if you have a question, there are two mikes. you can stand at the mike or tom or melissa will -- right into the mike, sir, if you would.

tom, turn it on, if you would. >> i really wonder and i do feel with the diminution of interest in public schools in particular downgrading history. history is not taught except for 45 minutes one day in a month after lunch or something. i have 12 grandchildren. they don't know their history. and they're not expected to because it's been woven into a thing called social studies. and that's it. so the crock of people to replace you are coming from the highest academic quadrant and they haven't had this learning experience going back. >> our students have. >> well, your students are different. even the idea of the black

history month, that doesn't tie to the civil war in any way hardly because they don't want to upset the little darlings. >> okay. >> thank you. i think there should be something coming out in higher academics to tell the school administrator, superintendents, mayors or whoever makes these decisions that history is important. >> we try. >> we're not in charge of school administrators. >> i'm well aware. >> sir, this is a good news/bad news story. >> i've heard a lot of people say on the panel today about how many books they've written and how many things they've written -- >> i said how many books i've written. it's all my fault. >> i'm sorry if i disrupted you. >> no, this is a good news/bad news story.

the good news is andy, gary, steph, we all -- every summer we teach teacher institutes all over this country, hundreds of them. we reach thousands of teachers. this never happened until about 15 years ago. the gillman institute is responsible for much of it. on the other hand, the impact we're having is a hard thing to measure. it's a hard thing to measure. often we hear from those teachers the very complaint you just made. andy? >> i should say one thing to confirm my reputation as a jeremiah seeing these things going downhill. unfortunately, i think the gentleman is more than right, and i would add to that that the percentage of students majoring -- statistics can be a little misleading, but the percentage of students majoring in some humanistic discipline, which to my mind certainly includes history, at elite universities including this one is rapidly declining. >> absolutely right. >> we should be worried. >> one of the best ways to get our world and the world of secondary and middle school

teachers together was the teaching american history grant program. >> fabulous. >> which was defunded. >> it's about to die. >> it's about to die. it was not very much money, but congress is not going to renew that. >> no, it's not. next question. the man in the yale shirt who is now a high schoolteacher in texas. >> i teach tenth grade world history to tenth grade students. >> god bless you. >> i know. >> what are you doing here? >> escaping. >> escaping is a polite way of saying it. i have two parts. first, looking back on that past question, i've talked to the u.s. history -- our u.s. history department trying to work through, how do we teach the civil war? what are thera