-- when my parachute opened. [laughter] [applause] >> i think we are all glad it did. [applause] ok, so that's it. watching american history tv all weekend every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook at c-span history . >> next, civil war historians talk about the 1864 overland campaign in virginia, including the battle of the wilderness, spotsylvania court house, and cold harbor. they explore the tactics of generals robert e lee and ulysses s. grant and compare the

two leaders. this event was part of the gettysburg college civil war institute annual summer conference. it runs about an hour. >> ok, good evening. i and peter carmichael, professor of history at gettysburg college and also director of the civil war institute. my guest is noted historian gordon ray. he 20 years ago published "the battle of the wilderness" with lsu press. this would be the first of 4 volumes to cover the 1864 overland campaign. gordon was the first historian to ever attempt to write a comprehensive history of those operations. those operations, as you know, covered central virginia and 1 at cold harbor. it really is hard to imagine

that anyone will ever again attempt to write such a comprehensive history because what gordon did is truly phenomenal. ,t is model tactical history well researched, beautifully written, and above all else, contextualized. as a micro-study of who did what and where. what is really remarkable is that gordon dived into the , and so much of tactical history, much about gettysburg, never draws from original manuscript material, which in my estimation, is almost criminal. gordon -- he dove into the archives. just to give you one example, series,d volume of his an impressive amount of research that included 150 manuscript , 55 contemporary newspapers, and more than 500 published histories.

gordon did all of this while .aving a day job as a lawyer gordon graduated from stanford law. he got his educational start at indiana university. graduated in 1967. i was just up the road in indianapolis. i was one years old when you graduated from college. just to get some perspective here. >> you make me feel so young. >> from there, you went on to harvard and got your in a in history. and then you did sometime in the peace corps as well. it appears in ethiopia. and then i learned by being a carpenter that making a living using your hands is a tough way to go. >> definitely. aboutt is remarkable gordon is he is one of those guys who gets up at 4:00 in the morning, cut some wood just for the heck of it, goes off, runs a

few miles, then does some charity work, and then starts his work day. it is able to accomplish in this field of civil war history with all the other things that you do. your legal career is very fascinating. i saw on your website that you were in the united attorney late 1960's, early 1970's. >> yes, during the 1970's, i was assistant district attorney in washington. >> and he writes briefs. one was on the cia attempts to overthrow the joe, and you also wrote a brief about the fbi it tends to discredit martin luther one was on the cia attempts to overthrow fidel castro. i did not leak anything classified deadeye? we are going to have a free-flowing conversation about his work, the overland campaign, and of course, i want to give the audience an opportunity to have a crack at him as well. .o let's begin

why did you decide to write a book about the wilderness when there have been two very good battle?s on the one was done and then i can 60's, one in the 1980's. you are practicing law in northern virginia. why write a book? >> i had a deep interest in the civil war. as i have told many people, my dad was born in 1901 and a little town in southern tennessee on the alabama border and grew up with confederate veterans. always had a deep interest in the civil war. when i was a kid, we would drive around to the battlefield. of course, that was before they were as well-developed as they are now. that was a couple of centuries ago, before you were born. [laughter] the 1970's, iin was a federal prosecutor in washington. i decided i needed to get into some other endeavor.

i started to go down to the battlefields in central virginia and got fascinated with the big idylls between grant and lee in may and june of 1864, started to look for books on those battles, and there was virtually nothing. like you said, at that time, there have only been one study that was done. it looked at the official report, regimental histories, no archival work or background. it looked like there had been a whole lot of battle culminating in this huge fight at gettysburg, and something else happened and lee surrenders at appomattox a year later. it was that something else that i found so fascinating. the big titles between the two vermeer generals -- premier generals from each side. >> here is an overview map. all of you should have it in your packet. it covers the overland campaign, gets us all the way to cold harbor and beyond.

this is what gordon's worked so brilliantly has captured and analyzed. let's just go ahead and get to the actual fighting itself at the wilderness. often, people see the wilderness as a leader less -- leader less -- leader-less battle. it was a growth area filled with dense underbrush, limited visibility, broke up formations, disrupted communication. when someone says to you that s battle,a leaderles would that be an accurate description or assessment? >> no, it was a very well thought out battle, although what was going to happen was thought out very shortly before .t happened it's the first time grant and, of course, lee had a chance to really oppose each other. 's armyealized that lee

had to be defeated, and this was the best chance to do it. potomac newthe force to just above the river. we offer a new grant as a general that would do headlong assaults, but what the union commanders decided to do was a turning movement across the river, downriver from lee and come back at him, negating the confederate defenses. unfortunately, when you cross the river down from where lee was, you go into this tangled area called the wilderness, which had been for a stint in colonial times but by 1864 was second growth. it had been cut down for smelters of various types, and it was a terrible place for a big army like the one grant was with, like the army of the potomac, to fight a smaller army like lee's. the terrain was terrible. infantry could not really see where other soldiers were. artillery would not have any clear targets, and the union and

