you may have going into battle, and all of a sudden, it stops immediately. it just ends. that whole process that you have gotten used to physically, emotionally, mentally, is now gone and you come home with the memories of it, with the good memories of the war, with the negative memories of the war, and possibly psychological or physical repercussions that the war itself had caused. for historians it's difficult in terms of chronicling these particular stories about veterans and their difficulties after the war, and for a few reasons is because civil war folks were very good at writing everything down in letters and diary entries during the war. they chronicled every bad piece of hard tack they ate, every raindrop that fell, every battle and every moment that they spent on guard duty, but then they come home. they're not chronicling the war in that amount of significant detail as they had previously. and so we are left with only those who kept writing diary

entries to actually tell us what all of this means in the grand scope of things. the other thing is that some confederates we can say well, we can go to the pension files, these documents when confederate soldiers will fill out documents to get money and prospects which we will talk about in a few minutes but those files in many ways are incomplete. they are also hidden from public view. in fact, some states actually still have medical seals on these documents because they contain private details. medical details, about family members that you don't want necessarily to go public. so for the veterans who came home psychologically disturbed, some of them turned to alcohol abuse, some to drug abuse, particularly opium. we also see some contemplate and actually commit suicide. bill hicks is one of these guys. he was described as the pristine man if you will, colossus in form. he lost a leg in the battle of shilo in 1862. he came home to a law practice that seemed promising but wasn't

that great overall. every day, hicks thought about that leg that he had lost in the war. it preyed on him until according to one of his friends, he had no choice but to blow out his brains because he didn't want to live the rest of his life as [ inaudible ]. another veteran who had severely beaten his child to take out some of his frustrations actually stood in front of the mirror and then put a revolver to his temple and fired. charles meninger wrote who had his businesses fail economically with debts and wounds decided to end his life on a drug overdose. these are extreme responses albeit but i think they give us some sense of the level of death and despair that veterans are facing. in fact, i don't think it's a coincidence that historians now are looking at all of these darker issues if you will of the american civil war, this dark turn particularly because of what our own service men and women are facing now as they return home from iraq and afghanistan. i think those of you who like to

read a lot about the civil war will see over the next five to ten years quite a bit of literature on those who lost limbs, those who ended up in mental institutions, those who were homeless or abused drugs or alcohol, because they didn't find ways to adjust back. because it's very easy i think for historians when they write the grand narrative of american history to end the civil war chapter on appomattox, the war comes to conclusion, reconciliation, reunion is beginning and you turn the next page and it's reconstruction. there is no if you will continued stories of those individuals who were in the midst of the war as they tried to transition home. you can imagine if you came home with an injury like these confederate veterans here that you see on the screen. the amount of chronic pain that you are going to have to deal with on a daily basis. southerners weren't supposed to complain. this is part of their sort of southern mantra of what makes them men. they are not supposed to tell all their friends how awful their injuries are, they are not

supposed to complain. they are supposed to do it in stoic silence. yet that pain is going to be now a constant part of their life. wounds that go from time to time to leak a little bit of pus. maybe a stump that wasn't perfectly formed and the bone inside decides one day while you're trying to walk down a set of stairs to poke back through the skin and create constant, constant pain. a ringing in your ears that was caused by all of the artillery shells that exploded next to you during the war that never seemed to subside. constant headaches that blurred vision. others even had the sensation that their limbs were still a part of their body. we call this phantom limb or sensory hallucination disorder today. in fact, i was able to uncover two cases of this. one confederate veteran who awoke crying in a hospital and he said i thought i was sleeping with my little brother at home and my foot, the one that was cut off, itched and i tried to

rub it against the other and my foot was not there, just this stump. it seems strange that in terms of the sensory hallucination it was usually in fingers, toes, feet and hands. you wouldn't necessarily feel that your whole leg was there, but you would still feel those toes or that foot maybe itching and trying to scratch it and it didn't exist. then all of a sudden, you have this horrific visualization, this realization that that limb is not coming back. another case of a guy in a hospital bed, he would always sort of quick flip over on his body and constantly, and the patient next to him asked, got up the gumption to ask him why are you always rolling so quickly in the middle of the night. he said that he always had this scratch on one side of his back and he would flip over so his arm could scratch it except the arm wasn't there any longer. it had been removed from the war. a constant reminder he had to deal with that he was going to be an amputee. these confederate veterans, particularly those who are disabled, become in many ways

