Forever Free: An Evening with Prof. James McPherson & Prof. Allen Guelzo - Gettysburg College

we are all familiar with the popular narrative that the fighting here in Adams County forever changed the trajectory of the Civil War that the outcome of the war was decided here during three days in July Ken Burns savour series embraces this conception of the war as he devoted more than 45 minutes to Gettysburg as the turning point of the conflict state standards of learning often asked what is the turning point of the Civil War and the correct answer in every instance is Gettysburg the Gettysburg Campaign looms large in the American mind especially if one seeks turning points in which all great events hang such reasoning unfortunately mrs. Howe the war was a vast struggle always emotion full of contingency and never determined by simple cause-and-effect relationships the halting and uneven steps toward a northern victory of Union and emancipation occurred as part of a long and complicated process one that took a life of its own and transformed the Civil War and to what Abraham Lincoln said that he did not want a remorseless revolutionary struggle why the war took this radical turn and what made it possible for Lincoln to celebrate in his benediction at Gettysburg that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom compels us to consider the year 1862 when Union armies nearly took Richmond when Confederate forces raided the border states for the first time when federal soldiers shifted away from a policy of conciliation and when emancipation join Union as a political aim to help navigate this critical and extraordinarily complex year of 1862 we have as our guides professors Alan gousa and James McPherson before we turn to the sea deniz conversation let me few say a few things about our panelists dr. Alan gales Oh is the Henry R least professor of the Civil War air at Gettysburg College where he chairs the err studies Department he is also the director of the Gettysburg semester an intensive semester long immersion and Civil War studies which draws undergraduates from colleges and universities nationwide dr. Gelles Oh earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania Masters of Divinity from the Philadelphia Theological Seminary and he received an honorary doctorate in history from Lincoln College in Illinois during the 2010-2011 academic year dr. Gelles uh served as the William Garwood visiting professor of politics at Princeton University where he offered courses on American statesmanship and the constitutional question questions of the Civil War era a leading Lincoln scholar dr. Gelles Oh became the first two-time winner of both the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute excuse me became the two-time winner of both the Lincoln prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute prize for his books those titles Abraham Lincoln redeemed were President and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation his latest book fateful lightning a new history of the Civil War and reconstruction was just released this year from Oxford University Press to my immediate left dr. James McPherson is the George Henry Davis 86 professor emeritus at Princeton University where he taught civil war history for nearly four decades he earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1963 where he studied under the distinguished southern historian C Vann Woodward professor McPherson is the author or editor of more than 20 books including his Pulitzer Prize winning battle cry of freedom which has sold more than 600,000 copies worldwide like Professor Dells own he has also a two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize which he earned for his 1997 book for cause and comrades y-min fought in the Civil War and for his 200 2008 effort tried by war Abraham Lincoln as commander-in-chief in 2000 he was named the Jefferson lecture humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities and in 2007 he received the first ever Pitt score prize for lifetime achievement in military history most recently he is the author of war on the waters the Union and Confederate navies a volume and the University of North Carolina's presses Littlefield history professor McPherson and professor gelser before we get started I would like to return to the issue about Abraham Lincoln not wanting this struggle to become a remorseless and revolutionary one certainly by the end of 1862 it had become that I'd like for us to begin our discussion by thinking about the expectations that Americans had northern and southern free and slave at the beginning of 1862 well were those expectations and how did the war challenge them well I'll start off Lincoln had made that come that comment about not wanting the Civil War to become a remorseless revolutionary conflict in his annual message to Congress in December of 1861 there were already signs by them that it might become a remorseless revolutionary conflict and some of those signs and involved the institution of slavery general Fremont and Missouri had issued a military edict freeing the slaves of Confederate sympathizers in Missouri where the conflict had already become or had begun to become quite remorseless because of guerilla conflict there Lincoln had to rescind that edict because he was afraid that it would drive the border states and especially Kentucky into the hands of the Confederacy then the Secretary of War Simon Cameron had in his annual report recommended the emancipation of slaves in the south and the arming of those slaves to fight for the Union Lincoln had to suppress that as well I think the reason he did so was not only because of the danger of driving the border states into the hands of the Confederacy and also alienating northern Democrats from his war coalition he wanted this to be not a Republican war and not an anti-slavery war but the war for the Union and he was afraid that these two vital constituencies would bail out from that war but he was also at this stage of the war December 1861 the beginning of 1862 still laboring under they I think we would have to say the misapprehension that a silent majority of people in the Confederacy really had been swept into secession and into this war by the passions of the moment back in 1860 in early 1861 but that if the leaders of the rebellion could be discredited if the armies of the rebellion could be defeated then if the federal government pursued a policy of conciliation of the southern people and of the southern states they could be they could be brought back into the Union without this becoming that remorseless revolutionary conflict so in the early months of 1862 the war was teetering on the edge of a war to restore the Union through defeating the armies of the Confederacy but then conciliating the people of the south teetering on the edge of that and something much more radical a war of subjugation if you will but at the beginning of 1862 Lincoln didn't yet want it to become a war of subjugation I think also in the context of 1862 what you see Lincoln talking about as a remorseless revolutionary struggle is something that he continues to worry about all through all through the course of the Civil War there are ways in which Lincoln will on the one hand say to people but we have to disenthrall ourselves from the ways that we have done things in the past but we're looking at a new situation we're looking at a critical situation we have to be prepared to take some steps we haven't thought about taking before but he's always trying to balance this because he never wants to see the progress of the war subvert the very reason that the war is being waged which is to preserve the Union which is to preserve the Constitution it's constantly asking the question is what I am doing something which in fact is going to cause more harm and he will be always yanking back generals politicians advisers who want to step over a certain line and at the very end in his second inaugural speech he will be talking again about how we cannot make this war or its conclusion into something remorseless he talks about how both sides have come into the war with expectations that neither side has seen justified by the conclusion of it and what then should we do as a result of that he was saying we should show malice toward none charity for all and again he is trying to keep a lid on this war because imagine a civil war in which all bets are off in which anything is possible as a result a military coup a president who ceases for himself extraordinary powers a Congress which takes actions that set the Constitution aside all of these things are possibilities anything can happen in this kind of crisis situation and what Lincoln is trying to do is on the one hand he wants to apply the maximum military might that will end this war and bring the Confederate States back into the Union at the same time he wants to make sure there's still a union to come back into and how