cavalry would be useless because there were just a few winding trails to this wooded forest. commanders decided they would stop and spend the night in the wilderness before moving on toward lee. they made a miscalculation. they figured they could spend the night safely before lee would be able to moving toward them. as one of the union commanders wrote, "this was the first misfortune of the campaign, a total miscalculation." what we need to understand is the federal army wanted to get out of the wilderness. it was lee's favorite hunting ground, and the main reason is that the environment owned he soldiers, owned the army and may be a way that other battles did not. war,l know that any civil the terrain was critical, decisive. but this is a fiendish place, right? is a place that owns the soldiers and certainly makes it fighting once the begins. we should note that the first day of fighting takes place on and then tournpike

the south on the orange plank road. they are almost two separate battles, and it was about a mile or so cap at yawns between those thatites -- mile or so gap eons between those two what we decided to do was attack. -- what lee decided to do was attack. lee realizes he could not stalemate them, he would be forced to fall back to richmond and petersburg. the war would become a surge. that would be the end of it. lee came up with what would probably be the most daring plan of his career. oftook his army and sent 1/3 a down the orange turnpike, 1/3 of it down the orange plank road, planning to pay in the

army in place with these two small forces -- to pin the army in place with these two small forces, then fanning to drive them back across the river, like he'd and the year before if grant figured out that lee divided his army into three pieces, he could focus on any of those three pieces and wipe them out. extraordinarily risky. lee was willing to take the risk because the other alternatives were pretty grim as well. >> sheer audacity. the armies got locked down into a fight. i would like for you to talk to the audience about the history.s of writing among professional historians, they have a very uneasy relationship with military history, especially the kind of military history that gordon writes, getting troops on the

ground. many feel it is history that is .oulless, chessboard it is extraordinarily complicated. could you give us just one example of engaging the source material, trying to bring in that human voice, and trying to make sense of the chaos of fighting within that environment? isthe way i usually proceed when i was trying to figure out what happens in any place in that wilderness, let's say, was to start with a unit, collect all the material that existed, everything printed, all of the official reports, archival material from across the country, and a lot of newspaper reports. newspaper material is one of the for theerrated sources civil war. soldiers were riding home every day. most regiments had somebody who was the unofficial correspondent for the county that the regiment came from them and they were sending information back to you can collect this now. it is in archives across the country. i put it in folders and figure

out here is how the union forces were lined up. here is what happened to these men. and then to figure out who they were facing, you look at the confederate equivalent. you might see one of the union regiments captured the flag of the confederate flag -- regiment. it is laborious, but you can work through that and put together the big, tactical picture. as you alluded to, there is a fascinating human story. like at spotsylvania courthouse, there is the big attacks there. it turns out that the man who spurred the ultimate confederate assault that capture the bloody angle at spotsylvania courthouse was a 40-year-old epileptic from charleston, who left letters behind and who other people in his regiment wrote about. i was able to figure out who was in his regiment and i talked to their descendents. some of them had letters that had never been put into archives. it is big-time detective work, but it's a lot of fun. >> let me ask you about the

newspaper accounts. we all approach historical documents. we like to assume that document ,s a clear window into the past that we can find the hard truths, that the author of that andment is being forthright there is an authenticity to it. with newspaper accounts in particular, northern and soldier -- southern soldiers often wrote within the trope of honor, duty, bravery, heroism. so, how did you engage that uniform, cultural façade question mark and i'm not suggesting that some of these men didn't behave in that way -- cultural façade? and i'm not suggesting some of these men didn't behave in that way. how do you deal with that? >> collect resources, read through them all, use your best judgment. i'm a lawyer, so i can figure this stuff out. [laughter] lawyers know all.

little higher? >> [inaudible] >> the problem was civil war -- rial is letters home people have axes to grind, people want to make their cells -- their buddies and themselves look good. the battles are written from a point of view. all the reports after the war read sort of like, "how i could have won the war if they'd let me do it." all you can do as a historian is get the accounts together, read through them all, see if there is a common thread. >> the soldiers, both sides, by

1864, there's a growing sense of alienation or estrangement from the homefront. n, the soldiers unwittingly contributed to that alienation by writing letters that -- they helped create the divide. chasm by theite a latter stages of the war. the image that i just pulled up is a sketch of the burning of the wilderness. it is the most enduring image of the wilderness. for anyone who has done some reading about the battle, this is probably the image that comes to mind. i'm curious about how your a positivenforms to perception about the fires in the wilderness and about this picture. >> i think this sketch is very accurate. there were two places in the wilderness where there were massive fires. in that field called songbirds field -- saunders field.

