back into history is that there very much was another option on the table, and 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. i mean, we can talk about the obvious good when we think about the freedom struggles of various different groups, when we think women, the current marriage equality levels. all of this stuff 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 movement and you see how many of those folks started out as emancipationists -- i'm sorry sh -- abolitionists. when you hear sarah gremke 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, and 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. but 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 always 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 witt. >> i should starty by observing that this is the david brian davis lecture 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, and 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 amendments and an ongoing 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 principal forums in the courts and in social movements that are claiming to articulate the true meaning with many different views of what true meaning might be of the reconstruction amendments -- the 13th amendment abolishing slave slavery, abolishing involuntary servitude, and giving congress the authority to enforce it. 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 three transformative constitutional amendments of our legal and constitutional history. and 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, so brown versus board of education and its progeny are the product of this. but 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. gun rights, 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 is no connecticut handgun second amendment right absent the 14th amendment, which has been inkormted by rights that were only before the civil war held by individuals as against the federal government. most criminal procedural law is the result of the 14th amendment. the list goes on and on. so 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, former 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. and 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 granted certiorari on a case -- >> worried about health care. >> 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 that i'm aware of, sustained thinking and deliberation and debate about what it means to exercise the huge power that comes with

an industrialized military force. and 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 hague conventions and the geneva conventions. and it's tried thousands and thousands of people 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 questions is really palpable as an important part of the conversation, i think. >> wow. you know, 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 pragmatism. now, pragmatism may be a little

older than the civil war, but his whole point was that this era of such terrible bloody extremes, horrifying extremes, brought about in america and louie minnon has written about this -- brought about in the next generation, a philosophical outlook or temperament we have come to call pragmatism, a la 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 pragmatism 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. but 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. we look at the -- the weimar 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. right? we are waiting to see whether the supreme court is going to strike down what i think is a kind of 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 sobering reminder to us of how sort of suddenly disaster can 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 pragmatism, that belief in union, that the ultimate aim of a cohesive republic is endangered baseeds on, you know, your study of what union men in the 19th century?

do we have a language of union anymore? >> i am not so sure. we do have that language of union anymore. 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. and i think an indication of that is the sort of hysterical treatment of everything that happens now. it's 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 like there is now. the only way you can believe that is if your historical memory goes back to last thursday. because if it goes back very far at all, you know we have been through far more traumatic things than we are going through now. and 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 armageddon-like 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 certainly 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. but 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 pollyanna notion of what the united states is and stands for. but i think that 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 than me. 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 it this kind of intellectual veneer, that everything he says -- 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, is outside of people who are actually historians or writers, the civil war belongs, the public memory, to a certain group of people. and 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. >> which is who? who does it belong to?

>> who does it belong to? pretty much belongs to white southerners with confederate sensibilities. that's been my experience. i don't think that is, in fact, true. but whenever you visit the battle parks, that's the impression that you get, that it's really not for you, it's 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. so i wonder if you decide the historical memory isn't for you, how are you able to call upon it when you think about your current 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 invested all. it is extremely difficult to teach. you are supposed to think compromise is the desirable outcome. >> right. >> but how are you supposed to think that in 1860 -- >> who are 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 the ones who are bargaining with seward over shutting down the show so that is going to give away the store. you know, he's going to give away the store. lincoln won't let him. so compromise is impossible. you have to feel that how could you morally back compromise in that particular context? you wrote about this a little bit when you were talking about how an african-american narrative of the civil war just kind of ruptures the story. and this is one of the main ways it 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. any compromise in 18 -- there is no way that it anybody understood a scenario in 1860 or 1861 by which slavery would have been e rad kated in four years,

uncompensated in total, except the scenario that we had -- war and state-sponsored emancipation. they only ever do it, doesn't matter what country it is, almost all these emancipations come when they want soldiers for the army. so it is a military emancipation policy in the union and a military enlistment policy in the confederacy. i find the whole idea of the middle ground and a political compromise in 1860 just really deeply troubling. and it is very hard to write a narrative around that without disturbing that assumption. and 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.

>> yeah, i mean, david was trained by james randall, who was one of the needless war school leaders. >> blundering generation. >> blundering generation, yeah. but, i mean, as our generation -- that's always a troubling phrase to use around anybody, isn't it? but let's just say people of our ilk, you know, we've been -- we've grown up appreciating conflict, that is, understanding historical change as conflict. >> i certainly do. >> yeah. >> that's a yes, on my part. >> okay, okay, andy. >> well, no. i mean, i just -- one can't disagree. 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 compromises 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 incarcerat incarcerated, in many cases mor lead us to conclude they ought to be. there are people in this country that speak with the passion about other issues on which they feel that any kind of compromise is to give away the moral ground completely. we may not agree with them, certain issues like abortion, for instance, i don't mean to presume what people think about that but -- >> use john brown. >> we have to recognize there are people in this country, and there are fellow citizens and they have the same free speech rights we have, who believe that there are issues right now that we are blind to, and that we are selling our souls by not acting against. they may not be international issues rather than national one, but you know, we need i think we need to take that view seriously. it might help tuesday feel a

