was so excited about that. and we kind of spoke the same liquid and it was looking forward to speaking with them, but they have such a thick accent that they would be laughing at me. but that was the only other group. in the north, that was, the northern area was made up of his decks -- uzbeks. and i'm not sure -- there were some with the northern alliance. so we had a relationship with all of those. the agency did, anyway. with those teams operating with the northern alliance. basically in the north, the teams would work with one of the major commanders from the northern alliance and they were doing the same with those guys. they had an army of their, tanks -- up there, tanks, helicopters and all that. we did not have an army, but we basically had guerrilla groups. so we had relationships with tried and they knew -- we

to pass information back and forth so the northern alliance guys knew what was going on in the south, that kind of thing, but we were not directly dealing with them, or any of the other ethnic groups. vince: please join me in thanking duane evans for taking the time to talk with us today. [applause] vince: his book is "foxtrot in kandahar." will you stick around and find some books? -- sign some books? duane: absolutely. vince: i ask that you will not a cost him right away -- accost him right away. give him time to sit down and set up. duane: thank you. thank you. [chatter]

>> you are watching american history tv, all weekend every weekend on c-span3. join the conversation, like us on facebook at c-span history. lectures and history, university of virginia professor gary gallagher teaches a class on civil war memory and how people in the north and south ofe interpreted the legacy the conflict from the postwar era to the present day. his class is about an hour and 15 minutes. mr. gallagher: all right, here we are for the last class this semester, and we will move into as youermath of the war, know. we spent all semester looking at various aspects of this conflict, and from the beginning, i alerted you that one of the issues of the class was going to be the tension

between history and memory. here we are finally at the end where we will focus on memory for our last discussion. there is no better event in united states history to talk memories ofwerful something that happened in the past can be. there's simply nothing remotely equal to it. the civile remember war, watching that in charlottesville over the last year and a half and the debates over the statue of re lee downtown, and i'll talk at the end when i get to the war today about some of the remnants of the war in our current situation and the ways in which the difference -- different streams of memory put in place by the wartime generation either do or do not remain with us. my real focus will be on how the wartime generation remembered the war, and i will focus on four great interpretive

traditions that came out of the wartime generation. andloyal white citizenry african-americans and former confederates had very different takes on the war as they went forward after appomattox. they embraced versions of the war that suited their purposes, both in terms of allowing them to come out of the war thinking good about themselves and also suited their purposes as they dealt with various political and social issues that came up in .he decades after the war their actions remind a stuff is almost never one history of an important event. we have talked about that. if there is just a history of the civil war, you don't need people like me. you would just go by the civil war book and read the civil war book, and if you were interested

in something else, you could buy the whatever else book you wanted. and there are a bunch of people in this room who either already do this for a living for will do this or a living. if there were only one pass, we would be doing something really useful in life, instead of what we do, something that the common good, instead of adorning it, which is mainly what we do. but the fact that we disagree puts us right in line with what the generation that actually experienced the war did. very vibrant disagreements with how they contested. we start with the winning side, the union cause and the emancipation cause, the winning memories of the war, and then we go to the lost cause, the most common term used to get the former confederate memory of the war, and then we will get to reconciliation, which is another

stream of coming to terms with the war that i think historians have vastly exaggerated. i mean, they have exaggerated the degree to which people said we are all americans, too bad with a lot of each other but let's be pals again and we all will love one another. then i will finish with thoughts of the war today and why people are still interested in the war, what they try to find by going back and examining the war. there are very different reasons for people to look that toward war,ar -- back toward the and i will look at some of those, but i want to start with the memory of the war that was held by by far the most people who were alive during the conflict and that is the union cause memory of the war. there are 31 million americans, plus or minus, in 1860. i would take at least 20 million or so would have said this is

the most important way to remember the war -- the union war, ishe memory of the the most important. it gets at the meaning of union we have talked about a lot here. i will say parenthetically this is about four great traditions here, the one that has been lost almost entirely in modern america is the union cause version of the war. most americans could not begin to tell you what union meant. we talked about this in the mid-19th century. they are absolutely innocent of that. my story about the onion in pasadena reminds us of just how far we are, all for the onion. someone who would say that now probably does not get what was going on in the mid-19th century. luckily, we all know how important union was, so you can go out and be sort of proselytizers, if you want, and thend people that union is

most fraught word in the political vocabulary in the mid-19th century, but the union cause celebrated above all the restoration of the republic and the carrying forward of the work of the founding generation, and they would have argued that we have now defeated the slaveholding oligarchs who posed such a threat to the works of the founding generation. we have gotten rid of slavery. they would have an happy slavery was gone, people who embraced the union cause, not for the reasons we would want them to be happy for the most. now the happy because issues related to slavery are not looking and waiting to verse into the kind of inflammatory brought and action that on the crisis of 1861. get rid of slavery, you get rid of the only internal factor that could sunder the union. yes, it's good emancipation came in the course of the war, but the reason it's a good thing is

that it has made the union safe and we are going to come out of the war with the republican tact . lincoln's notion of the last best hope of earth, which we talked about -- that is now still firmly in place, whereas it is eroding in europe. this war has made the union, i wille nation safe, and read just some representative -- just three quick quotations that get at the fact that the other thing celebrated by the union cause is the union was made by whom? , by citizenoldiers soldiers who put on uniforms and pick up muskets, because that's what you do if someone is threatening a political system that gives you a voice in your government and an economic affords the opportunity -- not the guarantee, but the opportunity -- to rise.

lincoln is absolutely the poster boy for this meaning of union. he gets at both the economic and control of our on government elements of that. that is what they are celebrating. let's pick someone at random, our friend william tecumseh sherman. this is sherman and his congratulatory orders to the minute his army. three armies came together from disparate fields with separate histories, yet bound by one common cause -- the union of our country and the perpetuation of the government of our inheritance. sherman said that the men had and addeden can do that they could join in the universal joy that fills our land because the war is over, and our government stands .indicated before the world touches all the key points there -- citizen soldiers, saving the government.