to do that walking that line so much more perilous so much more difficult in 1862 63 64 then I think we we often appreciate it's very easy to look at the results in 1865 and assume that well that's that's all it was at stake that was all that was going to happen we could have blown the entire experiment of a constitution of a democracy we could have blown that North and South completely to pieces the country as a whole could have fragmented into so many different ways and that could have happened it didn't and I think a large reason that it didn't happen had to do with exactly Lincoln's skill at balancing the agenda for bringing the war to an end but still keeping a union there that is worth celebrating and that can still celebrate at the end of the war is one piece one of the things I should have mentioned at the beginning is that the process for this evening will have 45 minutes or so that the chat amongst ourselves I'll be sending them easy questions if you get them into the flow I have great respect for my elders up here in fact dr. McPherson was on my dissertation committee after I get them warmed up for the audience then you get your crack and so we have some folks out there from the Pennsylvania Guard who will be taking questions that you can write down I believe you have cards as well they will be collecting those questions and they will be delivered to me and then that will give you all an opportunity or at least some of you an opportunity to ask them some things directly so my role of course is to be a facilitator facilitator but it's also to also provoke some opinions as well and I'm I'm struct Alan by your appointed to keep that Lincoln's job was to keep the lid on it and that we were on the cusp of being a fragmented nation and I think you speak very well to the great challenges that Lincoln faced and being able to accomplish that but can we get on the ground and talk about ordinary folks northerners and southerners freed and enslaved because I guess one could make the argument very difficult for Lincoln to keep the lid on this same because the ball on the ground wouldn't allow it so as we start to move into 1862 can you both comment about what's happening either in the military what's happening on the homefront again northern and southern that's making it very difficult for Lincoln to keep the lid on well let me just make a stab first at the comments about the soldiers I think the Union soldiers are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the idea of fighting a war against rebels who are trying to kill them trying to destroy the United States and at the same time now that they're in southern states like Virginia in Tennessee and Louisiana at the same time protecting the property of these people against whom they are fighting by the spring and early summer into the summer of 1862 you get all kinds of letters now from soldiers in the south saying it's time to take the kid take off the kid gloves and to crack down on these people I think that the idea that the silent majority of the southern whites were somehow bulldozed in to secession into the war that many people in the north initially including Lincoln initially thought people are changing northerners are changing their minds about that they see that the southern people are southern whites are more or less United in many parts of the south in support of the Confederacy and this idea that they can be conciliated back into the Union is is is going by the board and many sons of many of the Union soldiers writing letters home writing letters to the newspapers the newspapers themselves are becoming more and more determined to crack down these rebels show them no mercy and that begins to move in the direction of attacking their property not only the their plantations but slavery itself which is the chief form of property in the south so you begin to get a movement on the on the part of the the average soldier many of them saying it's time to move against these people take off the kid loves the kid gloves take their property and if necessary take their slaves as well that's the only way we're going to put down this rebellion it becomes a war not merely to restore the Union but a war to put down the rebellion and to and to do whatever it takes to put down that rebellion that attitude is becoming more and more prevalent on the ground not only among the soldiers but among their families back home among newspaper editors by the spring and summer of 1862 Anakin go in a number of odd directions to Union soldiers on the peninsula in the Peninsula campaign of 1862 are able to see the Confederate forces that they are opposing using large numbers of black slaves as laborers to dig ditches to build fortifications to provide all kinds of support services and this is what is freeing up white Southerners to take up arms and shoot them so Union soldiers are saying why are we treating slave property so delicately when this is being used by the Confederates to make war on us and at that point they're saying in very practical terms this is not terribly productive we think we should be emancipating those slaves because every slave that is emancipated is one more productive asset that is subtracted from the Confederacy so sometimes it's not a terribly idealistic opposition to slavery sometimes is very pragmatic but they're thinking in terms of how can we weaken the Confederate war effort sometimes it is very idealistic a colonel in one of the Ohio regiments he was from Cincinnati his name was Marcus Spiegel was part of the forces that moved into Kentucky and then into Tennessee and Spiegel wrote home in a series of letters to his wife and he said I always thought I always thought that God had made the black man to be a slave but since I have got down here and seen how slavery really functions that it's that it's not the what the what the romantic lithographs made it look like it's not what the Stephen Foster songs made it sound like that it is a really vicious inhumane system having seen that now I will not rest until it's institution is destroyed and then there were many people who reacted in exactly the opposite direction there were people through the North who said well not only do we not want the war prosecuted in a very aggressive fashion but one thing we certainly don't want to find are emancipated slaves now free coming north and competing with us for jobs so even in 1862 as soldiers are drawing one set of conclusions civilians and politicians at home in the north are drawing another set of conclusions and you have state legislators in Indiana and Illinois which go overwhelmingly and the administration and when they do they are meeting and passing resolutions as they did in the Illinois legislature calling for a peace conference to be called to meet at Louisville Kentucky on the 4th of July 1863 of course there was something else going on that first week in July of 1863 which got in the way of that or they are calling for denunciations of the Lincoln administration they're calling for the withdrawal of Illinois and Indiana troops from the army the newly elected governor of New York Horatio Seymour in his inaugural address he's just been elected that fall of 1862 his inaugural address it's one unending attack on Lincoln and Seamore will do everything he can to throw sand into the works of a Lincoln administration even to the point of refusing to cooperate with the initiatives to recruit black troops for the Union armies he won't permit New Yorkers to have anything to do with that so there are people who will react in exactly the opposite direction and this situation makes for massive political contests massive political confusion what are we doing where are we going to the point where by the end of 1862 and as you move into 1863 Horace Greeley called it the darkest time of year because it really was directions that were opening up in so many unprecedented directions that people did not know what was liable to happen as a long-term result of this even really nice job of talking about the soldiers response and how civilians on the north and the south responded did this but we still haven't really got on the ground yet and talked about the slaves response and so let me read to you a quote from this story and Barbara fields and like to have your comment on this on this remark in the Ken Burns documentary Barbara fields a professor at Columbia history she said the slaves stubborn actions in pursuit of their faith gradually turned faith into reality it was they who taught the nation that it must place the abolition of slavery at the head of its agenda I'll read that last part again it was they who taught the nation that it must place the abolition of slavery at the head of its agenda your thoughts well Ellen has already made one point about that and that is perception the growing perception that the slaves are providing they they make up the majority of the labor force in the Confederacy that keeps the economy