there are vivid accounts from several different men about how they tried to rescue soldiers before the fire got to them, but the men on the other side would shoot them down so they couldn't make rescues. there are accounts of soldiers killing themselves before the fire got to them and some gruesome accounts of when the fire would finally reach an injured man, they would hear the pop of the cartridges as they exploded. the second dayon of fighting down on the orange plank road. there, as a matter of fact, the union earthworks were built largely out of wood. a lot of union accounts talk about how, when the tendon federate -- when the confederates attacked, they would come bursting through the flames like so many devils. it fits a lot of the scene you been developing. these are not battlefields that soldiers came back to after the war. they didn't like to go back there. you come to gettysburg and this place has a monument, two or

three every square inch, it feels like. you go to the wilderness and there are only two or three that were put there by veterans. recently, there were some, but none back then. i know you did a nice piece on the spotsylvania monument years ago. >> let me do a follow-up. one of our faculty members somewhere out in the audience has written a very good book anled "ruination," environmental history of the war. one of the key questions she's interested in is how soldiers thought about their power to destroy nature. here again, the wilderness is different. the environment is striking back. >> these men weren't trying to or tore or -- fires destroy nature. this is what happens when you have a lot of shooting at each other. >> it underscores your other point that i haven't thought about -- i hadn't thought about

before. because it was such a wicked place and so foreboding and dark and sinister, they could not re-create in their minds are for the public the kind of heroic war that i think is easy to do here at gettysburg. painted that of picture very vividly in one of his books in the 1960's. he pointed that -- out that after gettysburg and some of the battles in open fields, people had a sense of flags flying and sun shining. when veterans talked about the battle of the wilderness or spotsylvania courthouse, it was more like men underground in caves, stabbing each other with knives. just horrible. >> i worked at the wilderness as a college student. i was always struck by the fact that, when people came, they were most interested, where were the fires. it is like gettysburg, where is the bloodiest spot. i don't know what to make of

that. i'm certainly not going to be dismissive of that kind of interest. anddo you write about war capture the savagery without -- without going too far and turning war into just some great horror? darkerpeals to people's side. it seems that it is something that does connect with folks. >> this was a horror. and this was a -- these were armies really trying to -- lee's army trying to stop grant and grant determined to win. this was all-out. >> do you have an obligation as a historian to elevate it, to move it beyond these descriptions that are so bone chilling? >> oh, yeah. >> how do you do that? how do you draw deeper meaning? >> i try to look for accounts

that were left by people who were thoughtful and who can talk about some of those vivid scenes. thing i if there's one feel i did in a lot of those narratives about the wilderness, cold harbor, i think i brought home what it must have felt like. it was horrible. >> you have a touch for understanding the soldier's experience. i think that is what makes the book so interesting to read. >> thank you. i think individual soldiers had very little idea about what was going on. they were there in a few acres of woods, fighting for their lives and the lives of their friends. they were getting orders. the woods were on fire. everybody was shooting and there was noise and smoke and a nightmare. that's the way it comes through. >> we have the end of the wilderness, roughly 17,000 casualties for the confederate side. >> 17,000, 18,000 on the union

side, 11,000 on the confederate side. >> grant is brilliant at taking a draw and turning it into a victory. we have this defining moment for grant and the army at the potomac. can you describe it and tell us why it is so important? hooker hadmore than taken at the battle of chancellorsville the year before and not very far away. there were wagers among the soldiers of the army at the potomac whether they would retreat like the other -- like the other generals had done, whether they would go to fredericksburg and try another route, or whether they would move south. of course, grant decided, the morning after the end of the battle of the wilderness, that he would shift south to the little town of spotsylvania, about 10 miles south of the wilderness, putting his army between lee and richmond. his hope was that lee would leave the wilderness.

the night of may 7, as grant starts to ride south, the union accounts are vivid. men who wear their talk about throwing their hats in the air and shouting and clapping, because grant didn't give up. they now had a general who was going to give up -- to continue who viewed this stalemate only as a tactical reverse, not as the end of the campaign. here is a guy who thought long-term. it is like the bloodshed of the last three years was going to have some meaning. this, in my mind, was one of the major psychological turning point for that army. this bond between the rank and file and grant is on display here. >there is a fair amount of turmoil still at the army high command, the relationship between grant and george meade was never really acrimonious, but it was an uneasy relationship because grant was giving meade a fair amount of

discretion at the wilderness and even in spotsylvania. >that relationship did not alwas produce sufficient results. let's turn to our spotsylvania map. the red marks the confederate line. this in the center of the map is where the confederates blunted the union advance coming out of the wilderness on may 8. once the union advance was halted, the line spread to the southeast all the way down to on the far, left-hand corner of the map, and extended to the north and east. you can see how the confederate line takes the shape of a big bulge. we will talk a little bit about lee. we haven't really mentioned lee at all here. there is the idea that lee had prescience, that he could anticipate his adversary's next advance.

