James McPherson: Why the Civil War Still Matters

ladies and gentlemen welcome to the National Constitution Center it is wonderful to see such a full house of lovers of history and of the Constitution and boy you are in for a treat tonight I am Jeffrey Rosen I am the president and CEO of this superb institution which as one or two of you may be aware is the only institution in America chartered by Congress to disseminate information about the US Constitution on a nonpartisan basis excellent know they can memorize it and this evenings talk is really at the core of an exciting new initiative that we have launched to commemorate and celebrate the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Reconstruction Amendments the 13th 14th and 15th amendments which abolished slavery gave equal rights and ultimately gave voting rights after the show tonight in addition to getting copies of your book signed I hope you'll go into the permanent exhibit and see a copy of the 13th amendment signed by Abraham Lincoln that we've just installed in honor of its 100th anniversary as well as a rare copy of the Emancipation Proclamation also signed by Lincoln and they are just absolutely thrilling to see I want to put in a plug for one or two other upcoming programs on April 9th Senator Mike Lee will come to talk about the Constitution which will be fascinating on May 13th Joseph Ellis talking about his wonderful new book on March 25th in DC we launched the first of a national series of town hall debates that I think are just as exciting as the lincoln-douglas debates and these are co-sponsored by the Federalist Society which is the leading conservative lawyers group in America and the American Constitution Society the leading liberal group and our first debate in Washington at the National Press Club is resolved Hobby Lobby was wrongly decided that's the case that recognized rights of corporate personhood and you will hear the two finest scholars in the country on both sides duking it out and then on March 31st we have another wonderful constitutional debate with our friends at intelligence squared and the question there is has the president exceeded his constitutional authority by waging war without congressional authorization and finally you can check it's going to be absolutely fascinating and all of these will be released as our We the People podcast which are getting 350,000 downloads a week and have just been picked up by the slate panoply network which has collected the 12 top performing podcasts in the country so there is a hunger for constitutional debate in this country and it is thrilling to contribute to it all right let us begin our conversation with the preeminent historian of the civil war in America it is my great honor to welcome James McPherson he is the George Henry Davis 86 professor of American history emeritus at Princeton his books include the Pulitzer Prize winning battle cry of freedom the Civil War era he's written many other path-breaking books about abolition the war Abraham Lincoln and reconstruction including for cause and comrades why men fought in the Civil War which won the Lincoln prize in 1998 he's here tonight to discuss his newest book the war that forged a nation why the Civil War still matters please join me in welcoming James McPherson it's a superb book and one of the themes that of course gladden my heart is its strong constitutional theme unlike some historians who say that the war was mostly about preserving the Union or about coming to terms with death you say that it was a constitutional achievement to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence and make it a reality in the Emancipation Proclamation and ultimately in the post Civil War amendments tell the audience how you became interested in the Civil War as a graduate student in the 60s and why even then you believed that it had contemporary significance well I was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore from 1958 to 1962 and one of the one of the first things that happened when I was a graduate student was that my initial appointment with the person who had become my mentor C Vann Woodward a southern of the preeminent historian of the American South had to cancel or postpone his appointment with me because he was called to Washington to testify before a congressional committee about problems associated with the second year of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School which had begun the previous year in the fall of 1957 with all kinds of problems as I'm sure most of you are aware that eventually required not only the federalization of the National Guard but the mobilisation of the one hundred and first Airborne Division part of it to protect those nine students at Little Rock high school and that began an experience of four years as a graduate student as an historian in which I was surrounded in Baltimore and in the United States by civil rights activism those were the years 1960 of the sit-ins 1961 the Freedom Rides in the south the effort to enforce the constitutional provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing the equal protection of the laws and I became increasingly aware of the parallels between the time and for that matter even the place Baltimore a border city in which I was living and the events of exactly 100 years earlier confrontation between the United States government and southern political leaders who were vowing massive resistance to national law violence associated with the civil rights movement of course not violence on the same scale as the American Civil War but violence nevertheless over some of the same kinds of issues the year after I left Baltimore to begin teaching at Princeton was the march on Washington organized by black leaders after they had failed to get President Kennedy to issue what Martin Luther King had asked him to do a second Emancipation Proclamation on the 100th anniversary of the first one so black leaders went ahead and organized the march on Washington Martin Luther King began his I have a dream speech standing before the Lincoln Memorial referring to the Emancipation Proclamation so all of these it was kind of deja vu in the 1960s for what had happened in the in the 1860s and as as a result I like I think many people many historians chose to try to understand the historical roots the most important issues in this case the most important single eyes issue I think in at least domestic politics in the United States in the 1960s 1960s I chose to write my doctoral dissertation on the civil rights activists of the eighteen the abolitionist and from there I moved on to the political and eventually the military dimensions of the civil war but my roots lie in the transformation of American society accomplished by the Civil