going that supports the Confederate war effort and thousands of them are being used by the Confederate Army for its fortifications for its logistics without slave labor the Confederate Army could not have operated and without slave labor the Confederate economy could not have function and so that perception is playing a major role here but I think what Barbara fields is mainly the point she's making primarily there is that from the very first day that Union soldiers penetrated anywhere into the South slaves started running away from their farms and plantations to Union lines in May of 1861 three of them come into the Union lines at Fortress Monroe and Virginia where Benjamin Butler is the commander they have been working on Confederate fortifications across the Hampton Roads and in the Norfolk area and they asked to be they asked basically for asylum in the Union lines and when the Confederate Confederate officer comes and asked Butler to return them Butler says now they are contraband of war and therefore under the laws of war can be seized and Moore says Morse more and more slaves begin to come into Union lines thousands of them and that really they vote for they vote with their feet for freedom and they force the United Army and the United States government to decide what they are going to do with these people in March of 1862 Congress passes a new article of war forbidding officers of the army of the United States to return any slaves that come in Union lines and that is the is one starting with Butler's contraband policy and this policy and a number of other policies adopted by the United States Congress and eventually by the President as well as the army these are these are moving the union war effort step-by-step toward a policy of emancipation and what Barbara fields is saying is that it was the slaves themselves who took the initiative to make this a war for freedom by by voting with their feet for freedom and coming into Union lines in their thousands and I think I think basically she's right about that they were actually when when you think about it there were a lot of cooks stirring the soup of emancipation slaves were one part of that and by subtracting themselves from the Confederacy i and it's curious this way mentioning Benjamin Butler Benjamin Butler was the kind of person you would not normally associate with a sense of humor but this was his great moment for improv because when these three runaway slaves show up at the gates of Fortress Monroe he takes them in and when an officer representing their masters Gemma said comes the next day to demand their return well this officer demands their return under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Law Oh Butler says I thought you people in Virginia had seceded from the Union you know in a later age we would call that cut spa and Butler increases the scope of the joke by saying well you know I really can't return these these slaves to you you slaveholders in the South have for decades told us that your slaves were property okay I'm gonna take you at your word these slaves are property and since property in war can be seized as contraband I'm seizing these slaves as contraband how do you like that deal with it and it's and it's funny because it serves this marvelous purpose the idea that slaves would run away and find shelter with the Union Army or run away through Union lines and somehow turn up in the north was profoundly unsettling to northern White's that was something they were afraid of but by making almost a joke of it by saying well these are contraband of war suddenly everybody could turn around pat themselves on the back and say isn't that funny what general Butler did contraband why didn't we think of that and that actually smooth some of the difficulty around accepting the fugitives as as refugees and it was a real stroke of genius probably the only stroke of genius that Benjamin Butler ever had during the war but it but a stroke of genius but you know it did create these odd situations and and one of the oddest above all is the one that actually saw Abraham Lincoln offer to buy a slave this happens in the fall of 1862 colonel of the twenty second Wisconsin regiment was an ardent abolitionist he'd just taken his regiment into Kentucky and at the picket line of his camp there shows up one day a fugitive slave his name is Adam and he's taken into the camp where he gets a job working with the cooks and the other workers there and the next day a carriage arrives the picket line and out from the carriage steps is he enormous 300-pound man his owner George Robertson also happens to be the retired Chief Justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court and Robertson who knows the law quite well thank you says to the colonel of the 22nd Wisconsin I want my slave back Kentucky is not part of the Confederacy we've stayed loyal and we expect our loyalty to be rewarded and the colonel says well let's talk to this slave and he calls add him up and it says Adam who are you are you willing to go with your master and Adam says no and at that point the colonel says well if he's not willing to go I'm not willing to let him go at that point a large number of soldiers have gathered around these people this particular justice is kind of looking at them thinking mmm maybe maybe this is a time for one of those prudence over valor moments and he withdraws but the next thing that he does is to file suit files a federal suit he files a state suit against the colonel of the 22nd Wisconsin he wants his slave back and he's accusing the colonel of seizing his property and he's pleading under the Fugitive Slave Law oh boy well all of this of course immediately goes up to Lincoln and what is Lincoln going to do the Fugitive Slave Law is legal Kentucky is part of the Union he cannot afford to alienate Kentucky and he's got the Chief Justice retired Chief Justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court carrying this case forward so what does Lincoln - he writes to George Robertson he says I will pay you any sum up to $500 for this slave for you to quit claim to this slave what is Lincoln doing Lincoln is trying to keep a lid on this situation he's trying to buy out George Robertson because he does not want Robertson taking this case into the courts where in fact there's a possibility that the entire initiative for emancipation might be overturned so rather than see the case get into the courts Lincoln is going to try it basically by a buyout offer now Robertson refuses the offer case goes into the courts it's not resolved until 1871 at which point Robertson wins his case and gets a decision worth nine hundred dollars from the colonel of the 22nd Wisconsin and two years later Congress votes to refund the the amount of the of the judgment but this gives you a sense of how maddeningly complex the environment was and how many false steps could be taken and how many improvisation 's were being made as people tried to cope with the cope with the complexity of slavery and emancipation it's the nine hundred pound gorilla in the room which people don't want to admit people want to pretend that slavery is not there but everybody knows that it is let's step back and talk about the military situation spring of 1862 a drumbeat of defeat across the Confederacy for those of us who focus on Gettysburg and believe that it's a great turning point there's that sense that after July of 1863 that it was an irreversible decline for the south and it's simply not the case and it also ignores that in the spring of 1862 that the North was very close to delivering a knockout blow we have the Mississippi River which essentially can a Union River it's no longer a Confederate River by June of 1862 we have Union forces that have basically taken all of Tennessee Memphis as well as Nashville and more importantly we have a federal force that's just five miles outside of Richmond the capital of the Confederacy this military situation will change dramatically thanks to the ascendancy of robert e lee his counter-offensive outside of Richmond can you help us understand the importance of the seven days campaign and how that shifted thinking amongst politicians policymakers among soldiers well I'll start with that you're quite right that the first five months almost six months of 1862 or a period of almost uninterrupted success for Union arms and it looked in May of 1862 is if the war were about to be won the Union forces as you said were within five miles of Richmond Jefferson Davis sent his family to North Carolina the Confederate Congress adjourned and decamped the Confederate secretary of the Treasury prepared the the Treasury reserves to be shipped out of Richmond it looked like Richmond it was about to fall and that might have been the end of the whole thing but then with Robert Lee's counter-offensive in June and July of 1862 and a counter-offensive in Tennessee and Kentucky in the later summer of 1862 the seven