>> author and professor gary gallagher discusses questions stemming from robert e. lee's surrender to ulysses s grant in appomattox in 1816 five. -- 1865. he analyzes if appomattox was the definitive end of the civil war and looks at the wartime goals of the union and if they were achieved. this talk was part of a daylong symposium and now, is the director of center forw -- nau

civil war studies at uva. a popular speaker that he allows organizations like ours to work him way too hard. but we do it anyway. .e flew in a few hours ago he was jetting up here from florida, where he was speaking at another conference. we do feel a little guilty for asking him back so soon. gary is not only a prolific speaker and author, but a popular battlefield guide, one of the leaders in the preservation movement, an and onenning teacher, of the most important mentors of graduate students in civil war history. as i noted when i introduced hey at the 2014 symposium, dedicated his prize-winning book his graduater" to

students at penn state and the university of virginia with admiration for their contributions to the field. i know his students reciprocate that admiration. as just an example of what gary had done for the next generations of historians, our previous speaker is just one example. we owe it to gary to put in a applause for his latest work, the recently released book, " the e-textook, american civil war." gary to bate asked cleanup.

ladies and gentlemen, gary gallagher. [applause] feels't think he guilty about anything, but he pretends well sometimes. first fewi missed the talks this morning. i did start my day in gainesville. begin with my hat as director -- i want to extend my symposium.all of the oday, we are a cosponsor for this symposium. wethe months role ahead, work with the folks here again multiple times and i suspect we will.

we did exchange a lot of e-mails, didn't we? here are my two questions. first, should we consider grant's acceptance the crucial event that signaled the effective end of the conflict? i raise this in light of a good deal of scholarship that extends it far beyond april and may 1865. was there a possible revolutionary change regarding race and black rights-of-way

give the conflict? the key to understanding this lies in accepting whether most of the white north believe the war had settled two momentous issues, saving the union, killing the institution of slavery, and the same white northern population really did not care very much about extending anything we would call equal rights to the freed people. those are questions and i will take them up in that order. it's hard for me to stand behind a podium. be walking around and doing things. but here i am. if i seem a little out of sorts, that's why. i may need help, i'm not going to get it today. gideon welles is always a good place to start.

on april 10, diary 1865, about news regarding u.s. the previous army day. the tidings were spread all over the country during the night. the nation seems delirious with joy. the surrender of the great virtuallyptain terminates the rebellion. well predicted there would be some continued quote, marauding and murder, but no conflict of armies after the news of reachesy's surrender the various sections. one day later, george templeton of the observant new yorker whose dire a ranks among the best of all 19th century accounts we have, suggested in clipped sentences that the demise of lee's army carried decisive weight.

lee is out of the game. start channeling ernest hemingway, except hemingway had not been born yet. other than that, he is anticipating him. chronicle therd life of the confederacy as it welles andhoed strong. i will put a brief plug here for pollard. pollard's volumes are a vastly underused source. source int a primary

different ways. i think it should get more attention than it does. instructiveully about innumerable dimensions of the confederate war. it deserves a really good modern, scholarly edition. somebody should do that with pollard. that's the end of my commercial for pollard. well and strong and pollard anticipated how most americans would understand the end of the civil war. they would put appomattox in a prominent position in their understanding of the end of the war. an increasing number of scholars have questioned whether lee's surrender should be reckoned a

decisive indicator of confederate national failure and the practical and of the conflict. this builds on a phenomenon that has been present for a number of years and seeks to empathize postwar violence in the former ,onfederacy and the conflicts other enduring consequences which were many and profound. within this chronological reframing, awarded not end at oromattox or durham station appomattox, durham station, citronelle and new orleans. it did not and with those iconic military surrenders that came in a group. it continued through reconstruction, or through the jim crow era, or down to the present, the war that never ended. fewe" magazine's cover a years ago, it had lincoln on the

