Guests Include:

• Pauline Maier, Professor of History at MIT and author of American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence
• James Heintze, Librarian Emeritus at American University and author of The Fourth of July Encyclopedia
• David Blight, Professor of History at Yale University and author of Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee

Show Highlights

• Declaring Independence
  For years, the Declaration of Independence sat untouched in a dusty archive. So how did it become one of America’s most prized documents? Historian Pauline Maier talks about how the meanings of “independence” have evolved over time.
• Guide to Frederick Douglass’ speech
  Historian David Blight narrates a reenactment of Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro,” widely known as one of the greatest Abolitionist speeches ever. In it, Douglass highlights the hypocrisy of celebrating liberty in a nation that allows slavery.

Web Exclusive

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?
Listen to all of Frederick Douglass’ speech, courtesy of TBM records.

Further Reading

Want to dig deeper into the history of July Fourth? Check out a list of sources that the History Guys put together to learn more.

In this episode, the History Guys focus on the dramatic six months between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the outbreak of war. Over the course of the hour, they attempt to understand the period from the perspective of Americans at the time. Why did abolitionists dread the prospect of Lincoln’s presidency? Why did slaveholders in many parts of the South argue against secession? What made the leaders of Virginia, a state long known as “the mother of presidents,” finally decide to break their ties with the nation? How did 19^th century ideas about race and gender shape people’s decision-making? And finally, did the existence of slavery mean some kind of civil war would come sooner or later, or might war have been averted?

“The Road to Civil War” is Part I of a three-part BackStory series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

Read Show Transcript

Guests Include:

* David Blight — historian and author of A Slave No More and Frederick Douglass’s Civil War

* Elizabeth Varon — historian and author of Disunion!: The coming of the American Civil War

* William Freehling — historian and author of Showdown in Virginia and The Road to Disunion

Features and Highlights

Listen to the story of Lincoln’s train journey from Springfield to Washington, DC, and hear extended versions of interviews in the show.

Further Reading

Want to peer further down the road to Civil War? The BackStory research team has compiled a comprehensive list of print and online resources for further exploration. Read On.

Listing of the music heard in “Civil War 150th: The Road to Civil War”

Tape: From VFH Radio in Charlottesville, Virginia, this is “BackStory.”

Peter Onuf: From weapons of mass destruction to the U.S.S. Maine, each of America’s wars has been accompanied by its own debate at home, but no war has produced as much debate about its root causes as the American Civil War.  Was it slavery or states’ rights?  Might it have been avoided or was it baked into our history from the outset?  One hundred and fifty years after the shooting began, the national conversation about what the Civil War really meant is still going strong.

Ed Ayers: We’re the American History Guys and today on our show, we’re diving head first into that conversation with an hour devoted to your questions about the Civil War.  What interests you about the war and how much does that have to do with your own family story?  How have our collective stories about the Civil War evolved and what in the world is left to discuss?

PO: The questions that remain one hundred and fifty years later.  That’s coming up on “BackStory” after this news.

Tony Field: Hi, I’m Tony Field, the producer of “BackStory.”  Today’s Podcast is the third and final installment in our special Civil War Anniversary Series.  You can find the first two parts on our website and on iTunes.  If you enjoy the Podcast, please consider making a contribution to VFH Radio to help cover some of our production costs.  There’s a link to give in the bottom right hand corner of our website, backstoryradio.org.  Fifteen dollars would amount to a dime for each year since the Civil War began and we’ll consider any donation of that amount as an endorsement of our work on this series.  As always, you can also help out by sharing links to our shows with your friends and by leaving a review on our page in the iTunes store.  Thanks so much for listening.  Now, back to the show.

PO: Major production support for “BackStory” is provided the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.  Support also comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  [music]  This is “BackStory,” with us, the American History Guys.  I’m Peter Onuf, the 18th century guy.

EA: I’m Ed Ayers, the 19th century guy.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh, 20^th century history guy.  [music]   A few weeks ago, a historian friend of ours here at the University of Virginia, a guy by the name of Gary Gallagher, received an invitation to deliver a talk about the Civil War.  Now, there’s nothing new about that.  Gary is one of the most prominent scholars on the Civil War.  He could probably talk about the Civil War in his sleep, but he had the feeling that this lecture was going to be just a little bit different.

Gary Gallagher: I was asked to talk to basically the Democratic Caucus of the United States Senate.

PO: The invitation came from the office of Senator Harry Reid.  They wanted Gary to provide the after-dinner entertainment for a group of 49 senators attending a retreat in Central Virginia.

Gallagher: I’d been told to give 20 minutes worth of comments and to be ready for 20 minutes worth of questions and answers, and the third and most important thing according to the person who invited me and who was speaking for the Majority Leader Senator Reid, “don’t be boring.”

PO: That last admonition weighed on Gary throughout the evening’s dinner, especially as the dinner went on, and on, and on, much later into the evening than had been originally planned.

Gallagher: Just before I got up, Senator Kerry who was sitting right across from me leaned over and said, “I wouldn’t give prepared remarks if I were you,” and I said, “I’m way ahead of you Senator, I’m not giving prepared remarks,” and so I didn’t.  I asked for a hand-held mic and I just walked up and down and talked to them.

BB: Gary ended up talking to the senators about everything from the balance of power between federal, state, and local governments to what happens to individual liberties in war-time—all from the perspective of the mid-19th century.  The Q & A continued late into the evening, leading Gary to believe that a lot of these senators found the Civil War more than a little relevant to the issues they’re dealing with today.

EA: In the spirit of that evening, we’re devoting today’s show to your questions about the Civil War.  We’re interested in hearing your thoughts about how the war connects with today.  The last two episodes of our program looked specifically at the run-up to the war and at the question of what actually motivated Northerners and Southerners to take up arms against each other.  In this third episode of our Civil War 150th Anniversary Series, we’re opening things up.  All questions are fair game. And, yes, we promise to do our utmost not to be boring.

BB: Okay, guys, I understand that we all get excited about anniversaries and it’s been a hundred and fifty years since the Civil War, but I got to tell you, I don’t understand all of the effort and the subtlety and the nuance that has gone into recreating this event.  It actually seems pretty clear-cut to me, right?  I mean, there’re two really fundamental things at stake:  one is the preservation of the Union—

PO: Yeah.

BB: And two is liberty.

PO: Liberty for all.

BB: Check.  Check.  Check.  End of story.  I mean, what actually is there to talk about.

PO: Well, Brian, I would say the question then and now is this:  who is an American?  Now, if you think we have a clear answer to that question right now, then I think you’re crazy and you know that it’s not true. We’re constantly debating the margins of nationhood.  Well, that’s what was happening in the period of the Civil War, that is, were African Americans really part of America?  Were they Americans?  Now, that’s the question I think that’s so troubling to us now looking back is even in the North, the civil rights, the liberties of blacks were radically circumscribed.  You would have very few people accept fully the notion that these are us, that is, white people saying black people are part of the great American people and obviously, slavery was the great bulwark of this exclusion of a whole people, but that’s the reality of the times, so let’s look it straight in the face and say, okay, yeah, we have come a long way but it wasn’t because we got rid of Confederates.  I mean, that wasn’t it.  There was a lot of other things that had to happen.

BB: So you’re pointing to a danger also, Peter, which is the notion that, okay, this is an important question, but we settled it in the Civil War.

PO: Yeah, exactly right.

EA: And not really settled it but atoned for it.

BB: And atoned for it.  Yeah, that’s terrific.

EA: What’s what gets me is a sense of, yes, I know we were all complicit in this for 200 years, longer than we’ve been since the Civil War that the nation as a whole tolerated and fostered slavery and somehow that the white North sacrifice, intentional or otherwise, in the Civil War somehow wipes the books clean—

PP: Yeah, yeah.

EA: And buys innocence for the nation.  I think the other danger of it is that it creates the impression that a war can fix a deep-seated social problem and, well, look, in just four years, the North wiped out slavery.  Imagine what we could do elsewhere with missiles and tanks, so I think that’s it full of danger to too easily settle up on a triumphal story of the Civil War.  I think it’s better for us to feel so profoundly fortunate that it turned out as it did and for us to redeem that good fortune by trying to live up to the best of its promise.

BB: Guys, we have some good fortune of our own.  We call that good fortune our listeners and our callers.  For the past few weeks, our producers have been soliciting your questions on our website, backstoryradio.org. Today, they’ve invited a few of the people who left comments there to join us on the phone.

[phone music]

PO: Our first call today is from Atlanta Georgia.  It’s Dan.  Dan, welcome to “BackStory.”

Caller (Dan): Hey, thanks for having me.

PO: So, Civil War, a hot topic.  Dan, what’s on your mind?

Caller (Dan): Well, I was thinking a lot about the secession crisis of 1860 and 1861 because it seems to me in many of the popular retellings of the history of the war that it kind of goes that Lincoln was elected in November of 1860 and from then on down, the Civil War was happening and there was no stopping it—

PO: Right.

Caller (Dan): But over time, you know, I’ve kind of looked a little bit closer at some of the events that happened and there was a really long time in between when Lincoln was elected and when the fighting really started.  The states, they didn’t all leave at once.  They kind of slowly filed out one at the time and there was a lot of negotiations back and forth and a lot of debate in the state legislatures and so with all of this going on, all of these different small events, how much could those affect the course of history as opposed to the longer term events that we talk about a lot in [9:03/ __________] slavery sectionalism.

PO: That’s a great question.  Well, you know, Dan, you’re really putting your finger on a hot button for historians.  It’s the contingency button.  That is, things are not inevitable.  Stuff happens but it doesn’t have to happen and we have one of the world’s leading authorities on contingency hailing from the 19^th century.  Come to us, Ed.  [laughter]  Communications are very irregular across the centuries.

EA: One way to think about this is there’s two groups of historians:  one, to the fundamentalists who point to the real fact that slavery is a driving source of conflict from the moment that the American nation is created and that the fact that we see every decade some different kind of struggle over it, shows that it was going to come to some kind of head and if you just want to get all hung up on the details of what actually happened, you’re overlooking this fundamental struggle.  Other people say, no, no, no, this is really about the political machinations at the time and this is what most American historians thought in the 1920s and ’30s, that if you’d had somebody other than James Buchanan and other inept blundering generation at the famous phrase went, you would’ve had the war.  I think what historians today are trying to figure out is exactly how do you connect those underlying structural tensions and the more dynamic personal—

BB: Contingencies.

EA: Contingencies.

PO: Yeah, yeah, right, but Ed, wouldn’t say that something had to happen.  I’m prepared to say that as an expert on the founding, so you might cast me as a fundamentalist but what’s going to happen is by no means clear.  Does it have to be that kind of war?  Do we know who the antagonists are going to be?  We don’t know these outcomes and it seems to me everything is wound up in the thing that does happen and that, of course, is deeply contingent.

EA: Well, you know, I think the critical thing to understand is that it’s not just that the war has started like a wind-up toy—

PO: Yeah, yeah.

EA: Even in April of 1861.  Now, once it begins, it can follow lots of different courses.  As a matter of fact, the one that it followed seemed very unlikely to most people at the time, that it could be fought to just ultimate exhaustion on both sides.  You know, even after Virginia and Tennessee and North Carolina and Arkansas leave, Maryland and Kentucky do not.  Even though you could imagine that Kentucky had at least as much reason to secede as Tennessee, it didn’t because of geopolitical positioning and so forth, so I think that Dan, you’re on to something really important, that we’ve got to relax our certainty of how the story is unfolding enough to actually see what happened.

BB: I have a question for you, Dan.  As 20^th century guy, I want to know what interests you about all this stuff.  You know, frankly, to me it seems a really long time ago.

PO: He’s from Atlanta, Brian.  [laughter]

Caller (Dan): Yeah, we’ve got a big reminder carved onto Stone Mountain.

PO: That’s right.

Caller (Dan): Of the conflict.  You know, in Atlanta, there’s historical markers on every corner in downtown Atlanta.

BB: Yeah, but you know you guys are too busy to hate there in Atlanta and you’ve kind of, you know, you’re the new South, but, you know, to get back to contingency, what about you?  What about your circumstances really drives you to learn so much about the Civil War?  You seem to know more about it than I do, for instance.  [laughter]

PO: That is saying next to nothing.

BB: I know.  I know.  Dan doesn’t know that, though.  You didn’t have to tell him that.

PO: Go ahead, Dan.

Caller (Dan): Well, I think that part of what drives my interest in it today is there so much contemporary debate on it, so even if the Civil War in and of itself was not that interesting, the fact that so many people keep debating about what caused it, how did this happen, what does it mean, you know, it just kind of naturally draws my interest looking to some of the history around it and saying, well, you know, what did happen.

PO: In other words, Dan, you’re saying it’s out of self-defense that you engage with it?

Caller (Dan): I want to feel like I’m well equipped [13:06 / with facts].

PO: You know, I think that’s a serious response.  I’m not making fun of that.

EA: I would have a word in particular for Dan.  We look back on it now and that is that Georgia came in pretty soon after South Carolina which was one of the original Confederates states, but historians have looked at the returns pretty carefully and think that maybe a majority of white Georgia men would have voted against secession if it had been presented as such.  And it’s certainly the case that Georgia under Governor Brown began to be a real thorn in the side of the Confederacy almost from the beginning, withholding men, resisting Confederate policy, so here’s the contingent thing I’d leave you with, Dan.  Virginia comes in kicking and screaming, deeply reluctant.

PO: Yep.

EA: And then is remarkably loyal to the Confederacy from start to finish whereas Georgia is torn apart.  Northern Georgia resists the Confederacy so we tend to think about the Deep South being the real Confederacy and the upper South being kind of an ersatz Confederacy—

PO: Yeah, yeah.

EA: But in the course of the war it becomes the opposite.

PO: So, Dan, do you feel well armed for your next engagement on the Civil War?

Caller (Dan): I hope so.

PO: Good.  Yeah, well, keep your powder dry.

Caller (Dan): It can be difficult to make some progress among people sometimes.

PO: All right.  Well, Dan, keep on fighting.

BB: Thank you, Dan.

PO: Thanks for calling.

Caller (Dan): Thank you very much.

PO: Bye.

EA: Bye, Dan.  [music]

PO: It’s time for a short break, but before we go, let me just tell you that we’ve posted tons of great multimedia resources on the Civil War at backstoryradio.org.  After the break, we’ll return to the phones, so please, don’t go away.  This is “BackStory,” the show that looks at a topic from the perspective of three different centuries.  I’m the 18^th century guy, Peter Onuf.

EA: I’m the 19th century guy, Ed Ayers.

BB: And I’m the 20th century guy, Brian Balogh. Today, we’re marking the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War’s beginnings by opening up the phone lines to your questions about the conflict.  For a few weeks now, our producers have been surveying all the comments that you left at backstoryradio.org.  Today, they’ve invited a few of the people who left questions there to join us on the phone.

PO: Hey, guys, we’ve got a call from New York City.  Elaine’s on the line.  Elaine, welcome to “BackStory.”

Caller (Elaine): Hi, thank you so much and thank you for having me on the show.  So, I was wondering, what did racial identity, ethnicity make up, was in the military in both the North and South since at that time there were a lot of different races and plus a lot of different ethnicities living in America already.

PO: Right.

Caller (Elaine): So, I would imagine the military probably had a good mixture of different races, probably in the North but I’m not so sure about the South.

PO: Ed, maybe you could speak in a general way to the ethnic and racial make-up of the armies.  In a way, the question is do they reflect the country or the parts of the country that are now at war with each other.

EA: They actually do reflect their populations very effectively.  No, the white Southern concern was that the Union armies were reflecting too much ethnic diversity, [laughter] that they were not really the Northern people mobilizing but rather sending what they saw as the riff-raff, people who didn’t have a job otherwise, sort of mercenaries, but we’ve looked at this pretty carefully and it turns out that white Southerners were right in that Northern immigrants did fight but they fought really as a part of solidarity often with other people from their own ethnicities and they fought with remarkable bravery and consistency.  The harder thing for us to understand perhaps is that also in the South, which was more ethnically diverse before the Civil War than it was afterwards.

PO: Yeah, interesting.

EA: That there sometimes people were more conflicted but you would’ve had very prominent Irish people, Germans, and Jews who would fight for the Confederacy, so I think the general story is that the entire populations of the North and South, the entire white populations, were quite mobilized by the Civil War.

PO: And that’s the important qualification, Elaine.  It’s white we’re talking about.  The idea of African Americans fighting on, well, on either side, though, ultimately, of course, even the Confederates consider mobilizing slaves and freeing them in order to win, but this is in the desperate final phases of the war, but the idea that this was a democratic movement in the broadest sense, North and South, even in the North there’s tremendous resistance to mobilizing black troops.

EA: Yeah, Elaine, I’m curious as to where your question comes from.

Caller (Elaine): Well, I’m Chinese and we all know that America at that time that there were a lot of people from all over the world already, so I was just wondering, what was their motivation to join the military at that time?

PO: It’s a great question.  Yep.  And I think Ed mentioned the Irish and maybe, Ed, you could talk a little bit more about the Irish because in some ways that is the great immigrant group of this period and how the Irish would fit into American society, that’s a live issue.  There’s some discussion among historians that in many ways Irish were treated as if they were black, that is, a despised other, so the moment of wartime mobilization and Irish enthusiasm for the war North and South, because Ed’s right, I mean, there’re Irish units on both sides, indicates a kind of self-conscious Americanization.  It’s a moment in which you can prove yourself that you’re a part of this great country.

BB: Yeah.

EA: This is all the more remarkable that the Irish would fight because they were often pitted against African Americans at the bottom of the social order—

PO: Yes, yes, exactly.

EA: Competing for jobs and so the fact that Irish people often who’d lived in the United States less than 10 years are willing to imagine themselves as a part of the American people and willing to fight for the freedom of other people is really another amazing story in U.S. history.

PO: Uh huh.

EA: Something we need to remember, however, is that the Irish also rioted in the streets against what they saw as, and what was, in fact, an unfair use of the draft that seemed to them days after many of their compatriots had died in Gettysburg and the story was in the Irish neighborhoods, that they had been sacrificed by Union generals who did not value Irish lives the way they did a people who had been born in the United States, so you have both the greatest gallantry and sacrifice for the Union but also the nagging story of when push came to shove, the Irish and other working people did actually riot against the United States.

BB: And just for our 20^th century fans, it’s also true for the 20^th century where we have zoot suit riots among Mexican Americans during World War II that on a large part ethnic groups and racial groups see this as an opportunity but they also are not unaware of the intense discrimination and it’s very understandable that some would ask, what?

PO: But isn’t it interesting, though, that the U.S. colored troops are not rioting?

BB: Far from it.

PO: They’re rioting for the opportunity to fight and so the comparisons are interesting because, of course, there’re mixed feelings about the war but the one group that is absolutely clear about the war would be freed people or slaves, that the war means for them the end of slavery and the possibility of dignity and inclusion in the nation.

Caller (Elaine): Right.

PO: Thanks for your call.  It’s been a lot of fun talking to you.

Caller (Elaine): Thank you.  Have a good day.

EA: Bye bye. 

Caller (Elaine): Bye bye.  [music]

PO: We’ve got another call and it’s a local call from right here in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Blake— welcome to the show.

Caller (Blake): Hello.

PO: So, what’s on your mind?

Caller (Blake): Well, you know, I was brought up in Virginia and have lived I guess with the Civil War for my whole life and remember very vividly the Centennial in Richmond, but recently I have been trying to learn a little bit about the, for lack of a better word, the causes and have been reading particularly about the influence of the church, in this case, mostly Methodist and Presbyterian churches in the South and was wondering how you guys viewed that.  Do you feel the preachers from their pulpits and their writings led the South to the Civil War and to secession?

PO: Well, Blake, that’s a great question.  Blake wants to know whether the preachers are responsible for the Civil War.  That’s the short version of it.  Obviously, they didn’t do it all by themselves.  I’d say this is a point of departure.  Many Southerners believe there was a piety deficit between North and South, that the South was a more Christian place and the North was riven by heresy and socialism and secularism and so Southern preachers did a couple of important things, I think, and that is, on one hand, to tell Southerners that they had God on their side, that they were good Christians, and second, preachers played an absolutely crucial role in the emerging pro-slavery argument.

EA: That’s really well put, Peter.  I think the preachers make a real point of saying, hey, hey, hey, the pulpit is no place to talk about politics.

PO: Right.

EA: All that we say is that slavery has God’s divine sanction.  Other than that, we have no political position at all to make.

PO: That’s all.

EA: That’s right.  So, Southern preachers do not lead the South into secession but as Peter says, as soon as providence seems to dictate that that’s the way to go, the ministers are some of the most vocal advocates of the Confederacy.

PO: But, Ed, it’s my impression from historians who’ve written on this subject that in fact Southerners had ample ground in scriptural reference for the support of slavery and they might even have had the edge over their Northerner counterparts, at least if you’re looking for literal readings of the Bible and what it tells us.

EA: Well, that’s the crucial point, Peter.  The literal historic injunctions, especially in the Old Testament do accept slavery as a reality.  Increasingly, what happens in the North is that people look at the spirit of the New Testament instead.  It said how can you possibly love someone as your brother and hold them in perpetual bondage so there’s plenty of energy in the Bible—

PO: Yeah, yeah.