living symbols of what that defeat meant for the confederacy itself. they are the constant reminders both them themselves and for society at large, who is going to look at them on a daily basis. you can imagine for southerners who have these proscribed notions of what southern manhood is and southern womanhood and how are they going to deal with these dilapidated bodies, altered forms of manhood who also went off to war to prove themselves as true honorable men but come home defeated and now have symbols of that defeat. southerners in some ways remain in flux over how to deal with their veterans. in macon, georgia shortly after the end of the civil war, the newspaper reported that one night, a gentleman got drunk and passed out on the streets of macon, georgia and two kids ages 9 and 11 saw him on the street, picked up a rusty saw and sawed off his leg. well, actually what they did was they sawed off his prosthetic

leg, his wooden leg he had attached which seems like a really strange phenomenon but the newspapers in macon pointed out that these children had depicted and been part of one of the great depravties of the age, if you will, that they had done this to this particular confederate veteran who had served in the war but then done something that had gone against the constructs of how southerners were expected to behave in society. you should be able to control your liquor. you are not going to go out and get drunk in a bar and pass out drunk on the streets and so some ways this was the children sort of reminding this gentleman look, this is not how a real southern man behaves, but at the same time, it is these children not understanding that he was a veteran, that he had given a part of his body in the cause of the war itself. so for these who are coming home disheveled and distraught, they have to find some sort of economic opportunity to move forward. most veterans worked, confederate soldiers who went off to war were doing manual

labor jobs, farming was the largest occupation of most confederate soldiers. they are going to come home and go back to the fields that their wives or other family members tended while they were away at war but if you were physically disabled, can you keep doing that same level of manual labor? there's a case in georgia, a confederate veteran who had lost a leg and his wife would literally just take him out to the plow and tie him to it so he could actually just steer the plow itself but would have to rely on the animals to move the plow forward. another worker who ended up in a tobacco warehouse could only work a few hours a day because he could barely stand on the one leg that he had. it was just too painful. other educational opportunities would spring up, in fact, a few southern states, virginia, georgia and mississippi, will offer free classes for wounded veterans to allow you to get an education and even become a teacher. but not everyone's cut out for being educators. james frazier is one of these

men who lost a limb during the war. in fact, he was described that he did not have a very enviable life after the civil war. he came home and decided to take up teaching but he routinely lashed out at his students because they were always texting on their phones or playing candy crush or candy crush soda now with the little gummy bears you have to get to float to the top. maybe that's why he lashed at them. no, it was the reality that he could not bear to deal with this chronic pain that he constantly had and this reminder of failure. so then frazier ended up meeting a woman and they fell in love and they got married, but then she shortly died and then he actually ends up in court because he was accused of beating her children, his now stepchildren, because in many ways, he just couldn't handle his new reality of dealing with failure in the aftermath of the american civil war. of course, i think one of the best places maybe, if you are an amputee and looking for a potential job, is to run for political office.

in fact, you can use that to garner sympathy. there are cases throughout the post-war period of veterans running, missing arms, missing legs, this is always noted in sort of their campaign bios that you would see appearing in the newspapers and they would emphasize that over and over again. one of these guys is francis ni nichols who is a double amputee that we see on the screen. because so much of him had been physically damaged during the war, some reporters actually questioned whether the constituents in louisiana should be willing to vote for a man in this physical condition to be governor of their state. and nichols thought about it and he said well, i guess they can just vote for whatever's left of me to hold the governorship of louisiana. which they will do twice. he will actually serve two terms as governor in louisiana. but large veterans -- large numbers of veterans, though, are not going to have those political opportunities, those

educational opportunities or able to transition back into manual labor. they are going to have to beg for work and find signs everywhere that say no main confederate need apply. one veteran in louisiana noted a man with one arm cannot be expected to ever make as much as two. when that becomes your financial reality, when you cannot find a job, you end up begging on the streets for money. this is one particular confederate veteran who was -- became a fixture on the capitol steps of austin, texas in the post-war years. every day as legislators would sort of come into their offices to debate the bills for the legislature in the state of texas, he would be out front as you can see selling pencils, hoping to elicit a little bit of sympathy from those legislators who would buy some pencils and then allow him to survive. as you can see, he is missing a leg, he has just sort of this wooden sort of device, peg leg