days brought Union hopes to a crashing halt seemed to reverse the momentum of the war and I think it was as a consequence of that and it was followed by second Manassas by the invasion of Kentucky by Confederate armies in the West northern morale plunged all the farther because the hopes in May of 1862 had been so high the expectations had been so high that the war was about to be won and as a consequence of that reversal momentum and in July and August of 1862 you have Lincoln rethinking the role of slavery that Lincoln rethinking the idea of trying to end this war through a policy of military defeat of Confederate armies but conciliation of the of the southern people in the southern states to get them come back into the Union without a revolutionary consequences Lincoln is now rethinking that and so are many of the northern people and as and and the first the first result of that I think was to was the Congress passed the confiscation act in July of 1862 that provides for the confiscation of property owned by Confederates including their slaves Congress also passes a militia act in July of 1862 which provides that the president can actually recruit and organize black troops if he wishes to do so the war is taking a harder turn as a consequence of these Confederate successes in the summer of 1862 and that harder turn is going to lead toward a policy of of emancipation to to strike at the heart of the rebellion as Lincoln calls it in a conversation with his cabinet members we want the army to strike more vigorous blows the administration must strike at the heart of the rebellion and Lincoln is now defining slavery as the heart of the rebellion the the great irony is it's out of its out of Union defeat that emancipation is really born it takes a decisive turn Allen can you talk about it and I'm using your words not mine you refer to George B McClellan as the Boy Wonder everyone likes to pick on George B McClellan but he plays obviously a pivotal role and how this policy plays out you talk a little bit about the relationship between McCulloch and Lincoln and and how McClellan reflects a very dominant philosophy not just within the Army but on the northern homefront as well when it came to the issue of emancipation oh I think you I think it could sum up the relationship between McClellan and Lincoln and one word the two men could scarcely have been different as more different in their backgrounds and they certainly were very different in their philosophies and as McClellan was in charge of the Army of the Potomac his notion of the war and how it should be waged was entirely different from Lincoln's - and I think a lot of this comes out of the fact that George McClellan had this very McArthur esque view of his role that he somehow as a soldier was fully entitled to dabble in public policymaking fully as much as any of his civilian employers and to George McClellan the idea that you were going to attach emancipation to the course of the war was unthinkable this was going to turn the war into exactly that kind of revolutionary remorseless struggle that was supposed to be avoided in fact McClellan suspected that Lincoln really wanted a revolutionary remorseless struggle and George McClellan will be perfectly happy to open back-channel negotiations with Confederate leaders he will talk or at least tolerate the senior generals of his army he will tolerate them talking about the possibility of turning and performing some kind of military intervention not in Richmond but in Washington I think that we are only just coming to appreciate now how far George McClellan was willing to go to prevent emancipation from becoming a reality because McClellan had convinced himself that the real threat to the United States was not really coming from the rebels the real threat was coming from these wild-eyed frizzy-haired abolitionist radicals who had taken opportunity of the war to seize control of the government and were now trying to turn it into this night marish scenario and the only person who was in a position to save the country north and south was George Brinton McClellan and the further that Lincoln pressed in the direction of emancipation the more McClellan became convinced that he had been anointed to keep this from happening when at the conclusion of the seven days battles Lincoln comes down to Harrisons landing where the Army has been backed up Lincoln even before Lincoln gets off the steamer that has brought him there McClellan bounds up the gangplank and presents him with a letter now mind you this is the McClellan who has lost battle after battle in succession over the past week or so you would not think he would have a whole lot of leverage at that point that maybe he would be going aboard cap in hand instead of letter in a hand but no he's George McClellan McClellan presents him with this letter in which he tells Lincoln Lincoln his commander-in-chief that from this point on we have to recognize that this rebellion is not really a rebellion anymore it's a war between two independent nations and needs to be conducted like that needs to be conducted on the highest principles of Christian civilization and among those principles respect for property is supreme therefore if there is any move towards emancipation that will dissolve the Union armies as though George McClellan as their general had no responsibility for holding them together this is a threat this is it this is the general command in the Army of the Potomac who is threatening the president that if you don't pull back and if you don't wage this war the way I think it should be waged there will be consequences and when you when you translate it into those terms you suddenly realize that a George McClellan had an extremely high opinion of himself and secondly that he had an army behind him an army that adored him officers whom he'd picked and put in position this man was a threat and if he had his way if he had his opportunity to be the peacemaker who was going to reconcile the north and the south on his terms then he might just take the entire nation down the road toward dictatorship and why not he was George McClellan and he knew better than anybody else and I think the McClellan at that point inadvertently he thinks he's going to scare Lincoln off from anticipation Lincoln was not the sort of person that you tried to scare because Lincoln puts the letter in his pocket when he goes back to Washington Gideon Welles his Secretary of the Navy said that the visit to Harrison's landing did something to Lincoln oh it did it all right because as soon as Lincoln gets back to Washington one of the first things he's going to say on policy issues to two of his cabinet secretaries is the time has come to move towards emancipation God has decided this issue in favor of the slaves George McClellan take your attitude jam it up your nose but let's not forget that after second Manassas Abraham Lincoln is back to George McClellan oh yes and let's not forget that in fact more than 50% of northerners are Democrat that perspective that philosophy was represented by McClellan so oh yes Lincoln's coming out of your conversations here pretty squeaky clean that's let's think about this for a moment that we Lincoln was a political animal he was very conscious and aware of marshaling support for the war now I know today that we hear all the time because of the 24-hour news cycle that it's the worst time of everything you know you can pick your topic but it's usually politics right there was more acrimony now than what we've ever seen well if you have a sense of history that extends to last Tuesday maybe you can reach that conclusion right but for most of us who have a long sense of history we recognize that these partisan battles have been extraordinarily ugly and intense and of course during this time they were particularly vicious let's talk about it in Lincoln here one can make the case that this man squander the lives of a lot of northern soldiers for pickled generals who were Republicans this is a man who also admitted that he was controlled by events and at times did not take decisive action in favor of emancipation and so he was always responding and reacting often of course to solidify his own political base how do you both respond to what I think is a charge that does have some merit to it you won't fight about this I do actually and I'm a native of Indiana well yeah I think that mclubbe that that Lincoln certainly is is a marvelously well attuned politician and he was someone who always is going to be sure that he knows where he's putting his foot down politically speaking but at the same time he's not just a cringing pragmatist he had been thinking about emancipation almost from the very beginning of his administration may people often say to me well why did Lincoln wait so long to emancipate the slaves why didn't he emancipate the slaves right after Fort Sumter well the answer is he was in fact already toying with ideas