Lecture 27 - Legacies of the Civil War

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 I'm going to talk for a few minutes about this memory question.

spk_0 There's an article assigned at the very end of the reading packet that you perhaps have

spk_0 read by now.

spk_0 I hope, a piece I wrote some years ago, which gives you a kind of a breezy take on some of

spk_0 the complexities of how the Civil War and Reconstruction have been remembered in the

spk_0 United States.

spk_0 It is arguably the most vexing piece of our past for our larger political, public culture

spk_0 to process.

spk_0 You can simply do it this way, though.

spk_0 This is one of the people that Tony Horowitz interviewed in his wonderful book Confederation

spk_0 The Attic, which some of you may have read.

spk_0 Quite popular book that came out about five years ago.

spk_0 Horowitz, a great journalist, did a travel book all over the South and tried to come

spk_0 to some grips and understanding of many things, but particularly of Civil War buffs and Civil

spk_0 War enthusiasm.

spk_0 Why this event endures so much in our popular culture?

spk_0 Among the people he interviewed was this guy who said, quote, I think there's a lot of

spk_0 people like me who want to get back to a simpler time, San Laat baseball, Cowboys and Indians

spk_0 and the Civil War.

spk_0 Just take me away.

spk_0 Wherever my present is, whatever my life is, just transport me to the morning of July

spk_0 3rd at Gattiesburg or some other place.

spk_0 He was a musician, interviewed on NPR yesterday morning, who's been through a horrible life

spk_0 of drugs and alcohol addiction.

spk_0 The end of it, he was asked to give the biggest influences on his recovery and his survival.

spk_0 And he said, well, certain artists, certain people, but mostly the Civil War.

spk_0 And that's where the interview ended.

spk_0 I was dying to find out what the hell did that mean.

spk_0 Good.

spk_0 God almighty.

spk_0 But God blessing.

spk_0 All right, legacies.

spk_0 Everything in history has a legacy.

spk_0 We use the term all the time, the legacies of this, the legacies of that, the legacies

spk_0 of that event, what are the legacies of World War II, what are the legacies of the Civil

spk_0 Rights Movement?

spk_0 But what is a legacy?

spk_0 Stop for just a second with me.

spk_0 Let me attempt a definition, some attempt.

spk_0 It can be simply another word for historical memory of how we remember things and then

spk_0 how we use them.

spk_0 It always carries some current, present, and often political meaning.

spk_0 If you use the term legacy for something, it probably has a current political stake.

spk_0 Reconstruction in our history was an ongoing referendum on the meaning and legacies of

spk_0 slavery in the Civil War.

spk_0 And so much of our racial history, our constitutional history, our political history, ever since

spk_0 reconstruction has been a referendum on the meaning and memory of reconstruction.

spk_0 Was there a reconciliation in the wake of these events, of sections, of states, of soldiers,

spk_0 of the political class, or of masters and slaves, blacks and whites?

spk_0 Who got reconciled?

spk_0 And who didn't?

spk_0 Legacies I'd suggest can be emotional.

spk_0 Test this with your parents or your grandparents.

spk_0 Legacies can be emotional, they can be intellectual, they can be physical, they can be financial,

spk_0 they can be about habits, they surely can be political, and they can be sacred

spk_0 or secular.

spk_0 My parents were the great depression in World War II generation and it was all over them.

spk_0 My father always feared insurance.

spk_0 He always wanted to know he had no money, but he always wanted to know exactly where his

spk_0 money was.

spk_0 He almost kept it under a pillow and it was stupid.

spk_0 It was crazy.

spk_0 But after the depression and five farm foreclosures that his family had, he couldn't stand letting

spk_0 anyone else have his couple thousand dollars.

spk_0 That's a legacy of the great depression.

spk_0 It's a habit, it's a point of view and it's a set of assumptions.

spk_0 This event had so many legacies that frankly we just keep adding to them with time.

spk_0 They just don't really go away.

spk_0 Sometimes a legacy is perhaps what is simply left over, out in public memory and our behavior

spk_0 and our policies.

spk_0 After historians have written all their books, museums have mounted all their exhibitions,

spk_0 teachers have taught their classes, elders have tried to instruct the young at the grassroots

spk_0 level and in families.

spk_0 A legacy is that which endures all of our filterings, all of our debates, all of our struggles

spk_0 over controlling the story we say we live in.

