kansas. our local content vehicles recently visited wichita to learn about its rich history. learn more about wichita and c-span's local content vehicles at c-span.org/localcontent. next month, we'll feature jefferson city, missouri. you're watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. this week on the civil war, they discuss robert e. lee's education, his work as a general and his ability to maintain troop morale under challenging circumstances. this is the second in a series of sessions we're airing from a conference organized by the virginia civil war sess yeah centennial commission. the topic was leadership and generalship in the civil war. this portion is about an hour and ten minutes.

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 two of my long standing friends. robert k. krick 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 fort 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 battlefields 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 battlefields 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 friends in lexington and she thought maybe 16. but then i consulted the librarian 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, stone wall jackson at cedar mountain, published by the university press in 1990. my favorite, on the other hand, is a book with a very long

title, no the as long as general mcclellan's title for his book, "the smooth boar volley that doomed the confederacy," a collection of essays published by lsu in 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 love, his son, robert e. lee crick. obviously impressed by his father, because he followed in

his footsteps. dr. carol reardon is george winfreed professor of american history at penn state and scholar and residence at the george and ann richards center for the study of the civil war, also at penn state university. she earned her bachelor's degree at allegheny college in 1974 and completed her ph.d. at the university of kentucky in 1987. she is, this year, the general howard k. johnson visiting professor of military history at the united states army war college in carlyle, pennsylvania. i had no idea i was going to draw so much applause. carol is an expert on the civil

war, the war in vietnam and a new field, the education of military officers. i can recommend her book, "picket's charge in military history and memory," published in 1997 by the university of north carolina press. it's 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 jominy in the other." i assume it is a study of civil

war strategy and tactics. carol is 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 when i discovered at penn state has a website called, rate your teacher. it has headings like interest and 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 categorin that categor 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 war time to work on confederate -- time to smooth away some of the sectional rancor, some of the suffering that affected the brightened recollections of the bright skies that affected some of their operations and it dulled their recollection of the anguish of the 1860s. furthermore, the victorian era, featured a times of emotive language. as a result, much of the turn of the century literature 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 frees his warrior spirit to join his fellow warriors on both side in bahalah. it was that kind of an era. chamberlain's ego dell centric prose had very little room for anyone but itself, but when it did it was a chivalric mid-evil joust. taste for that kind of prose has long since faded. it's not with us any more. it leaves behind skepticism about some of the tales. in fact, most of gordon's stories, stripped of their exaggerations, with stand scrutiny. i spent a professional life, trying diligently to filter a semblance of truth from the fiction. and i admit to being a skeptic about many confederate recollections especially in the 1890s vintage and onward. 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 of confederates painted as loyal to the end but whose official service records show them awol or signing a federal oath in 18 6/64 or maybe 1863. rank mushroomed dramatically in the postwar transmogrifications a bun pundit suggested it was prudent 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 confederate veterans, self-proclaimed. i myself remember, many of you do, no doubt, when the last confederate survivor died, a member of hood's famous texas 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 purposes today, 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 mementoes 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 amused. none of this universality of this kind of thing makes the errant nonsense in confederate memoirs any less annoying, any more palletble or any more excusable. but contention moderate historians insist the rosy glow infusing the lost cause memories is somehow unique. they go further to identify it as the conscious, manipulative creation of a defeated people. r.e. lee. so this inane 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 only one of a large number of confederate heroes and clearly behind some of them. carol said virginians directed postwar efforts to recast robert e. lee as 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 anyone could