like that and they surfaced as early as November of 1861 when he has Confed this plan for a buyout federal buyout of the slaves of Delaware one of the four slave states which remained in the Union he was already thinking in terms of how can I move things forward so that we can talk about emancipation and he had talked about it without arousing a political firestorm and the buyout the purpose of the buyout was to persuade the Delaware legislature to do the deed the buyout would provide the Delaware legislature with funding and the Delaware Legislature would abolish slavery within the boundaries of that state and then nobody could point a finger at Lincoln because it was the Delaware legislature that did it that was very symptomatic of the way Lincoln liked to move so his notion of what to do with slavery was actually already operative in 1861 it's not that he wakes up late in 1862 and says well I think I'll free the slaves because I don't like George McClellan he's been wondering about how to do this for some time and he's been trying a variety of mechanisms for some time for Lincoln when he deals with McClellan he deals with him in a very gingerly fashion because McClellan doesn't have the army with him he doesn't for instance at the end of the 7 days campaign he doesn't fire McClellan he doesn't remove him from command of the Army of the Potomac what he does is it creates this second army in Northern Virginia called the army of Virginia and puts John Pope in charge of it and then begins subtracting elements of the Army of the Potomac bringing them up and adding them to the Pope's army of Virginia so after a while George McClellan who's still in charge of the Army of the Potomac finds out that the Army of the Potomac is about 72 men who are I said quarters guard but then Peters you say then comes second Manassas I mean the one great problem about general Pope was he just couldn't win the battles and at that point the Army is demoralized the troops are demoralized Lee is knocking on the door of Washington and what is what is Lincoln to do he eats humble pie he asks McClellan to take charge of the defenses of Washington take charge of the troops sort them out his cabinet is aghast they had actually prepared a petition asking for McClellan to be court-martialed and Lincoln comes in and says well I've restored him to command ooh that was that was a long day in politics but he does this because McClellan is the only one who has the army with him as he says and McClellan who is always a eager to see himself as the savior of the situation sees this is his opportunity to once again get on the front of the stage reorganizes the army takes it into the Maryland campaign in fall of 1862 takes the army all the way to Antietam and then the great battle takes place there at Sharpsburg on September 17th 1862 Lincoln's role in this is very adroit he is a man of practicality not pragmatism he's a man of practical politics who is always working with his practical politics in tandem with his principles and he's one of those rare political figures who's able to do both it's a much more difficult intensely difficult balancing act in politics to do he is one of the few people who really proves to be capable of doing that to pick up on what you've both said to pick up on the Delaware thing the Delaware legislature refuses to pass the legislation later on in March of 1862 Lincoln gets the United States Congress to adopt a resolution offering federal compensation to any of the warder states that would adopt emancipation gradual emancipation Lincoln devotes a lot of political capital to trying to persuade the congressmen and other political leaders in Kentucky and in Missouri and Maryland and Delaware to accept this offer from the Congress to buy out their slaves they turn him down and the very day or the next day after they turned him down I think Lincoln makes the decision well if the border states aren't going to cooperate with me I'm going to move against slavery on my own and declare it's not going to be in the border states it's going to be in the Confederate States and it's just a couple of weeks after that when he announces to his cabinet on July 22nd that he has made a decision to use his power as commander-in-chief to seize enemy property this is the contraband policy being used to wage war against the United States this enemy property is a slaves that are providing the labor for the Confederate war effort to declare their emancipation in states that are at war with the United States Montgomery Blair one of his cabinet members says this is a politically suicidal act the Democrats will capitalize on it Montgomery Blair comes out of originally a Democratic family his father had been a chief supporter of Andrew Jackson the generation earlier but they had helped to found the Republican Party the Blair family but they were in the conservative wing of it and they still had their fingers on the pulse of the Democratic Party in the North Montgomery Blair warns Lincoln that this is going to be political suicide and Lincoln says what we're going to go ahead and do it anyhow because the Democrats would use their clubs against us no matter what we did so I think that Lincoln has made the decision to proceed on this policy of emancipation despite the political potentially harmful political consequences for his own for his own party in his own administration and his party does take a beating they do take a beating in the congressional elections of 1862 they do retain control of the House of Representative but they lose their overwhelming majority so let's go in and the Gettysburg College guard I can't see you but I assume you're out there if you could collect any of the cards for questions and bring those up that would be that would be fantastic let me go ahead though in let's talk about the Emancipation Proclamation that follows in the wake of the victory at Antietam and it is not certainly an overwhelming victory or a decisive victory for the Army of the Potomac but Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had to retreat across the Potomac and return to Virginia and with that Lincoln was able to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation it is a document that is extraordinarily I think controversial today amongst historians and especially amongst popular audiences so let me frame the debate and then you guys can weigh in there are many people who suggest that the document in fact did not free a single slave that in fact did not fundamentally change the war while there are others that of course that see this document as a revolutionary or a radical one help us understand how we can reach such radically different positions and of course where you stand on this issue as well well the historian to say that it didn't have any effect might also say that that declaration signed on July 4th 1776 didn't do a thing to create American independence it required the victory in the war to create American independence yet the Declaration of Independence became the great symbol the great the great statement the great assertion of of American determination to become an independent nation in 1776 and I think the Emancipation Proclamation and and really we need to extend the discussion here to the final proclamation that was issued on January 1st 1863 because what Lincoln issued on September 22nd 150th anniversary is tomorrow was a what was an ultimatum basically a warning Proclamation that if the states did not come back to the Union by January 1st then he would use his powers as commander-in-chief to in effect confiscate their slave property and and it would be forever free this is a powerful statement now of the change in the nature of the war it's no longer a war to restore the old Union to bring the southern states back into the Union without any any fundamental changes in the nature of the relationship this slavery and the relationship between the states and the nation now it has become a war to overthrow slavery to basically destroy the planter class and to change the nature of southern Society that proclamation of September 22nd did not free any slaves the proclamation of January 1st really did there were lots of slaves in Confederate states that were not exempted from the provisions of the Constitution effort of the declan of the Emancipation Proclamation that celebrated their freedom as dating from January 1st 1863 but it stated an expansion of the northern war aims no longer was this going to be a war to restore the status quo ante bellum that is before the southern states seceded now it was going to be a war to give the nation that new birth of freedom and that's a really powerful statement and a powerful declaration of expanded and Revolutionary War Eames I think that's captures especially how white Americans white northerners would have viewed this Confederates of course saw this as a revolutionary document but some of the words that you use especially new birth of