Robert E. Lee and the Question of Loyalty

welcome my name is Matt Bauman I was part of history here at University of Florida it is my distinct pleasure to welcome you to the department's annual Augusta and burns memorial lecture before I introduce our speaker a little bit of housekeeping first off this depart is a lecture but we've had aid from various sources including what I want to think on Phi Beta Kappa who helped contribute to the reception that will follow Phi Alpha Theta the history Honor Society contribute bill link to new power chair who stepped forward and helped contribute as well and following dr. Gallagher talk he will take questions after which there will be a small reception right outside and while the reception is going on the gift shop but the harm which have you have not been in there you really must it's a month and it's out they've agreed to stay open we'll be the only people here and minor things that we're selling copies of I booked a photography I'm civil war photography that Gallagher co-edited and so you can pick it up as well but it's a shaman baseball scouts speak of truly elite players as players who have five tools they can hit they can hit for power they can run they can feel they can throw Garry Gallagher is the Jon L now the third professor of history at the University of Virginia in our field in the field of history he is one of those very rare breeds who I would say has all five tools as I see it he is excellent in all areas of the profession we do let me suggest the history version of those five tools first off Gallagher is a superb and accomplished publishing scholar he's the author of nine volumes he's won multiple book awards he has as a scholar the list is amazing and incredibly impressive and certainly influenced in all sorts of ways he is secondly really one of the most if not the most influential editor certainly in support hero if not in US history he has personally edited a co-edited over 20 volumes well perhaps he more important than that she has served as editor winter on four different books syriza's and in the profession and among them he has Holly ended and in a hand closely in over 140 volumes that haven't published large emissive where you are it's an astonishing record third Gallagher is a credibly accomplished incredibly popular on a graduate teacher consider this you undergraduates he yesterday before flying here and visit us caught his Civil War class he has 150 students who showed up for that class which meets at 8 o'clock in the morning now this ensure this role is less to do but I'm still quite impressive first he's one of the most accomplished energetic successful graduate mentors in our field he has mentored 25 PhDs who have received a position more in averse and all 25 as I understand to have jobs 21 of the pepperbox three of them if his students hold named chairs of major institutions finally the fifth and in some ways the most elusive still Gary Gallagher is able to write and speak to all audiences he has given named lecturers all over the country he's given these four nameless I know that were turned into publication once another including two wonderful books he is here to give our name by Sir model named by service and is my great honor to hear him speak on his one of his graders expertise robert e lee and the question of loyalty Thank You math I'm very happy to be here I've been many places in Florida but I've never been to Gainesville before last night and today and that's given me a tour of the place you didn't tell me what he was going to say to introduce me I would have asked him to be briefer than that but I can't control what he does I'm going to talk about robert e lee and the question of loyalty loyalty within a context of intense sectional controversy and decisions that a lot of people who live in slaveholding states had to make in the Secession winner of 1860 61 whether to give up a loyalty of one kind and embrace another with lee it's often presented as he's either a Virginian or he is an American he's either going to remain loyal to his state or he's going to remain loyal to the United States what I hope my talk today will indicate is that that's a far too simplistic way to look at Lee's loyalties and I take my cue in this from one of the American Historians I admire most a man named David M Potter who wrote in the 50s and 60s he wrote a wonderful essay with a terrible title that I don't even tell you where he gets at this question of how you gauge loyalties and he makes what should be a very obvious point and that is that we all have multiple loyalties we have loyalties to state to family we might have a religious loyal the all kinds of loyalties which percolate up and down in different moments in our lives so that at moment X one of those loyalties might be paramount but in another situation it might not that is the case I think when we try to assess how people judge their own loyalties in 1860 and 1861 for our purposes today I'm going to use four loyalties loyal to home state loyalty to home state loyalty to the United States loyalty to the slaveholding south and loyalty to the Confederacy and before I get going more specifically with Lee I'm going to offer three framing observations that will be directly pertinent to my to the final part of my talk which looks at as he compared it and the first of those observation it is that I believe the Confederacy was a nation historians argue about this we argue about everything otherwise there'd only be one Civil War book I'm interested in the Civil War read the Civil War book and then belong to something else one of the things we argue about is whether it was a nation or not and I'm just going to tell you now without burdening you with a lot of other information that it was the notion that this is North versus South is simply not right simply not right there 15 slaveholding states in 1860 four of them never leave the United States and a big chunk of the most important of the slaveholding states broke away and formed in in effect a fifth border state in the middle of the war so it's not the North versus the South I see this is a contest between two mid 19th century nation-states one of which didn't last very long and played out its entire life in the midst of the most transformative military conflict in our history a second one of my framing arguments is that a substantial majority of the Confederacy's white residents developed a quite strong allegiance to the Confederacy doesn't mean there isn't great disaffection behind the lines of course there is this is there was behind the lines in the United States there were a