miss the tsunami of evidence about lee's wartime popularity amongst is own people, army, nation. i am driven to contemplating the 20th century philosophical construction, hanlon's razor, a sort of a core larry to the widely cited positioned agman's razor. suggests what can be adequately explained 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 unbelievable. is it driven by malice? i suppose. ignorance? sloth? perhaps. seems to be ample room for all motives distributed 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 per venture. they may have been wrong, the contemporary confederates, although i surely 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 day-to-day 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, more quotability and even less reliability. so even before, long before i became conversant with that ample body of evidence and on that matter and others, it seemed obvious to me that a great many veterans, indeed, most of them on both sides, 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. william allen, who worked here on this campus just beyond the far walls, wrote important things down there. he seemed always to me to be reliable. jediah hodgkiss 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 confederate and primary sources as self-serving, dishonest, unreliable in the pendleton-douglas-styles mode would also be fantastic. judicious judgment is wanted. a coreilary that doesn't believe -- rejection of testimony if it doesn't suit the most. 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 decades. arguing about whether the confederates recognized 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. gary bludgeoned me for my

naivete. 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 a few hours after getting in from gettysburg. 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 ranks 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. even of world history. his thorough 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 astonishment. although, of course, the nay sayers stand militantly arrayed against such enthusiasm of date. 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 that summer. second manassas, reorientation of the war away from richmond. it featured movement and daring unlike anything before and launched the fabulous cl collaboration with t.j. jackson of the vmi. chancellorsville, the lee, greatest of lee's creations i thing, against the greatest odds

is just -- simply incomparable. the salient effort of his plans there, of excessive aggression at the end of the campaign, wilts under the 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. became a priceless national asset. his other considerable attributes aside. on the same may 4, he and stuart 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 sedgwick. 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. the major who was son of a founder of duke university, a college professor, a scholarly officer, 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 their leader. four months after that chancellorsville episode, james longstreet achieved the independent command he long had sought, took the first core west

of chickamauga, and into east tennessee. removed from the superintendents of lee, he ran into disaster at knoxville as you know where a few score federals ensconced in fort sanders delivered him a terrific beating under the direction of the spectacular alexander 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 boswell's tavern. dozens of accounts tell of the emotional moment. abraham of the 3rd south battalion south carolina wrote home the next day more ferve endly 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. alexander said he suffered from no discernible tendency during his whole life and no writings of hollow sentiment. 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 businesslike tenor, alexander's 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 themselves hoarse at mechanicsville pounded down the plains in the wilderness and arrived just as lee faced the climax of the worst crisis he had ever yet been presented with. and they redeemed the moment. that 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 and 36

days after his 24th birthday. lee's perceived persona, workedi its way also on the officers under his command. always accepting roswell ripley and longstreet. samuel bemus of kentucky who took care of lee in 1863 after an onset of illness, that winter, dr. gil being absent himself, wrote a couple of letters home to his wife and children about lee. he waxed about as enthusiastic as any worshipper after the war could have created but 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 desire to imitate his actions and arrive at his excellencies. on every visit, my admiration for him increases. dr. bemus, by the way, reported

that lee recovered from what ailed him that winter, which runs counter to the modern notion much expressed that 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 bemus and young, and yashg and artellerist alexander proved nothing at all. that's four witnesses in an army numbering 65,000 men and more.yr proved nothing at all. that's four witnesses in an army numbering 65,000 men and moroya alexander proved nothing at all. that's four witnesses in an army numbering 65,000 men and morrky alexander proved nothing at all. that's four witnesses in an army numbering 65,000 men and mor an 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 is to 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. he offered a powerful tribute to

confederate arms and their prowess. raymond was a close friend and adviser of abraham lincoln, the national chairman of the republican party, a dreadful candidate to be nominated as part of a sinister 1864 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 yankeeist 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 admit that -- the fall of '64, "the new york times."

an interesting manifestation of anti-lee sentiment, among modern revisionism, is the notion that his deeply religious 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 detractors. the general's notions 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 content 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 afraid. the astoundingly good british historian, c.g. wedgewood, offered a crisp summary of the principle. she wrote history is lived forwards but written in retrospect. we know the end before we consider the beginning and we could never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only. we should try. and not everyone does. novelist phillip roth has written deftly that one of america's fervently embraced communal passions is indulging an ecstasy of sanctimony about self-defined advancements over others, condemning failings of others past and present, an