we supposedly saw that on many battlefields. we saw that, according to some, after the wilderness, that lee anticipated the advance to spotsylvania courthouse and was able to successfully block the thrust. prescience was for some time the standard interpretation of the general. >> lee was very often baffled by grant. he was uncertain how grant was going to move the army when the campaign began. he didn't know he was going to go around one side or the other. after the wilderness, he wasn't sure if grant was going to drop south or retreat or what. untiln't really find out it happened. spotsylvania court house a major misunderstanding by lee. lee threw up a line with this salient bluge, m -- bulge, or mule shoe. grant realized that was a weak point in the line. veryition that was difficult to defend. grant decided to launch a

massive attack against it, moved his troops into position overnight may 11 and into the morning of may 12, for a chart that is going to make picket's charge look like peanuts. it will be the entire union second core, about 20,000, with the sixth core attacking from one side and burnside's ninth core on the other. lee realized that was the week part of his line, but wanted to ofp that -- the weak part his line, but wanted to keep that permission because it was built along hills and high -- that formation because it was built along hills and high ground. lee gets reports about union movement and decides the grant is retreating, basically misreads what is going on. lee wants to be able to chase grant the next morning. he pulls his artillery back to spotsylvania courthouse, leaving

the very sector of line that grant has targeted for an overwhelming attack defenseless. the next morning, he pays the price for it. 3,000 confederate prisoners sent to the rear basically right away. >> the most successful assault in the history of the union army. that area of the mule shoe is beautifully preserved. it is one of the most evocative places of any virginia battlefield. prior to the may 12 assault, for willof these folks, othey go sunday out to bloody angle and see this ground. prior to that, grant probed these lines. depictions from wilderness out to cold harbor. i'm not sure how you feel about grant. up to may 12, grant is probing the lines in some fairly costly assaults. only one of those had any

success, and that was may 10 with henry upton that punched a hole in the confederate line. in thinking about your interpretations of grant, i found in my spotsylvania book a letter from you dated 1997. i had written a review of your book, i'm not sure where. >> you didn't burn my letter? >> i didn't. i treasured it, actually, as you can see. i wrote a review, i'm not sure for what. it was definitely not in a blog. it was a civilized time, before blogs. [laughter] [applause] and al arekevin going to get a little uncomfortable with that. i love blogs, sort of. i just want to redo your response to my review, which was very favorable, of course -- to to myo you your response

review, which was very favorable, of course. i don't have my reading glasses. here we go. i am sufficiently harsh on lee for his miscalculation of grant's movement, but on the night of may 7 and eighth and may 11 and 12th, i have criticized lee. you correctly point out that i am even harder on grant for persisting in pointless attacks. and i think i was proper in doing so. there was nothing wrong in the methodology of spotsylvania. his youth -- uyse -- lee's use of earthworks was flawless. grant's execution was fundamentally flawed. generals supervised by who seemed constitutionally unable to coordinate their movements. this is the best part -- " but we can debate -- "but we can debate these fine

meet. it's taken us a while. finally we've met. some say this is sort of playing into the myth of grant the butcher. >> i happen to be very high on grant. when i started working on the overland campaign i sort of made a promise to myself and that was i would set aside these myths we've heard about grant and lee and the various generals, try to set out the background as well as i could and see what that led to. i was born in virginia and lived in tennessee and i understand grant, who was not prop already in either of those places. i've come to view grant as, in many ways, one of the first of the modern generals and he really shows it if this campaign. he does launch a serious of --

series of attacks in hindsight a lot of them don't make a lot of sense. a lot of them fail because of lack of coordination among his seaboard nate but that was not his job. i now view grant as a general who used maneuvering as much as hammering and often a mix of it. began this campaign by maneuvering around to try to flank lee. hard fighting in the wilderness, doesn't work. within a day, doing his next flanking ma 23450u6r. flanks the spotsylvania courthouse, doesn't work. makes another maneuver. this is not a general throwing soldiers blindly to their death. these are thoughtful moods. >> let's make a quick comparison. you've often pointed out that grant was failed by his seaboard nate, immediate, hancock was a

constant thorn in everyone's side. these thoughts served up on a plalter that grant's seaboard nats don't carry the line. they -- sub board nats. he put him in a tenuous situation at the beginning of the campaign. the issue board nats are always blamed. once again, it's lee's fault that the artillery has been removed from the lines and that e initial union corps was so successful. lee takes was this criticism and his seaboard nats are culpable. -- grant, and from is a brook's biography does a suburb job of explaining how the chain

