time. they are still troubling but seem to me watered down versions of what was quarrelled over in 1860. and i want to try to remind myself to remember both things that you can't take it for granted. you have to fight back against it when you see it deployed again. because the confederate story feels a little like some vampire story, scholars keep driving a stake through its heart saying no, this is really about slavery, and doesn't matter. it keeps coming back up. it's not about slavery. >> you said scholars drive a stake through the heart. scholars. who listens to scholars? almost nobody does. i don't think jefferson davis is the key. i think that the lost cause school of interpretation took a brilliant turn very quickly and that was disassociate this struggle from the institution of slavery. they knew they were out of step with the west, the rest of the western world, so let's play

down sliv slavery, talk about constitutional issues whether the central government is powerfulment that's not the key. the key thing is they picked the best person to focus on, r.e. lee. you can talk about him without talking slavery. you can talk about chancellorsville a victory against the odds, you don't cast it i think so much as the states against the federal power as against the underdog waging a gallant fight over constitutional issues and it doesn't have anything to do with slavery especially if you pretend that robert e. lee didn't like slavery. they are brilliant about that. they don't fool the generation that wore blue uniforms. they never lost sight what if the war was about. once that generation was fadinged became more and more easy to do that and when the two most important films in our history in terms of their social impact both give a straight lost cause take on things, birth of a nation and won with the wind, no other film close to those in

their impact, that's a powerful. gone with the wind affected more people's understanding of the civil war than everything all of us have done multiplied by you pick the number and put together. it's true. and ted turner loves it. >> not to mention by 1900 there were 9 million black people growing and growing. race is at the heart of how this story played out to say the least. but -- >> a quick -- it's good to be realistic how much scholars can change things. you know, i don't know much about -- nothing about grade school and high school text books but i wonder how many students of american history are asked to read alexander steven's corner stone speech. that could be an effective anecdote that the civil war was

not about slavery. there it is laid out. >> we quote it. >> bonner in our audience has written. >> i think scholars by bringing to light the documents of our past that are frank and open about the racial ideology of the confederacy can make a count contribution i hope people read those and confront what they mean. >> i imagined that reason that scholars seem drowned out. i never got my stake, by the waxt do you get a stake if i wasn't issued my stake. the reason -- >> gary has several broken ones. >> you get it when you write about the confederacy. >> there's -- the story of the lost cause has been mobilized around a set of political projects. it goes without saying i think the premise of all of this that 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 relatively, sometimes, marginal in the conversation because it's being driven by political projects of you know, of huge import and significance. i'm reminded of the film the birth of a nation, the character, ben cameron is the hero of the klansman. so one of the great unknown features is that ben cameron is modeled on rufus bratton from south carolina. and rufus is the defendant in a case called united states which is the first case under the 14th amendment to reach the united states supreme court in 1872. and in a very, very telling moment the supreme court ducks the question entirely, manages in the case of the man who will be the model to avoid saying

anything about the 14th amendment. this is unknown because the case is av have i because bratton comes after avery, so it goes unnoticed but it really from the very beginning the political project of telling the story of the lost cause has had this political project around the constitutional amendments. >> the theme of what's the appeal of the lost cause is coming up. and i think, i agree with everything that's been said. and much of it is probably boils down to sort of code for racism. no question about it. but on the other hand we have folks up here, out there, the stories of losers have an appeal. stories about suffering have an appeal. the story of black suffering was repressed and suppressed and kept invisible in our history for a very long time. it is only now beginning, i mean still a long way to go but until

it arrives a it the central place it deserves but i hope getting there. if you think about the history of literature, "king lear" or willy loamen, people like to read stories about losers. and the south has claimed that. so they have -- so that has a certain visceral appeal especially if you don't think about it too much. >> i think just on both what gary and andy said, it's also very i think important to think about, you were eluding to this. we don't just want to read about losers. we want to read about specific people who lost. we don't want to read about how african-americans suffered most reconstruction. i want to use that, 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 but as you brilliantly put 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 suspect that if we accepted the academic story we, the entire country, for what the civil war was, the premise it had, it would have effects beyond those that are immediately apparent. i think people believe things because they want to. i think that should never be disregarded. there are very good reasons for not believing the civil war were about splavry. -would take us into policy questions, about affirmative action. when you really -- again it's almost i'm almost ashamed to say this but as an african-american, i had some sense that the civil war was about slavery. i was shocked how much it was about slavery. it was totally, again, as an african-american completely depressing. david in his lectures has that

