Why the Civil War Still Matters Today | James M. McPherson | 2011

[Music] well good morning to all of you and thank you for your warm welcome to this beautiful valley on this spectacularly beautiful day even before the many conferences and commemorations and books and other public events associated with the bicentennial of abraham lincoln's birth in 2009 and the current sesquicentennial observation of the civil war took place the american civil war was the most popular historical subject in most parts of the united states back in the 1980s the historian at vicksburg national military park declared americans just can't get enough of the civil war a bookstore owner in falls church virginia said also in the 1980s for the last two years civil war books have been flying out of here it's not just the buffs who buy it's the general public from high school kids to retired people civil war books are the leading sellers for the history book club back in 1990 some 30 million viewers watched the ken burns 11 hours of television documentary on the civil war and rebroadcasts during the past 20 years have lifted that number at least to 50 million in the united states and abroad it is said that some 40 000 americans are civil war reenactors who reenact civil war battles before thousands of spectators every year at or near where they took place a hundred and fifty years ago what accounts for this intense interest in that fratercidal contest conflict that almost tore the country apart an interest that is even greater now during these years during which we will observe the 150th anniversary of the war's main events first perhaps was the sheer size of the conflict fought not in some foreign land thousands of miles away as most american wars have been but on battlefields ranging from pennsylvania to new mexico and from florida to kansas hallowed ground that americans can visit and do visit numbering in the millions today then there is the drama and the tragedy of the war's human cost at least 620 000 soldiers plus an unknown number of civilians who lost their lives in that war to help you understand the immensity of that figure it was two percent of the american population in 1860. if two percent of the america of americans were to be killed in a war fought today when the country is ten times the population it was then the number of american war dead would be more than six million or to take another statistic twenty three thousand union and confederate soldiers were killed wounded or missing in a single day at the battle of antietam on september 17 1862 that was nearly four times the number of american casualties on another famous single day in american history d-day june 6th 1944. the human cost of the civil war cast a long shadow forward in our history and continues to horrify us but also solemnly to impress us today 150 years later then there are the larger than life near mythical individuals on both sides whose lives and careers continue to fascinate us today abraham lincoln robert e lee ulysses s grant stonewall jackson william tecumseh sherman clara barton and on and on there's a kind of romance and glory as well as tragedy about those people and their times that it is hard to resist this drama in romance and tragedy help explain why the civil war remains such a popular historical subject but they don't entirely explain why that war still matters to us today 150 years later to help explain that i hope you'll forgive a little autobiography on my part to account for how and why i became interested in the civil war when i was in graduate school a half century ago because it was for many of the same reasons that the civil war still matters to us today 50 years after my graduate school days unlike many of my friends and colleagues i did not have a youthful fascination with the civil war when i arrived in baltimore in 1958 for graduate study at johns hopkins university i had not read anything specifically about the civil war except a couple of books by bruce caton i had not taken a college course on the civil war because my college did not offer such a course i did have a vague and rather naive interest in the history of the american south in part because having been born in north dakota and brought up in minnesota as you heard i found the the south exotic puzzling mysterious during my senior year in college in minnesota nine black students integrated little rock central high school in arkansas under the protection of the united states army i was well enough acquainted with the history and current events to know that the constitutional basis for the presence of those black students at central high was the 14th amendment to the constitution one of the most important products of the civil war and of the reconstruction period that followed it in retrospect it seems likely that that awareness planted the seeds of my interest in the civil war era that seat germinated within days of my arrival at johns hopkins when like other incoming graduate students i met with a prospective academic advisor mine was professor c van woodward the foremost historian of the american south whose book the strange career of jim crow became almost the basis for the civil rights movement my appointment with woodward was postponed for a day because he had been called to washington to testify before a congressional subcommittee about potential problems at little rock as a second year of school desegregation got underway well here was quite a revelation to me a historian offering council on the most important domestic issue of the day if i had not seen the connection between the civil war in my own times before then i certainly discovered it on that occasion that consciousness grew during my four years in baltimore the last two of you of those years was also the opening phase of the commemoration of the civil war centennial but that in fact made little impression on me except for the initial events in charleston south carolina in april 1961 when a black delegate from new jersey's centennial commission was denied a room at the francis marion hotel the headquarters for the centennial observations in protest several northern delegations walked out of the events boycotting them until president john f kennedy offered the integrated facilities of the charleston naval base that offer provoked the southern delegates to secede from the national commission and hold their own events at the hotel it all seemed like deja vu all over again but apart from that incident the civil rights movement eclipsed the centennial observations during the first half of the 1960s those were the years of sit-ins and freedom rides in the south of southern political leaders vowing what they called massive resistance to national laws and court decisions of federal marshals and troops being sent into the south trying to protect civil rights demonstrators of conflict and violence of the march on washington in august 1963 when martin luther king stood before the lincoln memorial and began his i have a dream speech with these words five score years ago a great