valley. you've got all of this from atlanta to saf gnaw and back up to south carolina. south carolina, i think, the images of sherman's march, the georgia thing. but south carolina still remembered it, too. >> a lot of what we know today about it is filtered through movies and books. probably the thing that popularized sherman's march the most was "gone with the wind." both the movie and the book. it presented sherman as the wind that came through that destroyed the culture. it gets back to what caudle and ashdown said, it's sherman that destroys the culture and that becomes that, i think the term they use was the wind. this wire and wind that came through georgia. sarah reuben made an interesting point about the destruction itself. i thought it was interesting, i left it out of my talk. she said we have the sense of the march to the sea as being the giant tidal wave this tsunami.

60 miles across from one end to the other as it goes out to the sea. she said in reality it was more like fingers of destruction. stitches through the landscape. because the army was advancing down roads. and most places they stayed a day. if that much. so the destruction, the destruction is limited to how far off the roads they can go. so she said there are vast areas in between those roads. that were untouched by it. and those people of course applied food and help to the other people who had lost so much during the march. it's interesting, because i had not even thought about this. we do have this image of tsunami of fire going across and if fact it really is more like fingers of destruction going across georgia. yes, sir? >> people in the valley recognized that sheridan not only planned, organized and carried out zonal destruction,

so this was an order of destruction. and it was very thorough, although there's many other phases to it. but that's different than what happened in georgia. >> well, georgia, there was the order to destroy. i mean sherman's order was to destroy certain types of property. i think the same thing, as you pointed out, sheridan and the valley. it's interesting, the myths continue in both places as to what was destroyed. a very distinguished historian, bud, you and i know, was telling me about the fact that he was with a group of people and a meeting like this and this man swore that every mill in the shenandoah valley had been burned. after the program was over with, this historian said where are we going to eat tonight? this guy said oh, we're going to this wonderful restaurant in this restored mill, this mill that's been converted, civil war era mill that's been converted into a restaurant. so there's, there is this image that again that everything gets

wined out and destroyed. i don't know in terms of differences there. because sherm-set out, these were orders to destroy as well. grant knew what was going on. all of this happened with his full consent. we have this image of sherman as a lunatic that convinced 60,000 people to go on a binge of destruction. he's just out there flatheading through the countryside. nobody knows what's he's doing, he's just doing it on his own. it was all done with the permission of his superior officers, as much as the same way sheridan. it's all happening at the same time. the lincoln administration, the government of states is saying enough is enough. let's get it over with i tend to think about it as like the atomic bomb. no one would stand here and say the atomic bomb, dropping an atomic bomb is a good thing, it's a horrible thing, horrible thing, beyond horror. and yet, it's one of those things that at the time it was

felt it was necessary to do, to end the war. to use the tools that were at the disposal of the government. and today on looking back, we realize that even though tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people died, the casualtying would have been even worse on both sides. we talk about how many americans would have been killed if we would have invaded japan. think about how many japanese would have died as well. a mass splalaughter. so it was a horrible, horrible thing. we look back now on the consequences of it. and what it led to. it destroyed slavery. it preserved the united states of america. horrible thing that in the end had the consequence of giving us the world that we live in today, the great country that we live in today. i've got one question in the back here. >> you ended with contemporary times. my question is the following, is

you had mentioned that sherman fought a hard war to create a soft peace. and i'm just wondering in contemporary times it seems like we're fighting a soft war, in many places, and these soft wars continue, and we have a very hard peace. and one comment i have is in the libra codes and enhanced interrogation techniques in my opinion, these individuals are not entitled to libra core protections, because they're dressed as civilians, targeting civilians and to be nighted to the rights of the libra codes, you need to be in full uniform and respect libra codes if sherman was general or president for a day, would hard war be justified to create soft peaces everywhere where you are? because what i see, my bias is showing, that we have multiple soft wars, they're going to continue to grow like a virus. because we are not doing what sherman did in terms of bringing

about closure to some of these conflicts. >> i love questions like this. to me these are the kinds of questions that tell me that history is relevant. it's not just something fun to do. but we want to understand what happened in the past, because of its relevancy today. it helps us to understand. i think what i mentioned this whole area of sherman's career, the counterinsurgency, something that's not been explored very well. that's a great question, i wish i knew the answer to that you're making me think about this, i love this. this is the thing i tell audiences, you may not buy a single thing i've said up here, although what i've said is a compilation of what all the historians, a consensus to a large extent on much of this now. you may not buy any of it. what i hope is you will never look at this man and this march the same way. before i step away from the podium, let me say it's a real honor to be here with so many distinguished historians. there's so many great people, richard mcmurray and jeffrey wert. you started the day out with the

best, you started the day out with bud robertsonth and you ended it with the least. as far as i'm concerned. so thank you very much. [ applause ] this sunday on newsmakers, virginia governor terry mcauliffe talks about swing state politics, a former dnc chair and headed up hillary clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. the program airs at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. eastern. >> next, historian edward bonekemper discuss his book "the myth of the lost cause." why the south fought the civil war and why the north won." by former confederates seeking to justify their split from the union and their defeat and mr. bonokemper argues that slavery and not state's rights was the primary reason for cessation. it disputes the aspects of the

lost cause myth, such that the idea that confederate general robert e. lee was a different better commander than ulysses s. grant, and he defeated lee because of superior numbers and resources. the smithsonian resources hosted this two-hour event. >> good evening, everyone. can everyone hear me well? yes. good. i'm mary mclaughlin, and i am a program coordinator with the smithsonian associates. i would like to welcome you to what promises to be a stimulating program on the myth of the lost cause. it is always a pleasure to welcome ed bonokemper to the smithsonian. through the years he's had programs for us on civil war topics, in fact, this is his tenth appearance with the smithsonian associates. ed is the book review editor of

civil war news which reviews all 250-plus new civil war books each year. he was an adjunct lecturer in military history at mullenberg college for eight years and has history degrees from mullenberg and from old dominion university as well as a law degree from yale. he served as a lawyer with the federal government for more than 34 years and as a retired commander in the u.s. coast guard reserve. he is the author of six books on civil war history, including the "myth of the lost cause: why the south fought the civil war and why the north won." which was published last fall and his book would be available through smithsonian museum shops outside the entrance to this auditorium at the end of tonight's program and ed would be happy to sign copies for you then. so with that said we have a very packed two hours in store for you. i know this will be a very engaging program so we want to

bring ed up. please join me in giving a very warm welcome to ed bonokemper. >> thank you, mary. it's a pleasure being back here at the smithsonian to talk about the civil war and i really appreciate the great turnout tonight. it certainly shows the length to which people will go to avoid presidential town halls. >> and also, i do have to confess that as you heard, i've got two history degrees and a law degree so you will be hearing an argumentative historian this even coming is a good time for me to say these are my personal comments. they're based on my personal research. they do not necessarily reflect the views of the smithsonian at all.