of demand didn't work. but grant did what everybody said lee did so well. and that was give his issue boardnate lat nude -- sub nats lat tuled. so why -- i'm not suggesting -- >> i'm very hard on lee too. what i see is each of those generals, grant and lee, 458d issues with sub board nats. as far as lee was concerned, he starts off with a fairly seasoned group with longstreet, and him. a.p. hill is quite ill during much of this campaign. has to be replaced by early. richard steward you well always becomes very ill and has problems with discretionary orders. jeb stewart, who lee had relied on at chance legislatorsville is

dead, killed on may 11. lee's entire command structure is in sham billions so he doesn't have that seaboard nat group he had early only. grant is dealing with a man very different from grant, a man, in my reading of him, much more cautious. of interest also is the fact that they're socially different people. lee has aids whose -- who are the cream of the crop of philadelphia and grant runs around with -- >> geeled old boys from the midwest. >> exactly. it was like oil and water. i spent a lot of time reading -- up at the historical society in pennsylvania, there are letters from buildle and humphries and all of those various aids of immediate. and the letters they wrote home to their wives and they were basically saying that grant doesn't know anymore about

commanding an army than does an old cat. meade writes eduardo: holm to his wife and says i've been hugh mill yate because grant was actually getting all the credit. there was also information about sheridan, who was basically put over meade and meade by early in the campaign is writing home to his wife saying i would retire, i would resign except duty requires me to continue on. this was a totally dysfunctional family. >> let's go back to northern virginia. r.z. has said he would timly -- typically reserve for a court commander. big working on a buildo's d. the third corps, they're filing back, the right flank of the army is disintegrated.

lee with the texas troops at the forefront. lee expose is himself to enemy fire at least three times. >> at least. >> so your point about the army command structure changing i think is spot on and it ultimately took a toll on lee's health. after spotsle vaina. very sick. >> diarrhea, confined to his tent. >> unable to exert the time of control he typically would have and maybe missed some opportunities to strike a blow at the union army. one last thing about may 12, the bloody angle. a very provocative spot and a testament to the intensity, the severity of the fighting is the remains of a 22-inch oak tree that was felled by small arms fire, an oak tree that was rested in the confed rat

position at the bloody angle. >> occupied by south carolina. >> and i believe that the 22-inch oak tree is at the smithsonian? i don't know if it's on display now and if you haven't been to the bloody angle before, you haven't seen this a tree stump that gets its own monument. which was probably very use. that 22-inch oak tree was a point of reference for frals and confed rats when they were writing their accounts. unlike the wilderness, where there's shrub oak everywhere, ere is one that was useful for seeing where troops faugget fought. what was the fighting here not just intense, it's the duration of the fight. if you could explain to us why this even happened. >> sure. this salient or muleshoe we were looking at a picture of a bit ago. once the three union army

corpses got through, suddenly that whole area is filled with milling union forces. lee has to decide what to do and as you said, he starts to micromanage what's going on. he rides right down into the center of the fighting. he decides he needs to put up a new defensive line on the rare o -- reach so he can basically get rid of the muleshoe. but until then he has to hold barks basic lyrics the union force. what he does is hand pick different brigades out of different confed rat army corpses to drive the frals back. john gordon and they drive in. -- he sends the north carolinaens in and albamian boys and myians and drives them back and finally they take high ground at the muleshoe called

the bloody angle. manages to reoccupy the salient but he has to keep it occupied until he can get a new line in the rare and it takes him -- rear and it takes him something like 22 hours to get a good line built in the rear. it's raining all night and the next day. several units are punched into this mule shufe occupying the confederate side of the entrenchments. in front of them are the earth works thrown up and immediately on the other side were the attacking union forces, sometimes 20 to 30 lines deep. and basically those two units separated before by miles, now they were spramentespra -- spramented by a few yards of dirt and it's almost as though all of the anger and hey tret of the last three years finally bursts forth. the descriptions are horrific.

it's raining and bloody. the good shots are handed rifles so they can keep firing until they're killed. new men jump up and take up their position. the use co-horn mortars, confed rats do. thatof the mississippiians made bets what about it would be an arm or a leg. grisly stuff. at one point, a union colonel and confederate colonel each believe the other has given up. they start firing again and the colonels jump back on their crptive sides to have earth works and it rolls on. the tree you talked about is in the center of this fight. it's chewed down, 22 inches in diameter, chewed down by

musketry alone and falls into the confederate position. >> can you explain how that stump is preserved? >> a farmer saved the stump after the battle. ended up in his barn and it was after the next year, some federal officers coming through heard about it and went and got it, brought it town washington and it was preserved. it shows up in a lot of accounts from the southerners. the fighting goes on into the night. this hand-to-hand gruesome combafment around 3:00 the next morning lee finally finishes that line to the rear, orders his men to drop out of the muleshoe and they do. they're able to get out. and. next morning when the sun rises over spotsylvania county, grant learns he's gained a few acres of bloodstained virginia soil and lee is in a stronger position than he was the day before. >> you would say that's as important as any of these other