that's attached for a place to hold the stump in, but it's not going to be very comfortable, it's certainly not one of these advanced prosthetic limbs. it's a strange irony that this man is sort of here on these steps begging legislators for money, because in many ways, the legislators had not done him any service. texas was a state that did not give their confederate veterans any prosthetic limbs and waited several decades to actually extend pension benefits. he is in this particular case, if you will, this part of life, because the legislators had not done anything to assist him, to help him transition back into society. a doctor who saw this veteran on numerous occasions on the capitol steps wrote this about him. poor old confed, despised old rebel. they told you a wound would be an honor and you a hero. cruel mockery, bitter deception, your life blood shed, your youth wasted all in vain. these groups of beggers started popping up all over the streets

of southern cities. confederate veterans begging for money just so they could survive. the city of new orleans in particular had decided to crack down on this large number of beggers in the streets of the french quarter, particularly because the wealthy members of new orleans society did not want to interact with these men on a daily basis. so in 1883, the city of new orleans holds an event known as the corraling of the cripples as it was announced in the newspapers, where city officials went through the streets rounded up all those beggers, the wounded veterans, and put them in the shakes spears alms house. when they put them away, they realized many of them were confederate veterans who had no other options to survive in society other than to beg for money. so these cities started to actually transition the laws a little bit where they would say no begging allowed on the streets unless you are a confederate veteran. that was the loophole. so how do you prove yourself a confederate veteran when somebody comes by and says do you have the right to beg for

money here? do you show them your confederate i.d. card that you got during the war? well, they didn't have them. you show your uniform. that's your clearest marker of your identity. but what we find is cases of men who stole uniforms, who bought uniforms from confederate men who had been injured and disabled through other means and then now putting on that uniform, sitting on a street corner and pretending to be a confederate veteran. identity theft going on in the post civil war period, if you will. why these men have to beg is because the 14th amendment that was added on the constitution in 1868 had a clear provision, section four prohibits the united states government from paying any financial obligations that tied directly to the aid of those who participated in the rebellion against the united states. so the 14th amendment bars confederate veterans from getting any limbs, prosthetic limbs that the union government was -- had been processing and

giving to union amputees, it bars them from collecting a pension from the united states government, which becomes huge in the post-war period. in fact, 40% of the united states' budget in the 1890s is going to pay pensions for union veterans. so confederates themselves are left to the wills of the states themselves. so the first area that we see in terms of assistance for these men, particularly those who are disabled and injured, is in the form of giving them prosthetic limbs. but as you can see, not every southern state will actually participate. north carolina will be the first, georgia, mississippi, south carolina, virginia, alabama and louisiana will come on board by 1880. now, in order to get a prosthetic limb, you had to fill out an extensive application for this limb. where you had to give your details about who you are, but you also had to prove that first, you lost your limb in the american civil war. it wasn't that you lost your limb before or after.

it had to be a direct result of your military participation. you had to prove that by having a doctor or if you could find your regimental surgeon from the war, a lot of these guys came from the same communities, so you could go find him and say hey, can you be my eyewitness, can you sign off that i actually lost my limb during the war. the second thing you had to prove is that you left the war in an honorable state. what we mean by that is you didn't quick run away. you didn't flee your post. you actually surrendered when you were forced to surrender, when the union armies made the confederacy capitulate, if you will. that you went through this honorable discharge, you didn't run away, you didn't escape. you had to prove that you honorably left the war. so those who maybe fled after their injuries or didn't have the proper paperwork would have a hard time getting a prosthetic limb. so in order to figure out well, how many limbs do you actually need. like state governments who decide okay, we are going to do a prosthetic limb program, they would actually send out census

takers to go to communities all across the south, that particular state, and count how many amputees so they could come back and give the state governments a financial figure so they would know how much money they would need to buy these prosthetic limbs. limbs can be expensive, particularly legs, it can go anywhere from $75 to $150 at the time. prosthetic arms, $50 to $75 usually in that range. we see the legs coming first, particularly because of a mobility issue. if you give somebody a prosthetic leg, it helps them move a little bit. but then some begin to write into their state government saying wouldn't it be nice to have a prosthetic arm in many ways to help hide that injury, just to create some more comfort, whether emotionally or physically so they will be added a little bit later. so how do you get your limb? well, you end up going to usually a major city, one -- a lot of times it was the state capital where one of these prosthetic limb manufacturers had been set up. and you would ride the train there, they would usually pay