lot of people unhappy with many aspects of the Confederacy but despite undeniable evidence of substantial internal opposition to Jefferson Davis in his government I think one fact stands out and that is that only a determined citizenry would have waged the for a war that lasted for years and killed a quarter of the entire white military-age population of the Confederacy a scale of loss that is so far beyond any other white example in American history that it literally stands in a category by itself its loss on the scale of the major nations in world war one that is not an American experience to have that kind of loss in a war the Confederacy did and I think that is a very inconvenient obstacle to get around if you're arguing that there wasn't much sense of being Confederates my third framing observation is that the mainline military forces of the he represented the most interesting the most important institutional expression of the Confederate nation excuse me composed of regiments with strong state identifications the National armies and most importantly the Army of Northern Virginia Lee's army provided tangible and highly visible proof of a collective identity that both United and transcended state and locality by the midpoint of the war and even in a stronger sense by the latter stages of the war Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia function is the most important national institution in the Confederacy they people look to them rather than to Jefferson Davis and the national government it's very like what happened in the American Revolution where George Washington and the Continental Army became the most important rallying point where is the Continental Congress who the hell knows they're in Philadelphia then they're in New York and they're somewhere else it's a portable beast what matters in the end is the Continental Army still in the field then there's a chance for colonial successes the Army of Northern Virginia still and there's still a chance for just happenstance that acclimatise mark the effective end of the war for most people it's not the end of the war / Confederate forces force of thousands of Confederates are under arms elsewhere after April 9th 1865 the key is Lee and his army are gone and because Lee and his army are gone because they were so important not only to confess but also the people in the United States it seemed unequivocally to most people to mark the effective and the war things would drag on as we all know and my final observation is that military officers in the Confederacy form an important component in the equation of Confederate loyalty their statements and conduct not only influenced the men they live but also helped shape attitudes and expectations on the homefront and why these men came to embrace the Confederacy commands justly helps illuminate the larger topic of Confederate identity and sheds light for all of us at a distance of a century and a half as well on the complex web of loyalties that contended for supremacy during this very turbulent period in our history I'm always amused when somebody on the 24-hour news stations and it can be any of them now talks about how we've never been as divided as we are now we've never been as divided I can think of at least one point when we were more divided than we are now and it's not even close and people had to make decisions and Lee was one of them so let's get to lead my principle point today and I'm arguing against a very large literature and it might be a literature you don't even know about but I don't care because it's there and I'm going to set it up as my foil my main argument today is that the way to understand Lee is not just to understand him as a Virginian which is a very strong theme and has been over decades and decades of writings on the American Civil War as with almost all of his fellow American citizens he manifested a range of loyalties throughout his adult life and they are the four that I mentioned that will be at the center of my talk today without question he considered himself a Virginian that was an extremely important identity his family had moved very large in politics and in society since the colonial era but he also possessed the deep attachment to the United States he also considered himself a white southerner part of a slaveholding society that's the part of his array of loyalties that's usually left out when people talk about him and in the end he was an ardent Confederate an ardent Confederate these four levels of loyalty became more prominent receded came back at different points in his life but perhaps most important for our purposes Lee's commitment to the Confederate nation dominated his actions in thinking during by our the most famous part of his life the four years of overt military struggle between the United States and the breakaway slaveholding Republic that called itself the Confederacy the idea that leaves Virginia identity holds the key to understanding his life and career as I said already always held great vitality from Charles Francis Adams jr. who's one of those wonderful Adams as all the same size all look alike all go to Harvard all think they're smarter than everybody else and they are smarter than most people Charles Francis Adams jr. went down gave a very famous talk at Washington and Lee University where he talked about Lee as a Virginian Douglas Southall Freeman Lee's most famous biographer has a chapter that says it's the decision Lee was born to make was the decision to lead the United States Army in April of 1861 and go to Virginia this continued down to the 1980s jimick person's battle cry of freedom puts it this way Lee's decision to leave federal service after Virginia secession was called for or gained by birth and blood you get the sense that once Virginia voted to secede there was there was some kind of impair everybody in Virginia immediately shed their loyalty to the United States and became a Virginian and then a little while later a Confederate Lee the porochial Virginia also appears in the realm of popular culture any of you who've endured Gods and Generals there's a famous scene in that film morally during the Battle of Gettysburg is standing on the Confederate side of the river looking across the Rappahannock toward Berry Farm where George Washington brews up a girl grew up and he gives this long talk about how the Yankees just don't get it the Yankees do not understand place they don't understand what places and locality mean to a Virginian and that is what the war is about for him as the director of that Bill Maher on Maxwell explained for Lee Virginia was his home