american in whose symbolic statue is symbolic shadow we stand today signed the emancipation proclamation this momentous decree came as a great beacon-like of hope to millions of negro slaves who had been scarred in the flame of withering injustice these were also the years of the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 which derived their constitutional basis from the 14th and 15th amendments adopted a century earlier the creation of the freedmen's bureau by the federal government in 1865 to aid the transition of four million slaves to freedom was the first large-scale intervention by the government in the field of social welfare it was it was these parallels between the 1860s in the 1960s the roots of events of my own time in events of exactly a century earlier that propelled me to become a historian of the civil war and reconstruction i became convinced that i could not fully understand the issues and events of my own time unless i learned about their roots in the era of the civil war slavery in its abolition the conflict between north and south the struggle between state sovereignty and the federal government the role of government in social change and the resistance to both government and to social change those issues are as salient and controversial today in many ways as they were in the 1960s not to mention the 1860s today we have an african-american president of the united states which would not have been possible without the civil rights movement of a half century ago which in turn would not have been possible without the events of the civil war and reconstruction era many of the issues over which the civil war was fought still resonate today matters of race and citizenship regional rivalries the relative powers and responsibilities of federal state and local governments the first section of the 14th amendment which among other things conferred american citizenship on anyone born in the united states has become controversial today because of growing concern about illegal immigration as the great southern novelist william faulkner once said the past is not dead it is not even past well let's take a closer look at some of those aspects of the civil war that are neither dead nor past at first glance it appeared that northern victory in the civil war resolved two fundamental festering issues that had been left unresolved by the revolution of 1776 that had given birth to the nation first whether this fragile republican experiment called the united states would survive as one nation indivisible second whether the house divided would continue to endure half slave and half free both of those issues had remained open questions until 1865. many americans in the early decades of the country's history were concerned even obsessed about whether the nation would break apart republics throughout history had risen and fallen collapsed broken apart many european conservatives predicted that the same thing would happen to the united states some americans advocated the right of secession and periodically threatened to invoke it 11 states did invoke it in 1861 but since 1865 no state or region has seriously threatened secession not even during the decade of so-called massive resistance to desegregation from 1954 to 1964. i say no state or region or person has seriously threatened secession i don't mean to deny that some groups and individuals have indeed threatened secession but how serious they are is sometimes open to question for example the current governor of texas who has openly asserted his state's right to secede but somewhat inconsistently is now running for the republican nomination for president of the united states by the 1850s the united states which had been founded on a charter that declared all men created equal with an equal title to liberty had become the largest slave holding country in the world making a mockery of this country's professions of freedom and equal rights as abraham lincoln put it in a speech in 1854 the monstrous injustice of slavery deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites but with the emancipation proclamation in 1863 and the 13th amendment to the constitution in 1865 that particular monstrous injustice and hypocrisy existed no more yet the legacy of slavery in the form of racial discrimination and prejudice long plagued the united states and hasn't entirely disappeared 150 years later in the process of preserving the union of 1776 while purging it of slavery the civil war also transformed it before 1861 the words united states were a plural noun the united states have a republican form of government since 1865 the united states is a singular noun the united states is a world power the north went to war to preserve the union it ended by creating a nation this transformation can be traced in lincoln's most important wartime addresses his first inaugural address in 1861 contained the word union 20 times and the word nation not once in lincoln's first message to congress on july 4th 1861 he used the word union 32 times and nation only three times in his famous public letter to horus greeley of august 22nd 1862 concerning slavery in the war lincoln spoke of the union eight times and the nation not at all but in the brief gettysburg address 15 months later he did not refer to the union at all but used the word nation five times and in the second inaugural address looking back over the trauma of the past four years lincoln spoke of one side seeking to dissolve the union in 1861 and the other side accepting the challenge of war to preserve the nation the old decentralized antebellum republic in which the post office was the only agency of national government that touched the average citizen was transformed by the crucible of war into a centralized polity that taxed people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect the taxes expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts created a national currency and a federally chartered banking system drafted men into the army and created the freedmen's bureau as the first national agency for social welfare 11 of the first 12 amendments to the constitution had limited the powers of the national government most of them contain some form of the words that the federal government shall not have certain powers most of the next 15 constitutional amendments starting with the 13th amendment in 1865 contain the words that the federal government shall have the power to enforce those provisions the first three of the post-civil war constitutional amendments transformed four million slaves into citizens and voters within five years the most rapid and fundamental transformation in american history even if the nation did backslide on part of this commitment for three generations after 1877. from 1789 to 1861 a southern slaveholder was president of the united states for two-thirds of those years two-thirds of the speakers of the house and president's pro tem of the senate were also southerners 20 of the 35 supreme court justices during that period had been from slave states which