those competing fors of good/evil. that exist in all of us. and that's, that's one of the things i love about not only dr. suess's work, but the left as well. the left is not afraid to confront, the core ways in which human beings don't always live up to their possibility. which is why the government has a role in, in sort of maintaining the best ideals of human society and how it should be organized. finally, i would say for conservatives, that cultural appreciation for the art and expression is precisely why organizations like the national endowment for the humanities have constantly been subject to attack, free radio, because ultimately the expressions themselves have danger in their ability to uplift and to help people imagine a world that is just and fair and equal. >> khalil mohammed. thank you for joining us here on american history tv. >> thank you. >> thank you very much. >> this week on the civil war, two historians discuss robert e. lee's leadership during the

civil war. they consider lee's education, his work as a general, and his ability to maintain troop morale under challenging circumstances. this is the second in the series of sessions we're airing from a conference organized by the virginia commission. the theme was leadership and generalship in the civil war. the virginia military institute in lexington, virginia, hosted the conference and this portion is about 1:10.

good morning. my name is holt merchant. i teach history next door in washington lee university. and i am enormously pleased to have this opportunity -- [ applause ] i am still enormously pleased to have this opportunity to introduce you -- to you, two of my long standing friends. robert k.crick who will speak first and carol reardon. the first thing to be said about bob crick is he is unemployed. actually, retired. from the national park service after 35 years. chief historian, the last 32 of those years. at the fredericksburg, spotsylvania, national military park. before he came to virginia he was the historian at for the

necessity, national battlefield and fort mchenry national monument, a total of 35 years of service. many of us also know bob crick as a hero of the effort to preserve civil war battle fields from the assaults of generations of commercial developers of parking lots and strip malls. [ applause ] and for that we owe him a great deal. we also know bob as an author, lecturer, a guide, and i have been on many battlefield with him. it is a wonderful experience. when i was putting these remarks together i tried to figure out exactly how many books bob has written. i asked one of his close friend in lexington and she thought

maybe 16. but then i consulted -- -- library at washington and lee. he thought 26. i am thoroughly confused. you will have to ask bob how many books. the book that's -- the most attention, the most praise, published by north carolina press in 1990, my favorite on the other hand, is a book with a very long title, not as long as -- as general mcclellan's title for his book "the smooth boar volley that doomed the confederacy" a collection of essays, published by l u.s. su 2002. bob was born and grew up in california. he earned his bachelor's degree at pacific union college in 1965, and his master's degree at

san jose state university in 1967. i should probably stop here, but i can't pass up the temptation to mention one of bob's great hates and one of his great loves. the hate, of course, being general james longstreet. and his great lover, his son, robert e. lee crick. obviously impressed by his father because he followed in his

and a new field, the education of military officers. i can recommend her book, pickets charge in, in military history and memory. published in 1997, by the university of north carolina press, it's -- it's a -- a

wonderful piece. she has announced a book -- for may of this year. a book i tried to get my hands on to read it before i put the remarks together. i couldn't do it. my librarian couldn't find a copy of the book. it has the enormously intriguing title of -- with a sword in one hand. and i assume it is a study of civil war strategy and tactics. carol its the author of many articles, book reviews, conference papers, consultations, staff, prizes, and of course she is a wonderful teacher. i didn't try very hard to resist what i discovered at penn state has a website called, rate your

teacher. it has headings, interest, helpfulness, and clarity. and carol ranked very high in all of those. there is also a category that, the school calls, easiness. and she ranked very low. in that category. there is also a category called hotness, but i am going to pass on that one. please welcome both of our speakers. [ applause ] >> 30 years after the civil w , war -- trying to smooth away

some of the rancor, and recollections of the bright skies that affected some of their operations it dulled their recollection of the anguish of the 1860s. furthermore the victorian era, featured a times of emotive language. much of the tufrn the century was purple in prose, hyperbolic. gordon on the one side. chamberlain on the other. typified that genre. in gordon's pages no one ever dies in battle. in any kind of agony. instead a speeding, leaden messenger, joins his fellow warriors of both sides. it was that kind of an era. chamberlain's prose had room for any one but his own self. when it did it was -- character iszed as almost a chivalric,