War and reconstruction and those that transformation is embodied primarily in the three Reconstruction Amendments that mr. Rosen mentioned just a moment ago the 13th 14th and 15th amendments well we have lots to talk about about how the civil rights revolution fulfilled the promise of those amendments but I want to begin with the broad series of questions you raised the beginning of the book about the continuing relevance of the Civil War one important theme you say is that the Civil War decisively established that it was the people of the United States not of the several states who are sovereign and that we are indeed a nation and you talk about how Lincoln used the word nation with increasing confidence tell us about how the Civil War settled the question of national sovereignty well everybody knows that the Civil War was the war to preserve the Union and indeed the language of Americans the language of Abraham Lincoln is wordy wording that this is a war to preserve the Union of the states and at first in Lincoln's first inaugural address in his address the first address to Congress on the 4th of July in 1861 in his famous letter to Horace Greeley about slavery in the war in August 1862 Lincoln uses the word Union many times dozens of times but rarely used the word nation the sense of what the United States was in 1861 was a union of the states even though the preamble to the Constitution of course as we the people of the United States not the people of the separate states but of the United State nevertheless there was a kind of sense of this is a this is a in a an alliance of states for purposes of representing these states in foreign policy and in certain aspects of domestic policy but not yet quite a nation in the same sense that France or Great Britain or Italy as well not Italy yet either some other European nations were real nations but by 1863 when Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address he does not use the word Union at all he uses the word nation five times in this very short address and the same thing becomes true of Lincoln's language and the language of the newspapers the language of other politicians in the latter part of the civil war in the north the war forges is the title of my book said this was a war that forged a nation out of the union of the states it was a war that raised a national army it was a war that eventually imposed a draft it was a war that created the national banking system it was a war that created the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865 to aid the transition to freedom of the four million former slaves it radically enhanced the power of the national government and the union of 1861 by 1865 had been transformed into a nation forged not only by by blood but by constitutional change you stressed that while the original Constitution constrained Congress's power and eleven of the first twelve amendments had words like the federal government shall not have certain powers the new amendments the thirteen fourteen and fifteen said that Congress shall have the power all had special provisions saying that Congress can enforce these articles by appropriate legislation in what ways did the Civil War transform the relationship between federal and state power well Americans had gone to war in 1776 against the overweening power of the British Empire they had fought for liberty and liberty to Americans of 1776 meant freedom from excessive government control and even in the Constitution built into the constitution of 1787 were limitations on the power of the national government the the framers of the Constitution split power between the federal government and state governments between the two houses of Congress and between the three branches of the federal government the congressional executive and judicial fragmentation of power was regarded as essential to preserving Liberty and that was the dominant American ideology through the first seventy years of our history and it was the ideology invoked by the pro-slavery Southerners to defend slavery against the feared potential of a powerful national government that could use that power to to abolish slavery or to restore to restrict slavery and as a consequence you you had an ideology that said the sovereignty of the states was greater than the sovereignty of the national government invoked by the seceding States to justify their secession from the United States and the creation of a new nation well if it's state sovereign t states rights were to be used to destroy the United States that provoked a lot of rethinking of the relationship between liberty between the rights of Americans and power power had previously been seen as the enemy of Liberty but now in the Civil War the power of the national government was being invoked to preserve the Constitution and the basis of American Liberty by preserving the United States from the ruin of dissolution caused by secession before 1861 state sovereignty had been invoked not only as the defender of Liberty but of course also ironically as a defender of slavery which was seen by southern pro-slavery ideologues as a form of Liberty that is the Liberty of property the rights of slaveholders to hold their slaves if that was going to be used to destroy the United States it caused almost a revolution in sentiment on the part of many Northerners eventually Abraham Lincoln himself that now Liberty and power were compatible with each other and I think that that is really the the bottom line of these constitutional amendments the 13th 14th and 15th amendments the power of the federal government is now being used to abolish slavery to protect the equal equality under the law to protect equal voting rights and not only the 13th 14th and 15th amendments but most of the subsequent amendments to the United States Constitution include that clause as the final provision of each these amendments saying that Congress shall have the power to enforce this article so I think one of the one of the basic stories of the American Civil War is the transformation of the relationship between power and liberty no longer are they seen as enemies to each other in fact the power of the federal government is now a bulwark in many ways of many kinds of Liberty and and equal and equal rights in this country and yet as you described in your the last chapter about war and peace in the post-civil war south the Supreme Court worded the nationalistic promise of these amendments by striking down acts passed by the Reconstruction Congress an enforcement act that made interference with voting rights a federal offense and empowered the President to use the army and laws prohibiting private violence against African Americans all of these were invalidated by the Supreme Court on the grounds of the amendments