freedom--and forever free does that accurately capture what the slaves or the enslaved people thought at that moment did this document have that kind of impact on their lives and how we historically remember this moment as this great triumph of freedom so what really happened on the ground well I think you just know if I could get the questions well I think if you listen to what the slaves themselves have say on the subject then the answer is going to be yes if you look at slave memoirs they will speak about the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation if you look at the testimony of slaves who were interviewed before the Joint Committee of Congress on reconstruction they say over and over and over again I was made free by the presidency Emancipation Proclamation that's the consistent testimony people today look at the proclamation and they raised this particular question well did he really free anybody I mean after all the slaves whom the document purports to free were part of the Confederacy well Lincoln's word wasn't being taken by anybody down that way whereas slaves in places like Kentucky Missouri Arland delaware states that has stayed in the union proclamation doesn't touch them doesn't free them at all and doesn't that create a really contradictory situation where the slaves that Lincoln does have the power to free he doesn't free res the slaves he no longer has any power over because they're now the Confederacy well those he says he's going to free doesn't that show that this is really just a kind of political flim-flam that this is just a rhetorical gesture that Lincoln is making to try to gussy up the Union war effort and make it look like it's some kind of moral crusade that's the case that's often made and I think there's a number of fundamental mistakes about that first of all to think in terms of what Jim it was saying about the Declaration of Independence sure it's signed on the 4th of July 1776 I dealt with the King George the third thought much of it that didn't mean though that it didn't have effect what's more just because a law is put in place and the enforcement of that law is lagging somewhere behind it doesn't mean that it's not a law if you don't think that just here's an experiment go up in the Turnpike and do 90 miles an hour okay for as long as you possibly can while you're doing that 90 miles an hour for as long as you're doing it you can say to yourself there is no such thing as a speed limit in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania okay and it'll feel that way too that is until the people with funny hats and the revolving lights intercept you and at that point enforcement will have caught up with the law and you find out to your sorrow that the law really does have some meaning well the same thing is true about the proclamation enforcement would have to catch up with the proclamation enforcement in the terms of the Union armies that doesn't mean that the proclamation doesn't have real force people saw that soldiers saw that slaves saw that they perceived very clearly that what Lincoln had done was at one legal stroke ended their enslavement and transformed them at that same stroke into three individuals but that standard was very ambiguous I mean their status in terms of their political rights oh let's not define their economic rights still not defined they're moving to contraband camps was a very precarious situation if there weren't Union armies present then this emancipation has almost no effect it's what would you argue that's what that's life saying they didn't have any standing and unless the police are there right look worse the police right but I think that the point here is not to suggest that the emancipation had a limited effect it's to try to get on the ground and see it from the perspective of the enslaved which is the point is it's a confusing moment for them and it's very difficult to even determine that an army with blue suits is going to necessarily be their allies because experiences and contraband camps could be rather exploited but I think the bottom line here is that the Emancipation Proclamation overlooks a great deal not that Lincoln should have addressed it at that moment but these are fundamental issues that remain unresolved well into reconstruction and again I'm not criticizing Lincoln for not looking ahead it certainly was beyond I think what the Emancipation Proclamation what Lincoln had every intention any attention to you to pouring that that really leads us to our first question from the audience this is for both of you while the public touts the Emancipation Proclamation as one of Lincoln's greatest executive orders Proclamation is not a beautifully written document compared to the Gettysburg Address or his first or second inaugural address explain how Lincoln's strict constitutional limit strict constitutional limitations make the document valid you've written about this so go yeah but I can only vouch for the pictures this is one of the moments when NSA could you could you rephrase that question it's on the guard when we're talking about Lincoln's language here we know that Lincoln is a great master of language self-taught as he was with almost the bare minimum of what we regard as formal education yet he's a master of words and we recognize that here especially at Gettysburg so it does pose this interesting question how can the man who wrote the Gettysburg Address four score and seven years ago or who wrote the first inaugural with the mystic chords of memory or the second inaugural with the charity for all malice toward none how could he then when he sits down to write the Emancipation Proclamation write a document which starts off saying where as on the 22nd day of September in the year of our Lord 1860 and it goes on and on like that like it was a lawyer writing 10 cents per word people look at that and they say this is something not right here something not right here that must mean that Lincoln was really half-hearted about it and that is what led in 1948 the american historian richard hofstadter to say that the Emancipation Proclamation has all the moral grandeur of a Bill of Lading yeah it does it does but there's a reason for that because the Gettysburg Address and first inaugural a second inaugural they're all they're all beautiful pieces of prose but you can't take them into a court of law they're not legal documents they don't do anything to people the Gettysburg Address didn't do anything I mean apart from dedicated Cemetery it's great prose but it's not the kind of language that makes something happen in terms of legal relationships but the Emancipation Proclamation is the reason why it sometimes reads as dull and legalistic as it is it's because it is a legal document it's got work to do Lincoln cannot afford to indulge flights of rhetoric even even the most gorgeous ones he has to confess a document which is absolutely well armored and proof against any potential legal challenge and that means that it is going to come out sounding heavy footed and very legalistic but if he hadn't made it as sure and proof and as legalistic as it was then he actually would have been in dereliction of his own duty he would have been rendering emancipation vulnerable and his aim is to make the proclamation as airtight from legal challenge as possible he does that at the expense of of rhetoric he does it at the expense of beauty of language but he had a far more important goal in mind and asks for a bill of lading I don't know but actually a bill of lading is a very important document in 19th century commerce it's the document that itemizes everything that is in a particular cargo it's what's telling you the value of things and it's an extremely important document for merchants and for people who are doing business so I think it's safe to say yes yes the proclamation does have the moral grandeur of a bill of lading because it has the future of 3 million people within it 3 million people who are bound on a journey toward the land of freedom I think that's worth a bill of lading just let me read you one sentence this is a conclusion of the final Emancipation Proclamation January 1st 1863 after all of this legal language as ellen has mentioned that makes it armored against legal challenge Lincoln does then move into the kind of eloquence that you may want to hear and upon this act sincerely believed to be an act of justice warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity I invoked the considerate judgment of mankind and the greatest gracious favor of Almighty God so he can go in two flights of rhetoric to to to make this something beyond just the Bill of Lading as he did there at the conclusion of the final Emancipation Proclamation quick and easy question ready how old was Lincoln when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation old enough he's 53 years old there you go all right this is for both of you I have heard people say the Civil War was