your train fare to go. you would ge go into the offices. they would measure your stump, then they would craft a prosthetic limb on the spot for you and then put it on, see how it fit, make sure it was a little bit -- that it was comfortable for you, then send you on your way back home. it was a pretty big ordeal for you to actually go and participate in getting one of these prosthetic devices. i think in some ways when we think of prosthetic limbs, particularly in the 19th century we are thinking of peg legs. actually this post-war period is one of these renaissances if you will in prosthetic limb manufacturing. there are dozens of patents, we have like the clements patent leg right here where you can see joints are being created at the knee that actually allow flexibility of an artificial knee joint and they are even starting to do them in the ankles as well, to create an artificial achilles so you actually will be able to have that much motion in your prosthetic leg. you can imagine if you have seen prosthetic devices that are available today, like oscar pistorius, the blade runner and

the cheetah blades that allow men and women to move at rapid paces on prosthetic limbs, a lot of that technology got started right here in the aftermath of the civil war. to the point where we can see in this before and after picture it's really hard to tell this is what this guy actually looks like in real life. then you put on his two prosthetic legs that fit perfectly, cover it with your pants legs and he can go off into society without any major difficulties. lots of veterans liked their prosthetic legs a lot. they wore them out. some complained about them. they said well, one veteran said his wife could always hear him coming. she always knew where he was in the house, because of the noise that it made. if you were trying to maybe hide from your wife when she has something for you to do, that's probably not the best course of action to move forward. but if you didn't want the prosthetic limb, you could always take a one-time cash payment. so imagine being that confederate veteran who lost a leg or an arm, and you're left

with that choice. do i want this for my mobility, for my comfort, maybe to help me in my job prospects, maybe just so people don't always look at me funny because i'm missing a limb, or would you take the cash payment to help your family immediately or at least for the next few months. this becomes one of these great debates that many internally have to deal with. governors in some states, we saw that there were only seven southern states so that leaves the rest of the bunch that was not interested in supporting confederate disability. one governor particularly in arkansas said honoring the enemies of the united states by conferring rewards for them for services rendered as soldiers when fighting against the government and the armies of the union is certainly not supporting the constitution of the united states or the constitution of the state acting in harmony therewith. so you have states actively debating should we actually give prosthetic limbs to men who were

traitors, particularly as unionist sentiment in some of these states boils up in the debates in the state legislators. so there's a second mode of assistance and that is the construction of veterans' homes. that will appear both north and south. today's lecture mostly focuses on the confederacy but we will see a lot of these same things going on all across the united states in the post-war period. a lot of the homes were initially set up by private donors so you would have fund-raising efforts in communities to raise the money to construct the house and then actually staff the house and fill it with the furnishings and the items you would need, where veterans could ge and spend out their post-war years. the texas veteran home was in austin. virginia had one and they named it after robert e. lee. andrew jackson's home, the her mittage was actually turned into a veterans home for a period of time. if you were in new orleans on the east side of the french quarter, on esplanade avenue, there was the big home in new orleans for confederate veterans. kentucky's home was in the

pee-wee valley in this beautiful area out of louisville that gave veterans a great place to relax, take in the fresh air and live a life, if you will, with some medical ease, if you will. now, there was some debates particularly about these homes if the states should actually support them and then what kind of men would be allowed in one of these homes. again, you had to fill out the paperwork, talk about that your injury came from the war itself and again, that honorable departure from the war itself. in fact, some of these homes even had a debate about some men who asked that their wife be allowed to come along and live with them at the home. some said is that appropriate, should she actually live with you at the home. these are the questions that in many ways gummed up the assistance that many of these veterans needed in transitioning back to life. land grants become the third area of assistance but they are limited. only two states will really take on large plots of land that veterans could be eligible to