applied only to state action and not to private action was that a violation of the original understanding of the amendments well yes and no I think the framers of the 14th and 15th amendments did not want to to overthrow the federal system completely federalism remained an important part of the American constitutional structure and so they worded the 14th amendments and the 15th amendments to say that no state shall deny equal protection of the laws the privileges and immunities of the citizenship of citizenship or the right to vote and while life and and in Congress there were actual debates in 1866 of the debating the Fourteenth Amendment and in 1869 when they were debating the Fifteenth Amendment where some of the Radical Republicans wanted to say wanted to make it much more explicit to say that the federal government shall guarantee equal rights or shall guarantee equal voting rights but that would have been too radical a transformation for the moderates in Congress and so they did impose limitations on the states and the Supreme Court in the 1870s seized that language as a way of saying that the 14th and 15th amendments were a restriction only on the states and not on individuals who were still free to discriminate or against African Americans or anybody else and that which it was up to the states to provide to protect those privileges and immunities and if they did not do so the court didn't say well what remedy does the federal government have if the states failed to protect these rights themselves and it wasn't really until the middle of the 20th century that the court began interpreting the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments in a way that gave the federal government the power again to protect individual rights against the individual discrimination and now the court is even backing away a little bit from that on the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1890 v Lincoln you have some riveting chapters on him and you describe in the chapter about Lincoln slavery and freedom his evolution the fact that Frederick Douglass who first called him the black man's president then changed his mind and thought Lincoln was moving too slowly and said he was the white man's president but after Lincoln's death was more charitable and you also defend Lincoln against charges of racism in the famous lincoln-douglas debates as many of the audience will know Lincoln rejected Douglass's accusation that he favored racial equality said I am and I am NOT nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the races give us your sense of why ultimately Lincoln moved as far as he could on abolition and became the greatest prophet of equality in American history well Lincoln was a man of principle but he was also a very pragmatic politician yeah I think more than probably any other president in our history he would maybe franklin roosevelt would be another example I think those two they were able to be effective because they could use pragmatic means in order to achieve principled ends and Lincoln's basic principle was one of freedom he said over and over again that he wished all men could be free in the lincoln-douglas debates of 1858 Lincoln Douglas played the race card over and over again and said that Lincoln believed that blacks and whites should be able to marry with each other that they should have the same rights and of course that was political poison even in a state like Illinois and so that's what evoked Lincoln's response in in the lincoln-douglas debates but he came back Lincoln would come back and say that in in the right to eat the bread that they earned themselves the black man or the black woman had the same rights as the black as the white man or the white woman so he insisted on the basic principles of freedom when the war began he realized that he was a president of a coalition the that he would fight this war a coalition of Republicans who had won the election of 1860 but couldn't win the war on their own and Democrats and that slavery that you'd the cause of Union united the northern people the issue of slavery and emancipation divided them and it was a step-by-step process in 1861 1862 1863 incremental whereby Congress and Lincoln took one step after another toward striking against slavery the con first Confiscation Act in August of 1861 released from slavery any any slaves who came into Union lines who had worked on Confederate fortifications or in support of the Confederate war effort in any way in March of 1862 Congress passed an article war which Lincoln sign prohibiting Union army officers from returning slaves who escaped into Union lines to their masters Congress passes a second Confiscation Act confiscating the slaves of any supporters of the rebellion in 1862 I think you can see the the logic here that slavery is in its perceived as the cornerstone of the Confederacy and of the Confederate war effort the slaves were the principal labor force in the south they provided most of the logistical support for the Confederate war effort and increasingly there became a convergence between a war to preserve the Union and a war to strike against slavery as a means of preserving that Union because slavery was being used to wage war against the United States and that became the principal constitutional if you will justification for the Emancipation Proclamation in order to preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States by preserved in the Union it became necessary to strike against slavery that was the legal basis for the Emancipation Proclamation but one interesting thing about the Emancipation Proclamation is that I think an emancipated Abraham Lincoln from the the contradiction between his personal belief and freedom and his presidential obligation to to defend slavery because slavery was justified by the Constitution now he had found a way military justification to to use to strike against slavery as a means of preserving the Union one key part of the Emancipation Proclamation was its provision for enlisting his freed slaves to fight for the Union and to fight for their freedom and by 1864 a hundred thousand black soldiers were fighting for the Union by the end of the Civil War 200,000 slave former former black soldiers about 150,000 of them former slaves were in the Union had four had had fought in the Union Army and Navy their contribution to northern victory convinced Lincoln that they deserved equal citizenship he had come a long ways since 1858 and his comments in the debates with lanka with douglas - by 1864 behind the scenes he was encouraging the reconstructed his reconstructing reconstruction process in the state of louisiana to enfranchise literate slaves and those who had fought in the Union Army and he came out and favored that