EA: For both pro- and anti-slavery.

PO: No question, but what is also going on and what’s important for white Southerners is that they believe that they have been successful in a great missionary campaign to Christianize the quarters and it’s one of the reasons why they’re comfortable with slavery is that they have taken an instrumental role in spreading Christianity in the slave population so the idea that the slaves were an internal enemy or dangerous subversives who would rise up and revolt, that had been mitigated if not altogether eliminated for many Southerners because they thought of Christianity as a profound bond of union between black and white, even if they worshipped separately.

Caller (Blake): But would that be a true belief, do you think, or more or less just an apology for the burdens that they’d put on African American through slavery.

PO: Hey, Blake, what is a true belief?

Caller (Blake): [laughter]

PO: It’s a known unknown or unknown known.  Do they believe it?  I think absolutely.  One of the things that we learn as historians is to take our subject seriously.  They may be by our standards deluded and self-serving, but that Southerners believe they were good Christians, I believe that’s absolutely true.

EA: As a matter of fact, the South says we are in the process of creating the most Christian nation on the face of the earth, but your question, I think, Blake is right.  It doesn’t take long for the end of the war for white Southerners to begin to worry, hmmm, were we fooling ourselves?

PO: Yeah.

EA: Yeah, do they really love us?  [laughter]  The fact that they’re moving away at the very first moment of freedom really is a confrontation with a kind of truth that the white South is really not ready to embrace.

BB: Hey, Blake, may I add an addendum to your good question?

Caller (Blake): Yes, please.

BB: Guys, I’d like to know—  I do know, actually, that the church played such a crucial role in the lives of African Americans after the Civil War.  Can you tell me something about religion and slaves during the Civil War?

EA: Well, one of the first thing that happens is the churches which had been the really only inter-racial space in the slave South begins separating.  At the very first moment, African Americans seize the opportunity to have their own churches.  You know, they’ve always gone off on their private worship ceremonies out in the woods or whatever, but in the Civil War itself, as things begin to fall apart, you find that black ministers step forward and begin leading the African American church, so you find that there’s a kind of freedom that comes maybe first in the religious realm and African Americans are quick to seize it.

PO: Well, Blake, thank you for calling “BackStory.”

Caller (Blake): Thank you very much

EA: Thank you, Blake.

Caller (Blake): Right.

PO: Bye.  [music]

BB: If you’re just tuning in, this is “BackStory,” and today we’re talking about everything you ever wanted to know about the American Civil War.  Or at least everything the people on the other end of our phone line want to know.

PO: Next up on that line we have Carl, calling in from Murray, Kentucky.  Carl, welcome to “BackStory.”

Caller (Carl): Oh, thanks, glad to be on.

PO: Yeah, so, we’re talking about the Civil War and you have something for us.

Caller (Carl): My question involves education.  As a future educator myself, I’m just wondering what do you all see the significance of the Civil War for kids of the next generation?

PO: Yeah.  Super question. That’s really the big question of this series we’re doing on the Civil War.  What can we take away from the Civil War?  What are the lessons we want to learn and can we get beyond simply reveling in the details and reenactments and all that stuff.  How about the 20^th century, because, you know, as an educator—

BB: I was being quiet because I know so little about the Civil War, Carl, but I’ll say my piece and then shut up.  I’ll tell you what I’ve learned from the guys about the Civil War which is basically you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.  You know, there were some very smart people back then and we might not have agreed with them and their views, but they thought about this really carefully and they followed the news and they talked to each other and they debated each other and just about everything that they thought was going to happen either didn’t happen or happened in another way or happened in ways that absolutely would’ve confounded them two or three years later.

PO: So, Brian is so absolutely right and it’s the historians’ takeaway, but just imagine with Carl that we’ve got school kids and we want this to be a real teaching opportunity.  Are there any—  Well, the old-fashioned word “civics.”  Any civics lessons, Ed and Brian.

BB: Well, I’ll continue and then, again, try to shut up.

PO: You will succeed.

BB: I think one of the lessons I would take away, Carl, and your future students, is that language and the way we talk to each other matters.

Caller (Carl): Right.

BB: That’s a very timely issue today as you know, and we as historians tend to pooh-pooh some of this very heated rhetoric that’s being tossed around today and say, oh, you know, they were a lot worse to each other back in the 19^th century but, you know what, every now and then things kind of come unraveled and that heated rhetoric which they surely used contributed, I think, to tearing at the fabric of the nation, along with, of course, key issues like slavery and expansion of slavery into the territories and now I really am going to be quiet.

EA: May I ask what age students that you’ll be teaching, Carl?

Caller (Carl): It’ll be secondary ed, 8^th to 12^th grade.

EA: Oh, man, 8^th.  If I were you, I would choose the 12^th.  [laughter]

Caller (Carl): Hey, I’m at the point now I’ll take anything they give me, really.

EA: I know how that goes.  That’s right.  Even 8^th graders.  But, you know, it’s a fine line.  I always tell the story, I’ve actually written some things about kind of the open-ended nature of some of these things and my daughter who was 11 at the time which I guess is pretty close—  That’s not quite 8^th grade.

PO: Right.

BB: She’s very precocious, though, Carl

EA: Exactly.  She walked in, literally with her American history textbook with her finger in part of the pages and she said, “Daddy, what caused the Civil War?”  And I was thinking, okay, do I go into all this thing about a the complexity and the indeterminacy and the choices to be made.  I said, “slavery, honey.”  [laughter]  And because, you know, that’s what she could have right then.  That’s what she could understand.  If you have to chose one word, that’s what it is.

Caller (Carl): Right.

EA: But the trick is, you know, as the kids get older, to suggest, yes, it was slavery but how was it slavery?

PO: Yeah, that’s the question.

EA: It suggests that the North was all different from the South.  No, they weren’t.  They sort of discovered over the course of the war that slavery was going to have to be destroyed and they didn’t want to do it necessarily and they weren’t just the good guys who were coming in.

PO: Right.

EA: But the people that look back on it now and, you know, you have the same accent I do, so I know you’re a fellow Southerner—

PO: It’s really grating, isn’t it, Brian?

BB: Yeah.  I would say one’s enough.

PO: [laughter]

EA: Hey, it’s never enough, is it, Carl?

Caller (Carl): That’s right.  We got to band together, I guess.

EA: Well, we tried that once.  It didn’t really work out all that well.  Even the last time I checked you guys in Kentucky chose not to stick together with the South.

PO: [laughter]

Caller (Carl): Well—

PO: Come on.  East Tennessee, a hot bed of Unionism.

Caller (Carl): I would say I’m from far western Kentucky and we were called the South Carolina Kentucky, so I guess I’m from the pro-Southern part.

EA: And I’m from east Tennessee.  We’re called the Massachusetts of Tennessee, so I guess it all evens out.  Which is an important lesson in and of itself, you know, that this was not just a thing.  If I were to come up with a sort of short version of all this is that kids, this is a story that we have to follow to see how it unfolds.  You can’t just sort of get to the summary and say that’s what it was all about.

PO: You know what?  We have to be aware of unintended consequences and we like in our mythic understandings of American history to ascribe the right intentions to our forefathers and foremothers.  We like to think that the right people at the right time stood up like Abraham Lincoln represents the North and he had a vision that slavery was evil.

Caller (Carl): Right.

PO: It’s not that there isn’t a conscience and a moral sense.  There is all over the place.  It’s just that what happened was not scripted, that it became a war that ended slavery was on nobody’s mind or very few, except for radical abolitionists’ minds at the start of the war and I think this is humbling—

Caller (Carl): Right.

PO: So, Carl, after listening to all this, you still want to go into the history teaching biz?

Caller (Carl): Well, yeah, sure.  [32:49 / __________]

EA: Okay. So what can we do to get you’re a job now, Carl?  Let’s get down to brass tacks.

PO: How about we write a letter for him?

EA: We’re ready.

PO: All right.  “BackStory” endorses Carl.  Great talking with you, Carl.  Thanks for calling.

Caller (Carl): Oh, yeah, I really enjoyed it.

EA: Thank you very much.

BB: Thanks a lot, Carl.

Caller (Carl): Thank you.  [music]

BB: It’s time for another break.  Don’t go away, though.  When we get back, we’ll hear if these two very wordy colleagues of mine are capable of summarizing the Civil War in a hundred and forty character characters.  That’s right.  You’re going to hear Peter and Ed tweet the Civil War.

PO: You’re listening to a Civil War special from “BackStory,” and we’ll be back in a minute.   We’re back with “BackStory,” the show that turns to history to understand the world around us today.  I’m Peter Onuf, and I represent the 18th century.

EA: I’m Ed Ayers, representing the 19th century.

BB: And I’m Brian Balogh, spokesman for the 20th century.  Normally on our program we take a topic from the news and explore its historical context.  Today we’re changing things up a little, and devoting the entire show instead to listener calls about the Civil War.  But before we go back to the phones, I’m just determined to get a little bit of the 21^st century into this show.  Okay, guys, I’ve warned you and you have had sixty seconds, a millennium in 21^st century terms, to think about this.  One hundred and forty characters or less, I want each of you to distill the essence of the Civil War.  I want you to tweet the Civil War.

PO: Okay.  I start.  I get a hundred and forty characters?

EA: That’s right.

PO: Right.  All right.  Here’s the simple version.

EA: That includes your name.

PO: Americans love their country.  They’re nationalists.  We had two different nations on one territory and it was love of nation and, of course, one of those nations was predicated on the existence of racial bondage; the other on the integrity of a Union that included both parts, both nations.  It’s nationalism.  That’s my one word answer.  Patriotism.  That’s another word.  But it’s the same word.  It’s this devotion to some higher cause and I think that’s why we admire these heroes North and South.  We know they are devoted to a higher cause.  We may have different judgments about the worthiness of that cause in retrospect, but put ourselves back in a moment.  They died for a reason.

EA: Okay.  In fairness to Peter, they didn’t have Twitter in the 18^th century.

PO: How many [centuries] was that?  [laughter]

BB: We’ll call that a fascinating and engaging blog.  Ed, you’re closer to the 21^st century.  See if you can tweet the Civil War.

EA: North versus South.  Black versus white.  Events creating their own momentum.  North brings victory out of near defeat, brings emancipation out of slavery.  The story continues.

BB: Wow.

PO: That’s good.

EA: That was very close.  [laughter]

BB: Well, now that we’ve experimented with the 21^st century, why don’t we go back to an old-fashioned technology like the good old telephone, something I feel so comfortable with as 20^th century guy.  [music]

PO: We have another call.  It’s from our nation’s capital and it’s Alan.  Alan, welcome to “BackStory.”

Caller (Alan): How are you guys doing?

PO: Oh, we’re doing pretty good.

Caller (Alan): Okay.  Well, you know, gentlemen, it seems to me that one of the criticisms of the Emancipation Proclamation is that it didn’t cover the border states or some Union-controlled areas.

PO: Yep.

Caller (Alan): And a lot of people look at that and they say, well, you know, there’s some illegitimacy concerning the Union’s desire to eliminate slavery.  Could you talk about that?

BB: Well, you have to trace this really to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1^st, 1863.

EA: And what the Emancipation Proclamation says is that in those places in rebellion against the United States, slavery is hereby abolished, but that leaves enormous gray areas.  You have some areas where the Union Army has penetrated and occupied all along the Mississippi River, New Orleans, Nashville, Tennessee.  Then you also have states that have never left the Union that are slave states, especially Kentucky is the largest one, and in all those places, you have a fundamental uncertainty about the future of slavery that the Emancipation Proclamation does not resolve.

BB: Does that not get cleared up until the 13^th Amendment?

EA: That’s right, Brian, until the 13^th Amendment in 1865 officially abolishes in the grain of the Constitution not as a war aim—

PO: Right.

EA: Right?

PO: So, Ed, the bottom line for Kentucky is there were slaves until the 13^th Amendment was ratified.

EA: That’s right.  So, ever since then, people have pointed to the hypocrisy the Emancipation Proclamation, that it emancipates people who are weak and actually reach them and the ones that are completely within our control are not emancipated.

PO: Right.

EA: So, let’s think about Abraham Lincoln’s point of view.  He needs more than anything the loyalty of the slaveholding border states—

BB: Right.

EA: Or the war is lost, especially Kentucky and Maryland.  If Maryland goes, then the capital of the United States is surrounded by enemy territory.  If Kentucky goes, they lose the Tennessee River and the incredible strategic advantage that gives.  You might also say that even if those things weren’t compelling, he does not want to have to be fighting a war in the rear, so to speak, of slaveholders resisting the Union cause in those very tenuous Union states, so the reasons to not abolish slavery are much more powerful than the moral consistency of abolishing slavery in the border states would’ve suggested.

PO: Yeah, and Ed, it’s fair to add that preponderant opinion throughout the Union North was not anti-slavery.  It wasn’t as if there was a clear public will and so even in prudential political terms, Lincoln couldn’t get out, way out in front of the American people, that is, the people of the North without subverting his own cause.  You can talk about a war in the rear.  What would people have said about a war against slavery?  Not only was it unconstitutional but nobody was ready or had thought through the implications of the end of slavery, not just for the South but for the North as well.

BB: Well, I’m going to just jump in kind of on Alan’s end of things and just comment on the remarkable paradox.  If I’m right, Ed, that you had slaves being freed in the Confederacy before there were freed in the Union.

EA: That’s right.  So, the hypocrisy is apparent and people who want to be skeptical of Abraham Lincoln and, ironically, this is often African Americans who were looking at this and saying don’t be talking about giving us anything, because we seized our freedom ourselves.  When you did have power, you didn’t use it.

Caller (Alan): I just want to just add a couple other things.  You know, I don’t really want to, you know, glorify Lincoln too much, I guess, but I do understand that before the war, he tried to, I guess, in modern language, tried to maybe pay off the border states.  I know that he specifically approached Delaware and basically said, you know, can we have compensated emancipation and I think his term was, you know, this war will probably end slavery anyway.  Why don’t you let us pay you to free your slaves and then at least that will be one less contentious issue to think about, so, again, I’m not really saying that he deserves credit but I think that’s maybe a bit of history about him trying to cause emancipation in the border states that people don’t understand, so that’s just one thing I was going to add.

PO: Yeah, well, you know, Lincoln was in favor of colonization, that is, to free people and send them someplace else and the idea of compensated emancipation is another version of colonization.  It was going to be a big thing for white Americans to get their minds around the idea of an integrated nation based on the premise of equality.    If you look at state legislation in the North up to the Civil War with few exceptions, the legal political environment was increasingly hostile to freed blacks—

EA: That’s right.

PO: If you just tracked legislation as an expression of the popular will, you’d say, you know, things don’t look that good, so what’s remarkable is that opinion could be so radically reshaped and what really was in historians’ terms, a very short of time and I think that makes the achievement of emancipation all the more remarkable.

EA: Peter’s exactly right, of course, about the atmosphere for African Americans in the North before the war.  The sad thing is that it was the same thing for African Americans after the war as well.

PO: Uh huh, yep.

EA: A terrible backlash in some ways against African Americans during the war.  The New York City draft riots and all that, blaming African Americans for being held in slavery but after the war at the same time that Reconstruction’s going on, Northern states are removing the vote from African American men, so I guess what strikes me is that it is amazing that the North could mobilize itself enough during the war to get behind ending slavery.  I think that is the main story frankly that Lincoln through enough manipulation of political chits and public opinion and timing and good luck militarily and so forth was able to pull this off.  He was barely able to do that.  And after he did it, there was sort of a backlash in the white North, so I think people are right to be skeptical, but I think that what’s remarkable, too, is the extent to which for a moment in the crucible of war, Lincoln was able to lead a majority of white northerners to accept that destroying slavery was a wise and just and feasible thing.

PO: Hey, Alan, thanks a lot for calling.

Caller (Alan): All right.  Thank you guys.

PO: Bye bye.

EA: Thanks, Alan. Bye bye.

Caller (Alan): Have a good one.  [music]

BB: If you’re just tuning in, this is “BackStory,” and we’re talking about some of the questions that remain one hundred and fifty years after the shooting started for the Civil War.

PO: Guys, we’ve got another call.  It’s from Fultonville, New York. Wanda, welcome to the show.

Caller (Wanda): Thank you.

PO: Well, we’re talking about the Civil War and it’s on everybody’s mind for some reason just about now.  What have you been thinking about?

Caller (Wanda): Well, I’m writing a book called Soldier’s Dream and in researching the dreams in the letters of Civil War soldiers, soldiers from both the North and the South dream of home as a lifeline to normalcy and humanity, but I’ve found there seems to be a difference between the dreams of Southern soldiers which are often lengthy, evocative, describing the dreams as so real you can taste the peach or hold the beloved, and Northern soldiers who still do not deny their dreams are real, but they’ll say something like, well, I dreamed of you last night and it was really real.

PO: Hey, hey, Wanda, this is very upsetting.  I’m from the North.  You’re saying—

EA: Well, Peter, it’s obviously, Wanda, they read Hemingway in the North and in the South, they read Faulkner, Wanda.

PO: Whoa.

EA: Call over.

Caller (Wanda): I’m thinking that there might be a cultural difference in the mindset we have of the Northerner’s pragmatic and practical and getting things done and this is [45:05 / __________] Ed, and I dreamed about you, and the sort of overly romantic Southern solider who goes on at some length about trees and glades and flowers—

PO: Wow.

Caller (Wanda): And holding his beloved.

PO: Wanda, Wanda, we need to devote a whole season of this show to that question and let me toss it over to Ed framed in this way:  A lot of the discussion of the origins of the Civil War pivots around the idea that there were, as Southerners said, separate civilizations North and South, that is, your cultural question, Wanda.

Caller (Wanda): Right.

PO: That is, that they just think differently down there.  Now, as close as we get to an authentic Southerner in our midst and I don’t know about Ed Ayres since he’s from east Tennessee which is a dodgy part of the South—

BB: Yeah.

PO: But, Ed, what do you think?

Caller (Wanda): I’m from Tennessee.

PO: [laughter]  I didn’t say it was a bad part, just dodgy.

EA: We’re probably related, honey.  [laughter]

PO: So, Ed, this does verge on what we call in the business, essentialism and it does run counter to I think the prevailing wisdom among many of us now that in cultural terms there’s not all that much difference between North and South.

EA: Ahhh—  Boy, you set me up on this one, Peter.  As it turns out, you know, I think that does describe my own thinking about this, except that this question poses in such an interesting way, so here’s the paradox, Wanda.  I think that what you’re saying is true in the sense that Southerners are known and I have lots of tape on the editing floor here to prove, known for being long-winded and somewhat in love with the sound of their own voice

PO: Ed, will you just get to the point?

EA: This is the point, Peter, is that I like to talk, but the thing is is that there’s a famous line from Bell Wiley, the historian who pretty much invented the social history of soldiers way back in the 1940s and ’50s.  He’d read thousands and thousands of letters and he said, if you took the letters from Northerners and Southerners and threw them up in the air and they landed on the floor, you would not be able to put them back into the right pile again, that the differences between the way Northerners and Southerners talk and even the ideological content of what they said was far more alike in their letters than you might think.  Now, I don’t think that Bell Wiley was looking at the sort of subtle cultural manifestations that you’re talking about.

Caller (Wanda): Right.

PO: Hey, Ed, I got another idea here and that is we have troops from the North marching on the South and threatening the homes of these soldiers—

Caller (Wanda): Exactly.

PO: These evocative images really suggest that sense of profound threat.  It may seem more prosaic and routine for Northerners to talk about home, but that’s because it’s a fixed place and it’s not necessarily under risk.  Now, we know that the home front does suffer in the North but nothing like that nightmare vision of what happens when a countryside is destroyed by a marching army and it seems to me that those evocative images of this sensual, romantic, sentimental, wonderful place have something to do with—

Caller (Wanda): With what’s being threatened.

PO: Yes.

Caller (Wanda): And the universality that I found interesting speaks to—  [Carl Hume] made a statement which I don’t think was every thoroughly proved that when soldiers ceased to dream of home on the battlefield, they should be removed for a time until they began to dream again because they became animals on the battlefield and fought with less humanity.

BB: You know, it’s interesting because there’s a pretty well known article about World War II that talks about what soldiers were really fighting for had to do with home and had to do with consumer goods and it’s, you know, kind of tossed off as being superficial, especially when the army was spending so much effort and money to train soldiers in terms of the ideological reasons they were fighting.

PO: Yeah.

BB: But, in fact, you’re saying that this is really essential to retaining one’s humanity.

Caller (Wanda): And survival, because I’ve also found dreams of soldiers in Andersonville and the ones who survived best are the ones picturing in their mind and dreaming recurring dreams of a place in their childhood or a place in their home where they were thriving with food on the table and in one particular case, a person dreams of an inn where his father took him as a child in St. Louis where there were tables and tables of food and this got him through Andersonville.  He would wake up to a crust of bread, starving, but that memory of food gave him the will to survive and not go crazy.