battles. >> one of lee's best defensive moves. >> that's right and grant's move one of the under appreciated flanking maneuvers. i try and understand why cold harbor on june 3. i don't think we need the man nuferinge that led up to cold harbor. i need to understand why grant would commit to that. and obviously there's a short history here beginning at the wilderness that leads up to the culmination on june 3. >> uh-huh. >> how the the -- can we explain this? >> a lot of people have looked at that and grant was heavily criticized for his attack at cold harbor. if you look at what he was thinking at the time, though, there were very good reasons. by the time the armies had gotten down from cold harbor, they were seven or eight miles from richmond. richmond was in the confederate

rear and of course, there was a river between the confed rats and richmond. a good chance to attack the confed rats because they could be overrun. lee had gotten some reinforcements but there were still a lot available and grant wanted to attack before lee got fully reinforced. and lee's anklor was basically on two streams and grant had no good way to flank him out of position. grant was about as strong as he had ever been. and also, there was a nominating convention coming up for abraham lincoln in which he was again seeking the republican nomination, and so a victory at that point would have been a fantastic plum. basically, the destruction of lee's army and the fall of richmond.

bad place to stay. if no attack were launched, the union army was aware that the low lands of the swamps were a bad place to sit around for the summer so there was a need to move. given all those factors, grant decide told make that assault. he issued the orders to the army commander meade. at this point the relationship between grant and meade had completely fallen to pieces and rather than issue detailed orders to coordinate the serious various army corpses, meade did very, very little. the next day at 4:30 in the morning, this huge assault is launched. the confed rats are well dug in, are able to drive back the union forces. a totally disjointed union attack. >> casualties for the frals? >> again, you hear the stories about the 7,000 or 15,000, whatever, in the first 10 minutes or 20 minutes. i spent a lot of time looking at

the actual returns. union losses were closer to 3,500 during the first big wave. during the course of the entire day they ended up getting into the 7,000 range. refull day of fighting. >> five, six -- 5,000, 6,000 casualties in 30 minutes. >> i've written several articles about it. grant has unfairly been characterized as a butcher. this attack will rank somewhere as the seventh or eighth bloodiest of the war. i think the fourth in the overall campaign? certainly not number one. grants believed that the federal army was demoralized. we talked about the changing nature of warfare and he was surprised that the confed rats wouldn't come out of their works to fight. he misread this entirely. they weren't demoralized. you look at spotsylvania, there

are reasons for grant to believe he has opportunities. in many ways he was fighting the way lee had always fought it. it was ooble -- about possibilities and cold harbor in hindsight was certainly an unmitt gated disaster. but what led to it was some reasonable, sound thinking on grant's part. >> also, a realization that he was getting intelligence that lee was ill. >> before we wrap up and allow the audience to ask a few questions. a brizz -- grisly photograph. timothy o'sullivan taken of a confederate soldier probably killed on the 19 snth you can see that the photographer, despite the fact that this in no way has been touched up, as they did with some of the photographs at gettysburg, you can still see that they're posing things.

the musket, the hat, the canteen. everything is strgically placed. i'm curious. i'm not going to have you speculate about sullivan's note -- motivation, but when you look at this particular image, how do you want us and your readers to make sense or meaning of horrific human carnage of the overland campaign? >> well, i don't know what i want you to think about it but what i think about it when i look at it. i see a person and it just brings back to my mind the futility of this entire enterprise and the fact that there were people on each side ready to not only kill the other guy but die. and i reflect a lot on what's going on in the rest of the world right now. we look at syria or iraq and say how can those people do that to

each other? but we do the same thing. there were something in the range of 600,000 casualties, maybe 700,000. if you look at the relative size of our country today, it's about 10 times more populous so that would be like 6 million to 7 million americans slaughterering each other over a three or four-year period. those kind of pictures bring that back to my mind. >> well said. i think for all of us, we struggle with this issue when you take a look at an isolated death and the blow that that family must have felt and we think about that on a much larger skill sca -- scale. and try to not justify but to explain what brought northerners and southerners to this on the one hand, this is a war that ensured this country was communitied and it's a war that brought slavery to an end. i think brian jordan in the

first hour did a really nice job in talking about the dark side of the war and the war in which we see a trajectory toward progress and human freedom. for all of us, it's hard to get distance and to find a way that the loss of life in the american civil war did result in a powerful political and social change and diminish that organized killing is just a waste takes away from the fact hat it did bring a revolution. again, it is a tough thing, especially as we look around the globe today and we see that it is a world on fire with all kinds of violence that to us seems outing -- utterly senseless and pointless and you can bet there were plenty of people inside and outside the united states who looked at the overland campaign sexuggetsexggets my god, this

bloodbath, for what? if you have questions for gordon, if you step up to the mike. we don't need any long statements but questions are in order. >> yes, sir? >> do you hear me? >> yes. >> your writing is very engaging and very vivid. like patton. i just wanted to ask who are your sources of inspiration in history writing? >> oh, for history writing? ok. i got to say my high school history teacher made me write an essay every week, which was great. [applause] so any high school history teachers. and when i was in college, my last year in college i was in the history honors program and my professor there, francis ferrell, who was ed barr's thesis advisor also, he required us to write tons of papers.