he would fight for his home all about Virginia well now let's go through my four loyalties here with Lee we'll go through the winner order we'll begin with Virginia which certainly moved largest in his decision to resign his colonel senior in April 1861 that is the most important loyalty that is in place right then Lee was stationed out in Texas in early 1861 he was in San Antonio and it was from there that he was a lieutenant colonel was from there that he watched this unfolding political disaster back east the election of Lincoln as we know triggered South Carolina secession in December of 1860 and then the other six states of the Lower South were out by February first Texas was the last of those seven out and they immediately assembled in Montgomery Alabama all of them to Texas and put together what would become the Confederate government shortly after Texas seceded on the 1st of February Lee received orders to report to Winfield Scott in Washington there was a sad harding among a group of people in texas and lee began the jury home journey home he got to Arlington on March 1st and of course the national crisis deepened it once he was back in Virginia Jefferson Davis headed this new Confederate government in Montgomery tensions escalated centered on the federal installation in Charleston Harbor as we all know you know the sequence of events as well as I do in early March Lee at private discussions with Winfield Scott who was the general and chief of the United States Army's Lee had served on Scott staff during that famous campaign from Veracruz to Mexico City during the war against Mexico in the mid 1840s it was during that interview that Scott almost certainly urged Lee to remain in the United States Army very shortly after that on March 16th Lee learned that he'd been promoted to full colonel to command the 1st Cavalry first United States cavalry in the meantime the Confederate Secretary of War in Alabama named Lee Walker had awkwardly a brigadier General's Commission in the Confederate Army Lee never responded to Walker as far as we know but he did accept the courtesy of the first United States cavalry accepted that on March the 30th the final storm broke in April as we know Sumter April 12th 13th 14th to bombardment the surrender of the fort Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers on April the 15th was that which sent Virginia out of the Union Virginia had has two strong Pro Union boy votes in their state conventions but they had another vote after Lincoln's call and they voted to leave the United States Lee received requests on April 17th to meet separately with Winfield Scott and with Francis Preston Blair senior Blair was an old political very close to Andrew Jackson the Blair's are all over the political story of this part of our country he's the patriarch of this famous Democratic family he was well known to leave both meetings took place on the 18th the old man Blair had been told that he could offer leave Washington whose goal would be to suppress this rebellion when the time came he made that offer to Lee and Lee declined one of the arguments that Blair said was that here's one of the reasons the people will embrace you in this position because you are connected to George Washington he was of course connected to Washington Lee was his marriage to Mary Ann Randolph Custis who was the daughter of George Washington's grandson as all of you know Lee went I saw Scott after he turned Blair down and related what had happened I can only imagine that very powerful emotions pulled Italy in the wake of all of this as he thought about what he was going to do word of Virginia secession appeared in local newspapers on April 19th here in the Alexandria newspapers in the early morning hours of April 20 Lee composed a very straightforward sentence letter of resignation that he sent the Secretary of War Simon Cameron later that day he wrote a much longer level letter to sky felt very loyal to Scots God had been very good for his career Scott called me a best soldier in the United States Army me but he did call him the best soldier in the United States Army and Lee appreciated what he had gotten from being around and associated with a towering figures such as Scott Scott's kind of forgotten now he's a call most comical figure because he had a job of soldiers in United States history and should be reckoned such he usually isn't but he was and Lee for very good reason admired him Lee wrote to Scott that he would have resigned immediately quote but for the struggle has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted excuse me all the best years of my life and all the ability I possess in the penultimate sentence in this letter to Scott is one of the most quoted statements Lee ever pinned or spoke save in defense of my native state I never desire again to draw my sword the War Department took five days to process leaves resignation which became official on April 25th by then he had already decided to cast his lot with Virginia he was selling to Richmond he traveled down to Richmond on the 22nd he met with the governor who offered him a major general seat to take command of the Virginia state forces least not going in the comparisons going to Virginia genius not in the Confederacy at this point you still have a seven state Confederacy at this point so Lee is giving up his Colonels Commission in the United States Army to become a Major General of Virginia state forces at the end of April 1862 he went to the State Capitol there's this famous scene where he's assured into the chamber and the person who presided over the secession convention of man named John Janey who was from Northern Virginia and who was anti-secession through most of the convention as Lee was he introduced Lee and in the course of introducing him he played on the words that Lee's father like Horse Harry Lee had used in his famous eulogy to George Washington first in war first in peace first in the hearts of his countrymen Janey used a variation of those words in talking about how he hoped Lee's service to Virginia would play out during the president crisis League a very short comments in front of the Virginia politician these secession convention people there he said simply I will devote myself to the defense and service of my native state in whose behalf alone would I have ever drawn my story it's essentially the same thing he said to Scott and he said it in lots of letters to other people at the same time so Lee The Virginian is the key person here am I going to stay with my state am I going to stay inside my United States military uniform he stressed