take. the first was louisiana, which provided 160 acres of land to injured veterans. texas offered 1,280 acre land plots to injured or disabled veterans who could prove that they could not support their families. so it's not just the normal process of i got injured in the war, i was a good soldier, i honorably discharged, but you also had to prove that you were economically not in a position where you needed that plot of land to survive. so imagine being an amputee or severely injured man who is now going to get 1,280 acres in west texas, a lot of these were designed to move settlement populations, so texas, a lot of the population was concentrated in one particular region. this is to move people to western texas to central texas, to get them out of the coastal areas and some of the communities where they had been settled for large periods of time. would you want 1,280 acres of

land? what are you going to do with that plot of land, particularly if you're by yourself or if your kid aren't interested in helping you farm? it's really difficult to actually turn that plot of land into something sustainable. we will still see dozens of people fill out these applications and go through the process and get these land grants but they still are not in terms of as effective as prosthetic limb programs or going to a veterans home. but the big area is the pension application. the payment of cash offered four times a year, quarterly payments for the rest of your life. just because you had served in the military. again, the same sort of process, where each state will create a pension program and then confederate veterans had to again fill out the application, talk about their honorable military service, the nature and condition of their injuries. a lot of time you had to be very very specific so you literally

had to relive your injury. well, i was at this particular battle and i got shot in the right leg and this doctor cut it off at the field hospital. you had to relive that particular injury and you had to prove it in as much specific detail as possible with your eyewitnesss there on board to say yes, he got injured in the war, he is an honorable man, he deserves to have this pension for the rest of his -- of your life. you also had to prove that pensions bawere part of an economic discussion so you had to prove you didn't have enough property, you had a low amount of money, you had no means of survival so you could now become a ward of the state. for southerners, you being dependent on state government for assistance was considered the absolute opposite of what every southern man was supposed to be. it wasn't wide-scale assistance in this form before the american civil war because as men, southern men, you are the breadwinner of the family. you take care of your wife and

children in order to master them and be an honorable gentleman. now you are relying on the state government and you have to beg them for money? so at least for the state government's point of view, they had to make sure these men were at least being as honorable as possible in order to now collect this money. but these debates are pretty ferocious in the state legislatures and particularly when you have gorn governors or legislators who don't believe confederate veterans should get anything at all. the government of florida called a pension program simply evil because of the traitors who had been involved in this process. tennessee would do nothing then until 1883 and their first pension program was only for people who were blinded by the civil war and not just blinded, you had to lose both of your eyes. so not just blind in one eye but two eyes is where their pension programs began. arkansas didn't do anything until 1891. texas, 1899. kentucky was the last southern

state that sent confederates off to the war to do a pension program and they did theirs in 1912. we are talking 50 years after the civil war. i'm not a math major. those of you watching at home will have to count on your hands. but those are decades after these men have come home where they literally have spent years without any financial assistance or at least recognition from the state government that they had gone through such difficulties. yes? we have a question? >> not really a question. more like an observation. where it seems that a lot of those state governments, especially in the south, i can get how yeah, you went to war, you lost a limb, that's honorable. the whole pension thing probably due to how i was raised, i find that it's a lot more honorable to admit that you need help than it's such a dishonor, oh, wow,

you need help. such a blemish of honor to your family and yourself. i find it more honorable to admit that hey, you actually do need help. you are admitting that you need help. you're the bigger man. >> right. you can see, in particular, the process that you have to go through not just to admit it to yourself and put on it paper that somebody's going to read in a government office, but you have to get those eyewitnesses to say the same sorts of things here to sort of solidify that in many ways. yeah. leroy? you have a question? >> so the people that are in the state houses in the south obviously didn't fight in the war in any capacity if they're thinking these confederate veterans are not worthy. so who are they? are they northern implants? >> well, what will help these debates along is when you have those who are amputated individuals or injured veterans who actually get into state office roles. one of the reasons kentucky's

pension program actually gets passed in 1912 is because they have a disabled vet, confederate veteran elected governor who makes this his sort of calling card and is going to actually sign that particular pension program. but particularly in this sort of flux years in the immediate aftermath of the civil war you have some republicans who are being elected to state legislatures as they go through this process of republicans sort of filling state houses during reconstruction, where they are not interested in extending confederate aid. it's going to take until the years after the democratic legislatures come back into office, but then you have places like texas where the democrats have been in power, but then there's questions of fraud. what if people pretend to be confederate soldiers and forge those documents that we saw in the previous screen? should the state government be willing to give that much money out with the potential for fraud? then you have others who are sort of wondering the same thing about is it constitutional for our state to even give money to