, whoe content of new york was just a congressman at this point, became a very powerful, and some whispered corrupt, senator. he greeted a new york resident that was on his way home from the war, a veteran regiment, and he said that they had come together with a common purpose and hope. "peace with the government because edition of our fathers established has been the object of the war in the prayer of every patriot and every soldier." finally, i will quote one union soldier here, and ohio soldier, who wrote right after appomattox, "the citizen soldier of the republic, the great experiment of self-government has been settled for all people beneath the sun and liberty of popular institutions everywhere have recognized the outgrowth of american destiny. this is the absolutely pure form

of the notion of american exceptionalism that this soldier puts forward. this,s no place else like it was worth fighting for, we have salvaged it, and now, we are going to go forward. the loyal citizenry, the loyal, white citizenry -- we talked about how overwhelmingly white the states were -- almost 99% -- some of followed up on the wartime business in the aftermath of the war. we talked about that a little bit, with former confederates behaved as if they had not lost the war. in the summer of 1865, the loyal, white citizenry of the wared states decided that was necessary but only in response to a former confederates were doing, but you come up with the three great amendments, the 13th amendment in 186i-5, then the 14th, which sought to guarantee equal legal protections for formerly in

-- formerly, then enslaved people, then the 15th thedment, which gave them vote. republicans, those who believed in the union cause, tried to , as democrats as disloyal only lukewarm, if even that, in pursuit of saving the union. they talked about how treasonous the democrats were an engaged in what came to be known as waving the bloody shirt, which allegedly had its origins in some republican speaker literally waving a shirt stained with the blood of a union soldier. i will quote one of the great republicans of the postwar years. he was from maine, another person who may not have always been on exactly the straight and narrow. veterans, votern

for the republicans against the rebelats and the former fiends who were in the democratic party in the south, and this is where he that how he put it -- every prison guard tortured union prisoners at andersonville was a democrat. the man who shot abraham lincoln was a democrat. every man who tried to tear the the heaven it enriches was a democrat. every man who has tried to destroy the nation was a democrat. scar you have on your heroic bodies was given you by a democrat. it's sort of indirect, but if we really pay attention, we can to get out the message here. savedssage is republicans the union, gover publican's, and we can also see what is not mentioned. there is no mention of emancipation or getting rid of slavery. it is a mention of saving the

nation. they are very effective at waving the bloody shirt. they were very effective at running soldiers who put on union uniforms for president. not only grant, but we also get rutherford b. hayes and james a garfield and benjamin harrison, all union generals who were elected president, and the last gasp of electing union veterans came with william mckinley, who was a company grade officer, but nonetheless a union veteran. every republican who help the presidency for the rest of the 19th century had been directly involved in saving the union. the democrats -- we know who they ran successfully twice. .rover cleveland there is kind of a disjuncture between who is getting elected as a republican to the presidency and who is getting elected as a democrat to the

presidency. republicans would say of course the democrats are running a draft dodger. generals, they run draft dodgers. the democrats did run one former general, winfield scott hancock, in 1880, and he did ok, but he did not win. it is a plus to have union veteran on your resume if you are running for office after the civil war, and the democrats struggled with this, noting that they were not really fully on board with this struggle to save the union. the democrats regained control of the house of representatives in 18 74, did not even take a decade with the democrats to reestablish control of the house of representatives, but the republicans used the union cause very effectively. -- the loyal citizenry

did a number of things to commemorate the union cause. they established what they called decoration day, what we ,all memorial day now specifically to go and remember the union men who had given their lives to save the nation. you would go and decorate the grave, hence the operation day. but a flag, hear a speech related to the war, watch the veterans parade in their day.rms during decoration the government, as we talked about, established a national cemetery, simply because they needed a place to put more than a third of a million dead united states soldiers. no confederate soldiers, at least not deliberately, in these cemeteries. there are a handful of exceptions, but not many. day ceremony in a national cemetery, so you are not just talking about the men who gave their lives for the union, you are surrounded by them.

they erected memorials, monuments in the courthouse square. the most magnificent one of all is in indianapolis. it is an incredible monument right downtown. if you are headed to a colts game, you are not far from it. you can go touch base with the union boys and then watch the colts. they put these monuments up .verywhere very modest ones in villages and small towns -- really grand monuments. you cannot walk around washington, d.c., without running into union generals on horses. apparently there was even one of george mcclellan in washington, d.c., but the grandest of all is in grant right in front of the capitol looking straight down the mall with the lincoln memorial. you have national cemeteries, you have memorial day.

if you read the inscriptions, they are very important. this is something some bright graduate student should take on at some time, a really good look at the inscriptions on civil war memorials. the dominant motifs on the union once, the northern ones, are union, union, union, nation, and on some, but a really small percentage of all of them, you also will get some mention of ofncipation, often in terms lincoln's emancipation proclamation, together with union. when you look at the memorial landscape underscoring powerfully the fact that union was the dominant memory of the war among the loyal citizenry of the united states, but they also wrote and wrote and wrote. the civil war generation picked up pens and just outpour the

accounts -- regimental histories, memoirs, published stacks of letters, and so forth. when you read those, you also get a really strong sense of just how dominant this notion of a war for union was. a war for union, and it is a war that ended with this grand success that gratify the work of the founders -- how do you compete with the founders? that's one of the problems. all they did was establish the a bloody war, and then they are responsible for the constitution -- ok, check, check. what have we done lately? how do you compete with that memory? how about saving the work of the founding generation? that's not bad. let's put that on our resume, and that makes us look pretty good. that does not leave anything for later generations to do, but who

cares? and taking care of. with ata baby boom life. my generation lives forever. you are going to have us as a giant anvil on your back for almost all of your lives, and you just cannot do anything about it. so don't even try. you don't have a chance. this gives the civil war something they can stand -- they often created images of washington, lincoln, and grant together, put them literally side-by-side. i talked before about how the end of the war -- link it is the great figure for us now. at the end of the civil war, grant and lincoln work equivalent figures. they would put them together, tying the work of the revolutionary generation to the

work of the civil war generation a saved the union. hugely important, one of the winning memories of the war. the other winning memory was the emancipation cause. this would be embraced by the overwhelming majority of african-americans in the united states, both formerly enslaved and the small minority that lived in the free states. this would have been their principal understanding of the war along with white abolitionist. i think many radical republicans would have said the same thing. they would have said of course it is interesting that the union is preserved. if the union have not been if you do not save the union, you do not get rid of slavery. it's a good thing the union was preserved, but it's only worth preserving if it is an improved version. what is that improvement? has to be union without slavery. it is a union without the

institution of slavery, mocking that high language of the declaration of independence and other founding documents. yes, the union being saved is good, but the most important thing that came out of the war destruction of the system of slavery. requested some of the abolitionists think they were still promoting the work of the founding fathers? >> they thought they were improving the work of the founding fathers. they thought that founding fathers' work -- let's take a random thing -- how about the constitution. the constitution is fine, but it has a profound flaw at its center -- it accepts slavery. abolitionists called the constitution a rag that allowed slavery to exist in the united states, so the founders were on to some things, but their work was far from perfect.

only realize the purpose of the founders if we get rid of slavery. that would have been their attitude. there's one reason many people in the antebellum years did not like abolitionists, saw them as radicals, because many abolitionists would attack the constitution. that was just considered anathema by most american citizens in the late 19th century. did you have your hand at? no. is also apation cause winner. i would say five if we could not again,umber on this -- we cannot put a number on it, but i'm putting a number on it, i would say 5 million would say this was the most important thing. african-americans established their own traditions remembering the war. they had their own day they would remember, and they often

called it emancipation day. in texas, it is called juneteenth, which relates to the middle of june 18 6i-5 winword of emancipation came to some places in texas, but in virginia, it was often april 9, appomattox day because among the on the ninth of april were u.s. ct units in the army that was pursuing paralleling .ee's army as it went west in virginia, april 9 became the one day of the year where you would have your major celebrations in the black community. you have parades, beaches, the same kind of thing you would have with the mainstream of declarations/memorial day celebrations in the united states, but you would have them on different days and have them with a specific focus on this outcome of the war, the end of

slavery. for african-american veterans, that on their resume was just as useful as it was for white veterans who ran for office or whatever, but in numbers disproportionate to how many of veterans forre, very prominent in the community after the war. they had disproportionate influence. it was a tremendous cachet to say that. what's the most direct thing you can do to get rid of slavery? put on a uniform, pick up a musket, and go try to vanquish the rebels and destroy the confederacy. the widespread movement to erect monuments to u.s. ct men. there was almost none. the memorial landscape almost specificallyuments

directed at the emancipation memory of the war. the earliest monument that went up that dealt with the ending of slavery really is ball's famous statue and emancipation park on capitol hill, which went up in 1876, which later became controversial because -- i know many of you have seen it, it's lincoln standing up and reaching down and a black man starting to rise, conveying the message lincoln freed the slaves and struck the shackles from black people. as the first notable monument that went up to deal with emancipation. it is still there. if you have not seen it, you should go look at it. frederick douglas gave a speech in which he criticized that view came, butancipation that is 1876. the next major monument that went up was 1897, and that is my favorite civil war monument of

.ll 54thument in boston to the massachusetts and robert gould shaw, an amazing monument, but it is to shaw and to the 54th. can do, thereics was an article a few years ago where someone attacked the monument because they said it diminished the black soldiers because they were on the ground and shaw was on a horse. they were apparently innocent of the fact that criminals are on horses and infantrymen are often on ground, if they are white or black. the main place to find infantrymen is on the ground. that is why they are infantrymen. is a spectacular monument, spectacular. the national gallery in washington has a beautiful plaster of it. you don't have to go over way to boston. go to the national gallery, stand in front of that monument,

and then come and tell me that it demeans african-american soldiers. arguen academic could that somehow diminishes the service of these men. it is an amazing monument. yes? --did shock's -- shop shaw's family influence white was his regiment? mr. gallagher: absolutely. robert gould shaw was anti-slavery, but not really burning with the abolitionists spirit the way his parents were, but, yes, that is a huge element in that. when we went to petersburg and

we were down where they have the rebuild of work, we saw the little monument there that went up in 1992 the u.s. the teachers. -- the u.s. ct troops. will state the obvious -- that wasn't there. this is, i think, one of the influences of a successful part carrying overture into how we remember things. an impactlly do have on how people remember the past. that monument, i believe, would not be there if it were not for "glory." afters almost a century the monument in boston. it was not until the very end of , that youentury, 1998 got a kind of national monument,

and it is an washington, d.c. it is at vermont and 10th street district, and it is in the plaza that has the names of the 200,000 black men who , andd in the army and navy then there is a sculpture in the middle. .hat is 1998 when that went up so the emancipation memory of re andr -- it's the carries forward but would not be as prominent to someone who is just kind of looking at frederick douglass figured this out very early on. he watched what was happening after the war, and he believed that the emancipation memory of the war was slipping away as early as the 1870's, and he devoted a good bit of his later

years to try to keep alive the emancipation memory of the war. as early as the -- that robert e. lee died in 1870, in october of 1870, and frederick douglass of robert e.uaries lee, and it seemed to him that the loyal citizenry had already forgotten that there was a right and wrong side to the war. the union cause certainly believed there was a right and wrong side. the union cause is the right side. the rebels were traitors, and that's why we call it the war of the rebellion. and so there's a right and wrong side there. there's a right and a wrong side here. but douglas thought a sense of that was slipping away especially in democratic newspapers in the north, which had really quite gentle, even appreciative obituaries. he wrote after lee's death, he was sick and tired of the rebel sheath.

we can scarcely take up a newspaper that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late robert e. lee. that is douglass in 1870, already looking down the road and anticipating that maybe the emancipation part of this equation was going to be eroding much more quickly than it should. those who would have been happy to see the emancipation memory of the war erode put in place the third of our traditions here, and that is what's come to be called the lost cause tradition. this would have been former confederates who did this. and let's say maybe 5.5 million of them will give -- let's deduct 10% for actual unionists among white people in the confederacy, but then let's add

kentuckian southerners. kentucky woke up after appomattox. suffered from a kind of amnesia about what had happened the four years before. they all became kentucky colonel after the war. go compare the money was in kentucky for akram lincoln and jefferson davis. both of them were born there. compare the two monuments, i wonder which one's taller, and the one that is taller, i am going to give away is not , abraham lincoln's. let's say 5.5 million would have embraced the lost cause memory of the war very quickly. now, the white south has a much greater problem in some ways after the war than the loyal citizenry did. they are big-time losers, overwhelming losers. they have lost shatteringly. not kind of, not maybe, not gosh

i wonder really who won and lost, no, they're very well aware of who lost. they, as we have talked about, lost a far higher -- i mean you can calculate the difference in loss. a far higher percentage of their military men are dead far higher , than in the united states. we cannot recapture how important this was. their slave holding social structure is swept away. we, and this is i can't think of , anything equivalent in our society that you could change that would bring as much of a n impact. and i'm going to quote one person on this. he was married to one of thomas jefferson's granddaughters, he lived at edge hill out your test swick, wentt near ke to uva in 1853, his name a robert garlic hill cane, he married jane randolph.

her uncle was george randolph. we will go through genealogy. right after the war, he was -- we will not go through genealogy. right after the war, he was traveling through virginia, he kept a diary. and this is what he wrote shortly after. the abolition of slavery immediately and by a military order is the most marked feature of this conquest of the south, conquest of the south. man you mission after this fashion will be regarded here after, wrote cane, with scarcely controlled anger, when it has borne its fruits in the passions of the hour have passed away as the greatest social crime ever committed on earth. i think he's upset about emancipation. the greatest social crime ever committed on earth. other than that, i'm not upset about it. but i am pretty upset about it. so, you have former confederates surveying both the physical and the social landscape after the

war, and they're going to have to deal with a profound failure. no other part of white american society has ever had to grapple with this. what do you do? if that's what you're dealing with? how do you find a way to hold your head up and say, yes, we kind of did support secession, and yes, here's where we are now. how do we find something positive to take out of that experience. -- experience? how do you do it? and what they did, with their economy in ruins in the short term, the economy came back of course in many ways. they had some troops occupying them. that's been vastly overstated. there's never a real army of occupation in the former confederate states. there just isn't. the u.s. army gets tiny very quickly. much of it is deployed out west as it always was, and true army had --pation would have

you had a million men in united in may 1965,form and even that million were only occupying a very small part of the confederatesy. the u.s. army is back down to about 30,000 men by the early 1870's. the french army, more than a 30,000. half-million at that point, the persian army more than a half million. it's part of the united states tradition of not liking standing armies in the peace time, and you don't need them, and the fact most people in the loyal states didn't think there was a lot left to do. never mind that. that's a subject for another class, another place. the point is confederates are looking around. they realize how many of their young men are dead. they realize that their social structure is gone, and they don't know that jim crow is coming incidentally, so they can't say slavery's gone, but jim crow's on the way so everything is going to be ok. they did not know that yet. part of what they are doing in the next years, i mean jim crow

, is the most obvious expression of confederate response to the loss of slavery and defeat. but they don't know that is coming yet. how are they going to make sense of what's happened to them and the people who might look at say -- look at them and say, really, secession was a good idea? really? and look at us now. how do they do it? here is how they do it. they don't have a retreat where they all go to a cabin somewhere in the appalachians and say, let's come up with a rationale for the war. it happens organically, overuse the word organically, you can , find the seeds of it in the war itself, but they come up interpretation of the interpree war that allows them to maintain -- the wake of this awful defeat, and we have come to call it the lost cause interpretation. here are its main elements. there are a few variations of

it. number one, they are not idiots. they realize they were out of step with western civilization even before the war because they were a slave holding society. they understood they needed to distance themselves from slavery. and so they argued the war was not really about secession, not really about slavery. it was about constitutional principle, it was about do you want to intrusive central government ramming things down your throat, or do you want the states to maintain their integrity and sovereignty as the founders said was their argument? we've talked about this in the course of this semester, and you've read jefferson davis. i have tried to inoculate themselves against the charge -- they have tried to inoculate themselves against the charge they're doing all this to protect their slave holding society. they know they're going to be judged before the bar of history and if they're as honest retrospectively as they were going forward about slavery, they would look bad.

we have talked about this. we talked about alexander stevens' cornerstone speech before the war, and we have talked about jefferson davis before. they're saying slavery's right up the middle of it. retrospectively they changed their minds as we know. they say not only is it not at the center of things it's really , only incidental. that is the word that jefferson davis said, it was incidental to this struggle for high constitutional principle. get yourself free of the taint of slavery. that is number one. number two, why did the war end the way it is? because we never had a chance. because of overwhelming union man power and material resources, there is no loss of honor in losing a war for high constitutional principle that you never could have won. it was a gallant fight for the right reason, but we couldn't -- never could have won

because there was so many yankees, and they had so much fight. you know that grant. grant wasn't a good general, he could just count on some of them. he went to west point, he learned arithmetic, and he has got unlimited men. and poor lee, we know this, lee only has 11 men at petersburg at the end, and they've only got nine shoes among them, and six of them are left shoes. so, it's the situation is terrible. and grant has a million men. and yet it takes grant nine months to subdue r.e. lee. who is the greater general there? is it mr. arithmetic, or is it r.e. lee? it's not close. numbers, numbers, numbers. go down not university cemetery here in c-ville and walk in the entrance, and there's a confederate monument there, first one that went up in

charlottesville, went up in 1983. read the inscription on the front of it. fate denied them victory. fate. i'm going to tell you this right now. if you ever get in a contest where you know fate is against you, just throw in the towel right then. because if fate is against you, you are not going to emerge triumphant. that is a perfect loss cause message on the front of that monument in the uva cemetery where there are 1000 confederate soldiers buried who died in the hospital's in uva and later charlottesville during the war. so it's not about slavery, we never could have won, there's a n alternative reason for confederate defeat as well which is utterly irreconcilable with we could not have one. it's we almost won, but james did lee at get --

longstreet undid lee at gettysburg. we would have gone. one reason they think it's so one reason they think it's so important now is was confederates, they couldn't talk enough about it and argue enough about it in longstreet, that perfidious republican, catholic , grant-liking, lee-hating guy. he undid, and jeb stewart did, too, and so did ule, we never could have one. -- won. won, or youuld have take it. you get one chance. you never get to sites. the main thing is we never could have won, northern man power and resources. and i'm going to read to you a wonderful quotation that gets at this from one of my favorite lost cause buckaroos, and that ule -- here is how he put it getting this sense of kind of , flesh and blood, band of brothers confederates contesting

this mechanistic juggernaut from the united states. he put it this way. general lee had written after -- this is why lee lost. general lee had not been conquered in battle but surrendered because he no longer had an army with which to give battle. i think that's because he was conquered. but never mind that. what he surrendered what he , surrendered was the skeleton, was the mere ghost of the army of northern virginia which had been gradually worn down, here's where you pay attention, by the combined agencies of numbers, steam power, railroads, mechanism, and all the resources of physical science. all that stuff is on the yankee side, all the confederates have -- all the physical science stuff. that is important. all the confederates have is not enough shoe and blood and sinew. and this pressure from the grant, -- hordes

under grant, hissing is visible now. finally produced that exhaustion of our army and resources and that accumulation of numbers on the other side which wrought the final disaster. i mean it's numbers, dude. , can you understand that? there's nothing else going on here. and he says, shall i compare grant to lee? he said, you might as well compare the pyramid's in their majesty beside the nile to a pygmy perched on atlas. we know which was which. they are also aware, they are very self-consciously looking toward the future. they understand how historians and future americans are going to understand the war. they're going to read what the wartime generation wrote. that is where people are going to turn to reach their conclusions about the war. and they talk to each other in the immediate aftermath of the war.

lee had already kind of paved the way about the numbers argument. and i need to say we already , know this. there is a truth in the element, the none -- the union does have more. it has four times as many white men in its military age population. we know that. its industrial capacity is far beyond that of the confederacy. they're not making that part of it up. that part of it is true. but they exaggerate it and miss confederate advantages and so forth. but they know they're writing for the future. lee thought for a while about writing a history of his army after the war. he got down to lexington, and he even began to collect information about it. he wrote to former officers and said my records are incomplete, do you have something on this, do you have something on that? correspondent, and this is what lee wrote in november 1865. he said my only object is to transmit if possible the truth

to prosperity and do justice to our brave soldiers. these that we shall have to be patient and suffer for a while at least. at present the public mind is not prepared to receive the truth. his truth is that the u.s. overwhelmed. the order -- the united states, the order at appomattox, his farewell order which he didn't write, but he approved of it and someone he really trusted wrote it, he said they had been compelled to give into overwhelming numbers and resources. that is the phrase lee used at appomattox. so that union numbers thing starts very early. jubl early replied to lee on this point of getting the record down so that people will read it in the future. he said that -- he said, yes, you should write this history of the army in northern virginia, you need to do this, general leave. lee did not in the end because

he got busy running washington colleagues as president. and i think it's a good thing he didn't write it. he couldn't write worth a damn. he wrote one thing we have, and it's the most wooden. he probably had i love passive voice on one of his tattoos because he never broke free of passive voice. that's another aside. here's what early wrote to lee. he said, the most that is left to us is the history of our struggle. and i think that ought to be accurately written. we lost nearly everything but honor, and that should be religiously guarded. so here is -- we've got to get our version down, former confederates are telling one another. we have to do it. we have to do it for our own people our children and others , so we can look them in the eye. but we know that we're going to be judged going forward by people who are going to look at things that the wartime generation wrote. so they are busy doing this. and saying it wasn't about slavery. and they never could have won.

and then they play their best card. do they say what person can we talk about? i know let's talk about , jefferson davis, everyone loves him. no, of course they do. because almost no one loved jefferson davis. he's not loveable as you know from reading his works. who can you talk about, who's the most important confederate during the war? well, it is r.e. lee. it isn't even close. you can talk about him without talking about slavery. you can even pretend he sort of -- he is sort of anti-slavery if you squint just right and stand on your head and turn the lights out. you know from confederates, that part of it, i won't belabor that, you can talk about lee, he's your best card. he was a brilliant general, he did win great battles against long odds. joe hooker did have twice as as -- atliterally chancellorsville as lee, yet lee won with his cohoert thomas jonathan jackson struck down at

high tide, tragically. if only, all the if's that linger, what if, what if, stonewall jackson. and then you lower your voice, had been at gettysburg. what if he had, what if he had? we know what. he would have been in a box had nong, and would have impact on chancellorville, and it would have seemed awkward to carry his corpse up into pennsylvania even to rally the troops. look, there is jackson in a wooden box. rally behind the virginians. that really would not work that way. so, you focus on lee. focus on lee. and present him as a christian gentleman, which he was. project him as someone who's the anti-mcclellan. there's not a single letter in lee's vast correspondence that is like almost any letter than mcclellan wrote to his wife, the

kind of letters that say i'm wonderful, if only they'd let me have my way. lincoln is an idiot, everybody else is an idiot. i'm a hero, i want to save the republic. i, i, i, me, me, me. i, i, i. there aren't letters like that. so he does, he is the perfect person to seize that. and so they do. they emphasize lee is their man. and there are more monuments to lee? up. the one in charlottesville was the one of the last ones that went up in 1924. but there are more monuments to lee than anyone else in the confederacy by far, by far. and we will see in a minute he , even crossed over the divide from being a lost cause figure 2 -- when i was growing up the two great figures in the civil war were lincoln and lee. lincoln and lee. not lincoln and grant. why wasn't it lincoln or grant? -- and grant? or anyway -- davis was never in the running.

he had no chance to become one of those people. so the confederates settle on these things, and then they have their own traditions. it is still celebrated in some places, their own decoration day. i think fredericksburg, they have their own national cemeteries, although there is no nation to create the cemeteries, groups of women across the south. a former uva student who's now a very successful professor at purdue, caroline cheney, wrote a memorializations, and talked about the re-internment in what can only be called a confederate national cemetery. they are parts of larger cemeteries. hollywood cemetery in richmond has a confederate section. they bury them by state. they would have speeches there just as the union cause people

would have speeches in national cemeteries. you would have the confederate decoration day confederate , memorial day just as you had the national memorial day, the decoration day. and monuments went up all over the former confederacy. there are five of them in charlottesville. the war didn't ever come here directly. you have one in the cemetery, you have to confederate soldier in front of the county courthouse downtown. you have a question statue's of jackson and lee. and you have the statue in front of the rotunda that list the uva graduates that died in the army. and that happened all over the confederacy. little towns have confederate monuments usually in front of the courthouse, but the same on and on as you have in the north. and usually the inscriptions on them get at the idea of overwhelming odds, of fighting for high constitutional principle, often specifically state rights against an encroaching federal government.

go read the one in front of -- county courthouse. you get state rights, you get -- so it's a kind of duly memorial landscape in many ways that you get after the war. and the lost cause puts up many, many, many monuments. they also wrote just as people who embraced the union cause or those who embraced the emancipation cause. one of the great examples of emancipation cause writing was a by a, three volume study senator named henry wilson who was from massachusetts who wrote on the rise and fall of the slave power, the third volume of which deals with the war. but the confederates do a lot of writing, and they prove quite successful at getting their version of the war into print and into popular culture. now we have talked in here a bit

about here the two most scenes theeen films that deal with civil war. the two most important fall -- films are birth of a nation and gone with the wind, depending on how many people saw them, how long they were part of the cultural landscape. they are lost cause. they're not pure lost cause. but there's no emancipation cause in them, no real union cause. there's a little reconciliation touch, but they are pretty much lost cause. sherman is the great destroyer and the great invader in these two. they come in, giant yankee armies wreaking havoc, destroying everything. they also have the motif, which is the last element of the lost cause i'll talk about which is the loyal enslaved population. that is another key part of the lost cause. the slaves were happy, the slaves were content. the slaves were well-treated under the confederacy. and in fact the yankees didn't like black people as much as confederates do.

that kind of reaches its apex in the film gods in general to me, where you have -- it is 2003. it's a lost cause film in many ways. and you have a conversation between stonewall jackson and his black cook. and jackson is interviewing him, it turns out they're both from lexington. and the words that come out of the black character's mouth are quite remarkable. we are kind of all in this together, aren't we? and you think what does the cook think is in it for him if the confederacy wins? really, it just makes your mind drift away to something else that might make sense. and a book, my favorite favorite book title of all books on the civil war is stonewall jackson, colon, the black man's friend. [laughter] gary gallagher: i'm not making that up. i'm not making that up.

that is an actual book title, and you can tie that into gods in general. if only the confederacy can win, at last black people can get a break. i mean that's kind of the message in here. like i said, you just can't make some things up. you just can't. the bitterness that remained among former confederates was profound. profound. and i am just going to quote all of the reconciliation stuff. here is something that gets at what former confederates actually thought. this is part of the lyrics from a song called "oh, i'm a good old rebel." oh, i am a good old rebel, which was sarcastically dedicated to the honorable thaddeus stevens, so you know what is going on here. 300,000 yankees is stiffed in southern dust. we've got 300,000 before they conquered us. they died of southern fever and southern steel and shot. i wish they was 3 million instead of what we got.

i can't take up my musket, point them no more, but i ate going to love them -- ain't going to love them. i don't want no pardon for what i love and am. i won't be reconstructed. and i don't give a damn. welcome back to the united states. that is right, we are all americans. i am not really upset. i love the lyrics of that one. everybody tells me how easily they got back together. let's talk about reconciliation quickly. this is powerful part of the literature. the idea that white americans north and south just decided not to talk about slavery, don't talk about race, don't talk about who was right or wrong, just get together in a sort of burst of racist energy agreed. -- energy. agree that everyone was gallant and we love each other. there's absolutely some truth to this, and there you can find evidences of this. but i think you need to be

careful about exactly how you explore this. i think there was a public face for some people and a private face. his private face he seized about reconstruction. face, hehe public never deviated from it. his private face he seized about reconstruction. he hated what was going on in terms of racial accommodation. he was very upset. that is the private lee, not the public lee, the same was true of many other figures. but there was some reconciliation in some ways where they're talking about a common heritage. we are all americans. but i think it has been overdone. it is still very important to look at. this is a strong element in many films that have come down over the years. there's a good bit of that, those of you who watched the film gettysburg. the reconciliation film there is

really teased out by hancock and are instead, all -- armstead. all they care about is each other. they love being in the army together, and they are alas fighting each other, and they are really just americans. and it's too bad this is going on. that's a very strong reconciliation theme. the war with spain gave a wonderful opportunity for our kind of public reconciliation. and so the united states government, for example -- i mean, they need soldiers from both former confederates states and former loyal states in the war with spain, and so they pitch it that way and make a big deal with the fact you have southern white boys and northern white boys all in blue uniforms going off to fight the spaniards in cuba and elsewhere. and they even trotted out a group of former confederate

generals and made them generals in the united states army. joseph wheeler was one of them. there's a film of little joe wheeler who is about this tall walking back and forth with a little sword and a long white beard. nephew, ise, lee's another one. and this guy named after the house where rocker lived, a former major general brought back as a general during the war with spain as well. this is a very self-conscious effort to push reconciliation. here are all these boys fighting together in blue uniforms against a common foe. against a common foe. and the newspapers loved an alleged quotation from joseph wheeler down in cuba. as his troops were attacking and he got caught up in the moment and he said, go get those damn yankees. and someone said, general they're spaniards. , that's what i meant.

spaniards, not the yankees. that joe wheeler, he's such a caution. and he's really just an american now just an american. , just an american. the reconciliation cause took a number of forms. and we can see it on the memorial landscape. and you are -- i am finally going to come to your handouts here. the top thing on your handout is the united states half-dollar in 1925 that has robert e. lee and stonewall jackson on it. robert e. lee and stonewall jackson on a united states $.50 piece. just think about that a minute. i wonder how many losing rebels in civil wars in history ended up on official coinage from the republic they almost undid. turn to the next page there. you have this great cartoon from 1938, which is the 75th anniversary of the battle of

gettysburg. and it has -- i don't need to -- i mean let's pretend i have , power point now, and i'm so repeating the stunningly obvious as if you can't figure out anything on your own. it's a union and a confederate veteran. ancient veterans, and there they are shoulder to shoulder. was gettysburg necessary? really, was gettysburg necessary? it almost makes you think of recent quotations of was the civil war necessary? anyway, was gettysburg necessary? was it necessary? and the implications of course was it wasn't necessary. our family had a spat. oh, too bad, too bad, too bad. and i'm going to give you two perfect examples of reconciliationist rhetoric. that do airbrush emancipation out of the picture, talk about who was right and wrong, and both took place at gettysburg. one on the 50th anniversary of

the battle, one on the 75th. and they were delivered by two people who, let's just say they're not quite picked at random, woodrow wilson and franklin delano roosevelt. the same speechwriter wrote the same speeches, but here we have wilson. we have found one another again as brothers and comrades in no longer, friends rather, our battles of past wars forgotten. except we shall not forget the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against each other, now grasping hands and smiling into each other's eyes. just a kind of collective american manhood that had fought for causes -- we won't talk about what the causes were and whether one was right or wrong -- just these are american virtues. devotion to cause and heroism, they are not northern virtues, not southern virtues, american

virtues. 25 years later, franklin roosevelt quote, men who wore : the blue and men who wore the gray are brought hereby old -- are brought here by old meet here int they united loyalty to a united cause of which the unfolding years have made it easier to see. of the veterans present, roosevelt and behind him, he was dedicating the eternal peace monument up on guttiesbering. -- gettysburg. that is kind of in the background. and the words on it are peace united in the entire nation. and he closed by saying -- all of them we honor, not asking which flag they thought under then, thankfully stand together now under one flag. that's the same time that the cartoon came out in the philadelphia newspaper of the two veterans together. and there were newsreels of these old, old men literally shaking hands across the wall, the famous stone wall at gettysburg.

so this is the very reconciliationist take on the war, and the idea why much of this and in the literature is that white veterans from the unions just completely turned their blacks on white veterans. more recent scholarship suggests that isn't true. you can be a racist and still think emancipation came. we talk about that a lot in this class. when you talk about slavery and attitudes towards race, you need to understand that they can be somewhat puzzling to us now because we -- what we would assume to be the case on their part often isn't the case. and that was often the true with the union veterans looking back at the war. your other two -- the u.s. has commemorated the civil war in a number of stamps. i put two examples in your handout. the first page which has five of them on it it was a simpler time , in the centennial years when i

was young and everything we had to learn, were only nine things and you were considered educated. the only put five stamps out, during the civil war centennial, and there they are. one each year. and it is very straightforward. they're battles. they don't take a side. they don't there's nothing , political about them. it wouldn't take, the only argument would be should we have more in the west or more in the east? and of course there's more in the east because as we know the east is more important. even though other people are more confused about that, we have shiloh, gettysburg, appomattox. your next sheet shows how much more complicated -- but that is it's even handed. there's no taking sides there. fast forward to the 1990's. that is the sheet of commemerative stamps from the 1990's, and you can see it's different. it has men and women. black and white, native american, different battles.

it is a much more complicated landscape of the war, but still an evenhanded one in terms of for every union figure, there's a confederate figure. and you and if you look at the , very top, and i didn't bring my glasses, but i'm pretty sure it says this. i think it says civil war in very large letters. and then i think it says war between the states in smaller letters. that's, again, who calls it the war between the states? former confederates. they call it war between the states, and the united states calls the civil war. well, that's not really what many -- what did the union people really call it? the war of the rebellion. when they published all of the records of the war, they didn't call them -- it's the war of the rebellion. that's what it is. about civil war in bigger print. and i can just kind of close my

eyes and imagine the table where they are all arguing. i don't want to -- you have got to. i want it bigger, no you can have it smaller. and you can just hear. the committee meetings, i weep at that prospect. you're going to learn to hate committee meetings more than anything else in your life. you go in, you sit around for three hours, then you decide to meet again. and it really makes life seem not worth living when you're in those. ok, where are we today? well, the civil war still gets a lot of attention today. and i think people come at the war with two basic things in mind. and the first one is, what can we find in the war that is really about us and things we are interested in now? how do we draw from the war things that are going to be pertinent to political and social issues that we are involved in now?

it's full of those kind of things. it is bursting with them, in fact. two obviously ones are those related to race. the current wave of debates about monument came in the wake of the charleston killings. it didn't just sort of happen to come that way. it came that way. revisiting these confederate memorials in the wake of a brutal racial incident in our current world. it brings the emancipation cause back into the picture. hollywood has embraced this. for years the lost cause was the default end of the war, and the apogee of that is gone with the wind. for emancipation clause is now the default understanding of the war. those of you who wrote about lincoln, you see it in lincoln. it is even in abraham lincoln, vampire hunter. that is all over abraham lincoln, vampire hunter. gettysburg and the war in abraham lincoln, vampire hunter. don't mess with those other two years. it's all settled at geltiesbering, and it's all

about slavery. any of you who suffered through the free state of jones, it prevents this biracial nirvana where, anyway -- i won't go off on that. it is wishful thinking and projection, but the understanding is that the emancipation is the cause that has the most resonance among the ones that came to us from the wartime generation. there's also a good deal of debate about the relative power, the central and local governments. i mean we've seen this. barack obama is elected president, texas talks ability -- talks about secession. donald trump is elected president, california talks about secession. i mean, here's the deal, secession was settled by the civil war. that is not going to happen. but you go back to the war -- i just find it amazing you have , pretty much wake up and say, i know what i want to do, i want to get right to south carolina in 1870. so i'm going to argue for secession. there must not be a mirror in

the house when that happens, there is a little check on themselves. you can go back to the war, finding ways to extract from it things that are pertinent to us. the other way to go back is to go back and try to understand what was actually going on. and that often leads to problems because what we think should have been going on often isn't what was going on. i mean to us, to people in 2017, a great war to end slavery makes sense. that is worth this profusion of blood, to eradicate the institution of slavery from the american republic. but when you go back and actually read stuff, which is dangerous, you find out that alas, that is not the primary motivation. and you find out that you have to come to terms with the union. and that's a hard sell now. it's hard to tell people what

union meant. what did it mean? what did it mean? how could people, and part of it is we've been a great power for all these decades. it's hard to imagine anything internally literally destroying the republic now. people don't wake up and wonder whether the nation is going to be here next year. but that was a genuine fear in the mid-19th century, and is tied to unions, and recovering that can be very difficult. and it causes us to sort of get outside our current comfort zones and come to terms with the real past. it is not about taking people you -- oh, i like them, and i don't like them. there are people we like more than others in the past, but what is the goal for this second way to get at the war should be understanding what was going on in the past not deciding whether shaw like robert gould early.han juule

it is a very different progress, both of them will go on. as a kind of detached observer, i like to sit back and watch the civil war carnival unfold as it always does, kind of in waves. but it always does. here is what i want. here's the main thing that i want, and i know this is going to happen because some of you down the road, when you're much older, you know, mid-20's, you're going to sit down in front of your computers or you probably text by then and admit to me that you have either been to a battlefield or read something that made you think about hius 3072. and if that happens, my heart will soar. i love to think that some of you -- now, many of you are going to be unscarred either that way by this class. some of you, as i've said