always had a majority on the supreme court before 1861 but after the civil war a century passed before another resident of a southern state was elected president lyndon johnson in 1964. for half a century after the civil war only one southerner served as speaker of the house and none as president pro tem of the senate only five of the 26 supreme court justices appointed during that half century were southerners the institutions and ideologies of a plantation society and a slave system that had dominated half of the country before 1861 and sought to dominate more went down with a great crash in 1865 and were replaced by the institutions and ideology of free labor entrepreneurial democratic capitalism for better or for worse the flames of the civil war forged the framework of modern america that last point requires some elaboration before 1865 two distinct socioeconomic and cultural systems had competed for dominance within the body politic of the united states although in retrospect the triumph of free labor capitalism seems to have been inevitable that was by no means clear for most of the antebellum generation not only did the institutions and ideology of the rural agricultural plantation south based on slave labor dominate the united states government during that most of that time but the territory of the free state of the slave states also considerably exceeded that of the free states before 1859 and the southern drive for further territorial expansion seemed more aggressive than that of the north most of the slave states seceded from the united states in 1861 not only because they feared the potential threat to the long-term survival of slavery posed by lincoln's election but also because they looked forward to the expansion of a dynamic independent slave-holding polity into new territory by the acquisition of cuba and perhaps more of mexico and central america if the confederacy had prevailed in the 1860s it's quite possible that the emergence of the united states as the world's leading industrial as well as agricultural producer by the end of the 19th century and as the world's most powerful nation in the 20th century might never have happened that it did happen is certainly one of the most important legacies of the civil war not only for america but also for the world at the same time however the civil war had left the south impoverished its agricultural economy in shambles and the freed slaves in a limbo of second-class citizenship after the failure of reconstruction in the 1870s to fulfill the promise of civil and political equality embodied in the 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution those amendments remained in the constitution however and the legacy of national unity a strong national government and a war for freedom inherited from the triumph of the 1860s was revived again in the civil rights movement of the 1960s which finally began the momentous process of making good on the promises of a century earlier even though many white southerners for generations lamented the cause they had lost in 1865 indeed mourned the world they had lost a world they romanticized into a vision of moonlight and magnolias white as well as black southerners are today probably better off because they lost that war than they would have been if they had won it and some of them might even admit as much no single word better expresses what americans believe their country has stood for from 1776 right down to the present than the word liberty the tragic irony of the civil war is that both sides profess to fight for the heritage of liberty bequeathed to them by the founding fathers north and south alike in 1861 wrapped themselves in the mantle of 1776 but each side interpreted that heritage in opposite ways and at first neither side included the slaves in the vision of liberty for which they professed to fight but the slaves did and by the time of lincoln's gettysburg address in 1863 the north fought not merely for the liberty bequeathed to them by the founders but also for that new birth of freedom lincoln invoked at gettysburg these multiple and varying meanings of liberty and how they dissolved and reformed in kaleidoscopic patterns during the war provide the central meaning of the war for the american experience right on down to the present let's take a look at those various meanings southern states invoke the example of their forefathers of 1776 who had seceded from the british empire in the name of liberty to govern themselves southern secessionists proclaimed in 1861 the same spirit of freedom and independence that impelled our fathers to the separation from the british government will impel the liberty loving people of the south to separation from the united states and as jefferson davis put it from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights which our fathers bequeath to us let us renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty one of those liberties for which southern whites contended lincoln had said sarcastically back in 1854 was the liberty to make slaves of other people in 1861 many northerners similarly ridiculed the confederacy's profession to be fighting for the same ideals of liberty as their forefathers of 1776. that said the anti-slavery poet and journalist william cullen bryant that was a libel upon the whole character and conduct of the men of 76 ignoring the fact that many of the founding fathers owned slaves most of them in fact bryant claimed that the founders had fought the revolution to establish the rights of man and principles of universal liberty while the south he said seceded in 1861 not in the interest of general humanity but of a domestic despotism their motto is not liberty but slavery in 1864 right in the middle of the war lincoln as he often did used a parable to make an important point in this case a point about the multiple meanings of liberty he did so in a speech in baltimore in a slave state that had remained in the union and was even then engaged in bitter debates about a state constitutional amendment to abolish slavery in maryland which by the way narrowly passed later that year the world has never had a good definition of the word liberty and the american people just now are much in want of one lincoln said on this occasion we all declare for liberty but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing with some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men in the product of other men's labor here are two not only different but incompatible things called by the same name liberty lincoln went on to illustrate his point with a parable about animals the shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat he said for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty especially as the sheep is a black one plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon the definition of the word liberty and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures even the north and all professing to love liberty hence we behold the processes by which thousands our daily passing from under