confederate veterans? does our state constitution, if you are a strict constructionist can you do something like here in georgia which determined the amount of money you would be paid per year in the pension program based on your injuries. so both eyes are worth $150 a year or $30 for one eye, your hearing loss, $30, entire foot or leg, $100, entire hand or arm, both hands and arms so double amputees will get $150 in various gings combinations as you can see the legislature made sure all bases were covered. if you have a limb that doesn't work, that's just functionally just there but it doesn't have any functionality, that will be worth $50. every finger or toe, $5. any other injury, this is sort of the umbrella category here that prevented manual applications of life, were worth $50. again, you had to provide the documentation. you had to prove it and then the state pension board who was reviewing these documents then had to give you clearance. yes, bethney?

>> so was it just physical ailments that they got pensions for? was it like psychological? i guess you would call it shell-shock? >> or ptsd. no. there was no sort of diagnosis of that at the time period. so these were just physical injuries themselves. later, you will see some confederate veterans apply for pensions because they will claim their experience in the war created this new disability. they had marched and marched and their feet hurt during the war. the war had created this nagging physical condition. it was only physical, nothing emotional. even though we clearly have evidence of signs of this stress there was no financial reward, no counseling available to these particular veterans. this is some dark stuff. this is clearly people suffering. and it doesn't match in many ways our societal perceptions of the south post-civil war. particularly if you drive around the south today. you see very very different

images of southern veterans from the war themselves. in fact, when i was a kid we drove around these battlefields and we went to places and every southern town that we went in to go to arby's, we loved arby's for our family food on our vacations, we would drive by the confederate monument or we would go to manassas and see stonewall jackson looking like he participated in a home run derby with his horse looking at muscular as well. these are southern men looking very strong, very proud. you have no sense of suffering coming from these monuments themselves that are scattered all over the southern landscape. this is actually one of my favorite monuments that has been constructed probably on any battlefield. this one is at shilo. it's sort of the lost cause monument if you will of what happened in the battle of shilo. this is sort of the southern interpretation. this sits right at the location of where the hornet's nest was defended, the pivotal part of

the first day's action. you can see the focus of the monument which is pretty long length-wise is the center figure itself. in the middle, we actually have the embodiment of defeat. and she is in the middle there, and she is standing on both sides by darkness on one side and death, death ois the right with his head down, darkness is sort of looking like a jedi, when he was turning into darth vader, "star wars" in theaters in less than a month. maybe this is a "star wars" monument. talk about lost causes. anyway, she is handing the wreath from darkness to defeat because in many ways, when the battle of shilo ends, and johnson has been killed, his image is right below the monument, when he turns over command to beauregard, who is

very confident at the end of the first day they are going to win a major victory here and the next morning, as light rises from the darkness, grant's armies, the reinforcements have come in and sweep the confederates off the field. the confederate soldiers are embodied on both sides of the monument themselves representing the southern soldiers who participated in the battle, but what's interesting is there's 11 on one side and one less on the other side showing the amount of casualties that have been inflicted by the battle itself. then we also have embodiments of soldiers on both sides, on the left side we have an infantry man holding a confederate flag and defiant artillery man next to his side. on the right side we have the head bowed of one particular soldier -- officer into submission because he wasn't able to secure the battle for the confederacy and a cavalry man who looks very frustrated because he hadn't been involved in the war. these things, these monuments, these embodiments of confederate

soldiers and officers and the interpretation of the war itself become the main focal point for southerners in the post-war period. they are not as interested in particularly granting immediate medical support and care for their veterans. instead, they want to make sure that their side of the story ends up being the dominant narrative moving forward here. this is the lost cause. one of my favorite stories about the lost cause is a guy by the name of james elizar who grew up in the south, hearing tales from his grandfather, a civil war veteran. his grandfather told him so many great details about the war. but when he turned 12, he had this moment of horror that made him cry, because it all of a sudden dawned on him that the civil war went beyond the battle of chancellorsville. his grandfather had painted this grand narrative of the confederates winning battle after battle after battle and