a needless waste slavery was already on the road to extinction is that true no no all right next question let's recommit through these next was a big stack here well slave slavery there's no way of knowing how long slavery would have lasted without the Civil War but the the cotton economy was at an all-time level of prosperity in the late 1850s slave prices were higher than ever cotton prices were fetched if a cotton was fetching a good price cotton as a as an article in international trade played the same role in the economy of the middle of the 19th century as oil does today and the United States south was the source of three-quarters of the world's trade in cotton so and and slaves grew 90 percent of the cotton in the American South so slavery was never more economically viable than it was on the eve of the Civil War and there was no sign anywhere on the horizon that slavery was likely to disappear anytime soon and a flexible institution we should add that it was being adapted in factories and mines and railroads I mean ordinary I don't think it would have ended before Brazil or Cuba it would have lasted well through the 19th century I think so yeah when you do when you do the numbers on cotton for instance and cotton really is the white gold of the transatlantic economy in the 19th century you do the numbers you you see these dramatic things 57% of all American exports before 1860 were one commodity cotton cotton was was the big moneymaker for the American economy not only that but if you looked at the way various commodities are being sold across the Atlantic about 5% of American grain is being grown for export at that point whereas 95% of American cotton is being grown for export purposes and it wreaked tremendous fortunes for cotton growers when you think of it like this imagine two-thirds of every American estate worth more than $100,000 in the 1850s two-thirds of them were in the south the richest County per capita in the United States was not Westchester County New York or Shaker Heights Cleveland or Grosse Pointe Woods Detroit it was Adams County Mississippi and that is indicative of the extraordinary wealth the cotton represent cotton was a great moneymaker and to be involved in slave owning and cotton growing was synonymous with great wealth and and and Peter is absolutely right not only cotton because there's no rule I mean we often in our minds associate slavery and cotton agriculture but there's there's nothing written in stone anywhere that says that slave labor can only grow cotton in the border states in the upper South slaves grew wheat tobacco number of other agricultural commodities but even more ominous slaves were moving into industrial production industrial labor because after all one great advantage of having a slave labor force in a factory was that the slaves were never going to go on strike so instead of slavery being looked upon as a dying institution the South was actually giving it a new lease on life and on the very verge of the civil war in the southern literary messenger William Holcomb writes a long articles speaking about how slavery is the labor system of the future that wage labor as it's practiced in the north that is just a temporary phase that the real future economically for America is going to be slave labor everywhere doing everything and I think Allen makes a superb point because that it also underscores how Americans including southerners look across the pond and what they saw of course was tremendous labor unrest so to conclude that dependent labor or slave labor would be the wave of the future it's not an unreasonable conclusion to make we also should note that the southern economy I believe was the fourth richest in the world in 86 if we took the Confederate states purely as a separate economic entity they would be the fourth largest economy in the world in 1860 in fact if the Confederacy had for instance levied just a five percent export tax on the cotton that it was exporting abroad it would have raised something in the area of a hundred million dollars in revenue which would have been infinitely more than the United States own annual expenditures the government expenditures it would have made the Confederacy unstoppable not only as an economic power but as a political and military power as well two more questions the first this is veers away from emancipation do you think that military history is over represented in Park Service interpretation also well it was a war well III think I know where that question is coming from the Park Service made a commitment a dozen years or so ago in its Civil War parks and other historical parks but specifically in civil war parks to try to put the particular battle that that Park represented into a broader context of the social and political issues of the war the the context of what that war was about the issue of slavery of course figures largely in that and Gettysburg National Military Park has been a leader in that and of course you can see that as I'm sure many of you out there have done when you go to the new visitor center not so new anymore since it's just had his fourth birthday but I think in the past one could make the case that military history is over-represented because the Civil War was about more than just the the Army's fighting with each other what we've been talking about this evening was a major theme in the Civil War and that's now getting more attention in in the parks and especially here at Gettysburg and I think that's all to the good I think that when we talk about the Civil War it's important to understand a 360-degree view yes this was a war military history is important but it's also a political war it's a political war between factions that are jockeying for control of the United States government in the direction of policy it is a political war in which generals in the armies are making military decisions in large part motivated by political considerations McClellan of course is probably the most dramatic example but he's far from being the only one and that's not true just of the Northern armies either the southern armies are seriously riven by political dissension so politics enters into the way the military aspect of the war functions and vice-versa and then there's the role that the slaves play there is the role that civilians play and sometimes the civilians are acting in tandem with the military sometimes the civilians are acting politically yet another aspect of the civil war which has to be brought into play here is the legal and constitutional aspect because the war is also being fought in the courts there are questions about the constitutionality of certain actions that are taken by the government there are protests against the draft for instance in 1863 maybe one of the most dramatic of these confrontations can be illustrated in a case that was known before the Supreme Court as prize cases prize cases was really a case about four separate vessels whose owners brought suit in federal court because the vessels and their cargoes had been seized by the federal blockade in May of 1861 now the owners of the cargo ships protested and they said well a blockade in 18 May of 1861 was not legal because only Congress has the authority to impose a blockade and Congress hadn't come into special session until July the blockade was there because Lincoln issued a proclamation well that's unconstitutional therefore the seizures of our cargoes are unconstitutional and maybe the blockade itself is unconstitutional because blockade is only supposed to exist in legal terms between two independent sovereign nations and the Lincoln administration has all along insisted that the Confederacy is not a sovereign independent nation it's a rebellion is that confusing enough in legal terms okay all right this goes into the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court hands down a final ruling on this in March of 1863 in prize cases in which the Supreme Court does what supreme courts often do and that is tries to have it both ways basically the decision in prize cases says well yeah the Confederacy is only a rebellion but the blockade is constitutional that decision was supported by a five to four vote change one vote on the Supreme Court and the Union blockade of the Confederacy falls to the ground legally it opens a Pandora's box of legal actions and not only legal actions for ships and cargoes owned by American citizens but what about all the vessels and cargoes belonging to other nations which have been seized by the blockade what are they going to do in terms of that now that it seems that the blockade would be a an unconstitutional and illegal act of seizure the the consequence is flowing downstream from that would simply be in calcul it's not a battle it's it's not part of what we would think of as military history and yet the war could have been lost on one vote on the Supreme Court in that issue so it is it is important I think as critical as