his theory was if you can't explain what you're talking about then you're not doing your job as a historian. his thing was no jargon. simple sentences, don't use the passive voice and no jargon. >> that wouldn't make it in the academy today. we love jor gone. the more difficult it is to understand us, the more brillyanlt. the key to success. >> i'm a lawyer but i'm a trial lawyer and i talk to people. a lot of the cases i try to involve experts and they can go on for days and nobody as any idea what they're talking about. my job in talking to jurors or lay people who don't know this kind of stuff is basically to translate is and make the incomprehensible sound exrensable and also try persuade them that my view is the right one.

>> i'm from mexicoville, pennsylvania. you explained a lot of metz, including myths about casualties. the incorrect idea of grant being like a bull going straight -- straight at lee and things like that what if anything, are the corrections to the record that you made that you're most proud of and is there something that you'd like to -- your readers to take away especially from reading your books. >> i think the main thing they helped change -- and people like peter and others have done as much for it as i have is really what grant was all about. he'd generally been portrayed as a general that would just throw troops at the enemy, no thought so it and -- to it and that's not the case at all. a very thoughtful guy, a guy who was ready to, in many ways break with tradition, do unusual

things but very thoughtful and really a judicious combination of attack and ma nuferse. the other thing i think lee required some evalwhation as well. we mentioned lee was always a general who could read what his opponent was going to do. he couldn't do that with grant. on the other hand, each time he fouled up he was able to come up with a plan that would save his 450eud. he was also very innovative and sharp. i've always thought of each general as getting up in the mirror and seeing their opponent looking back at them. two really sharp generals and dealing with the issues, it's a wonder either one was able to make it to the end. i have high admiration for both of them as general is. >> during this campaign in 1964

-- 1864 there's a presidential campaign going on. did you find much evidence of political organization among the oops, attempts to sway their colleagues in the trenches with them? >> i didn't look a whole lock lot at that. i did look at numerous before the campaign began. southern numerous are fascinating. before the spring of 1864, the southern editorialists were writing about how important it was to defeat lincoln, particularly in virginia. i know one of the atlanta numerous had a story line that said basically the bullets in the campaign of 1864 are going to be the ballots in the presidential election. grant wanted to get his best man in the east, put some spine into

the eastern dandies, defeat lee and bring the war to a close. i didn't, though, look that carefully at what type of politicking was going on by the -- within the units or by the individual soldiers. no. >> thank you. >> uh-huh. yes, sir? >> both lee and grant knew each other. to what extent did knowing each other play into how they fought each other during the campaign? >> yeah, they knew each other but not very well. i don't think their prior knowledge of each other really played any part in what they were doing or how they handled their battles. a lot of the soldier accounts are interesting because they point out -- they argue that grant didn't think much of bobby lee until he finally met him and then saw what he could do and had to change his mind about

bobby lee during these campaigns. i never saw anything from grant that indicated that. i think grant looked at lee as just another good general he was up against and was determined to beat him. >> basically it's research, research, research and do more research on your research. was there a time when you were reading those articles that you just saw something and went this is it! i've been looking for this for a year and a half and i found it. did you ever have that kind of moment? >> not quite like that, but i did -- [laughter] i did get some interesting insight, though, and i have to mention this -- the boston newspapers, the boston evening transcript was an exceptional newspaper during civil war times. during the 1864 campaign it sent a newspaper reporter to each of the union army corpses as well as union headquarters.

you'd have reports each day going to boston that tell you what warren burnside, grant, meade, everybody is thinking and what an aha moment to me was when i was looking at some of the attacks at the spotsylvania courthouse on why grant launched a series of attack on the entire line. i didn't understand until i read some of those articles and one of the reporters had been at headquarters before those attacks took place and basically explained that grant had decided that lee had weakened his line somewhere because he'd moved some forces to support a different part of the line. that's the first time i ran across an explanation and it came from a reporter right there at headquarters. those reporters, by the way, i can't overemphasize the civil war newspapers were reporting what they were learning at

headquarters. often headquarters didn't have an accurate picture of what was going on in the field but just to know what they were thinking explains often what they were doing and things that now look irrational were were often based on intelligence. >> thank you very much. >> yes, sir. >> bob sprague from pennsylvania. an oh, and a question. the oh, -- observation, at 1862 stated rick burg, lee it is good war is so terrible unless we grow too fond of it? the question is this -- in 1864 did we grow too fond of it? >> hmm. you know, i don't know how to answer that, is all i can say. i mean lee viewed decisions about whether the war should go on or stop as political decisions. he didn't get involved in that