the yoke of bondage hailed by some as the advance of liberty and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty the shepherd in this fable was of course lincoln himself the black sheep was the slave and the wolf his owner as commander-in-chief of an army of a million men lincoln wielded a great deal of power and by this stage of the war that power was being used not only to defeat the confederacy and preserve the nation but also to abolish slavery but traditionally in american ideology power was the enemy of liberty americans had fought their revolution to get free from the power of the british crown as james madison put it there is a tendency in all governments to an augmentation of power at the expense of liberty to curb this tendency framers of the constitution devised a series of checks and balances that divided power among three branches of the national government between two houses of congress and between the state and federal governments as in madison's words an essential precaution in favor of liberty even that was not enough in the first ten amendments to the constitution the bill of rights the power of the national government was further limited by all those shall nots in those first ten amendments through most of early american history those who feared the potential of power to undermine liberty remained eternally vigilant against this threat when the famous reformer of the treatment of mentally ill dorothea dicks persuaded congress to pass a bill granting public lands to the states to subsidize mental hospitals in president franklin pierce vetoed it in the name of preserving liberty for if congress could do this pierce warned it has the same power to provide for the indigent who are not insane and thus the whole field of public beneficence is thrown open to the care and culture of the federal government this would mean pierce continued in his veto message this would mean all sovereignty vested in an absolute consolidated central power against which the spirit of liberty has so often and in so many countries struggled in vain the bill for mental hospitals therefore would be the beginning of the end of our blessed inheritance of representative liberty pro-slavery southerners like john c calhoun insisted on keeping the national government weak as a form of insurance against a possible anti-slavery majority in congress at some future time that might try to abolish or weaken slavery state sovereignty or states rights was a bulwark against this potential anti-slavery majority the most extreme manifestation of state sovereignty of course was secession in the name of the liberty of southern states and the southern people to reject the federal government and form their own pro-slavery nation if this version of liberty was to be dis used to destroy the united states most northerners concluded during the civil war then it was time to take another look at the meaning of liberty to help us understand this change in attitude toward the meaning of liberty we can turn to the definitions offered by the famous 20th century british philosopher isaiah berlin in a famous essay titled two concepts of liberty the two concepts are negative liberty and positive liberty the idea of negative liberty is perhaps more familiar it can be defined as the absence of restraint a freedom from interference by outside authority with individual thought or behavior laws requiring motorists to wear seat belts or motorcyclists to wear helmets would be under this definition to prevent them from enjoying the liberty to choose not to wear seat belts or helmets negative liberty therefore can be described as freedom from positive liberty by contrast can be best understood as freedom to it's not necessarily incompatible with negative liberty but it has a different focus or emphasis take freedom of the press freedom of the press is generally viewed as a negative liberty freedom from interference with what a writer writes or a reader reads but an illiterate person suffers from a denial of positive liberty he's unable to enjoy the freedom to write or read whatever he pleases not because some authority prevents him from doing so but because he cannot read or write at all he suffers not the absence of a negative liberty freedom from but of a positive liberty freedom to read and write the remedy lies not in the removal of restraint but in the achievement of the capacity to read and write the civil war accomplished an historic shift in american values in the direction of positive liberty the change from all those shall nots in the first ten amendments in the cost of to the constitution to the phrase congress shall have the power to enforce this provision in most of the post-civil war amendments is indicative of that shift especially the 13th amendment which liberated 4 million slaves and the 14th and 15th which guaranteed them equal civil and political rights abraham lincoln played a crucial role in this historic change toward positive liberty let us return to lincoln's parable of the shepherd the sheep the black sheep and the wolf the shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator here's lincoln the shepherd using the power of government in the army to achieve a positive liberty for the sheep but the wolf was a believer in negative liberty for to him the shepherd was as lincoln put it the destroyer of liberty especially as the sheep is a black one positive liberty is an open-ended concept it has the capacity to expand toward notions of equity justice social welfare equality of opportunity for how much liberty does a starving person enjoy except the liberty to starve how much freedom of the press can exist in a society of illiterate people how free is a motorcyclist who is paralyzed for life by a head injury that might have been prevented if he had worn a helmet with the new birth of freedom invoked by lincoln at gettysburg he helped to move the nation toward an expanded and open-ended concept of positive liberty on the side of the union lincoln said on another occasion on the side of the union this war is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men to lift artificial weights from all shoulders to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all to a fall to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life of course the tension between negative and positive liberty did not come to an end with the civil war that tension has remained a constant in american political and social philosophy in recent years with the rise of the tea party and other small government or anti-government movements in our politics there has been a revival of negative liberty the next presidential election might pit the concepts of positive and negative liberty against each other more clearly than in any other recent election how that might play out in the midst of our sesquicentennial observations of the civil war remains to be seen in any case it is yet another example of why the civil war still matters thank you you

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Published: Tue Nov 17 2020