publicly in what turned out to be his last speech on April 11th 1865 and I think that central to this product progress of Abraham Lincoln toward equal citizenship for the freed slaves was the contribution that blacks had made to Union victories especially of like soldiers fighting in the Union Army I think that that was the the central and core factor in this process and not only convincing Lincoln but convincing a majority of Republicans in Congress and the majority of the northern people I think the Fourteenth Amendment which grants equal citizenship to black people including former slaves and the Fifteenth Amendment that the contribution of black soldiers in the Civil War was a major factor in the adoption and ratification of those amendments fascinating so it was only after his experience with African American soldiers that he fully was able to complete Jefferson's promise in the Declaration but you do describe that remarkable speech as early as 1861 in right across from Independence Hall across the mall where he said I have not had a single feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration I think he went on to say I'd rather be assassinated on this hot that's right betray the principles of the Declaration a remarkable moment describe that intellectual evolution and also how in the Gettysburg Address he came to Rican sieve of Jefferson's promise as a new birth of freedom well of course the Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal with an equal title to Liberty but most of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence including Jefferson himself own slaves now most of the founders including Jefferson saw the inconsistency between a declaration of all men are created equal and the inequality involved in slavery but they were faced with as they would have put many would have put it with with a fact of slavery which could not easily be gotten rid of and Lincoln in 1861 was faced with that same fact slavery was protected by the Constitution the three famous compromises in the Constitution that protected slavery the Fugitive Slave Clause the three-fifths clause and the clause postponing for 20 years any restrictions on the African slave trade so anybody like Lincoln who was opposed to slavery but nevertheless was President of the United States foreign to defend a constitution that defended slavery was in a in something of a bind and what they what they basically said what Lincoln meant I think when he said that he had never had a political thought that did not drive from the Declaration of Independence was that this represented an ideal all men are created equal represents an ideal toward which we must strive but which we have not yet achieved the great thing about the Civil War was that it gave Lincoln an opportunity to move much closer to achievement of that ideal which then become embodied in the Constitution basically the Thirteenth Amendment wipes out those provisions in the Constitution that had defended incorporated slavery into the Constitution that's no longer part of the Constitution and the 14th and 15th amendments take a massive stride toward equality equality of rights even though they were not fully implemented at that time at least they are now incorporated into the Constitution and in a way one could say and I think Lincoln would have agreed with this the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments now fulfill the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence in a way that the original constitution of had not done would the post reconstruction amendments have been broader and more protective of equality if Lincoln had lived that's impossible to say I think probably not I think the wording of the 14th and 15th amendments would have been quite similar to what they actually are if Linc even if Lincoln had remained as president Lincoln was not the most radical of Republicans he was not Charles Sumner he was not Thaddeus Stevens he represented a broad middle part of the spectrum of the Republican Party and I think those amendments the 14th and 15th amendments represent that left-of-center but nevertheless not way out on the radical fringe of the political spectrum of the time and I think that's where Lincoln would have been - and what did the radical abolitionists want well they Charles Sumner being one example of that wanted the Constitution merely to say that all men are equal before the law and all men are equal in voting rights and the federal government shall have the power to enforce that in other words not no state shall violate but all men and a straightforward declaration of equality to be enforced by the federal government but that was too radical for Congress said this those that kind of amendment would not have been ratified would not have passed Congress and not would not have been ratified in 1868 in 1870 so clearly banning discrimination by private as well as state actors and there was not the constituency for it we did have a wonderful discussion with some Reconstruction historians and Chief Judge Ted McKee here recently from the Third Circuit who noted some cases recently that are trying to construe the Civil War amendments to ban private discrimination is that a fair reading of them even if not all the supporters of them would have gone that far well I guess the argument would be that if the states fail to provide equal protection of the law then they are in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and that the federal government then can impose their their enforcement of equal rights I think probably some of the well I mean let me put it this way one of the one of the shrewdest Republican leaders was Lyman Trumbull of Illinois who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and had a lot to do with framing the Fourteenth Amendment before the 14th amendment Cromwell had taken the leadership in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 most of whose terms were incorporated in the first Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Trumbull had said that civil rights would still be the province it under the Civil Rights Act that's before the 14th amendment adopted that civil rights would still be most most of the rights that we think of as being civil rights would still be enforced by the states but if the states failed to do so his Civil Rights Act of 1866 would transfer these cases to the federal courts and I think that that principle that if the states fail then it becomes up to the federal government was was seen even by some of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment as making it possible for the federal government to step in if the states failed but of course the Supreme Court in its the 1876 decision two or three decisions in eighteen in the 1870s and then the 