spk_0 It is where the past and the present meet.

spk_0 And there's no event in American history that's caused more of these struggles.

spk_0 There are others that compare.

spk_0 There's no event that's caused more struggles over just how the past and present meet than

spk_0 our civil war.

spk_0 Just take some of these ideas as physical legacies, emotional legacies.

spk_0 If you took the number of dead in the American civil war and you moved it to the present

spk_0 per capita, 13 million Americans would die in a war today.

spk_0 Slavery was gone, anger at its loss had no end.

spk_0 In the South, the economy and the physical landscape was in collapse.

spk_0 Two thirds of southern wealth of the Exham Federative States was destroyed in four years.

spk_0 A lot of that wealth, of course, was slaves.

spk_0 Three and a half billion dollars worth.

spk_0 Forty percent of all southern livestock were dead at the end of the war.

spk_0 Fifty percent of all farm machinery destroyed.

spk_0 There was an enormous refugee problem.

spk_0 Mobilization had occurred unmatched.

spk_0 It will be unmatched until World War II.

spk_0 And in the South in particular, the war had killed approximately, a killed or incapacitated,

spk_0 excuse me, one of every four males from the age of sixteen to forty-five.

spk_0 How do you process that kind of loss and destruction and violence in a society that must find

spk_0 a way to reconcile?

spk_0 It can't send the defeated part somewhere else.

spk_0 It could have tried, but Brazil wouldn't take them all.

spk_0 Certainly Britain wouldn't take them all.

spk_0 Mexico couldn't, wouldn't.

spk_0 How would this reconciliation actually come?

spk_0 I was doing research at the Huntington Library a couple years ago.

spk_0 And I was actually there to give a lecture and I had two days to kill.

spk_0 I was just playing around on the Allen Nevin's papers.

spk_0 Allen Nevin's was a great civil war,

spk_0 a story back in the 50s and 60s that grew up reading his works.

spk_0 And I was actually giving a lecture named for Allen Nevin.

spk_0 So I thought I'd spent a couple days in the Nevin's papers and just lose myself.

spk_0 Nothing better in the world out of the teaching of this class than losing yourself in a great library for two days with no agenda.

spk_0 And I'm fond of the through the Nevin's papers.

spk_0 It was a huge collection.

spk_0 And I just bumped into an essay in manuscript form by my hero, Bruce Ketten.

spk_0 I've mentioned him before, grew up reading his books,

spk_0 stillness at Appomattox, and so many others.

spk_0 The great popular historian of the Civil War in the 50s, 60s, 70s.

spk_0 And he was this little essay by Ketten entitled,

spk_0 The End of the Centennial 1965, not the date.

spk_0 Centennial of the US Civil War.

spk_0 Ketten and Nevin's had been themselves directors, executive directors, presidents and vice presidents,

spk_0 whatever they were called, of the US Centennial Commission for the Civil War.

spk_0 A commission that was in many ways a debacle because it was all occurring.

spk_0 Again, think of the dates at the time of the Civil Rights Movement.

spk_0 Anyway, I had just published a book on Civil War memory this long, tone,

spk_0 and here comes this little essay and I was thinking,

spk_0 oh, Bruce Ketten, I'm sure he'll agree with me.

spk_0 Now in this essay, which was later published, I discovered,

spk_0 and Ketten wrote it in 1965,

spk_0 he muses about memory and he used the actual word memory.

spk_0 That was reassuring because that was writing about memory in a world of academics

spk_0 who were always very suspicious about what the hell this idea of memory was supposed to mean.

spk_0 He marveled in this piece at how Americans had healed, that was his word,

spk_0 from their Civil War, from this kind of bloodletting,

spk_0 how a nation number of hundred years had healed, he said.

spk_0 And that a nation could actually commemorate a Civil War so openly all over the landscape.

spk_0 He said was truly remarkable if not unprecedented in modern history.

spk_0 The war he said was his word, a source of unity.

spk_0 The memory of our Civil War, and I'm quoting Bruce Ketten, 1965,

spk_0 has not been a divisive force in this country.

spk_0 I had one of those moments where I said, oh, God, Bruce, say it ain't solved.

spk_0 You didn't say that.

spk_0 Reminded me the time I ran into my greatest baseball hero ever in airport.

