dr. edward ayers. some of you have met him before, if you are in a sultry heat at manassas, he gave the keynote address at manassas on that date. it seems a very, very, very long time ago. he was more recently a driving force behind the outstanding events in richmond last weekend commemorating the fall of richmond. dr. edward ayers is one of america's preeminent civil war historians and i do not say that lightly. he is one notch is of impeccable scholarship, but reaching people beyond academia. he roots out untold stories amplifies voices unheard, and he constantly challenges us to see events in new ways, always with a sense of historical justice for those who were there. perhaps more than any historian working in the field, he helped us assign meaning to events that were almost always far more complex and far-reaching than we imagined them to be. he is retiring from the university of richmond this summer. while it is a great loss to the university, the prospect of dr. ayers devoting his energies to hi

dr. ayers devoting his energies to history is good news for the rest of us. it is my pleasure to introduce to you dr. edwardpplause] edward l. ayers: thank you. there are indeed very many of you. and it is convenient that all of you come labeled. i can see where everybody is from the baseball cap, so i see everything from boston to mississippi. it seems very fitting. i'm going to take a few moments to think about what it has meant for this country to have a national park service step up throughout the sesquicentennial for a year after year, day after day, to make the sites available to us, comprehensible to us, welcoming to us. it is true, i was at manassas. it was approximately 800 degrees. i also had the good fortune of being at fort sumter the evening before the firing. i happened to be at gettysburg, where it was also hot. as john mentioned, we had thousands of people in richmond to commemorate what it was like when the confederates fled that city, and united states colored troops and abraham lincoln came into it. it is one of the more powerful moments of my life. does the americans come together and re

edward ayers: that still means that reconstruction was radical. dr. caroline janney: absolutely. edward ayers: i heard a story and ask what time a question that the panel before us was asked, what if lincoln had not been assassinated? and he said he thinks it would've slowed the civil rights movement because they wouldn't have been a 14th and 15th amendment because it wouldn't have had the resistance that the white north was willing to overcome that fatigue to make it radical. an interesting thought that if -- if you don't have a 14th amendment, you don't have a foundation for this overwrites movement that follows. i think she made a right point that it is not such a retreat as they are driven from the field in some ways. the white south actually wins reconstruction through military force. through the ku klux klan and riots and those kind of things i think it is -- it is -- >> and andrew johnson gave them a little notch. if they left it up to andrew johnson, there would be no -- >> it would have taken a real military operation to force reconstruction, and there would have been no