medieval joust. it has the faded it is not with us any more. it lefsz behind scepticism. most of gordon's stories, stripped of their exaggeration. i spent a professional life, trying diligently to filter a semblance of truth from the fiction. and i admit to being a skept ache but many recollections especially from the 1890s vintage and onwards. a list of old soldiers who claimed to have been personally proposed by r.e. lee, but the paperwork that was lost would fill a volume. so would obituaries, loyal to the end, but official service records show them awol and signing a federal oath in 1864 or maybe 1863. rank, mushroomed dramatically in the postwar transmogrifications a pundit suggested it was peru tent to refer to any adult male

south of wilmington, delaware, as colonel unless for sure he preferred judge. a few years ago, a diligent researcher took to examine the last handful of surviving veterans, self proclaimed. i myself. remember, many of you do no doubt when the last survivor died, a member of hood's famous brigade i was 16 years old at the time. it proved easy to establish during research he was a fraud. in fact every one of the late sampling had not served in the confederacy, they had been lured by flattering publicity and probably even more by the prospect of a pension during the depression. that result isn't surprising but nicely highlights the problem of late life fantasy if not mendacity. significantly for my purpose tuesday, most significantly the investigation featured similar results for the elderly pseudo

veterans of union armies. soldiers grown old, ramble away from reliability often very far indeed whatever their longitude. veterans of world war ii and korea, who gather today, i subscribe to many of their periodicals and journals and read them with genuine appreciation, but they look back over the decades often with some what similar results. as my father-in-law, lay dying, a few years ago, i used his saved memen tows of a long stint in europe in the 1940s to track down his record. i found the website, operated by his unit's veterans' organization, he was in the camouflage engineer battalion. the website declared their clever deceptive measures could be credited for shortening the war by several years. how long was the u.s. in the war? less than four years. several years. saved 100,000 lives. my father-in-law had the good sense to be mightily amutzed. none of this universal spichlt ty of this kind of thing makes the errant nonsense in

confederate memoirs any less annoying, any more palatable or excusable. but historians insist the rosie glow infusing the lost cause memories is some how unique. they go further to identify it as the conscious, manipulative creation of a defeated people. r.e. lee. so this insane strain runs, was not really all that popular during the war. he only became an icon when he was carefully crafted for the purpose having been chosen by machiavellian conspirators to meet the need for a southern hero. conley's book about hollow artificial lee legend declares almost unbelievably seems to me not until the 1880s would lee be regarded as the south's invincible general. at his death, this eminence lay years ahead. ten years after conley, piston

said the same thing. when he died october 12, 1870, lee was one of a large number of confederate heroes and clearly behind some of them. carol sprer don, said virginians directed postwar efforts to recast robert e. lee as the the confederacy great hero. after shedding a tear for bragg, dorn, and sibley, i would suggest to you that this is really insupportable. and wondering how any one could miss the tsunami of evidence about lee's war time popularity amongst is own people, army, nation. i am driven to contemplating the 20th century sill sof cal construction, a sort of corollary to the widely cited, posited, never a tribute to mall as, suggests what can be adequately explaned by ignorance

or sloth. they're not all wrong for the same reasons. pretending that the countless thousands. tens of thousand of confederates who lee statured during the war do not exist. is it driven by malice? i suppose. ignorance? sloth? perhaps. seems to be ample room for all motives distrib utd in a case as startling as this one. the virtually unrelated question of whether lee deserved the adulation, that is subjective enough to defy adamant declaration of the sort i have been giving you. that the adulation flowed is just beyond venture. they may have been wrong, the contemporary confederates though i do not think so. they believe it cannot be disputed. i don't think by anyone except the most determinedly, comprehensively obtuse. we all of us need to establish a hierarchy of credibility about witnesses, the civil war,

everything. we do it in life. we evaluate information. some people, some sources of information deserve far more credit than others. and some deserve none at all. the modern tendency to dismiss southern accounts, confederate accounts, as inherently automatically dishonest ignores that simple perception. robert styles, the virginia, field officer in his widely popular memoir with good cause, he is always colorful, always quotable, and always interesting, he is not always reliable. h.k. douglas, offers even more color than styles, more drama, quotability and even less reliability. so even before. long before i became conversant. it seemed a great many veterans, on both side were not dedicated to dishonesty, most of them were trying to tell the truth. there are vivid contrasts with the pendleton, et al syndrome.