spk_0 Probably don't even know him, Al Kalein, the right field of the Detroit Tigers,

spk_0 the one and only Al Kalein, only Roberto Clement couldn't even come close to Kalein as the right field.

spk_0 Right into my airport once, end of his career, and I was about 28,

spk_0 and he was smoking a cigarette.

spk_0 Damn, don't meet your heroes.

spk_0 How could Bruce have written that sentence?

spk_0 I just written a 500-page book that argued exactly the opposite.

spk_0 For forging all this unity, I read on in the essay,

spk_0 for forging all this unity, he gave most of the credit to Grant and Lee at Appomattox

spk_0 and the nature of the surrender, the compassionate character of that surrender at Appomattox.

spk_0 But then he went on.

spk_0 He said primarily he gave credit to what he called the Confederate legend,

spk_0 which he described as I'm quoting him,

spk_0 a mighty omnipresent force in the land, in all seriousness, still quoting Katen.

spk_0 The legend of the loss caused has been an asset to the entire country.

spk_0 Now that just blew me away.

spk_0 Oh Bruce, please tell me you didn't write that.

spk_0 Katen's portrayal of the loss caused in this essay was that of a benign,

spk_0 innocent, romantic cluster of legends about the old South,

spk_0 driven by the assumption as he put it that, quote,

spk_0 no hint of enmity should ever be kept alive.

spk_0 His loss caused, in the brevity of one essay,

spk_0 was a story of noble sacrifice by the South and heroism of an nostalgia for an older civilization

spk_0 that had been some kind of bulwark against modernism.

spk_0 And in the end, as Katen put it, the Confederate legend, the loss caused, he said,

spk_0 quote, saved us.

spk_0 I couldn't really take it anymore.

spk_0 At the very end of the essay, Katen redeemed himself a bit.

spk_0 He acknowledged that in 1965, the war had left, he said,

spk_0 the unfinished business of black equality as its deepest legacy,

spk_0 and that, quote, the Negro was what the war was about somehow.

spk_0 Now, that was probably a rip, given how closely Katen knew Lincoln,

spk_0 loved Lincoln, that was probably a rip on Lincoln's use of the word somehow in the second inaugural,

spk_0 where Lincoln says, somehow all knew the war was about slavery.

spk_0 And we've been trying to explain that somehow in our 65 to 70,000 books on the civil war,

spk_0 that some of them have ever since.

spk_0 Now, I remember rising up from that thinking, well, I just lost another hero.

spk_0 How could Bruce Katen have said all this?

spk_0 Well, for one thing, he never did any research on the loss caused.

spk_0 He didn't know the loss caused.

spk_0 He didn't know that the loss caused became essentially a racial ideology,

spk_0 that it became a cluster of legends as he put it, but a cluster of legends in the service of white supremacy,

spk_0 a few assumptions in search of a history, and an ideology that came to be the buttressing,

spk_0 the base of Jim Crow America.

spk_0 But then I started thinking more and more, and I began to realize, don't be emotional about this.

spk_0 Bruce Katen was actually in 1965 capturing, absolutely capturing,

spk_0 the mainstream American conception of the loss caused and of civil war memory,

spk_0 that the South's heroism, that the Confederacy's effort to stake all on the line for its independence,

spk_0 that the glorious figure of a Robert E. Lee, the steadfastness of a Jefferson David,

spk_0 had indeed become national phenomenon.

spk_0 Katen was just summing up the mainstream of American thought by the 1960s,

spk_0 and that old cliche that you've heard, perhaps before many times,

spk_0 that the South lost the war but won the peace, or the South lost the war but won the debate over the memory,

spk_0 was basically what Katen was summing up.

spk_0 I think Katen believed this too, but I let him off the hook.

spk_0 Because by circa 1965, the understanding of the American Civil War and the broad mainstream culture,

spk_0 not among most African Americans, and now a new young generation of historians

spk_0 who came of age in the wake of World War II, and were deeply interested in the problem of race in American history as never before,

spk_0 and deeply inspired by an anthropological, sociological, psychological revolution in the study of race,

spk_0 we're beginning to write about it differently.

spk_0 The great Southern poet who lives much of his life, much of the second half of his life, right here,

spk_0 and whose papers are right there, the binarchy, Robert Penn Warren, wrote brilliantly about this in a little book,

spk_0 a little essay, actually a big essay, and a little book that he wrote in 1961 called the Legacy of the Civil War.