this is completely bonokemper -- bonokemper talking to you. so mary and the smithsonian should be off the hook. okay. we are here tonight to discuss a very important topic and that is the myth of the lost cause. now i'll give you a couple of examples of the myth in action and then go on and explain what the details are of the myth and what the components are of the myth and also take a look at each one. the myth of the lost cause was taken by ex-confederates and general william nelson pendleton and reverend william jones between 1860 and 1900 to basically justify the civil war. what had happened was the north

fought the war and the north fought the war and northerners went home and resumed their daily lives and really didn't care much about writing about the war until a hundred years after the war. >> southerners on the other hand, had a lot to write about and had a lot to justify. what happened was almost the entire war was in the south and the south was just an economic basket case by the end of the war because northern army his gone through and destroyed pretty much anything of economic value. in addition, you had to realize that the south major institution, social institution, that is slavery had suddenly come to an end and there were 3 1/2 to 4 million slaves with a big question about what happens to these african-americans? and so southerners felt compelled to explain why it was that this devastation had occurred and that, for example, 25% of southern white men

between the ages of 20 and 45 were dead. not just casualties, they were dead as a result of the civil war. so there was a lot of explaining to do and that's the origin of the myth of those first 30 years, but it has continued, and probably the best example of the seven volumes by douglas freeman in the 1930s and 1940s, first of all, explaining in the first four volumes called r.e. lee that lee walked on water and then in the next three volumes, basically explaining any thoughts that lee might appear to have had by blaming all his subordinates called lee's lieutenants, which could have been called lee's scapegoats and that was a continuation of the myth of the lost cause. the reason i felt compelled to

write the book was as i went around the country talking to members of civil war roundtables, i found that a lot of people who, in my view, should have known better were greatly affected and bought into a very many aspects of the myth of the lost cause. so that's why i think it's important for all of us to consider what the myth is and how much we want to buy into the myth, and the change of position that occurred among southern leaders is on the threshold of the civil war as seven other states were seceding before lincoln took office. jefferson davis gave a very emotional address to the united states senate in which he said sayonara. in that address he explained

that he felt compelled to leave and his state felt compelled to leave the union because the institution of slavery was being threatened by the federal government and by northern states and so that was his discussion in 1861. i believe that was december 1860. two decades later in 1881, jefferson davis published his two-volume memoirs and in that work jefferson davis adopts the myth of the lost cause position and says slavery had almost nothing to do with the war. in fact, he states specifically there would have been a civil war even if no american had owned a slave. i won't comment on which i think

is truth or fiction, but just note the contrast between the two and this is very typical and it's why it is so important to go back and look at the evidence at the time of cessation and at the time of the formation of the confederacy. now, as i said, a lot of people have bought into this over the years, and i think it greatly affected the historiography of the civil war and the north, south, east and west you the myth, and that's why it's important to understand what a myth is and to examine how valid you think it is based upon the evidence. the statement i have behind me, and i'll try to not rely upon the upper left corner, this is a quote from john keegan. john keegan is or was an internationally recognized military historian with about 20 military history books and he

lived in england, to be honest and he did not understand the civil war that well and he wrote a book on it, eventually and it was not a very good book, and in one of his other books on intelligence and war, he just made a general statement sort of off-the-cuff and this is where historians run into trouble, and i do it myself all the time, you try to make a general statement about something which is tangential to what you're writing about and what you know about, and keegan said, the southern people were resolute in their determination to preserve state's rights. the legal issue over which they had declared separation.

he bought into what i consider to be the myth that state's rights was what the cessation and the formation of the confederacy were all about. so i'll springboard off of that and let me tell you what i see as the major component of the myth. the first one i just stated and that's an absolutely critical one, slavery was not the primary cause, states rights was the primary cause, of the civil war. i'm now talking on the left there. the myth goes on that it's an institution to whites and blacks alike and all of a sudden the myth jumps into something that sounds inconsistent with what i just said. by the way, the civil war was unnecessary because slavery was going to expire on its own within a fairly reasonable period of time, and we'll take a look at that. further, the argument goes and

the south never had a chance to win the war and one would ask, if that's so why did you start the war? and thus, the south did the best it could with the resources that it had and part of this then is that robert e. lee was the great military leader and that he was one of the greatest generals who ever lived, and you will find a lot of the books that take the lost cause position. they talk about lee literally in christlike terms and talking about gethsemene. he clearly lost a really big battle at gettysburg, so what to do about that? that became fairly easy to deal with. james longstreet was made a scapegoat for lee's losing

gettysburg and one reason for that is because he had the gall to actually take a position in the grant administration as a collector of tariffs in new orleans. so he went over to the republican side and that was death to the political career in the south and made him a sitting target to become the scapegoat of gettysburg. lee surrendered to grant and if lee is so great why did he lose to grant? so that myth goes that grant won only by being a butcher. grant is a butcher and he only won by brute force, and the myth of the lost cause is that union forces only won by engaging in total war. total war. that's a phrase that's really, i think being bandied about

loosely these days and we will take a brief look at that. okay. we will start out with what was the issue of slavery in 1861. i don't think we really need to deal very long with the issue of was slavery beneficial to whites and blacks. certainly certain whites benefited from it and keep in mind, please, when i say slavery tonight in shorthand, i will be referring to slavery/white supremacy. the reason i do that is if you're in the south and even if you did not personally own a slave you were still the social beneficiary of the existence of slavery and that can simply be explained by saying that no matter how poor a dirt farmer you were or how little you owned

you always knew that if your society there were 4 million people who were inferior to you as a matter of law and of social practice. so, that said, let's look at slavery itself and the reason i say we don't need to spend much time is basically we have a long history of rapes and murders of slaves. we have the beatings and the scars on the back. we have massive movements of slaves from the northern tier of southern states from maryland and virginia primarily down to the deep south. the best estimate is that about 1 million slaves were sold out of the northern south at the border states or the northern

southern states into the deep south. about 1 million slaves and if you take that million and adjust and actually increase for the number of transactions that did not involve such long distance transfers, i think it is a fair estimate that probably about 1 million slaves over the 200-plus years of slavery were separated from their families. there were children taken from parents and wives taken from husbands, et cetera, was there no thought really given to trying to keep the families together except in rear instances. i'm saying it's a very common practice to split the families. i put that in quotes because you have to keep in mind that part of the devastating effect of slavery was that slave marriages were not recognized and the slave his first names and not last names and marriage not recognized and children were the property of the mother's owner and as far as the owner was

concerned it was his economic decision as to what to do with those slaves, whether to hold them, sell them, et cetera. so there was a devastating impact on the african-american family because they were really legally kept from forming family groups as we know them. i don't think i need to say too much more about justifying slavery except just to remind you, one reason this comes up is because of approaches to the south. i'll call it the mint julep approach as we reflect it with the novel of "gone with the wind just take a look at things with a big shaker full of salt. there was something that seems to me a little bit inconsistent in the myth which is despite this wonderful, benevolent

institution which is going to come to an end within a reasonable period of time which was defined loosely before 1900 because it was no longer really beneficial economically to the owners and the reason this argument is made because then it can be argued the civil war was unnecessary. the civil war was unnecessary. northerners didn't have to fight the war because slavery was going to disappear anyway. if you look at the records you will see that the value of slaves throughout the states that became the confederacy were on the rise in 1860. it had reached the highest point they'd ever reached. cotton sales were way up. the value of cotton had continued to increase and also keep in mind that slaves were not only used to raise cotton. slaves were used for tobacco,

rice, indigo. they were used for a lot of crops and a lot of farm production and by this time a lot of owners had recognized, some slaves, despite the fact that they were put down as a group and some slave his talents as artisans, carpenters, et cetera, so they were being leased out and in addition as the south was starting to get industrialized in the very early stages, slaves were being used in industrial arenas. for example, in richmond, virginia the tobacco plants and you're talking about creating cigars or cigarettes, slaves were almost the exclusive labor to run all of the tobacco factories and even more interesting, in richmond you had the treadinger iron works in the civil war for all of the confederate artillery and

armory, they were the iron works which was the iron works and that was almost exclusively manned by black slaves. so the southerners were beginning to figure out from an economic perspective, there are a lot of other usees to which we can put slaves and part of the argument that slavery was going go away is also that the south had run out of land that could be developed for agriculture. i think the simple rebuttal to that is between 1865 and 1925, the amount of land dedicated to agriculture in the south tripled, it tripled. more recent studies really showed that the land was there to be developed for agriculture and it's just that economically it wasn't being done at the time and in terms of slavery

disappearing, the estimate of the southerners themselves is the cessation resolutions is they were defending an institution which had assets in slaves from 4 to $6 billion and that would be hundreds of billions of dollars now if you categorized assets in the united states, that was the biggest, single category of the most valuable single category of assets in the united states was the value of slaves. so i personally see no indication that slavery was to go away. now we get to the $64,000 question and what caused the cessation and the formation of the confederacy. i say that once you had a number of slaves going from seven to