alexander his evidence, always intelligent, comes close to being unimpeachable. robert allen, worked on this campus, wrote important things down there. he seemed always to me, to be reliable. and hodgekiss of upstate new york and stanton, virginia, held strong opinions. they weren't always right. i see evidence he was looking for truth. to attribute the near invincible reliability of the alexander version to all confederates would be irresponsible. no one should do that. but to precisely the same level, tarring all sources as self-serving, dishonest, unreliable, in the pendleton-douglas-siles mode would also be fantastic. judicious judgment is wanted.

a quor larry a corollary -- [ inaudible ] i suppose 100 of you in this room, or 50 of you have stood with me, in gettysburg, arguing with my long time hero, gary gallagher, who will be here, my role model for many decade. arguing about whether the confederates recognize that what seemed to be a golden opportunity there or not. did they make this up based on hindsight? because for a long while there were only postwar, if early postwar accounts. a why had no one said so then? those vivid postwar accounts must be part of the all pervasive lost cause bilch. well not at all surprisingly, contemporary evidence did surface from people who wrote at the time subsequently over the years. a north carolina lieutenant writing, that delay was fatal to us. we lost the golden opportunity. it is hardly possible to say how

great our victory would have been. dare we miss the genius of jackson, the simplest soldier in the ranges felt it. there is plenty of room. i suppose, to argue the options on the slope above the house and their potential results. but not so much anymore to express the notion that those who were frustrated made it up after the fact. one of lee's battlefield attainments as opposed to confederate perceptions of their admired leader, seems clear to me that lee against long, long odds, crafted some of the most amazing campaigns in american history. his reversal of the war's course in eight summer weeks in 1862, moving from the outskirts of richmond to the doorstep of washington is hard to contemplate without some sa tonnishmeton i astonishment. an army that was not yet sculpted to his preferences with

a great many officers who soon would be exiled to lesser duties. and lee stood the war squarely on its ear. second manassas, reorientation of the war against richmond. featured movement and daring like anything before. chancellorsville, the lee, greatest of lee's creationize thing, against the greatest odds is just -- simply incomparable. the salient effort of his plans of excessive aggression at the end of the campaign, wilts under new evidence, come to light in the last few years. since i pointedly made that negative comment myself in print. a number of years ago. correspondents with stewart on the 4th of may and 5th. sequestered in california, has turned up in which he vigorously owe posed, attacking the entrenched federals but hoped to

damage them as they crossed the river. lee's impact on the soldiery, became a priceless national asset, uh on the same may 4 he and stewart corresponded, the army commander faced the need to straighten things out well to the east of chancellorsville where some of his troops were dealing with the rear guard under john sedgewick. the infantry recognized disarray and stirred restlessly. i never saw officers and men so utterly and so generally demoralized, major york of the 6th north carolina wrote. he confessed, i myself to some extent participated in the demoralization. mate your who was son of a founder of duke university, college professor, a scholarly author, he was not much prone to hero worship. but described the universal relief when lee showed up in very striking language. suddenly we saw passing through the woods, general lee.

as soon as his face was well seen, the word went down the line, all its right. uncle robert is here. we will whip them. there was no cheering. the men leaned on their muskets and looked at him as though a god were passing by. what an incredible impact upon his army to have that attitude toward thereby leader. four months after that chancellorsville episode, james longstreet achieved the independent command he long had sought, took the first core west of chickamoga, and into tennessee. removed from the superintendents of lee, he ran into disaster at knoxville as you know where a few federals ensconced in fort sanders, delivered him a terrific beating under the direction of the burnside of all people. and the chafing that had, annoyed, longstreet when he was under lee's command, disappeared with his new perspective. he was happy enough to get back