great quote i make use of. i should send you a fee or something. >> that's fine. >> when you begin to understand -- >> we'll talk. >> we should. because this really, this changed my whole career path actually. when you start to consider that african-american slaves, as you put it, were worth all of the property put together in the country. that when you start thinking about that chess, mississippi and all of the millionaires, more per capita. >> state of mississippi. >> this is like depressing. i mean it really will cause to you rearrange how you think about yourself in reference to your country. so, if millions of people, sorry, hundred 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 expanded, it just so happened by luck, by chance that we got emancipation, who are we then? what are we then?

i mean are we the land of the free? i think it poses deep excy stengs questions. >> is this why you've written a stunning piece about why don't blacks study the civil war more. is this somehow when you do get back to the civil war, you find there's not such a pretty clean moment of jubilee, it's not the country, well, it's the country freeing the slaves but not just the country freeing the slaves, it's an ugly, terrible war time process. >> right. no, for everybody. there are as an african-american there are these moments of pride but it -- it is sort of, i wrote this, for two hours, not about tragedy. >> a great conversation but you can't look at 600,000 people died and cheer it on. it's bigger than that and other questions there. even for african-americans, you

know, you get like the riots and memphis afterwards and you read about people being raped. like it's not -- there's nothing good, at least in the immediate sense. maybe there is a long term but not -- it would not make you feel good immediately. >> i was going to say one thing that 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 kind of try up fanlt atone about this war in a way that is difficult to explain to anybody who is asking you. and i think one of the cause of that is that the normal focus on the suffering and trauma that goes along with civil war, just thinking about contraband camps as refugee camps, using a word

that puts them like in other wars where there are huge numbers of displaced people. yes t slaves are freed but they have to survive the war and being brutalized by both armies, by their masters and mistresses, i mean that's one part of the story. then there's a million other human stories of suffering and trauma. the other thing that interests me about this lost cause thing that is so obvious but probably worth saying here is that there's two versions of the love of the lost cause, crudely put at least two populations for this, one is the people for whom it is an ancestral history, that's difficult to deal with when you encounter it in public settings. if that was our only problem -- >> about honoring my great great grandfather. >> if that was the only population for the lost cause we wouldn't be in the trouble we're in. there is another population that is in california and you know, that is just using it as a

metaphor for conservatism and what they regard as opposition to the overreaching of the federal government. these things are different but that's part of the reason why the lost cause continues to appeal. i know and there is a romantic cast to it which is why people who have no familial connection to 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. >> andy. >> just one other comment on one of the difficulties in coming to terms with the civil war seems to me. progressive minded people, which is somewhat self serving description but i think we'd agree to describe most of the academic profession that is

people who consider themselves liberal left leaning people, like the outcome of the civil lar, obviously. the outcome of the civil war was the end of slavery. >> a good war. >> a good war in that sense. but those same people, who i myself generally speaking have not lately seen a war that we liked. that is, the idea that there could be a war which begins as a war to contain slavery, but evolves into a war to kill and end slavery, it scrambles the mind because we talk about the father war and the mission shift in war and once you unleash the gods of war bad things happen is our general view of modern history. >> this is good mission creep. >> exactly. a great phrase. what do we do with that? i've asked some of my colleagues who are certainly i mean, a few outliars in favor of iraq war

because they thought there were weapons ever mass destruction there but most people in our world were against yet trot specktively for the civil war so that's a confusion, i think, that we haven't resolved. >> i can't help saying that i don't even think most of the men who volunteered and put on blue uniforms would have said war was about the extension of slavery. they would have said it was reservation of the union and that meant something to them that we have lost. to them it had a specific meaning. they saw slave holder as ala garks. they didn't see them as part of the tradition from the founding generation. they believed that small d democracy was at stake. they didn't believe it was at -- there was a larger project in place in north america, that is saving the handy work of the founders and chastising these but they looked across the ocean and said democracy hasn't worked anywhere. the revolutions of the late