little 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, i mean, there are hard truths we need to come to terms with with the civil war era, one of them is nobody's talking about a compromise relating to the institution of slavery itself. the place they are trying to compromise is on the extension of slavery. that's where the argument is. no one is arguing, no one beyond what would have been considered the abolitionist fringe is arguing for emancipation but the civil war is a perfect example of is how wars rage out of control and bring consequences no one could have anticipated. the end of slavery in four years, no one could have anticipated that. absolutely no one. and the only reason it happens is because three million men take up arms and that makes many things possible. >> the things we stumbled on with gentle guidance, another

legacy, which is -- >> i can't remember. >> which is that the civil war experience frames both powerful impulse towards moral modesty about our passions and our views and objectives and political ends, that's the lesson of robert pen warren's pragmatism, lesson from the war, but i was teaching this morning oliver wendell holmes jury who injured three times in the war, in the chest, in the neck, and comes out of that experience, went into the war as one of the maybe relatively few abolitionist officers, and comes out of the war convinced his moral passions and of his colleagues were foolish mistakes. so it frames our moral modesty. >> passion itself. >> but it also frames the passionate social projects that people have engaged in ever since so the civil rights

movement borrows on the long that the woman's rights movement borrows powerfully. so we have all of these social movements that organize themselves around the models of on 0lition as the one great relatively pure example of extraordinary reform but at the same time modest by the same events. >> i want to make a quick argument. for why slavery is a little different. if you look at a state like south carolina or mississippi, you're talking about the majority of the people there are enslaved, i think slavery is i guess i'm 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 t division of families. i think that's a little different than peta. i think i'm being presentist right now. but when we talk about

tragmatism what's fighting about a compromise between two sides that have power. i don't think we should lose sight of the fact there are a great number of people who have absolutely no power and i think belong in that debate. >> look. it's an irrefutable point, the tricky place i find myself with and i talk on this topic and slightly fascinating we have 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 slave holding or any kind of reduction in our sense of the heinousness of the crime of slavery. but -- very difficult to go here but you know, i once heard someone speak about comparative ka clam atry.

the greatest historian of slavgry here in the front row which makes he more nervous, slavery is clearly one of the great crimes in the history of humanity. but there have been other great crimes. the goolog, the holocaust. we didn't intervene in time to stop the holocaust. what we know about stalin retrospectively, mao, we didn't intervene. and i think one of the answers to david's question about why the david donald generation was looking for compromise, that was the policy of the 1940s and 1950s. it was a containment policy. we chose maybe we didn't have the power, we chose not to intervene in horrors, a higher scale, lower scale but horrors that were perpetrated against millions of people, we chose not to intervene because we believed that actually by the full containment they would eventually be eradicated. that's what lincoln believed in

the 1850s. containment would 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 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 saying in retrospect it was clear that military action was the only option, and that all the times we refrain 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, so much to do with all of thesement let me move to stephanie and gary's ideas. the story. this beguiling powerful irresistible story that caught you as a kid, caught me as a kid, and stephanie, the idea, why doesn't the confederacy just

go away. only four years, had a nice flag, just go away. what is it, 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 -- >> i know you raised that but didn't want 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're we were told that repeatedly in the room in jerusalem. we thought we were the outliars. >> how dare they. >> we don't love the story in the way you mean but to historians of other civil wars we look crazily in love with our

civil war even as we're documenting its horrors, its cost, its limitations. and you know, to historians of african civil wars, the spanish civil war, the civil war in yugoslavia. >> ireland. >> in ireland they look at us. who else not simply commemorates but celebrates their civil war. and in fact re-enacts it. >> who puts robert e. lee on five postage stamps. >> now. >> since he died. five postage stamps. there is no other loser in a civil war who ended up on five. >> even one. >> even one. >> but i do think that we have to be really careful, which is you know, there are so many eerie echoes of the civile war. rick perry threaten cesession. sometimes you're hearing these strange echoes of the old debate. >> norman mailer wanted new york

city to secede. >> so do the norwegian immigrants in michigan too. >> i think what i think on the one hand i'm struck by these anld and troubled by these and on the other hand sometimes they seem like thin reflections. and i think part is that this romantic story, the confederate appeal is the story of principled -- a principled struggle against tyranny, especially the tyranny of the federal government. >> centralized tyranny. >> that was jefferson davis' reprees of the real struggle. >> and wilson fell in love with. >> available since the 1870s. fit many types of causes. and i think you get thinner and thinner versions of it