to virginia, after lee died six years later, longstreet spent three decades, casting aspersions. in the spring of 1864, late april, the men in longstreet's first core had no doubt where they stood on the lead question. one of the most dramatic displays of affection for their commander, for any commander any time anywhere took place on the 29th at a review that reunited the man and the general. first core gathered in a bug field near mechanicsville, virginia, the little hamlet west of boswe'll tavern. dozens of accounts tell of the emotional moment, the 3rd south carolina, wrote home the next day, more fervently with good spelling. we had a grand review yesterday by the greatest of men, general r.e. lee. some said they had shook hand with the greatest man in the

world. he was in fact a flinty-eyed narrator and he was hotly accused, after the war, in his writings. his analysis, for being inadequately respectful to lee. contrary to his usual business-like tenor, alex and ear description of this april reunion is very, very emotional. the general reins up his horse and bears his good gray head and looks at us. and we shout and cry and wave our flags. sudden as a wind. a wave of sentiment. such as can only come to large crowds in full sympathy. seemed to sweep over the field. each man seemed to feel the bond which held us all to lee. there was no speaking, but the effect was that of a military sacrament. seven days later the men who

shouted them hoarse at mechanicsville. arrived just as lee faced the climax of the worst crisis he had ever yet been presented with. and they redeemed the moment. at military sacrament paid off. sergeant young, i quoted to you enthusiastically a moment ago went into the breach with one of the first units to arrive at widow taps field and a bullet in his lung laid him low. he died that night. less than a week after his enthusiastic letter home had, and 36 days after his 24th birthday. lee's perceived persona, worked its way also on the officers under his command. always accepting ros? well ripley and longstreet. beamus of kentucky took care of lee in 1863, he had an on set of illness, dr. gill being absent, himself sick, wrote a couple letters home to his wife and

children in kentucky and he waxed as enthusiastic as any worshipper after the war could have created. he was writing at the time. he is so noble a specimen of men that even if he were not so distinguished you would be attracted by his appearance and manner. i know you would all love him if you saw him with a deep quiet admiration that would find expression in a desewer to immitate his actions and arrive at his excellencies. on every visit my admiration for him increases. dr. beamus reported lee recovered from what ailed him that winter which runs counter to the modern notion, much expressed. lee's failing health, stymied operations during that year. an idea circulated primarily in a popular novel which really isn't all that stout a foundation for any kind of historical architecture. quoting beamus and young, and york, and alexander proved nothing at all. that's four witnesses in an army numbering 65,000 men and more.

they are representative of a roaring tide of precisely that kind of sentiment, unmistakable, pervasive almost uninterrupted. the only way anyone could miss the truth of lee's towering war time popularity in south ties be ignorant of primary sources seems to me. written in 1864, by the founder and current editor of "the new york times," henry j. raymond. a tribute to confederate arms and their prowess. raymond was a close friend and adviser of abraham lincoln, republican party, and dreadful candidate to be nominated as part of a precursor to the lost cause. yet his language which i will read to you in a moment, sounds like precisely the sort of thing that the lost cause people so much hate today, i have heard

this kind of sentiment by southerners, scorn, derided for decades. savagely even. here is raymond, the yankeest of yankees. the rebels have an energy and skill. no people on the face of the earth ever made so hard a fight with such limited means. it goes on. considerable length for a couple paragraphs. and concludes all candid men, whatever their hatred of the rebellion, are free to -- fall of '64, "the new york times." an interesting manifest asian of anti-lee sentiment, among modern revisionism, is the notion that his deeply relij nature revealed personality and even psychological disorders, his devout faith pleased onlookers in the 1860s and beyond but from the 1970s downward to today, a linchpin for his destraktors. the general's noegsz of his personal worthlessness, without

god's guidance and support, serve as a text for modern detractors to depict lee as insecure, even a manic-depressive. i must admit to you because of the context that i myself am immune to the song of solomon, if you will, i don't know where the road to damascus is or lies, i am perfectly content, perfectly contnt to admire the general's pious character. and to suggest that psychoanalyzing him, as a subscriber to the pervasive religious tenets of the time just is not supportable. in all matters grown antique, we should avoid translating the current climate intact to a far different era. or exploiting our knowledge of the way things turned out. but we do not all conform to that basic premise, i am afrachltd the astoundingly good british historian, c.g. edgewood, offered a crisp summary of the