11. seven deep south states seceded between lincoln's election and his inauguration in 1861. the seven deep south states seceded and they immediately began seizing armory and weapons scattered throughout the south. the only ones that escaped seizure were fort pickens in pensacola and fort sumpter at charleston. other than that, the south was already seizing these weapons and they were -- the states were buying weapons in europe. they were preparing for war and ultimately, the decision was made personally by jefferson davis authorizing to bombard ford sumpter to bomb the war.

given the reasons for the south seceding and forming the confederacy it should not be a surprise that once those things were in place there was going to be a war and as you will see there were a lot of people trying to avoid a war by dealing with the issue of slavery. okay. the first thing i want to do is look at contemporary evidence, 1860, 1861. i think that's the only or the most valid way to determine the cause of secession and the formation of the confederacy. a lot of people display or wave the confederate battle flag and my question is basically when they're doing that what does

that flag stands for? that's the confederate flag and stands for the con fed rassy and what did the confederacy stand for and we as a society ought to look into that issue and draw our own conclusions about yet confederacy? why the confederacy? now, to me, anything that occurred, anything that is said after about the middle of 1864 when it was pretty clear the south was going down the tubes. anything from that date to the present is second guessing. it's looking back and it's imposing one's own personal views on the situation and god forbid i would impose my personal views on any of this, but my point is that i'm trying to focus on what actually happened in 1860 and 61 and look at that contemporaneous evidence. i think that is our most valid evidence of why there was a

confederacy. i think you have a handout which has this on it. okay. there are a couple of points i want to make from these statistics that i'll put together from a couple of different sources. the first thing is that only slave states seceded from the union. there are about 15 freed states and 15 slave states and the only states that ever seceded were slave states and that might tell you something that there were more than just state's rights at issue. now, among the group of slave states and among the 15 there are three categories. the first category and the early seceders. the seven states that went out

before lincoln was president and then you have four more who went out after ford sumpter and did not want to take up arms against their fellow southern states and had a great deal of interest in slavery, as well and you had four other slave states, specifically delaware, maryland, kentucky and missouri which were known as the border states and those slave states never seceded and let's look at this data and see if there was a correlation between what i'll just summarize initially as the blackness of a state and how likely it was to secede and when it was likely to secede. so the big numbers up here are -- oops. in the first group -- in the first group of seven that went out early, 47% of the population were slaves. 47% of the total population was slaves and here's a number that may shock some of you. 37% of the families in these states owned slave, and i say it may shock you because the

promulgators of the lost cause like to say things like, did you know that only 1% of americans owned slaves in 1860 so slavery could not have been a cause of the war. well, that, of course, includes everyone north and south, man, women and children. and let's just look at certain states and not look at individuals because under that -- and let me move on. there's another related rationale which is that you know that only about 5% of southerners owned slaves. so therefore the war could not have been about slavery and what that does is if you have a family and you have a father who owns x number of slaves and he's married to his wife and he's got

eight kids, that's really ten people who benefit from having one or more slaves in the family and so i think it is rational to look at how many families directly own slaves? and this doesn't even get us into what goes beyond that which is the whole social structure and how we'll call lower class whites having 4 million people by law subservient to them and let's look at this now and 37% of the families in the first seceding states owned slaves and after ford sumpter, we had 29%. 29% of the population was slaves and 29% of the families owned slaves and finally in the four border states coming up right here and the last ones on your handout, only 14% of the population consisted of slaves

and only 16% of the families owned slaves. so just on a demographic basis it appears to me that there is a significant relationship between slave population and family ownership of slaves and the willingness to leave the union and the earlier the better in cases where the numbers were higher. okay. enough about that. the best evidence. the best evidence of why there was a confederacy is as you would expect in the words of the seceders themselves, in the words of the seceders themselves and that is mind-boggling about

why they seceded and you don't find mention of the word tariff of a red herring that's thrown out there and you actually don't see state's rights either. what you see is a long list of slavery-related issues and now the -- i've got some of these here, i think. we will just take a look at two of them. let me first back off and say that of the seven first seceding states they left statements about why they were seceding and actual documents in the cessation resolutions ore companion documents saying here's why we did this and only louisiana was silent and we have other ways of looking at louisiana, as well. right now we're just exloring here's what people said about

why they were seceding and why they were forming a confederacy. first of all, the first one out, of course, south carolina, and so they issued a declaration of the immediate causes for seceding from the union and northern states and government failure to return slaves in accordance with the constitution and federal law. quote, but an increasing hostility on the part of the nonslave holding states to the institution of slavery has led to a disregard to their obligations and the laws of the general government has ceased to effect the objects of the constitution. south carolina complained and northern state his condemned slavery as sinful. northerners had elected as president a man who had said government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free.

they criticized the fact some northern say thes had the audacity to allow free blacks to vote. so my conclusion is far from respecting other state's rights to cast liberty laws, for example or extend several freedoms or rights to african-americans south carolinians were opposed to these states being able to choose for themselves what they would do or not do, but in addition we have them complaining that the federal government is not doing enough. the federal government is not, in their view, aggressively enforcing the fugitive slave provisions of the constitution and the federal law. you should be aware that believe it or not, the u.s. constitution has originally adopted had a specific provision that required runaway slaves to be returned back from the states from which

they had fled. this is not just a matter of federal law and 1792 congress put this in law and as you well know in 1850, that statute was strengthened quite a bit and this is typical, the southern complaint and fugitive slavery is a big, big source of aggravation and complaint by the southern states. it is a complaint that the federal government isn't doing enough. it doesn't sound like they're really concerned primarily with states' rights, vis-a-vis the federal government and what they want the federal government to do which is to preserve slavery. mississippi was right in there behind south carolina, and their governor urged the convening of a cessation convention and the united states is now up for a final settlement.

the legislature called for a cessation convention and they had a long list of grievances. so the mess miss legislature convening a cessation convention. they complained that the north had defined the constitution's fugitive slave provision and enticed slaves to free and agitated against slavery and sought to exclude savory from the territories and opposed the admission of more slave states. moreover, abolitionists sought to amend the constitution to prohibit slavery and to punish slave holders. they had encouraged john brown's raid and had elected a president and vice president who were hostile to the south and its system of labor and so the legislature left no doubt why they were convening a cessation

convention and the convention basically used the same kind of language and obviously seceded very quickly. the convention said in their declaration of the causes of sec session -- seccession, this, our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. these products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. these products have become necessities of the world and a blow at slavery is a blow at civilization and commerce. that blow was at the point of reaching its cons nation. there was no choice left to us, but submission to the mandates

of abolition or a disillusion, that's not a summary by me, of the union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. now that's not some summary by me, that's verbatim what the mississippi seccession convention said. they had a long list of grievances, 16 slavery grievances. the point being in all these documents in which the states explained why they were seceding and one word that runs through it all and the word is slavery. slavery, slavery, slavery, and really, no other reasons given and most of these documents are readily available and you can google them and find them in the official records of the civil war and a civil warren cyclopedia called heidler and heidler.

these are around, if you want to checkup on me, be my guest because reading these things will be an eye-opening experience. okay. simultaneous with seccession, you had other things that were occurring which tells us a lot about why there was seccession. first of all, there were settlement efforts being made to try to avoid war. the country was not stupid. the whole election of 1860, the four-way presidential election in which lincoln emerged the winner was all about one issue. that issue was extension of slavery into the territories or not with the candidates having different positions on that issue, but it was that issue which people were voting on

almost exclusively. so when lincoln comes in and gets elected on the basis of no slavery into the territories, that sets off fire bells in the south and they are very, very concerned about that issue. as i said, people were not dumb, and there was a great realization that all of this could lead to war and so there were certain leaders in the federal governments and in some of the states who were to try to avoid war and so if we take a look at what kinds of compromises they wanted to work out to avoid war, we get real good contemporaneous insight as to what was in people's minds and what was thought to be the cause of secession and if we could deal with issues how could we avoid a civil war? well, the first major development was in december of

1860 and january 1861 when the senate and the house put together a massive committee, 33 members and one from each state and they came up with proposed constitutional amendments and these are called the cridendon and he comes from a slavery state, but that state never did secede. crittendon was maeking a good-faith effort to tri to avoid war, as were most of the other people who put this package together. but the key point is, what was the focus of the package? what were the compromises? what were the constitutional amendments that were recommended in the same months where south

carolina seceded and other states started to follow suit? well, here are what the crittendon amendments would have done for the constitution and extend the free line to the pacific ocean? recognize and protect slavery in existing slave states and all present and future territories and then prohibit congress from interfering from the interstate trade from abolishing slavery in d.c. unless certain conditions were met. freeing slaves brought to d.c. congressmen showed up with their own slaves, they didn't want them to become free by virtue of showing up in the district. prohibiting in the transferring of slaves and they would be prohibited from the constitution

from doing and then here is the beauty and here is my favorite, congress would be prohibited from passing any future constitutional amendments allowing any of the above or authorizing congressional and interference or abolishment of slavery. okay. so in other words, we not only are going to address the slave issues all in accordance with the wishes of the seceding states, but we also want to say in the constitution, and by the way, this can never be changed. this can never be changed. for our purposes, the point again is that every one of these points dealt with slavery. they're all addressing slavery issues. there's nothing in here about tariffs and there's nothing in here about states' rights. it is about slavery. then, and by the way, the crittendon amendments went nowhere. lincoln sent word to the republican leadership which now

controlled the congress especially since southern democrats were bailing out which made it easier, lingeron sent the word to republican party leaders that they were not to go along with any amendments along these lines because doing so would be totally inconsistent with why the republican was formed in 1854 with the principles of the republican stood for and with the election results of 1860 when the plurality of americans voted not to extend slavery into the territories by supporting the republicans. so lincoln thought this would be a total sellout of everything that he and his party stood for so he passed the word no and so that guaranteed that these amendments were going nowhere, but again, for our purposes and the important thing to note is that major effort made to avoid

war by addressing what issues? slavery issues. okay. continuing that trend, the next month in february 1862 or 1861, was there a major peace conference in washington, d.c. and fortuitously, there is a brand new book out on that called the peace that almost was and the peace that almost was by mark tooley, t-o-o-l-e-y and it's an excellent book. i think there is a disconnect between the publisher's title and the contents of the book which i have experienced myself, but the title is overly optimistic and the peace that almost was it wasn't going to happen. and what happened is that seven states were already out so the

remaining slave states, the eight southern states that had not seceded pretty much came, they all came and most of the northern states came to this month-long conference in washington, d.c. and at that conference, lo and behold, what did they do? they developed proposed constitutional amendments to avoid war. that was what they were all about. so what did this set of constitutional amendments say? it said reinstitute the boundaries of free and slave states, to approve new territories. prohibit congress, affirming the fugitive slave laws, ban the importation of slaves and require unanimous approval is my

favorite on this collection, require unanimous approval by the states to revoke any of these constitutional amendments. so in other words, these are going to be locked in forever, as well. so one month after the crittendon amendments were shot down the peace conference recommendations were also going nowhere at all. in fact, it's kind of ironic, ex-president john tyler of virginia which had not yet seceded chaired the conference, and ex-president, big name and so he was a big pusher to get pro-slavery constitutional amendments as part of their agenda. he got what he wanted, and he stated on the final day of the conference that it was now his obligation to present these to

congress to try to see about getting them passed. so he basically sent them pro forma to the senate and never sent them to the house and the next day he showed up in richmond as a member of the virginia cessation convention and attacked all of the proposals as ridiculous, but again, those are all very interesting, but again, the point is trying to avoid war. this group trying to avoid war and they're political leaders from the state, not from congress, political leaders from the states were virtually identical to the crittendon ones and what they shared in common was they all dealt with slavery. we now also can take a look at southern leaders' statements early in the war or before the war as to what this was all about.

as i said before, davis had made his statement in his farewell address to congress when he went home, and the vice president of georgia gave us a helping hand in trying to understand what was going on. he delivered in savannah, george a in about february of 1861 an address which is called the cornerstone address and it's called the cornerstone address because in his talk, stephens said the cornerstone of the confederacy is slavery. the cornerstone of the confederacy is slavery. quite frankly, i had known that from general reading before, but when i pulled the entire speech out and read it through and it's widely available, too, i was astounded to the extent that stephens went into detail and what he did was he said, you

know, the founding fathers, thomas jefferson and those other guys made a very serious mistake because they said that all men are created equal. well we knowequal. we know that in the confederacy, confederate stands for the principle that all white men are created equal and black men are here to serve us. he was very specific about this. now immediately after the civil war, he started the usual backing down, and his back-down excuse was that he was misquoted. [ laughter ] one of the longest misquotes in world history, and the problem for him is that not only did the savannah paper carry the story about this speech in savannah, the atlanta papers carried the same story about a speech he gave in atlanta in which he made the same points. so the confederate leaders

contemporaneously with with secession and formation of the confederacy told us what their views were at that time. now we've got stephens bailing out. i told you before that davis bailed out later and said there would have been a war even if nobody owned any slaves at all. so that's why i say that if we're really looking at why the confederacy, got to go back to the beginning and look at it contemporaneously and forget about everyone else's rationales later. i don't care what side the rationale was on. that's nice to know, but it's pretty much irrelevant. let's go back to primary original evidence. okay. the confederacy's constitution adopted at the same time. i'm thinking very early april, 1861, six states and texas came in. they would have started doing

this in february and then they adopted a preliminary one and a final one. okay. if you look at the confederate constitution, you would think that would tell you something about why is there a confederacy. and what the confederate leaders did in the constitution was pretty much copy the u.s. constitution except as expected they built in a lot of extra protections for slavery and pretty much said you couldn't tamper with those down the road. but perhaps because i'm a lawyer, i focused on one provision in the confederate constitution which i think tells us a lot. florida is that there's a supremacy clause in the federal -- the confederate constitution. very similar to the federal one, to the u.s. constitution. supremacy clause says the supreme law in the confederacy

is this constitution, confederate treaties, confederate law. and it says state judges are bound by that supreme law regardless of what state law says. hmm. okay. it sounds to me like the southern states had switched masters. and not that each state was going to stand alone and be its own government, but they were -- they were basically looking for a more compatible and understandisuperior federal government and not doing this purely on the principle of states' rights because that one clause basically throws states' right out the window and puts the power in the confederacy as the supremacy clause of the u.s. constitution in general puts the power in the united states government when push comes to

shove and there's any conflict and any conflict over the issues. see where we are here. okay, a lot of the rest of there is already in your outline, so i'm not going to worry it exactly what's on the board at any given time. okay. [ laughter ] especially since a quarter of you can't see it anyway. so sticking to the outline, the motivation of the four later seceding states is again pretty much documented as being slavery related. the leaders talked about it. their secession conventions talked about it. it's almost a replay of the earlier seceding states, but things reached a crisis stage because they were seceding in

time of wear fare. a lot of them do -- warfare. a lot of them do not want to take up arms against their sister states, and they wanted to defend slavery. in fact, the four border states almost went, too. and that was one of lincoln's big concerns throughout the war. okay. i've given you a lot of evidence contemporaneous with formation of the confederacy about what the confederacy was about. now i want to go beyond that and look at the confederate government's behavior during the civil war which would shed additional light on their purpose. and what i submit to you as my personal view is that the behavior of the confederacy in several key areas demonstrates that the confederate leaders were more concerned about plerveing slavery than they were, unbelievably -- preserving slavery than they were,

unbelievable, about winning the war, than winning the war and preserving independence. that it was all about slavery. and so what are the kinds of things i'm talking about? well, the first is fairly controversial area. the rejection of using slaves as soldiers. now you might say, wait a minute, wait a minute, i've heard that there were some slaves fighting for the south. i mean, look just in 2010, the commonwealth of virginia, well known for the accuracy of its school textbooks. [ laughter ] published the book that said 2,000 blacks fought under the command of stonewall jackson. so when challenged on it, the department person who had come up with this addition to the text said, oh, that was on the internet. so -- i mean, it sounds like eye good source.

could have at least said it was wikipedia. it was on the internet. that was the source of that. and i will be the first to admit that there were probably several thousand blacks who went with their masters to war because the masters weren't used to pressing their clothes, doing their laundry, and all those wonderful little things that slaves can do. so a lot of officers in the confederacy took one slave with them to the battlefield. and there certainly would have been instances where the master gets killed or wounded and a slave picks up a gun and fires it or takes care of the master, gets the master home, or the master's body home. so there would be an appearance of slavery, and in addition there's no doubt that tens of thousands of slaves were used as slaves to build fortifications and to do mundane things which are part of military life but

which do not include actually engaging in combat. now, another favorite example is to say that slaves participate or blacks at least participated on behalf of the confederacy. it is the louisiana guards, the louisiana guards, that was a unit of about 2,000 mixed race people. louisiana already was a great blending place, blending of the races. so there were people there who were free and had mixed blood. so a lot of people would characterize them as black even though they were very mixed race. and they signed up at the beginning of the war, they said, okay, we have a company called the louisiana guards, and we want to fight with our neighbors. we want to do whatever our neighbors want to do. this may very well have been to preserve their status in society, whatever.

we don't know. the reasons probably differed from man to man. what's interesting -- so the argument goes, my god, here you had 2,000 blacks lining themselves up with the confederacy, but what happened to them? what happened to them is they were not part of the confederate army. they were part of the louisiana militia. they were never provided with arms by either the federal government or the state government, and that by early 1862, the louisiana legislature figured out that this didn't look too good, and so they changed the law and said to be in the louisiana marco rubio, you must be all white. so i think that example turns out to turn back on itself and to demonstrate once again that the south had a great deal of reluctance to use black soldiers. now let's get to what's really pretty clear, and that is that

until five weeks before appomattox, the confederate government never officially allowed the use of slaves. that tells us something right there, that this was an issue raised periodically throughout the war, and that until march of 1865, this practice was not authorized. even then it had stroings it. that tells us 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, and more than two months to 1865, the confederate congress did not authorize slaves to be used in the confederate army. and so it's hard to argue that, well, the confederacy did this, and thousands walked for them, et cetera. when the law prohibited in the

confederacy. further evidence of what we're talking about is that on january 2nd, 1864, pay tritrick layburn irish born, maybe that bought into it, the social mores of the south, patrick clayburn, maybe the best confederate general, saw what was going on concerning manpower. the confederacy started the war, outnumbered 3.5-1, of white men of fighting age. 3.5-1 they were outnumbered. and so they had a desperate need for manpower. and despite that, they had not moved toward using their slaves. by the end of 1863, this is following gettysburg and chicamauga, chattanooga, and many other bloodbaths, the

confederacy was really down to the bottom. they were now not only recruiting but drafting boys and men from age 15 to 45 and still didn't have enough manpower. so clayburn, frankly, spoke up, and he produced an issue paper, a well-thought-issue issue paper on the subject in which he said we have been decimated, president davis has done all he could to drum up voluntarily or involuntarily support from the whites all over the south. we've gone out and dragged people kicking and screaming out of the appalachians to fight for the confederacy. but we still don't have nearly enough, and we're going to be beaten unless we find a way to address the manpower issue. so in his issue paper, he recommended that slaves be utilized as confederate soldiers and that consistent with

historical use of slaves in warfare, that slaves who fought would at the end of the war together with their families be freed. so this is a lot to swallow for a lot of people. this was basically saying use blacks as confederate soldiers and, by the way, you should emancipate a large number of them. he first of all got about 13. his only generals with his large division to sign off on this. they thought it was a pretty good idea. at least they weren't going to disagree with the boss. they went in with the paper signed by himself and 13 others, presented it to joseph johnston who was the commander in the tennessee/georgia area at the time. this was before the atlanta campaign started, early '64. he presented this proposal and

argued for it, and johnston had called a general meeting in response to a request from clayburn. johnston had all of his other division commanders and deputy commanders and just a whole slew of military leaders in the "western theater" attending this meeting. and johnston remained silent after the presentation was made. and one person spoke up in support of clayburn's proposal, and that was his former law partner out of arkansas, general hinman. and he had written an anonymous letter to a newspaper a month or two before pushing for the same idea. other than that, everybody else opposed it. they not only opposed it, they violently opposed it. and they said among other things -- and this came up again and again on the question of using blacks as soldier s -- thy

said, we're fighting this on the contingent of slavery. slaves are not successful at being soldiers. if they are, we undermine the argument that supports the rationale for slavery, so we can not do this. johnston sat on the proposal. clayburn had wanted him to send to richmond. one of the other generals at the meeting who violently opposed it snuck a copy to president davis, directly to president davis. and davis saw it and exploded. so davis along with his secretary of war, john seddon, and chief military adviser, braxton bragg, who had been promoted under the double peter principle to davis' military adviser at that point, the three of them started using words like treason, take names, keep a list, watch these men, da, da,

da, da. and davis finally had the secretary of war send word back to johnston -- destroy all copies of the proposal, and no one shall ever discuss this again. he almost succeeded in destroying the records because the only copy that ever appeared was found 20 years later when confederate records were being assembled to produce the official records of the war of rebellion. and there it was. so that's in the official records, if you choose to read clayburn's very thoughtful and thought-provoking proposal which at that time got nowhere. one clear effect it had is it stopped his career advancement because over the next ten months before he was killed in general hood's suicidal attack at franklin, tennessee, in november of that year, there were three

times that core commander positions became nope that army, the army of tennessee, and that meant also that there were three possibilities to be promoted from two stars to three stars. clayburn got nothing, even though he has a brilliant record in the war. so his idea was rejected. now ironically, about the same time that he was killed, all of the sudden jefferson davis and robert e. lee come around because they're the top of the pyramid, and they see what's going on the nationwide basis which is that 1863 was bad, but 1864 is even worse from a confederate manpower perspective because of the tremendous losses the confederacy suffered in grant's overland campaign of virginia, although they suffered

numerically less than grant did. the percentage of casualties was higher, and they were irreplaceable. at the same time, sherman had had a very successful campaign in georgia, and by this time had captured atlanta, georgia. confederates continue to take heavy casualties. their manpower situation was something that could not be ignored. so davis and lee then began an effort to convince the confederate congress that they should authorize the use of black soldiers. specifically, free slaves and use them as soldiers and then emancipate them and maybe their families, as well. so november, december of 1864 and on into early 1865, they continued to make this push. but if you want evidence about

what the confederacy was about, look at the politicians' statements, the congressmen's statements, senators' statement, the southern press, and again we have this rejection of the concept because it's inconsistent with what we are fighting for and if we did this it would just undercut our whole rationale for slavery. so because of the strong opposition, the proposal got nowhere until finally about march 8th or 9th of 1865. the confederate senate by 9-8 and confederate house by a narrow vote finally approved using some black slaves as soldiers in the confederate army. there were at least three catches. one was the master of the slave had to agree. number two, the state from which the slave came had to agree.

and number three, there was no emancipation promised as part of the deal. so that is what passed. that is what passed. and basically it became something of a fiasco. there were about 200 black corpsmen taken out of richmond hospital organized into two companies. they were paraded and drill ed n richmond. they were performed the manual at arms. they never played any role in any fighting in the waning days of the confederacy as richmond fell and then appomattox courthouse followed shortly thereafter. despite the fact that there had to be more manpower in order to win the war, the confederacy consistently rejected that approach until the last desperate hour. by the way, the defenders of the

lost cause will always throw this out and say, you know, the confederate congress authorized the use of slaves. yeah, they did. they did. one month before the war was over, and they did it in such a manner that nothing came of it. other things they did before the civil war which gave an indication of how important winning the war was, vis-a-vis winning the war, prisoner war exchange. again, we get back to manpower, critical need for the south. so they benefited greatly the first half of the war because the north engaged with them in prisoner of war exchanges. they were essentially 1-1. they might have refined rules like one colonel equals ten privates and that kind of things. you essentially had one-for-one tradeoffs between the confederacy and union for the first half of the war. ah, along comes the emancipation

proclamation and northern recruitment and training and use of black soldiers beginning in mid 1863. so what happened there is that black soldiers who were on the losing side were often shot down as they tried to surrender. if they were lucky enough to survive, they were treated as slaves, as property, as assets, and not as prisoners of war. and the south, specifically davis and lee, refused to exchange them. grant and lincoln said, well, that's too bad then because we're going to stop prisoner of war exchanges. so the exchanges were stopped until almost the end of the war until they changed their view. for a critical year and a half of the war, the south needed every man it could get, they refused to trade prisoners with the north. so we -- well, it refused to

trade blacks, and the north reciprocated by not trading at all. you have to say it's pretty clear that lincoln and grant weren't acting solely out of consideration for the captured blacks. let's be honest, they also knew that the equalout would be at that confederacy was no longer benefiting from these prisoner of war exchanges. i think as a classic -- it's a classic example of slavery driving the issue. even though the actions taken on slavery were inconsistent with what the confederates needed to win the war. the final area i'd point to is international diplomacy. suffice it to say that the south was very reluctant to guarantee england in particular and also france and the pope that they would end slavery and make sure

that the international slave trade was completely stopped. if you want some real good insight to that, there's a book that came out probably two years ago called "our man in charleston," "our man in charleston," by christopher dick dicky -- dickey. d-i-c-k-e-y. and the british council was there. and obviously he was a white man. the white aristocracy made assumptions about his political views, obviously being pro slavery, et cetera. they were way too frank with him for their own good. so he kept feeding all of this information to britain and maid -- and made it clear during the civil war itself, don't trust them, they are not going to back off of slavery and obviously britain was not going to intervene on the side of a state that was actively promoting

slavery. once again, they acted at their peril. okay. there was -- i have one other book to mention, and that triggered one other issue. if i may retreat for just a second and say that one other piece of evidence, contemporaneous evidence about why secession occurred was that as the first seven states went out, five of those states appoint appointed 51 delegates to go to other slave states. nowhere other than slave states, but they went to other slave states to try and convince them to leave the union and to join the confederacy. i don't need to tell you what the arguments were because they're the same arguments i've told you about all night. i do want to tell you that if you want to look into that, there's a small book a few years old called "apostles of

disunion," "apostles of disunion," by charles dew, d-e-w. it talks about missionaries for the southern cause, talking to the other states, and every argument they made was slavery related. every argument they made. so that takes care of the three books that i wanted to make sure that i mentioned, okay. moving o did the south have a chance to win the war? the myth says, no, the south never had a chance to win the civil war. and i would beg to differ. at the beginning of the war, southern leaders were pretty much unanimous in thinking they would win. there was a great precedent called the american revolution in which the outgunned, less powerful party won. in the revolution, the colonists ended up doing things very intelligently. washington took two punches in the nose before he realized they had to do this, but he avoided

major conflicts. and acted very defensively and frustrated the british. and ultimately the british population gave up on the war. in addition, the colonists played their cards correctly internationally and got the kind of european assistance that the confederacy did not get. at that early stage of the war, you had military experts, for example, the "london time," military correspondents, southern leaders almost unanimously. one confederate soldier was the equivalent of three northern soldiers. and so there was a great belief that the confederacy would win the war. there are some very sound reasons for thinking that that was likely to happen because after the second batch of southern states seceded, you had

11 states forming this massive land area about two-thirds the size of western europe which had to be conquered by the north. all the south needed was a tie or stalemate. the north needed an affirmative victory. and the south, moufr, however, ended up not being satisfied with a tie or stalemate. whether it didn't seem dramatic enough, whether lee's convictions about what was the right things to do, the south under lee in particular went on the attack, on the aggressive, both strategically and tactically. strategically we have the gettysburg and jannetantietum. i'll talk more about this in a few minutes. the south did not play its cardwell a-- cards well at all.

and there are reasons strategic line and tactically, and it did not do so. there's no reason to believe the south could not have won the war militarily on that basis alone. huge area, difficult to conquer, and especially with the weapons developments that had occurred between the mexican war and the civil war. so i was saying that the south could militarily have won the war. in addition, there's a separate line of thought that i've developed over time that i think has some validity to it. the south had an excellent chance of winning the war politically. this is not ex-postfacto rationale. in 1863 and 1864, the correspondence, diaries of confederate leaders indicate they were looking forward to the election of 1864.

they recognized how important that election was because abraham lincoln was the steel backbone of the civil war. his election brought it about by bringing the slavery issue to the fore, and lincoln was the steel backbone. the press and congress went hither and dither, but lincoln was solid. and confederates realized this. they were looking forward to this and said if we can defeat lincoln in 1864, we'll get a lot of what we want, and especially as it turned out because george mccollum was running against him, and george wanted nothing do with ending slavery whatsoever. and george was also willing to have some kind of a truce, a pause, a cease-fire, to talk things over. i think once that happened, that's pretty much the end of it.

how could the election have gone in favor of mcclelland? the first things is that superficially we've always heard the election of 1864 was a landslide. that it was 55%-45%, and electoral votes were something like 2 212-21. it sounds like mcclelland had no prayer. if you dig into the numbers, there were four million voters, four million voters. if less than 1%, something like 29,000 of those voters had changed their votes in selected northern states, mcclelland won by one electoral votes. it would not have taken much of a shift. less than 1% voter shift would have given the location to mcclelland which i find astounding in light of the fact that in the ten weeks leading up to the election, all kinds of

military developments had gone in favor of the union. you had the fall of mobile harbor, you had the fall of atlanta, you had phil sheridan cleaning out the shenandoah valley. so there should have been no reason to give up on the war, no reason to do anything other than support lincoln, and let's bring this to an end based on what positive developments were going on. but despite all of that, as i said, the election was very, very close, a lot closer than is commonly understood. so that's enough of my opinions about -- it was not, it was not at all inevitable that the north would win or that the south would lose. you have to examine deeply the possibilities of southern victory. and part of this ties in to robert e. lee. now we'll move into lee.

lee was, according to the legend, one of the greatest generals who ever lived. as i said, he was made the mini god of the myth of the lost cause. several years ago, my late father-in-law and i after reading a whole slew of books on the civil war, dime tcame to th startling conclusion that each of these authors had something negative to say about lee but always apologized for it. it was uncharacteristically, lee did that, out of character, lee did this other things. and the authors were not all pointing to the same things. they were pointing to a variety of issues. at that point, i said to my father-in-law, i said, you know, i'm going write a book on how robert e. lee lost the civil war. that was my book number one. i lived in virginia at the time. i now live in pennsylvania. [ laughter ]

so i have criticisms of lee's generalship. first of all, lee was a virginian first and a confederate second. no big surprise there. before the civil war, a lot of people identified themselves with their states, and no one said the united states is, said united states are. in the case of virginians and lee in particular, he was really into almost a religious faith in his state. wherever video went, he was going to go. and actually when he declined command of all federal armies at the beginning of the war, she'd, i will lift my sword not only in deftsd of -- defense of the old confederacy, old dominion. he was open, above board. people had to realize this guy is interested in virginia, and

maybe in not much else. that is the way it played out. my favorite example of this is that in 1862, lee on his own, without approval from anybody in richmond, shortly after second manassas, decided to cross the potomac and invade pennsylvania. now he got bogged down in maryland in what's known as the maryland or antietum campaign. he said, we're crossing the territory, i think it's a long shot but worth it, and gave him political advice. i think this will have a great impact on europe if we can have a big victory. lee said in the letter to davis, by the way, since i am leaving richmond uncovered by taking his whole army into enemy territory, he said, i recommend that you bring braxton bragg and his troops in from tennessee to protect richmond. at the time lee made the

recommendation, braxton bragg in east tennessee was outnumbered 3-1 by union opponents. and so -- which leads me to conclude and not just that, but i generally conclude that lee either did not know or did not care that was going on in any theater outside of his own precious virginia theater. the only time that reinforcements went to from lee's army elsewhere is when longstreet was allowed to go to chicamauga, lee delayed that movement by three weeks. during the three weeks, union soldiers captured knoxville, tennessee, blocking the easy and simple route to get to the chattanooga area. that forced longstreet who started three weeks late to take an eight to ten-day trip using eight to ten small railroads to get through the carolinas and georgia to get to the chicamauga

battlefield. at the battlefield, longstreet showed up in the middle of a two-day battle, had roughly one half of his troops, none of his artillery, had none of his horses and mules. he went in with one arm tied behind his back. due to some federal incompetence and good luck for the confederates,longstreet was in a strong position to pretty much destroy rosecranz's army. but he became known as the rock of chicamauga by defending the ridge, snodgrass hill, got a couple of names, for the whole afternoon and into the evening before he made an orderly retreat to join the rest of rosecranz's fleeing army in chattanooga. and i think the outcome could have been quite different had longstreet had his complete force including all of his

artillery? n so far as trying to blast thomas off the highground at chicamauga. it gets worse. lee was ordered by davis, very unusual, lee was ordered by davis to send longstreet down. two days after longstreet started moving, lee wrote to davis and said, among many other things, she'd, i've got an idea about longstreet. after he gets down there and fights the major battle that is obviously in the offing, what should be done with longstreets? he should be moved from the chattanooga area up to northeastern tennessee to knoxville where he can chase out the union forces that are there, and then -- this is lee -- and then he can come quickly back to my army. the only term that really counted, the army in northern virginia. and this -- this may sound like -- almost like a joke, a funny

proposal, an aside, whatever. but this had fatal consequences. what happened is after the battle of chicamauga, confederates on scene got into a huge finger pointing contest with basically bragg pointing the finger at all subordinates and subordinates pointing the finger at bragg as to who left rosecranz's army escape at chicamauga. why are they ensconced in chattanooga? they were blaming each other, and davis went personally down to try to settle the dispute. and he settled it in typical desdissian fashion in which -- davissian fashion in which bragg was one of his buddies. in what must have been one of the most intriguing conferences of the war, bragg's subordinates sat in the presence of bragg, and all recommended that bragg be removed from command.

all. subordinates telling the president to remove this commander. and what happens? davis basically sustained bragg in his position and removed most of the subordinates. [ laughter ] one little problem was that longstreet was a subordinate on loan. and there's little doubt that longstreet went out to that theater with the idea of, you know, bragg screws up, maybe i can get that command and have my own independent command and not just be working for bobby lee. after chicamauga, longstreet realized -- and what davis did -- longstreet realized there goes that plan. on the other hand, bragg knew what longstreet had tried to do, that he had stirred up this dissent among the subordinates. and it didn't need much stirring up. longstreet did stir it up. davis then thinks, hmm, i had

this wonderful suggestion from robert e. lee about what to do. that is to send longstreet off to knoxville and leave bragg with rest of his army in the chattanooga area. he suggests that to bragg and longstreet. for separate reasons they agree. longseat is sent away with 15,000 u.s. troops up to knoxville. this is when the confederates semi encircled chattanooga. and the union realized the critical important of chattanooga as the gateway to atlanta and also a defensive area protecting again the confederate invasion into the heart of the northern midland, into the midwest. the union brought in grant and said, take care of this, we want you to save the army that's trapped there, get rid of the confederates in the area. and they sent around two corps,

two entire corps, 20,000 troops by rail from the virginia river through midwest, into alabama and into chattanooga. in addition, sherman was marched from the mississippi valley to the length of tennessee to get in the fray, as well. while the union is building its forces in chattanooga to 75,000 to 80,000 troops, lee's wonderful suggestion has resulted in the confederates going from 50,000 to 35,000. confederates were spread thin. they had no reserve. and when you had the miracle breakthrough at missionary ridge, confederates had no reserve, their line starts being rolled up from the middle, and the entire army flees back into georgia, setting the stage for sherman's atlanta campaign of

the next year. this is a good example of the kinds of impacts that lee had on other theaters other than the virginia theater. that's number one. virginia one, confederate second. the other major problem with lee is given everything, given all the relevant circumstances, he was way, way too aggressive, way too offensive. he fought as though he were a union general with unlimited resources and the strategic necessity to go the attack. as claimed before, my theory is that the south only needed to tie or stalemate, and they needed simply to make it very difficult for the union to capture southern armies, to capture southern territory, and to retell the union attacks at least to the extent of making it so bloody that the northern

morale would decline, northern people would give up on the war. believe me, that came close to happening in the middle of 1864. instead of doing that, lee, for whatever reason, went on the strategic offensive, antietum and gettysburg campaigns. between that, took about 75,000 casualties. and in addition, within virginia alone, tactically, seven days battle, first major battle that lee took command of his army, was a one-week series of attacks by lee on mcclelland's army. and lee did achieve a strategic success by driving mcclelland away from richmond. mcclelland started fleeing the instant lee started attacking. and the point here, though, is

that lee had achieved his strategic goal of moving mcclelland's army and retreat away from richmond the end of one day. by the end of two days, lee knew from reports from jeb stewart that this was the case. he kept attacking for the rest of the week. so in that campaign, lee took 20,000 casualties to mcclelland's 16,000, and mcclelland's casualties were soft. they included a lot of missing. lee's casualties were hard casualties, killed and wounded. 20,000, pretty much all killed and wounded. that was not a good start. it was not an auspicious beginning because the south could not afford to fight the war in that way. one you may not have heard of is the back end of the battle of chancellorsville. lee was on the offensive against fortified union positions and took heavy losses there. and then the one that you definitely know about is gettysburg where on days two and

three lee essentially did nothing but assault strong federal positions on high ground against longstreet's advice, and took just a severe, severe beating. so again and again, again and again during the war, the record is replete with strategic and tactical, aggressive behavior by lee which was inappropriate for the south because of the fact that the north had the burden of winning the war, and the south was so badly outnumbered, could not afford to squander its manpower. in addition, one other factor is this -- the weaponry had changed significantly since the mexican war. so during the course of the civil war, you're talking about widespread use of rifles instead of muskets. talking about rifled artillery. talking about breach loaders instead of muzzle loaders, use of the mini ball, form of

bullet, if you will, which was much more accurate. and then as the war progressed even further, the use of repeaters. what did all these things do? they moved the power from the offensive which had been in the mexican war to the defensive. the defense had the power in the civil war. he did not want to attack unless you had to. lee did not have to, but he did. some demonstration of my point is that about 80% of the battles of the civil war, in about 80%, t the tactical defender could not be budged. you really did not want to attack unless you had to, and lee attacked again and again. so those are some of my reasons for -- for some of my reasons for lee not being the great general that we've heard of.

one second longstreets is blamed for gettysburg, scapegoat, here's the bottom line on that. on lee's birthday, big celebrations, they started the year after he died, 1871, 1872, lee's birthday, famous speeches were given. one by drew early, the second by william nelson pendleton. they created this story and said that lee had ordered longstreet to attack the enemy at dawn on day two of the three-day gettysburg battle. suffice it to say, it was a total lie, had nothing to support it, that's been well proven over time. although it took about 100 people to look into it and con come to the conclusion that that was not it at all. he ordered longstreet to attack at 10:00, 11:00 in the morning, he gave longstreet until noon because longstreet still had

troops coming up the road which tells you it's unlikely that lee would have ordered an attack at dawn, especially since lee only sent out scouting parties at dawn. the whole things was a lie, but it was to tar the reputation of james longstreet and to take lee off the hook. now lee committed a slew of errors at gettysburg, the highlights being, number one, at the end of day one, when union armies would retreat through the town of gettysburg back toward the high ground, total disarray, lee came on scene, gave the worst order of the civil war to general richard ewell in which he said take the high ground if practical, if practical. had jackson been aliefd -- he had died two months before and had commanded that corps -- every effort would have been made to capture it. there's an ongoing debate about whether if the confederates had done it, would they or would they not have captured the high ground. the only things i'll say is that

was the best chance that lee had to capture the high ground the entire time he was at gettersburg, and he basically did not take it. he gave a weak general a weak order. so nothing, nothing came of it. so that's the longstreet story in a nutshell. and also, i need to point out that lee then on days two and three of gettysburg launched a continuous series of attacks on the high ground, and he never did so at the same time. there was never a contemporaneous attack on the forces. he had longstreet attack on the south. after that attack peters out, finally 24 hours later, richard euwell attacks from the north. that peters out, next day, pickett up the middle. south, north, middle, and

essentially oversimple tified b two-thirds of lee's army watched the other one-third carry out the attacks. it was an abominable campaign, and military historians are in pretty much unanimous agreement about it was lee's worst, and it was devastatingly bad. that moves us on to ulysses grant. grant was called a butcher, and it was said that he only won through brute force. we don't have time to go through his brilliant vicksburg campaign in which he was outnumbered in the theater, in enemy territory, won five battles in 18 days because he didn't just use brute force, he used deception. he used speed, he used concentration of force. he was outnumbered in the theater until he began the siege of vicksburg. when he won the five battles, by fooling the enemy, each of the

five battles, grant had more than the enemy did because the enemy divinidn't know where he where he should be. it was an absolutely brilliant campaign. again and again, grant has a record during the war, he captured -- in february, 1862, major union victory. he captured vicksburg, arguably the most important campaign of the civil war. he was brought in, saved chattanooga within a month. rescued a union army trapped there. was so well regarded as a result of all this that he was promoted to general in chief and three stars and asked to win the war which he did within 11 months. so i think the record is pretty clear about grant's success. let me deal with minute with the casualty statistics which i have studied to a fare theewell. and i've got some here. okay. these are -- these are grant's

casualties, and i don't know if we have a total -- no. okay. we do. up top or right-hand side? here's the story on casualties. we're comparing grant and lee. not just against each other but against all their foes in the course of the war. it's my favorite synopsis. grant commanded five armies and three theaters, was the winner everywhere that he went, and did all that he did including capturing three enemy armies at a cost of 154,000 casualties, while he imposed 181,000 casualties on the enemy. casualties are killed, wounded, missing, and captured. killed, wounded, missing, and captured. grant did all he did in three theaters, the total 154,000 casualties. lee, on the other hand, commanded one army in one

theater which he lost and did so at the cost of 209,000 casualties. 55,000 casualties more than grant. so you can understand based on that analysis anyway where i have to say we've been sold something of a bill of goods about how great lee was and about how bad grant was. and frankly, the majority of civil war historians believe that grant was the greatest general of the civil war even if the general public does not. that's where the real damage has occurred is the general public has been saturated with this story for 150 years-plus, and has bought into a lot of it. so i regard the myth of the lost cause as the most successful propaganda campaign in american

history. so i leave you as the final judges on that, and i thank you for listening to my biased opinions. [ applause ] >> thank you. thank you. okay. there are microphones in each aisle, and we have just 15 minutes to deal with any questions anyone would like to ask. and we will stop at 8:45 sharp so you can get out of here and go home if you'd like. does anybody have any questions? sir? there's a mike back there. you can go back to the mike. go ahead. >> how far along did efforts come from the north to purchase the freedom of the slaves to stop the civil war from happening? and if -- if they were

considered, what was the total cost compared to that of the civil war? >> that's a real good question. i assume everyone heard it since he has a mike. okay. abraham lincoln explored the purchase of slaves, compensated emancipation is the term generally used, and listen at first was willing to consider migrating, sending those slaves to africa or to settlements in central america. but lincoln explored the concept of buying the freedom of slaves. he had done the kind of calculation that you talked about, and he used delaware, which had a very small number of slaves, no more than 2,000, as a good example. and so he had some calculations that for the cost of one day of war, you could free 1,000 slaves and go on from there. but -- so he tried to sell this to the border states.

these are once still members of the union. they had not gone o aut, and th would not go along with it. they had meetings with delaware. held meetings with the four border state representatives, and no one bought into it. no one at all. so even in the border states, there was such a firm belief in slavery that they were not willing to consider selling their slaves in order to avoid the war. again, tells us something about maybe the slavery things was not just economics, but it was economics plus politics plus social. that a lot of things went hand in glove. yes, sir? >> thank you very much for your presentation. i was wondering whether you consider the shelby -- [ inaudible ] >> a lot of it. shelby foote, shelby foote was a dyed in the wool southerner.

very entertaining commenter on the ken byrne series on the civil war. i would say don't read his early. read about 20 other civil war books before you go to his trilogy. simply because his trilogy doesn't have any dates, doesn't have any footnotes, and it's very readable because foote was a novelist. he did a lot of research. and he put his heart into it. and he tells a great story. i found it very useful because i had read 30 books on the civil war at least. and i had all these pieces. and i thought that shelby put it all together. he very -- he was simply say, here's what was happening in virginia, and meanwhile in mississippi -- so he sort of made it possible for me anyway to visualize the war as a -- a total entity. and i found it useful in that regard. it's very colorful, some people who might not just want to read

historians' books with lot of footnotes and everything, might find his colorful approach to be good. i do warn, i would say -- i wouldn't do that until you familiarize yourself with a lot of other books. for god's sakes, do not use it as a case book. i made that mistake and used it as a course book in a college course. and it was just way too beyond the students particularly because it had no source citations, and because it had no dates. it was just -- and then, and meanwhile, et cetera, et cetera. but it reads beautifully, and it has its place. but shelby, shelby does have a lot of the tendencies of the supporters of the myth of the lost cause. >> thank you. >> you're welcome. yes, sir? >> according to gary gallagher, university of virginia -- >> right --

>> concerning black troops, say black support. he said that lee went into the gettysburg campaign, i believe it was 77,000 troops. but also they took with also th about 10,000 slaves that not only were personal servants. th they also were teamsters, cooks. they may not have been firing r artillery but they were driving the horses on the thing. >> that's a fair of assumption. when lee invaded, pennsylvania he needed a lot of people to do the grunge loading the grains taken out of the state. the cumberland valley was stripped. it was a huge market basket for lee and maybe the best thing

that came out of the campaign was the success in moving cattle and horses and mules and huge quantities of materials back. having black slaves to do it would free up white soldiers. what that doesn't get around is the fact these people were slaves. they were slaves. they were not subject to the uniform code of military justice. they did not get promotions, any kind of military pay. they were assets. they were slaves. they would have gotten no respect. but they were resources. i think i mentioned them earlier, they were used to build fortifications and that kind of thing. there were subsidiary jobs, something less than a full soldier that they were allowed to do. that makes it very difficult to study that issue of were slaves used or not. what did congress officially authorize? they did not authorize slaves to be used.

sir? >> yeah. the book was wonderful. something that you touch eed onn the book and you didn't have as much time for tonight, touched on the idea of general sherman. i've read two biographies of him. i just wanted to put as a question to you, do you think he's unfairly treated as a casualty of the smith and that he was actually an extremely effective general, but he gets swept up in this hatred in the myth and a reason to sympathize with the south. >> you're right. i didn't reach that point. that's sort of my last point had to do with the allegations that the north won only by total war. and the allegation is primarily that sherman in georgia and the carolinas and that sheridan in the shenandoah valley are the classic examples of the north using total war. there's a difference between total war and