1883 civil rights cases a decision did not agree with that said that that the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments were only a restriction on the states and did not restrict private individuals over that wonderful dissent by Justice Harlan which he wrote with the pen that Chief Justice tani had used to write the Dred Scott decision I did not know that his he had writer's block and he couldn't think of what to write and his wife went to the curator of the Supreme Court and found the inkwell that tani had used to write the infamous Dred Scott decision put it on his desk he came back from church and saw it and suddenly the words Oh what a story it's a great that's a great story hard to do with that with a Mac but it was a great it was a great story I would love to talk about the Constitution all evening of course and we may return to it but there's so many superb chapters in this book about Lincoln as a military leader as well as a political leader and the overwhelming sense you get of him as a military leader is his hunger for action against these whinging generals who are just refusing to act and you give a couple examples of active generals like the great Farragut who said I love this I believe in celerity what a great motto he was also the guy who said damn the torpedoes yes full speed ahead but people like McClellan and DuPont just just wouldn't act so to tell us about how Lincoln evolved as a military leader how he dealt with his frustration at the inaction of his generals and why he was able through private reading almost to come up with more sophisticated strategies that were ultimately implemented by a grant well Lincoln had no significant military experience he had been a captain and a militia outfit that saw no action in the Blackhawk war back in 1832 so when he becomes commander-in-chief of a nation at war after the attack on Fort Sumter he has to rely completely on the professional military officers and especially at first on his general and chief Winfield Scott who was next to George Washington I suppose the most famous and successful military commander in American history up to that time but Winfield Scott was 75 years old he weighed 300 pounds he would take two or three hour naps every day he didn't have the energy he was a Virginian who was very much upset by having to run a war against other Virginians and he was quite conservative in his in his sense of strategy and so Lincoln began a process of disillusionment with his military commanders which was accentuated by McClellan who took over as general and chief and also as commander of the Army of the Potomac when Scott retired in the fall of 1861 and McClellan was cautious he was conservative he seemed to be more interested in training the army and in holding dress parades than in fighting Lincoln and Lincoln had the same kinds of problems with general Halleck with general Buell Lincoln early came to the conclusion that this war was not going to be won by maneuvering by conciliation that it could be won only by hard blows that it was a war and one General after another in the first year of the war of McClellan most notably or notoriously if you will seem to have a different idea on how this war could be carried on and so Lincoln put himself through a kind of crash course of reading about military strategy and military history Lincoln had once taught him Jeff for mental exercise at once taught himself Euclidian geometry he had a logical mind he would probe to the to the depth of any problem that he confronted and he sent himself to to become an effective commander in chief and he came up with concentration with a strategy that military historians called concentration in time to overcome the Confederate advantage of interior lines which gave them the ability of concentrated space and tried to impose this idea on his generals we have the greater numbers than the enemy Lincoln would tell its generals and that but unless we use that that advantage they will be able to use their concentration and space to to stop us from overcoming their inferior numbers that we should attack on several fronts at once and and keep on attacking well not a not until grant becomes general a chief in 1864 does Lincoln have somebody in place who believes in relentless relentless attacks against the enemy is the only way to win this war earlier David Glasgow Farragut as the naval commander in the first Admiral in American naval history used the same kind of concentration and aggressive aggressive strategy that Lincoln was looking for so he the Navy was actually more successful when the Union Navy was more successful than the Union Army and the first half of the war and in fact some of the major successes of Union arms in the first two years of the war were really enabled successes rather than army successes so is really the team of Farragut and the Navy and grant and Sherman eventually shared and Thomas in the army that won this war but Lincoln didn't have all of them in that in the top positions until 1864 and that's one of the reasons that it took four years to win this war and he and the generals you mentioned understood that the goal was to destroy the southern army rather than to maintain particular territory that leads to the debate that you described in vivid detail about whether or not this was a total war like World War two an assault on civilians and indiscriminate carnage you you instead call it a hard war not a total war what's the distinction and how does that relate to this discussion well I in my earlier work I did define the Civil War as a total war because it involved the total mobilization of both societies on a scale similar to World War two and it ended only in unconditional surrender of Confederate armies as World War two did but an influential article back in 1991 by an historian named Mark Neely said that the Civil War was not really a total war in the same sense as world war ii because it made a distinction between the lives of civilians and the lives of soldiers in world war ii there was no to such distinction Allied air forces bombed German and Japanese cities German and Japanese armies made war against civilians and that's true total war or as Carl Fong cause of its called it absolute war with war with no restraints at all no distinction between civilians and soldiers and the civil war did not was not total in that sense there were civilian casualties in the Civil War but they were not deliberately targeted in the Civil War in the same way they were in world war ii and in other wars throughout history as well and so i now joined the fraternity I guess that defines that civil war as a hard war but not a total war a hard war in the sense that by 1864 Union armies are attacking the even earlier than that really 1863 the