1840s failed. democracy is in retreat. if it's going to be saved anywhere it has to be here, and if these can destroy the nation because the presidential candidate they favored wasn't elected in an election no one said was crooked, they didn't like the result, then the aristocrats are going to be able to say people aren't capable. he said it. we all think lincoln said it and then everybody said oh, that must be the case but in fact, even barely literate soldiers said almost precisely the same thing. lincoln in his usual way captures brilliantly what is really very widely held among the white loyal citizenry. so i can't even give them credit for going to war most of them, to limit the ex -- the democrats sure as hell didn't. i mean, 45% of the north are democrats. they are not on board with anything relating -- >> that other democratic party

in the other century. >> when does it become like a semantic question. if the thing that's threatening union is the extension of slavery, you may be for union but the thing you're actually fighting against is the expansion. >> the democrats wouldn't have said the thing threatening the union is expansion of slavely. it's an all a garky class is decided to dismember the union just because they didn't get the president they wanted. >> they wanted to dismember the union. >> those are two different. why i fight to save the union and fight to secede. they are different questions. >> go ahead. >> there is a long side this a military history dimension i think to the lost cause, this is an application of the loser stories are popular stories. i think, i believe i'm right when i say there is an underpopulation of union side re-enactors. >> yes. >> and this is not a coincidence. in the -- so it's not strange.

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 picket's charge, pointless to be a union side re-enactor. but a confederate side is to try to see through the triumph of heroism in the face of mass slaughter stlxt is an appeal to that story which i think is an important -- a military history side. >> what about black re-enactors. what do you know about that. i'm reading a lot of black re-enactors out on the circuit. those guys are interesting. >> my favorite experience of black re-enactors was in 1997, 100th anniversary of the unveiling of the shaw memorial. the great monument in boston.

boston held an extraordinary conference around that anniversary. scholarly conference for about 2 1/2 days, a bunch of us giving papers on this and that. but the people who stole the show were about 100 black re-enactors who took over this event in a way. they had a panel of five black re-enactors of different ages, discussing what they do and why they do. turned out almost all of them started right after the movie glory. they found each other after the movie glory. >> watershed. >> glory is watershed. you've written about this. then they started forming units and regiments and so on and during the ceremony, in front of the shaw memorial, many of you may know, i hope, not only did these 100 re-enact the march of 54 in front of the monument, did formation, it was quite moving. one of them stood in front of the monument on the pavement

beneath the stage during the whole ceremony and kept doing a kind of about face for an hour and a half as though he was on the monument. it was a kind of street theater unlike anything i've seen. and he got standing ovations. he got a greater ovation than colin powell for the key note address, and it was a pretty good address. this is complicated. i've done events in the south, charleston, south carolina, where we dedicated a monument to the first memorial day, and a group of black re-enactors were there. these guys are serious. i no longer crack jokes about re-enactors partly because of this experience. it also says something about my own attitudes, doesn't it. black re-enactors are the good war. all the confederate re-enactors, eh. if you really talk to a lot, some are out to drink beer on a weekend. some are out to find enough

authenticity rush and some are out to just find the past because they don't like living in the present. a lot of reasons people do this. black re-enacting is -- i think we can all -- i think we reached a moment in the 90s when doing this was available to african-americans in ways it had not been before. people discovered black soldiers because of glory. >> at gettysburg on november 19 last year, a civil war lecture given on the anniversary of lincoln's gettysburg address and they have a re-enactors march. thousands of them. there were a lot of black re-enactors and they got the biggest response by far from the crowd. when they went by. >> they are cool. cool. they have become really cool. i wanted to get john talking about -- about liberty and the

common good and actually some quotes from yesterday's supreme court in terms of legacy. but i want to lob one more the to ta-nehisi first. this came up in my seminar two days ago. what do you think the internet is doing, will continue to do, the sheer ubiquity and democracy of the internet to not only this aspect of historical memory but historical consciousness, memory generally. and you're on it as much as anybody. >> i don't want to get in trouble here. i saw excerpts from this piece gary wrote. okay. i would love to see it. there are two aspects. the first is it really created a disparate, i should say a