Virginian letters to his family he wrote his sister and Lee Marshall who was a unionist she said essentially the same thing I couldn't make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives my children my home he said this to others but in fact that obscures the fact that many members of Lee's family did in fact maintain their loyalty to the United States cousins who didn't speak to him again after he decided to go with Virginia and it also obscures the fact for many people who think well he went with Virginia a third of all the United States military officers from Virginia stayed in the United States Army in the midst not just Winfield Scott and George Thomas the two most famous ones almost a third of all the Virginians in the army remained in the United States Army so for many Virginians a decision to go with Virginia has leaked it was not the only it's not the only choice they could made in this crisis many of them made another when there you get a sense of that reading about Lee you get a sense that the sort of way out there outliers are Winfield Scott and George Thomas who did remain loyal to the United States so he is a Virginian at this point no point of a no question about it but he also had always had a very strong loyalty to the United States the second of these loyalties I'll talk about and that certainly complicated his decision on April 20th I think indeed in much I think a great deal of Lee's life would have led most of us to say he probably wouldn't lead the United States Army in this secession crisis his hero far and away the most important figure in Lee's life in terms of the person he sought to emulate was George Washington and Jorge was as strong a nationalist as you can imagine absolutely as strong a nationalist as you can imagine he's the greatest of all Virginians by a very wide margin of course he's Lee's I will there be no nation without George Washington no Regular Army no sense of the whole transcending the state and the local Lee came from a family of Federalists his father also very loyal to George Washington and his family events very little state centered sentiment in 1798 his father had opposed the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions and had wanted absolutely nothing to do with the state standard sentiments of those resolutions offered by Jefferson and Madison he argued Goodlife Horse Harry Lee for the cost was entirely the act of the people and not of the state governments Harry Lee's comments anticipated Abraham Lincoln's argument during the secession crisis we the people not we the states let's us locate the foundation of power for the government of the United States life force Harry and Lincoln would have agreed very much on that that's the family that Lee came out of he'd rendered Stan's service to the Republic as an engineer as a very gifted staff officer in Mexico and as superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point all the way these are even Federalists in his personal views Lee applauded news of Democrat James by cannons election in 1856 mr. Kent mccannon it appears is to be our next president he wrote to mrs. Lee in December of 1856 I hope he will be able to extinguish fanaticism north and south and cultivate love for the country and Union and restore harmony between the different sections he opposed secession as I already said during the winter of 6061 in a letter to his sister Ann Marshall described quote his devotion to the Union and feeding of loyalty and duty of an American citizen his letter to Winfield Scott also testified to his love of Union and earlier that year he'd written to his son Rooney and in that letter Lee echoed his Federalist father insisting that the framers meant for the Union to be perpetual this is not a union that can be broken up easily it's perpetual his idle to talk of secession he stated bluntly to his son and then he turned again to his professional model Winfield Scott excuse me George Washington his professional model and said that he would be very much distressed very much distressed if the political troubles that seemed to be brewing brought with him the possibility that Washington's quote noble deeds will be destroyed and that his precious advice and virtual virtuous example would so soon forgotten by his countrymen there's a second loyalty despite that clear affection for the United States as we already know Lee didn't lead the United States Army he did leave it which brings us to a third level of loyalty and that is Lee's strong identification with the slaveholding south I think it's this third loyalty which was perfectly compatible with his sense of loyalty to Virginia I think this proved decisive in some ways during the secession crisis in letters and comments addressing his decision to resign from the United States Army he often mentioned the south as well as Virginia the parts that are always quoted are the parts relating to Virginia the parts that are not so often quoted are the ones relating to the south his political philosophy stood strikingly at odds with the very Alang rhetoric of secessionist fire-eaters however and that's often quoted too however he wrote to his son Custis that's his oldest son well before his resignation quote the south in my opinion has been aggrieved by the acts of the north I feel the aggression and I'm willing to take every proper step for redress in his meetings with Francis Preston Blair and Winfield Scott he proclaimed that while he opposed secession quote I will not take up arms against the south or against fellow southerners the desire to maintain racial control figured prominently in Lee's southern identity he's often presented as an opponent of slavery the only way you can come to that conclusion is not to read anything except one thing you get to take one statement and repeat it endlessly and ignore everything else than he wrote on the topic it was not an opponent of slavery he believed a wife why wouldn't he be what in his background would suggest to us that he would be an opponent slaver he's from a family that is at the very very apex of the slave holding power structure of the state of Virginia the Lee's his mother's a Carter the Carters in the leaves they don't talk they don't have to talk to anybody else if they don't want to they're at the very top just talk to each other and life will be rich he is from now the idea that he would come out of that background and in any significant way really be against slavery doesn't make any sense but here's the statement that everyone quotes it's late December 1856 he observed both slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country