the military aspect of the war is it was a war but as critical as that aspect is we've got to see it in this 360 context in which we see that the civil war is a contest not only between two armies but it's also a contest between political ideas it's a contest between constitutional ideas it's a contest on so many different levels which i think is one of the great things that makes the Civil War such an interesting topic such a subject that never really wears out you made a great case for a national park devoted to the baat Cade say Bermuda or something like that all of our Park Service people would be going there I am I have toyed with the idea of a field trip to Allen your points very well taken though about politics and I think we should remind ourselves that the tremendous changes that have occurred here at the Gettysburg Museum they're true they are they're unbelievable I think the visitor gets a theory they're a complex story now that they they didn't get before but we need to remind ourselves that our battlefields are still very much Raviv landscapes I Cannon have become jungle gyms for our kids or the centerpiece of a family portrait the monuments continue to shape our historical gaze toward honor and duty and they in the process depoliticize our landscapes I think the next frontier is actually interpretive markers next to our monuments our visitors need a facilitator out there to understand not just the politics of the war but to also understand the politics of creating monuments and so that leads us to our our final question it's mine I'd like for you to comment on criticism that Ed Ayers noted southern historian president of the University of Richmond to criticism of how Americans continue to place emancipation in Union side-by-side Ayers writes anti-slavery progress war and national identity intertwined at the time of the Civil War so that each element became inseparable from the others the story has become common sense to Americans emancipation war nation and progress all seem part of one story the same story which airs this problem here and do you agree well I I'll say that I think they all are part of one story and that I disagree with there there's if he is challenging that construction of the story the Civil War was about whether the United States would be preserved as one nation indivisible a the reason that the war had started in the first place was because the southern states that seceded in defense of slavery and launched basically launched a war to perpetuate slavery the Union side eventually came to the point of say that in order to win this war we're going to have to end slavery or at least attack slavery the result of the Civil War was to preserve the nation and to abolish slavery and I personally think that this represented progress as well as freedom and nationalism so I see nothing wrong with that with that coalition coalescence of ideas and themes associated with the American Civil War and I'll I'll simply take the point of view that says I think you're absolutely right we sometimes we sometimes separate our the war for the Union and the war to end slavery as though they were two separate wars as though somehow the Civil War began as the war for the Union and then gradually morphed into becoming the war against slavery perhaps as though we think that the first year and a half of the Civil War was a kind of adolescence and we needed to grow up and grow out of this idea that the war was for the Union into the more mature environment where we say what was the war against slavery but I think from the very start of the war it was really about both and everybody knew it was about both Lincoln in his second inaugural began by reflecting back four years earlier to 1861 and I said back then four years before everybody knew that slavery was the great interest that was causing people to clamor for the breakup of the Union people wanted to break up the Union for the sake of protecting slavery people would end slavery for the sake of protecting the Union and at Lincoln's mind the two are really not separate they're wedded together because unless you saved the Union you weren't going to be able to do anything about slavery if the union was sundered if the American Union was broken in half and the Confederacy succeeded in its bid to become an independent nation you weren't going to be able to do anything about slavery there anyhow so unless there was reunion it was going to be any possibility of touching slavery so Union has to be there but in Lincoln's mind also there was no point in restoring the Union if all you were doing was going back and putting slavery right where it had been before Lincoln understood that his election marked a dramatic turning point in the political future of slavery because for the first time in six decades and a validly anti-slavery president had been elected without a single electoral vote from the slave states that was the handwriting on the wall so the slave states no longer were going to be the tail that wagged a political dog that of course is why they seceded they could read the handwriting just as clearly as anyone else and they decided to get out while the getting was good or at least a try Lincoln's understanding that he puts into his great Cooper Union speech in February of 1860 he is understanding the Constitution was that the founders of the Constitution the founders of the republic had always expected that slavery was going to become extinct on its own they they tolerated it at the founding because it was there but with the understanding that it was going to go away it was never supposed to be part of this American experiment and liberty and the fact that it had grown up contrary to every one of those expectations made Lincoln said in 1854 it made slavery the one retrograde institution that was embarrassing American democracy that was turning the promise of American democracy upside down and negating it and making the American democracy a laughingstock in the eyes of every aristocracy in Europe you restore the Union but you want to restore the Union to what it was intended to be at its very beginning which is a union without slavery so what you're restoring the Union you are striking the deathblow of slavery right there the two are like the double helix of DNA you will not get the one without the other if you restore the Union then you can strike it's slavery but if you're going to restore the Union let it be a union without slavery let it be a union who is Lincoln said whose Republican robe was cleansed from the soil of slavery and which is now unambiguously committed to freedom that was the struggle that he believed the civil war was about and I think that is an important struggle my goodness the cost we paid for it was enormous six hundred and twenty seven hundred and twenty thousand law and the and the calculations continue to shift because it's so hard to keep track of the numbers all those times you shake your head and you think was it worth it but remember where we were in 1860 in 1860 the United States was the one large scale functioning surviving democracy in the world all the other experiments and democracy had gone by the way the French Revolution the revolutions in 1820 and 1848 aristocracy was on a roll the idea that some people were born booted and spurred to ride other people that was the idea that seemed to be in the ascendant and we were the last holdout and Lincoln knew that if we botched it now by blowing our own political brains out by secession that would be the end of democracy right there because no one would ever take democracy seriously afterwards Lincoln understood that what we were fighting for he said this in these terms he said this is a People's contest to determine whether a democracy can really work that's what he said at Gettysburg he says this war this Civil War this is a test of whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure that's what the lives were about and that was why those dead had not died in vain because then we're not just fighting about the boundaries they were not just fighting about political reunion in fact they were even fighting about something was even more important than the issue of slavery and that was the very notion of democracy the workability of democracy the idea that ordinary human beings can govern their own affairs by themselves without somebody telling them how to do it that was the great achievement that was the great thing at stake in the war the Union survived and slavery went down because democracy was right and we have been living with the promise of that and struggling to take that promise forward ever since he all join me please Thank You confession to coach in developing you

Channel: Gettysburg College

Views: 38,285

Rating: 4.7288136 out of 5

Keywords: Civil, War, Lincoln, Slavery, Emancipation, Proclamation, History

Id: hykab2cKMAI

Length: 88min 0sec (5280 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 25 2012