ended the war at chancellorsville. it was one of the saddest awakens i ever had. i listened to grandpa tell of whipping the lard out of the yankees on a dozen battlefields, the matchless jackson cutting the enemy ranks to pieces. it watts when i got to the point in our history book, gettysburg, that i discovered the bewildering fact that the south had lost the war. this discovery made me depressed for days. the term lost cause was coined by edward pallor, a writer in 1866, in his piece the lost cause, a new southern history. this becomes sort of the dominant intellectual narrative that will drive southerners in their remembrance of the american civil war in the post-war years. here's some of the things that they are going to emphasize. they are going to do this by writing textbooks about the civil war, so when you get to that chapter on the civil war, you are going to read these sorts of things about the american civil war, not what you would be reading in northern

textbooks during the war. you would also see this embodied in monuments like we saw at shilo. shilo, remember, according to that monument, the south lost the battle because albert sidney johnson died and it got dark. those were the reasons. it wasn't anything else embodied by that particular monument. it was those elements itself. so you as a goer to the battlefield would see that and be able to understand that particular interpretation. slavery is not the cause of the american civil war and the lost cause. this is states' rights, this is tariff issues. african-americans were faithful slaves. they supported the confederate cause. they were not prepared for freedom. they may not have even wanted to be free individuals. so our embodiments that we see with lost cause cinema in popular culture of mammy and uncle tom embodied in those sentiments. the south only lost the war because they were defeated by superior numbers and resources

in the united states. forget all those disaster battles where confederate officers screwed up royally. no, it's superior numbers, industrial might that the union had that is the reason for failure. southern women remained loyal to the cause. there is no disillusionment, that richmond bread riot's not getting a major section here. the women writing to their husbands come home, the war is over, you're not going to see that document emphasized in the southern textbooks. and they did not give up their honor when they failed to win the war. so just because you lose the war it doesn't demasculinize you if you will. you are still an honorable good solid gentleman and to prove that, we are going to give you the embodiment of robert e. lee and stonewall jackson who are going to appear on all of these monuments and we are not going to necessarily celebrate those other confederate generals who didn't do quite as well. so you're not going to see a lot of accolades of oh, let's put

john bell hood and braxton bragg on great big monuments. you are not going to see those efforts. instead it's going to emphasize the honorable, noble lee and jackson. jackson, who died in the war, giving a limb for the cause, and robert e. lee, who was overwhelmed by superior numbers. it makes them in many ways larger than life. dominant figures that dominate the post-war period. and this becomes the cause, if you will. veterans groups like the united confederate veterans which will form about the late 1880s, early 1890s, will be all about the textbook battles. they will get very angry at the yankee publishers and what their side of the story written so southern children learn the true side of the war. other organizations are going to honor the graves of the dead or give long tactical speeches on figuring out why the south lost the war and they are usually going to blame not robert e. lee, not stonewall jackson, but

james longstreet, lee's honorable -- well, not so honorable in the lost cause, core commander at gettysburg and throughout the war. longstreet, it will be his fault that gettysburg didn't turn out the way it was. after all, longstreet was in charge of the men, he's the next guy on the totem pole, like the ceo deciding he's not going to resign but blaming the vice president and throw him under the bus. it also hurt poor james longstreet that he was a republican and he actually got a position during the grant administration so he may not have been politically aligned with many individuals who were thinking about the lost cause. i think this in many ways becomes the struggle for historians going forward in that the lost cause doesn't have a lot of room for injured veterans, for distraught widows, for orphaned children. when you would have these organizations sort of spring up, they would put in their mission statements like the united confederate veterans that they were all about raising money to take care of that generation

that had been destroyed by the war, but then they would use all that money then to go build a monument on a battlefield, to go construct gigantic monuments or even to go in battle to hire authors to write textbooks after the war. for others, these organizations, because they are not representing their own personal pain and damage, they don't want to spend the money. they don't want to go and attend yearly reunions to have to relive these injuries on a daily basis. and this is an important i think juxtaposition moment in that sort of post-war history, that we have an entire group of veterans who are struggling and they don't fit these nicely pat, neat narratives. notice that the lost cause in many ways, it's hard to argue around it in terms of if you're wanting to nit-pick particular elements, you just have to actually argue the exact opposite. so it becomes a pretty sort of standard set of talking points as the post-war history is constructed.

and this, plus state governments who are lacks da days:lacks dayd those who aren't interested in supporting their veterans makes this very difficult. thank you all so much for your attention today and for participating. american history tv on c-span 3. this weekend on saturday afternoon at 2:00 eastern, jeffrey rosen talks about the influence of former chief justice john marshall. >> adams famously said my gift of john marshall to the people of the united states was the proudest act of my life. and marshall has been widely praised for transforming the supreme court into what his by grapher john edward smith calls a dominant force in american life. >> at 10:00 on real america -- >> roger.