that part is quoted Watts here's the part that isn't quoted so often you believe the liberation of enslaved people should be left entirely in God's hands quote their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influence of Christianity than the storms and tempests of fiery controversy you often read he didn't ever own slaves he did own slaves you didn't know agreement he never owned much at all he inherited some slaves when his mother died he's all but he's embedded in the powerful slave holding aristocracy but he never owned a house but Lots came along with his marriage of course including many many slaves he also believed he also believed that abolitionists were Anatomy to any reasonable formulation of what the United States should look like he loved abolitionists he looted the what he termed quote the systematic and progressive efforts of certain people of the north to interfere with and change the domestic institutions of the south now my students many of them don't know what that means the domestic institutions talking about slavery that's what that means ladies a domestic institution slavers an institution the states have control over not the United States government except in a couple of instances such actions by abolitionists Lee stated can only be accomplished by them through the agency of civil and servile war it's not in favor of civil or servile war incidentally if you want to parse that part of his statement his resentment of northerners who would with the South's racial order continued during the war although seldom quoted by historians his reaction to Lincoln's final proclamation of emancipation in January 1863 is the single most powerful indicator of his real feelings about what would happen if the South lost this labeled in South lost the institution of slavery to order its racial relations he wrote On January 10th 1863 a note to Secretary of War James ACN in the Confederacy calling for greater mobilization of human and material resources in the face of United States military power that threatened complete social disintegration in the Confederacy and here is his language the proclamation stands as a savage and brutal policy wrote Lee with barely controlled anger which leaves us no alternative but success or degradation worse than death if we would confuse me save the honor of our families from pollution our social system from destruction using pollution that way degradation that way those are code words that appear through Antebellum arguments about slavery white southerners logging those words toward abolitionists and others in the North that they thought were going to interfere with the strength of slavery as a way to order relations Lee was really upset about the Emancipation Proclamation it's already 4:30 5:00 okay he says if they're going to save the honor of our families they have to resist more because you cannot you cannot give in to a foe just cannot do it few years earlier Lee also had spoken of honor claiming that quote there's no sacrifice I'm not ready to make for the preservation of the Union save that of honor as a member of the slaveholding aristocracy of Virginia and the southeast sense of Honor dictated that he stand with his blood class and section he hated the idea of disunion but rejected the idea of a country quote that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets he was unwilling to risk force changes in a social structure predicated on the institution of slavery well those who cling to the idea of Lee as pre-eminently they Virginian I'm now to my fourth level of loyalty here have to come to terms with his absolute devotion to the Confederacy amid the stress of war Lee quickly and decisively adopted a national as opposed to a state centered stance his most important leader in the conflict was to the Confederate Nation not some of the time not most of the time all of the time if it's ever a question of does the state prevail or does the nation prevail these answer is the nation prevails the nation prevails even if that is not what Virginia might want his national viewpoint stands out vividly in his wartime correspondence from the very beginning of the conflict until the final scenes at Appomattox he urged Confederate soldiers politicians and civilians to set aside state and local prejudices in order to come together to be successful in their effort to establish their new republic we articulated his views about the relative importance of state and national concerns on many occasions I'll quote from a letter he wrote to South Carolina's Secretary of State in late December 1861 it's just eight months into the war and Lee was taking the long view at this point South Carolina wanted to husband its own resources want to do a deploy in state resources in defense of South Carolina rather than sending them north and having them become part of the national military effort of the Confederacy Lee wrote the Confederate states have now but one great object in view the successful issue of war and independence and he explained to this South Carolinian everything worth their possessing depends on that everything should yield to its accomplishment said the same letter to North Carolinians the way to defend North Carolina is successful and the Confederacy is successful at the Confederacy successful then North Carolina is successful North Carolina cannot be successful alone it can only be successful as part of a national effort the nation is what matters the Confederate people debated a number of issues relating to the expansion of national power at the expense of states and localities they debated whether national authority should be able to transfer us on what were considered individual liberties and freedoms this idea that the Lincoln government became this great demon first and it did a lot more because it was much harder for the Confederates to maintain a successful national defense in the face of a very powerful United States military effort the Confederate national government becomes the most intrusive central government on history by far until one of the ironies this allegedly state rights nation puts up with things that would have been unimaginable in 1861 because they'd have to if they're going to maintain the war and Lee is absolutely on board with that absolutely on board without pushing it as hard as he can I'm gonna use three examples of especially important things that he supported the National viewpoint in this regard one is conscription there never been conscription in the United States history national government had never constructed they had asked people to serve never forced