spk_0 He wrote it for Life Magazine, it was later published as a book.

spk_0 In that book, trying to capture what the meaning of the Civil War was in American culture 100 years after,

spk_0 Ten Warren said that somewhere in their bones, and I quote him,

spk_0 most Americans have a storehouse of lessons drawn from the Civil War.

spk_0 Now exactly what those lessons should be has been, I think, the most contested question in America's historical memory,

spk_0 over and over again, at least since 1865, and probably even since 1863, when the war underwent a revolution.

spk_0 Among all the possible lessons of our Civil War, Robert Penn Warren, is the realization his words that slavery looms up mountainously in the story and cannot be talked away.

spk_0 Our culture has spent nearly now a century and a half, and it is still at it of talking away the place of slavery in this event,

spk_0 and it is place in the aftermath.

spk_0 When one is happy in forgetfulness, said Penn Warren, facts get forgotten, or as William Dean Howles put it in 1900,

spk_0 and I think I quote this in the essay you've read, but the American people always like is a tragedy as long as they can give it a happy ending.

spk_0 We have a tragic sensibility as long as we can see an exit from it.

spk_0 All right, let me just give you three hooks to hang your hat on in terms of how Americans have processed this memory.

spk_0 I've labeled them reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist, and they simply mean this.

spk_0 There are some other ways of thinking about how Civil War memory was processed, but most of them can come under these categories.

spk_0 A reconciliationist vision of this war took root in the midst of the war.

spk_0 It took root especially in dealing with all the dead.

spk_0 And Drew Faust's new book on this called Republic of Suffering is a must read if you stay interested in this subject.

spk_0 I'm conducting an interview with her tomorrow night in New York about that book.

spk_0 I've talked to so many people who keep telling me they can't read past page 50 because it's so depressing.

spk_0 And I usually say something stupid like, it's good for you.

spk_0 Take your pill.

spk_0 The reconciliationist vision of this war, I mean somehow putting ourselves back together, is rooted right there and putting bodies back together and in putting hundreds of thousands of bodies in the ground.

spk_0 And Faust's book has never before we are taken literally into those graves.

spk_0 She has found tremendous evidence of what soldiers themselves did on battlefields to bury their own dead and sometimes even bury the enemy to give people decent human burials after they'd been half eaten by dogs.

spk_0 Nothing like burying a dead man without a coffin on a battlefield that you've known will make you pray and beg to be reconciled with something.

spk_0 But a second kind of civil war memory, if we can call it that, was the white supremacist memory which took many forms early, including of course the terror and violence of the clan and the dead.

spk_0 And it's many imitators in reconstruction and then locked arms eventually in the later 19th century and into the 20th century with reconciliationists of all kinds in our culture and delivered the country, a racially segregated memory, a racially segregated story of this experience, at least by 1900 and really even before.

spk_0 A third kind of memory always competing with these we might call an emancipationist memory, embodied in African Americans, complex and they had no single memory of slavery, the war, emancipation and reconstruction in their own.

spk_0 Complex remembrance of what slavery and their freedom had meant to them.

spk_0 But an emancipationist vision of the civil war was also rooted in the politics of radical reconstruction, also rooted in the three constitutional amendments and conceptions of the war as a reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks to citizenship, blacks and eventually others to constitutional quality.

spk_0 In the end what you have here is a story eventually of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed that emancipationist vision in the national culture and how an inexorable drive for reunion of north and south both used race and then trumped it.

spk_0 But the story doesn't just dead end in this white supremacy victory.

spk_0 This lost cause victory because eventually the lost cause wasn't about causes lost at all.

spk_0 The lost cause ideology of the south became a victory narrative and the victory they argued was a national victory over reconstruction.

spk_0 If you want to ask what was the biggest success in the long struggle over civil war memory, it was the success of the lost cause ideology in selling themselves to northerners who bought in and said yes the nation is finally triumphed over the mistake of reconstruction.

spk_0 But there was a fledgling neo abolitionist tradition that emancipationist vision of the civil war never died a permanent death in American culture by any means kept alive by blacks, black leadership and white allies.

spk_0 There is a persistence of that memory that frankly folks made possible the civil rights revolution of the fifties and sixties and it was happening even before the fifties.