infrastructure of the southern economy and for that matter southern society in order to undercut the ability of the civilian population to continue to support the war effort but you're still not targeting civilian lives and this question of the significance of the carnage is at the root of your really interesting chapter on death and destruction in the Civil War and you quote historians including drew Gilpin Faust the president of Harvard noting that the loss of life itself was the creation of the modern Union and the main legacy of the war and you disagree with that conclusion you say I think that the 13th to 15th amendment which define freedom citizenship and equal rights or even more nationalizing and transformative than the carnage and the harvest of death well do Fawcett for whom I have enormous admiration and she's a good friend concluded her book on death in the Civil War by saying that the most significant consequence of the Americans or was the the the the enormous death toll in the war and the way in which that forged a memory and a sense of meaning for the war I don't challenge the idea that the enormous death toll of the Civil War had huge consequences for American culture in American society and it's one of the reasons that the Civil War continues to be such a subject of interest in this country but I still would argue that the major consequences of the Civil War were what we've been talking about earlier this evening the transformation of American society the fulfillment of the promise of the Declaration of Independence or at least the partial fulfillment and the potential fulfillment of it and sense was the carnage worth it I've always thought that the question was the carnage worth it is a philosophical question and not an historical question and philosophical questions like that I don't think have a definite yes or no answer I wrestle with this question I think all historians wrestle with the question the death toll and the American Civil War is now estimated to have been 750 thousand soldiers what were the results worth it the preservation of the United States has one nation and the abolition of slavery and the transformation of American society I don't know if you can give a yes or no answer to that question I guess I would come down if forced to that yes it was worth it but if I had been a father of a son who was killed in the war you know that's a that's another way of looking at it well you give the percentages for what a similar toll would be according to the current population of the u.s. how many people would die well if the of the 32 million people in the northern and southern states in 1861 750,000 represents a death toll of nearly two and a half percent of that population and if two and a half percent of the American people were to die in a war fought today it would be seven and a half million deaths so think about that would any war that we fought today be worth seven and a half million deaths that's that's an unanswerable question I think although merely to pose it is to suggest how different our attitude toward carnage and dying for ideals is yeah yeah what's amazing about the Civil War generation and I think that's true for both the North and the South and of course the percentage in deaths in the Confederacy was considerably higher than it was in the Union is is the willingness and ability of these societies to sustain that human cost and keep fighting I don't know if we would do that today you say that religion had an important part in motivating people to fight well religion religion had not so much in motivating them well yes I guess in one sense both sides thought that God was on their side that they were fighting for a holy cause but also I think soldiers of that generation that was a that was a very religious generation of Americans it was the product of the Second Great Awakening in the history of American Protestantism in the 1820s and 1830s in American society and the the sense of a of conviction associate and conversion associated with the Second Great Awakening and also the belief in a life after death I think made it possible for soldiers to face death in a way that a more secular generation might it might not have done so death wasn't for many for many of the soldiers for many Americans of that generation death was not the end of life it was entrance into a different sphere of life life after death and so death did not hold as many terrors for them as it does for a more secular society and I think that was one reason that these societies both the Union and Confederacy were able to sustain that level of carnage and keep going because they thought that what they were fighting for was worth the sacrifice no question about it I would love to keep asking questions because this is so fascinating but I want to start and open this up to our phenomenal audience and here are some of their questions does William T Sherman's total war policy at the end of the war have any relevance in today's conflicts with insurgents in the Middle East no I don't think so I think that what's going on in the Middle East now would be going on if William T Sherman had never lived Sherman's concept of hard war total war whatever we want to call it was not unique in the history of warfare and if even if it had not been practiced in the American Civil War I think that 20th century Wars and what's going on now would have happened in the pretty much in the same way in other words while Sherman was a manifestation of a certain strategy of warfare he didn't necessarily invent it and his he didn't necessarily establish a precedent which is now called on because he established it was the election of 1876 the biggest roadblock to successful reconstruction until the civil rights movement in the in the 60s well yes and no I think the election of 1876 set up the compromise of 1877 to resolve the disputed election and part of the provisions one of the some of the provisions of a compromise of 1877 were the agreement by President Hayes who was inaugurated under that compromise to withdraw the federal troops from the south but I think that the Supreme Court's decisions in 1876 and at other times had already weakened the power of the federal government to enforce the terms of Reconstruction and the the voters were moving in that direction even before 1876 the Democrats had gained control of Congress of the house in the election of 1874 partly as a consequence of the depression that was set set in with the panic of 1873 but also partly as a consequence of a kind of northern voters retreat from reconstruction so it wasn't just the election of 1876 it was a process going on in the latter part of the 1870 1870s and and the the election of 1876 was a it was a punctuation point in that process but it was part of