PO: Wanda, this is, of course, another story about human nature and how we can transcend horror and survive it and it’s an inspirational one.  I’d just like to add this darker dimension to it, however.

BB: He’s from the North, Wanda.

PO: Yeah, well, when we sentimentalize home and these dreams are a way of making home seem very real, present to you in your dream and you re-dedicate to the cause and to surviving the great war, but at the same time, as you sentimentalize your home, you’re demonizing your enemy because those are the people that want to destroy your homes, so I’d say that both it’s a triumph for humanity and it’s also a triumph for inhumanity.

Caller (Wanda): Well, that’s interesting.  That’s interesting.  So then you wonder which takes over if the dream of home—

PO: Oh, yeah.

Caller (Wanda): Yeah.

PO: No, and on an individual level, what can you say?  This is wonderful.  This is a resource to work with.  This is the way people have survived, but on a cultural level, when a whole society is at war with another society, I think it takes on a rather uglier profile.

Caller (Wanda): Unless it’s what gets you back to where you were before.

PO: Yeah.

Caller (Wanda): However you define home, back to that memory of someone that you’ve loved, back to a place where you can separate yourself from the battlefield and be where you were when things were normal again.

PO: It is a dream of peace.

Caller (Wanda): Yeah.

PO: Yep.

Caller (Wanda): Yeah.

PO: Well, Wanda, this has just been fabulous and thanks so much.

Caller (Wanda): Well, thank you.

BB: Thank you so much, Wanda.

Caller (Wanda): Oh, thank you.  This is great.  [music]

BB: That’s where we’re going to have to leave things today.  But as always, we’d love to keep this conversation going online.  Drop in at backstoryradio.org and let us know what still interests you about the Civil War.

PO: Again, that’s backstoryradio.org.  You can listen to the first two episodes of our Civil War series there, as well as any of our other past shows. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter.  Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

EA: Today’s episode of “BackStory” was produced by Tony Field and Catherine Moore. We had help from Miriam Kaplan and Jose Argueta.  Jamal Milner mastered the show and Gabby Alter wrote our theme.

BB: “BackStory’s” executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

PO: Production support for “BackStory” is provided by Cary Brown Epstein and the W.L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation.  James Madison’s Montpelier, Weinstein Properties, Trish and David Crowe, Austin Ligon and an anonymous donor.

Tape: Brian Balogh and Peter Onuf are professors in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History.  Ed Ayres is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond.  “BackStory” was created by Andrew Wyndham for VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Tape: From VFH Radio in Charlottesville, Virginia, this is “BackStory.”  [music]

Peter Onuf: Liberty and union.  Liberty and union.  That was the refrain across the American North as Civil War broke out one hundred and fifty years ago.

Ed Ayers: But the phrase doesn’t mean what you might think.  Most Northerners were not very concerned about the four million people still held in bondage.

Tape: Liberty is often tied now to your attitude towards slavery.  That is not how they would’ve deployed that word for the most part.

E. Ayers: Southerners, on the other hand, were very much thinking about those four million enslaved people and specifically what it would mean if they were all freed.

Tape: The fear and paranoia about what that represented is almost impossible for us to capture today, but it certainly inspired most of them fight much harder.

P. Onuf: We’re the American History Guys and today on our show, what motivated people, North and South, to take up arms.  That’s all coming up on “BackStory” after this news.  [music]

Tape: Hi, I’m Tony Field, the producer of “BackStory.”  I just wanted to let you know that today’s Podcast is the second installment in our new three-part series on the Civil War.  You’ll find the other two parts on our website and on iTunes.  If you like what you hear, please consider a contribution to help us out with some of our production costs.  There’s a link to give in the bottom right hand corner of our website, backstoryradio.org.  Fifteen dollars would amount to a dime for each year since the Civil War began and we’ll take any donation of that amount as a endorsement of our work on this series and, remember, you can also help out by sharing links to our shows with your friends and by leaving a review on our page in the iTunes store.  Thanks for listening.  Now, back to the show.

P. Onuf: Major production support for “BackStory” is provided by the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.  Support also comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  [music]  This is “BackStory,” with us, the American History Guys.  I’m Peter Onuf, 18th century guy.

E. Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers, 19th century guy.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh, 20th century history guy.  [music]  How might America be different today if the Union had not won the Civil War?  What legacies of the Civil War have an impact on your life?  These are a couple of the questions posed by curators at the American Civil War Center in Richmond, Virginia. Visitors are encouraged to answer each question on a post-it note, and stick it to the wall there before they leave.

Tape (Christy Coleman): We had a post up there one time.  The person actually used like four post-it notes to get their point out and [laughter] one of the things that they went on about was here again is another example of how the haves managed to convince the have nots to fight their battles for them.

E. Ayers: That’s Christy Coleman, President of the American Civil War Center.  She says that the notes visitors leave often reflect their regional affiliations.  Northerners, for example, tend to answer that question about the war’s legacy with a certain amount of, well, triumphalism.

Tape (C. Coleman): You know, if it wasn’t for this war, we wouldn’t have expanded the rights to so many and opened our gates and broken down the power structures that would have us all truly slaves, etc. etc.

P. Onuf: This April marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s beginnings.  But despite the passage of all that years, Americans in many parts of the country are still trying to understand what the war really meant.  Go ahead—Google the recent controversy over Virginia history textbooks or the dust-up over South Carolina’s commemoration of that state’s secession.  Or just spend some time with Christy and those post-it notes in Richmond.

E. Ayers: In our last show on the Civil War, we looked at how the election of Abraham Lincoln set off a cascade of events that resulted in war.  Today, we’re going to pick up where we left off, but we’re going to shift our focus from the politicians to the ordinary men and women who, in the spring of 1861, found themselves staring war in the face.  In the South, most of these people did not own a single slave.  And in the North, only a small minority were committed abolitionists.  All of which leads us to our central question for today’s show—what motivated these people to pick up weapons and fight one another in the Civil War?

B. Balogh: We’re going to return now to Christy Coleman, the president of the American Civil War Center in Richmond.  When we spoke to her, she told us about another one of those post-it notes, another question that yields particularly interesting results.

Tape (C. Coleman): “Where do you consider your strongest allegiance— to your state, to your nation, or some other place.”  And it’s interesting that you can always tell when there’s a political upheaval going on in our current society, because the percentage of those answers shifts dramatically.  You know, prior to the 2008 elections, for example, you had a lot of people identifying themselves very strongly as Americans.  I am an American, this is the U.S.A., I’m very proud of it.  And then in 2010, you see a shift, and people are identifying via their states, you know, I’m a proud Virginia, I’m a proud Texan, I’m a proud, you know, what-have-you, and 9 out of 10 times, it’s Southerners that are identifying via their state.

B. Balogh: So Peter and Ed, I know this is going to shock you, but, you know, it sounds like these folks leaving their post-it notes are applying their biases from today’s world imposing it on history, so I’m curious to know have Americans done this specifically to interpretations of the Civil War.

E. Ayers: Well, you know, it’s not just Americans but it’s historians, too.

P. Onuf: Oh, oh, oh.

E. Ayers: I know.  I’m sorry, Peter.  I hope you can keep your sobbing to a minimum, but, you know, as long as there’s been a professional historical set of organizations since the late 19^th century, we’ve been able to see the academic historians sort of shifting their interpretations of the Civil War as their own times changed.  Let me just give you a thumbnail sketch of how that has been.  After World War I, widely seen as a war without purpose, the American Civil War was interpreted by our predecessor historians as a war without purpose.  The leading historians of the Civil War talk of a blundering generation that got us into that mess.  World War II comes, immediately revised our understanding of the Civil War.

P. Onuf: Yeah, a good war.

E. Ayers: Exactly.  Sometimes there’s evil in the world.  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., says, “and you have to rise up to defeat it,” and that’s what the Civil War as well as World War II was all about.  Then Vietnam comes along and we might expect that we would go back and reinterpret the Civil War as a big mess, but instead, historians are saying, ahhh, look, what else is going on now in the ’60s and ’70s, the civil rights revolution, let’s go back and look at the abolitionism and reconstruction and focus on that and then when you get into sort of the very frustrating, sort of decentered wars like the 1980s and 1990s, there’s a real disillusionment among a lot of scholars with the Civil War in general and we start discovering guerilla fighting and all kinds of breakdowns of morale and all that sort of stuff, so that’s kind of where we’ve gone.  Every single stage of our own warfare experience in the 20^th century had disrupted our understanding of the American Civil War.

B. Balogh: Well, Ed, your summary of 20^th century developments being read into the Civil War is terrific, but it strikes me that one of the key 20^th century developments is people are drafted for wars in the 20^th century and I know there was a draft in the Civil War but how did that actually play out, this tension between all those folks who volunteered and the eventual draft in both the North and the South?

E. Ayers: You know, the draft is important but we’d have to acknowledge that both the North and the South benefited from enormous degree of voluntarism.

P. Onuf: Right, right.

E. Ayers: You know.  Both armies were filled with men who could not wait to show their dedication to their nations.

P. Onuf: Yeah, but we could go back further to the Revolution, to the first American war.

B. Balogh: Let’s do it.

P. Onuf: Yeah, the wars that in effect define American political culture, that idea that Jefferson articulated in his first inaugural address that we are the strongest government on earth because of the devotion of citizens to defending the country.  It’s the idea of the citizen soldier that our country’s wars are our wars.  This is a free country and we die freely for our country.

E. Ayers: Well, as a matter of fact, it strikes me, Peter, that the war driven by popular commitment that Jefferson dreamed of didn’t actually happen until the American Civil War.

P. Onuf: Right.

E. Ayers: Because the War of 1812 and the Seminole War, the Mexican War, all those were deeply compromised, deeply conflicting, disappointing, those kind of wars, right?

P. Onuf: Yeah, that’s a good point, but what I would say is that Jefferson wasn’t really inventing the citizen soldier.  What he was doing was creating a political culture, a civic culture in which there was a lot of vicarious fighting and that is that the party formation in the antebellum period before the Civil War in effect mobilized people in a semi-quasi-proto-militant way.  They would march to the polls. They would feel righteous anger at enemies, even with the other party but nonetheless it was that belligerent frame of mind, the idea that it’s incumbent on you as a good citizen to be ready to fight at the polls or wherever the fight is taking place because fundamental issues are at stake and I think that helps explain the amazing preparedness of the American people to slaughter each other in the Civil War.

E. Ayers: I could argue that this is actually what brings on the Civil War.  If you think about the timing of the coming Civil War, it’s determined a lot more by what you’re talking about, Peter, than by any change in the actual status of slavery.

P. Onuf: Yeah, yeah.

E. Ayers: Or, it’s not that the North becomes modernized enough to fight against the South.

P. Onuf: No, no.

E. Ayers: What it really is about is the party system because for the last 30 years, people have been used to thinking of two parties:  the names of the parties and the identities of the parties change but what happens is this two-party system which had been around now for decades really just begins to unravel in the 1850s.  First, you have the Whig Party begin to show signs of weakness.  Then the Know Nothings emerge and the Democrats splinter apart.  Then the Republicans arise and once this sort of bipolar, in both senses of the word, party system shatters, you have all that sort of polarizing energy built up.

P. Onuf: That’s exactly right, Ed.  That’s exactly right.

E. Ayers: Everybody’s used to thinking, us or them.

B. Balogh: Yes, so help me, guys.  Let me try to understand this.  All of these passions are rattling around but in the past, they’ve lined up through the mechanism of parties and those parties have been distributed roughly evenly between North and South so the passions don’t get channeled into these sectional rivalries.  Is that what you’re saying?

P. Onuf: Right.  Well, I think the key thing, Brian, is we shouldn’t imagine that there’s something going on in individual people’s minds and that there’s a flashpoint or a threshold that people cross.  They say, I’m going to fight now.  I propose when you think about the run-up to the Civil War that there is an excess of patriotic feeling and it’s not necessarily focused and that’s the whole point of it, it’s only in the process of mobilizing for the war that this ambient patriotism that Americans North and South share becomes focused in a particular way.

B. Balogh: So where was Cuba when we needed it?

P. Onuf: Well, [laughter] that’s a great point.

B. Balogh: To use a late-19^th century example.

P. Onuf: Well, yeah, yeah.  No, that’s what Americans were looking desperately for some kind of war to fight elsewhere and we had Mexico.  I mean, that proved to be problematic, but it—

B. Balogh: It bought us a few years before it blew up in our face.

E. Ayers: But, you know, I think the strange thing is you go back and look at the mobilization of the Confederacy, there is no new language, there’s no new idea that the very people who had been for the Union and who’d been all about loyalty and sacrifice and fealty to the fathers and to one another, just switched the entire apparatus of loyalty from the Union to the Confederacy literally overnight.

P. Onuf: Yeah, yeah.

E. Ayers: And this patriotism you talked about could be directed toward an entirely different and new and warring nation and so that’s another thing that makes it a fight inside the family is that there is no warring ideology except that one family possesses slaves and the other does not.

P. Onuf: Yeah, and you know, we talk a lot about war weariness imagining that somehow there’s only a certain amount of enthusiasm and it’s spent.  It plays out over time.  Instead, it’s almost as if that energy, that original commitment, in some ways it grows.

E. Ayers: The cause becomes more coherent in both the North and the South—

P. Onuf: I think that’s a great point.

E. Ayers: And so that’s the thing is we don’t want to think about it as, okay, I’m doing an inventory of my emotions and loyalties.  Yep, there’s adequacy supply—

P. Onuf: [13:23 / __________] [laughter]

E. Ayers: To go fight and die.  Instead it’s like, yeah, I’ll go fight this one battle or I’ll join every other young man in my community going off for this, and so the initial motivations don’t become—

P. Onuf: [13:38 / __________]

E. Ayers: What James McPherson called the “sustaining motivations” and one of the things we have to do about the entire Civil War is remember that it’s an unfolding story with different kinds of motivations and contexts and not just one monolithic substance that we kind of analyze like a chemical ingredient

B. Balogh: Right, so we should be asking why they fought when.

E. Ayers: Exactly.  They’re constantly playing catch-up with events.  They act and they go, okay, what did that mean?  [laughter]

P. Onuf: Yeah.

E. Ayers: And so the Civil War is not driven so much by ideas as it is interwoven with them.

P. Onuf: Yeah.

B. Balogh: So, I think it’s great that we’ve entered the time dimension into this discussion and I’m going to enter another time dimension and that is it’s time for a short break.

[music—“when Johnny comes marching home”]

B. Balogh: When we get back, we’ll hear why the word Union quickened the heartbeats of men in the antebellum North.

P. Onuf: You’re listening to a special Civil War anniversary edition of “BackStory” with the American History Guys.  We’ll be back in a minute.  [music]  This is “BackStory,” the show that takes a topic and considers it from the perspective of three different centuries.  I’m your 18^th century guy, Peter Onuf.

E. Ayers: I’m your 19^th century guy, Ed Ayers.

B. Balogh: And I’m the 20^th century guy, Brian Balogh.  Today on our show, we’re exploring the motivations of soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War.  Most people agree that slavery was at the root of why the war started, but if most Southerners were not slaveholders, and most Northerners weren’t abolitionists, then why were so many thousands of people willing to put their lives on the line?

E. Ayers: That’s a question that’s really challenged historians for many years in large part because there’re so many answers that are at least partially right.  Now, there’s a historian Adam Goodheart who’s the author of a new book called 1861: The Civil War Awakening. He’s also one of the main contributors to “Disunion”—a New York Times blog that chronicles the events of 150 years ago.  And in his research for both projects, Goodheart had discovered that there was an enormous range of considerations that factored into people’s decisions in the lead-up to the war.

Tape (Adam Goodheart): I found a letter in a sort of a bundle of letters in an attic a few years ago on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a bundle of letters from an Army officer from the spring of 1861 trying to decide which side he was going to go with and on the one hand, he was a slave-owner.  He was from a slave owning family.  He’s grown up in the Southern state of Maryland.  On the other hand, he’d been an Army officer.  He’d been under the Stars and Stripes since he was a 14-year-old cadet at West Point and he’s having a correspondence.  He’s stationed out at a fort out in Indian territory in what’s now Oklahoma and he’s corresponding with his wife and his brother back East and some of the decision has to do with slavery.  Some of it has to do with the Union and some of it has to do with which way Maryland is going to go but then he’s also talking about, well, what’s this going to mean for my own career.  His wife writes something that really stuck with me.  She said, “It is like a great game of chance.”  And I thought, well, gosh, he’s trying to decide, well, if I join this Confederacy will I end up as one of the founding fathers of a new nation or will I end up as a traitor being tried for treason.

P. Onuf: In the end, that officer decided to stand by the Union or at least by his career in that Union, and if his choice about which side to fight for seems like a tough one, then what about all the ordinary civilians in the North who had to decide whether to fight at all?  Joining the Army would mean leaving their jobs and yet tens of thousands of them flocked to answer Lincoln’s call for men.  So how do we explain that?

B. Balogh: Well, fortunately, Peter, we don’t have to explain it.  We brought in our colleague Gary Gallagher, University of Virginia historian who wrote a book on this very issue.  It’s called The Union War and it argues that while the Southern states went to war to protect slavery, the vast majority of Northern men who volunteered to fight did not oppose slavery.  Even after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Gallagher says that ending slavery was for most of them purely a military strategy.  That’s why they went along with it.   He says that if you asked these guys what really compelled them to take up arms, they would have answered that it was their deep commitment—hold your breath—to Union. Now, if you’re scratching your head on that one, you’re not alone.  I was a little confused by it also.

[music]

B. Balogh: You know, Gary, that I’m the 20^th century guy on this show.

Gary Gallagher: I’ve heard that.

B. Balogh: And I just can’t understand how all these men could fight and many of them die for something as abstract as Union.  Can you explain to our listeners what Union meant to these men?

G. Gallagher: I think what Union meant at the absolutely base for the mass of white Northerners was it meant a small “d” democratic republican system that gave a common person a voice in his own government—men are voting.  Only men are voting.  We know that—in his own government and it provided economic opportunity, not a guarantee for economic success, but much greater economic opportunity than any aristocratic or oligarchic society had and that was something that they treasured and they had imbibed Daniel Webster’s great rhetoric.  It’s everywhere.  It shows up in advertisements—Liberty and Union, Liberty and Union, and what they meant by liberty is not what we would normally think about.  Liberty is often tied now to your attitude toward slavery.  That is not how they would’ve deployed that word for the most part.  Liberty for them meant freedom to enjoy these political rights and a chance to move ahead in an economic sense.

B. Balogh: And I’m really struck by the comparative nature of your answer.  We think today we live in a world of globalization—

G. Gallagher: Right.

B. Balogh: But you were saying that these people woke up thinking I may not have much money, I may not have much education right now, but I’m special because I can vote and I can have a say in my government and millions of people around the world don’t have a chance at that.  Am I getting that right?

G. Gallagher: That’s absolutely right and they not only thought it, they wrote it down and they wrote it down sometimes in language that makes it clear they had very little education.  They’re literate but barely literate and they had a poster example of this in the presidency.  Abraham Lincoln literally did what they believed this system allowed people to do, literally go from—

B. Balogh: That’s the opportunity part.

G. Gallagher: That’s the opportunity.  That’s the opportunity and they compared themselves again and again and again to Europe and they were well aware of the failed revolutions of the late 1840s in Europe.  They believed that if the Union failed, if after an election, a legal election, if the party that lost that election could simply destroy the nation because they weren’t happy with the result, then the aristocratic oligarchic monarchical Europeans could look and say we told you a democratic republic could not work.

B. Balogh: So it’s almost as though they viewed those slaveholding aristocratic-leaning Confederates as the kind of shock troops of the aristocratic model around the world that was just waiting for America.

G. Gallagher: They wouldn’t have said aristocratic-leaning.  They would’ve said the words they used, the word “oligarch” came up a stunning number of times to me.  I was really struck in doing the research for this book how often the word “oligarchy” was applied to the slaveholding class of the South. They called them aristocrats.  They called them oligarchs. They said they were absolutely inimical to what the United States was about.

B. Balogh: So, in a way, you’re saying they were fighting against those slaveholders.

G. Gallagher: They were, yes.

B. Balogh: They just weren’t fighting against slavery.  They weren’t terribly upset by slavery per se, except that to have slavery, you needed slaveholders which defied the very concept of a democratic republic.

G. Gallagher: That’s absolutely right and they sought to punish the slaveholding class which had caused the whole problem in the first place, they believed, and there’s no better way to punish the slaveholding class than to take their slaves away from them because they’re property and slaves was the basis of their power and so get rid of them.

B. Balogh: Yeah. Well, Gary, let’s get down to brass tacks.  What public opinion polls did you consult for your study?

G. Gallagher: I used the three major ones that were available in the mid-19^th century.  [laughter]  There’re no public opinion polls.

P. Onuf: Oh, God.

G. Gallagher: What I did was try to put different kinds of evidence in conversation with one another.  For example, I read—  There were two major illustrated weeklies at the time, equivalent of Life and Look really, Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.  I read every word of every issue of those for the whole war to see how this sentiment—

B. Balogh: That’s why I haven’t seen you for years.

G. Gallagher: Yes, I’ve been—  Yeah, I don’t have a tan anymore.  I also looked at soldiers’ letters.  I looked at letters from people behind the lines.  I mean, I used different kinds of evidence, fully aware of the fact that this is not a science.  There’s nothing scientific about this and anybody who pretends they can get a scientific sample of letters from the Civil War is either deeply ignorant or dissembling because it just can’t be done.  It can’t be done.

B. Balogh: Well, this has been so informative.  We have a guy on the show who claims to know about the 19^th century, Ed something.  Ed Ayers, that’s right.

G. Gallagher: I’ve been one of Ed’s admirers since I was a little boy.  I mean, I grew up sort of idolizing Ed.  [laughter]

B. Balogh: Now, he is getting up there in years.  Now that you’ve explained to us why the North fought, I felt we could bring Ed in.  He just happens to be standing outside looking just so anxious to get into this conversation.  Ed, come on it.

E. Ayers: [sound effect]  Hey, everybody.  It’s good to see you.  I didn’t know how long you’d leave me with my face pressed up against the glass there.

B. Balogh: I know.  I know you’ve been listening in and I’d just be curious to get your thoughts about what Gary’s had to say, especially about Union and about why men in the North fought for Union.

E. Ayers: Well, you know, it takes a little bit of the drama out of it to say that I think he’s exactly right about the motivations of people at the beginning.  I do think, though, if you read our textbooks, there is a general sense embodied in Abraham Lincoln of a sense of a moral growth over the course of the war and that is Northern soldiers come into contact with enslaved people as African Americans fight 200,000 strong in the United States Colored Troops, as people begin to wonder if this amount of bloodshed must not have a larger redeeming purpose as Abraham Lincoln says, some kind of providential reason to obliterate slavery.  People often think that the white North develops a greater understanding of slavery and its injustice over the course of the war.  Would you agree with that or not?

G. Gallagher: Not in the way you put it.  I think the big problem we have is not accepting the fact that for most of the white North Union was a completely sufficient reason to fight the kind of war they fought.  Union meant so much to them.  I mean, a number of historians have said Union wasn’t worth the loss of a single life. Well, that would’ve been stunningly wrongheaded to people who lived in the loyal states.  I don’t think there was a great moral shift.  I do believe that some Union soldiers surely changed their views about African Americans when they saw slavery up close, but many others had earlier notions about black people actually confirmed and their letters make that clear.  The prejudices came out more on the wrong side of things from our point of view.  I think there’s quite a variety of reactions to seeing slavery and seeing African Americans up close.

In terms of Lincoln, Lincoln’s second inaugural, of course, is the place that we go to see this change in this almost spiritual take on what the war was about, but Abraham Lincoln’s message to Congress in December 1864 which is after the elections—there’s no reason for him to pitch this to the loyal population if he didn’t think that most of them still focused on Union—he said in a great war such as this, you need to have one thing (I’m paraphrasing him) which everybody believes and he said, in our war, it’s Union.  He said killing slavery is one of the means to achieve that great end that we all agree on.  That’s December of 1864, so I just think that Union is most important in 1861, ’63 and ’65.

E. Ayers: So, Gary, since we know that we’re writing history for today to help us understand what the Civil War means for us, you are taking advantage of the fact that we’ve now recovered the African American component of the war and you don’t try to displace any of that, but you’re trying to restore an understanding that in alliance with that was a dedication to Union.  Does that speak to our current time in some way that we need, you think?

G. Gallagher: Well, I guess my principle goal isn’t to speak to our current time.  I think it’s important in our current time to understand the complexity of our past and I think that if we’re going to come to terms with the Civil War, we have to understand that it isn’t exactly what we wish it had been, but one of the points I make is that it’s sort of miraculous that a mass of white Northerners who were as racist as they were would be transformed by this giant military event into a population that believed slavery must be killed and I think that is a radical transformation within a mid-19^th century context and I think it shows the capacity for growth and change in the direction we would say is the right direction even if it’s not for exactly the reasons that we would prefer that it had taken place.  I think that’s important to know.

[music]

B. Balogh: That’s Gary Gallagher.  He’s a colleague of ours in the History Department at the University of Virginia and his book is called The Union War. If you’re just joining us, this is “BackStory,” and we’re talking about the reasons soldiers on both sides of the Civil War were motivated to fight.  We’ve already heard that most white Northerners did not go to war in order to end slavery, even if they ended up supporting that as an eventual outcome.  But Peter, Ed—what about black Northerners?  I mean, a lot of our listeners have probably seen Glory, the movie about the African Americans who fought on behalf of Massachusetts and on behalf of the Union.  I want to know more about those guys.

E. Ayers: Well, you know, the first thing to understand is they were not permitted to fight until 1863.

P. Onuf: Right.

E. Ayers: So, the war ultimately is half over before African American men are allowed to fight and there’s widespread skepticism in the white North that many of them will, but what happens is as soon as they open the doors to black recruitment, African American men of all kinds of backgrounds surge into service.  Black men who could’ve sat out the war put themselves in harm’s way to help make sure that this war is a war that does fight against slavery and this strikes me as one of the great miracles of American history, frankly, that these thousands of African American men whether previously held in slavery or born free or having made themselves free, go fight for a nation that has held them in slavery, you know, and why?  Because they have the idea—

P. Onuf: Yeah, yeah.

E. Ayers: That fully extended to its logical conclusion, to its consistent meaning, the federal nation of the United States would guarantee even their freedom.

P. Onuf: Well, I think that’s a great point, Ed.  There are values that Northerners are invoking about freedom and liberty and about the reason that we need to fight for the survival of the Union and African Americans, free and enslaved, take those ideas seriously in a way that most white Northerners don’t take them seriously, that is, they make a local application.  Northern whites are saying our freedom is what’s crucial.  Well, those ideas once they’re in the air, even Jefferson the slaveholder said “all men are created equal,” that idea is hard to put down and all of a sudden in the midst of war, it seems to have this power.  It’s really the story of imagining an America that could be but that wasn’t.

E. Ayers: You know, in this moment, there’s an incredible quote from Frederick Douglass who goes into the Civil War deeply suspicious of Abraham Lincoln, of the Republican Party, even of the Union cause. Why are we fighting to maintain a Union with slaveholders?

P. Onuf: Right.

E. Ayers: He does say now that black men, black families, can fight for not just their freedom, but for the very survival of the United States, this changes everything.  He says, “once put an Eagle put on their buttons and a rifle on their shoulders and things can never go back to the way they were.”

B. Balogh: And what difference did this make in the actual prosecution of the war.

E. Ayers: Well, you have 200,000 African American men fighting on land and sea that you would not have had otherwise and they come into the United States purpose just when the North really really needs men.  As a matter of fact, let’s not fool ourselves.  That’s why they are enlisted in the first place.

B. Balogh: Right.

E. Ayers: Is that despite all this language of Union and self-sacrifice, not enough Northern men stepped up to sustain the purpose.

Reading: Dear Wife i have enlisted in the army i am now in the state of Massachusetts but before this letter reaches you i will be in North Carlinia and though great is the present national dificulties yet i look forward to a brighter day When i shall have the opertunity of seeing you in the full enjoyment of fredom i would like to if you are still in slavery if you are it will not be long before we shall have crushed the system that now oppresses you  great is the outpouring of the colered peopl that is now rallying with the hearts of lions against that very curse that has seperated you an me yet we shall meet again and oh what a happy time that will be when this ungodly rebellion shall be put down and the curses of our land is trampled under our feet i am a soldier now and endeavoring to strike at the rebellion that so long has kept us in chains tell Eliza I send her my best respects and love Ike and Sully likewise your afectionate husband until death-SAMUEL CABBLE, Private 55^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863

P. Onuf: It’s time for another short break.  When we get back, we’ll shift our focus to the South, and ask why so many white men who did not own slaves were willing to lay down their lives in defense of a nation that was based on slavery.  You’re listening to “BackStory,” and we’ll be back in a minute.  [music]  We’re back with “BackStory.”  We’re the American History guys.  I’m Peter Onuf, otherwise known as the 18th century guy.

E. Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers, “BackStory’s” 19th century guy.

B. Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh, representing the 20th century.  Today on the show, we’re marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s beginnings by asking what motivated people on both sides of the conflict to take up arms.  Before the break, we were looking at the Union cause.  Now we’re going to shift to the Confederacy.

Tape (Aaron Sheehan-Dean): You know the old saw is that the Civil War was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, and that actually turns out not to be accurate.

P. Onuf: This is Aaron Sheehan-Dean, a historian at the University of North Florida.  A few years ago, he published a book called Why Confederates Fight, a book that also answered the question of who those Confederates were.

Tape (A. Sheehan-Dean): Wealthy men and wealthy counties send much higher proportions of men than do poorer places and the Army is also different in ways that we might not imagine.  We would assume that this army would be composed of younger men, of unmarried men.  In fact, a majority of the soldiers in the Confederate Army are married and they have families, so they’re deeply invested in protecting their families and in preserving the society as they know it in 1860 and 1861.

P. Onuf: So what about all the men who did not own any slaves?  Why would they have flocked to enlist, and continued to enlist, even after the initial excitement of war had worn off?  This is the real million dollar question for Sheehan-Dean.  After all, slaveholders may have been over-represented in the Confederate army, but they still made up a minority of the ranks.

B. Balogh: After spending a lot of time with letters that Virginia soldiers sent home to their families, Sheehan-Dean concluded that there were three main reasons why non-slaveholders felt that they, too, had something worth fighting for.  The first was political—recent democratic reforms had given white men new voting rights that they worried could be undone by the Lincoln administration.  The second was economic—they realized that the strength of the Southern economy depended on slavery, and in classic American fashion, many of them aspired to join the ranks of slaveholders one day.  It was aspirational.  But the third—well, that one’s a lot trickier.  And so I asked Sheehan-Dean to explain himself.  [music—banjo]  So, I’m familiar with people fighting for political rights and their economic stake in society, but here’s one that really threw me for a loop, Aaron.  Maybe you can help me out.  Companionate marriage—  I didn’t even know what term meant.

Tape (A. Sheehan-Dean): Yeah, now we just call it love.  [laughter]

B. Balogh: I don’t know what that means either, Aaron.

Tape (A. Sheehan-Dean): It’s the job of historians to muddy the waters.  The notion of a companionate marriage, of a marriage built on love, though, is actually a pretty recent thing in the middle of the 19^th century.  We tend to assume that emotions are the same and that families are the same because they’re such bedrock parts of our lives but, in fact, the notion of how families are constituted and how people within them relate to one another was changing in the 18^th and 19^th centuries and we were moving from a period in which the model of the family was as a microcosm of the state in which the father was the king and you obeyed him because it was God’s law, to a model in which husbands and wives came together because they loved one another and they respected one another and even more importantly, that parenting absorbed the same ethos—that parents should love and respect their children and children should respect their parents because they love them.  And this creates, I think, a much stronger and more intimate kind of bond within these families and so as the war grinds on and particularly in parts of the upper South like Virginia and Tennessee, as the North wages a hard war which imperils their loved ones and puts greater hardships on women and children at home, soldiers talk about the necessity of protecting their families because of their love for those families, and I think we’ve tended to talk about the motivation of soldiers in terms of hate and in terms of hating the Yankee but, in fact, what I saw in these letters over and over again was that many more men spoke about love and the love of their families as the primary reason that they were fighting.

B. Balogh: One of the things you stress in your book is how the motivations for fighting change as the war drags on.  Could you tell me how Lincoln’s Proclamation freeing the slaves changed things?

Tape (A. Sheehan-Dean): Yeah.  Well, it fundamentally changes things because up to that point the Union Army had been quite inconsistent in terms of its policies on slavery and in some places under some commanders had returned slave and in other places, it emancipated them and the Emancipation Proclamation then makes quite clear that if the Confederates lose, whatever society they will return to will be completely different than the society that they’d left so it means now that particularly non-slaveholding men are going to be competing with enslaved men who are now freed.  They will be competing with them at all levels and the fear and paranoia about what that represented is almost impossible for us to capture today, but it I think certainly inspired most of them to fight much harder because now there was no going back.  There was no finding a peace that would allow them to have the Virginia they used to know if they failed.

B. Balogh: And did those fears extend beyond the political economy?  In other words, were these soldiers worried about this post-apocalyptic society with slavery ending in which there was actually social mixing among the races?

Tape (A. Sheehan-Dean): They are.  I mean, certainly the rhetoric of what would happen socially in the event of emancipation that had been used extensively by Southerners and Democrats in the years before the war then bloomed during the war and non-slaveholders as well as slaveholders imagine that black men once emancipated are going to be out to capture their wives and their daughters and there’s a long, long rhetoric of really vile kind of racialized, sexualized imagery about what black men are going to be doing to white women and that threat is a much more immediate social threat to a homefront that’s largely undefended in most parts of the upper South because the rates of enlistment were simply so high.  Seventy, eighty percent of white men, eligible white men, would’ve been in the armies and serving away from their home communities so that’s really the immediate threat is what’s going to happen in the wake of emancipation and, you know, decades of hysteria and sort of fear mongering about that possibility then produce a great deal of anxiety among those soldiers who are now not at home.

B. Balogh: Let me ask you about all of these causes.  When we ask why did the Confederate soldier fight, you’ve now laid out a number of them.  I’m just curious on the ground level, how did individuals integrate balance, deal with these competing motivations ranging from it’s my obligation to protect my wife who, by the way, wasn’t imposed on me, but I chose and I love, to states rights?

Tape (A. Sheehan-Dean): Yeah. Well, they struggle with them all the time and particularly when they come into tension when the collapse of slavery creates insecurity and fear that might compel them to go home and there’s a great letter from a soldier named John Jones whose wife has written to him.  His wife’s name is Molly, saying you need to come home, we need protection here and he says to her, I’m going to stay in the Army.  He says, this is the best place to protect you and it’s important that we strike now.  He says, we need to get the Yankees now while they’re organizing.  I’m afraid they might come home and get my boy.  That is, what had been in the pre-war period would’ve been envisioned as a kind of a personal effort to repel, honor you.  You’d use violence to protect your family becomes a corporate form during the war and a recognition that the Army is the best way to do this, but there’s this tension and they are basically arguing with and trying to convince their wives, in many cases, that this is in fact the best decision because a lot of the wives weren’t at all convinced.

B. Balogh: Yeah.  Now, you know I’m a 20^th century guy.  I think of the literature that comes out of World War II and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, all this complaining about the boredom and bureaucracy.  Do you come across a lot of that, too?  I mean, in all of this emphasis on why they fought, do we sometimes kind of lose track of the fact that often they weren’t so keen on fighting?

Tape (A. Sheehan-Dean): No, they’re not keen at all.  I mean, that’s in fact all the letters are are long complaints and I have to imagine, you know, they often—soldiers often complained to their wives—your last letter was three days late, why haven’t you written?  And I think if I received your letters twice a week and it’s just three pages of complaints, I probably wouldn’t be eager to respond either after six months of that.  [laughter]  Soldiers had a great deal to complain about.  I don’t begrudge them their complaints.  You know, the food is both bad and scarce.  Dysentery and diarrhea are rampant.  Every man would’ve been infested with lice and had scabies and all sorts of sort of kind of routine physical problems that you 20^th century guys don’t have to worry about, you know, we’ve got clothes and shoes and socks and a lot of these men marched barefoot up to Antietam in the fall of 1862.

B. Balogh: Yeah, it’s incredible.

Tape (A. Sheehan-Dean): And a lot of them felt like the Army was poorly run and poorly managed and poorly supplied and they complained bitterly and always and it’s not an expression of disloyalty.  It’s an expression of frustration and anger over the fact that they aren’t being provisioned the way they need to be provisioned if they’re going to be able to do their jobs and they’ve signed a contract to fight for the Confederacy, the least the Confederacy can do is get them some rancid corn and mealy meat or something.

B. Balogh: Yeah, and you mentioned loyalty which is so important.  If I read your book correctly, that loyalty actually grows and deepens over the course of the war in spite of what we might call the complaining or that classic Civil War term, kvetching.

Tape (A. Sheehan-Dean): Yeah, and I think you’re absolutely right that it deepens which is surprising.  We would anticipate and the traditional story gives us a story of sort of kind of waning morale.  The morale deepens as the crisis of what failure, of what defeat looks like, looms larger for these men.  They certainly wear down and they wear out in many cases and I think ultimately that’s what accounts for Confederate defeat is simply wearing out, but in the process, these men have committed themselves very very deeply to a Southern nation, to the Confederacy, but a Southern nation that lives on beyond the Confederacy.  It’s the Confederate state that is destroyed by the Civil War but I think unfortunately not a very deep sense of sectional loyalty that presents enormous problems for post-war America, for reconciling these men.  This is one of the classic problems of Civil War and one that Lincoln recognized, that the harder you fight and the more bitter and the longer the fight goes on, the more difficult that post-war reconciliation is going to be.  [music—banjo]

[E. Ayers]: Aaron Sheehan-Dean is an historian at the University of North Florida and author of the book Why Confederates Fought.  Thank you so much for joining us, Aaron.

B. Balogh: Thanks, Brian.  That was great.  [music—banjo]

E. Ayers: So, Aaron does a great job of evoking for us the central idea of home—

P. Onuf: Yeah.

E. Ayers: And the motivations of Confederate soldiers and their understanding that is what they are sacrificing their lives for.  And you might ask, what did this look like from the perspective of those for whom they were sacrificing their lives.  What was it like for the women who lived in those homes that the Confederate soldiers were defending?  No one has thought about this more thoroughly than Catherine Clinton who has written about women in the war before and after for a long time, and she told me that when you look really closely at the lives of women in the Civil War era, Northern and Southern, white and black, a lot of the easy stereotypes and generalizations begin to fall away.

Tape (Catherine Clinton): Men were coming home maimed.  Men were coming home scarred.  Men were coming home psychologically damaged and then, again, men weren’t coming home.  There were small towns in Wisconsin where marriageable-age men were simply wiped out, an entire generation and the young women became skilled at the rituals of mourning.  And I think this really deeply affected their outlook on life.  It scarred an entire generation of young women.

E. Ayers: So, it sounds like you would emphasize in some ways the commonalities perhaps that we’ve overlooked between Northern and Southern white women.

Tape (C. Clinton): Right, and also the way in which war and men marching into war can create a commonality between women, black and white, in the South.  When we look at matters of war unleashing violence against women, war unleashing men’s restraints during war time, I was struck by the fact that Jefferson Davis was someone who spoke about rape as a fate infinitely worse than death, so we look at the way in which gender and sexual politics during the war affected very dramatically how women lived the war and that a woman alone, black or white, might be in fear of soldiers marching through.  Maybe they were supposed to be liberators, maybe they were our own boys, but in both cases, war can unleash terrors and cause a gender divide that was quite dramatic.

E. Ayers: So, the more we look at the Civil War, as Catherine Clinton shows us, the more you see that the humanity of the people at the time stretched over four years, dying in incomprehensible numbers, in incomprehensible ways, for causes that had been unimaginable, it’s going to require every skill the historian has to try to make sense of this thing.

P. Onuf: Right.  And I think, Ed, Catherine tells us something important, reminds us of something that is omnipresent in the experience of people in war and that is here we are fighting on behalf of civilization, however we define it, yet just beneath the surface of civility and law is the reality of violence and as Catherine quite rightly points out and this is what Southern soldiers feared, as Aaron told us, when the forces of war are unleashed on your home, then the laws of war are hanging in suspense and that is the whole notion of laws of war which is the whole basis of modern international law, that you can somehow create conventions and standards of how you fight.  Well, actually killing people blurs the distinction between barbarism and civilization and it’s that dissent into barbarism that is the threat of all wars.

B. Balogh: Yeah, and Peter, with that phrase, “the threat of all wars,” we really must confront this question of ultimately how different—

P. Onuf: Yeah, yeah.

B. Balogh: Is the Civil War from all wars.  Now, I who know the least about this so I’ll listen to your answers, but for me, it remains very distinctive, primarily because we did this to ourselves.  We fought this—

P. Onuf: Yeah.

B. Balogh: On our own homeland, so to speak, and that certainly makes it distinctive, but listening to you guys, especially about the number of young men who signed up without being coerced and their sense of patriotism, either to the Union or to their home state and the larger Confederacy, really underscores this notion of doing this to ourselves—

P. Onuf: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right.

B. Balogh: And that remains distinctive to me, but I’d be curious to hear where you and Ed come down on this question.

P. Onuf: Well, Ed—

E. Ayers: You know, I think it was an exceptional moment in American history but I guess I’d argue that this is our version of something that all nations seem to go through at some time, right?  They’re fighting over who are we really.

P. Onuf: Right.

E. Ayers: And unlike other countries where they might be fighting over a religious difference or a longstanding who owns that piece of turf, here this was all about a future.  There was not anything immediately at stake because the North didn’t think that it could abolish slavery in the Constitution, but Americans projecting themselves across space and across time were fighting in many ways over what the future of America would be.

P. Onuf: Yeah, and I do think, I mean, you’re exactly right.  There’re been so many civil wars.  There’s been so much slaughter in world history.  We’re not special in that regard, but what makes this special for us is that the United States was founded on the notion of a vision of peace, that is, that republican government would end conflicts within nations, that this was a model for the world, that the Union was a way to transcend the problem of war that had scarred the European continent for centuries, that the Americas had the hubris, the pride, to think that they had discovered the formula for progress and perpetual peace and prosperity and that is republican government and that’s why there’s so much pathos in Lincoln’s Civil War rhetoric about the meaning of the war, about the meaning of republican government, because what the war was really demonstrating was the failure of that dream.

B. Balogh: Well, guys, one thing is not exceptional and that’s that once again we’ve run out of time, but we want to know what our listeners think about all of this and we want them to continue the conversation online.  You can find us at backstoryradio.org.  And while you’re there, have a listen to the first installment in our Civil War series, “The Road to War.”

P. Onuf: Again, that’s backstoryradio.org.  We’re also on iTunes, Facebook, and Twitter.  Don’t be a stranger.

E. Ayers: “BackStory” is produced by Tony Field, with help from Catherine Moore.  Dylan Keefe mastered the show, and Gaby Alter wrote our theme.  Our interns are Jose Argueta and Miriam Kaplan.  Special thanks today to Clinton Johnston.  “BackStory’s” executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.  Production support for “BackStory” is provided by Cary Brown Epstein and the W.L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation, James Madison’s Montpelier, Marcus and Carole Weinstein, Trish and David Crowe, Austin Ligon, and an anonymous donor.

Tape: Brian Balogh and Peter Onuf are professors in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History.  Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond.  “BackStory” was created by Andrew Wyndham for VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

“Why They Fought” is Part III of a three-part BackStory series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

Read Show Transcript

Further Reading

Still questioning? The BackStory research team has compiled a comprehensive list of print and online resources for further exploration. Read On.

Reporter Thomas Pierce recounts the story of Abraham Lincoln’s long train journey to the White House from his home in Springfield, IL.

[CHECK BACK LATER FOR THE REST OF THE INTERVIEWS FROM THIS EPISODE]

Gary Gallagher: Why Northerners Fought — University of Virginia historian Gary Gallagher argues that while Northern leaders’ opposition to slavery brought on the Civil War, it wasn’t what motivated the majority of men in the Union army to enlist.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Why Confederates Fought — University of North Florida historian Aaron Sheehan-Dean explains why so many non-slaveholding Southerners were willing to lay down their lives in a Confederate war to protect slavery.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Why Confederates Fought (Extended Interview) — Hear the full account of Southern soldiers’ motivations in this extended interview.

23rd New York Infantry, ca. 1861-1865 (Library of Congress)

150 years ago this April, the Union went to war with the Confederacy. Ever since, Americans have been debating the causes of that war. Most historians today agree that it was fundamentally about slavery. And so what are we to make of the fact that most Southerners didn’t own any slaves, and most Northerners were not abolitionists?

In this hour of BackStory, the History Guys turn the question of the war’s causes on its side, asking instead why Northerners and Southerners took up arms to fight one another. What causes, in other words, were they willing to die for? Were families on the home-front united in their commitment to war, or were there differences of opinion? Who didn’t want to fight? What did slavery mean to white people on both sides, and what role did enslaved and free African-Americans play in the liberation of slaves? How much did Americans’ reasons for fighting change between 1861 and 1864? And finally – how have intervening wars altered the ways we interpret the motivations of Civil War soldiers?

“Why They Fought” is Part II of a three-part BackStory series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

Read Show Transcript

Guests Include:

 
• Adam Goodheart (lead author, New York Times “Disunion” series)
• Christy Coleman (president, American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar)
• Gary Gallagher (historian, University of Virginia)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean (historian, University of North Florida)
• Catherine Clinton (historian, Queens University Belfast)

 

Features and Highlights

Listen to historians Gary Gallagher and Aaron Sheehan-Dean explain what men on both sides of the conflict were really willing to die for.

Further Reading

Want to peer further down the road to Civil War? The BackStory research team has compiled a comprehensive list of print and online resources for further exploration. Read On.

Listing of the music heard in “Civil War 150th: Why They Fought”

Peter Onuf: This is “BackStory,” with us, the American History Guys.  I’m Peter Onuf, 18^th century guy.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers, 19^th century guy.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh, 20^th century history guy.  [Music]  One hundred and fifty years ago this April, the first shots were fired in the American Civil War.  In less than four years, more than six hundred thousand Americans would die—the equivalent of six million people today—and the largest and most powerful system of slavery in the world would grind to a screeching halt.

Ed Ayers: Now if you were to travel back in time to the months or even weeks before that April of 1861, and you were to tell people that this was what they could expect in the near future, chances are they would think you are crazy.  As much as they might have wanted that outcome, or dreaded it, it just didn’t seem possible that such a thing could happen in the 19^th century.  After all, politicians had been cutting deals about slavery going all the way back to the very founding of the country.

Peter Onuf: It’s hard not to see things in hindsight when we think about the Civil War.  To see it as a conflict that just had to happen, that was predestined, to understand its causes based on our knowledge of its results.  But for the rest of the hour today on this special Civil War edition of our show, we’re going to try to make sense of the lead-up to that war the way Americans at the time would have made sense of it.  Our story begins in the winter of 1860.  [music]

Frederick Douglass Reading: Our last monthly paper announced the probable election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, the Republican candidates for President and Vice President of the United States.  What was then only speculation and probability, is now an accomplished fact.

Brian Balogh: This is the lead editorial in the December 1860 edition of Douglass’ Monthly. That’s Douglass as in Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist who had himself escaped from slavery 22 years before.  Ed, this was such a crucial election.  Can you give us a little background on who was running, what were the parties, all that stuff?

Ed Ayers: It’s an amazing election.  The future of the nation in the balance and everybody knew it.  The stage had been set really for over a decade as the Whig Party which had been a strong national party tied to holding the country together had disintegrated.  The Democratic Party had broken apart between northern and southern factions.  A new party, the Constitutional Union Party, had grown up trying to mediate between the North and South.  Also, in the space the Whigs had left, the Republican Party emerges in the North and says that the territories may not be taken over by slaveholders, so election day comes and what you find is that Stephen Douglass, sort of a moderate, and John Breckenridge, the strong pro-Southern candidate, split the votes of the big national party, the Democrats.  The Constitutional Union Party wins lots of votes, especially in the upper South, but Abraham Lincoln wins 40% of the vote, all that in the North, and with that percentage, he becomes President of the United States, so you have a new president, a brand new party never in political power and finally, in the South, some of the Democrats are saying now let’s start talking about secession.

Frederick Douglass: Unquestionably, secession, disunion, southern confederacy and the like phrases are the most popular political watchwords of the cotton-growing states of the Union.  Nor is this sentiment to be entirely despised.  If Mr. Lincoln were really a friend to the abolition movement instead of being its most powerful enemy, the disillusion of the Union might be the only effective mode of perpetuating slavery in the southern states, but the South has now no such cause for disunion.

Brian Balogh: Now, hold on.  This is Abraham Lincoln he’s talking about, the Great Emancipator, and Frederick Douglass is calling him the abolition movement’s greatest enemy.

Ed Ayers: It’s confusing, isn’t it, Brian, especially for you 20^th century people?

Brian Balogh: Yeah.  Come on.

Ed Ayers: Here’s the thing.  So, Abraham Lincoln really does hate slavery.  He and the Republican Party say we are not going to allow slavery to expand into the territories to pollute the rest of the nation, but they do not think that slavery can be ended where it now exists, so from an abolitionist, like Frederick Douglass’s point of view, they cannot help but be ambivalent about someone who acknowledges the constitutional right of perpetual bondage.

Tape (David Blight): It’s the same dilemma others have faced throughout our history.

Ed Ayers: This is David Blight, a Civil War historian who’s written a lot about Frederick Douglass.

Tape (David Blight): You advocate for something for perhaps all of your lifetime. Along comes a political persuasion or a movement or a party that kind of goes partway there.  And sometimes you are most disgusted with those who seem to be on your side and yet won’t act on it versus those who you know are not on your side and will never act on it.

Frederick Douglass: With an abolition president, we should consider a successful separation of the slave from the free states a calamity greatly damaging to the prospects of our long enslaved bruised and mutilated people, but under what may be expected of the Republican Party with its pledges to put down the slaves should they attempt to rise and to hunt them should they run away, a disillusion of the Union would be highly beneficial to the cause of liberty.

Tape (David Blight): What he wants to happen is an all-out break that forces some kind of organized military action against the South.  He says that only then would slavery really really be threatened and he’s actually saying to the secessionists here, you know, if you just back off and cool it and you stay in the Union, your Godforsaken slave system is going to last a heck of a lot longer than if you bolt the Union, but he wants them to bolt.

Frederick Douglass: In truth, we really wish those brave fire-eating, cotton-growing states would just now go at once outside of the Union and set up for themselves.  But no.  Cunning dogs.  They will smoother their rage and after all the dust they can raise, they will retire within the Union and claim its advantages.

Tape (David Blight): Douglass actually predicts this over and over that what will really happen will be yet another compromise, something on the lines of the Compromise of 1850.  He sees this ultimately being assuaged by compromise and that’s his worst fear, you know, he wants one thing.  He expects another.  He fears where this is going but note how he says that what at least has happened and this he celebrates, is that for the first time American political culture was under the control of people who to some degree were threatening the future of slavery.

Frederick Douglass: For 50 years, the country has taken the law from the lips of an exacting, haughty and emperist slave oligarchy.  The masters of slaves have been masters of the Republic.  They were the president makers of the Republic.  Lincoln’s election has broken their power.  It has taught the North its strength and shown the South its weakness.  More important still, it has demonstrated the possibility of electing if not an abolitionist at least an anti-slavery reputation to the presidency of the United States.

Tape (David Blight): Now, that sounds like such a half measure, but it meant a great deal to an abolitionist like Douglass.  It’s like this new order of things, a new order of events that is about to take place.  The trouble is they just don’t know where these events are yet going.

Ed Ayers: That’s David Blight, Professor of History at Yale University.  We’ll post a full version of my conversation with him at backstoryradio.org.

Brian Balogh: So, guys, we understand pretty well that northerners were worried about slavery spreading to the territories and continuing a southern domination of politics across the Union.  Were there equivalent fears in the South about northern strangulation of the political rights of southerners?

Peter Onuf: Yes, Brian.  Let me pick up on that and I’ll kick it over to our good friend, Ed, and I’d say absolutely there were.  There were great concerns that now that the Republicans were in control of the national administration that this was the culminating chapter in a long narrative of southern victimhood, believe it or not, that is that the federal union had been redistributing wealth through its commercial system, the tariff and navigation laws and so forth, and that in effect, the South had been subsidizing the North—

Brian Balogh: Let me just stop there, Peter.  You mean that this tariff was protecting northern industries but disproportionately taxing southerners.

Peter Onuf: Yeah.  But even when the tariff went down, they analyzed the whole commercial system and saw a maldistribution of benefits, that they were flowing to the North.  In other words, the real problem for the South was democracy.  That is, under the Constitution, it would be possible for a hostile majority to seize the reigns of central power and they’d been waiting for that to happen since 1787.

Ed Ayers: And so here’s the terrifying vision of secessionists that Abraham Lincoln has a brand new party, they’ve have never been in the presidency before but as soon as he builds the network of patronage that’s going to expand all the ports and post offices of the South.  My goodness, what could you do then about abolitionist literature?  What could you do then about building party strength?

Peter Onuf: So, Ed, you’re suggesting that there’s a fear among some southerners that Republicanism might gain some traction in the South?

Ed Ayers: Oh, yeah.  Three-fourths of white southern men are not slaveholders.  Why wouldn’t those guys want to say, you know, what I’d like to have is a party that’s really for me.  [laughter]  And why is this plausible?  Because the South has had a two-party system until very recently which has just collapsed, so there’s a vacuum there that all these former Whigs, all these former people who believed in a lot of the things Republicans believe in which is using the federal government to build railroads and canals and all that sort of stuff, they could be pulled into the Republican Party and the South would begin to fragment from within and as soon as you have that happen, goodness knows what would happen with the enslaved population if they thought they had some white allies.

Brian Balogh: So, that’s a very good explanation of kind of the apparently quite realistic assessment of the politics, but what about the fear of race war, what about the kind of racial situation on the ground?

Ed Ayers: Well, I’ve got two words for you, Brian—John Brown.

Brian Balogh: Yeah.

Ed Ayers: Now, remember, it’s only in 1859, just the preceding year, that he leads a campaign, as he says, to begin the end of slavery through the black men themselves, rising up against their masters and hands out all these pikes and things, right?  So they look around and they think, well, we don’t know who Abraham Lincoln is.  Who knows what he’s going to do?  But what we do know is maybe those black people were listening and they’re waiting for the next John Brown and that when the political system becomes destabilized, that they will cease the opportunity to rise up against us.

Peter Onuf: Yeah, and it’s worth remembering that throughout American history, servile insurrection, the uprising of slaves, is associated with outside interference.  If you go back to the American Revolution and Lord Dunmore’s proclamation in March 1775, freeing Virginia slaves as the last royal governor—come to our alliance, join us.  In a way, that’s the thing that southerners would fear.  It’s not that their slaves would rise up spontaneously by themselves because they think they’ve worked it all out because slavery is becoming a more efficient, even we hate to say it, but a more modern and effective institution.

Ed Ayers: Right.

Peter Onuf: And I think what you’re saying, Ed, is that it’s this vanguard of aliens, foreigners to the South, northerners representing the administration who could tip the balance in dangerous ways.

Brian Balogh: It’s fascinating and, of course, you guys know that persists into the 1960s when the first charge against people demonstrating peacefully for their rights, civil rights.

Peter Onuf: Yeah.

Brian Balogh: Outside agitators, because our own people, although subject—

Peter Onuf: They know their place.  Right.

Ed Ayers: Yeah.  They would never do this without outside agitators.  [music]

Brian Balogh: Well, we’re going to take a short break.  When we get back, we’ll pick up our story in South Carolina where the secession train finally leaves the station.

Peter Onuf: You’re listening to a special Civil War Anniversary Edition of “BackStory with the American History Guys.”  We’ll be back in a minute.

Peter Onuf: This is BackStory, the show that brings three centuries of history to bear on a single topic.  I’m Peter Onuf, the 18^th century guy.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers, the 19^th century guy.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh, 20^th century guy.  Today on the show, we’re marking the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War’s beginnings with an in-depth look at the pivotal six months before the fighting started.  In the first part of the show, Ed and Peter were explaining how utterly different the election of Abraham Lincoln looked in the South to the way it looked to abolitionists in the North.

Peter Onuf: Now, we should be careful to point out that the “North” and the “South” were hardly monolithic entities at this time.  Very few northerners were committed abolitionists.  In fact, northerners were more likely to think that slavery kept black people in their places and in the South, just because practically everybody hated Lincoln, that didn’t mean that they were ready to walk out of the Union.  According to Civil War historian William Freehling, in fact, that was very much a minority position in December 1860.

Tape (William Freehling): So the problem for the minority of secessionists is to figure out how they can get the majority out.  And the thing they must above all else avoid is a southern convention.  Because in a southern convention to decide the issue of secession, they’re going to lose.  What they have to do is do it state by state.  And when enough states seceded, then there would be enormous pressure on the majority to reconsider its position.

Peter Onuf: South Carolina is the where the secessionists make their first stand. Three days after the election, it announces it will hold a convention to debate secession and a few weeks later, that convention votes unanimously to leave the Union.  University of Virginia historian Elizabeth Varon says that to understand why South Carolina was the first to go, we need to understand this demographic fact.

Tape (Elizabeth Varon): South Carolina is one of the two southern states on the eve of the War that has an African American majority—59% of the population—and what this means as a practical matter is not that blacks have any voice in the politics of the state; of course, they don’t.  This is a slave population.  But it does signify a sort of overweening dependence on slavery, so South Carolina has long been at the forefront of the defense of the institution.

Ed Ayers: In fact, South Carolina had been at the forefront of that effort ever since the 1830s.  Back then, South Carolina said when there’s a law that directly contradicts the interest of a state, it may be nullified, rendered null and void, and South Carolina staked a lot of that back in 1830 and ’31.  It lost.  President Jackson called their bluff, but the idea that the federal government should not be able to endanger the rights of slaveholders and the security of white people in a predominantly black state endured and it came up again here in the secession crisis.  [music]

Reading (Mary Chesnut): My father was a South Carolina nullifier, governor of the state at the time of the nullification row, so I was of necessity a rebel born.

Ed Ayers: This is a passage from the diary of Mary Chesnut, one of the most famous documents of the American Civil War.  In addition to being the daughter of a former governor, Mary Chesnut was also the wife of James Chesnut, the first U.S. Senator to quit the Senate after the 1860 election.

Reading (Mary Chesnut): I remember feeling a nervous dread and horror of this break with so great a power as United States but I was ready and willing.  South Carolina has been so rampant for years.  Come what would, I wanted them to fight and stop talking.  So I was a seceder, but I dreaded the future.

Tape (Elizabeth Varon): Americans, Southerners included, had long been encouraged to dread disunion and indeed to imagine it as the worst possible thing that could befall their country.

Ed Ayers: Historian Elizabeth Varon.

Tape (Elizabeth Varon): And this image of disunion as something that was just a cataclysmic apocalyptic tragic outcome had a great deal of political utility because invariably when anyone in the days of the early antebellum period proposed something radical, they were accused of wanting disunion, of fomenting disunion, of opening this Pandora’s box, so, for example, when abolitionists came along and proposed the immediate emancipation of the slaves, those who supported the slave system said, ahh, you’re disunionists, you want to alienate North from South and prompt this kind of terrible unwinnable war and women’s right advocates were accused of the same thing, so people like Chesnut had to unlearn this longstanding set of assumptions.  To embrace secession, they had to unlearn the idea that disunion was just a dreadful and horrific prospect.

Ed Ayers: By the winter of 1860, that lesson was well on its way to being unlearned.  In fact, one of the most famous quotes from this period is from Mary Chesnut’s husband, the U.S. senator.  Or rather ex-senator.  A few days after South Carolina seceded, he reportedly said this to a fellow South Carolinian who was nervous about the future.

Reading (Senator James Chesnut): There will be no war, it will all be arranged.  I will drink all the blood shed in the war.

Tape (Elizabeth Varon): The secessionists had this sort of a rose-colored view of what secession would mean.  Some of them thought the North would quail in the face of this secession movement and either sort of let the South go after a sort of brief dust-up or give the South what it wanted.  Interestingly, it was the Unionists in the South who said, yes, secession’s going to bring a war, but it’s going to bring a war we can’t win.

Ed Ayers: And one thing we would need to pause to point out, I think, is that secession was not the only way to protect slavery and that if people opposed secession, and by people, I mean the slaveholders of the South—

Tape (Elizabeth Varon): Right.

Ed Ayers: Does not mean that they were somehow less committed to slavery than secessionists were.

Tape (Elizabeth Varon): That’s such an important point.  The debate between unionists and secessionists in the South is not a debate over slavery per se.  It’s a debate about how best to protect slavery, whether slavery which has thrived in the Union, as the unionists say, will continue to thrive in the Union or whether slavery is in mortal danger unless the South secedes, and Unionists are absolutely saying the surest way to destroy slavery is to bring a federal army down here.  Absolutely.

Ed Ayers: Once again, we see how the election of Lincoln meant so many different things to so many different people, even people who were supposedly on the same “side.”  But Varon told me that in many ways, the secession debate was about a lot more than politics.

Tape (Elizabeth Varon): One of the things the secessionists do so well in those critical months in which this all has been debated is tap a kind of martial fervor, particularly among men, particularly among young men, the idea that this war can not only be short and sweet, but it can be fun, it can be a break from the ho hum of everyday life.  It can be a field in which men can win honor and glory and the hearts of women and all the rest, and there’s a lot of young men in the South who are eager to sort of recapture the glories of the South’s early history, the time when it dominated the federal government and all the rest, who are very susceptible to this kind of argument.

Ed Ayers: So, as we go into secession, there’s this strange amalgam of dread and exaltation in the South, right?

Tape (Elizabeth Varon): Yes.  Right.

Ed AYers: And a sense it’s not that people can’t imagine the terrible things that will happen, they just don’t think they’re going to.

Tape (Elizabeth Varon): They just don’t think that they’re going to, exactly, and, I mean, this is something that is puzzling.  Many people have said to me, couldn’t these guys crunch the numbers?  It was obvious that the North had not only more people but more industry and more of everything, even more agricultural output, but the secessionists perceived that the South had other advantages that they believed would bring them a quick and decisive victory.  [music]

Ed Ayers: That’s Elizabeth Varon, a historian at the University of Virginia.  We’ll link to some of her work, and to audio of my entire conversation with her, at backstoryradio.org.

Peter Onuf: Well, Ed, picking up on what Liz just said about the confidence of secessionists it would be a quick war, why didn’t they understand what they were up against?

Ed Ayers: Yeah, it’s a little eerie to see how confident the South is.  It’s not merely that they’re playing defense, oh, our rights have been infringed.  They’re going, here’s our chance.  We control the world’s dominant commodity—

Peter Onuf: King Cotton.

Ed Ayers: We have a monopoly over the equivalent of oil of today.  Our labor force has never been worth more.  Slaves are worth more than all the railroads and factories and banks of the North added up, and why would we want to constantly be harangued by these Yankees about our moral failings, about our economic failings, about our political failings.  They don’t like us and they just demonstrated that they don’t.  Hell with ‘em.  Let’s leave and be the fourth richest economy in the world by ourselves.

Peter Onuf: And, Ed, wouldn’t you say that there is this assumption that when push comes to shove, they won’t stop us, because they’ve always buckled in and rolled over in the past within the context of federal politics.  We’ve had our way, so let’s call their bluff definitively.

Ed Ayers: Exactly.  And here’s another reason.  Why would they roll over all the time?  Because they need us.  More than half of all exports are coming from the slave South.  The entire northern economy is driven by the cottons coming out of the slave South, so not only are they morally bankrupt and sort of hypocrites and blowhards, but they are under our economic heel.

Brian Balogh: They just didn’t think the Union was really even going to fight.

Peter Onuf: There was no will there.

Brian Balogh: And it does seem on that because there had been so many compromises, because there had not been civil war, that there really might not be—  I mean, I guess I can understand why reasonable people might think that.

Ed Ayers: But, the fact is, as Liz points out, other reasonable people said you’re crazy, [laughter] in the same debate, so it’s not like they couldn’t imagine it.

Peter Onuf: Right.

Ed Ayers: So, where is the soft underbelly of the Unionists, that they are not being manly, and the phrase, and I want you to strap yourselves in because this will hurt your feelings, the phrase that they would use—what’s the opposite of a secessionist?  Not a unionist, but a submissionist.

Peter Onuf: Hmmm—

Ed Ayers: You would submit, you’d roll over for the Union—

Peter Onuf: Ohhh, yeah.

Ed Ayers:  And so that’s what the unionists had a very hard time fighting against.

Brian Balogh: So, guys, did women think about this in the same terms that we’ve been talking about, you know, doubting people’s manhood?

Peter Onuf: Yes.  I would defer to Ed on this, but my guess is that women, in fact, take that on in a very big way in some ways.  Men can waiver but women are pretty sure.  They’re pretty clear on what a man would do.  If we were men, that is so much the plaint of Civil War women—how can we show our patriotism; if we were in your place, we would do this.

Ed Ayers: That’s exactly right, and so if you’re going to protect me, then you’re going to act in a manly way and of course, this was the other place the unionists are saying, honey, I am protecting you by not going to war.  [laughter]  But the thing is that there’s not a manly language of compromise.

Brian Balogh: What happened to the presumably manly language of compromise that had served the nation for decades?

Peter Onuf: Well, yes, to the extent that we revered the fathers and their statesmanlike vision and prescience when they created this strong more perfect union.  Then by all means, that was the epitome of manhood but that’s old manhood in a way and there’s a language, a subversive generational language of youth rising up and it takes the form of calling these compromisers and using that word “compromise” in the modern pejorative sense.  These guys were old fogies.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, and so looking back, we tried so hard, historians, to try to figure out who’s voting for these people.  Who’s voting for the Republicans?  Who’s voting for the secessionists and the main pattern they’ve been able to find is that it’s young men on both sides.  The Republicans have this group called the Wide Awakes that are not even able to vote yet, but they’re out marching and carrying torches and things, kind of a paramilitary, and down South, it’s the guys who are saying I’ve been listening to this crap my whole life, let’s go.  We don’t want these old guys compromising our rights away one more time.  The irony, of course, being the young men who are saying these things are the very ones who are going to end up dying in the trenches of the Civil War.  [music]

Reading: In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Peter Onuf: On January 9, Mississippi follows South Carolina out of the Union.

Reading: Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.

Peter Onuf: The following day, Florida follows suit.

Reading: We have not acted in haste or in passion but with the utmost deliberation and from what we regard as immeasurable necessity.

Peter Onuf: Alabama goes the next day, and a few days after that, Louisiana and Texas.  On February 4^th, representatives from all seven states meet in Montgomery, Alabama, to draw up a new constitution.  Now it’s often said that the original Constitution was a pro-slavery document.  There was the part about slaves counting as three-fifths of a free person, and that other bit about all states having to return fugitive slaves.  And the fact that it was ratified at all testifies to how much the slave states felt that it did it protect them.  But the Confederate Constitution took the protection of slavery to a whole new level.  Here’s the Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, Alexander Stephens, explaining the new and improved version of the founding document.

Reading: The prevailing ideas entertained by Jefferson and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature.  It was an evil that they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.  Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong.  They rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races.  This was an error.  It was a sandy foundation and the government built upon it fell when the storm came and the wind blew.  Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Ed Ayers: So, guys, you know what’s amazing to me?  The word that’s repeated several times in here is “new.”  We think of the defense of slavery and of race as being the oldest kind of archaic attitude as possible.

Peter Onuf: I see what you’re saying.

Ed Ayers: But what he’s saying, yeah, that was okay for the old fashioned 18^th century but now in the 19^th century, we know better that the Negro is not equal to the white man.

Peter Onuf: No, Ed, that is so absolutely right and it’s because of emerging understandings among racial scientists, anthropologists, ethnologists in the 19^th century about racial difference, it’s because of this realistic political economy that is a sense of what makes the world turn round and that would be cotton which is king.  This is getting past the platitudes and the banalities of the Enlightenment of the founding era.  All men are created equal.  Hmmm—  I don’t know about that because they certainly didn’t practice it if they believed it, that is, the founders, and the idea that slavery would go away.  No.  No, it so manifestly had not.  It is a robust institution so let’s face the facts.  You can say this is that pragmatic realist American go-go spirit.

Ed Ayers: And you’ll notice the very last sentence, they see this as not just a continuation of something else, but the beginning of a new world order.  This, our new government is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.  It’s hard to imagine a more chilling phrase in all of American history that this could have been the truth.  It could’ve the first new nation based upon the great truths as they imagined it of black inferiority.

Peter Onuf: Yeah, but Ed reminds of the American founding when that same notion of being in the forefront of world history offering a model for the rest of the world that was very much the language of newness in 1776, 1787.

Brian Balogh: Well, it’s lucky that we’re all about the old, guys.  That’s all I can say after hearing this discussion because new is really pretty dangerous.

Peter Onuf: Yeah.  Well, you know the underlying issue is the question of how the United States and our history is defined according to timeless values.  In effect, Lincoln refutes the notion of newness when he invokes the spirit of Jefferson and says, listen, those principles of 1776 articulated in the Declaration, they are the principles that constitute our creed.  This is the church we worship in, all of us.  This is the rock on which this nation is built, that is to think that the principles of the Declaration infuse the Constitution.  All men are created equal, that that’s foundational to how we should understand the Constitution.  Well, we like to think that today, but Lincoln is really the author, if you will, of that conflation of those two great documents.  [music]

It’s time now for another short break. When we get back, we’ll look at why so many men in Virginia, the Old Dominion, were so reluctant to join up with the brand new Dominion. You’re listening to a Civil War special edition of “BackStory.”  And we’ll be back in a minute.

Peter Onuf: We’re back with BackStory.  I’m Peter Onuf.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show we’re focusing in on the secession crisis that gripped the nation 150 years ago this spring. When we left off, it was February 1861, and representatives from the seven lower South states that had left the Union were meeting in Montgomery to create a new government.

Ed Ayers: At the same time in Springfield, Illinois, President-elect Abraham Lincoln was boarding a train for Washington D.C.  It had been three whole months since his election, and it would be another month still before he would actually take office.  And so you can imagine the anticipation all along his route as people gathered in the hopes of hearing something—anything, really—about what the man whose election had triggered the crisis planned to do about it.  Radio producer Thomas Pierce is going to tell the story now of Lincoln’s journey to the White House.

Thomas Pierce: [sound: train rattle, steam]  We begin in a baggage car, trunks full of books and clothes rattle as the train moves east.  On a small card, the trunk’s owner and destination—A. Lincoln, White House, Washington, D.C.  The ride is just as bumpy up in the passenger car.  Reporters grumble how it’s hard to write down anything at all.  They’re here to document the two-week journey of the President-elect who watches tiny Illinois prairie towns pass by outside the window. [sound:  train whistle]  The stop at each train depot is a similar scene.  Brass bands that erupt into old songs like “Hail Columbia,” church bells and cannon salutes.  Thousands of people pressing for a first glimpse of their new president.

“He has a large head with a very high shelving forehead,” one reporter writes.  “A first crop of darkish whiskers; a clean well-built neck, more back than chest, a long, lank trunk.”  Future President Rutherford B. Hayes who’s in the audience in Indianapolis, notes Lincoln’s curious way of bowing uncomfortably to the crowds.  “His chin rises.  His body breaks in two at the hip.  Homely as L is, if you get a good view of him by day light, when he is talking, he is by no means ill looking.”

In town after town, Lincoln addresses the crowds from podiums in the back of the train and at least once standing on a chair in a hotel lobby.  At each of these stops, he seems to make a point of not really saying much at all.

LINCOLN READING: You know that it has not been my custom, since I started on this route to Washington, to make long speeches; I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.  [Note: This is from the speech he gave in Pittsburgh at the Monongahela House, a hotel.]

Thomas Pierce: In the months after his election, Lincoln had proved he was a man who could hold his tongue, especially on the subject the public most wanted to hear about—how he planned to handle the fact that state after state was leaving the union.  Many thought his silence was a terrible mistake.  One New York Herald editorial called it “foolish.”  The New York Times said the silence had left the “field open for a struggle of factions.”

Alexander Stephens, who would become Vice President of the Confederacy, was at the time still arguing against secession in his home state of Georgia.  He wrote Lincoln, pleading with him to say something that could help his cause.

Reading: A word fitly spoken by you now would indeed be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver.’

Tape (Eric Foner): What could Lincoln say that could change the basic problem, which is the South thought slavery was right and Lincoln and the Republicans thought slavery was wrong.

Thomas Pierce: Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of The Fiery Trial, a book about Lincoln and slavery.  He says that while Lincoln appeared to be letting history unfold without him in those months, he was anything but silent behind the scenes.

Tape (Eric Foner): Lincoln intervenes fairly forcefully by the end of December in letters to members of Congress, in which he makes it very clear that he is opposed to compromise on what he considers the key issue, which was the westward expansion of slavery.

Reading: Let there be no compromise on the issue of extending slavery.

Tape (Eric Foner): He wrote to Republican allies in Washington—

Reading:  Have none of it.  Stand firm.  The tug has to come, and better now, than at any time hereafter.

Thomas Pierce: In Congress, which was starting to thin out with defections, there were increasingly desperate calls for a plan that might head off military action.  Kentucky Senator John Crittenden was proposing that the Constitution be amended to protect slavery forever where it already existed, and that the Missouri Compromise be reinstated, allowing for the extension of slavery below a certain line.  Lincoln didn’t take issue with the constitutional amendment, but he was dead set against any plan that would result in the creation of even a single new slave state.

Tape (Eric Foner): Lincoln says basically, look, we’ve been elected on this platform.  If we compromise now, a year from now they’re going to threaten to secede unless we acquire Cuba as a slave state.  In one of his letters to a member of Congress he says, you know, if we compromise, it’s the end of us as a party.

Thomas Pierce: In the end, all five Republicans on the Senate committee considering the Crittenden Plan voted against it. And the Republican Party, of course, lived long and prospered.  But the fact that Lincoln proved savvy in his political calculations that winter does not mean he had any idea of what was just around the corner.

Peter Onuf: That special report for “BackStory,” is from radio producer Thomas Pierce.  [banjo music]

Brian Balogh: So, Ed, Peter, we’ve talked about how a lot of the secessionists thought the North was just going to let the South go, that there really wasn’t going to be a war over this.  Can we read Lincoln’s silences given him trying to hold his party together and everything, his refusal to compromise?  Can we read that as Lincoln thinking, yeah, the South really isn’t going to fight, that the secession thing is just going to fall apart if we don’t fan the flames?

Peter Onuf: Yeah, Brian, that’s a plausible interpretation.  Lincoln just didn’t get how deep secessionist feeling was in the South.  He thought it could be isolated, that it was a kind of a cancer that could be excised.

Ed Ayers: And he has good reason to think that because a lot of people from upper South are telling him that.

Peter Onuf: Yeah, exactly.

Ed Ayers: Mr. President, if you’ll just be patient, we’ll work it out down here, especially in Virginia.

Peter Onuf: And think about this, Ed.  Virginia’s right at the center of the union, or at least historically.  I mean, it’s the absolute heart and soul of the United States of America and a lot of these border state people, they take all of this Manifest Destiny talk and they say, our future is with this great imperial republic.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, the border states say we’re virtually a third nation.

Peter Onuf: That’s right.

Ed Ayers: We are the reasonable people.  The weirdo abolitionists in New England and the weirdo secessionists in South Carolina, they’re not the real America we are.  We’ll figure this out.

Peter Onuf: And that’s when slavery comes in, though, because that becomes the issue, doesn’t it, Ed?

Ed Ayers: Yeah.  Well, because here’s the fundamental paradox.  Virginia is the great compromiser, the great mother of presidents, and also the largest slave state.

Peter Onuf: Right.

Ed Ayers: Not merely in the number of enslaved people who live there, but in its centrality in the slave trade.

Peter Onuf: Yeah.  They depended on the rest of the South.  That was a big market for their human property.

Ed Ayers: Oh, yeah.  As a matter of fact, if you don’t have that market, you worry about being overrun—

Peter Onuf: Right.

Ed Ayers: By enslaved people, so Virginia is deeply tied to the Deep South.  [music]

Brian Balogh: And so, on February 13^th, at the very same time that the Confederacy is drawing up its new Constitution, a group of white men gather in Richmond to try and figure out what Virginia should do.  They’ve been sent there by Virginia voters, and when they arrive, only one out of six delegates is actually in favor of secession.  Here’s Civil War historian William Freehling who’s just published a book about the convention.

Tape (William Freehling): The Virginia convention is often called the Virginia secession convention.  But if you look at all its deliberations, well, they finally decide on April 17^th, it’s better to call it a Unionist convention, because what most of the deliberations are trying to do is find some way to save the Union.  Their dream is to get the lower South to come back into the Union, so they don’t want to alienate it too much.  They are classic men in the middle who are trying desperately to keep the extremes from going to war with each other.

Brian Balogh: Just like their counterparts further South, most of these guys make the case that slavery would be safest inside the Union. But Virginia, they argue, has more at stake than anybody.

Reading: I say, sir, that a dissolution of the Union will be the commencement of the abolition of slavery.  Will it not, sir, make a hostile border for Virginia, and enable slaves to escape more rapidly because more securely?  Will it not, virtually, bring Canada to our doors?

Reading: By Virginia seceding, you transfer the seed of this war to this fertile and salubrious country.  Virginia would be the battleground.  Their fields would be laid—

Reading: Would you bring this desolation upon us?  Will you make northwestern Virginia the Flanders of America and convert our smiling valleys into the slaughter pens of as brave and loyal a people as dwell in the “Old Dominion?”  I hope not.

Brian Balogh: So how did secessionists counter this prediction that secession would bring devastation to Virginia?  They said if it’s peace you’re after, the best thing we can do is secede.

Reading: We are told that it will bring war.  On the contrary, it will tend to avert war. Virginia, united with the Southern confederacy, will present small inducement for war upon that Confederacy.

Tape (William Freeling): That’s what the secessionists keep saying, the issue is not should we ideally secede, the issue is that we’ve already got a secession.  The question is now should we stay in the Union when a third of the South has gone out of the Union.  Now, that’s a fascinating position because it indicates how much those first third southerners who went out of the Union can manipulate and control the other southerners.

Ed Ayers: And what do you think the key point of leverage was for those states that went out?  Was it the importance of those states to the southern economy or was it the fact that the remaining southern states were now a pretty distinct minority in Congress, less able to protect slavery than ever?

Tape (William Freehling): That’s exactly the point that secessionists make.  Maybe we would’ve been in a position to stay in the Union if everybody had stayed in the Union, but now we’re stuck in the Union with only eight states against 20 northern states and four of our states are kind of shaky.  Delaware owns only 1,700 slaves.  Maryland has as many free blacks as slaves.  What business do we have trying to protect slavery when our great protectors are now in another nation?

Brian Balogh: That’s William Freehling, senior fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.  We’ll post an excerpt from his latest book on secession, Showdown in Virginia, at backstoryradio.org.

Ed Ayers: So that’s how the debate in Richmond goes for seven long weeks. While the delegates are inside debating, outside, pro-secession demonstrators are building bonfires, marching in the streets, urging what they call the grannies inside to go ahead and act and to act decisively on behalf of the new nation.  Finally, on April 4^th, the secessionists force a vote and the result, after all of this, after all the bonfires and parades and speeches, it’s 2 to 1 against secession.

Brian Balogh: Wow.

Ed Ayers: Okay, and so the country’s looking around and going, whew, okay, boy, that was close.

Peter Onuf: We dodged a few bullets.  That’s right.

Ed Ayers: Exactly.  And it seems like maybe history’s turned a corner, but history was unfolding elsewhere as well, especially back down in South Carolina at Fort Sumter, a federal outpost in the mouth of Charleston Harbor.  Right after Lincoln takes office, he finds out that the Union soldiers in that fort are running out of food and that without a resupply, they’re going to have to leave.  They’re going to have to pull out and if they do that, the world’s going to say, okay, it looks like South Carolina has actually succeeded in secession.  The problem is if he does send the supplies down there, South Carolina could interpret that as an act of war.

Peter Onuf: Well, and they do, Ed, because they fire the shots that are heard round the world, you might say, that start the war and with the shots fired, you might think at last the old fogies in Virginia are going to see the light and they’re going to say, okay, the Rubicon has been crossed.  We’ve got to join our sister states to the South.

Ed Ayers: You know, you would think that.

Peter Onuf: Yep.

Ed Ayers: And yet that’s not what happens.

Peter Onuf: Right.

Ed Ayers: Virginia does not secede after the firing on Fort Sumter.  A lot of people want them to and they said, no, no, that’s not enough.  Sending bread to a fort is not an act of war, but Lincoln looks at this and says, okay, what do we have?  We have an explicit attack on the United States.  I have no choice as commander in chief but to call out the militia across the country to put down this illicit rebellion against federal authority in South Carolina.

Peter Onuf: Yeah, and in fact, Lincoln is calling the secessionists criminals.

Ed Ayers: Yep.

Peter Onuf: They’re outlaws.  They’re traitors.  And this is an action that all good Americans are going to want to join in, including Virginians.

Ed Ayers: And that’s when those who had supported Virginia staying in the Union feel that they really have no choice but to go along with secession.  They have another vote.  This one is the exact opposite of the first vote they’d had.  Now, their numbers are switched.  Ominously, those who vote to stay in the Union are all in the western part of the state, so Virginia is divided, but in the eastern part of Virginia, a great cry goes up that now history has been fulfilled.  Virginia’s destiny has come to fruition.  They are joining the Confederacy.

Brian Balogh: So, both of you seem to think that this is an incredibly important moment but, you know, it seems to me totally reasonable.  If you’re going to be in the Union, then you need to supply troops.  Why did that simple request for a few troops push Virginia over the edge on this issue?

Peter Onuf: Well, remember, that Virginians had already met to consider the possibility of exiting the Union.

Ed Ayers: Because they don’t deny that secession is legal.

Peter Onuf: That’s right.  Right.  And the very meaning of that convention suggests that there is a right to do it.  We decided not to do it.  They exercised that right and we have more than a scruple about punishing them about invading a sister state.  That’s a big taboo in America.

Ed Ayers: So even if Virginia may not choose to leave, they say South Carolina had the right to.

Peter Onuf: Yeah.  I mean, this is crunch time for Virginians and they really have to answer the question—where do our ultimate loyalties and interests lie and if forced to choose, and this whole unionist business is a plea—don’t make us choose.

Ed Ayers: Right.

Peter Onuf: And what Lincoln does is he forces a choice—you’ve got to choose.

Ed Ayers: Or does South Carolina force the choice and that’s precisely what they were trying to do.

Peter Onuf: Yeah.  Well, I think you could say that.

Ed Ayers: Because otherwise, South Carolina firing on the fort, there was no particular reason they had to do it right then, right?

Peter Onuf: Yeah.

Ed Ayers: But what it does is it means there can no longer be vacillation in the upper South.

Peter Onuf: That’s right.

Ed Ayers: Okay.  So, now it’s a firing war.  Which side are you on and as you say, once Virginia had to decide that, they knew that they would have to stay with their other slave states.

Brian Balogh: So, the real issue after all this brilliant exegesis is Virginia’s a slave state and it knows it once the firing begins.

Ed Ayers: That’s right.  And, so, you have a paradox here, Brian, of an unbalanced equation.  The North does not go to war to end slavery, but the South does go to war to protect it.

Peter Onuf: Absolutely right.

Ed Ayers: But nobody, northern or southern, is imagining that the war will bring this enormously powerful system of slavery to an end in just four years.  [music—“sail away, sail away, we will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay”]

Brian Balogh: Well, that’s it for today’s edition of “BackStory.”  In part 2 of our Civil War series, “Why They Fought,” we’re going to put aside these wonky policy questions, legal interpretations of the Constitution and we’re going to ask why so many men and their families, North and South, were willing to put their lives on the line as the war unfolded.

Peter Onuf: For more information about that episode, including broadcast times and stations, visit backstoryradio.org.  You can also sign up for our free podcast there, and listen to any of our past shows. That’s backstoryradio.org.  Don’t be a stranger.  [music—“sail away, sail away, we will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay”]

Ed Ayers: “BackStory” is produced by Tony Field, with help from Catherine Moore.  Jamal Milner mastered the show.  Gaby Alter wrote our theme.

Brian Balogh: Special thanks today to the “BackStory” players:  Ray Smith, Kate Burke, Matthew Gibson, Carl Thompson, Ed Barbour, Alex Grubbs, Ned Wharton, Burke Hunn, Tom Mansbach, Rob Vaughn, Miles Barnes, Coy Barefoot, and Gerald Baliles.  Thanks also to Jose Argueta and Miriam Kaplan.  “BackStory’s” executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

Ed Ayers: Production support for “BackStory” is provided by Cary Brown Epstein and the W.L. Lyons Brown Junior Charitable Foundation, James Madison’s Montpelier, Marcus and Carole Weinstein, Trish and David Crowe, Austin Ligon, and an anonymous donor.

Voice: Brian Balogh and Peter Onuf are professors in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History.  Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond.  “BackStory” was created by Andrew Wyndham for VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Read up on the origins and history of the idea of race.
Peruse an excerpt from The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon Reed, which won the 2009 Pulitizer Prize in History.
Watch Barack Obama’s March 2008 speech about race.
Listen to the story of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that ended laws against intermarriage or read about it.

Slavery & Science — Historian Daryl Scott discusses rise of scientific racism and how race has evolved–and not evolved–in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Frank Morris of the Center for Immigration Studies discusses historic tensions between immigrant laborers and African-Americans.

Excerpted from: “Aliens” in America

Historian Daryl Scott discusses rise of scientific racism and how race has evolved–and not evolved–in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Excerpted from: Black & White: The Idea of Racial Purity

William Brown moved north from Jacksonville, FL, during the Great Migration. He describes what happened when he asked a Philadelphia real estate agent for a job. Discussion of challenges for African Americans looking for work in the early 20th century.

Excerpted from: Looking for Work: A History of Unemployment

_____________________________________________________________

Peter:  This is Backstory, with us, the American History guys.  I’m Peter Onuf, 18th Century guy; I’m Ed Ayers, 19th Century guy; and I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century history guy.

[music]

Ed:  A little over five decades ago, the Russians sent a dog into outer space, a mutt named Laika,  that some government functionary had found on the streets of Moscow.  The suited her up in a dog spacesuit, put her on a rocket ship, and off she went.

[music and woman speaking Russian]

Ed:  We later learned that that little dog only lasted a few hours, and she probably died from stress.  But back in November, 1957, it seemed like most of the stress was on this side of the Bering Strait.  The U.S. Had been caught napping a month earlier when the Russians announced that they had launched Sputnik 1 . . .

[music and man speaking Russian].  “Today, a new moon is in the sky” . . .

Ed:  . . . now they had repeated the stunt, this time with a living, breathing passenger on board, at least for a little while.  What would Sputnik 3 carry – a nuclear missile?

Male Announcer:  “You are hearing the actual signals, transmitted by the Earth circling satellite, one of the great scientific feats of the age.”   [beeping]

Brian:  It didn’t take long for the pundits to figure out who was to blame for this colossal national embarrassment – the military?  No.  Congress?   No.  The White House?  No (uh uh).  It was America’s schools who had gotten us into this mess.  Russian schools were churning out scientists who could put a dog into space; and American schools were churning out, well, rock-and-roll.

[background music - “Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll.”]

Brian:  As the cover of “Life” magazine announced the following spring, there was a “Crisis in Education”.

[background music]

Dwight Eisenhower:    The Soviet Union now has, in the combined category of scientists and engineers, a greater number than the United States . . .

Brian:  Dwight Eisenhower, November, 1957.

Dwight Eisenhower:  . . .  and it is producing graduates in these fields at a much faster rate.  This trend is disturbing.

Brian:  It may have been disturbing, but the Sputnik episode was not the first, or the last time, schools were blamed for our national crises.  Just think about all the politicians you’ve seen railing about low standards in our schools.  To take a classic example, “A Nation at Risk”, the report commissioned by Ronald Reagan in the early 80s, to quote one of its best lines, “If  an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have feuded as an act of war” . . .

Ronald Reagan:  “Despite record levels of educational spending, America’s students came in last in 7 of 19 academics tests, compared to students of other industrialized nations.”

Peter:  On each episode of BackStory, we rip a topic from the headlines and spend an hour exploring its historical context.  Today, our topic is “Public Education”, because once again it’s taking its lumps in our nation’s capitol.  Here’s President Obama back in February.

President Obama:   “We have one of the highest high school drop-out rates of any industrialized nation, and half of the students who begin college, never finish.  This is a prescription for economic decline, because we know the countries that out-teach us today, will out-compete us tomorrow.”

Ed:  So have we always been worried about being “out-taught”?  Later in the show, we’re going to be speaking with a historian of education about what many think of as “The Golden Age of Education”, the era of the one-room schoolhouse, back in the 19th century.  We’ll also look at one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century history of education, but first, we’re going to turn to our 18th century guy for some deep background on all of this.  So, Peter, do people back in your period worry that we were going to fall behind our competitors, the British or the French, because our schools weren’t doing their jobs back then?

Peter:  This is really deep background, Ed, and the answer is “no”.  In fact, the idea that the common people should be educated was a heresy in the old days; that is, why would you want them to be able to read and write, because as many early modern thinkers thought, if people were too literate, they’d be uppity, maybe they’d claim rights or something like this.  And that’s really the story of American education, it doesn’t begin in an international competition, it didn’t have anything to do with that.

Ed:  How many people did go to school, Peter, was it just for elites. . .

Peter:  In theory, in Colonial Massachusetts, every community with a certain population was supposed to have a school, but this was a statute that was observed more in the breach.  Most education, as we know it today, took place within homes, particularly Bible-centered homes, where literacy was important in the religious life of communities, there weren’t schools to do this.  You could say that churches were a kind of educational institution, but basically these were places of oral performances, that is, where sermons would be delivered, and text would be read out to the congregation.  So mass education as we know it is really a phenomenon of, well, Ed’s century.

Brian:  Well, now I can see Ed waiting for the school bus, but before we let him get on it, I’ve just got one more question.  And yes, Peter, it has to do with your guy, Jefferson.  He had a few ideas on education, didn’t he?

Peter:  Absolutely, Brian, he is the author of a still-born notion of universal public education; we don’t like to emphasis the “still-born” part, we like to say that Jefferson was a great visionary in his 1779 Bill for the Diffusion of Knowledge.

Ed:  It only took another 130 years to come to pass in his native Virginia.

Peter [laughing]:  That’s right, Ed.  Virginians are slow, but . . .

Brian:   He was nearsighted, you’re saying.

Peter:   . . . But his scheme of public education was that every community would support a school, for girls as well as boys, at the primary level, and then there would be this kind of peri-middle selection moved up where a few select boys would be sent on from primary schools to grammar school, or secondary schools, and then on the peak of his system, the University of Virginia or William and Mary, at that time on a scholarship.  But this proposal really reflected the paranoia that Jefferson and other Revolutionary leaders had about the ignorance of the people; that if they weren’t adequately educated, they could be subject to demagoguery and they could be mislead, and so they had to be trained to be able to detect conspiracies against liberty within the ruling class.  One of the paradoxical things about the democratization of American education is that the people resisted this because they suspected the motives of educational reformers; they thought education reformers were really trying to put one over on the people by taxing them to support a system of education that would primarily benefit elites.

Ed: So, let me tell you about where public education came from in the form that we know it.  By which I mean, taxpayer supported universal education.  Like so much, frankly I’ll have to admit, that starts in New England and Massachusetts, and Peter has described what it was like in the Colonial era with this kind of patchwork of home schooling and so forth, but with the expectation that the Commonwealth owed an education to people and that the whole population was uplifted by a more broadly distributed education.  And so, in the 1830s, Horace Mann who is as close to anyone as the parent of American education, looked around and said, “You know, what we really need to do is to make this a far more coherent, forceful state-supported system.”  And what Horace Mann says is, “Folks” . . , by which folks I mean wealthy people, “. . . it’s going to pay off, if you’ll pay taxes to create public schools for everybody.”

Brian:  So in Peter’s period, Jefferson and others arguing we needed education to create citizens, but are you suggesting that Horace Mann was also saying to Americans, ‘Hey, you know, education produces productive citizens who can actually help this economy?’

Ed:  No, he didn’t say any of that.

[laughter]

Ed:  Yes, that is exactly, my 20th century friend, what he said, and he actually would make pretty specific argument to big manufacturers, ‘Look, guys, if you want workers to be disciplined, to answer bells, to be self motivating to the extent you want them to be, to be able to read simple instructions, education is not merely useful to the Commonwealth in creating better citizens,  yadda,  yadda, yadda, it is literally going into your pocketbook’.  You look back at it and you could see that that’s really the only way that man was going to be able to persuade the people who paid the most taxes to pay more to educate, frankly, other people’s children.  And I don’t want to be cynical.  People would like to have jobs that were regular and well paying and industrial jobs brought something that we never had before, which was year-round sustained, guaranteed employment that was not tied to the agricultural cycle.

Peter:  There might be another dimension to this.  I wonder if immigration had something to do with the importance of education.  The literacy rate in Massachusetts before Horace Mann was virtually universal for men, and pretty high for women was well.  So it wasn’t that you needed those basic skills, and of course, if you had a religious population that spent all that time at church, they had their own bells, so to speak, they had that kind of discipline.  But when you had large numbers of Irish, Catholic immigrants, you faced a kind of new demographic challenge.  Is that an element in man’s notion of public education is to Americanize?

Ed:  You know, I don’t think so.  As logical as that seems, part of it would be our friend chronology.
And the fact that this . . .

[laughter]

Ed:  . . . The fact that this begins in 1837 suggests that it predated the big tide of Irish immigration that would not come for another decade, and that would not peak for 20 more years, I think, in fact, that if man had waited until the challenge was to spend tax money to educate a bunch of new immigrants, it would not have happened.  So, ironically, the fulfillment of a sense that a homogeneous America can become more homogeneous by using education.

Peter:  So, Ed, what are the social changes that lead to an emphasis on education?  If it’s not yet widespread immigration, is it the fact that Massachusetts farm children are moving away from home, because only a limited number of people could sustain a farm operations through the generations, so that there’s an anxiety about the future and about what provisions are going to be made for children, and a growing recognition that new sets of skills are going to be necessary to cope with an unpredictable future.

Ed:  Beautifully put, Peter, and exactly right.  And this takes us back to Sputnik, because the same way that the Soviets led to a great period of instability and anxiety in the country, if you’re sitting there in Massachusetts and you’re watching a lot of your population leave, and you’re wondering how it is that you’re going to be able to keep people in New England when you’ve got the Northwest open.  When there’s land out there to be taken, what’s going to keep people on the rocky soil of the Berkshires.  It’s also the case of manufacturing is growing, and if you want to compete with the great industrial power at the time, England, you’re going to have to have a population that knows how to invent and create.  I think it’s a recurring theme for as long as we’ve been a nation.  Maybe not back in the Colonial period, but it didn’t take long in the 19th century for that kind of rhetoric of  ‘We’re under peril, and only education can really save us.’

Brian:  Well, in a minute, we’ll delve a little deeper into that 19th century, and look into why one-room schoolhouses weren’t all they were cracked up to be.  We’re also going to take a few of your calls, but first it’s time for a quick break.

Ed: Remember, if you’d like to call on a future show, have a look at our website to see what topics we’re working on, you can find us at BackStoryRadio.org.

Peter: We’ll be back in a minute.

[music]

Peter:  This is BackStory, the show that looks to the past to explain the America of today.  I’m Peter Onuf, 18th century guy’ I’m Ed Ayers, 19th century history guy, and I’m Brian Balogh, history guy of the 20th century.

[music]

Brian:  Today on the show, we’re exploring the history of public education.  Like so many other topics we’ve explored on BackStory, we tend to remember that history as being much rosier that it actually was.  Take, for example, the song we’re listening to right now, “School Days”.  [music]

Jon Zimmerman:  “School days, school days, good old golden rule days, reading, writing, ‘arithmetic, taught to the tune of hickory stick, etc.”

Brian: That’s John Zimmerman, a historian of education at New York University.  In 1949, the “New York Times” declared this one of the 10 most popular songs in the history of the United States.  “School Days” is all about a one-room schoolhouse in Ed’s period, the 19th century, but it was written in the first decade of my century, by a guy named Gus Edwards.

Jon: Now what’s interesting about “School Days” is as follows:  Gus Edwards was a German immigrant who moved to Brooklyn when he was 7; he never, as best we know, stepped into a one-room schoolhouse, and he might not really have left New York; actually, he did, eventually he lived in L.A., but Gus Edwards was a vaudevillian, and later became a booking agent.  This is the guy who wrote our most popular and our most influential ode to the one-room schoolhouse, and he’s an urban immigrant from Germany.

[music]

Brian:  Part of the reason Jon Zimmerman is so fired up about this subject, is that he’s just written a book about it.  It’s called, “Small Wonder:  The Little Red Schoolhouse and History and Memory.”  In it, he looks at the way school reformers with a wide range of agendas, invoke the one-room schoolhouse as a kind of model of educational setting.  In fact, until recently, there was an actual model of the little red schoolhouse outside the entrance of the Department of Education in Washington.  Zimmerman basically argues that this nostalgia, a word he likes to point out, comes from the Greek for homesickness, that this nostalgia skews all kinds of facts about little red schoolhouses, beginning with their color.

Jon: Most one-room schoolhouses were either white, or more commonly, just unpainted because school districts didn’t want to pay to paint them.  [laughter]

Brian: Help me understand this, John, Americans seem to put public education on a pedestal, but we don’t want to pay to paint the little schoolhouse.

Jon: I think that’s true and I think that that contradiction goes back all the way to the founding and the common schools.  The common school movement, the idea that there should be universal, state-supported education, was, although not unique to the United States, in many ways, distinct to it.  By 1850, there are greater fraction of elementary school aged kids going to school in our country than in any other country on earth.  But what we did in 19th century was we sent an extraordinarily large fraction, relatively speaking, of our kids to school and we sent them to school in essentially shacks; that’s what one-room schoolhouses were, they were 15 x 40 feet in dimension, and they were in every sense bare bones.  Most of them did not even have a belfry or bell, even though we remember that part too; very primitive heating systems, if any at all.  You read accounts of people trying to drink water in a one-room schoolhouse, but finding out that the water they had brought in earlier in the day was frozen, was ice.  The teaching force which was overwhelmingly single, female and young; and young means sometimes as young as 15 or 16, often has very little more education than the kids they’re teaching.  If you think about “Little House on the Prairie”,

Brian: …my touchstone for all things historical, by the way… [laughter]

Jon: …this was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical story and it was about her life on the prairie in the 1880s.  It didn’t become popular until the 1930s, which was precisely the time when, thanks to the WPA and the PWA, the ripping down these one-room schools, and that’s important, too.  Because again, this comes a venue for nostalgia for remembering institutions going away.  But was does she remember in those stories; she remembers being a kid teaching other kids.  And she remembers all kinds of problems with the so-called “big boys”, because you might guess that the big boys are the ones who are going to test your authority.

Brian:  And, Jon, what is roughly age range?

Jon:  Age 3 to 20.  And often all in the same place, and sometimes there would be as many as 100 kids in a 15 x 40 square box, and sometimes there would be as few as 4.  The major deficiency is that the pedagogy is what we would call “rote”.  And rote means repeat.  And it has to be not just because of the lack of training of the teacher, but also because of the enormous age range of kids.  So they all have their own primers, and people would bring in whatever text book they had, and they would memorize it and then recite it in a rotating way to the teacher.  And so it was not uncommon to find 11 or 12 year old kids that could just say a whole text book.

Brian: Wow. But was there some basis for the later nostalgia of this home sickness, as you put it?

Jon:  If the question is was there reason for people look back longingly at these, there absolutely is, and here’s the reason:  Whatever their deficiencies, they were communal institutions.  In most cases, they were the only public building, so they were not just a place where the kids went to school, they were a place where the community met.  If it’s the only public building, it’s not just a schoolhouse, it’s the place where voting happens, where debates happen; not just that, weddings, funerals, all of the holidays, Christmas, Easter and so they were not perfect, they had a multitude of deficiencies, but when people look back at them and say, “But they were ours”, this is absolutely true.

Brian:  Am I being really naïve, and nostalgic to use your word, to think there was something good about getting literally everybody in the community, kids, adults, etc. all in one room and just letting them hash it out.  Contrast that image, at any rate, to what we have today, this long chain of bureaucratic command stretching all the way from the Secretary of Education down to the Assistant Principal for physical education and discipline.

Jon:  I think you have to go back to answer the question, to distinguish between what adults were doing in these schools and what kids were doing.  The one-room schools of the 19th century were profoundly small “d” democratic and debate-filled institutions in the evening, when the entire community showed up to debate, among other things, who was going to pay for the school.  You don’t have to be a nostalgist to celebrate the idea that there were these public institutions that brought everybody together to debate the content and the contours of their shared lives.  However, let’s not impute that dynamic to the classroom itself when the kids and teachers were in there; because that was not a land of democratic debate.

Peter:  That was the three Rs:  rote, rote and rote.

Jon:  Completely.  My way or the highway. [laughter]  And that’s why teachers devised all of these, to us, draconian punishments.  By the way, the dunce cap was rarely used, but every other kind of humiliation was, often recapitulating the alleged errors since, so a kid that talked too much would have a twig affixed to their tongue; a kid who chewed gum would have the gum put on their forehead or their nose, and to me the most fascinating one, which tells you a lot about the 19th century is that a kid who was a poor speller would have to cut letters out of a newspaper and eat them. [laughter] This sounds quite barbaric, and in many ways it is . . .

Peter:  Is that where “eat your words” comes from?

Jon:  . . . It may be.  We don’t know.  But something that I find fascinating about this is, on one level it’s awful, horrible, humiliating, gross, right? But I think it’s also an example of the time when any academic failure was considered to be a function of a lack of effort, not differential ability.  Right? That punishment is pre-IQ test, and it’s pre-the entire concept of disability; if you’re not spelling, it’s not because you have a different learning style that prevents you from spelling, it’s because you weren’t listening, so eat some words, here’s your punishment.  So as awful as it is, I think there’s also something and in some ways I find rather salutary about it, there is something quite small “d” democratic about the idea that everyone has the same ability, ergo, if they’re doing worse, it’s because they didn’t apply themselves.

Brian:  Right.  There’s a presumption that there’s an equal starting ground, there.  Well, Jon, I want to thank you so much for joining us.

Jon:  Thanks for having me.

[music]

Peter:  Jon Zimmerman directs the History of Education Program at New York University’s Steinhart School of Education.  His new book is “Small Wonder:  The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”  You can listen to an extended version of our conversation at BackStoryRadio.org.

[music]

Brian:  Well, guys, you noticed that I took advantage of being alone with our guest to deflate all kinds of things, and I was just, to anticipating you now pulling them apart and maybe we’ll start with you, Ed.  What do you think about what Jon said and does it have any application to all of those schools that you’ve studied in the South?

Ed:  No, it takes the fun out of it, Brian, to roll over on your back like that, but, actually, it was a great interview.  I think in many ways it captures what the experience of the 20th century south was like.  The south, as we know, is a little bit behind the times when it comes to education, and it simply wasn’t the same kind of value placed on it.  All the way from the 18th century on, the elite was actually pretty well educated, and they went to a lot of trouble to create academies and colleges, and boarding schools, and tutors, and all those kinds of things, but if you go back to the 19th century south, there were no mechanisms for middle- and lower-class people to gain an education.  If you were African American, of course, it was illegal to learn how to read.  So not only were there not schools, but there were laws that prohibited you from gaining literacy.  So the idea coming along of a school for everybody was a late innovation and progress.

Brian:  So this may be naïve, but at least one good thing of this notion of a common schoolhouse, is that it does strike me as a place where at least everybody could come together.

Peter:  Well, they come together, Brian, but not necessarily on everybody’s terms.  If you think about early public education in New England and Massachusetts, particularly, where the “King James Bible” is the text, in effect.  It’s a Protestant education and that was one of the reasons why many Catholics, wanted their own schools.

Ed:  And no sooner do you have public schools in New England, then Catholic schools start growing up, then you have the biggest debates and riots around parochial schools in the north in the 1840s and 1850s, because people say, “I don’t want the state educating my children into Protestantism, and I don’t want them to be using books and Bibles that are prejudice against my religion.”  And the people on the other side “Well, we don’t want Catholics gathering together outside of the common vocabulary, and teaching about Popery, or whatever.”

Brian: Hey guys– I never said they sang “Kumbaya”  together; I just said they came together to hash out some of these fundamental issues that are at the heart of our democratic republic.

Peter:  But, Brian, these are not level playing fields.  We have a notion of state neutrality, which I think we, to an extraordinary extent, live by in modern day America, but it’s been a tough slog, and you can’t take it for granted.  Even today, you have to wonder what are the implicit messages, this is what’s being asked when people challenge the nature of education and the role of religion in education; what’s being taught in schools?

Brian:  Well I think it’s time for some explicit messages, which is why we’re going to turn to our listeners.  As we do every episode of BackStory, we’ve been fielding your comments on today’s topic on our website, BackStoryRadio.org.  We’ve gotten a lot of great comments there, and our producers have invited a few of you to join us on the phone today.

[music]

Brian:  We’ve got Kathleen on the line from New York City.  Kathleen, welcome to BackStory.

Kathleen:  Hi.  I have a question for you guys.  These days I hear a lot of complaints from my daughter about school – it’s too long, there’s too much homework, and I was wondering, what did the children in the 19th century think about school?  The reason I ask this is because both my grandmothers, who were born in the 1880s, they loved school, they thought it was like so great, I can get away from doing chores, and so what evidence– what kinds of sources do you guys have, what did the kids of  the 19th century say?

Ed:  What’s interesting is how much this changed over the 19th century.  At the beginning of the 19th century, they didn’t think about school all that much because they didn’t really go all that much.  I think you would have seen that kids would not have complained about how long school went, but rather, would have been struck by how sporadic it was, and how short the day was, how little attention each individual student received because they were all together in one big classroom.

Brian:  And I just want to say to 18th and 19th century guys, that kids didn’t really start going to school until the 20th century.  Even as late at 1900, half of the kids in the United States didn’t go to school, and the average number of years that people went to school was about five years.

Peter:  So, Brian, when would you say school began to present something like a total environment for children and they’d expect to go through it and they would see it as a fact of life, one that they didn’t necessarily like very much.

Brian:  I would say, Peter, if you’re talking about northern urban schools, I would say by the 1920s school is kind of a regular experience for most kids.   Now we’re not talking about high school, but we are talking about regular schooling, at least through what we would call middle school age years.  One of the reasons for that was compulsory education laws and more and more states started imposing them beginning in the progressive era, but you know when they really took effect was during the Great Depression, and why do you think that was, Kathleen?

Kathleen:  Keeping teachers employed.

Brian:  Keeping teachers employed, but also keeping kids out of the work force.  There were so few jobs to go around, all kinds of measures were taken in order to preserve those jobs for adults, but that’s really somewhere between the 20s and 30s; that’s when kids started complaining about school the most because they were in school the most.

Ed:  I would say, having read quite a few letters and diaries and stuff in the 19th century, you don’t have to go very far to find people complaining about “Oh my God, I’m going to shoot myself if I have to sit here and read this Latin one more night.”  [laughter]  So I think that the point that I would make is it depends on everything else in which the education is embedded.  If the contrast is shoveling out barns, school looks pretty good.  So as we’ve ratcheted up the expectations of schooling, we’ve ratcheted down the expectations of everything else.  Kids entire experience of being young is now channeled and focused on school.  We invest it with a lot more significance than it used to have, including a lot more complaint about boredom and so forth.

Brian:  Do you agree, Kathleen, are you actually interested in this?

Kathleen:  I am very interested in it.  I went to a New England school that had six grades in four rooms.

All participants:  WOW!

Brian:  How did that work . . . could you tell us more specifically how that worked?

Kathleen:  Well, the teacher didn’t pay attention to all the time because sometimes she was working with the other kids, so you could spend your whole life daydreaming or reading, as in my case, and they wouldn’t necessarily know what was going on.

Brian:  So, Kathleen, you’re saying you learned more because the teacher didn’t pay attention to you and you actually could read.

Kathleen:  Yes, yes.

[laughter]

Peter [sarcastically]:  Here’s a radical reform proposal. . . I like that very much.  Hey, Kathleen, thanks for that great call.

Kathleen:  Thank you, it’s been really fascinating.

Brian:  Well, it’s time for another short break.  Remember, we want to hear your stories about your own education.  Did school facilitate your education or did it just get in the way?  What do you think our schools today can learn from the lessons of the past?  Leave your comments and questions at BackStoryRadio.org. or just give us a call.  Our phone number is 888-257-8851.

Peter: After the break, we’ll take more of your calls and we’ll speak with a Virginia woman who experienced school segregation up close and personal.  We’ll be back in a minute.

Brian: Production support for BackStory comes from James Madison’s Montpelier, Marcus and Carol Weinstein, Trish and David Crowe, and J.M. Weinberg.

[music]

Peter:  This is Backstory, the show that turns to history to understand the world around us today.  I’m your 18th century, Peter Onuf,;

Ed:I’m your 19th century host, Ed Ayers;

Brian: and I’m your 20th century host, Brian Balogh.

Brian:  Today on the show, we’re looking at the story of public education in America, and asking whether people have always worried about school as much as people seem to worry today.

Peter:  We’re going to take another call now.  This one is from John in Moneno[?], Virginia.  John, welcome to BackStory.

John .:  My question is when I think about the old one-room schoolhouse with the schoolmarm that was paid by the parents of the students, when and why and how did we move from that consumer based model to our current more socialized model?  Now we’re funding this big giant school system as opposed to saying that we’re watching the children from the schoolhouse making sure they’re coming out smarter and then paying for that.

Peter:  I think what you’re getting at. John, is the levels between us and the education of our kids, or other people’s kids, it’s so distant we don’t really feel we don’t have much control over it, although you have to say the survival of PTAs and school boards that are responsive to local citizens, they keep alive that historic memory of having control over children’s education and over the way we govern ourselves.

Brian:  As has home-schooling, which has become quite popular recently, but, I want to address the elephant in the room, the B word, because I think it goes to the heart of John’s question, and that bureaucracy.  I think what John—you tell me John—is really talking about is getting away from a kind of direct-parent control and handing over control of education to all of these middle men–and the funny thing is that all these superintendents, etc. were men, and all the lower paid teachers were women, as this transition took place during the late 19th century and early 20th century.  Am I on the right track there, John?  Is this what’s really got you troubled?

John:  Right, when did the states decide the localities weren’t very good at it and needed to get involved and then when did the Federal government decide that the states weren’t very good at it and they needed to get involved and it’s done exactly as you’ve said:  It created this huge bureaucracy; the amount of money we spend educating our children in the public sector is much  more than private schools spend to educate a child and it’s not because the teachers are so overpaid, or because they have really fantastic books, it’s because we have these bureaucracies, we have all these upper level administrative people that we’re paying, and it’s consuming a lot of the funds that should be either going to education or not be collected in the first place.

Brian:  Thank goodness you didn’t ask that question, John, because it would have required actual historic knowledge to answer it.  I’ll take a crack at it anyway.  Basically, the states got involved in the late 19th century and early 20th century and by the 1920s and 1930s, it was the states that started saying it’s not cost efficient to have all of these little one-room schools all over the place.  We’re going to build consolidated schools.  And, of course, at the same times, states were building roads, so it was easier to get to these schools, it was easier to run school buses by the 30s and the 40s.  When did the Federal government get involved?  Well, you’d have to point to the very important Education Act in 1965, passed by Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, and that was aimed at poor kids.  And were most of the poor kids?  They were in the South.  And a very funny thing happened on the way to the school house – states that were determined not to integrate; southern states started accepting this Federal money and along with money comes control.  And the Federal government said we’re not going to fund segregated schools, and if you don’t integrate, this is separate from Brown vs. Board of Education– separate from the courts.  The Federal government said if you don’t integrate, we’re going to cut off all that money.  And you know what? Those states said we’re getting so much Federal money, we can’t even think of not accepting it, we’d better move towards integration.  The last thing I’ll say, John, in answer to your question, is none of us like bureaucrats—“bureaucrat” itself is kind of a pejorative term, of course you can find examples of excess, but I think that overall these bureaucrats have really been pretty impressive at raising the standards of American education; at the same time that they have helped bring in virtually all kids to the education system.  It is not easy to educate everybody and educate them well.  Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox now.

Peter:  It’s never too late in America and that distinguishes the American educational system from every other educational system in the world.  And it’s never too late to learn something about history if you keep tuning in to BackStory . . . That’s what we’re here for, sort of a remedial education for grown-ups.

John:  I truly appreciate the education that you have just given me, which is that you . . .

Peter:  . . . Are you calling me a bureaucrat?

[laughter]

John:  . . . No, a teacher.

Peter: Well, thanks so much for calling, John.

John: Well I feel a lot smarter.

Ed:  So, Brian,  you mentioned the school funding in Federal government help lead to desegregation in the late 1960s.  I think it’s important to remember that big case that lead to desegregation, Brown vs. Board of Education, occurred back in 1954, so there’s a whole missing decade in between.  Now what happened was this:  Southern politicians led by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, basically said “We don’t care what you say, we’re not going to integrate.” It was a movement that came to be known as “massive resistance.”  In 1958, the Governor actually closed down the white schools in three Virginia cities so they wouldn’t have to integrate them.

Brian:  And one of those cities was our own Charlottesville.

Ed:  Yah. And one of the students who graduated from Charlottesville’s black high school that year was Alicia Lugo, and we’re going to hear her story in just a minute.  But first let me give you a little background on her:  Alicia Lugo went off to college, got her teaching degree, and came back to Charlottesville; she was assigned to teach in the same school where she had been a student.  Now this is 1965, and even though segregation had officially been outlawed, the student body there was still all black.  Two years later, the city closed that school and moved her over to Walker School, integrated finally after all those years.  Years later, she went on to chair the city’s school board for more than a decade.  Now I’m going to shut up and play for you my recent conversation with Ms. Alicia Lugo.

Alicia Lugo:  I was born in Charlottesville.  All my public school education was here in Charlottesville.  First at all black Jefferson Elementary School, and then all-black Burley High School, which was an excellent school.  I think that people have some erroneous feeling that because we had fewer supplies and less resources and our teachers were fighting over one film projector, and that sort of thing, that we were somehow receiving an inferior education.  I find that laughable from the standpoint of 50-60 years later.

Ed:  Did people not resent the fact that they might have multiple film projectors and better supplies and things at Lane?

Alicia:  No.  Projectors and supplies don’t make the excellent education experience.  You have to make a child want to learn, and that’s what we came up under.  To my way of thinking having been a student at all-black Burley, feeling safe knowing that there was a definite connection between my home and my teachers, my parents were intricately involved.  In fact, many more black parents than now were supportive of both our teachers and our schools and Burleigh students excelled everywhere.

Ed:  Why do you think that so many people then would work through the courts and sacrifice so much in order to bring about integration of the schools?

Alicia:  Because they recognized that there is no such thing as “separate but equal“.  That for many minority children, the segregated school system was a farce.  When children had to walk two miles past an available school to go to school.  Those things were jokes.  But even though the “separate but equal” schools were crushed by the courts.  If you walked down the halls of the average school today, you’ll see situations where classes are either all black, Hispanic, and poor white, and other classes that are all white with a token black person or Asian person in there.

Ed:  So why do you think that integration did not turn out the way that people dreamed of?

Alicia:  Because I think that there were those people who had no intention of letting it turn out that way.  The only way systems change is that you treat them like a rubber band.  As long as you keep the tension on the rubber band, you can change its shape.  But one you let go of that tension, once you let go of that scrutiny, it drops right back into its original ball.

Ed:  That’s a great metaphor.  May I steal that?

[laughter]

Alicia:  Sure you can.

Ed:  So it’s your sense that tension left the school when there was not really a direct connection between the teacher and their community and the students and their community.  Is that what happened?

Alicia:  Exactly.  When the scrutiny was gone because who can complain?  Now we have the desecrated schools, so you got what you asked for.  But we’ve got in Charlottesville, a majority African American school board, we have an African American female superintendent, an African American assistant superintendent, female, and we have a 13% drop-out rate.  What’s wrong with that picture?

Ed:  And what do you think is wrong with that?  What’s driving that?

Alicia:  Well, I guess to my way of thinking, when school is not interesting, when you don’t see any relationship between school and your future, when you feel you’re in a hostile environment, when you feel that you’re not safe in that environment, when you feel that people don’t have the level of expectations for your performance, that they do for other students’ performances, school doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?

Ed:  I see what you’re saying.  If we can go back to your story for a minute, I wonder and I think about, what great changes that you saw and experienced and helped lead, did we lose a generation or did we lose some continuity or some tradition of our teachers that the people said that it is so ridiculous if the states can be playing games, like with “massive resistance” and if they’re not going to be really giving every kid a chance, instead doing this “tracking” and so forth.  Did people just become disgusted and said that they would just put their energies into something else?

Alicia:  Uhuh. Which is exactly what I did.  I stayed at Walker one year, and I realized that the numbers of minority children dropping out of school, getting pushed out of school, somebody needed to be out there to help reclaim.  And so for the next 35 years I worked in non-profits that worked with kids trying to help them get themselves on track.

Ed:  I’m really grateful for your time today and your insight and a couple of metaphors I’m going to steal, but also very grateful for keeping the faith over all these years, and doing the very best you can with whatever history’s handed you.  Thank you very much for joining us today; I really appreciate it.

Alicia:  I enjoyed it a lot; thank you.

Ed:  That’s Alicia Lugo, former teacher and school board chair right here in Charlottesville, Virginia.

[music]

Brian:  There’s a deep irony in that interview that Ed teased out and it’s that at the very moment when real opportunities were opening up for African Americans in society, Ms. Lugo seems to suggest that teachers were giving up on students and students were giving up on school.  How can that be?
I know this is my century, but I don’t have the answers to that.

Peter:  Well, Brian, I think that was what was so upsetting to me about this interview, that sense that you won the big struggle, you thought, over integration, but there’s a bigger struggle over what we now call “racism.”

Ed:  That’s the fundamental tension or tragedy in the heart of all this.  On one hand, you can’t just say we’re going to have “separate but equal,”  because obviously “separate but equal” doesn’t work.  On the other hand, when you do that, you insert several layers of necessary bureaucracy between parents and students and the schools.  I’m not exactly sure, we do know what happens is that some people spend the money to create those schools over which they have control, which are the little private schools, and Charlottesville has a number of those itself right now, which are dedicated to young women, or dedicated to people of different religious backgrounds.  I don’t know that segregation, as a matter of fact it is a trivialization of that word to talk about people looking for various kinds of affinities, but I think that what Ms. Lugo would say is that real integration was never given a chance, and that economic inequalities were inserted in place of racial inequalities, and as a result, we have a sham.

Peter:  I think the point is that community, which we get nostalgic about, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, and in many ways that’s what we strive for, a sense of identification with each other, of nurture and care, yet communities are also inevitably through history exclusive, and they want to define themselves according to their own image, that is, according to the group that dominates within that community.  It’s a highly volatile situation, and I think the only upbeat message of all this is there’s been such massive dislocations that a new sense of community will emerge out of all this, which will at least move forward in terms of our expectations of our students.  Who is going to succeed?  And there’s some reason to hope that self-perpetuating notion of discrimination and superiority and racism.

Brian:  Well I don’t think we should underestimate the importance of daily contact and interaction within the schools.  There may be tracking within certain classes, but I don’t think we should underestimate the interaction between racial groups, starting in kindergarten, even if those relations are not smooth or out of Disneyland at all times.

Peter:  Well, Brian, I think what we’ve got here is an example of schools which we expect to take the lead in social change, but in many ways, social change is going to register last in schools.  It’s a real paradox.

Ed:  Those are all really good points.  I guess looking at it from the point of history, that’d be a great idea for a radio show.  I’m struck that we’ve had 300 years, almost 400 years, of slavery and injustice, and I wouldn’t want us to despair too soon when we’re only 5 years into a new more expansive, inclusive order.  There’s no doubt that what Ms. Lugo said is true, but if we lose faith that we can make that change, we’ve lost faith in America.

Brian:  Ed, I think that’s a good way to sum up, and it’s a good thing, too, because that’s all the time we have today.  But remember, we want to keep the conversation going.   Visit us online and tell us what you think about the past, present and future of public education in America.  You can find us at BackStoryRadio.org.   Don’t be a stranger.  Thanks for listening.

Brian: BackStory is produced by Tony Field, Rachel Quimby, and Catherine Moore, with help from Bart Elmore and Lydia Wilson.

Ed: Special thanks today to David Bearinger.  Jamal Millner mastered the show and Gaby Alter wrote our theme.

Peter: BackStory’s Executive Producer is Andrew Wyndham.

Ed: Major production support for BackStory with American History Guys is provided by the David A. Harrison Fund for the President’s Initiatives at the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Richmond, Cara Brown Epstein and the W.L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Foundation, UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, and an anonymous donor.

Female Announcer: Peter Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor of history at the University of Virginia. Brian Balogh is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is President and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Full Transcript

Guests Include:

* Jon Zimmerman, Professor of History and Education at New York University and author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory

*Alicia Lugo, who graduated from an all-black Virginia high school in 1959; taught in Charlottesville’s segregated school system; and went on to run that city’s school board

Show Highlights

• Little Red Schoolhouse
  Education historian John Zimmerman tells 20th Century Guy Brian Balogh why Americans romanticize the one-room schoolhouse, and what they were really like.

Web Exclusives

Zimmerman Extended Interview
Brian talks to education historian Jon Zimmerman about why the Little Red Schoolhouse represents America’s educational ambitions.

__________________________________________________________________________

Teacher Resources Page
Teachers, if you’ve used BackStory in the classroom, visit our Teacher Resources page and tell us about the experience. Or let us know how we can make the show even more useful to you.

__________________________________________________________________________

Call of the Week
BackStory caller Jennifer wants to know whether school was more rigorous for students “back in the day.”

Further Reading

Want to dig deeper into this history of public education? Check out this list of resources compiled by the History Guys to learn more.

Were the categories of “black” and “white” already in place when Africans first came to America, and if not, when did they take shape? How did the founders think about race, and what are we to make of the contradictions between the public writings of men like Jefferson and their behavior in private? What is the “one-drop rule,” and where did it come from? In what ways have religion and science affirmed and challenged notions of racial difference? It’s not hard to see the progress that’s been made on the road to racial equality, but what have been the major setbacks and reversals along the way?

Guests include:

*Pulitzer Prize winner Annette Gordon Reed (The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family) reflects on why Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, continues to be so controversial

*Historian Daryl Scott (Howard University) parses the differences between race consciousness and racism throughout the 20th century

Features & Highlights

Hear more about racial purity and racism in these interviews with Annette Gordon Reed and Daryl Scott. Listen here.

Further Reading

Want to dig deeper into the history of racial purity? The BackStory research team has compiled a comprehensive list of resources for further explanation. Read on.

Show Highlights

• Open Doors, Back Doors — In a country populated by immigrants, why are Americans so wary of newcomers? Historian Mae Ngai explains that the door slammed shut in the the 1920s.
• African Americans & Immigration — Frank Morris of the Center for Immigration Studies discusses historic tensions between immigrant laborers and African-Americans.

Related Links:

Read the introduction of Mae Ngai’s book.

What’s the difference between immigration now and 100 years ago?

Learn more about the conflicts between African-Americans and recent immigrants.

For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is behind bars. For African-Americans, that figure is one in 15. In this hour, the History Guys ask whether we’ve always been so fond of the lock & key, and look at how our prison system has been structured in the past. Washington DC Corrections Director Devon Brown discusses the racial disparity, and historian Rebecca McLennan explains why 19th century prison labor was not only central to America’s penal system, but also to its economy. And we head out to the side of the highway to speak with some members of the local jail’s work gang.

Show Highlights

• Chain Gang, Revisited — 20th Century History Guy Brian Balogh spends some time on the side of the highway with the work crew from Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail. He asks whether prisoners see their work as public humiliation or reward for good behavior.
• A Debt to Society — Historian Rebecca McLennan explains why 19th century prison labor was not only central to America’s penal system, but also to its economy.

Show Highlights

No Vacancies
Historian Susan Rugh describes the discrimination black families faced on America’s highways in the 1940s and 50s. Many of those travelers recounted their experiences in letters to the NAACP – letters that eventually helped convince U.S. Senators to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Taking it to the Streets
Historian Peter Norton speaks with 20th Century History Guy Brian Balogh about how automobile companies in the 1920s managed to re-define streets as a space for cars, rather than pedestrians. And he explains the little-known history of the term “jaywalker.”

Related Links

Read a chapter from Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City

Find out more about the history of batteaus and view pictures from the 2008 Batteau Festival

Read more about Susan Rugh’s work on black family vacations and view letters to the NAACP complaining of discrimination on America’s roads: Easterling (PDF) Gresham (PDF) Young (PDF) Williams and Haynes (PDF)

BackStory loves bicycles! Here’s our favorite bicycle history book, by David Herlihy

Carts & wagons in colonial Virginia