them to serve Confederacy get that first second area is the impressment of goods and enslaved labor the Confederate government rather than just at one point is took what they needed at the price they said and you're a farmer I need something I take I mean anyway and I'll have them for three months impressment of goods and services then the last of these issues is whether or not the Confederacy should arm slaves look at them very quickly during the winter in spring of 61 62 Lee instructed his aide Charles Marshall to quote draft a bill for raising an army by the direct agency of the Confederate government in other words national conscription a significant proportion of the Confederate forces in you Department listen for one year they were gonna get out and the Confederacy couldn't allow them to get out so Lee helped frame this it passed the Confederate Congress that spring it had not only made all compare males all white men in the Confederacy between the ages of 18 and 35 liable for service it also extended the length of service for all those men who were due to get out for another two years it seemed to be an absolute breaking of a contract between these soldiers who'd volunteered in good faith in the spring of 1861 and now been told they're in the Army for two more years and when they were about to get out two years later the Confederate Congress changed the rules again and said now you're in for the duration if the Confederacy ever got you into a uniform you never know that's the bottom line they all serve for the duration in the Confederacy the United States never did that the Confederacy had to they didn't have as many men Lee support of giving Jefferson Davis all the power he needed to make this happen so he's very strongly in favor of that he also supported the impressment of anything that Confederacy needed he said if we need it we should get it he said it one way and it takes all the meat to feed our armies nobody else gets me impressment should be enforced you know fairway so that everybody has their share of the burden sadly but it absolutely should be put into place at one point he said we should take over the railroads there should be no civilian traffic on the railroads fantasy never went that far but Lee was ready to go that part and toward the end of the war when the issue of whether the Confederacy was so desperate for manpower that they should arm some slaves came up Lee watched it play out for a while he generally stayed out of politics didn't believe soldiers should participate in politics because all a soldier does is whatever his civilian superiors tell him to do he understood that Grant understood Hamilton Johnson didn't understand that George B McCullen just couldn't understand why people didn't realize he was the man and they should January of 1865 on the question of arming slaves and he said of course we should arm them if that's what it takes to win the war we should do it if we do not arm some slaves and lose the war we will lose all our slaves and lose them all on the terms the Yankee said if we achieve independence by arming some slaves then we will be in charge of ordering our social relations not the end well this shows how anti-slavery he was because he said if you're gonna have black men come into uniform you must give them an incentive you need to freeze any black man who fights will free his family and let them live with a little bit well the Confederate Congress said we like everything about your idea except freeing their families freeing them and letting them live where they want to live other than that we're right on board with you and we'll go ahead and see what happens well nothing happens as we know it came too late but my point here is our self-interest is this argument you save as much of your social structure as you can by doing this it's supposed to leave time for questions so I'm going to just say that we can't know I love to think about this I don't think about it a lot but I've thought about it a couple of times I'd love to know whether Lee and I'm sure he did in the way that day he was in Richmond going to see the members of the secession convention that last week of April when had been often offered command of the state forces of Virginia as he went to the Capitol he walked past and many of you I'm sure have walked past it as well Thomas Gibson Crawford's heroic equestrian statue of Washington she's up on top of the monument with all these sort of sub virginity heroes around the base there's the man and then there's everybody else and that's the way it should be he walked past dead and then he stood outside the chamber waiting to be called in and there in front of him is who Don's marble full-size statute George Washington there's his the man he sought to model and I wonder whether he reflected on how loyal steed loyalties to Virginia and the slaveholding south had in his case Trump won national loyalty one that Washington would not and led him to another national loyalty he wasn't going straight to the Confederacy in this point there's a Waystation just the state of Virginia for six weeks it's hard to imagine that ago she in place very soon and commissioners from the deep south States had already been saying what wonderful idea would be if Virginia joined the Confederacy and hey we might even move the Capitol whether he reflected on some of the ironic elements of that day for him looking at his hero who's an ardent nationalist first to last and taking a step that led him away from a decision Washington wouldn't have made just something that's kind of fun to think about and now the floor is over yeah there anyone have a clue of how bloody the civil war would be mobilize the old number used to be six hundred and eighteen thousand soldiers died in the war that was the number forever years ago recent scholarship has potentially bumped that number up to three-quarters of a million which i think is too high but i think it's perfectly reasonable to think the real number might be seven hundred thousand or more i would say on the grotesquely low side rather than even close to the Civil War in terms of its toll is the revolution the revolution killed 1% of the population so the only one that's even close to the Civil War nothing else so there would have been nothing that really would have prepared Americans for this yes Lee ever second-guess his convictions well Lee is one of those guys who would never have gone on Oprah we know every that ever flickered through his mind he didn't sit around and say I really want you to understand this list of things to do and he never wrote a word you never wrote