spk_0 But if one thing in particular happened to the memory of the civil war, it found its way eventually into a broad consensus in the broader national culture.

spk_0 This is never in the animus of course but in the broader national culture that somehow in this war in this armageddon in this bloodletting everybody had been right nobody had been wrong.

spk_0 You want to reconcile a country that's had a horrifying civil war, how do you do it?

spk_0 Well you start building thousands upon thousands of monuments. You start having soldier reunions, you've read about the Gettysburg reunion in this essay of mine I won't even go into that the biggest of all the blue grey reunions which became a Jim Crow reunion by 1913 and Ken Burns did not tell you that in his film and played a very interesting trick on you with that editing button by showing you black and white veterans at the 1913 reunion shaking hands.

spk_0 And in a resistible beautiful emotional moment the trouble is those veterans were shaking hands 25 years later in 1938 at the at the New Deal reunion at Gettysburg they weren't there in 1913 but in the film that's certainly what it looks like.

spk_0 Power of filmmaking.

spk_0 There was a popular novel published in 1912 where a zillion popular novels published about the Civil War but this one was by a Southern woman writer a very interesting writer we don't read much today if anybody reads her although she was important in her time her name was Mary Johnston.

spk_0 She was a virginian born to the upper crust of Virginia planter life born just after the war she was imbued with the lost cause tradition but grew up wanting to interrogate it a little bit she was a lost cause but she asked questions about it she became a suffragist a progressive woman in so many ways she wrote a trilogy of civil war books.

spk_0 Her most famous book and was a huge bestseller was called to have and to hold one of her trilogy is a novel called cease firing which also was a near bestseller and in cease firing on the last page of the book she has Lee's army retreating from Richmond out toward their surrender at Appomattoff and she's a good writer.

spk_0 And literally on the last two pages she has two Confederate soldiers in their rags half starved in conversation.

spk_0 And one of these old veterans asked the other what he thinks it all means what's what's it all about brother.

spk_0 And the other answers and says I think that we were both right and both wrong and that in the beginning each side might have been more patient and much wiser life and history and right and wrong and the minds of men look out of more windows than we used to think.

spk_0 Did you never hear of the shield that had two sides and both were made of precious metal.

spk_0 Why didn't we just get along. We were both right. Now that's an honest sentiment she puts in the mouths of a half star of Confederate veteran who's lucky to be alive and is now either about to desert or surrender to the union army.

spk_0 Neither option of which he ever hoped to live to have to face. And she also captures in that moment a very honest sentiment that had said in all over American culture especially in veterans culture at all those blue grey reunions and the Gettysburg Blue Grey reunion was about to occur the following year after this book was published and that is this sense of the mutuality of sacrifice among soldiers.

spk_0 Cure the hatreds of war by bringing the warriors together because they have a mutuality of experience.

spk_0 But there was and there was of course no lack of honor at Appomattox on either side but outside of all that pathos that that understanding that sentiment that Americans had bought into by the millions.

spk_0 There was of course another whole story going on out in American culture and in national memory. In 1912 the NAACP counted 72 lynchings in America about 90% of whom were African American by 1912 when that book was published the entire Jim Crow legal system in all of its absurdities was fully in place roughly by about 1910 across the South.

spk_0 Some of the border states and to some extent even in the North in Eurasia a cultural historical namanic Eurasia had been going on for three four and five decades of emancipation from the national narrative of what this war had even ever been.

spk_0 That process led the great black scholar W. B. Du Bois same year 1912 in the crisis magazine the journal of NAACP to conclude as he put it this country has had its appetite for facts on the civil war and the Negro problem spoiled by sweets.

spk_0 They didn't too much candy. Let me give you one other example from one of these other blue gray reunion by the 1890s these weren't easy to do these blue gray reunion is bring them back and feather in union veterans to old battlefields or sites and cities and so forth these weren't easy to do they first attempted doing it in the 1870s Confederates didn't want to come to these things 1880s even it wasn't easy to do.

spk_0 They had one of Gettysburg on the 20th anniversary and on the 25th anniversary it was hard to especially to get Confederates to go to Gettysburg the scene of their worst defeat but by the 1890s 25 years out now and 30 years out from the war with the transmission and we know this about so many events in the way generations learn from one another and the way memory gets passed on as soon as there is truly a generational trend.