>> the roll will put the shuttle on its precise heading toward an imaginary target in space. >> the 1981 nasa documentary space shuttle, a remarkable flying machine, on the two-day maiden voyage of the space shuttle "columbia." on road to the white house rewind, the 1968 campaign film for republican presidential candidate richard nixon. >> i have decided that i will test my ability to win and my ability to cope with the issues in the fires of the primaries. and not just in the smoke-filled room of miami. >> and at 1:00, a panel of authors on their recent books chronicling mexican american civil rights from the 1930s to the 1970s. >> this coalition of labor unions, mexican american civil rights leaders and religious authorities came together to protest the exploitation of the

program and in fact, accelerated congress's decision to terminate it the next year in 1964. and i think this was a moment of blossoming for the movement. >> for the complete weekend schedule, go to c-span.org.

by their victory this evening, and we have a further surprise in the form of tonight's speaker. a person who many of you know probably quite well. dennis e. frye is the chief historian of the harper's ferry national historic park.

indeed, this is a homecoming of sorts for dennis because he graduated from shepherd with a b.a. in history. one of the most outstanding students the university has had. we are extremely excite tod have him back here this evening. he has had a very long, varied and prestigious career. indeed if i were to kind of recite his entire cv i think we would be here until 7:00 or 8:00 this evening. i will just give you a shortened version of all his accomplishments over the past several decades. dennis is a writer, a lecturer, a guide and a preservationist. he is indeed a prominent civil war historian. dennis has had numerous appearances on pbs, the history channel, the discovery channel, and a&e as a guest historian. and he helped produce emmy award winning fell vision programs such as the battle of ant knee

yum. he's also remarkably one of the nation's leading civil war battlefield preservationists. hi is co-founder and first president of the save historic foundation and he is co-founder and former president of today's civil war trust. from whom he received the trust's high es honor. dennis has also earned the prestigious nevins freeman award for his lifetime achievements in the civil war community. dennis is a tour guide in great demand, leading tourists in organizations such as the smithsonian, national geographic, numerous colleges and universities and civil war round tables. tennis is also a well known author. he has published remarkably 95 articles and nine books.

harper's ferry under fire we have received the national book award from the association of partners of public lands and september suspension, lincoln's union in barrel was awarded the 2012 laney book prize for distinguished scholarship in writing on the military and political history of the war. dennis has rin for civil war magazines such as civil wartimes illustrated, america's civil war, blue and gray magazine, north and south magazine and hallowed ground. he's also served as a guest contributor to "the washington post." dennis resides nearby at the battlefield where he and his wife sylvia have restored the home used by general andrew burnside as his post ante tum headquarters. it gives me great pleasure to welcome this evening dennis frye. can you welcome -- join me in welcoming dennis. >> thank you.

appreciate it. it's a great pleasure to return here to shepherd. when he's talking about decades, plural, i wasn't even finished in my second decade when i started here. i was a 17-year-old actually. and it was 40 years ago, 1975, 40 years ago that i began here in shepherd when i was in if college. and, in fact, i was reminiscing a little earlier this afternoon as i was sitting here at the school. we had a great football team then. we didn't go undefeated, but we had a great football team. we had an excellent basketball team under bob stark key. one year, i think we went 33-337 one of the best college records in the united states. and we had great academic professors here at the time. i'm a home grown boy as most of you know. lived just across the river here in washington county. grew up only a few miles from

the antietam battlefield. eshepherd as always been special to me. it's great to return here this evening to be here in the bird center. i knew senator bird well. i did quite a number of tours and programs for him at harper's ferry national park when he would come and visit. and he became a big ally in helping preserve civil war battlefields. a really great honor to be here at shepherd, my home school. i'm so thankful that 40 years ago i was taki