anything he thought about writing the history of the Army in Northern Virginia for a while after the war and started to gather material about it but when it became president of Washington College that turned out to be a full-time job and so he set it aside the closest we have to direct testimony from him and it isn't direct his transcripts of a series of conversations he had with one of Stonewall Jackson's old staff officers a man named William now ordinance Allen was at Washington College and he would go down to that basement office at least he was in the chapel at the end of the day and Lee would talk and Alan would scurry back to his quarters and write anything down that he said Lee said but what we know is that Alan said when he said that that's the closest we have and there isn't a lot of second guessing there not a lot of second-guessing about decisions here or there I mean he said after Gettysburg if I'd know now he's going to end up even as Dolabella was I would not have done but I don't think he had Lee has this reputation and he deserves it in one way of being very much a reconciliation of staff to the war he tells white southerners don't look back look forward we lost the war they get deceptive terms so in a public sense he is very much for reconciliation but privately he seemed if what was going on he loathed the Radical Republicans he thought reconstruction was a hideous process but he kept those apart he had his private views and he had his public views publicly he's a reconciliation as privately he's not privately do you think boy I really should have stayed in the army there's a kernel you never said that as far as I know who knows what he thought yes in the back yeah I think we did think like was a struggling anything was always going to be good and if something went wrong he didn't just dissolve into kind of a pool of self-pity as well leave didn't Liam grant share this they here and he's gone he never comes back that's we lived in a big house now we don't live in a big house anymore something's going on here that's not perfect he had a lot of failure Greg had a lot of failure and they both dealt with it I think the same way they would kind of put it behind them and deal with that you know the realities in place except what's happened you can't change that in deal with what you can deal with and don't blame other people go right quit I need someone to blame you I think you're the one new cameras burnside are the reason I didn't win at a speed of not my own terrible General Lee and grant never did that others the question is you know and this is a question that comes up in any talk that I ever gave on any topic while I'm in New York can we tell exactly what motivated individual Confederate soldiers to fight because we all know that most impaired soldiers did not own slaves even though the old notion and you still find it in some works it was just so tiresome to see this come up again and again the old idea that the wealthier classes avoid and service even Confederacy anybody who thinks that and wants us to just stop thinking and finally and really gives us read Joe Cathars book on the Army and Northern Virginia slave holders over representative both officers and among soldiers in the ranks what historians used to do is they'd only count as slaveholders people who actually owned slaves according to the manuscript census returns well if if I'm the son of a slave owner I would not be there actually over-represented I don't think there's no way to answer your question perfectly but but the idea and I'm not saying it's implicit in your question but it's often implicit in the question is if most white Southerners didn't own slaves how could slavery be important really how could it be that important to the system of labor control it's a system of racial control they are afraid of what four million enslaved people who do not want these waves and they know they don't want to be slaves they pretended after the war that slaves are happy of course they weren't happy why do you need slave codes if slaves are happy they have in the backs of their minds the image of Santa Ming of large scales slave revolts it scares the hell out of them everybody has a stake in that whether you love slaves are not you have a stake in racial control there are also all kinds of reciprocal relationships slaveholding and non-slaveholding my people I'm a little I'm a very small farmer in the cotton growing area in Georgia I can't afford a gym to tend my but my rich neighbor has a gym and I take my turn on the slave patrols during harvest I do I go back to my neighbor Maxfield my neighbor and I leases later from him it works for both of us everybody everybody the slaveholding south is not the slaveholders and a non-slaveholding it's one organic society knitted together in myriad ways and if you want to know what the most obvious response to defeat is on the part of Confederates it's Jim Crow most white Southerners what if I can't have it back we lost a great war that is no longer something we can talk about the Yankees won the nation's put together we can't have slavery okay what's the next best thing the next best thing is Jim Crow and it takes them a while to work it out but they work it out everybody has a stadium everybody it doesn't mean every single white southerner is in favor of slavery and don't go looking for letters well I've read 200 soldier letters and not one of them said I'm fighting to protect slavery well it's they don't need to say that they don't wake up in the morning and say boy it's great I'm fighting for slavery now what's going on in Virginia they don't do that doesn't mean they don't care about it doesn't say that all the time but when he's confronted with something like the Emancipation Proclamation then you get an insight into how important this is yes way over here in the dark I think my other four united states generally doesn't hit them beyond this list is lemmings in general he's available he's not in the United States my list of the greatest United States voter Washington of course even though I made lots of mistakes he's still the man Winfield Scott u.s. grant for me grandmother for you grant get some love he doesn't get much of why guys in power in Georgia so tragic when people overlook pastor if there's a Liscomb deeply unstable soldiers then I would put padding on that list I put Stonewall Jackson on that listener maybe Andrew Jackson I'm not sure and I don't think he did I think he regretted retrospectively I think he regretted that the Confederacy didn't win I don't have any doubt but I think he was deeply troubled Lee did