a process that I think would have happened anyhow we have just started live-streaming these great events and I'm thrilled to report that we have a series of questions from Twitter which have just come in from our great national audience so thank you everyone for tweeting your questions and here are some of them here are two of them together do you think the Civil War has taught well in K through 12 grades how should it be changed and what did you think of the movie Lincoln why are there so few good movie is set during the Civil War I don't really have a firm opinion on whether the Civil War is taught well in grades K through 12 my sense of it is that it's taught poorly in some schools and taught very well in other schools that it has a great deal to do with the individual teacher or with the with the strengthened and ability of a Department of History and in high schools so McGary one answer to that question as far as the movie Lincoln is concerned I liked it a great deal I had some quibbles with some of the distortions of facts in there but on the whole I think it was a very successful movie other civil war movies that I've liked had been glory and I think that's a very good one the Red Badge of Courage is one that I've always liked a movie that go it was the early 1950s I think of course so that was a movie that could have been about any war in fact the fact that it wasn't about this Battle of Chancellorsville is not even mentioned in the movie itself but I think it raises some profound questions and I've always recommended it as a movie as well as a book of course I think everybody every kid probably reads that in high school now but I'm not sure they understand its relationship to the Civil War unless the teacher points it out to more related questions from Twitter what changes have you seen over the years and students studying the Civil War and what would you have done if you didn't teach them right about the Civil War well one interesting thing I've seen in my own experience in teaching about the Civil War is that when I first started teaching the Civil War course back in the 1970s most of the at Princeton most of the students were male students they and that wasn't only because Princeton was at that time a majority male school it was even you know even a smaller percentage of women in the course and then the University as a whole and I think it was because the Civil War was seen as a story of as a military story and the guys were more interested in that than the women but over over the years I had more and more women in my course and I think it that was because they saw it as a part of social and political history in the United States that the kinds of transformations we've been talking about this evening and we haven't even mentioned the roots of the women's rights movement in the antebellum and civil war generation but when when when you when you look at the history of that time that the rise of the women's rights movement is an important part of it as well and women made a major contribution to the war effort in both the Union and the Confederacy and as a consequence I've had a broader interest on the part of both genders in the Civil War then I saw it first and teaching it and I forgot the second part of the question what would you have done if you didn't teach him right about the Civil War what would I have done if I did not teach you about the Civil War well in college I actually was more interested in 20th century history yeah I became interested in the Civil War as I explained at the beginning of our conversation this evening from my experience in Baltimore during the civil rights movement so I might have wound up teaching about the New Deal and World War two if I hadn't told a book in Civil War back to our wonderful audience questions here are two really interesting related questions one says the civil rights movement has been called the second reconstruction will there be a third reconstruction and I think related to that as the question as we see the end of the sesquicentennial celebration of the Civil War do you foresee the Civil War being more or less relevant between now and the Bicentennial in 2060 as far as a question of the third reconstruction we may be in that right now the racial issues that have been coming to the fore and in the last few years the Obama presidency the issues that are likely to emerge as a result of the debate about inequality and growing inequality of income and wealth in this country which have a racial dimension obviously may be a sign of a third reconstruction that we're in the process of debating right now and again I forgot the second part of the question do you foresee the civil war being more or less relevant between now and the Bicentennial well I don't I think it'll continue to be as relevant as it is right now I think that the last four years because of the sesquicentennial have seen an increased emphasis on it because of the various anniversaries that we've commemorated the anniversary one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation of various battles and so on but those are only these sort of surface manifestations of the deeper interest think enormous numbers of people have in the Civil War so I think that probably I mean well before the sesquicentennial there the Ken Burns series on the PBS back in 1990 had an enormous response and that was well before the sesquicentennial I think that because the issues over which the Civil War was fought remained so salient in American society today issues of race and of federal versus state power and a lot of the other things we've talked about this evening those are going to remain salient issues in American society for a long time and so I don't see that they'll be any there may be a decline in the surface manifestations of interest but I think the deeper level of interest will continue speaking of Ken Burns one audience member asks how did your life change after Ken Burns the Civil War premiered it didn't change a whole lot my book battle cry freedom came out two years before the Ken Burns series and that changed my life more than the Ken Burns can you draw similarity draw similarities of Tea Party members in Congress today two attitudes before and during the Civil War and related to that can you comment on the efforts today to transform the nation back to a union of the states well the tea party believes in a weak federal government and and clearly that is a return to the antebellum federal government many members of the Tea Party would overlap with organizations like the League of the South and and others who argue for a much diminished federal government and look upon Lincoln and the transformation caused by the Civil War toward a strong federal government and a strong presidency which we