>> next, abigail talks about free people both during and after the civil war. the talk is about an hour. look insideng to the refugee camp of the american civil war. i agree with mark summers who spoke yesterday about reconstruction that it started

in 1861. it started in these refugee camp's. i'm going to start with two stories. the first one might be familiar. the story of how the contraband decision got handed down. it happened important role virginia. baker,ownsend, james shepherd mallory get a boat where the union just arrived. there are confederates all around and these gentlemen had been building confederate fortifications for their master. they knew they were about to go to north carolina and would be leaving their families and they decided to chance it.

next morning, a confederate soldier comes under flag of truce and says, please return the slaves. were rebels really entitled? weren't they foreign country? you say you are a foreign country. said, i'm confiscating these three men as contraband property of war. he even gave the confederate soldier a receipt.

this spreads incredibly quickly. it is an in between status. property likee of smuggled goods but you are a person. but whatever the ambiguities of contraband, it definitely is a link to emancipation. could say portman road is the birthplace of the emancipation because this decision does one of two things. it makes congress recognize they have to do something.

slaves themselves hear of it. they here, come to fort monroe. stott just individual males. is a fitting place for this dutchpen because the africanship dropped 20 in a sale to the english colony. the first africans we know touching american soil. they touch it here at the exact place that the contraband decision is enacted.

that is the first story. the second story am pretty sure you don't know. this is a very popular image that gets repeated. this is mary armstrong. i want you to go back with me to when she is 17 years old. she get her free papers and gets a ticket to texas.

these are battles. she had free papers hidden in her bosom and was traveling through a war zone. mary takes the riverboat to new orleans and gets on another boat to galveston, texas. then she gets a stagecoach to austin. in austin is when a man stops her. going?ou

she gets sold. when the highest bidder comes, she schools out her free papers. them. see this gal is free and she's got papers. he takes her to live with him for a while. there is a refugee camp in wharton texas. i go, i find my mama.

talk about crying and singing and crying some more. barry armstrong was not pushing lincolns armed to the emancipation proclamation. it is by no place the birthplace of freedom. the emancipation proclamation didn't even apply to texas. mary armstrong brings the power into texas. the cap she came to inhabit was not like other refugee camps.

it was a place of making and building. so she put wharton, texas on the map. this is a map of the refugee camp's. this is something that created with the database and gis software. fewer to include the plantation, it would be 562. between 800,000 to one million slaves on the move. some of these are union run.

so let's look. we have camps down the eastern seaboard, a cluster of camps in the chesapeake bay area. the south carolina and georgia sea islands. a few places in florida and key have you have contraband colonies there.

there are 770,000 slaves. he see that represented in the caps. they are very crowded. what you have here in the you havelouisiana is planters that often comply with the union and keep their slaves at a wage labor agreement. but you see a lot of migrating and movement between camps.

let's look at coming into the camp because this is a different kind of coming. it will be majority female, majority child. but there's a lot of building going on nevertheless. there was no precedent for this kind of exodus. the typical run away was an individual mail. you had blind octogenarians.

they didn't just look like fugitives, they looks like fine ears. they say they're coming like the oncoming of cities. we just witnessed a dragon train were all the women were breast-feeding and a caravan of walker's behind them. they were imagining something different. at fort monroe, the three fugitives -- the confiscation was a clear boon.

businessman lot of the contraband decision. it was highly profitable. males beadvised only accepted. send the women and children back to the confederacy to be their burden. but by coming his families, they were imagining permanent freedoms that can only be possible if they came as families. there were learning how to read and write. they sought to create havens.

let's look at what happens inside the camp. there is the labor. this is very much these positions in tow. there are objects the union confiscated. the reconstruction, a look at the sea island.

whether you work in families or gangs, slaves prefer to work with their families. taskpreferred to work in a system. dissensionlot of even between missionaries and the contraband camp superintendents. plant foodso want to and gardens, something that will sustain. they want commercial staple crops.

enlistment because something of an ambivalent enterprise. usually far away from where their families are. they are loading and unloading on the docks. you also have this question about women's labor. a lot of them are learning how .o read

we can see a town built on the ashes of hampton. a lot of women are doing this work. they become the backbone of the agricultural labor force. so with this, we can see how they are imagining land. they're making decisions among themselves. now the issue of land will become very contentious.

as one of the most heartbreaking terms of reconstruction. they still make a way for themselves. barterays you could until air-conditioning came along. but you have many free people making a community that last. let's look at another example of land.

it becomes one of the most successful camp's of the civil war. they are out trying to win a war and there are free people on their plantation. the friedman village becomes a model community. it is made by a black doctor. when the government wants to expand, they can't get anyone to leave and they have to buy them out. each family gets $350, it would

be about $9,000 in today's money. but local farmers to these residents in. we also have familiar churches. >> it goes along with it. the union subsidizes their trips. they are bolstering a black religious network.

these are the scenes and want to explore. i want to see what is happening in the camp. it's not just families coming in but pregnant women. because if they make it across givinge so they are birth in slavery and not in freedom, their child will also be free. the cornerstone of this slave system is that the status will pastor the mother. journey will make the

to these camps that she can give birth out of slavery. because a doctor makes a report. their own grannies, this is the term used. they were generally young-ish or middle-aged women. these are found among the contraband. i would suggest the government secure their services. differents and these becomeed places incubators for disease.

using herbs and using their knowledge. era route for diarrhea, watermelon seeds for constipation. what you also see with , it is a constant source of frustration. to hydrate. ability it is really striking. 3372en, 2138 women,

children. 57% children. unlike most wars in this case, refugees are running towards the line. they were giving birth out of slavery because it was meaningful, even though it was even birth in a war zone. it was often ugly, against fence posts, women finding whatever they could to cut on the local court straight -- cut umbilical cords. they need to bury the placenta, so they looking for places to do that and they are determined to do that even if they are in a place of deprivation. this is a reconstruction from the point of view of midwives of

invention. this was ingenuity in the face of great crisis. this photograph is in midwifery school at penn school at saint helena island, where a successful refugee camp is. your is picture of refugees in the rain. shoes and water. these are not familiar scenes in the same way we see the gero type. but shoes and water are all over the record. you can't get through a page without seeing another plea, another action motivated by need for shoes and water. ingenuity that comes with finding these are making these -- shoes are desirable for

passage over the rocky terrain to make the migration into the camp. in urban areas, shoes give you status. it means you name -- you may not be owned, you can walk freely without suspicion. with shoes, you can pass through seeming like you are on a rent. children went barefoot all the time, one woman said. small shoes were especially hard to come by. the aid workers are in earnest. just send shoes, they write to all the bostonians and pennsylvanians who are sending goods their way. we know shoes are especially important because slave masters during this time locked them up at night. the shoes of negroes are locked up in many cases to prevent them from going off great masters blame their slaves departures on their ability to procure shoes. the two may -- negroes begged of him i got five dollars to buy shoes just to run away in. this was not just mobility, it

was mobility they could control. once she got her shoes, she left the camp and she went to d.c. to search for her daughter. the black soldiers said he enlisted so he could send his enlistment bounty to the woman i call my lady so she could get some shoes. that's what he spent all his money on. water was of paramount importance. a downpour like this meant you got a shower. one refugee said his spirit was cotton until his group found some of those models. they would be plum bloody, but we would drink that water as if it was the best in the world. rain could mean floods and it

could compromise shelters, but it was hygiene too. this is easy transportation, if you had something that could keep you afloat. confederates were in a story us -- notorious for destroying anything they could ea flotation device. using wheelbarrows. access to fresh, drinkable water was important, and this is why the south carolina sea island refugees do so well and why they stayed and built. there's not just saltwater, there's potable water. some mississippi river islands, they would become strategic

readouts. presidents island, johnson's island, island number 10. these are the locations of contraband camps, places of protection, and they become places unto themselves, places of an experiment. most of these islands are all women and children and they learn how to do for themselves. they built lasting connections, even if the island communities themselves don't last. there is even a story of all slaves gravitate to rivers during this period and make their way through them.

during this time as there is great migrations of free slaves, you see mexicans setting up great platforms right in the middle of the rio grande. if you can swim that platform without drowning, you can get your freedom in mexico. you are not just going north, you are going south too. the other scene i wanted to bring to your attention was revival. i argue that emancipation is a religious event. emancipation gets marked religiously by freed people in these caps. you will see it again and again, and it's not about a particular nomination trying to bring people into the fold. there is conversions, but it's

not the same as jesus christ as your lord and savior. it's much more oriented towards bringing about the result of emancipation, being in direct conversation with god. here you see in this slide -- this is on december 31, 1862. to make emancipation on january 1 as promised,. meetings last all through the night. a lot of them are female lead. emancipation was an awakening. a new england minister captures his feelings. this is outside new orleans. he writes of the experience he had observing one of these watch night meetings. for a few moments, perfect silence prevailed. then a single voice coming from a dark corner of the room began a low, mournful chants in which the whole assemblage joined by degrees.

an old man knelt down to pray. his voice when it first flow, then gained impulse. as he went on, he burst out with a good dear lord, we pray for the colored people. thou knowest not what we have been through. do us free. the audience swayed back and forth in their seats. and then one or two began a wild, mournful chorus. in an instant, all joined in and the sound swelled upwards and downwards like the waves of the sea.

the ritual he described as weird and overwhelming, he half laughed and then felt deep sadness. it was improvised and yet ordinate it. this is how strangers met and forged a language, a common way of knowing. this is just outside new orleans, a month after the emancipation proclamation. these few hundred blacks had come from a radius of 40 miles to meet in a rude church and voice their chat for permanent freedom. funerals become the bane of the existence of many an army commander because there is a lot of death in these caps. -- camps.

they insist on having an all-night funeral for every fallen person. it starts at midnight for the torch procession. the coffin is very important. free people fight hard for coffins. there are so many protests over burying too many people in a whole. the refugee funerals lasted all night, sometimes into the morning. in fact, congress even passes a law. they want chaplains to give a monthly report saying how these funerals are going on, what's going on with the funerals. they show us that refugee camp's were simultaneously faces of

death and possibility. slave religions reduced a technology for communing around. buffering is destructive, but under a system in which suffering had been so much a part of everyday life, for slaves could also be redemptive. the commander of the first african-american regiment of volunteers -- i learned to think that we abolitionists had underrated the suffering produced by slavery among the negroes but overrated demoralization, or rather we did not know how the religious temperament of the negroes had checked demoralization. they shared loss, and loss became one strategy for meaning making and kinship forming. suffering could be redemptive great the purpose of many of these meetings was directly positioned to bring about permanent emancipation. that is what is different. it's a little passive aggressive, when he gave him an receipt, but he's also saying

you can come back for your slaves as soon as you pledge -- as soon as you pledge loyalty, things will go back. what free people were pushing for was a permanent freedom great if they did not find their family, they made their family. this was a climax of a folk religion speaking of freedom, and strivings for lost family erupted, and in the void because there often weren't reunions, came religious means of conceiving new can. let's look at how the caps change the landscape. -- camps change the landscape. they get shut down on paper, but the people go someplace. fort monro was a place in point -- case in point. we have fort monro as a mecca,

rendezvous point. you can see it in the wta interviews that fdr, the new deal conducts in the 1930's. they systematically interview former slaves. they were talking about fort monro even then. here are the numbers of the people who come into fort monroe. the three on may 23, 1861. 67 in the next week. by summer there is 800, 500 of which are women and children. by early 1862, 1500. june, 5,000. by 1864, four monro and the satellite camps around it. the islands are more of a peninsula with a little strip they had to find these other camps and open them.

it becomes home to 39,110 free people. this is where we can see, if you look at census maps, that is the increase in norfolk county. that's the legacy of the contraband camp in fort monro. you also have the grand contraband cap, built on the ashes of the confederate coming in and guerrilla warfare. they build it again, and it becomes a place where hampton institute, historically black university, becomes the linchpin for the black middle class. alexandria, washington, d.c.. we look at that as a case in point. cultural -- multiple contraband caps on would forever change the character of the nation's capital. the black population of

alexandria increases from 2802 7300. april 16, 1862. d.c. declares immediate emancipation. everyone from maryland and virginia coming into their borders. in 1863, the black population of d.c. was just over 14,000. by 1870 it was 43,000. memphis, tennessee is called new africa. there are six refugee caps there.

they actually outnumber the white population in memphis. the population quadruples between 1860 and 1870. let's turn back to marry and her migration in 1863. what was the side of the refugees driven further south by their masters? here was a meeting ground and the site of reunion realized. this crystallizes something so important to me. she got her free papers in 1863. you often think of urban spaces as the place of freedom greatness was under union control. she could enjoy her freedom, earn wages. instead she went to texas, where the slave trade was active, hunting for her mother. more than the security of a wage, making assertions of equality, living actual legal freedom, mary went to texas because freedom's function was a claim to her kin. it was being together.

freedom did not mean anything if she wasn't with her mom. she wanted to know she existed, new her location. even when free people find out their next of kin is dead, they want the body sent act. and the union often obliges. it is the force and forcefulness of these families to be together that made freedom meaningful. a place of possibility opened up for reunion in this world instead of the next, which had been the core of like religion for all of slavery times. it was a possibility to remedy that prayer that was so often cited.

it had been just white noise coming in the background. i will meet you on the other side. i will meet you in heaven. now maybe it could be i will meet you at fort monroe. here it was in these caps that slaves innovated new families of adoption, a woman with eight children finds another lost in a cornfield on the way and adopts her. the coming together of the cap played out the choreography of reunion. it was in these cramped communal spaces of mass existence that they turned strangers into kin, with song, late-night meeting, all-night funeral. in this way, refugee camps set up the blueprint for community reconstruction. thank you so much. [applause]

anybody want to ask a question? [inaudible] >> about mary's trip to mississippi in 1863, there was not much real regular passenger service tired -- service. how did that work? how did she get down to new orleans? do you know?

>> the way she tells it -- this is mary's own words. i will give it to you from the way she describes what the boat was. it was a scary experience for her, she had been in st. louis all her life. she said she got on a boat with a big wheel on it in the back. and she had to stay crouched down near the wheel. don't make any fuss -- it wasn't about hiding, she could be there. she had a ticket. her master who freed her help her get a ticket.

it was possible there was a cargo piece of this. stay near the big wheel and don't show your papers, don't look at anybody in the eye. that was the story she tells. she's able to get to new orleans on the mississippi river. >> dave sullivan, newmarket, new hampshire. did mary find her family at all, and where did her life go, in a positive direction? what was the outcome of her life after the camp? prof. cooper: sure. he asked, did mary find her family, and what happened next? where did she go afterwards? what happens is, she finds her mother. her father was pulled away when she was four years old. her master legally sold her mother. her mother was alone.

he got extra pocket money by taking her down to shreveport, louisiana. she was determined to find her, but she was the only can she knew. she did get married to george armstrong shortly after the war, 1866. they settled in houston. she lived, her mother and george armstrong, and she becomes a nurse and is very active. she helps in the yellow fever epidemic later in the century. you can see her posing here. she is very much -- you can see that she is proud of her story and proud of her experience. thank you. >> my question is about a more sensitive topic.

freed african-american women being frequent targets of sexual assault and frequent victims, particularly at the hands of white soldiers, i was wondering if you had any information about this occurring in these refugee camps and what, if any, the response was from the community. prof. cooper: as you can imagine, a core piece of reconstruction is about women's sexuality and the fears of what has been inherited from slavery. what's interesting is both subjection and liberation, you actually have women bringing charges of rape. what is harrowing about it is you get to hear the details of the experiences of rape. but it's also the first time

this is able to be named as rape. it's never been legally construed as such. a union soldier gets 5 years for rape in the norfolk area. [inaudible] you do have missionaries to are especially aware of it -- who are especially aware of it. this is where camps become places of survival. the survival is at first exciting for missionaries. . then they become alarmed. they are led by women. women are trying to find how to

have their own dual identities. women make arguments defending -- [inaudible] thank you. [inaudible] >> at the same time that all these african-american refugees are fleeing to union lines, there's also southern white unionists that are also going to union lines to escape conscription. can you talk about the relationship between these black

refugee caps and white refugees who are showing up at the same time, how they relate to each other, how the government relates to them? prof. cooper: in the records -- [inaudible] it's when you have in different places is different context. places like north carolina, totally segregated. the white unionists are local

and they feel entitlement. in other places -- c+ jane austen. the story about a white refugee women who is lost, including her children. she has five children and she loses one and is so depressed. a black refugee woman says, you've got to get it together. you have 4 other children. you've got to keep going. it becomes a bit of a religious text. thank you for your question. >> i'm thinking about the black people in the north and recently freed people in the south at the extent to which the people in the north could reach out and do something. they did send a lot of soldiers

down there. could you speak to that a little bit? prof. cooper: free black communities and the north, how are they interacting. you have soldiers. you have transplants who are southern born and now living in the north. black teachers -- charlotte is in the south carolina sea island. you have mary todd, lady in waiting. you see them mobilizing so they have mutual aid societies, getting funds from black communities in the north. methodist, episcopal and episcopal zion churches are

active in the effort. you do see a little bit of compassion. -- compension. a lot of free people are interested in homesteading. one man says, i will wait on the union sons. give me another year before i will sign up for your three-year tour. they are a little wary of wage labor sometimes, and interested in working -- worshiping in a circle. it's actually a really interesting moment in -- moment.

thank you. >> hello. i'm from los angeles, california. how did one go about establishing a refugee cap -- camp? was there land set aside by the government? >> they are so diverse. it's actually a work in

progress, that i have a website. it is so different for each one. i'll give you an overview. [inaudible] what you see are sometimes they are self-made, sometimes they are union made. often what is interesting about the union made camps is there is a certain level of neglect. within neglect, there are places for autonomy. the flip side of that is you have deaths, health crises. sometimes it takes a few allies. there is a union town.

what happens is they basically get an ally to get them 20 pegs of nails and boards and they build a community that is so successful that they start making profit off turpentine and the union tries to kick them out. you find all kinds of gypsy communities moving around. more people come around. all of a sudden you have a town on the census in 1860. all of a sudden you will find these places completely created by people on the move. the mississippi valley camps have the best record. john eden is a very abolitionist chaplain. these are regulated by the government, but meant to have free people call the shots as much as possible. [inaudible] this is where -- the birth of

different yurok receipts. it's good for historians to get a read on their notes. the superintendent of contraband is not a military role, but they often give this role to chaplains. they become assistant, then superintendent -- assistant superintendent. they choose different people who are good at reading just a little bit, and in they become teachers. this is how you have the first teachers. this is how you have so many women. even though you read the memoirs of like politicians, their wives are helping them read the paper because they got education in these camps. this is where you start hearing of the improvised leadership culture, especially among female missionaries and the superintendence. >> david rosen from alexandria,

virginia. i was struck by your comment about the pensions of refugees to have their own land at homestead. is there anything to be said about what happened subsequently between the former refugees and the possibility of homesteading? prof. cooper: thank you for that question. kansas actually has the best outcome. there is a movement in 1879 where african-americans in the south who have in arrest -- been harrassed go to kansas. you have astounding land in leavenworth, kansas. this is people -- the big devastation is on the south carolina sea islands. they are building with the

intention of having these lands for themselves. if they think they are going to get it, a few get in an time to keep their land. the court has already ruled. what happens with andrew johnson, basically sherman's order goes forward in january 1865. then johnson revokes it that summer, and so howard, the head of the freeman's, has to break the bad news. there are possibilities. you even have people going west. you have people going up. illinois is the free state southernmost on the mississippi. you see people taking that passage and finding land, even

going to nebraska, michigan, wisconsin. that is perfect timing. much for your participation in the conversation. hope to see what more events. [applause] >> now we return to the live event at gettysburg college in pennsylvania, a discussion of reconstruction and the legacy of the civil war. next, andrew slap from gettysburg college talks about reconstruction in the north.

his talk is just under >> it is one hour. my pleasure this afternoon to introduce andrew slap. he is a professor of history at east tennessee state university. he teaches a wide range of subjects from civil war history to appalachia history. he earned his phd in 2002. he studied with dr. gary gallagher. dr. gallagher moved on to the university of virginia and then andrew finished up with the noted scholar mark neely. his first dissertation became his first book. the title is "the doom of reconstruction: the liberal republican in the civil war era." in this book, dr. slap examines the split in the republican party and how that split alters the course of reconstruction.

andy is a very busy scholar. andy and i worked together on a teach america history grant for number of years. he is a very lively speaker as well and a very active scholar. he does a number of things, including the editorship of a series with fordham press that focuses on the northern experience from the civil war, and this afternoon he will speak to us about the north and reconstruction. i said to him, can you give me inside, maybe a little bit of your argument? and he said no. top-secret. so we will all be sitting on the edge of our seats, andy. let me introduce to you andy slap. [applause] professor slap: i would like to thank pete for that nice, kind

introduction. i would like to start with a story about pete several years ago. back when i was a vulnerable graduate student and he was already a professor at a conference, and he comes up to me and says, andy, it's really great you are doing this work on reconstruction. it's such an important period. then he clapped me on the back and says, it's so unfortunate reconstruction is so boring. and then he walks off. [laughter] i'm sure he does not remember that. >> [indiscernible] professor slap: he claims he did not say that, but it struck a chord with a vulnerable graduate student. i'm hoping that reconstruction will be interesting, not just the south, but what was going on in the north and what was went to happen to the south and the

nation as a whole. first, the question -- what is reconstruction? all of you have traveled many hundreds or thousands of miles to attend an institute on reconstruction and maybe some of you have an exact idea what it is, maybe some of you still question it. this is being debated by historians even now. there is actually a disciplinary section, a debate over what reconstruction was, how it should be studied, how it should be taught. to provide a few examples, i'm going to show you some of the recent book titles in the last 10 or 20 years on reconstruction. these are all excellent works of scholarship, mostly by people i know, like, and respect. here you see leanne white's book about gender during the reconstruction. here is a book about

reconstruction that does not have the title in the name. they want you to look at the world that the war made without being confined by reconstruction, even though reconstruction in forms much of this fine volume. you have another book about 20 years old, the reconstruction of american liberalism, stretching and american political thought all the way from civil war into the early 20 of century. in another example, heather cox richardson, here being very explicit -- "west from appomattox," looking at reconstruction in the west from the 1890's. this is certainly a trend in the last generation of scholarship, looking at reconstruction across the continent and deep into the 19th century.

some argue that reconstruction is still going on today. and heather cox richardson says the story of reconstruction is not simply about the rebuilding of the south after the civil war. since we are a history institute, i want to turn to a historical figure. appropriate since this is gettysburg college -- abraham lincoln. he said, we all agreed that the states are out of their proper, practical relationship with the union and the object is to again get them in that proper, practical relation. for abraham lincoln, a good majority of northerners, at the end of the civil war, the purpose of reconstruction, what reconstruction meant was reconstructing the southern states and reconstructing the

union. issues about labor, economics, gender, these were all important, but it was part of a longer reconstruction and does have more porous boundaries, but it's not the way that many contemporaries would have thought. i'm going to be an old fogey and talk about reconstruction as if abraham lincoln would have envisioned it as the and of his life. when you are rebuilding the union, what kind of union are you rebuilding? this is from 1867, showing the reconstruction -- i'm sorry, it's too small for you to see the wonderful, fine details, but you see at the base of that pavilion, the foundations are the states. some are being taken down, they say "slavery" on them. there's clearly the idea you

will have a new nation without slavery. as we all know, part of reconstruction is determining what that will look like, what kind of republic will you have? slavery and race were major issues both in the south and in the north, before the civil war, during the civil war, and afterward. and the civil war had a transformative effect on the northern opinion about slavery and race. one example is the illinois black code, first established in 1820, and then continuing all through the 1860's, reinforced, added to. that document you see there is a certificate of freedom that african-americans -- free african-americans in illinois had to have proof they were free.

if you are from another state and were african-american -- if you were from another state and were african-american, and you were free, you had to have proof or you could only stay 10 days or you were fined. curtis, an abolitionist throughout the civil war era, rejoiced in "harpers weekly," this is a test which everybody can understand, which most people will prove, but to make it dependent on complexion is as wise as to rest upon the color of the hair or the breath of the shoulder. the monstrous objection of the country to the prejudice against color is not, as many who are under it and floyd suppose, a natural instinct. it is only the natural result of the system which arbitrarily and forcibly makes color dramatic of servitude." he was obviously the vanguard. he was not the only one.

you have individual states and cities trying to desegregate public services. pennsylvania passes a law in 1867, desegregating streetcars. cleveland and chicago integrate their schools in the first years after the civil war. there's no telling how much further northerners would have gone in race relations because andrew johnson, and intransigent white southerners, resisted almost any attempt at reconstruction in the south. northerners pushed further than they intended to. reconstruction could have been over if white southerners had accepted that they had lost, accepted the 13th amendment had to be ratified.

but these did not happen. you have andrew johnson vetoing legislation, white resistance with the ku klux klan. so, you have a series starting with the civil rights bill -- this is lionel trumbull, a moderate united states senator from illinois. he is going to reappear later as we talk. and then also some of the crowning achievements of reconstruction. certainly if you look politically at the 13th and 14th amendment providing national citizenship, national civil rights, and political rights for african-american men. i just talked about, particularly with amendments in the civil rights bill, they are often the focus of reconstruction. but there is much more going on in the north. many northerners were focused on other things besides what was happening in the south or the

legacy of the civil war, and many of the seeds were planted during the course of the civil war. i want to spend much of our remaining time talking about things that happen during the civil war. then, similar to a book title i have there -- planted the doom of reconstruction, led the north to finally not continue on actively intervening in the south to try to remake southern society or protect african-americans. this is a long process for people like lionel trumbull and others who are abolitionists and pro-civil rights, but gradually moves away, particularly during the second half of reconstruction. some of the other things that happen, you have during the civil war and acceleration of economic growth in industry and

large corporations. economically this is a major change going on in the north. at the same time, businesses are changing, corporations are changing. you also have, to no surprise, a huge increase in the federal budget and federal debt, and obviously, some of this is because of the war. but if you look closely there, even by 1871, the federal budget is still vastly bigger then in 1860. if we take a look at federal debt, here after the civil war, it declines, but not nearly as deeply as it does after world war i or world war ii. the civil war has made a difference in the size and role of government. and how those interact concern many northerners, reticular liberal northerners who had -- particularly liberal northerners who had favored emancipation for have to americans. certainly charles francis adams junior argued one of the consequences

of what was happening has been the growth of a most corrupt system of legislation and logrolling, where great corporations openly allied themselves with political parties. not like there are any parallels in modern history here. now some of this is -- i will say just regular corruption. and part of this also is because you have a lot of the true ideological leaders of the republican party dying during the early stages and the later stages of reconstruction. that is stevens, charles sumner, charles sumner who was a true believer and a one issue person to some degree -- they are dying and being replaced by a new breed. you have chandler, the chairman

of the national republican committee at one point when he is the chairman, he is on the payroll of four different railroads you have the speaker of the house, james g. blaine and cook, and while blaine is speaker of the house, cook vices mortgage. he am the mortgage to his house. there is another level. there is a level where economic changes made arguably without these changes, the north could not have won the civil war, but they met resistance by some of the same people who favored emancipation and civil rights one of these changes, the legal tender act, where the united states goes off the gold standard, starts printing money as the national currency, really for the first time.

met the resistance of people who wanted the united states to prosecute the civil war. horace white -- if the present war shall teach the american people the double lesson that they cannot make chattels of human beings and that they cannot make money out of paper, it will be cheap at any price. he is comparing greenbacks and slavery. keep in mind, this is not your average republican. he is the chairman of a committee. he is a radical republican. and he is opposed to this kind of government intervention in the economy. many think it is unconstitutional and could lead to -- how shall we say -- corruption. of course, if you know anything about jay gould, you know corruption is coming soon. grant is president. and gould, his partner, starts

to try to bribe grant's cabinet. he does arrive grantville brother-in-law, to try to influence -- he does bribe grant's brother-in-law, to try to influence policy. there is much more temptation for mischief. they actually tried importing gold -- hoarding gold, were nearly successful they found out -- here is a contemporary cartoon showing them, i have it in the gold room. there was something called the gold room on wall street in new york city where people traded gold. the federal government, grant, found out just in time.

a lot of damage was already done. thousands of investors lost everything. lots of farmers who were not even involved in this saw the price of their crops drop by 50% because of the fluctuations in currency going on. this is an example of the federal government doing something to help win the war. but then many liberals seeing problems with this, of having the government that involved in the economy. and the spoils system, actually a democratic idea -- not small d, well, small d and big d democratic -- andrew jackson, you do not want to profession of civil servants who will rule everything. you want constant change over and they should be responsible. that is, politicians are going to appoint postmasters, revenue officers, customs agents.

people have argued this is a problem -- like mark summers spoke last night -- this will be a problem even in the antebellum period. so, the question of influence becomes much greater. there is a cartoon from the time, actually 1872, showing congressman meeting his constituents. they've come to ask for jobs, and he asks for money. and karl schurz, who we will -- carl schurz, who we will see later said -- i maintained a republican government will rather gain them lose him a and gain immensely, by reform which takes from the machinery of the public service is partisan character, and which will remove from out would collect the dangerous agency of corruption

of partisan patronage. they thought this was inviting corruption into the system and they should have a civil service reform law and possibly even shrink the size of the civil service. we have the problem of monetary supply enlargement, the civil-service. there's also the moral character of 1862, something republicans, and before them whigs, had been trying to pass for years. with the south seceding, they are able to grow industry in the north. you see this chart? at the bottom, that big v, that is when the tariff is introduced. the rates shoot up and stay high for decades.

there are many liberals in the north who protested the tariff. they thought it was government playing favorites, picking an industry. ok, we like this industry, we are going to protect them. we do not particularly care for that. we're not going to protect them. newspapers started in 1865 -- here is 1867, arguing "we consider the strongest objection to protection -- being the high tariff -- in a country as rich as this is the constant impatient and holds out to legislative corruption." deciding how much to protect the iron industry or the cotton industry or some other with farmers. now, the tariff was not bad enough. "the nation" said that the tariff led to so much lobbying and so much influence, the incessant application of

railroads and other corporations for more grants of public lands. they thought the railroad was the most dangerous thing even though they were helping fuel the economy, even though they were helping the north when the civil war. you see this chart, a huge growth in railroad starting from the end of the civil war and accelerating in the decades after. the unions the pacific railroad act. you see lionel trumbull done in the corner? he was on retainer for the railroad company while he was a united states senator. he argued against the union pacific act. his argument was it infringed on states rights. the federal government had no constitutional authority to go into states and build internal improvements. here is a senator, the republican who wrote the civil rights bill, arguing about

states rights in the midst of the civil war. now, the fears of corruption certainly came to pass. railroads got huge grants of land on either side of their tracks, they gave them bonds to help fund the railroad building. just to give you an idea of the size of the railroad, of what they were getting, because of the pacific railway acts, they are given 130 million acres of land. that is estimated to be 9% of the public domain of the entire united states, plus close to 65 million dollars. that's not adjusted for inflation.

$65 million. as for how people thought about this, charles francis adams junior again -- son of a president, grandson of a president, he called the railroads a power in 1869. i'm sure you know what that means, what he was alluding to. what was the power people were afraid of just 10 years earlier? it was the slave power. him and his friends and colleagues were consciously evoking the slave power, which was threatening the liberties of others, which would go to any lengths to protect itself. and railroad corporations had grown up during the course of the civil war, equivalent of the slave power. it was not entirely wrong they would do if they had to to protect themselves. they created a subsidiary to do the construction.

i am not going to go through that because that would take 20 minutes. there is a cartoon from the time showing the damage done, the republican congressmen and senators caught up in this scandal. they had been receiving railroad stock to look the other way. particularly damaging, two of the most prominent ones -- this comes out in 1872 in the midst of grant's reelection campaign. schuyler colfax, grant's vice president, and henry wilson, who was on the ticket to be his vice president -- for eight years being involved with this.

and with the gold scandals and the other corruptions, people felt that the government was too big, too active, working to closely with these corporations. you have large centers of power and money, uncountable. unparalleled in history. we've other things going on in the country, not in the north, not with railroads, that were also having an effect. i'm sure that you have heard in the overview section about the ku klux klan. there are more klan outrages increasing in 1870 and 1871. the answer for this -- rent and the republicans passed the ku klux klan act of 1871. this is the third of three measures the gave the federal government power to try to stamp out the klan.

they declared martial law in several states, in south carolina, sent military troops, held trials. to a large degree, they stamped out the klan. but there was resistance, not just from white southerners. people referred to this as going too far. yes, let's give african-american civil rights, was passed the 14th and 15th amendment, but do we want to be passing martial law? it's pretty direct. but even more telling, lionel trumbull. remember, he is the author of the civil rights bill, and he resented the ku klux klan act. he argued, "show me that is necessary to exercise any power

belonging to the government of the united states, and in ready to put it forth, but sir, i am not ready to take it for punishing for the actions of one citizen against another." this is largely based on the civil rights bill he had altered. -- authored. he continued, i believe the rights of the people, the liberties of the people, the rights of the individual are safest among the people themselves are not in a central government over a vast region of the country. this is part of the fear that him, charles francis adams junior, and others worried they had fought the civil war to protect the republic, to retain the union, potentially and -- end slavery, but they did not want an activist central

government. the civil war, in many ways, is bonds. a lot of this came home to roost in lionel trumbull's native state, illinois. you have the great fire. you have a declaration of martial law. you have a huge fire destroying ,7,000 buildings in chicago killing people. this is what a third of chicago looks like after the fire. small public services, very few firefighters, very few police. this massive disaster. special police are created to police the ruins, to watch out for looters and disorder, and soldiers are brought in. chicago is the headquarters for general philip sheridan.

he has soldiers to protect chicago. the problem was according to the constitution, he can't do that. the mayor does not have the constitutional right to ask for soldiers to maintain civil order. the general cannot decide on his own. it has to come at least from the state legislature or the governor. unfortunately for sheridan, the governor of illinois the time, governor palmer, the two of them were enemies from the civil war. they served on the same side, but they fought politically. it was with great relish the governor of illinois and other illinois politicians fought to have sheridan -- they would ideally like to have them arrested. they certainly want to have him investigated for going beyond the constitutional bounds of having a military government.

not in the south, but in the north. and here is from the speaker of the house of illinois. the evidence is irresistible. "these are among the innumerable instances afforded us by the likeness of history that serve as the living example for free people to warn them against the indulgence of the encroachment of military power. we become slaves to tyrants by fitting our own necks for the yoke. "you might say, ok, this is a politician with a vendetta. they received hundreds of letters, many identifying themselves as republican, saying this is a danger sign. the united states government is going too far. it's trying to have military government not just in the south, but in the north.

i want to share with you a few excerpts, so you get the flavor. the citizen from illinois saying it is eminent in the near future to do away with the people's government by the powers of the military. someone from indiana -- it seems ere long and everywhere the military will supersede the civil authorities of the whole country. these are pretty calm compared to others that go along with the statute. there was the centralization of a gusto that lost rome her liberty. there is the ultimate and deadly foe of freedom. so, comparing what grant is doing in washington, d.c. to what augustus had done in rome, crushing the empire. in even more graphic terms, someone from vermont -- military

necessity has always been to please tyrants and best bits. -- despots. to give rid of their role has occasioned unbearable suffering and the flow of oceans of blood. what is going on during reconstruction, the power the military has gained, the power the government has gained is starting to be a danger -- just as dangerous as the slave power was. this also threatens liberty. this also threatens freedom. and they see this as not just the subjugation of the south. but also, increasingly, the subjugation of northerners, of unconstitutional government. a number of these people -- and number of the people i have quoted here -- henry adams, carl schurtz -- you can see him on the right. he is one of the more distinguishable characters in

the cartoon. henry adams, charles francis adams, many others joining the movement in 1871 and 1872 -- the republican movement to oppose what grant was doing. not necessarily grant to rid the actually went to focus on civil service reform. they want to focus on tariffs. without what was going on in the south was secondary. they are much more concerned with what the federal government and corporations are doing in the north. the problem at the convention hall in cincinnati as many of -- cincinnati is that many of these people, to put it kindly, were bad politicians. i do not mean bad as if they did bad things. they were not competent. they could not nominate who they wanted. greatly up being forced

risk really, the famous editor of "the new york tribune," had always had political aspirations, certainly an appalachian is -- an abolitionist before the war. but he is also pro-terrorist, connected to tammany hall, and he is the opposite of what many liberals wanted. -- he is also pro-terrorisariff. -- is also pro-tariff. carl schurtz goes to a friend's home, sits down of the honor, and without saying anything, starts playing chopin's funeral march. which probably tells you what he thought about greeley's nomination. it starts turning on reconstruction, which had been a minor thought to many of these northerners.

it shifts the focus of the country to reconstruction, particularly because republicans had nominated grant, and democrats want to cause mischief and they nominate horace greeley as the democratic candidate. democrats have lukewarm support. republicans face the difficulty of running against an entrenched power of the republican party. this is our friend jay cooke here. i like this. i like the quote even better. they are trying to get money from him during the campaign of 1872 and he writes back to complain. he says, though new hampshire is not bigger than one of our wards, and i know we could carry a ward for $10,000 -- fairly explicit -- the result is rather

predictable. greeley gets crushed, actually dies shortly after the election. yet obviously gone into it with a heavy heart, but the effects of this election are important. because it shifts the topic from the splintered republican party to reconstruction. it also continued dissolving parts of the republican party, and grant and stalwart republicans take some of the issues that republicans had had -- like passing a very mild civil service bill and doing things like that. now to come back to our friend jay cooke here, something that goes on during reconstruction that does even more to turn attention of northerners away from what is happening in the south is -- you have had

railroad building, a huge influx of currency because of the legal tender act. you have had industry booming because of the protective tariff. as we've seen in the past some a as in the 1920's, you have these economic booms that sometimes keep going after they outstrip the fundamentals and this happened at this point in american history. jay cooke could not sell several million bonds for the northern pacific railroad company. that set off widespread economic distress throughout the north. take a look at unemployment, going from 4% to 8% in just a few years. i think we can all remember back to 2008. you start to have economic problems. that refocuses people's attention very greatly and quickly. here they are redirecting

northern attention even further away from the south and what is happening with african-americans. because of economic duress, because of scandals and grant's administration, even though he wanted to run for a third term or at least talk about it -- he was dissuaded -- the far left, there you can see carl schurtz a gain. he pops up all over these cartoons. you can see the somewhat modern allusions -- the no grant party, as opposed to the no-trump party. you have new people running for president, for the republicans. we all know, and if we're talking about the south and a broad overview of reconstruction, we talk about

the election in 1870 six that 1876 that mars the results from south carolina and a couple of other states and throws it into a contested election. there is a special electoral commission, which there are entire books written about. if you want to read that, you're more than welcome. the end result, simplifying it greatly, is white southerners and democrats agree they will accept haze as the republican nominee for president. he will be president. republicans will run the national government and republicans will agree to end reconstruction and let democrats and white southerners run the south. now here is an image from the time, showing this idea of republicans and white northerners abandoning african-americans in the south,

very evocative, emotional betrayal. i get in more trouble with my fellow historians for these book covers. here are some of the classics. retreat from reconstruction. the north is retreating from what it set out to do. the definitive volume on reconstruction. reconstruction -- america's unfinished revolution. it did not set out to do what it was supposed to do. or michael fitzgerald, "the splendid failure." explicitly saying reconstruction was a failure. i ask in the last couple minutes i have before taking questions -- to return to lincoln. we saw at the very beginning, to try to judge his reconstruction a failure and what is going on with the north.

he said that the states, so-called are out of their proper relationship with the union. and this will again get them into that proper practical relation. for many northerners, in 1864-1865, even 1866, this was the overriding desire of reconstruction. after many years of war, they wanted to focus on other things, trying to deal with an expanding economy, expanding government. we are fighting over exactly what northern society is going to look like. and in many ways, by the northern terms of what lincoln sets out about what the goals of reconstruction are, even though hopefully it is not the goals we would have. we hope that they would have accomplished more, they would have a just, equitable society.

but can you have from their perspective, can you have the public while you continue policing the south? and by the end, many northerners said no. they were not willing to go that far. they could not continue. the government they wanted was smaller, less activist. they were tired of years of war. and just to put this in one last perspective, something that stuck with me for the last -- oh, 15 years now. i was teaching at penn state. there was a graduate student. this was in the fall of 2001. got to reconstruction for the end of the fall semester and i asked, as i normally ask my

classes, both then and now, what is the attention span of the average american? what is the attention span of the american population? the young marine in co raises his hand and says, i'm in the -- the young marine nco raises his hand and says, i'm in the marines. in a year or two i'm going to be in iraq. i don't follow the news. think about how long the north had been involved. even if you start with fort sumter. you're talking civil war and reconstruction. you're talking 15 years of the nation dealing with civil war and reconstruction. this puts that in perspective of what the north did accomplish and whether it was a failure or success on our terms or their terms. thank you very much. [applause]

>> -- from chula vista, california. this morning, we -- you spoke, we talk a lot about freedom. it reminded me of a speech that malcolm x. made in 1964. he said, it's freedom for everybody or it's freedom for nobody. my question to you is, with regard to freedom -- and it's difficult. we know it's difficult. all of us know it's difficult. all of this, the civil war and reconstruction and all of that. what what do you think could have been done differently to

have indeed made reconstruction a success -- which is not considered a success. professor slap: you are asking a nice small question here. [laughter] professor slap: one of the challenges of that is what is a success? from my personal perspective of what is a success, not looking at northerners' perspectives in 1865 or 1867, from my perspective, if you want to actually have equality, justice, liberty for 4 million african-americans freed from slavery, you probably need to station the union army down in the south for a generation or two. i think that is what would have been required. and think what the government had to do during the 1960's. and many would say that is still

not a success. i think it was a few weeks ago mississippi finally had their last school system desegregated. so, that would be -- you are going to station 50,000, 60,000 troops in the south for 30 years, that would probably work. >> [indiscernible] >> you had lionel trumbull's opinion about the government's right -- isn't that what he supreme court ruled in the u.s. versus cruikshank's? what was the supreme court's role in the retreat from reconstruction? professor slap: yes, for most of his time in the senate he was the chairman of the senate judiciary committee and he was very much involved, and people who helped write the 14th amendment, they decided the supreme court interpreted it correctly, that they never intended for the government to go after specific individuals,

but states. so, that was the intent of many of the republicans to voted for -- who voted for it and supported it. ok, logan? >> hello. you mentioned about economic growth. you see the impact of the population, do you see population growth impacting economic growth regarding immigration or migration from african-americans? professor slap: you do have -- there is somewhat of a pause during the civil war and picking up again during reconstruction, but throughout this time, the united states is in desperate

need for labor. it is certainly helping the economy. i'm sorry, i did not notice you. there is a blinding light. we just talked about what success means and the northern perspective, my current research is focused on the african-american experience during the civil war -- save a very different perspective than what white northerners think about what freedom means. >> we've talked about a lot of things in the context of the governments in the union. during the time of reconstruction, the average citizen of the north, do they tend to care what happens in the south, or do they only

care what happens to them? it's hard to believe everybody in the union would have the same kind of support of government that a radical republican would have? professor slap: you're exactly right. and for time purposes, that is one of the quotes that i cut out , the overview where lincoln was talking about... we don't agree amongst ourselves what to do with reconstruction. you do have these massive divisions in the north over what to do. yet divisions within the republican party and they make it difficult. i would never say this is what an average white northern or thought. that makes it harder to deal with what is going on in the south.

you have a divided north. they can't agree on one particular policy and following through for years. >> hello. my name is rick allen. i am working my way to your excellent book on the team of -- theme of reconstruction. carl schurz was also in president hayes is cabinet as were several others. would you consider the compromise of 1877 somewhat of a victory for the local anyway? ns professor slap: yes -- schurz is very instrumental. there is correspondence going back and forth before hayes' inaugural address, and he is saying, i think you should stress this, and he comes

-- complements him. it appears that hayes take some of his advice. the liberal republicans -- and he complements him, and it appears that hayes take some of his advice. schurz in particular, and several others from ohio, tie themselves to hayes. >> hi, i'm julia davis from connecticut. you said at the beginning if the southhad expected that -- would have accepted that they lost, it would have lasted for a year or maybe two. then how could the north have gotten the south to accept they lost when what they lost was something very great to them, which was awful, but it was ingrained in their vulture and values and basically who they were -- in their culture and values and basically who they were? professor slap: you bring up a very good point. they couldn't, and the north was

not trying to get the south to say, you are right, racism is wrong. i can throw comments of william lloyd garrison that you would think is racist and he was one of the leading abolitionists of the century. the north kept telling southerners you need to repudiate your articles of secession, saying they were wrong, were not going to do it again, we are sorry. the south of say, ok, fine, we will repeal our articles of secession. yeah, ok, we are taking them back, but we were not wrong, and we will do them again. the 13th amendment had been ratified by another states to become part of the constitution and you have former confederate states also to ratify it -- it was things like that but they wanted. it was not necessarily ending racism.

that was certainly part of it. a lot of it was accepting that secession was wrong. >> hi, i'm steve conrad, class of 70 gettysburg college, go bullets. i have a question about diplomacy in the. of reconstruction. william seward had the alaskan purchase, mexican crisis, alabama claims, hamilton fish in the grant administration got us out of war in spain. how does the diplomacy of the period fit in with the overall. -- theories and themes of reconstruction? professor slap: ok, i will give you an example, but not one that you mentioned. there's actually, at the end of the civil war, there are huge numbers -- tens of thousands of union troops sent to the mexican border because ulysses s. grant and sherman and sheridan all

think that is a continuation of the war. the french invaded mexico and aided the confederates and were friendly with the confederates and they think the civil war is not going to be over until the french are pushed out of mexico. so, for a couple years after the civil war, you have a lot of troops on the border and you have general sheridan -- it eventually becomes 350,000 rifles coordinating the mexican government can get them to fight the french. and in the meantime, the french are saying, why is your military arming the people with which we are fighting? you have a lot going on with the civil war and reconstruction going on, certainly, diplomatically. thank you all for your attention and time.

[applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> we have 30 minutes until we have our next panel discussion on the civil war. >> good afternoon. i am peter carmichael, a history professor. i'm the director of the civil war institute. those of you in the audience, you can be part of the conversation.

#dwi 2016. let me introduce our panelists. right, a my far current lecture in american history at the university of edinburgh. he does a range of courses on southern history. in his first book, an excellent one, published by the university of north carolina press, is entitled moments of despair, suicide, divorce, and debt in civil war north carolina. david is a man who university shepherd

civil war. this is in west virginia. assistanto an professor of history in the universities history department. his published a number of articles. his dump your studies for the national park service. he is on the cusp of cementing his first of august for publication in the university of north carolina press. is jason phillips. ofis the elderly professor civil studies at west virginia university. his first work published by the university of georgia press is , theled, diehard rebels confederate culture of civility. he is currently working on a new

project entitled a history of the future. how the yearsores of anticipating the civil war ultimately influence of the ways it was remembered. is brian craig miller. he is an associate professor at wichita kansas. he is the author of "john bell hood in the fight for civil liberty" and serves as the editor for one of the premier scholarly journals in our field, "civil war history." "emptyest book entitled sleeves: amputation the civil war south," published by the university of georgia press. finally, diane sommerville, an associate professor of history

at binghamton university in new york. she teaches courses in 19th-century u.s. history, the american south, women's history and the history of sexuality. rate,cently published race, and the 19th-century south. she has also offered numerous scholarly articles. most recently, a verdant too trauma, bear -- suicide, and confederate soldiers. the peace and the john t hubble prize for the best article in the journal of civil war history. we will begin with diane presenting a very brief paper on her work, and then, of course, we have our panelists. [applause]

diane: well, thank you, everyone, for coming out this gettysburgr afternoon. what we will try to do this waysnoon is to open up that we can have conversations with you all about the experience of confederate veterans returning home. to that end, i will talk for maybe 15 or so minutes about generally the work that i'm doing, but then also give it to who willhe panelists spend 45 minutes -- four or five minutes about a different topic that we can then have questions about.

i want to begin with the very famous quotation by a historian -- a social historian who wrote 25 years ago that we needed to on some history being done the lives of ordinary soldiers. despite the many, many other books and articles published in , he wrotehistory surprisingly little has been written about the experiences of ordinary soldiers. most of the work dealt with generals and politics and status, but the experiences of ordinary men and women emerged as a focus only relatively recently, and study of veterans even later. several books published since 2009 praised the steps of civil war soldiers as they returned home to their families and communities. only one of these books, a case

study of books out of one virginia county, is the only book devoted to just confederate veterans. two of the books cover both the northern and southern veterans. we view the myriad experiences of veterans after the return home from the mundane to the heroic. the return to their plows and scours for employment. they collected pensions and ended up in veteran homes or insane asylums. they ran for political office. a few became university presidents. others became alcoholics. quite a few struggled with disabilities. mental, visible and invisible. historians ask questions like what did soldiers do after the mobilization? how did they live? how did their service affect

them? how did war change them? how were they treated when they returned home? we had only just begun, relatively speaking, to answer questions. we know the experiences were varied. we are not even sure what a typical veteran's experience looked like. we also know much more about union veterans largely because of the availability of sources. union veterans, of course, were eligible for federal pensions, so those records, which are a real treasure trove of information about soldiers' lives after the war yield rich details about the veterans and their families. but former confederates were not eligible for federal pension so we lack that same space, although many southern states did offer pensions, those records are spotty and certainly disperse. so working on confederate veterans poses some challenges. that said, we do have some examples of historians working in a variety of areas on confederate veterans.

some of them sitting to my right this afternoon. one of the big questions that we will address, either implicitly or explicitly is how did the experiences of confederate veterans differ from union veterans? after all, all veterans, north and south, shared similar experiences. they fought on the same field, they missed their families and acquired the same diseases but southern soldiers returning home after the war faced a different set of circumstances and conditions that made their post war lives in certain ways very different from that of union veterans. first and obviously, they lost. their fledgling nation was destroyed. they faced defeat unlike union solders who returned home victorious. by contrast, southern soldiers limped home in humiliation. it also meant loss of suffrage and political rights.

they were subjugated. second, war was fought almost entirely in their homeland, so as the south sustained extensive physical ruin and economic devastation, many soldiers returned home to find their dwellings demolished or in ashes. their fields in ruins. third, slavery was abolished. slavery was, of course, a chief form of wealth and labor in the region but it's abolition posed questions about the very essence of southern identity. who were white southerners now without slaves? as confederate soldiers made their way home in 1865 and sought to reintegrate into civilian life these three critical differences from northern soldiers' experiences fundamentally shaped how southern households and communities developed during reconstruction. these posed challenges, defeat, devastation, and emancipation,

cut to the quick of masculine identities of southern men and greatly influenced the homecoming of confederate veterans. humiliation and shame from military loss and submission to the enemy, loss of political independence and rights, scattered confidence, financial and business failure, reliance on women for emotional and sometimes financial support, and diminished status in family and state. regional recovery hinged on the ability of men to return to the support -- to support their family and community networks at a time when those very networks were damaged and destabilized. former confederate soldiers returned home, in some cases, to unimaginable burdens and hurdles recovery.

psychological distress brought on by combat experience exacerbated issues, leaving veterans suffering psychological harm that impeded readjustment to civilian life and compounded their emotional and psychological distress. a southerner, like susan bradford, witness add bittersweet homecoming of relatives and commented on the demoralized demeanor of soldiers returning to the neighborhood. i sit here and wonder, if all the dear men in gray feel as crushed and as disconsolate as these. will they ever be able to forget? this observation, that many confederate veterans were crushed at war's end is borne out in a variety of historical sources. the most seriously afflicted

veterans ended up in southern, what was called at the time -- lunatic asylums. it presented history of violence often committed against family members and sometimes themselves. over 3/4 of the veterans admitted to the georgia state asylum from 1865 to 1872 were described as violent, very violent, had in the past had assaulted persons, many family members. trauma afflicted veterans directed much of their menacing rage toward relatives making reintegration challenges. confederate veterans in a state of emotional turmoil recently -- frequently turned on themselves and responded to their emotional agony by resorting to self-injury. suicidal behavior, of course, is an indicator of war-related trauma like ptsd and occurs at a higher rate among veterans than the civilian population. of the veterans admitted to the milledgeville georgia asylum about 1/3 were suicidal.

the case of snelton epitomizes the suicidal spiral of a former soldier after the war. his demise began during the war. after the teen enlisted and earned his distress, his psychological demise earned him an early discharge from the war, and then later entry into the milledgeville insane asylum. he made clear his intention to destroy himself and while in the asylum tried to burn himself and several times attempted to throw himself out of windows. after years of a recovery and relapse cycle, peppered with multiple suicide attempts, he finally succeeded in ending his life in august of 1871, by ingesting strychnine. another form of self-destructive behavior among confederate veterans was alcohol and drug abuse in the post-war years. today, we understand drug and alcohol use by soldiers and veterans as an attempt to self-medicate, to numb one self

from the traumatic experiences of warfare but in the 19th century substance abuse, especially alcohol, was viewed not as a symptom of mental illness as we know today but rather as a cause of mental illness. post war southerners noted the rise of alcohol abuse after the war, which they attributed to the suffering associated with the war. excessive drinking by southern men had been well-documented in the antebellum period, but after the war southerners believed it was on the rise and as a consequence of the civil war and its aftermath. ex-confederate soldiers and civilians alike turned to alcohol to escape an array of societal and permanent problems after the war.

whether alcohol abuse in the postbellum south can be attributed to post combat disorder or to the depressive malaise that engulfed the region during reconstruction for southerners, especially men, excessively. less commonly than alcohol, but just as addictive and destructive, confederate veterans sometimes abused opium. after the civil war many believed that the war had contributed to the recent uptake in opium users. whether or not the civil war triggered increased opium use, opium addiction became more visible in the 1870s. with the increased visibility of opium addiction the demographics of the users shifted from women to men, in the antebellum period opium addiction was mostly -- opium users, opium eaters, they were called, were almost always believed to be women. wounded veterans like a.g. were among those who sought physical relief from opium. for a decade he relied on opium to relieve the pain following the amputation of a leg in 1862.

a reliance that led to that addiction and eventually killed ewing. transitioning back to civilian life proved even more difficult for southern men who, in the years after the war, already weighted down by defeat and war trauma faced financial ruin. unlike the north, south experienced extensive physical damage that made rebuilding difficult. financial difficulties or to use the phrase of the day, pecuniary embarrassment. underscore the failure of men to fulfill one of the basic responsibilities of manhood, providing for one's family. moreover, southerners experienced pervasive indebtedness which singled dependency, undermining the very basis of masculine identity. on top of anguish from combat memories proved too much for some ex-confederates.

as joyous as homecomings were, the defeated warriors could not deny the massive work that lay ahead to rebuild. the physical reconstruction of homes, barns, fields and infrastructure awaited. the economy in shambles offered opportunities for men who were desperate to resume their statuses as heads of household and as bread winners for their families. with little or no money, sharply diminished wealth, and dim job prospects, southern men faced abysmal outlook with little hope for a quick turnaround. the failures and unemployment plagued postbellum south.

tin ability to provide for one's family in an environment of economic uncertainty beleaguered many white men of the region. who had devoted entire lives to building businesses and then cultivating the reputations and the networks and relationships that were attendant to those crumbled in the face of business failures white men business failure in the post war south eviscerated one's sense of self. economic opportunities evaporated after the war. southern men were unable to cattle their motional suffering from productive outworks like work. consumed by failure at home, on the military front and at work, southern men, many of them, collapsed psychologically. some committed suicide while others ended up in asylums. a watch maker from richmond, who served in the infantry during the civil war made good on a threat to kill himself february, 1871, despite his wife's pleadings. he replied to her, i am done. it is too late. and then shot himself. his wife reported suffered from pecuniary troubles. financial calamity and material deprivation awaited confederate men returning home.

despair and pessimism about the future. money worries and loss of property paralyzed numerous ex-confederates. women, too, worried about their family's financial well-being. many experienced economic misfortune personally. debt and financial ruin signaled dependency as well as an inability to fulfill one of the chief responsibilities as head of household. that of providers. in addition to diminished prospects for work southern white men experienced reversals of fortune and evaporation of wealth and property that also contributed to their mental decline. southern white men beset by pecuniary difficulties after the war were embarrassed by their inability to provide for their families. many equated financial failure with poor character, a holdover from the antebellum times even though intellectually most

understood that the war and its aftermath was to blame. emancipation, of course, wiped out the wealth of many slave holding families. take, for instance, virginia family of charles berry. in 1860 he supposed over $10,000 worth of personal property. largely slaves. when the war came, he enlisted and served in a calvary unit and he survived. but in 1870, the extent of his loss and personal property was registered in the census records showing personal wealth worth a mere $250. he drowned himself in a virginia creek in 1871. >> indebtedness, unemployment, loss of wealth, and livelihoods scourged reconstruction south and plagued nearly all southerners. but it was experienced in a very gendered way the financial and material ruin nation of the former confederacy set the stage for an inhospitable homecoming for soldiers, many that brought with them the baggage of emotional and psychological damage.

so with that, as a bit of a springboard i would like to pivot to our panelists, each of whom today will speak a little bit about one aspect of the confederate homecoming experience and i'm going to begin with jason phillips, who will start us off this afternoon, by talking a little bit about the process of surrendering. making the point, that the familiar story of surrender -- was experienced very differently for most confederate soldiers. jason? >> jason: thank you. he said wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. popular stories about --

appamattox concludes civil war history with peace and reconciliation. this romance of reunion showcases robert e. lee offering his sword to grant who returns to blade and shared military honors. we're told union soldiers affirmed the sentiment by saluting confederates while they stacked arms and unfurled flags. in the end, southerners go home with the federal promise not to be disturbed as long as they maintain peace and uphold the union. for confederate veterans, surrendering and returning home was more emotional and more complicated than fiction suggests. they coped with defeat by viewing the enemy as barbarians, by honoring themselves as the heroic remnants of a legendary army. the victors hoped that mercy would ease reunion by displaying their moral superiority. in instead, leniency emboldened diehard rebels to resist change. the only union superiority the confederates would admit after the war was numerical

superiority. diehard rebels cherished their parole certificate not as signs of reunion, but as proof that they personally had never abandoned the cause. returning home presented new challenges for these veterans, during the long journey troops vented, raged, a sense of entitlement. they stole what they needed, even from civilians along their path. a new orleans reporter noted ex-conned rat soldiers have fought for four years without pay and now they propose to pay themselves. ragged men, walking home, presented a stark contrast to how they rode to war on trains and horses four years ago.

defeat literally brought white men down to earth. horseback riding was a sign of white mastery in the old south. now those masters shuffled along in the dust, along with everyone else. tattered clothing and empty stomachs did not distinguish veterans from thousands of freed people who walked the same roads in search of family members and as an expression of freedom. while heading home, many veterans encountered -- encountered the war's destructive campaign for the first time. in the shenandoah valley veterans followed the tracks of philip sheridan's campaign. for three days, we were refreshed by the sight and smell of dead horses, one rebel noted. when he saw the burnt district of richmond, he blamed the destruction on northern immigrants and southern blacks. retreating confederates had burned their own capitol, but this diehard rebel was already rewriting history.

thousands of defiant confederate veterans presented one of the biggest challenges to reconstruction. they even vented having to swear and oath of allegiance to the united states. as one veteran put it, they thrust their i oath of allegiance down our throats with bayonets. the presence of black troops in the south infuriated diehard rebels. colored regiments formed a larger percentage of occupation forces, because they enlisted later in the war. ex-confederates ignored this fact, and assumed that the enemy imposed black garrisons on the south to humiliate white men. for diehard rebels, diane suggested, reconstruction meant one word. subjugation, a permanent that meant confiscation, exile and amalgamation. some say the war is settled and some say the difficulty has

hardly begun. for foster, surrendering meant submission, reunion, and free and negroes, and we've been fighting too long for that. if confederate veterans accepted reunion and emancipation, thousands of their comrades had died for nothing. think about that. george mercer thought, we must continue the good fight and leave the rest to heaven. veterans avoided defeat and humiliation by keeping quiet, by biding their time until the federal occupation ended, and they once again returned to power.

the southern insurgency during reconstruction was more than a response to post war challenges. it was a continuation of the civil war by other means. >> if i could just ask one question here. it sounds like you're arguing for accepting surrender as -- rather than -- as the onset of reconstruction rather than the final act of the civil war so if we accept that, then how will that change how we look at that period? >> that's a good question. i think obviously, the surrender closed military conflicts, but they opened political debate about the future. one of the first challenges of reconstruction was securing federal oversight in the south. and only war time powers could justify this control, and only an army could enforce it. diehard rebels hoped that the surrenders meant more than this. they hoped the surrenders meant peace. the end of federal control in the south. so that they could rule their region again. instead, the surrenders meant the end of confederate authority in the south. okay? it's a very different thing. and therefore, the spread of

federal power in the south, and we see this debate even between grant and lee, about the terms of surrender before it takes place, i think first step of reconstruction really happens at the appomattox courthouse and other is surrender ceremonies. >> the past to reclaiming masculine prerogative and returning control was a bumpy one. david will tell us a little bit about how these challenges shaped the reentry of confederate veterans into their households as well as the relationships with wives, children, and other family members. david? >> david: thank you. one of the things you raised in your talk was the ways in which we could -- we could highlight the ways in which the confederate experience is different from the union homecoming experience and one of the ways in which i think they are fundamentally different is that, in the north, there is this issue of the vacant chair.

the soldier has gone off to war and the family remains at home and tries to sustain themselves until they can hopefully, with any luck, return to have the veteran return to the family and resume some kind of normalcy after the war. and i'm not sure if the vacant chair works as well for confederate veterans, because the home front and battlefront are blurred and that makes it difficult sometimes to think about confederate families at home trying to sustain their pre-war lives unhindered. this happens in lots of

different ways. thousands of confederate families are forced to become refugees, they are driven away from home during the war. we think in large part to the confederacy of confederate civilians on the move trying to find some place where they will be safe for the conflict. so when we think about soldiers coming home, in april of 1865, their families are coming home, too. and so, in some cases the scenes we have are not the family waiting patiently for these soldiers to return home but both groups coming home and sometimes the soldier gets home first and he greets the family coming home months later. which i think is a very different kind of experience. other confederate families are really, in some ways, very much on the front lines, that the union army, of course, is marching through the south, think about sherman's march and what have you, so families are coming face-to-face with the enemy just as the soldiers are coming face-to-face with the enemy. and even if they are not refugees and they are not on the front line i think families, white families in the south, are facing huge financial problems, especially in the latter half of the war. they have been deprived of their major form of agricultural labor, the man of the household, who has gone off to fight, there are food shortages, as we all

know, across the confederacy, rampant inflation, bread riots, all which puts families in a very precarious financial position for the last few years of the war. and then the end of the war, confederate currency is worthless, and they have lost their slaves. and so the moment in which soldiers are coming home, families have been suffering for a number of years. all of which is to say that sold east valley are coming back, many of the soldiers are coming back in pretty bad shape. coming back with missing limbs, coming back with the psychological trauma that's inherent to warfare.

but their families are also in pretty bad shape. and i think this complicates the reunion between soldiers and their families in 1865. in many ways you have across the south white families in crisis. and one of the ways that you can look at this and one of the ways you can gauge the extent of trauma of the wars on families is look at divorce records. divorce is very rare in the south throughout the 19th century, but one of the things you find in 1866, many southern counties, you have more people filing for divorce that year than the previous 20 years. when i look at the divorce petitions you will see -- it happens whether the petition is filed by the husband or by the wife. think i, you know, the trauma that's happened in these families which resulted in marriages breaking up is a product of the ways in which the soldiers had their experience, but the families were suffering during the war itself.

i think it's interesting to note that these problems that white families are having and the problems -- white families are falling apart, it's the same moment that african-americans are trying to encode their families with legal protections, that they are getting married, that they are trying to find children that have been sold away and trying to rebuild their families, so the falling apart of many white families is happening you simultaneously with the rebuilding of lots of families that have been broken in slavery. the final point i want to make is thinking about the veterans experience and the families experience. there is a huge diversity, i think, of veterans experience. lots of veterans are coming back with the trauma of war, missing limbs, but other veterans are coming back, i think, relatively intact both physically and mentally. the same is true for families and geography is playing a huge part in. some parts of the south, they are facing destruction of their farms and near starving

conditions and in other parts of the south they are able to sustain themselves with a fairly similar standard of living that they had before the war, and so i think when you mix these two variables, diversity of the soldiers' experience versus the family experience, means the ways in which families are able to receive their soldiers back is going to very tremendously. is there much difference between divorce records in northern communities and northern states compared to the south? what do you think difference would be because certainly southern men and women struggled to get back together again just like northern men did. what do you think major difference would be? >> war is traumatic for families. families are suffering in different ways more than the

soldiers are. it's difficult with the soldiers being away for long periods of time. confederate soldiers are away from their families for a longer period of time than most union soldiers. and they are coming back in worst shape and their families are in worst shape and all of that is reflected in the ways in which the divorce petitions are coming through. husbands accuse their wives of infidelity. the only basis for divorce in the 19th century was adultery. but they also tie it to saying this only started to happen -- once they went off to fight. diane: thank you. pivoting from family ties to bonds among former confederates, jim will share thoughts on what he calls the brotherhood of veterans. jim? jim: thank you. as diane mentioned, she said the war was quickly forgotten. what is so exciting about some of the current scholarship is it suggests otherwise. what you will hear today and throughout the course of the

conference is that the dichotomy between so-called hibernation and revival is two schematics. there's a lot of fluidity we are soldiers andn that veterans thought a great deal about their wartime experiences throughout the postwar era. 1865, immediately in veterans started to sort out a simple meeting to this conflict in sundry ways. for me, there are two ways to look at it. southern spirit thrives in the press. regimental histories are turned out in great numbers, and survivors associations begin to flourish. eventually, in great numbers. that is a public discussion that exists. so too did veterans look to the war and private waste as they had done threat the conflict. -- private ways as they had done throughout the conflict.

some "prolific through the wartime era. some wrote hundreds of letters. they continued in the postwar period. not in the same numbers, which is unfortunate for us the scholars, but it is certainly there. in these unpublished letters, veterans had clearly changed in some fundamental way. they sought to make connections

to the wartime experiences with other veterans. for me, the way where we can understand this best is through the lens of emotions history. these are individuals who experienced deprivation, trials, and combat, and had a very similar set of emotional reactions. an outpouring to these experiences. many of these men in the antebellum era had been very disinclined to talk to other men, and indeed, anybody but their wives about these inner feelings. but what we see in these slivers of evidence is that veterans are talking to each other in the postwar period through these letters. it's not as vibrant. those that survived or extremely suggestive. they are turning back to their

wartime experiences. i shared earlier several examples of the severe trauma that soldiers had adored. we see these threads ticked up in the postwar era. one north carolinian, walter clark, says "no one can imagine anything like it," referring to battle, "unless he has been in one." suggesting to their family that essentially they can fully understand whether this is right or wrong. we know as scholars that civilians and your horrible traumas during the conflict. they thought that their families could not extend -- not understand their wartime experiences. the same men that they had in many cases fought and slept with throughout years of combat. one example, an individual is writing to his friend in this evocative language. he says "sometimes in my sleep, my mind wanders to the sad battlefield. i lie down in the lines, have frightened, expecting at any moment the command of 'forward!" smith experienced these night

terrors, and thought out others to see if they too had similar experiences. indeed, as he found, some suggested that they had similar experiences. in the process 40 and era -- the post-freudian era we might say, ptsd. the way you do with this is through respondents with the commanding officer and with other soldiers. you see this very rigid strange throughout the late 1960's, early 1870's in which smith is trying to seek out anyone possible to talk about these experiences. just to parse out these feelings and see if he can somehow make sense of it. if he can lend meaning to it. in some cases he is successful. what this suggests is that there is a profound transformation to

his experience, the southern men experience. they're looking at other southern men in unique ways. they are disclosing themselves in very unique ways that i would say are not probable or even possible in the antebellum era. these so-called emotional communities that exist among veterans are a means by which many of these men begin to make sense of the war and tried to navigate the postbellum era. it has a host of trials for these veterans. this forbidding the near of the closed --forbidding the near -- forbidding veneer of this closed southern culture. southern men sought out veterans to express and examine their new

emotions. in many instances, the men that were the most acceptable, the ones that would understand best are other confederate veterans. >> did you find any ways in which those expressions changed over time? >> i think that many men, by the 1880's, discontinue their private writings and are more apt to publish memoirs, regimental histories that we see today. for me that period between 1865 and the late 1870's is the most interesting, or the emotions are most raw, where the reactions are most visceral. whereas by the 1880's, you still see the remnants of that trauma, but the language has been tempered, it is a period in which the lost cause is flourishing. there's a lot more political motivation behind the public discourse.

as a private one, not as interested . that private discussion more or less is discontinued by the 1880's. they are just getting quite old or not willing to correspond. >> brian is going to take us in a different direction. he is going to talk about the question, what does it mean to historians when we focus our attention on those that are disabled and damaged? >> in 1883, new orleans decided to hold an event that was advertised in the local newspapers as "a corralling of the cripples." city officials would move through the streets of the french quarter and pick up all the disabled bakers, including dozens of disabled veterans that had no economic choice but to beg. they then placed them all in the shakespeare alms house. the wealthy residents and those tourists who had visited the

city on regular basis had become shocked, disgusted, and second by the sight of men exposing their wounds, their deformities, their empty sleeves in order to secure a few nickels. new orleans was not alone in enacting these bigger laws. cities across the south removed physically damaged men from public view that had few financial opportunities. for thousands of confederate veterans who lost a limb or suffered from a severe injury, a corralling marked only one of the arduous tasks that emerged in the transition from the military in cap meant to the homestead. injured confederate veterans returned to a society that had been accustomed to judging the disabled as unmanly, as the pristine mill physiques had marked southern messerli. --southern masculinity. americans upheld the beauty of the healthy white body and for witness to what they would define as --

deviant parties -- deviant bodies. they gawked in horror at the site shows, fat ladies, conjoined twins, and those who had been born without arms or legs. for years prior to the american civil war, damaged and disabled bodies had been relegated to hidden spaces, hospitals, prisons, and sideshow attraction pens all across the south. but now the end of the war meant that for numerous communities, they would now view these agitated man -on it- these amputated men on a daily basis. it made them torn. a cloud of defeat hung over the minds who asked if the physical sacrifice exhibited by the heart hand of war had been worth it. disabled men found few economic

gratuities in a world rooted in physical labor. one man noted after months seeking work, he felt like the entire south had a giant sign hanging up that said "no maimed veteran need apply." the struggles i describe jhere clash with our perceived understanding of veterans. the lost cause and the movements that crystallized for veterans did their darndest to accentuate the manly honor that all that fought had been worth it. monuments proclaimed that this was a group of honorable men, not broken men, and that these are very real challenges in terms of understanding the entire experience of all veterans. but even some historians have been uncomfortable in recognizing the place of damage and disillusioned veterans.

we are not here to tell you that every single confederate veteran returned home damaged in some way. some lives very normal lives. at the same time, we cannot discount or discredit the existence of these men in society. their plate which dictate -- their plight would dictate how the south deals with the price of defeat. the pensions filed across the former confederacy reveal an entire generation of men physically and economically suffering. even if you did one level deeper and go to the governor's papers of many southern states, you will find numerous letters from amputated and physically suffering men begging for help. give me something, because i have served this state during the war. these soldiers who came home bearing this phenomenon of a missing limb will create a permanent class of disabled and diseased men.

such veterans faced chronic bouts of pain. the gallic sisters of citizens who now have to process their place in a society so long rooted in the physical and mental body. disabled men were thrown back to their families to deal with the emotional rigors of life. the dimmest veterans remained -- damaged veterans remained dependent on society to accept them once again has honorable men, even if labor was no longer in the cards for supporting a family with diminished economic prospects. the limbless would turn to the government, who haphazardly and reluctantly agreed to extend the aid in the form of tensions, prosthetic limbs, land grants, educational opportunities, and even a spot in veterans homes. the very existence of these disabled man in the south forces a cultural reconstruction.

one in which the broken body would eventually be honored, and one in which the physical and psychological sacrifices of a veteran population demanded a reconsideration of a government that would now allow for a class of dependent citizens who could even still be seen as manly in their dependence, even one that could give a pound of flesh in the cause of the american civil war. >> one question that i have, as someone that also writes about damaged men returning home, how do you navigate that tricky word, "victim?" how do you write about these men empathetically, but also recognizing that they are deserving of all the humanity and dignity that we can give them?

>> that is difficult thread, or needle to thread here. these stories are difficult to digest. this was a difficult project, and i'm sure you experienced the same thing. it's hard not to read a pension file filled with a long paragraph of a man explaining his graphic injury in details. and he's doing it just so he can prove that he can get some money for a prosthetic limb. it was on the burden of the individual to prove that he had lost that limb in battle rather than in an industrial accident, or had been born with a deformity. as you gather these tales, you have to step back to look at the larger picture. there is a reason that disabled history isn't at the forefront of our historical studies. it's difficult to comprehend. it doesn't always neatly fit the narrative of the return home of the veteran. in many ways, it is a necessary

one. one that enriches and deepens our understanding of the war. >> with that uplifting panel-- [laughter] i think i would like to turn it over to you all to ask questions of these interesting -- oh boy, lots of questions. okay. >> we've learned about alcoholism and drug abuse. i know some military historians have even criticized the so-called dark turn in civil war history. i'm wondering how do you respond to that? what do you think is the place of this in historiography? >> david? [laughter] >> we are not all that dark, we are lively and fun guys, display what we read about. we have received some criticism on the market aspects -- on the

morbid aspects of the veteran experience. if we end the soldier's story in 1855 and don't look afterwards, we are distorting the experiences of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. some with fairly minor consequences of war, and some with enormous consequences. in order to respect their experience we have to explore these narratives. the other thing we are doing is, there is a narrative embedded in the lost cause of the confederate soldier who comes back almost triumphant and unbroken. we need to recognize that that myth of the lost cause is only hiding the large part of the truth. >> i would add to that, one thing to keep in mind, and why

this doctrine has happened is because of the digit ideation -- why this dark turn has happened because of the digitization of pension files and particularly applications for prosthetic limbs or land-grant that have made this -- these records much easier to access for historians. in some cases, states have medical holds or psychological holes on records starting to lift because so much time has passed. these records are enormously rich. they are detailing a level of suffering decades after the war. the pension program does not come into place until 1912. you're talking about several decades where these men are still writing about the constant physical pain they are having from their indicated limbs, from their feet that have been damaged from marching during the war, that they no longer can work. their life has been consumed by a deeper level of suffering.

the economic commitment that southern state governments will have to put forward to take care of these men and widows, and orphaned children -- i think demands an exploration of these studies. it has a profound impact, at least in terms of southern culture. >> if i could add, one of the criticisms is that by overemphasizing, and i think that is the way it has been characterized, the dark side, that we run the risk of blurring atypical experiences -- suicide, trumpet, amputation, that we some how blur the typical experiences from the normal toll -- the atypical experiences from the normative ones. we don't know what the atypical experience is. i read this fascinating essay on chamberlain. this is the guy, he's normal, he's great. he came back and was president of the college.

but if you read the article, you realize the rest of his life, he suffered physically and mentally. it affected his family and almost cost him his marriage. that would be my response. >> any comments on confederate deserters, of which there were many? >> deserters. >> any comments about deserters? >> how they were treated when they came home? >> i think it depends on when you deserted. if we're talking about the end of the war, is interesting to note, i focus on the formal ceremonies. not every confederate soldier ended at appomattox. those whose units were dispersed in other places; in order to not appear like they were deserting,

they left in military order together. in a way that almost anticipates what you are finding, that they are using their community experience in wartime as a martial host to handle this transformation into peacetime. if you left camp alone, you are a deserter. if you left camp with your company, you are not. >> i would add that desertion comes to a price. when you apply for a pension or prosthetic limb, you had to prove that you left the army and an honorable fashion. if you do not have the paperwork, your pension application would be denied. >> i'm the defendant of two --descendent of two confederate veterans wounded in the war. prior to the war, both were

farmers. my question to you, has there been another study about returning veteran farmers? in those years, farming was such a difficult thing to do physically when you were whole and healthy. many were expected to be farmers when they were not whole and healthy. that seems like a special subgroup. i wonder if anyone has looked at that. >> you have done a little bit with farmers, right? >> one anecdote i can tell you, there was a case of a farmer that returns home and is missing two limbs. his wife takes him out every morning and ties into the -- ties him to the bow, and uses that to guide him forward. most accounts are for those amputees that try to form in some capacity. most are unsuccessful. this is why they were demanding prostaglandins, just to at least -- demanding prosthetic limbs, just to move around the field. there were studies on agriculture itself.

i am much or how deep they have gone in postwar veteran issues. >> in a book referenced earlier, "take care of the living," jeff deals with economic retirement from 1860-1870 in pennsylvania county, virginia. it could give you an in-depth view of one county's experience with agriculture and farming. jeff's book would be able to answer that in some capacity at least. >> thank you. >> hi, i'm from oxford, ohio. probably a psychological and medical question. you undoubtedly looked at the same group, or a large group of returning northern soldiers facing the same circumstances.

do you have any percentages that southern soldiers were worse off psychologically or better off, or somewhere in between than those from the north? and two, what was the result of amputations in terms of what both governments did for both sides, in that medical situation? >> jim martin will be here tomorrow, i believe. she can talk about the union side. the postbellum south is not a great place to gather statistical data for lots of reasons. but they did not tend to keep vital statistics into the 20th century. lots of records did not survive the war. it's impossible to answer that question from a statistical point of view.

but as i was trying to implicitly argue, the conditions after the war were so far worse in the south. and the support was not there for southerners. although brian might take issue with that, because he makes the argument that things were not great for the northerners either. >> what about the medical treatment for both, and how those horribly disfigured people were handled from one end of the country to the other? >> there are a variety of experiences. the other government have a structure in place -- the northern government has a prosthetic limb structure in place. southern states have to rely on benevolent care. organizations use private donations to gather funds to collect prosthetic limbs.

then it is up to the individual states because private soldiers are barred from federal benefits from the 14th amendment. >> document -- they had to document that they had lost a limb in service? or could they just walk in and have one replaced? >> that would be a good question for jim at 9:00 a.m. [laughter] can he shout that out from the audience? >> i think you had to establish. there were questions about how the wound was affected. >> from the standpoint of suicide and substance abuse, do you have a rough ballpark estimate of the percentages. the number of those that were affected? a rough estimate? >> no. [laughter]

you just can't. it's just too difficult. the northern records; anybody who has worked in the official records, there is no analog for the confederacy. unfortunately, it is a lot more anecdotal. unless you statistics that you draw from an asylum, which i am working on, but the problem is they don't identify asylum dwellers as veterans. and you have to go to a second third level to identify them as a veterans. it is very cumbersome. >> with suicide data today, even now it's bad. trying to get good numbers and do comparisons between different dates, different countries. it isn't as good as we think it is.

doing this in the 19th century makes it 10 times harder. the data isn't good. but those in the north and south recognize that something is happening. they talk about suicide mania, suicide epidemic. they are aware that something is happening with veterans and entire communities in the postwar period. >> over here. questions about robert e lee. a couple of years ago, a book was written. the lee family found a chest full of letters that lee had written after the war. and so, the author put a lot of stuff in the book, showed it to the lee family, and they wanted him to take a lot of it out. he survived the world without any battle injury. the question is, somebody like him who was well-educated and

had a lot of responsibility, versus a lowly private -- was there any way to tell if the education of the person or the responsibility they had, if they survived the war without the gst? -- ptsd? i almost asked the authored if property lee suffered from ptsd, and you said she was not a psychiatrist. -- and she said she was not a psychiatrist. can education make a difference? >> in my own work of suicide, i found suicides taking place among common soldiers all the way to officers. i think there were a variety of triggers that are different, right? i have the one story of a virginia cavalry officer who basically had a breakdown before a battle.

he basically became incapacitated. probably by -- he realized that as a military officer, he was leading his men down. his company realized that he was ill and started leaving him back home to petersburg, when an -- en route he got a hold of a , sidearm and killed himself. i think is motivation was different from an ordinary soldier, who would have taken his life. david? david: i think trying to figure out which soldiers end up with ptsd is difficult today. it is very difficult today. people respond differently to the trauma of war in complex ways that we can't figure out. let alone figure out for someone that is been dead for 150 years. certain conditions in war and to

be more likely to be associated with trauma afterwards being a prisoner of war. losing a limb is extraordinarily dramatic. -- traumatic. the other thing important to recognize his the communities after the war, their ability to have fellow soldiers to talk about their experiences with their families, those that seems , to be most likely to gravitate toward suicidal ideation chain -- ideation tend to be those who are isolated. those work in conjunction with each other. >> over here. >> excuse me. i have a question about alcoholism.

can it be cured? are there are number of alcoholics that left the asylum during their lives? >> anybody want to tackle that? that -- my would say own read medical , caregivers in the 19th century conflated causes and symptoms. if more often than not, somebody's behavior was aberrational or erratic, it would be associated with alcoholism.

it would go no further. they would not look at service in the military as an excellent -- as an explanation. quite a few were abusing alcohol or opium. that was a common -- >> i would like to add to that, the psychological framework they are working in is a 40 and one. -- working in is a freudian one. if we look at somebody that is struggling with alcoholism or suicidal ideation or depression , or what have you we tend to , think, what happened to this person earlier in their lives that led them to this place? in the 19th-century, they asked, what happened to them that morning that led them to that place? their idea that something could affect somebody 20-30 years later -- that idea did not exist yet.

and their remedy for all kinds of mental issues, the asylum model was largely to put somebody in a bucolic setting and hope that make them better. treatment, it was very, very limited. the only treatment they really had was the extent to which you restrain patients and asylums. -- patient any doubt asylums. in asylums. is it better for them to kill themselves, or struck them selves to a chair all day? those in a good choices -- those are not good choices for doctors to make. >> would the panel contrast the experience of white veterans in the south african-americans that came back from war service with the union army? >> all right.

there is an interesting thing that happens with suicide in the 19th century. before the civil war in the south, suicide is associated with slavery. suicide was what slaves do. it was thought to be something that white people don't do. what happened in some ways, that flips. suicide becomes associated with whiteness and not associated with african-americans. and the best piece of evidence i have for this in north carolina, two white asylums and one black asylum. the black asylums, if you read read the records, they say year after year, we have lots of , but none of them are suicidal. they have pretty racist ideas about why that is.

eventually one african-american , patient finally commits suicide. explanation in the asylum is that he was very, very white skin, so so he doesn't count. "hung himself before daybreak, looked almost white." i think that is mostly cultural perception rather than reality. the ways in those traumas are processed by communities are different. >> we have time for one more question. catherine? well, i did not want to question, but i wanted to commend that the question was raised about the dark turn. i would like to say that i really find these panels in the .ork begun is so enlightening

and brian pointed out, we now have records that are being opened up. we can look at them online and go to the archives and tell the stories of those forgotten people. decadese in the earlier . think the way you simulated the field and got people looking. diane, you check this out in the record-keeping is so difficult. your turning of stories in the stories are done in any way, shape or form takeaway or law rob ther -- takeaway or honor of those who thought, returned, and restored the nation. is nevertheless their stories that deserve an equal voice. maybe we can reconstruct their lives.

so, thank you all. >> thank you. [applause] >> we have time for one more question. fight it out. [laughter] itrock, paper, scissors or -- rock, paper, scissors. >> all these injuries or invitations are chronic. you can see chronic illness and an amputated vet. i published a paper in 2000 on the history of sexually transmitted in the united states military from 1860 to the present. the soldiers did not tell. i have written about -- his was from a urologic cause. one had developed gonorrhea on the way to westwood. and suffered from the rest of his life.

he was killed at petersburg. >> and the effects were buried to long-lasting, right? last question? >> we're out of time. >> i just want to say when i , looked into the descriptions of the degree of social pathology that it is the during the civil war related to traumatic experiences if i came , in the middle of the conflict and didn't know what war you were talking about, i would think you were talking about vietnam or iraq. and my feeling generally is that there is a great similarity in terms of the result of any kind of war soldiers have been in and anderences are the -- differences. there is a uniqueness going on. i think there is a great degree people who resemble those on shelters on the streets right

now. suicide, all of that. we should you look at the uniqueness of the experience. i think there is a lot more similarity. >> right, i think that is what a lot or people see. there are a lot more similarities than people saw at one point. thank you for your comment. i appreciate that. >> thanks to all of our panelists. we will see you after dinner. [applause] >> we have more now from the present, sponsored by the civil war institute at gettysburg college in pennsylvania. the focus was the construction and the legs of the the war. up next, a panel of the story of stuff about house others created about anate -- this is

hour. >> good evening. i am peter carmichael. i am a professor of history. i am the director of the civil war institute. it is my pleasure this evening to the moderator and panelist for this session. -- joining meme is keith bohannon, professor of history. keith has a lot of experience in this historical profession. whenarted as a volunteer he was a teenager. researchid extensive and the georgia archives. there is simply not another percent who knows more about georgia then people hanan --

then peoplan keith bohannon. keith'seely was advisor. keith ise right of katie. she is associated professor at virginia commonwealth university. katie is a graduate, or i should say a student. dissertation,her and gave a book called "major's civil war. 's " interest you have any on the civil war, you must read katie's book and harkens back to the scholarship of bill wiley.

-- impact on the environment with foundational information we turn it over to all of you so you can any questions you might have i am moderator analyst. we thought we should do next for care -- we thought we should put hair near katie. >> what do we mean by a myth?

it is crucial that we don't equate myth with falsehood. myth,uld understand that especially in the case of a lost cause, myth is a way of perceiving a truth. vehicle forides a spiritual and moral meaning. the way of perceiving truth. that would not be satisfying is if we line up all the tenants of a lost cause and not them down. falsehood, falsehood, falsehood. hand,s the real task at is how did white southerners and why did white evidence come to embrace things that for many of --puts themlutely into a fantasy world?

we know that many of these former confederate were extraordinarily smart and intelligent individual. any goodat hand, like historian, is to be empathetic and put ourselves in their place and try to understand how they could perceive truth through and give any actual merit. the origins of lost cause, the term lost cause was not created by historians. and emerge during the war -- it emerged during the war. how did that term come to the surface? i can tell you it did not happen like this. you did not get a bunch of former confederates gathering in some resort in a room saying we need to come up with a way to explain why we lost this war? lost cause, got it. next. let's get the tenants of the lost cause.

it happened in a much more spontaneous way. it comes out of the war itself, as i mentioned. you can see the loss caused, or inment of the lost cause general orders number nine. lee'sy of you know, was farewell address to his troops. it was an address that he did not compose. it was an address that one of his sergeants wrote the draft. lee did make corrections. there were elements that lee thought were harsh for the union army. i put in bold a few sections and i will go into this quickly. we will come back to general orders number nine, but this see some ofu can the essence of the lost cause

interpretation as to why the confederacy failed. i can see it well from here. the very first paragraph is crucial and i put it in bold. compel to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. second paragraph -- 50 to this issue of honor. how confederate soldiers was going to respond to this defeat. at the previous panel spoke to this issue of subjugation. the were subjugation time and time again, you will find it throughout the war. that would mean and the basement of men and loss of mastery. they are very clear here. you want to restore the reputation of their men and the mother meant to go home and to say to their family members that

they did what? that they in fact served honorably to the very end and the capitulation was forced on them is for the resistance would have been pointless bloodshed. general orders number nine is what i would consider the most important lost cause document of the war. . edward pollock did a lot of pollock gets ad lot of credit for popularizing the war. southern women played a vital role in advancing the lost cause ideals and they did that through commemorative activities, especially when it came to the reburial of confederate dead. many southern women claimed this reinterment of creating

cemeteries just for them, that was an a political act. what they did was intensely political. more than pollard, we should give credit to those seven women in those first years after the -- 1865 1864 --18651867 to 1867. they did great work in advancing the lost cause message. she wrote a book on the lady's memorials association were checking out and i believe it is a book back in our library. so the popularization of the lost cause in the immediate postwar years, the strikes you sort of that i keep saying lost cause. why in the world did they employ this language? lost cause, lost cause, it makes no sense.

it is a really strange way of saying that we have been subjugated. it is almost an acknowledgment of it. ae use of lost cause was foil. lost, but not really lost. defeated, but not dishonored. so the language of lost -- of cause, help southerners deal with the burden of defeat. for all ofng to see these fantasy. -- you are going to see this for all of c-span to see. [laughter] >> you will get more opportunities to laugh at this. ourselves why ask was the lost cause necessary?

i believe you should turn to the great southern historians. i see all of you out there and i am not trying to shame my audience. move your hands for me right now. i do this with my students. even if you are really not doing it, go through the motions. and woul n c. b odward. he wrote about the burden of southern history. he identified the exceptionalism of that history for white southerners. and for white southerners, they had the burden, or the guilt of holding pledge. they have the burden of confession. they have the burden of a war that sacrificed so many lives.

and they had the burden of military occupation. they had to explain, not just to themselves, but they had to link to the entire world and that is crucial and something we have not heard a lot of around here, and that is the construction is something -- reconstruction is something that cannot be studied in isolation. in needs to be globalized. -- it needs to be globalized. they were speaking to a world where they wanted to membership of in that had moved away from slavery. now they had gone to their deaths as a nation and as a people that defended an institution that most of the world had turned back upon. why they turn to the lost cause and effect the nation's that they had to make it safely. -- make it sacred. i impress upon all of you as

deplorable as many of these as historical as many of them are, we need to position ourselves from the perspective of those former confederate. imagine that bloodletting, that nation endured. and now coming out of that, knowing who is going to write the history of this war. it is going to be the victors, of course. all right. now, with that said, we start to work our way through our outline. i will turn it over as a moderator, i think i put too much time there. i will give my other panelists an opportunity to speak. there will be give-and-take and we will have questions for you all. -- what isuestion the place of slavery in the old south? i would say that slavery

permeated every aspect of society in the old out. to of the things i looked talk about with my students is that figure that is known out where one order of -- one quarter of the population in the old south was slaveholding ibe of the civil war -- slaveholding by the eve of the civil war. instance, those who wanted to move up economically in society would aspire to slaveowning because most of the wealth, the southern is were hold in land and in cotton land. in addition, i would speak to the idea of flavor billion. -- the idea of slave rebellion.

the spectre flavor billion with something that every -- the spectre of slave rebellion was something that everyone feared. everyone knows about net turner's rebellion. hacked women and children in their beds at night. there was this idea that even if you are not a slave owner yourself, suddenly the slave population rose a up and get to whites what was done to them in the brutal institution of slavery, it meant that possible violence could be done. inryone was invested subjugating blacks the slavery in the south. -- ne of the people we will talk more about john be gordon.

death,onths before his gordon's reminiscence is published. his depiction of slavery, it mainly recounts his work career. but the trail of slavery that he gives the reader is very typical of what you see in countless lost cause books. slaves are devoted and loyal to their masters. the white and black races in the south know each other and understand each other. it is only during reconstruction when northerners come down to manipulate and take advantage of free people that problems arise. gordon also points to how slavery had existed in almost every state at the time the constitution was ratified. and it disappearance in the north occurred not because of

anti-slavery sentiment. let me stress that this is what gordon is stating. end of flavor the in the northern states came about, not because of it being perceived as immoral, it had more to do with industrialization and a climate that would not allow for plantation slavery. >> let me add another element to this, we have heard a lot about the power of race creating a bond that transcended class. there is no doubt about that. at times we overemphasize that it oftenrace because reduces, especially poor white, as to almost unthinking historical actors. that they hadd white skin, but the real differences between them, class differences and social differences.

to think that all of these men when it came to the war, these amply -- they simply follow their lead classes to their death is a gross oversimplification. there was a firm believer -- there was a firm belief that within the south, slavery created a system that protected white workers, not just raise them up, but protected them from an economic system that was brutal and unforgiving to workers across the globe. the global perspective is essential here. especially in the 1840's and 1850's. merry time, is it? southerners theme -- we're already seeing southerners and united states,

this cherished free labor ideology rise up by their bootstraps. that was not the reality for all white men. the intellectual class of the health pointed to the north. they pointed to europe and ed, -- the weighted to europe and said, they have no protection as workers. when they become old, they get kicked to the curb. cradle to grave protection. self-serving and extraordinarily paternalistic view of the system, but it was their view. and you cannot just this method. with that view was a firm commitment to hierarchy. we have heard a lot about mastering. you believe all men are created a will regardless of this in color. even with a lost cause, that utopian view they have of their society, it is an utopian view.

in the south wants to be a part of the world of nations and an advance realization, but they say to the rest of the world, we -- the answer and is a great and it is slavery. what is going to help us avoid all the chaos. -- we will move to the causes of war. you want to go first? >> to get back to gordon, i think is reminiscent illustrates one of the main tenants of the lost cause. deviates and he

starts off with his ex the nation -- starts off with his explanation that slavery was the main cause of the conflict. it is fair to say that if there had not in slavery, there would not been a war. , and then hehifts gets to this point that confederate leaders made after the war. davis and even in their writing -- davis and stevens in their writings, said that is really the heart of the conflict rests with different interpretations of how relationships should be between the federal and state government. and southerners feared an increasingly powerful national government that would restrict the threat of slavery.

and when they protected their interest, six session was a constitutional legal action they were taking. about thebe speaking chief architects of important lost cause ideas, and he has a great quote about the cause of the civil war from his memoirs. i will leave that feared he says, during the war, avery was used as a catchword to arouse the passion of a mom and to some extent the prejudice is of the civilized world were against it. this was not the real cause of the war. it was the right of the government against the domination of a fanatical faction of the north, and avery was the near occasion of the attack and is him between the two sections.

welli think he illustrates if there was a shift. if you look at their writing in 1861, versus 1855, you will notice a distinct switch to an emphasis of self-government as a cause for fellow succession. there are numerous documents we could look at to compare different is such as the .eclarations of successions stevens'ompare this to post were writing where he completely reverses his submission. it takes two volume. s. >> the cornerstone of the fence that are -- the cornerstone of the confederacy feet that there

was a very fine lines leaseholders had to walk. even in the messages of succession, used the a very heated racial language. very clear there is radical factions. when it came to the moment to go to war, that racial rhetoric gets down a tremendous. we should also provide ourselves and it is so crucial, and i am drawing heavily on another southerner that said the farmers and non-slaveholders were not political marshmallows ever used by the slaveholding class. the fact that there was a much desertion of the confederate pizza that. of thetion of the confederacy weeks to that.

how does the southern home front respond to military invasion of the lost cause? >> gordon talked about the of whitesacrifice women on the southern home front. and in sending their men off to a number ofuring markets and shortages. he talks about the loyalties thatblaze had -- loyalties had for their masters. he has kind things to say about most union generals including grant toward lee's men.

but there are a couple of union generals that gordon is not kind to in his writing. gordon because of what witnessed in the shenandoah valley as the devastation by the soldiers. >> gordon served under jubal early. early was not nice to anyone. jubal early was disgusted by the invasion of the homefront. union hadwhat they hunterd was fixated on and what hunter had perpetrated against the women of the shenandoah valley. he has some choice quotes about it. he says the scenes were truly

heart-wrenching. houses had been burned. women and children left without shelter. even the negro girls had lost their refinery. there is jubal early standing up for the slave. this is not to make little of this. the devastation to the valley was something that early was very impassioned by in this motivated his fire during the war. his famous orders to burn chambersburg, he wrote in his memoirs that he did not regret that at all because he felt that it was retribution deserved because of what the union had done in the valley. it was definitely an igniting piece of his lost cause. >> i am curious of how the two of you teach this to students? katie, you pointed to you cannot

deny the fact that there was a strategy waged against the south. fact theredeny the was tremendous unity across class boundaries. bring thisyou at theity without -- same time reaffirming a lost cause perspective? how do you teach it? how do talk about it? katie: well, i don't really see attention, because going back to what you started with, we need to understand that the lost cause had a purpose. it came from a place of authenticity, even if it developed into a mess. jubal early is an excellent example of the emotional toll. in this case, i am not talking

about what the veterans panelists spoke of earlier. i'm talking about the anger and wage -- and rage. this is what war does. deeds were done of a malignant and cowardly fanatic. just making that up. he feels that that is what he is seeing when the march to the valley -- when he marched through the valley. truth, itthe whole provides the kind of education you need to understand why the lost cause exists. , again tog out reiterate, the lost cause has kernels a reality and it. we looked at general orders number nine. the army in virginia was outnumbered in its major

battles. i don't even know what the title of the movie is. usually hollywood screws that up. i am buried due and pressed but the director -- i am very impressed with what the director did. i don't necessarily agree with all of his findings. that is what historians have jobs because we have interpretive differences. we are like lawyers that have to keep proving our cases. it is different interpretations. what i heard from him is we see a confederacy badly divided. and that division results in poor whites and runaway slaves coming together as a band of brothers. i am curious -- >> i was going to say, at the same time >> you have to ask the

question, if you focus on gorillas and unionists --as unionists and resistance on the deserters, how are those people able to operate for so long? 80% plus in the army? and so, if that is the case, what does that say about the loyalty of the majority of people in jones county? >> 80% mobilization is just mind-boggling. . that level of investment. --that level of investment. >> that level of mobilization, what is behind it? amount of force and violence. what this all points to when you start to unpack lost cause and

see these various experiences in , aboutifferent stories the return of confederates soldiers, they demand and deserve our attention. simply rejected, and not to take it seriously because within that, you can appreciate why men and women, during the war and in the aftermath of the war, why it was theysy for them that thought it had to be made sacred? to dismiss that out of hand as historians is problematic. it is also problematic even today. we are far too quick to see an expression of confederate heritage as an expression of racism, or someone who is not historically well-informed. if you want to create a real

conversation, you have to have different perceptions. it is easy to do that with the lost cause. withand i have engaged people with different views. we learned quickly on to tell them that their understanding as to why the south lost in slavery was not important, i came to see -- a line what was going to work was to say your ancestors who fought on the confederate side. causedn i say slavery the war, and my damming your ancestors? i am not. if you say that, you just may get a conversation. i think that is an excellent example of dealing with this issue in a nuanced kind of way. >> that is a very good book. .

why did the confederacy fail? >> we answered this question with the first document we looked at, general orders number nine. --al early says lee's arlene lee's army had been worn down. he is combining the north industrial mindset with the overwhelming numbers of soldiers in the union army. and there is little knowledge meant in most of the -- little acknowledgment in the lost cause writing. can you help me with gettysburg? in the lost cause, gettysburg is pivotal to explain away. can we talk a little bit about gettysburg and how it plays in this theory and confederacy?

keith will give a little preview. what i would say is, jubal early was one of the leading figures who was damming those laws on the street. --ive another choice quote am firmly convinced it generally's plans have been --general lee's plans had been carried out, a decisive victory would have been obtained. which perhaps would have secured our independence. this is postwar construction and the focus on wall street is in the 1870's after james long straight had publicly made statements about robert e. lee. robert e lee's desk. >> and it was to protect his

image. that angered him. focuselped to shift the to long street. in addition, long street had committed hypocrisy by becoming a republican. >> he tripped over himself of the time. katie: which was just another reason to attack him. moment,ttysburg was a or maybe james long street was the reason. tell us about lee here. just how the lost cause -- >> the first thing we should point out it is not solely a lost cause construction. there is staggering amounts of evidence from the war that lee's victory in the first two years of the conflict had an enormous

impact on confederate morale. that is a point i would bring up first. katie: absolutely. early and many other ex confederate generals made it their project to venerate lee. for early, i think it was personal. when he had aced defeat and the -- faced defeat in the shenandoah valley, the public has lost faith in you, but i have not. you have done a great job for the confederacy. after lee's death, lee and early exchange numerous letters that early treasured. lee was so important to him. in those letters, lee said, let's but the emphasis on manpower material to show the world the real reason we lost. this became a pet project

between the two of them. and i think this melded and early putting a lot of effort into venerating lee. writingarify, lee was early and gordon and other copiess to try to obtain of their reports. lee was also particularly interested in getting strength figures to help bolster the argument that his army had always been grossly outnumbered. important point. lee had been working behind the scenes. if he had written his memoir like he intended to do. >> confederates were urging him to. >>* when you go public and engage in that kind of debate, no one ever looks good.

dein 1870, to a degree, -- degree,g in 1870, to a preserved his reputation. also did not want to engage in those issues. here is where the lost cause comes in. it appears he is just above the fray and engaging in correspondence behind-the-scenes. he made it. clear that the wrong side had won. he was no friend of black folks during or after the war. the lost cause is able to smooth all of the edges over. keith's point was important. lee was the idol of his people. after the war, he became a

quintessential, christian gentleman and a great general. that is a great thing to teach to your students. did he not carry himself that way? some will say how can a professor of history say that when arguably he was a slaveholder? again, that would be missing the point. the point is how he carried himself and how he was perceived , not just by confederate spies, but northerners as well. the elevated him to a point where he was christ-like. in gettysburg, you have to find scapegoats. he has a military record with one asterisk on it that is gettysburg. of a lot ofell sense. they have to show the world that

they were not out generaled. this means, what? the war does not exist beyond the appalachian mountains. if it only focuses on virginia, you can focus on lee as the only general who was not out generaled. we have gettysburg, and with gettysburg we have. withone great war -- gettysburg, we had that one great war. cause, itof the lost is very much with us. that, what is striking is his reputation has been regained, has in it? and very goodvie scholarship. ,ut what is troubling to me there is a lost cause hold on

this whole subject because people will speak about long street and say, if lee had only listened to long straight. -- long street. if you let the yankees pearl the region against the armies, things would have been different. they marched onto washington d.c. when i hear that hallucination, i want to enter a people and say, do you know what you are saying? we do this far too often as civil war students. what you are saying is that you want confederate victory, which means you want one of those nations committed to slavery. so stop the what if's. that drives me nuts. [applause] let's do the last question.

. >> the legacy? early withed it gordon. what is the legacy of the lost cause? >> this is a complex question. we could spend a couple of hours just grappling with this. i will make one point. in terms of physical reminders, where i am from, every county seat, every courthouse square has a confederate monument. inmost of these were erected 1890's. they were erected for multiple reasons. they were erected to commemorate the staggering loss of life. they are also reminders to everyone in those communities of

the omnipresent, day-to-day reminders of who holds the reins of power? they are being erected during a time where pretty terrible things are taking place. at the beginning of the 20th century when you have a disenfranchisement, jim crow laws being passed legalizing segregation, and you have lynchings. some -- so, those monuments today are problematic as we know it. if we follow headlines, especially since the horrific massacre in charleston. >> i am going to ask, how do you teach? >> monument avenue, a monument, let's see jackson, lee, stewart, and arthur ashe. [laughter]

>> on monument avenue. >> on one major thoroughfare. >> i am sure this issue comes up with your students. how do you handle it? >> i teach a mixed population of students. bsu is an urban campus. i have students who come up to a saying their parents have picture of jesus on the refrigerator next to robert e. lee. differentudents of ethnicities and genders. like i said, it is a very mixed group. think about what they believe should be done with monuments. i honor that, frankly, and i will tell them that i do not have the right answer. we have to have conversations as communities and i am heartened that we are having conversations as communities.

as we know, the lost cause interpretation, it started in the south and it spread through popular culture to the whole country in the 20th century. when we compare the centennial's to the other celebrations, we see an emphasis on emancipation that had been up secured for so long. i think it is very healthy that we have conversations. i tell my students the job of the story and is to provide context for the monument so we that we have a jim crow artifacts. you did a great job explaining that there was a lot of motivation putting these monuments up and honoring the dead, the fallen, etc. in addition, to honor white superiority, right? these are all ideas encompassed in the statues. when they stand up there by

themselves, people may not know the story, or only parts of the story. providing jill is working on the monument here at gettysburg, and what she is doing and other communities are doing this in georgia is to put up interpreting markers to provide that context because first of all, for those who wanted to remove the monuments or take them off the cemeteries or just destroy them, that makes no sense to me because it seems to me that if you want people to appreciate, understand what notn armies accomplished, just union victory, but also emancipation, we have to encounter, we have to contend with what they were up against, and we also have to point out that these monuments say much more about the age of jim crow

than they do about the civil war. it is horrifying to me to think that many of these individuals want to wipe the slate clean, when if we had other interpretive markers there, if people had to read to understand and appreciate why there monuments were unveiled, i think that would do a great deal into trying to understand and make history relevant, which everyone is crying out for. i think there is a way of doing this. above all else, i hope we can agree about this. i want to preserve my right to be offended. [laughter] i went to my right to be offended to be preserved. [applause] i am offended by many of the confederate monuments, but i know that taking them off that absolutely ajust grave mistake, said to get an opportunity, jill has been wonderful work, and at some point come we have to get her to lead a tour of the battlefields as they relate to the 1960's.

i will and to this end we will go to questions. end well turn to this will go to questions. i think we should all be extraordinarily proud. we should have gratification and where we came in the short period of time. i think all those voices are coming to the surface. they are all being discussed. we are engaging history in a way that you did not seen the centennial, and what we have done and what others have done, on this one 50th anniversary, it is truly remarkable. this one hundred 50th anniversary, it is truly remarkable. we have questions that will be read to us and there is jill coming up to the microphone. jill: did southern religious traditions and rhetoric have an effect on the south's ability to accept contradictory elements of the lost cause?

>> fantastic one. [laughter] jill: their ability to accept, excellent question. i would say the religious and cultural context certainly shaped the manner in which the laws [indiscernible] for instance, one of the major reasons that the lost cause was developed was that people have to come to terms with the fact and they have lost, thought that they were morally correct and that god was on their side, so they had to cope with those seemingly contrary continue i think they to justify and fixate on elements that they can say were morally correct, and some of those were in contradiction of each other. >> i think you are spot on. it is the idea that coming into

the war, they thought god was on their side like northerners did, and this is a great shock, but did former confederates lose their faith in god? did they lose the christianity? they did not. i got the panel was very good and i thought these were things that needed to be discussed. these man, even though the trauma of war and the defeat, nonetheless, they had faith to hang the two and it was in a meaningful and powerful way and religion was one of them. god will in fact vindicate us, it will happen, they thought hopefully in the lifetimes, but then they truly did believe in that. the lostquestion, if cause in itself became a religion, and if you have done reading, i think it is the primer and it goes to the

confederacy. i think it is a good starting point. blood is aaptized of book that looks specifically at the topic of the person asked about with the relationship between protestant evangelical christianity in the loss. >> i am sorry, go ahead. jill: did the lost cause rationalization brink [indiscernible] in england and france? >> i should not even repeat it because it is a anecdotal, but i never meant a brit there was a zealot for the confederacy. [laughter] sorry. it will be some international incident now that i said this. they have to weigh about the eu now, so they were not care about this, but there is a lot of -- they have to worry about the eu now, so they will not care about this. >> there was a lot of it among the upper class. >> i agree. some of it even resonates with

theherners and so nurse. there is something romantic about the confederacy. northerners and southerners. there's something romantic about the confederacy. i was the confederate reenactor when i was a boy, born in wasana and my mom says i the confederate actor because it was cheaper than the other side, but i will say this that i knew this was morally wrong and slavery was the cause of the war, but there was something -- it was, i used the word again, there is a romantic appeal to the confederacy and i suspect that is what says a lot about why they are infatuated with the confederacy. an examination of the lost cause inform the critical examination of our national myth such as [indiscernible] >> wow.

take it away. he said he would take the hard ones. [laughter] [applause] >> that is not what i said. no, i did not. i said i would take the hard ones that i ask. >> no, we should for wind the tape. [laughter] >> can you repeat the question? >> we actually need a lifeline. >> jim martin, are you in the audience? >> how does an examination of the lost cause of southern miss inform critical examination of our national myth such as e pluribus unum? >> how does it inform our national myth? >> it does. >> i think by the early 20th century it does and it becomes a national myth and lee becomes an icon alongside abraham lincoln. you can look in the memoirs and see that.

he has very positive things to say about abraham lincoln alongside -- an excellent response and good question. it needs to remind us of how valuable the lost causes over time, how it is changing, how it can bring contradictory elements together. heritage, not hate, and that is not something next confederates ever said. that is not something would have heard in the mid-20th century. that is very recent. to me suggests that people are on the defenses. >> real quick. >> i hear it all the time. the confederacy in the early 20th century, that is when the lost cause has been submerged in that, so the daughters are holding contests about writing about the glories of the old south, and at the same time, they are spewing the racial supportingthey are

u.s. militarism abroad. you see all those of what you would think our hundreds of victory elements that are able .o come together talking about the evolution of the lost cause, not something you heard in the 1920's, the last 20 years or 30 years -- >> i tried this afternoon, but i cannot find the origin of the term but it is recent trade >> a reminder that -- recent. fromreminder that it is the beginning and they say, we are not political, of course they were political. it is deeply political. >> and the anti-federal government is malleable. >> how are we doing? ill: if southern history places the guilt of slavery, secession and the death of hundreds of young men on society, wise the

confederate out of like the most recognized symbol of southern history and ideology celebrated incident being associated with that guilt? again, i called our attention [indiscernible] what he argues very convincingly flag took on different meanings at different times to different people, and it was a valuable symbol, so one person can hold the confederate flag and say simply heritage and they say they are remembering their lineage and family. another person can hold the flag and say, to me, it is about federalism and i think that the federal government should have the light hand in the state should have a heavier hand. >> i would say during the civil war, speaking to the confederate flag issue, it is seen as a symbol of the nation. you take that flag in one battle and you have men who died under that flag from the same

community and now that flag is drenched in blood. it becomes a sacred emblem and takes on a different meaning. us, i hope, to complicate why the confederacy, against incredible odds, maintained excessive class cohesion for the war. lots of explanations and the confederate flag itself becomes a sacred object. it was an object on the battlefield. i think we have time for one more. go ahead. >> this is a combination of two different questions concerning race in the civil war. respond the lost cause to the rape of former slaves i confederate troops, and conversely, how does it handle the rape of southern movement against union -- by union soldiers? >> the most writings of violence on that topic.

.t least memoirs certainly public [indiscernible] thinking off the top of my head. >> i have looked at a lot of cases on the union side. union soldiers who were .onvicted of rape patricknstance in 1864, was so concerned about the confederatesat the were using against the north that african-american soldiers had been let loose and they were raping white women, and that he wanted to make a point after a black soldier had been convicted of possibly committing sexual violence against the white woman . he went to such great lengths , hishe had the soldier name was johnson, he had johnson scouts in full view of the confederate line in st. petersburg. the confederates thought that

the yankees were hanging a spy, so they shelled the area. killed, thers were flag went up and they explained to the confederacy that this was a black soldier convicted of rape. patrick choreographed this to the very end. he brought in to photographers , and thoseographers photographs were taken of johnson hanging from the scaffolding, and then that image was made into a woodcut for "harper's weekly," so it was a huge picture and in the public discourse. one final point about this, it backfires on patrick because he discovered was, one, i have .ooked at this very intensely there was only one small article about this in the confederate papers.

i thought they were playing this up everywhere but they did not do it. slaves who run away and went to patrick said that when they had johnson on the scaffolding that the confederates pointed across the lines and said to the slaves this is what the yankees due to slaves, this is what they do to african-americans. patrick's attempt to send a message to infiltrate the public discourse of the confederacy didn't work at all. there was some discussion of it. >> birth of a nation. i do not know why i did not think of that. one of the two most important films made to propagate the lost cause, enormously important films, there are themes of attempted rape there. in the case of "birth of the nation," it is the black endangering the virginity of the white woman. that is the best example.

>> and there is also "gone with the wind." she is attacked. >> she is the yankee on the staircase. physics scarlet shoot her? -- does scarlet shoot her? >> that is right. thank you so much. [applause] [indiscernible conversation] from oure more now coverage of a recent conference hosted by the civil war institute of gettysburg. it is the focus on reconstruction and the legacy of the civil war. up next, history professor at arizona state university talks about the political career of you -- of ulysses s grant. it is about one hour. many people see 1865 as high point in the life of

ulysses s. grant. after a year of long hard fighting against the army in of that, on april 9 year, he accepted the surrender of property leader -- of robert e. lee, which you know was the decisive step to bring in the american civil war to victorious conclusion for the union. what did that victory mean? roots of union victory? would struggle to defend and would -- ulysses s grant struggle to defend and find that victory for the next years. first, as general in chief of the army of the united states, then as the 18th president of the united states, and then finally in his postpresidential career as a speaker and author

after he left the white house until his death in 1885. during that time, grant worked very hard to try to balance the need for reconciliation between whites northerners and white southerners with the need to secure and preserve racial justice and equality for african americans. thought to secure the political success of the party and save the union, the republican party, and he also decides to claim and then defend his own role in achieving military victory and preserving its fruits. this is understandable.

place in history he understood after a 2625, depended on the victory that he made one worth winning. so grant's personal identity is one of those that is intertwined with what happened in the 20 years after appomattox. we have to bring those years together. them,d of separating grant's presidency, his time as general in chief, and there are ways to bring them together to talk about s grant -- talk about ulysses s. grant's attempt to preserve the victory. this notion of grant and a civil war is not original with me. i have built on it a great deal. a historian who wrote about this, richard current of the university of wisconsin, wrote a short essay called president grant and the continuing civil

war, which people overlook because it was in a limited circulation. the fact is that current rather distinguished historians of american politics understood , what the american civil war had been fought to secure had not been secured entirely at appomattox. for a lot of discussions over the past years about when did the civil war end? what is the relationship between the civil war and reconstruction? s grant tell you that -- ulysses s grant solve it to us joined together. that reconstruction determined what the american civil war achieved for americans, white and black of that generation.

motion what we today still struggle with, the meaning of the civil war always , viewed through the filter of how we understand reconstruction. you can't take the two apart and dealing semantical discussions about when the war ended, when it achieved. everyone in this room remembers something like this. you remember april 9. the famous day in american history, right? you are going to say, of course appomattox day. 2003, the following of baghdad -- the fall of baghdad. if you heard announcers that day as we watched the statue be pulled down in baghdad that saddam hussein we are told this , is what would make april 9 an

important day in american history which shows the , attention span of most news , asors in the united states well as their actual education. just after that, not too long afterwards, the president landed on an aircraft carrier with a big banner, mission accomplished. i don't think we view that mission as having been accomplished anymore. we don't view that war as having ended with a surrender of conventional forces on april 9. the fall of their capital city. if we observe that imagine april --if we observed that imagine for example on april 11, and someone was smarter than

george w. bush, i know this is hard to conceive, but when abraham lincoln spoke to the on april 11, 1865, several days before his untimely passing, he does not celebrate that the mission was accomplished. lincoln understood that the mission had barely begun. that the conventional war may be drawing to a close but the struggle would continue and take forms people had not anticipated. lincoln would not be around to observe what would happen. but grant, as general in chief in 1864, he would be around to try to secure the peace that union soldiers had done so much to win. he would do so under a new president, andrew johnson who

on known asice april 15, income tax day. many felt a lot of pain on april 15, 1865. grant's role is really important. he is the most popular man in the united states. sorry robert e. lee fans. as general and chief of the united states he is a command. he will play a major role in peace, just as he displayed in war. beginning, grant worked hard to promote reconciliation. between former confederates and victorious yankees. you can see that fact with the terms of appomattox, the generosity he showed robert e.

lee, making sure his men could take home the forces, offices could retain their sidearms. there is no painting of [indiscernible] lee himself was touched by grant 's generosity and talked about how it would leave a good impression on his soldiers. we may have forgotten that was 24 hours when he may not have written but he approved of the general orders. he worked to promote reconciliation throughout the remainder of 1865. one of the ways in which he did so, he became ambivalent about the use of african-american soldiers on occupation duty in the postwar south. this was not by design but by happenstance. most of the white volunteers,

people a good vote in most cases after all they went back to the , big parade to be discharged , leaving united states colored troops, united states volunteers, major means through which the united states army could exercise authority in the postwar south. you can imagine that was a challenge for all concerned. southern whites had always been petrified by the notion of an african-american with a rifle. thatld still say today white people would be very upset to see black people exercise their second amendment rights. you could understand

african-americans recently freed , enjoying their freedom, testing that freedom, when they met resistance and violence in southern whites, would seek protection from their allies in blue uniform. southern whites resented the idea of black people telling them what to do, much as they had told black people what to do for centuries. grant himself tried to mediate this process without basically not standing firmly behind black soldiers but saying let's try to work this out because i understand southern sensibilities. he was after all married to the daughter of a missouri slaveholder, so we had some idea about what people were talking about. 1865 grand was a grant of reconciliation.

he takes note of violence in the south but he is not terribly concerned until the end of the year when he takes a tour of the south atlantic states. he begins kissing -- it begins to see there is a little more resistance to the idea of reunion and racial equality than he thought. he wasn't at this point pushing for black suffrage, but he wanted protection from violence and he thought it would be a reasonable consequence of the war to anticipate. it was a chaotic situation. his biggest recommendation was we still need to have some , military presence in the south because things haven't been restored. order isn't fair. a lot still to go. starting in 1866, his priority started to change. he got many more reports about violence against african

americans, white eyes of african-americans, and he became more concerned about the need to can -- need to protect african-americans and to stop violence against them. he was much more upset with resurgent confederate nationalism. now that there was no confederacy, that was very popular. he began to believe that white southerners were not accepting what people like to call the results of the war. at one point, the generous victor of 1865 told a newsman that perhaps the union army should have been tougher with the white southerners. maybe they needed to visit more neighborhoods. included in neighborhoods sherman visited. one time, [indiscernible] i'm waiting for someone to say sherman burned down my house, where was it? alaska. [laughter] sherman was everywhere.

i gather if you were a parent , you would want to scare your kids, go to bed or sherman will come and burn you. [laughter] do not play with matches, you will become sherman. [laughter] grant in begins to change. 1866 he begins to understand one of the fruits of victory was the distraction of slavery. the destruction of slavery did not mean the absence of slavery but the beginning of the establishment of the foundations of freedom. he wasn't sure what that meant yet, but he did understand what he was seeing was not what he had hoped for. remember, grant recalled one out of seven soldiers happened to be african-american. we forget that. as close to one out of 7 million

of confederate soldiers was a black confederate soldier. one out of seven united states soldiers in 1864, 1865 was african-american. so, he is defending his men as well as african-americans. this meant that began to change his attitude of who he was going to defend and protect. he started with support of johnson. he won it to give johnson a lot of space and support. by he began to have questions 1866, about johnson's motives, questioning his racism. this came to a head in september 1866 when he embarked upon his infamous sling around the circle , trying to support candidates to defeat republican congressional candidates in that election. johnson took grant along with him on the trip which became a comic disaster.

grant was not a public spokesperson. johnson would give these speeches that would be copied. everybody knew what johnson the same next. those of you shocked by the language of candidates, andrew johnson compared himself to jesus christ. haven't heard that certain people -- yet. grant would come out and full design is and the crowds the start cheering and billing for johnson. when the train was making its way from buffalo to cleveland, what would you do? grant got drunk.

later he said the president was a disgrace and he didn't want to be with a man who was making speeches on the way to his own funeral. grant supported the 14th amendment. when southern states failed to ratify the amendment, he consulted with congressional republicans in framing the reconstruction act of 1867 which put the military in charge of restoring civil government throughout the south with the 10 states that had not ratified the amendment. tennessee had ratified it and was excluded. during 1867 and 1868, grant gave instructions to his generals, loyal generals who wanted to follow his policies, and daniel

sickles followed orders. it could happen. maybe he will learn from july 2. who knows. he did not support what he wanted to do. winfield scott hancock came to command with democratic sympathies. but he was the person in charge with trying to tell people this is what i advise you to do and i will protect you from the president and other critics as you try to do your duty as outlined in congressional legislation. the rift between johnson and grant grew. he began considering a decision to run for president of the united states.

grant had no hunger for the presidency. he was getting all kinds of great stuff as general. people from boston gave him books. they read,? ? people from philly, they help finance a house. they gave it to him in new jersey. [laughter] >> but then again as we know from a certain musical every is legal in new jersey. just ask the governor. [laughter] >> but new yorkers being the , intelligent people they are simply gave him money. [laughter] >> the ethics laws were somewhat different then. he is a young man. and guess what? being general in chief was the longest term job he had ever had.

this is a guy who in 1860 was a clerk and his father's general store. but grant felt a duty and obligation to run for president he is the youngest man to assume the offense of presidency at that time. 46 years old. but he tells his friend sherman who always hated politicians that to leave the presidency would lose the results of the costly war which we have gone through. so grant ran for president to save the fruits of victory from continued political turmoil and disagreement which had reached its climax in 1868 with the treatment and near conviction of andrew johnson. grant didn't need a speech writer.

he issued a four word statement. accepting the republican nomination that may, let us have peace. it had magnificent -- a magnificent malleable , statement. between whites and blacks, between north and south, let us have peace and go make some money. let's have peace. great stuff. let us have peace. the words today engraved at the entrance to his tomb. --nt jewel enough votes votes drew enough including hundreds of thousands , of african-americans casting their first ballot in a presidential election to secure , the presidency in november, 1868. those people who voted for him voted to bring reconstruction to an end. they have had enough. four years out.

if only it had been that simple. president, grant moved quickly to support the ratification of the 15th amendment, and when it was 1870, grantmarch commemorated the occasion with a proclamation, in which he said, the 15th amendment concluded the road of repudiating the dred scott decision. presidents cannot issue proclamations. two grant, this was -- to grant this was a special occasion. use race, color to deny an american citizen the right to vote.

although he was more skeptical of trying to do the same in texas or mississippi. mississippi ran grant's brother-in-law for governor. in the case of georgia where violence had been rampant because one of my secret klansman, john b gordon, redo that plaque. we don't want to talk about them. despite grant's best efforts

white supremacist terrorist , violence increased. in 1870 and 1871, though grant urged congress to pass the most forceful in a series of enforcement acts to allow the federal government to protect the right to vote, the ku klux act. he could suspend the right of habeas corpus and said federal troops to protect black rights from terrorist groups. that is homeland security for you. in the fall he does use that , power to send troops into the country of south carolina, including where i used to teach. it is credited with breaking the back of the ku klux klan to the extent that some historians say exactly nothing about what

happened during his second term about reconstruction. i won't make that mistake. because he may have broken the ku klux klan, he did not break white supremacist terrorism. that continued in different forms and with somewhat different objections. -- different objectives. he tried to look for other solutions to the problem of how do you get white softeners to respect african-americans , including the controversial proposal to next the dominican republic. annex the dominican republic. lots of raw material. the one difference was grant said, we will take the dominican republic, make it a part of the

united states, and then we will see if african-american work , where laborouth is precious, although treated badly, those african-americans can leave and go to the dominican republic, where there is lots of room and lots of opportunity for them and maybe , want southerners to keep that workforce may respect their civil rights. some historians dismiss this as cockamamie proposal. it was a proposal frederick douglass among others endorsed. frederick douglass was not a cockamamie man. frederick douglass would oppose colonization before the american civil war and endorse annexation. the man who opposed annexation and played a major role in his

downfall of massachusetts senator charles sumner, friend of the black man, assisted by missouri senator and former commander charles shorts. his gettysburg reconstruction connection. grant could stop some of the violence, but he couldn't stop the eventual collapse of several republican regimes, even when he won overwhelming reelection in 1872. but grant's second term saw the collapse of his reconstruction policy. violence, nauseating fashion. i think that's important to understand. hero. grant as a in this case, he is going to be a hero of a different, lost

cause. and not the hero, but someone who has to deal with very difficult ashton. what grant learns is that while white southerners may not have the will to fight for independence they have united will to fight for the preservation of white supremacy. white northerners, while they may have the energy to presume the union they do not have the heart when it came to preserving black equality and freedom. a couple of incidents illustrate his frustration with what was going on. april 13, 1873. i'm talking to you today on the one-year anniversary of the murder of nine people in charleston, south carolina. we are all horrified by that.

april 13, 1873, 100 african-americans were shut down in cold blood in colfax, louisiana because they supported the republican party. a few of the people who massacreed the colfax were brought to trial. but they were acquitted because of a narrow interpretation of republican enforcement legislation to protect lack civil rights. grant addressed this in a special message to the united state senate in january of 1875, which he complained that everyone of the colfax unwhipped withs on

of justice and in no way can be found in this boasted land of civilization and christianity to punish the perpetrators of this bloody and monstrous crime. he was calling out the american people, certainly the american white people. how can you say that your christian people? how can you say that you are a civilized people, and we allow this to go on? the president noted the spirit of hatred and violence is stronger. -- a stronger than law. a lot of people tell me he was not an eloquent man. i know of no more eloquent words said by an american president than these. grant began to understand the people who supported him were

not so enthusiastic about supporting federal intervention to protect black rights. later that year, the governor of mississippi, another commander in the 11th core, by the way, the sieges the president for seeches the president for federal assistance to try to fend off white supremacists in mississippi. the so-called mississippi plan. everyone knew what forcibly meant. responding to the plea from governor ames, noting the whole public -- there had been so much lying and misrepresentation in the popular press and among politicians, as grant put it,

the great majority of americans are ready to condemn any interference on the part of the government. people did not have the stomach to support protecting black rights anymore. at least white people did not. and so reconstruction's collapse, we talk about the compromise of 1877. reconstruction really starts good in 1875. grant, a man who hated retreat, had to conduct the fighting withdrawal. following year, 1876, and south carolina, in the wake of a july 4 celebration gone wrong, african-americans were gunned down in homburg on july 8. grant writes back saying the

scene is cruel, bloodthirsty, unprovoked and uncalled for, a repetition of the course that has been pursued and other southern states. terrorist violence have become a way of life for white christmases -- for white supremacist and african-americans were their victims. grant went on. a government that cannot give protection to life, property and all guaranteed civil rights, including an untraveled -- untroubled ballot, is a failure. too long denial of guaranteed rights will lead to revolution. the suffering must fall on the innocent, as well as the guilty. grant left the presidency in 1877. therefore, seeing that while the union had been achieved, justice for african-americans had not

been. yet, he still couldn't quite forget what had happened. after his presidency, he goes on a trip around the world. isng the people he meets, otto von bismarck, another great statesman of national reunification or unification. the two men talked. ofnk of this conversation ulysses s. grant and otto von bismarck. he says while your situation is like ours you have to unite your , country by blood and honor, through war. grant says that wasn't all. it was also about slavery. slavery was essential. we cannot be a truly united people until we destroyed slavery. so, slavery is still on his mind. but, so is the attitude of many

white americans using military force. it seems that president heyes had no problem pulling out troops during labor strikes. why were americans willing and in some cases enthusiastic to use military force when it came to labor unrest, but showed a market lack of enthusiasm -- showed a marked lack of enthusiasm when it came to protecting the rights of african-americans? so something was wrong here. that was a really sharp indictment of the american people and the american system. grant reflected that reconstruction had been a mistake all along and that the restoration of civil government had been a mistake and had been too hasty. it had been better to have a

prolonged federal occupation. that would be the only way african-americans would have their rights protected, at the point of a bayonet since they were being denied by a hood and a noose. perhaps this was the wrong way of going about things. we made clear that since we have given blacks the vote, we have to honor that pledge. it maybe it would have been better to not allow anyone to vote. but the mind of the american people is against that. it is hostile, the military government. it is hostile. we don't want that. we want a restoration of the union and civil government even , if that civil government ends up not protecting the rights of some citizens. returning to the united states

in 1870 nine, the following year, grant became a candidate for a third term, lost the republican nomination after many, many ballots. those brokered conventions we heard about this year. convention was a marathon that resulted in the nomination of james garfield. grant was thinking about reconstruction, about the war all the way to the end of his life, and the writing of his memoirs. in grant's last year, not only was he writing memoirs, but the whole world watched a long painful death watch as he slowly became victim to throat cancer. you could see a series of balancing act at grant undertook during that time in making his death means something as well as having his memoirs say something.

the memoirs reassert the centrality of slavery. grant says there would not have , been a civil war had there not been slavery. honored the courage of confederate soldiers while bemoaning their cause as one of the worst for which anyone had ever fought. courage wasg the reflected in the dedication of the memoirs, which was the -- which was to the american soldier. his son said, don't you mean the union one? it to theo, leave american soldier. grant still expressed regret in his memoirs that moore had not been done for african-americans, the nation still did not seem up for securing the promise of freedom and equality but he

, glimpsed in the wake of emancipation. -- equality that he glimpsed in the wake of emancipation. he worked hard defending his own record, staff officers had done that before. grant would start to read the chapters and make comments including comments like don't be so harsh on ben butler he is , a valuable political ally now. those memoirs did two things. he does not speak highly of robert e lee. he had enough of the lee worship. and clearly, sometimes felt rather sensitive about the way in which lee was viewed, even then. in very clever ways,

evened some scores with other generals who wore blue in such an artful way that a lot of people take his memoirs at face value instead of a narrative presenting an argument and interpretation that emphasizes some things, and does not discuss other things such as the , rumors of grant's drinking. even if he bought a farm next to where the budweiser clydesdales are now housed in st. louis. he entertained visits from confederate officers including simon buckner. he had surrendered to him in 1862. now he welcomed buckner and messages from other confederates as well. he talked about the need for harmony and peace even as he reminded people because of the war had been slavery and justice had to be done to the black man.

several of those former confederates acted as pallbearers at his funeral after his death on july 30, 1885. ulysses s grant understood that you cannot defy the american ending at appomattox. that was one stage in a longer struggle. although there had been achievements and successes there had been shortcomings and failures. we ought to keep that in mind as we visit battlefields such as this or as you go to the site of one, lincoln's gettysburg address where it talks about the unfinished work for us. -- the work before us. grandma say, that the work remained unfinished in his time,

and i would say, it remains unfinished in ours. thank you very much. [applause] >> i believe we have time for some questions. so now you can pepper me to your heart's desire and i will try to , deflect with my trusty stanley cup. [laughter] >> yes? massacre, general camby was murdered allen west. did the threat to the west and on enforcement on reconstruction in the south drawing troops? >> no. what happened -- these are two major blows coming within 48 hours to his policies. there's not a major distraction.

we do know, we have heard the military would rather seek service out west. that is where the glory was. it was also where custard went. you know what happened there? the gettysburg eye. -- gettysburg guy. it didn't have much of an effect, much more significant was the effect of the panic of 1873 and the economic depression which made many people think , about their own interests rather than the interests of others. yes? >> you mentioned in his memoirs he didn't mention general lee to a certain degree. >> he mentions lee, but not with the positive praise some others had. >> i was curious if they did have a history before the war in the mexican-american war. why would he not give due respect to him like he did it appomattox?

>> you can respectfully without the notion that there was a fourth member of the trinity and that was robert e lee. [laughter] >> and grant thought people had exalted lee's abilities beyond measure. the second day of combat, may 6, when someone says we are being attacked. grant turns around, throws down a cigar, and when grant threw down a cigar, that was bad news. -- he saidnk people you think he is going to do a double somersault and turn on our flanks and our e at the same time. go back and think about what you are going to do, not what lee is going to do. was thethe problem veneration of lee. lee wasn't even sure he remembered it very well. grant is a lieutenant.

he walks into headquarters and there is lee. they were buddies of any sort. lee was not a man of great humor. the last time they meet, grant is president. lee comes lobbying for a railroad firm. i know lee, lobbyist. [laughter] i know there are people who want to go to graduate school. grant looks at him and says you have more to do with destroying railroads then building them. lee doesn't laugh. [laughter] do you think that grant's memorial depicts his vision of how he wanted to be remembered after his death, or do you think he would make changes to how his morning -- about his memorial

was developed? understood het was crafting how people -- i understood he was crafting how people remembered him. i think grant was also able to admit mistakes. his memoirs admit the final assault at the harbor and in vicksburg were mistakes. he may not admit the mistakes others want him to admit, but i think it is a human grant that comes out in those memoirs. not a perfect grant. it is a man who wants to even old scores and wounds that still hurt. yes? >> i was just wondering. >> grant is one of the first presidents to expand suffrage. how do you think you change the roles of the presidency? >> how to grant change the role of presidency? grant understood before one thing, the president had to work

with congress. a skilled johnson was lacking. grant also understood perhaps his should be people who should support the administration. grant also was not reluctant to use the executive veto. most notably in 1874 to reject an inflation bill. you seem a presidential assertiveness during grant's administration usually associated with residents down the road. grant himself was the first united states president to advocate the line-item veto. so, there are things grant does that try to rebuild presidential power. >> would you comment on how grant's relationship with the jewish community ended up?

>> it did not start off well. [laughter] >> what we are talking about is a general order that rent issues in december of 62 during a series of setbacks -- december of 1862 during a series of setbacks. recognizing the smuggling that is going on behind his line, he decides to strike at the people he thinks to be most responsible, jewish folk. now, by the way people said if , he had just said jewish lers were traders that would have been ok. he said to exile all jewish people from his command, which could be interpreted to be his own soldiers. word of this order got to washington. lincoln said you were going to resend it. it is the only charge grant response to during the 1868

campaign. he says, you are right, that was a mistake in order, a dem idea. there was a recent book to talk about grant actually did things that jews supported him on. this was a damaging thing and he knew it. he had blown it. he disavowed it and said it was wrong. grant have the ability to say he was wrong. there are presidents who can say they are wrong, or candidates that say we can't. he liked that it was a horrific order. some biographers have tried to explain it. but grant deunced his own act. thank you very much. [applause] >> you are watching american history tv all weekend every

weekend on c-span3. to join a conversation, like us on facebook at c-span/history. >> on lectures in history, history professor elizabeth gray talks about the use of an public opinions on opium in the 19th century. how addicts were upper-class women who had been prescribed the drug spider doctors. it created a gender divide between alcoholics and opium addicts. her class is about 45 minutes. elizabeth gray: good morning everyone. today we are looking at the issue of drug addiction and 19th-century america. this is before the concept