not fight extremists and like many Americans he would have loved fire years and abolitionists together in that regard they are extremists they're threatening the Union they are outside the mainstream there a problem there's no way that they can be a solution there a problem and he's kind of in this he wants people to be reasonable reasonable within a certain framework us alone and we shouldn't do anything to interfere with God's grand plan and so for the present this is the best way to order racial relations he said that just that directly after the war you already had a question and I'll come back to you if nobody else puts their hand up you mean his loyalty to Virginia and then the Confederacy was that the subtitle of my talk well one of the prices of loyalty is that there are heaps of bodies wherever robert e lee is on the landscape he is for grant I'm going to grant is known as the butcher what's your riddle there Gramps butcher care about lives grant that Yankee he barely could its idea what do you think I don't know generally but tell me what you think in Grant's great victories in the West all those great battles in the West Henry and Donaldson Shiloh Vicksburg Chattanooga is total casualties 35,000 re least equivalent period in command in the Army in Northern Virginia casualties 95,000 when does Grant become bloody the same time everybody else does is when they come into contact with Robert Lee yeah Joe Black Stars book tells us if you are a soldier in robert e lee's army you have a seventy-four percent chance of becoming Macavity 74 percent what's the second bloodiest army during the Civil War Army The Pajama of course you read constantly two out of three dead soldiers in the Civil War died of disease only one-third died at battles depends on where you are if you're in the Army of the Potomac two out of three die of battle wounds and one out of three died of disease now if you're on occupation duty in Matheny's then you probably don't have a very good sense about a good chance of getting sick and not much of a chance of getting shot Lee is so one of the outcomes of his decision is there a lot of graders across the states of the former Confederacy he is by far the bloody soldier in American history if we gauge it by the percentage of his men we get killed nobody even close William grant if it's too broad I won't answer how accurate leaves a bloody fellow we're taking that as our baseline on either side during the war McClellan's men loving Germans man 11 you have a good nickname as an indicator of what distinct about pull them in but there's none like Lee's there and they're a couple of incredible moments is on May 3rd 1863 there in Chancellorsville clearing Lee's army began to be a divide at Stonewall Jackson's Corps separated from Richard H Anderson and Lafayette McLaws divisions and all morning the Confederates assaulted more numerous Federals until finding their way together in the midst of that second and third generation scrub forests and came into the clearing at Chancellorsville the Chancellorsville structure was burning Joe hooker had been taken to the rear stung by an artillery round and Lee came riding into the midst of his infantry along the plank road this is credible outpouring spontaneous outpouring of affection of NATO you know there's no man there's the old man and here we are and look at what we've done and I think they look at him that way me go get them that way you want to understand if you want to understand July the 3rd at Gettysburg go to April 3rd in Chancellorsville clear there's another launch we came back to the army after his in a performance in eastern Tennessee in the winter of 63 I think even Longstreet I mean he had it he was you know he got away from me and then he got put under Braxton Bragg and realized he had it in Virginia and the two divisions have Longstreet's Corps Pickett wasn't within the force were lined up in this two big gate post defenses had disappeared Liam on-street wrote to the gatepost went up and down the lines of the under who's the most perceptive former Confederate soldier who wrote his book and grant to the two folks by former soldiers he likened it to a military sacrament there's no question that that bond existed and I think it I mean the key to it is success Lee takes over the army and on in Virginia the Confederacy is absolutely on the ropes absolutely the entire war in the West in a symphony of United States success in the West Henry and Donelson Nashville was gone Memphis was gone New Orleans was gone Mississippi is not a Confederate River anymore Silas northern Arkansas is gone because of peerage go farther out on the little competitor of Army and the mexico's turned back at Laurier after is not a scintilla of good news and George B McCombs five miles from the Confederate capital that's the situation when irony took over fast forward to the middle of September he's reoriented the war into the United States from outside the place of human his army in the minds of the Confederate people and his soldiers it's just it doesn't mean everybody liked Lee of course there were people who didn't like him but overwhelmingly it's the the morality army Northern Virginia is quite impressive until very near the end what time I was supposed to stop okay one more question says how would I characterize as widely he's outwardly absolutely loyal in the United States he applied to get a pardon the pardon it was a two-part process nice and in one part and intent in the other part and then when he's standing in the second part it wasn't put together with the first part and he never got I think Jimmy Carter partly Jimmy Carter partly about the same time Kentucky ratified the 13th amendment going on in the 1970s I think that he was making a gesture saying that he has a practical attitude to what happened in the world he would have no just bring more misery we tried our best we lost they won they set the terms we followed the terms because they won in this story that's the public stance so I think the fact that he Jubal Early never swore allegiance to the United States after the war many people didn't believe it so I would say he would look at us and say and Mena I scored my loyalty to the United States doesn't mean okay in the United States here's your option you can either be back in the United States so the question they ask on the polls is what counts and sometimes they don't ask the question that really tells us what we want to know thank you very much you

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Length: 68min 59sec (4139 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2016