widespread audience for the kind of los causes we've heard. that's the bad thing. the whole -- there you go. it's all -- i think it's gotten a legitimacy on the internet that it might not have. i think it has a huge part of that. i'll talk about it from my experience. that is this. i was someone who you know, considered himself somewhat of a history buff though i dropped out of college i kept history as a primary interest of mine. 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 would be able to begin reading again as a fan and not someone writing a book. i was so happy about that. >> god, i can't remember doing that. >> no one told me you were going to lose that. that it would all be about your work. i went back, read about how -- in the background there was this

thing, the civil war. and reconstruction. i said i'll go read a book. write another about reconstruction, the civil war started to loom larger. at that point i was blogging. one of the things i do is talk about what i'm reading. so you know, there would be these faint references to the civil war and someone said you should really check out, this was a comment, anonymous commenter, you should check out james mcpherson's battle cry of freedom. and i can't even -- i can't give words to what happened after that. but in short, i'm here now largely because of the internet and it's a weird thing because i put for most of my career as a print journalist. the internet offers a kind of interactivity, if it's properly curated conversation. people can tell you what you're wrong about, what you're right

about. and they will be intelligent. i think i've gotten some -- i came to most of your work floos the internet. some guy e-mailed said hey, this guy david blithe has a series. it was on the internet and i watched and it blew me away. this was recommended to me by the crowd. we have a very, very different relationship. i don't have to presume to be right. they can be right, they can be directing me. i can take a seminar from them. so i think this sort of democracy is extremely exciting. it's not the usual position that a writer finds himself in. don't usually get the opportunity to say hey, i don't know about this, why don't you tell me. but you can do that on the internet. it's okay. there is no sort of presumption of authority. that's just been intensely liberating for me. it's been path altering in a way i never expected.

>> any other points on the internet or you want to pass? >> can i say i hope all of you guys blog. i really do. because i'm sorry, i want to add this. one of the big problems, one of my great frustrations is the wall like jay store like i have some access to jay store that helps but most people do not. and there are so many exciting -- >> we need to get awe library card. >> so many exciting things that you guys are doing and it's not even -- a lot isn't that hard to read. but getting it out -- because that's the rap on historians, it's hard to read. but it's not true. it's not that hard to read. >> it's true sometimes. >> but really, getting historians to the public, that's been something i've really -- so i hope you guys take up the cause yourself. >> if the fire wall comes down we'll have a test of that and we can't afford that test. >> i was going to say i know

it's sort of very, very predictable whining but i'm curious about your perspective on this and those of hue spent more time blogging. when you do a piece like "the new york times" website i did one on the confederate constitution which i love doing, they blew the production values, you couldn't read the thing. they took -- had this cool idea that they should have a manuscript copy of the confederate constitution and there is this fiction that it's a copy of the u.s. constitution which it is not. so i wrote an introduction and then these hyper links explaining what the difference was in each place where they significantly changed the constitution. so you can scroll over the document and these links pop up. i get to explain what words they changed and what dwinks it made. that was a really cool thing to do. but the conversation that went on after watt one of the most polarized i have ever seen. and it wasn't encouraging. it was kind of disturbing and didn't seem to make anybody

think anything except that they were right to start with that all of the academics are left wing morans. and elitists and the confederacy, you know, 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, 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 in slaves which comes to bite them when they want to enlist men. they can't free them. they tied their own hands which is why they have to go begging to the states. they do not have a clause that says that states have a right of cesseion. it was polarized. there was no middle ground. >> i got called for a piece i

did slight.com, just another geriatric professor. which i take issue with. >> this is not you guys fault. we take the motion of democracy too far and it's not you know, gotten into people's heads on the internet yet that you really should cure ate. i try to explain. look, 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. so if you want the space to be elevated you have to treat it that way. that's -- we haven't quite gotten it through our heads we should commit resources for it being that way. i'm sorry. >> 99% of the time. >> there are 100 other legacies. 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. tom, turn it on if you would. >> i wonder how you feel with the diminishment of schools downgrading history. history is not taught except for 45 minutes one day a month after lunch or something. i have 12 grandchildren. they don't know their history. and they are not expected to because it's been woven into a thing called social studies. and that's it. so the crop of people to replace you are coming from the highest