front with a tear rolling down his cheek. and read that article, you will get a nice sense of no, the war did not end then. it is still going on. a disproportionate number of authors and readers have borrowed ever more deeply into sumter andbetween appomattox. thereby robbing the conflict of needed context. a longer perspective works against a focus on appomattox. it was appomattox alongside gettysburg that was one of the two events that received by far the most attention during the sesquicentennial. those were the two that were the

highlights, too much attention to appomattox in this view creates a misleading impression that grant and lee fashioned an agreement and wilmer mclean's parlor that ended fighting and opened the door to reunion and reconciliation. it's too neat. it's too simple. and i will say very strongly can no serious person dispute the necessity of placing the civil war within a spacious 19th century contest, specifically any attempt to grasp the centrality of the war to the larger history of the united states. you have to place it in a much broader context. to engage with its long-term racial and constitutional and social consequences.

would argue against that, no one who is serious. many of the profound questions with which the civil war they aren grappled -- still present with this in some the, as we move through second decade of the 21st century. debates about central versus state authority, about the difficulty of ordering a biracial and multiracial society in a way that is fair for everybody about the challenges of a military occupation, we can think of that in relation to reason wars in the middle east. all of these things have very easy connections that we can make to the civil war, and yet they are rooted in what we are doing right now. construction of a long civil war should not obscure the

fact that the conflict did in in 1865. clear indications of this fact include the surrender of all confederate military forces, the dismantling of the confederate thee, the restoration of union, the destruction of slavery, and rapid demobilization of a million citizen soldiers wearing blue uniforms in may of 1865. that are huge outcomes underscore the unequivocal termination of a war that had the verdict of the battlefield and otherwise would not have established a powerful republic, dedicated preeminently to the long-term perpetuation of a slaveholding society. beguiled by the notion that the warhead to end the way end the wayr had to it did.

baloney! the united states not only could have lost the war, the united states at more than one point c pretty clearly to be careening towards a failed war effort, the most serious time in the summer of 1864 leading into the fall of 1864. we have to be able to recapture what's actually happening going forward, and not to fall victim to what i call the appomattox syndrome, starting at the end of the story and saying, of course the united states triumphed. and see howack those inevitable things were coming. no. those things were not inevitable, and we should not think that. if the confederacy had won, it would have been a major western devoted to the

perpetuation of a slaveholding society. what stopped at appomattox was not a small thing. thing.a gigantic the political and social notlict that follows should be considered an extension of the war by other means. postwar violence, however grotesque at times, did not approach in scale or fury the of the military carnage war years, the bloodiest incidents during reconstruction, among them the new orleans and .emphis rights of 1866 those scarcely would have qualified as obscure skirmishes during the civil war. they would have been the tiniest blip on any scale of violence during the civil war. former confederates perpetuating much of the postwar violence had vastly scaled-back their goals.

their goal during the war was to establish a proslavery nationstate that would take its place among the states of the western world. they are not trying to establish a nationstate anymore. regain localng to political power and maintain white supremacy. the goals are on a very different scale. most of the most certainly would have preferred to reinstitute slavery, but they settled down for a watered-down version of what the confederacy had provided, a social structure in which white people exerted economic and legal and social control over millions of black people. reality byw south, a the late 19th century, lasted for many more decades and i think should be viewed as the

most obvious expression of the confederate generation's response to defeat and emancipation. a describe postwar events is violent continuation of the military action of 1861, 1865 robs the most encompassing more in history of much of its singularity and meaning. that road anyn further, though sometimes i'm tempted to. mentioning.s worth i love to quote grant. you should all quote grant. grant is a bright fellow and incredibly important figure. not a butcher. that's my little grant

advertisement. not nearly as bloody as r.e. lee, as we all know. if you want the bloodiest general in united states history in terms of the highest proportion of his soldiers who get shot, it isn't even close. then drop down and argue about other people. there is no doubt about who's first, r.e. lee. yes, you call grant the butcher. grant immediately accepted the centrality of what had transpired on april 9, 1865. in his memoirs he said that lee's surrender essentially closed the rebellion. i determined to return to washington at once, he explained, with a view to putting the stop to purchase of supplies and what i now deemed other useless outlay of money. he said he did that on the 10th of april.

for the general in chief, managing the transition to peace had already begun as he made his way back towards richmond. we are now moving to the second part of this talk, was reconstruction a lost moment? the loyal citizenry greeted the end of the war with a great sense of satisfaction, whether part of the strong line in pennsylvania avenue at the grand 1865, on may 23 and 24 witnesses to more modest ceremonies in other cities around the united states, or individuals in countless homes, returning.ed they favored punishment for a few confederate leaders and expected the mass of former rebels to accept defeat and reenter the united states on the victor's terms. lincoln's assassination sparked

but theperiod of fury, killing of john wilkes booth on april 26, 1865 and the expeditious trial, conviction, and sentencing of the conspirators -- most people's desire to inflict widescale punishment on next confederates. the execution of captain henry in november 1865 had a similar effect. i think we have lost any real sense of how important the question of treatment of endoners of war was at the of the war. it is a volatile issue and the confederacy. charging the other of calculated brutality towards prisoners on the other side. this was a huge issue. it is an issue that lingered for many years after the war, with lots of accusations on both sides about how fiendish the

other side had been with prisoners of war. people in the united states, the work of the war seemed fully accomplished in may 1865. if you are writing things down, underline that. if you remember one thing from that, that's the one thing i want you to remember. in 1865, most of the loyal citizenry of the united states said, we have accomplished what we wanted to accomplish in this war. the census of 1860 tells us the three states were 98.8% white in 1860. republic, the free states were in 1860. that loyal citizenry never had

embraced and -- emancipation as a standalone moral goal worth fighting and giving lives for. a majority of that white population had not. but they had come to regard emancipation as a necessary tool, a tool that had several outcomes that were very important in their mind. it would help defeat the confederacy. the confederacy could only keep going on the backs of enslaved labor. enslaved labor could keep the economy going in many ways. emancipation would punish the slaveholding elite that had from a northern perspective brought on the whole crisis and this enormous diffusion of blood in the first place, and the third thing you would do, emancipation the one internal

factor that anyone could imagine disrupting the republic again. the issues nonrelated to slavery that will disrupt the public? let's make a list. there's no list. relatedo be something to slavery. get rid of slavery, you get rid of the future threat to the union. these reasons to support emancipation seem to have been ofisfied in april and may 1865. a few white citizens didn't say you should give the franchise at least two veterans. some in the white north would say, you need to extend it to all freed men. but they were a distinct minority. they voted no far more times than that.

of 1865, in the summer the actions of president andrew johnson and events in various southern states created a good north,re support in the or a harsher approach towards reconstruction. johnson at first spoke of making , buton and odious offense then granted pardons to those who had been large slaveholders. confederate states passed black codes. they severely circumscribed african-americans' freedoms and perhaps more controversy early in the loyal states, they reelected high confederate political and military officials to important posts. while those things are going

on, some union soldiers who were still present in the former states of the confederacy reported evidence of what they considered a widespread treasonous sentiment among the , and loyalls citizens in the united states concluded the old slaveholding oligarchy had not been effectively smashed after all, and its members intended with help from andrew johnson and the northern wing of the democratic theirto reassert political power. the democratic party is the majority party. the democratic party was the majority from when thomas jefferson put it on to our radar screen during the early republic all the way down. it is the majority party and there are people -- republicans know they are not the majority party. if somehow the southern democrats who left can get back with northern democrats worth 45% of the electorate in the loyal states -- the democratic party is the majority party again. with someone like andrew johnson

in the white house, only james mccann is lower on the roster of presidents. people love to argue about who the worst president in american history -- that's not hard. james buchanan. second is andrew johnson. now your arguments can start. you have those two firmly in place. now have at it, and have big fun after you have those. johnson's aggressive opposition to congressional republicans and the intransigence of x rebels pushed the loyal white citizenry far beyond where they otherwise would have gone in the wake of the war, and where they thought ofy would go at the moment victory. the 14th and 15th amendments, barred states made it harder for x rebels to hold office and guaranteed to vote for black men.

those amendments and an array of other legislation sought to secure and extend the fruits of union victory and emancipation. increasing severity of governmental policy had far more to do with chastising x rebels then with helping african-americans, though the latter surely were the immediate and long-term beneficiaries. go back and read the 14th amendment sometime, not just the parts we talk about now. read the whole thing and then ask yourself, what is this really about? i was going to quote grant again, but i'm not going to now. what i was going to say is, he wrote an interesting letter about all of this saying that he, like most of the north, came out of the war thinking that you of thenot punish most former confederates. some of the leaders, maybe.

not most of them. as events played out in the summer of 1965, which is really an important summer and framing all of this, people began to say, maybe we do need to give the vote to black men. maybe we do. maybe that will be necessary to make former confederates realize, by god, they lost the war. we just fought a really big war, and somehow they don't seem to realize who won. this is very apropos of what kerry was talking about. it was a mighty goddamn big deal to them who won. pardon me.

many historians have detected a lost moment during reconstruction, when far more could have been done to achieve true equality for freed people. if only the white north had followed through on the promise of the 14th and 15th amendments. maybe all the ugliness of jim crow extending all the way through the rest of the century and deep into the 20th century could have been avoided. such a view runs aground on three things. fiscal realities. long-standing american opposition to the idea of military occupation in peacetime. profoundrtant, the racism from our perspective between 1860 and 1880.

youe three factors -- if take those three factors into consideration, look at what's possibly you cannot conclude there was a great lost moment. the fiscal reality of a true would haveby itself scuttled any attempt to deploy enough military forces to bring large areas of the former confederacy under anything approaching a true occupation. more than onetly million united states soldiers under arms on may 1, 1865 only held part of the confederacy. even one million united states reallys were not occupying the confederacy. the vast majority of these men were citizen soldiers who believe their work was finished and wanted to go home. they believed, we have a deal with the government.

send us home right now. do.e's nothing left to just more than 800,000 of those million were mustered out by the end of november 1865. one year later, only 11,043 of that vast volunteer army remained in uniform. as contentious6, debates about reconstruction raged in washington and throughout the country, congress thed to fix the size of peacetime regular army at 54,302. number easy to remember. that number was reduced in 1869. it was reduced again. armiesion and french

fluctuate between 1/2 million an d 700,000. this is also instructive to people who love to say the civil war marxists great turning point that shows what a militarist society the united states is. it lets them be a wash and militarism. it is a nation that so loves -- just think about that a little bit. fact that things like that are probably more complicated than they seem when you just throw around big, juicy generalizations. during this period, a significant proportion of the army is deployed in the west. it is deployed in the west dealing with native americans. all the soldiers are not available for occupation duties

in the confederacy. congress never would have approved the expenditures to keep a huge army of occupation in the former confederacy. in my view, there never was an actual occupation. advocate birth of a nation, gone with the wind, these things look to make it seem like the white south is under the military boot heel of the united states after the war. there's nothing approaching what anyone would call a real occupation of the confederacy after the civil war. i'm almost finished, i promise you. the opposition to the idea of military occupation also was pervasive in the united states. the north whoy in supported a hard war against the rebels. this was part of a deep seeded american aversion to strong peacetime military

establishment. -- thise considered attitude goes all the way back to the colonial and revolutionary eras in opposition to the quartering act and other things the british did in the time of the great wars for empire and run up to the american revolution. there's a huge debate about that as the new republic gets going. the armor got down to fewer than 100 men during the articles of confederation. the united states army got down to 80. they did not have much to do. way if will go a long you use them just right. there's a real long debate that gets through these various stages. about can youate

trust a regular army, a real army in peacetime? many people fervently believe that you could not. the attitude comes back to four during reconstruction and the former occupying states of the confederacy, even if they are the former states of the confederacy and you are very unhappy with them. the first one by itself would have scuttled a real occupation. the most important factor by far was the profound racial prejudice of the era. most of the loyal white citizenry simply did not care aboutuch, if at all, bestowing what we would consider equal rights on millions of free people. they just didn't care.

they did not care about bestowing them on free black people who lived in the northern ates. pushing for emancipation is a tool to hurt rebels and remove a source of future political tension was one thing. spending money and deploying huge numbers of troops in peacetime to guarantee full rights to black people was another. many democrats during the war had never even supported emancipation strongly for those other reasons i talked about. many democrats did, but by no means all of them. the infantry conveyed common attitudes apropos of this point in a letter regarding u.s. colored troops men. this man went on to state that

once a black soldier returned to civilian life and he lays off the blue jacket, he is a negro and should be treated as god designed, as an inferior, with kindness and sympathy, but not as an equal in a social point of view. you know there is a range of reactions among u.s. soldiers when they actually confront a slavery up close. many of them had no idea what slavery was like or what black people were like, for that matter, because there are so few black people living in the three states. this is a common attitude. we are glad they are fighting with us. after the war, letting these men vote -- are you kidding? a very common attitude. far from a lost moment. the era of rec instruction -- reconstruction wreck -- represented a miraculous period

of substantial improvement to the constitution, improvement that would have been unthinkable except as an outgrowth of a great war. blightedjim crow later the american south, the 14th and 15th amendments remained as unequivocal evidence of the transformative power of major military events. questions? anybody have a question or a comment? [applause] every speaker gets a glass of water when they are finished, so i do too. yes? hadhat if the confederacy won the war? when and how do you think slavery would have ended? gary: i have no idea, except it would have ended a lot later.

what if questions can't be answered. but we all love what if questions. if there hadn't been a war, i think it would've lasted several decades more. i think the united states would have had the distinction of being the last western nation to get rid of slavery. it would have been after brazil, after spanish cuba, i think. nation going forward would've lasted a very long time. slavery was thriving in 1860. there was a time when scholars pretended slavery was on the way out and the civil war was needless because it would have collapsed under its own inefficient economic weight. that is not true. it was crossing over from large cash crop agriculture to thinks like wheat. it was making the transition right here.

it's a very malleable institution and one that works very well in a different parts of the southern economy. you spoke about the occupation of the south by the --youry and how in statement has been that it was relatively minimal, i could not be considered a true occupation. but what about from the perspective of a reasonable southern person who has troops in their state? how about that? gary: the keyword in your question is "reasonable." the one reasonable people might disagree about, what constitutes a reasonable person. if a reasonable person said five yankees in our state's five too

many and we should be allowed to reorder things the way we want -- we concede the war is over, we concede that emancipation has come. that's not a reasonable position from my perspective. a former confederate might have said, that's entirely reasonable . we don't have slavery, but we've got an idea about these things we call black codes. we will work on those and do this and do that. i think a chew military occupation would have had a significant military presence in a significant part of the former confederacy. there was simply no way that was going to happen. radical reconstruction divided the former confederacy except for tennessee into 5 military districts. there was a two star general in charge of each of them. you have an on paper military occupation.

you have state militias that include many african-american members who are particularly welcomed by reasonable former confederates. you have an occupation on paper. what i would call a real occupation that can actually affect people's daily lives in a significant part of the former confederacy, no. you do not ever have that. m if i'm a follow-up -- if i ay follow up, when you talk about a reasonable perception, not talking about simply how many union troops are there, but what was the condition of the state economically cross -- a devastated south, no economy, no weaponry other than pistols -- how when they perceive that? gary: i think there were still

some shotguns in virginia after the war. of course former confederates believed there was an oppressive presence in the former confederacy. no one would argue with that. "reaou use the word sonable." we as the ones who get to decide what is reasonable -- >> who's we? gary: you are the one who asked the question. here is what would be a reasonable expectation at the end of a great war that left more than 1/3 million loyal boys dead, which is why we have -- weal cemeteries now did not have national cemeteries before that -- it seems that kind of sacrifice in a war to restore the union and one that included the disruption of that theould assume defeated party would not try to

reconstitute just as close as possible to what their society had been like before and had lead this nation into this cataclysmic event in the first and please, we need to stop now. there are other people who might want to question. that would be my response to that. >> thank you. gary: we can talk more later if you want to. >> would you comment on what jefferson davis's thoughts were? .ary: it's 3:53 jefferson davis had a lot of thoughts and comments during this period. i used jefferson davis in my civil war class. i love to pair quotations from the run-up to the war and postwar comments. alexander stephens and jefferson davis, two people i pick at random who happen to be president and vice president.

you can quote them in 1861, quote jefferson davis's message to the confederate congress in april, in which they both say the heart of what is going on is that the dickies are threatening the institution of slavery. -- no, it was not that central, it was merely incidental to this broader debate over whether the central authority or the states and localities should be supreme under the system put together by the founders. i think davis was thinking of the in which to position confederate war before the bar of history in a favorable way, but he also -- there's no question he did not believe he had transgressed against the

constitution in secession. he wanted to be put on trial. students,graduate cynthia who teaches at the uva law school, she writes her dissertation about this -- he desperately wanted to be put on trial. the u.s. government considered it for a couple of years, but they decided if you're going to play straight with the try him where the crime took place -- that means here, in richmond. you suspected that perhaps could not get 12 jurors in richmond to say that jefferson davis was guilty of treason. suggestion was, he projected confederate power into pennsylvania. try him in pennsylvania. that's the kind of scurvy trick jefferson might have liked. they said no, you have to do it

this way. theye end they decided weren't sure even on constitutional merits. the constitution does not give direct answers to whether secession is allowed or not. it isn't until the end of the 1860's that this comes along. they settled it on the battlefield, but he was not worried about that. i don't think jefferson davis lost any sleep thinking i was wrong. i don't. i think he believed, i was right, they had more stuff, and so we lost, and now i'm going to try to dress this up in the best way possible so that other people will empathize with us. one of the things they needed to do there was distance themselves from slavery. they knew they were out of step with the rest of the western world, and the western world was

the world that matter to them in terms of judging them, so that's what they were doing. during reconstruction, probably more importantly during the jim crow era, white is the federal government not get involved in blocking the southern states from enacting or passing a literacy test to be able to vote? was it that the government did not want to get involved in that mess, they did not want to have anything to do with it? it is a federal system still. federalism does not go away as a result of the civil war. this creates big government, and that is the end of states and localities and it is the behemoth in washington, raising our taxes.

there is still tremendous struggles, just as there had been before the war, relating to federalism. more than that, there's not the will to do that in many ways. there are many factors to it. within a late 19th century -- we live in a world where attention spans can scarcely reach into the double digit minute range. lasted 12 years. war, 12 four years of a years of reconstruction, 16 years, and the notion that people are going to remain really worked up about this and really commit that this will be the main thing in their life

when you are going through the life ison in 1873 -- going on, and other stuff is happening. at some point, you just do other things. you don't focus on this forever. the historian about 40 years ago posed a question of why segregation, why the coming of jim crow occurred when it did so many years after reconstruction. he suggested the passing of this confederate generation, they realized this was their last opportunity to cement the results of the war. is there any credibility to that? i think jim crow is the most obvious expression of how the white south dealt with defeat and emancipation.

there was an absolute unity on the question of white supremacy. is put forward is almost an abolitionist. he had very conventional views on race and slavery. but he's definitely a moderate in many ways too. loathes the fire eaters and lump sum together with abolitionists as extremists who are an amicable to a smooth functioning of the union. but if you want to get some sense of how important maintaining white supremacy is to the white south, look at r.e. 's statements. if you want to get a quick snapshot of it, look at his letter the confederate secretary of war sent in january 10 or 11, after thet

announcement of the final proclamation of emancipation. his anger is barely controlled. he said, this threatens everything. pollution ofthe our families. he uses all the code words from the antebellum years applied to what will happen if the abolitionists get their way. he can scarcely control his says, we have to muster resources in a way we have not been doing it to this point because if we lose this war, we lose everything. that is what the emancipation proclamation represents to r.e. lee. does this mean that only white folks in the south have this attitude? of course it doesn't. the figure i gave you earlier is one that is really important if you are thinking about race in the 19th century. 98.8% of the people in the free states were white.

they don't feel threatened by black people, unless enough black people congregate somewhere, then they do feel threatened by black people often. if you want a nice wartime example of that, look at the draft riots in new york city. they start as anti-conscription riots, but they end up as a race riot in new york city. together anger about two things the united states government did in the first half of 1863 that infuriated most and even some conservative republicans. that is emancipation changing the terms on what this war is -- i am not going to risk my life in a war to free negros, and i would not have said negros in 1863. bringing together that stream of

anger, and then the federal government is going to make me put on a uniform? central government never made people go into federal service before the civil war. didn't do it. that was considered a fundamental abridgment of individual liberty. the confederacy did it first. we love state rights. we did do that. that conscription, impressment, travel passes -- we did all that stuff. but let's talk about lincoln and what a tyrant he was. it's kind of funny, actually. i think they are worn out, john. thank you. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >

@c-spanw us on twitter, history for information on our schedule and keep up with the latest history news. >> this weekend on lectures in history, a wheaton college history professor teaches a class on the evolving aims of the union army during the civil war. here is a preview. tracy: one of the things we have tried to identify already is that you are un-american in the northern state in the middle of the 19th century, you can oppose slavery for many reasons separate from a principal commitment to racial equality. that might be your motive, but it need not -- not be. when we talk about the recruitment of black soldiers, the northern population cannot separate that from a policy pointing towards racial equality. policy isin way, this

more controversial, even more divisive simply than emancipation itself. we can add to the list of i willersial issues -- mention that in the summer of 1862, the north moves towards a conscription policy, meaning the forcible draft of soldiers. they do that, calling for nine months of volunteers in the summer of 1862 or nine month draftees. move to a much more encompassing draft. anyone between the ages of 20 and 45 and white male is subject to the draft. it begins to have a very significant impact on popular opinion. >> you can watch lectures in history tonight at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern. this is american history tv, only on c-span3.

every election cycle will remind us how important it is for citizens to be informed. c-span is a vehicle for empowering people to make good choices. it really is like you are getting a seven course, gourmet, five-star meal of policy. and boy, do i sound like a nerd. it's true. >> c-span is a home for political junkies and a way to track the government as it happens. >> most staffers seem to have a television on their desk when c-span is on, but i think it's a great way for us to stay informed. >> i urge my colleagues to vote for this amendment. >> there are a lot of c-span fans on the hill. my colleagues, when i go back today they will say, i saw you on c-span. >> you get something like the history brain elevators in pennsylvania, or landmark supreme court decisions.

there is so much more that c-span does in terms of its programming to make sure that people outside the beltway know what's going on inside it. >> i announce my candidacy. >> i am officially running -- >> for president of the united states. >> a reporter who covers politics, and for so many of my stories in "the washington post," c-span has been part of my research. >> there are so many niches within the political blogosphere, and all these policy areas get covered. >> is a place i can go that lets me do the thinking and decision-making. >> good morning, everyone.

phone lines are open, so start dialing in. >> interaction with collars on c-span is great. you never know what you are going to get. >> i'm your mother. i disagree that all families are like ours. i don't know many families that are fighting at thanksgiving. >> welcome to booktv's coverage of the 32nd annual miami book festival. >> c-span2 -- on the weekends, it becomes booktv. >> it's been a wonderful way of accessing the work of those folks who are writing really great books. >> every weekend, c-span3 becomes american history tv. you are a history junkie? you've got to watch. >> whether we are talking about a congressional hearing, an era in history, there's so much information that you can convey if you've got that kind of

programming. whether it's at the capitol or on the campaign trail, they have a camera. they are capturing history as it happens. it brings you inside the chambers, inside the conversations on capitol hill, and lets you have a seat at the table. >> i'm a c-span fan. >> i'm a c-span fan. power of c-span, access for everyone to be a part of the conversation. >> a military historian talks about his book, 47 days, help urgings warriors came of age to -- his book, "forty-seven days: how pershing's warriors came of age to defeat the german army in world war i."