his job was to run the army of northern virginia and win battles and he did that as best as he could. i don't know how to answer it any other way. he was sick a lot during these campaigns. not a lot of letters home during these campaigns. >> by we i meant all of us on both side. all of us had grown too fond of killing? >> of killing? i get a sense that by 1864 the war had almost become something that just keeps going on, had almost taken on a life of its own. you see less and less by that time in the war about some of the ideological reasons that people were fighting. either preservation of slavery or union and it's looking more and more like people are fighting because they have to go out and do it or it's for their cause or comrades. you get up in the morning and at night before you cook your meal,

you dig entrenchments and be ready to fight the next morning. >> i think the men are really conflicted. brian gordon quoted letters in a wrote from the overland campaign when he returned home, he wanted his wife to take his uniform and put it in his office and if he ever had a bad day, he could look in the corner and see it. there are worst days. he issued a new uniform and wrote his a wife and that he wished he could take his coat and preserve it and send it home. and the blood of his comrades.

there were moments when these gusted that a that are part of and the exhilarating high that goes back to the book looking at the ruins of destruction. man's capacity to destroy. times thatt clear at it might and power. men.al soldiers taking the the spectacle of it. the spectacle of war. the seductive. you can see the men wrestling with that. >> i was recently at cold harbor and one of the things we talked about was how weatherman able to make another charge? they were making the attacks at cold harbor and it is a 4:30 a.m. in the morning and charging. it is -- militaryk these

sightings are visible. pure pressure to the point you hold up and do some kind of courts-martial internally and it could go beyond. there's a whole new element we often forget. we could do a few more before we have to go. >> which side? lee decidedto why to act as a court commander in a number of these battles. >> why he decided -- >> abandoned after the court commander. >> well, the two examples we look at was the wilderness when the line collapsed and the confederate army was done in and reinforcements come in. lee is right there. my take is he felt like he had

to lead by example. there was a time to really -- this was the high point of the battle and he had to inspire the men as much as possible and he decided to ride ford. forward.- lee goes back and they make their own salt. he did it three time. i think that he realized it is the force of personality to make sure the job gets done. i have seen some historians who a suicideat lee had wish and was trying to kill himself before the confederate because his confederacy wasn't doing. iat does not sound b release knew. -- that does not sound like the robert e lee i knew.

,hen you look at the modern some of the modern portraits of lee we are seeing which is very powerful and moving and i would not mention the artist. i do not find it to be a seductive aliment. we see good men looking forward crystallizingee the moment. it is undeniable. lee was there because his army was fragmented. it had run off. andpopular imagination certainly gives us one-dimensional. to theng one of the lee rear, when the soldiers were calling lee to the rear, one of the soldiers is reported as foolng, and "get to that the hell out of here."

[laughter] >> our last question. >> i am emma. i am a student and an intern. i have a question about civil war memories. the moneymen in for just birth had a humanized -- the monument in fredericksburg has a humanized feel. have you been able to see that your research of the wilderness, does it prove that how the wilderness or carnage, possibly not as injured in that kind of warfare or battle because it does not have that humanlike loo k? who comer of people into fredericksburg is much higher than wilderness and cold harbor. bloodbath we have added a battle keeping people

away doesn't have the lovey-dovey version? >> i never thought of it that way. that is an element. i know that a couple of reasons the battlefield there at transylvania and cold harbor is not that well visited is that there are not many monuments, the better. spread out and not a land so it is hard to get a grasp. monuments, and they are spread out and not on land so it is hard to get a grasp. it is very complex and a lot of people moving around and doing a lot of things. it is hard to figure out unless you take a tour with an organized group. for a lot of those reasons, people do not visit that much. the camaraderie between union soldiers and the confederate soldiers when that would take

little breaks from murdering each other is fascinating. began, theycampaign are separated by the river in northern virginia, central virginia. throughout of the winter, they are trading tobacco for coffee and all kind of accounts of the soldiers getting along great. within days, they are slaughtering each other. at cold harbor after the huge assaults and massive casualties by the seventh of june, h reuss is worked out and there's a cease-fire that last for a few hours. truce isss -- a r worked out there's a cease-fire that last for a few hours. they start trading tobacco for coffee. they did not find out anything about the troops or how they were positioned. taking ake old friend break and saw each other again. the truce ends and moments

later, they are killing each other again. that is a strange -- it is a sense of militarization. the turn of the century. it manifested itself during the war. it is a fraternity when it comes to issues. no agreement between the lines. and we are going through our suffering on the battlefield that nobody else can understand. >> good news, gordon. he will write one more volume from cold harbor. >> it is getting near completion. [applause] >> thank you so much, gordon. >> you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook.