not reallyoes does hold up that well in terms of accuracy. rumor -- schumer -- [applause] we struck a commemorative coin with the design from the cemetery 150th and we would like to present that to you. >> thank you, i appreciate it. [applause] >> thank you, everybody. >> next on lectures in history, a university of virginia professor teaches a class on civil war memory and how people in the north and south have interpreted the conflict from

the postwar era to today. this is about one hour and 15 minutes. prof. gallagher: here we are for the last class this semester. we're going to move into the aftermath of the war, as you know. we spent all semester looking at various aspects of this conflict. right from the beginning, i alerted you one of the themes in this class was going to be the tension between history and memory. we talked about it on the first day of class. have reiterated as we've gone along. here we are finally at the end where we're going to focus on memory for our last class. there's no better event in the united states history to talk about how powerful contending memories of something that happened in the past can be. there's simply nothing remotely equal to it, i think, than the civil war. passions get up quickly when people remember the civil war. been watching that in charlottesville over the last year and a half in the debates

over the statue of robert e lee downtown. i'll talk at the end, when i get to the war today, about some of the resonances of the war in our current american situation, and the ways in which the different extremes of memory put in place by the war time generation either do or do not remain with us now. my real focus today will be how the wartime generation remembered the war. i'm going to focus on four great interpretive traditions that came out of the wartime generation, thrived for many decades after and in differing degrees right down to 2017. the loyal white citizenry, african americans, and former confederates have different interpretations of the war after appomattox. they embraced versions of the

war that suited their purposes. both in terms of letting them come out of the war feeling good about themselves, and also various social and political situations that came up in decades after the war. there's never one history of a n important event. if there's just a history of the civil war, you don't need people like me, you would go buy the civil war book and read it and you would know all about it. and if you were interested in something else, you could buy the whatever else book appeared but we exist, and there are a bunch of us in this room that are doing this for a living or will do this for a living. if there were only one past we would be doing something really useful in life instead of what we do, something that contributed to the common good instead of adoerng it which is what we mainly do. but the fact we disagree puts us in line with what the generation that experienced the war did.

they had vibrant, is a sort of soft word, to describe how they contested their versions of history. we'll start with the winning side. the union cause and the emancipation cause. the two winning memories of the war, then we'll go to the lost cause, which is the most common term used to get at the former confederates' memory of the war. then we'll get to reconciliation , which is another stream of coming to terms with the war that i think historians have vastly exaggerated. they've exaggerated the degree to which people said we are all americans, sorry we slaughtered each other, let's go be pals and love one another. that's comforting but not exactly accurate. then i'll finish with thoughts about 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 back toward the war. and i'll talk about 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. i would guess if we were going to parse numbers, there are 31 million americans plus or minus in 1860. i would say at least 20 million or so of them would have said this is the most important way to remember the war, the union cause memory of the war is the most important. and it is, it gets at the meaning of union that we've talked a lot about in here. i'll say parenthetically, this is of our 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 couldn't begin to tell you what union meant in the

mid 19th century, they're absolutely innocent of that. in my story about the union in pasadena reminds us how far we were. all for the onion. somebody says that probably doesn't get what was going on in the 19th century. luckily we know how important union was. we can go out and be sort of proselytizers if you want to remind people union is the most fraught word in the political vocabulary of the 19th century. but the union cause celebrated the restoration of the republic and the carrying forward of the work of the founding generation viewed they would have argued we have defeated the slaveholding oligarchs who post such a threat to the work of the founding generation. we have gotten rid of slavery. they would have been happy that slavery was gone, people who embraced the union cause, not

for the reasons we would want them to be happy. they're happy because now these issues related to slavery are not lurking and waiting to burst into the kind of inflammatory language and action that brought cessation crisis of 1860, '61, get rid of slavery, you get rid of the only internal factor that could sundayer of the union. it's good emancipation came in the course of the war, but the reason it's a good thing is that it's made the union safe. we're going to come out of the war with the republic intact. small d democracy, lincoln's notion of the last best hope of earth, that is now firmly in place. whereas it's eroding in europe , as americans believed, and they were right, in the wake of the failed revolutions in the 1840s. that is what this war did, it

made the nation safe. i'll read some representative, three quick quotations that get at this. and get at the fact that the other thing celebrated by the union cause is the union was saved by whom? by citizen soldiers who put on uniforms and picked up muskets because that's what you do if someone is threatening a political system that gives you a voice in your government and a economic system that affords the opportunity, not the guarantee, the opportunity to rise. we've read lincoln. he is the poster boy for this meaning of union. he gets at the economic and the "we are in control of our own government" elements of that. that is what they're celebrating. let's pick our friend sherman. this is him in his congratulatory order to the men of his army in may 1865. three armies came together from

distant hills with separate histories but bound by one common cause, the union of our country and the effectuation of -- and the perpetuation of the government of our inheritance. sherman said that the men, had done all men can do. and he added that they could join in the universal joy that fills our land because the war is over and our government stands vindicated before the world. he touches all the key points there, the citizen soldiers, saving the government. roscoe conklin of new york who's just a congressman at this point, became a very powerful and some whispered corrupt senator after the war. -- greeted a new york regiment that was on its way home from the war. a veteran regiment. and he said that they had come together with a common purpose in hope, "peace with the government and the constitution

of our fathers established has been the object of the war and the prayer of over patriot and every soldier." and finally i'll quote one union soldier here, a ohio soldier, he appomattox,fter "the citizen soldier of the army of the republic. the great experiment has been settled for all people of all countries beneath the sun and liberty and popular institutions everywhere are recognized as an outgrowth of american destiny." this is the absolutely purest form of the notion of american exceptionalism that this soldier puts forward. there is no place else like this, it was worth fighting for, we have salvaged it and we are going to go forward. so the loyal citizenry, the loyal white citizenry, we talked before about how overwhelmingly white the free states were, almost 99%. they would have said ok we've done it, we saved the union.

they followed up on some of the wartime business in the aftermath of the war. we talked about that a little bit. when former confederates behaved as if they hadn't lost the war in the summer of 1865, the loyal white citizenry of the united states decided more was necessary, but it was only in response to what the former confederates were doing. you come up with the three great wartime amendments, 13th in december of 1865, and then the 14th which sought to guarantee equal legal protection for formerly enslaved people and the 15th amendment, which gave the vote to the african-american men. you get those in the aftermath of appomattox. republicans, those who believed in the union cause, used it politically as you might imagine, and tried to cast democrats as disloyal, as only lukewarm if even that, in pursuit of saving the union. they talked about how treasonous

many of the former democrats were, and they engaged in what became waving the bloody shirt, which allegedly had origins in some republican speaker literally waving the shirt of a union soldier stained with blood. a postwar figure from maine, who may not have always been exactly on the straight and narrow. 1876, northern shotans to "vote as you during the war." in other words, vote for the republicans against the democrats and the former rebel s who were in the democratic party in the south. this is how he put it with his very light touch. "every prison guard who tortured

union prisoners at andersonville was a democrat, the man who shot democrat,ncoln was a any man to tried the old flag was a democrat, every man who tried to destroy the nation was a democrat. soldiers, every scar you have on your bodies was given to you by a democrat." now this is sort of indirect, but approximate we really pay attention we can figure out the message. the message is vote republican, the republicans saved the union. we can see what's not mentioned, no mention of emancipation, getting rid of slavery, it's a mention of saving the nation. they were very effective at waving the bloody shirt, running soldiers who put on union uniforms for president. not only the man, we get u.s. grant twice, 1868 and 1872. but then we also get rutherford garfieldand james a and benjamin harrison. all union generals who were elected president. the last gasp of electing union

veterans came with william mckinley, a company great officer, but nonetheless a union veteran. every republican who held 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, grover cleveland, who hired the poor polish guy to fight for him. there's a disconnection between who's getting elected as a republican and a democrat to the presidency. the republicans would say of course the democrats are running a draft dodger. we run generals, they run draft dodgers. the democrats did run one former general for president, 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're running for office after the civil war.

and the democrats struggle with this notion that they were not really fully on board with this struggle to save the union. they came back, once the former confederate states were back, the democrats regained control of the house of representatives. in 1874, didn't take a decade. but the republicans used the union cause very, very effectively. they also, the loyal citizenry, did a number of things to commemorate the union cause. they established what they called decoration day, what we call memorial day now, which was a day to go specifically and remember the union men who herself given their lives to save the nation. you would go and decorate the graves, hence decoration day, put a flag, hear a speech

related to the war, watch some veterans parade in their uniforms during decoration day. the government as we've talked about, established national cemeteries specifically because they needed a place to put more than a third of a million dead united states soldiers, only noted states soldiers, confederate soldiers, at least not deliberately in these cemeteries. there's a handful of exceptions. so you would go off and combine those two things, a decoration ceremony in a national cemetery. so you're not just talking about the men who gave their lives for the union, you're surrounded by them as you hear a speech about the value of union. they erected memorials and monuments in courthouse squares. the most ago any sent one of all -- the most magnificent one of all is in indianapolis. it's a incredible monument. if you're headed to a colts game, you can touch base with the union boys and then watch the colts who wish they had a line that could defend the best quarterback in the nfl.

[laughter] prof. gallagher: they put these monuments of everywhere in villages and small towns to really grand monuments. you have can't walk around washington, d.c. without running into generals on horse back. there's even one of george clinton mccullen. but the grandest is of grant right in front of the capitol, of course, looking straight down the mall toward the lincoln memorial. you have national cemeteries, you have memorial day. if you read the inscriptions on the monuments, they're very important. we don't have a good book. this is something that something -- that some bright graduate lookd take on, a serious at the inscriptions on civil war memorials both union and confederate. the dominant motif are union,

union, union, nation, and on some, put a really small percentage of all of them, you also will get some mention of emancipation, often in terms of lincoln's, they'll mention lincoln's emancipation prok -- emancipation proclamation together with union. the memorial landscape underscores powerfully the fact that union was the dominant memory of the war among the loyal citizenry of the united states. they also wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. the civil war generation picked up pens and just outpoured the counts. regimental histories, memoirs, published sets of letters. when you read those, you get a strong sense of just how dominant this notion of a war for union was. it's a war for union. and it's a war that ended with this grand success that ratified the work of the founders. it actually gave this generation work. how do you compete with the

founders? that's one of the problems. all they did was establish the country in a bloody war against scummy great britain, then they are responsible for the constitution. ok. check. check. and what have we done lately? how do you complete with that memory? that's tough. 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 doesn't leave anything for later generations to do. who cares? we're taken care of. sort of a baby boomer approach to life. i want all of you to take care of me as i get older. and my generation lives forever. we are going to be around. you are going to have us as a giant anvil on your backs for almost all of your lives and you can't do anything about us, so don't even try. [laughter] prof. gallagher: you don't have a chance. here this gives the civil war

generation something that they can stand. they often created images of washington, lincoln and grant together, put them literally side by side. i've talked before about how at the end of the war, lincoln is the great figure for us. at the end of the war, grant and lincoln were equivalent figures. tying the work of the founding generation to the generation that served the union. very overtly tying them together. the union cause memory hugely important. one of the winning memories of the war. the other winning memory of the war was the emancipation cause. this would have been 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 abolitionists. i think radical republicans would have said the same thing. they would have said of course it's a good thing the union was preserved. if the union had not been preserved, slavery would have lived. so, yes, it's a good thing the union was presevered. but it is only worth preserving if it is an improved union. and it is only an improvement if it is a union without slavery. institution of slavery mocking that high language in the declaration of independence and other high documents. the union being saved is good but the most important thing that came out of the war is the distraction that frederick called the held black system of slavery. student: did the abolitionists

think they were promoting the work of the founding fathers? prof. gallagher: they thought they were improving the work of the founding fathers. and they thought the founding father's 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. so many abolitionists before the war, for example, they called the constitution a rag that allows slavery to exist in the united states. so the founders were onto some things, but their work was far from perfect. it will only -- will really only realize the purpose of the founders if they get rid of slavery. that would have been their attitude toward that. one reason many people in the antebellum years did not like abolitionists and thought they were a problem is because abolitionists would attack the constitution. that was considered anathema by u.s. citizens in the late 19th

century. so the emancipation is a winner's cause. i would say five -- if we're going to put a number on it, we can't, but i am, i would say about 5 million people would have said this is the most important thing. and african americans and others established their own traditions in remembering the war. they had their own day, one day that they would pick during the year. and they often called it emancipation day. and it was on different days in different states. in texas, it is called juneteenth. it refers to when word of emancipation came to places in texas. here in virginia, it was often april 9, appotomatax day. the troops the cut in front of on april 9, they were

in the forefront of the army pursuing paralleling his army as it went west. in virginia, april 9 often became the one day of the year where you would have your major celebration in the black community. parade, speeches, the same kind of things he would have with the mainstream of declaration/memorial day celebrations in the united states, but you would have them on different days and you would 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. in numbers disproportionate to how many of them there were. usat veterans were very prominent in black communities after the war. they had disproportionate influence. it was a tremendous cachet say i

was a usat man. i did the most direct thing you could do to get rid of slavery. what is the most direct thing you can do? put on a uniform, pick up a musket and try to vanquish the rebels and try to destroy the confederacy. there was not a widespread movement to erect monuments to usct men. there was almost none. the memorial landscape almost devoid of monuments specifically directed at the emancipation memory of the war. the earliest monument that went up that dealt with the ending of slavery is balls famous statute in emancipation park, thomas ball's statute on capitol hill that went up in 1876 which later became controversial, it's lincoln standing up and reaching down and a black man starting to rise.

it conveys the message lincoln freed the slaves, struck the shackles from black people. it's the first notable monument that went up to deal with emancipation. it is still there. you should go look at it. frederick douglass gave a speech there in which he criticized that view of why emancipation came. that's 1876. the next major monument was 1897, and that is my favorite civil war monument of all, monumentsaint goggins' to the 54th massachusetts and robert gould shaw. but it is to shaw and to the 54th, as only academics can do, there was a article a few years ago where someone attacked the saint goggins monument because they said it diminished the

black soldiers because they were only ground and shaw was on a horse. they were innocent of the fact generals are on horses and infantry man are on the ground whether they are black or white. the main place to find infotainment -- infantryman is on the ground. it's a spectacular monument. the national gallery in washington has a beautiful plaster of it. you don't have to go all the way to boston to see it. go to the national gallery, stand in front of that monument and then come and tell me that it demeans african-american soldiers. an i have said before, only academic could argue that that somehow diminishes the service of these men. an amazing monument, 1897. family: didn't shaw's influence that? didn't shaw'sr:

family influence why he's the on the minute -- monument? yes. without shaw's family, would the monument have gone up? no. a very well connected family. and an abolitionist family, his parents more than shaw. not really burning with the abolitionist spirit the way that his parents were, but that is a huge element in that. when we went to petersburg, we saw the little monument there that went up in 1990 to the usct troops. it went up in 1990. i'll state the stunningly obvious. that wasn't there until the wake of glory. "glory."

this is one of the influences of a successful part of popular culture in carrying over to how we remember things. i made you write about movies because they have a impact on how people remember the past. that monument would not be there if it weren't for "glory," that put usct men on the map. that is almost a century after saint godness monument in boston. it wasn't until the end of the 20th century, 1998, that you got a kind of national monument to the usct men ,it's in washington, d.c. it's at vermont and 10th street in the shaw district of washington, and it's a plaza that has the names of the 200,000 black men who served in the army and the navy on tablets that go around this little plaza. and then there is a sculpture in the middle. that's 1998 when that went up.

so, the emancipation memory of the war, it's there, and it carries forward but it wouldn't be as prominent to someone who is just looking at the memorial landscape to figure out what the memory of the war was. frederick douglass figured this out 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 1870s 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 read the obituaries of robert e. 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 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. so there's a right and wrong side. there's a right and a wrong side here. thought a sense of that was slipping away, especially in democratic newspapers in the north which had really quite gentle or even appreciative of actuaries. 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 lee."te robert e 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 call the lost cause tradition. this would have been former confederates who did this. and let's say maybe 5.5 million forhem, let's deduct 10% actual unionists among white people in the confederacy, but and othersentuckians who discovered they were confederates after the fact. they woke up after -- suffered from a kind of amnesia about what had happened the four years before, they all became kentucky colonels after the war. they put up a huge monuments jefferson davis. compare the two monuments.

i wonder which one's taller and the one that is taller, i'm going to give it away. it is not abraham lincoln. 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 who won and lost, no, they're very well aware of who lost. they lost a far higher -- you can calculate the difference in loss. far higher percentage of their military age 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. i can't think of anything equivalent in our society that you could change that would bring as much of an impact. and i'm going to quote one person on this. he was married to one of thomas jefferson's granddaughters, lived at edge hill, went to uva in 1853, his name a robert garlic hill cane, he married jane randolph. her uncle was george randolph. he worked for the confederate government and right after the war he was traveling through , virginia, he kept a diary. and this is what he wrote shortly after appomattox. "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 "whenly controlled anger, 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 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? 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 army of confederate states. there just isn't. the u.s. army gets tiny very quickly, most of it is deployed out west as it always was, and true army of occupation, you had a million men in united states uniform in may, 1865, and even that million were only occupying a very small part of the confederacy. the u.s. army is back down to about 30,000 men by the 1870s. the french army, more than a half a million at that point. the prussian army, more than a half million. the american army is tiny. it's part of the united states

tradition of not liking standing armies in the peace time, 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 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 -- 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 it. how are they going to make sense of what's happened to them and the people who might look at them and say, really, secession was a good idea? really? and look at us now. how do they do it? here's how. 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 rational of

the war. it emerges organically, in the immediate aftermath of the war. you can find the seeds of it in the war itself. but they come up with a interpretation of the war that allows them to maintain a sense of honor in the wake of this awful defeat and we have come to call it the lost cause interpretation. here are its main elements. there are variations of it. there are a few cardinal elements. number one, they are not idiots. they realized they were out of step with western civilization even before the war because they were a slaveholding society. they understood they needed to distance themselves from slavery. they argued the war was not really about slavery, it was about constitutional principle, it was really 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 have read jefferson davis. they try to inoculate themselves against the charge they're doing all this to protect their slave holding society. they understand 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 jefferson davis before. they say slavery is right up the middle of it. retrospectively they changed their mind. they say not only is it not at the center of things, it's really only incidental. that's the word jefferson davis used it was incidental to this

, struggle or 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 manpower 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 win because there were so many yankees and they had so much stuff to fight us with. you know the yankees, that grand. grant. grant wasn't a good general, he could just count. men andhe had unlimited poor lee, we know this, lee only has 11 men at petersburg at the end and they only have nine shoes among them and six of them

are left shoes. [laughter] prof. gallagher: so 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 robert e. lee? it's not even 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, 1893, read the inscription on the front of it. victory."ed them 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 at uva and charlottesville during the war. it's not about slavery, we never could have won, there's a alternative reason. it's we almost won, but james long street undid lee at gettysburg. we would have won. one reason they think it's so important now is was confederates, they couldn't talk enough about it and argue enough about it, long street, that republican catholic grant-liking, lee-hating guy. he undid, and jeb stewart did, too, and so did everybody. we never could have won.

you take it one way. the main thing is we never could have won, northern manpower and resources. i'm going to read to you a wonderful quotation that gets at this. from one of my favorite lost cause arguments. he's really important in the development of the lost cause argument. 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. this is why lee lost. "general lee had not been conquered in battle but surrendered because he no longer had an army to give battle." i think that's because he was conquered. but nevermind that.

[laughter] prof. gallagher: "what he surrendered was the skeleton, the mere ghost of the army of northern virginia which had been gradually worn down by numbers." here is 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 yankee side, all the confederates have is not enough shoes and blood and sinew. this pressure from the yankee hordes 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 pyramids in their pygmy."by the nile to a they are aware, they are self-consciously looking toward the future. the 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 paved the way about the numbers argument. and i need to say -- we already know this. there is a element of truth in the numbers argument. the union has more. it has four times as many white men in its military age population. we know that. it is -- its industrial capacity is far beyond that of the confederacy. they're not making that part of it up. that part is true.

but the exaggerated and missed 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. he even began to collect information. he wrote to former officers and said my records are incomplete, do you have something on this, something on that. this is how we explained what he was up to. he wrote this in november of 1865. he said, my only object is to transmit if possible truth to and doity -- posterity justice to our soldiers. be patient, ato present, the public mind is not prepared to receive the truth. his truth is that the u.s. overwhelmed. order atrewell

trustedox, someone he wrote it, he said they had been compelled to give in to overwhelming numbers and resources. that is the phrase that lee used at appomattox. the union numbers thing start early. the man replied to lee. on the point of getting it down. he said, you need to do this. lee did not, he got busy. i think it's a good thing he did not write it, he could not write worth a damn. he wrote one thing we have, and it's the most wooden. he probably had i love passive , 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. here is we've got to get our , version down, former confederates are telling one another. we have to do it, get it for our own people, our children and others so we can look them in the eye. 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. 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, 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? r.e. lee. isn't even close. you can talk about him without talking about slavery.

you can even pretend 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 to 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 many men at chancellorville yet won with his covert. jackson struck down a high tide tragically, if only, all the if's that linger, what if, what if, stonewall jackson, then you lower your voice, had been at gettysburg. [laughter] prof. gallagher: what would he had -- we know what. he would have been in a box moldering and had no impact on chancellorville and it would

have seemed awkward to carry his corpse up into pennsylvania even to rally the troops. [laughter] prof. gallagher: that wouldn't 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 any letter than mclelen wrote, the kinds 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 am the hero. i want to save the republic. i, i, i, me, me, me. there aren't letters like that. he's the perfect person to seize that. so they do. they emphasize lee is their man. and there are more monuments to lee that go up.

the one in charlottesville was one of the last ones that went up, in 1924. but there are more monuments to van -- than any in the confederacy. and we'll see in a moment he even crossed over the divide from being a lost cause. when i was growing up the two great figures in the civil war were lincoln and lee. not lincoln and grant. why wasn't it lincoln or grant? and never mind davis. davis was never in the running. he had no chance to become one of those people. so the confederates settle on these things and they establish their own traditions. they have their own decoration day. it is still celebrated in some places. i think fredericksburg still does. they have their own national cemeteries, although there is no nation to create the cemeteries, groups of woman across the

south, a former uva student who's now a very successful wrote a bookpurdue on what were called ladies memorial associations. they oversaw the disinterment from-- of confederate that battlefields into what could only be called confederate national cemeteries. they are part 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, decoration day. and monuments went up all over the former confederacy. there are five over in charlottesville. the war never came here directly. you have one in the cemetery, the confederate soldier in front of the county courthouse

downtown. you have the equestrian statues of jackson and lee. and you have the tablets in front of the rotunda that list the graduates that died in the confederate army. that happened all over the confederacy. little towns have little monuments, usually from the courthouse but not always. it's the same phenomenon as you had 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 the county courthouse. you get states rights. 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 three volume study by a 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. we have talked in here a good bit about films, the two most films about the war are "birth of a nation" and "gone with the wind." they're not pure lost cause. but there's no emancipation cause in them, no real union cause. there's a little reconciliation

cause, they are pretty much lost cause. sherman is the great destroyer and great invader in these two. 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. reaches its apex in ,"e film "gods and generals 2003, it's a lost cause film in many ways. and you have the conversation between stonewall jackson and his black cook. jackson is interviewing him, and it turns out they're both from lexington. and the words that come out of

the black character's mouth, we're all in this together, and we are looking toward it. you watch and think, what does the prospective cook thinks in it for him if the confederacy wins? really, it just makes your mind drift away to something else that might make sense. and my favorite book title of all books on the civil war is "stonewall jackson: the black man's friend." [laughter] prof. gallagher: i'm not making that up. it is a real book title. if only the confederacy can win, at last black people can get a break. i mean that's kind of the message here. as i have said often you just , can't make some things up. you just can't. the bitterness that remained among former confederates is profound. i'm going to quote all of the

reconciliation stuff. here's 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," which was sarcastically dedicated to the honorable value stevens. 300,000 yankees is stiffed in southern dust. we 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 and fight them no more, but i ain't going to love them, that is certain sure. and i don't want no pardon for what i was and am. i won't be constructed and i don't give a damn." [laughter] prof. gallagher: i love the lyrics of that one.

when 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 decided not to talk about slavery, don't talk about race, who was right or wrong, just get together in a sort of burst of racist 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 base for some people and a private base. 's private face he seized ethed about

reconstruction. that was the private lee. not the publicly. he hated what was going on in terms of racial reconstruction. he was very upset. the same was true of many other figures. but there was some reconciliation in some ways where they are talking about -- in films, 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 fame there is really teased out by hancock and armistead. they're really thinking about each other and all they care about each other. they really love being in the army together, and they really are 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 confederates states and former loyal states in the war with spain, and so they pitch it that way and make a big deal out of 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.