by the way we haven't talked about very much but Lincoln was by far the strongest president and probably not until the 20th century did we have strong strong executive but that was a function of the war centralizing power in the executive the the Tea Party believing in a weak federal government and the weak presidency I think is it attempt to to reverse some of the changes that were accomplished by the Civil War which I don't think can be reversed but that's that's part of the American political process is this dialectic between opposite opinions and eventually we reach some sort of a synthesis well not point do you think that the Civil War constitutionalized Lincoln's belief that the people of the United States rather than the people of the sovereign individual states were sovereign and that therefore secession was unconstitutional or is that still up for grabs because it wasn't embodied in the Constitution well I think the Civil War resolved the question of whether a state could see seed there are groups like the League of the South like I just read about it the other day the Republic of Texas which believes the Texas should be an independent nation who talked about the right of secession but nobody seriously I think or no serious organization has proposed secession Rick Perry and a book that he published several years ago when he was governor of Texas talked about the right of Texas to secede if it wanted to but I couldn't take that too seriously because at almost the same time he was running for president of the United States here's a general historian question will the transformation of information gathering and dissemination from papers newspapers letters diaries etc to electronic form impact the ability of future historians to find and use data for their research absolutely on the one hand I think historians in the future looking at our time are going to be overwhelmed with data on the other hand the decline in written evidence is going to be a it's going to be a problem for them I'm just glad that I'm an historian of the 19th century when people wrote letters and kept their records on paper and those have been preserved and I mean not all of them obviously a lot of things have disappeared but I'm impressed by the amount of information that I as a historian of the 19th century era am able to find without being necessarily overwhelmed by it but I don't know what historians in the 22nd century are going to be able to how they're going to be able to make sense of what's going on in our time master their sources if Lincoln had lived today the obvious question would he have used a private gmail account the official War Department account that I can't answer very wise on a nonpartisan basis sort of related if Lincoln is not assassinated would the reconstruction have been radically different I think it would have been considerably different I don't know if radically different is the right word it would have been different in this way the whole reconstruction process was poisoned by the growing polarization between President and Congress between 1865 and 1868 to the point where of course Andrew Johnson was impeached and escaped conviction by a single vote but the the conflict between Congress and Johnson poisoned the whole process and even more to the point it encouraged southern resistance to the Congressional reconstruction program because southerners thought after all we have the President on our side Johnson vetoed every bill passed by Congress he encouraged the southern states to refuse to ratify the 14th amendment he tacitly encouraged the violence of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to reconstruction process if Lincoln had lived that kind of polarization there would have been tensions between Lincoln and Congress no question about it there had been in 1864 over the reconstruction issue but they had resolved these tensions Lincoln was the leader of the Republican Party Andrew Johnson had been a war Democrat Lincoln was a northerner Andrew Johnson was a tennessean in a party that was primarily northern and and Republican and Lincoln Lincoln would have been able to work with Congress rather than to work against Congress in the way that Johnson did it that I think would have made a considerable difference whether in the end it would have made reconstruction more successful and more permanent it's hard to say just no way of knowing Lincoln of course would not have been president and presumably after March 4th 1869 he probably would have stuck to the two-term tradition and they the retreat from and revolt against reconstruction in 1870s might have happened anyhow who knows but at the 1860s would have been considerably different I think well I would love to continue it's time for lots of people want you to sign their books so I'll just close by noting again we're so thrilled that you've been here and to inaugurate and I hope to continue to be involved in our effort over the next five years to commemorate the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Reconstruction Amendments as a sort of closing call to action what's the essence of you want of what you want Americans to know about the relationship between the Declaration of Independence the Civil War at the Reconstruction Amendments and the civil rights movement well I think that that they are intimately related with each other that it represents the Declaration of Independence stated an ideal that the United States has tried and with some but not complete success to live up to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery was a major step toward living up to that ideal but it was incomplete the Reconstruction Amendments carried it on farther and to the extent that they actually were carried out for a few years during Reconstruction represented a major effort to to live up to the ideals of Declaration and independence we retreated from that for 80 years but the civil rights movement has pushed them further toward fulfillment and so I think that there's a relationship among those that can be studied and with with understanding of what this country has stood for has failed sometimes to stand for but in the end I think has made a real effort to succeed I think it's a it would be a crucial part of any student's civic education to understand this relationship beautifully said ladies and gentlemen please join me in thanking the great James Macpherson you

Channel: National Constitution Center

Views: 41,102

Rating: 4.6767678 out of 5

Keywords: James McPherson: Why the Civil War Still Matters, Civil War (Literature Subject), America's Town Hall, Jeffrey Rosen CEO National Constitution Center, National Constitution Center

Id: M9XUiBgDz2Y

Length: 71min 34sec (4294 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2015