spk_0 The old veterans as they get older are willing to come. The 1900 blue gray reunion was held in Atlanta and by the way southern cities started to compete for these things like northern cities because they were huge money makers thousands and thousands of veterans would come to their families and spend thousands and thousands of dollars anyway in 1900 the blue gray was in Atlanta and during the major speeches at that reunion

spk_0 the commander of the GAR the Grand Army of the Republic the big northern veterans organization was a guy named Shaw from Massachusetts no relation to Robert Gould Shaw of the famous 54th mass and in his speech he lectured the Confederate veterans this guy had a lot of New England hootspa he lectured them about their efforts to control school textbooks which by the way all veterans organizations were absolutely

spk_0 doing every Confederate veterans organization had its textbook committee and many union veterans post and organizations had their textbook committee they were competing with one another to control the story in America's textbooks and trying to lobby and control publishers.

spk_0 Anyway commander Shaw was a little exercised about this and he said among other things quote you can almost see a sort of school marmish finger wagging and what he said he said quote keeping alive sexual teachings as to the justice and rights of the cause of the south in the hearts of your children is all out of order it is unwise and unjust.

spk_0 The commander of the United Confederate veterans was none other than John B. Gordon John B. Gordon had been a Confederate general John B. Gordon was the Confederate general in charge of the stacking of the arms and the surrender at Appomattox John B. Gordon then went on to get elected governor and then senator from Georgia during reconstruction he was also one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia although he lied through his teeth KKK hearings of 1871 about it

spk_0 John B. Gordon by the 1891 one of the most ubiquitous and popular Confederate memorial day speakers and he was good at it he got up to respond to commander Shaw and this is a final passage in what he said John B. Gordon 1900 head of the UCV United Confederate veterans when he tells me in my southern comrades the teaching our children that the cause for which we fought and our comrades died.

spk_0 The United is all wrong I must earnestly protest in the name of the future manhood of the south I protest what are we to teach them if we cannot teach them that their fathers were right it follows that these southern children must be taught that they were wrong I never will be ready to have my children taught that I was ever wrong or that the cause of my people was unjust and unholy all my friends you were right but we were right too.

spk_0 Everybody was right nobody was wrong and a war that killed 620,000 people and maimed about 1.2 million and transformed the society but no one was wrong.

spk_0 In fact by the 1890s as it is still today we can very popular to be a Confederate veteran if you read Tony Horowitz's confederates in the attic he showed how so many civil war reenactors it appears still today prefer to reenact Confederates than the reenact unionist although the lots of unions are not going to be in the way that they are.

spk_0 They are not going to be in the union reenactors and there are not lots of black reenactors which raises a fascinating intellectual question which we don't have to dwell on now and that is why is defeat sometimes more interesting than victory ask yourselves that.

spk_0 Why do those Nazis never disappear from the bookstore shelves often right up front? Nazis dogs in the civil war as the publisher sometimes tell you if you write about those we will buy it we will sell it.

spk_0 Hate being in that category and then there are those who will say things like Nazis holocaust memoirs dogs in the civil war.

spk_0 The Confederate veteran magazine which became a very popular magazine in the 1890s and last like 35 years into the 20th century ran this little story in 1894.

spk_0 It reported a story of a southern woman a white woman and her son attending a production of theater production in Brooklyn New York of the play called Hell by the enemy.

spk_0 And theater production plays about the civil war especially with some kind of reconciliationist theme became wildly popular by the 1890s.

spk_0 The boy sitting there with his mother according to the anonymous author asked his mother what did the Yankees fight for mother and as the orchestra strikes up marching through Georgia the woman answers for the war.

spk_0 The union darling painful memories were told bring sadness to the mother's face as she hears the Yankee victory song and then earnestly the boy asks what did the Confederates fight for mother and before the mother can answer the music changes to home sweet home which fills the theater says the author with its depth of untold.

spk_0 The mother whisper their answer to her son to you hear what they are playing that is what Confederates fought for darling and the boy counters did they fight for their homes and with the parents assurance the boy burst into tears and with what the author calls the intuition of right he hugs his mother and announces.

spk_0 All mother I will be a Confederate. They just fought for their homes it's all you needed to know now it may be all a mother would want a little boy to know but all over American culture there were millions who didn't really want to know anymore.

spk_0 Everybody was right nobody was wrong there are a hundred ways to plant this story or examples through which to tell this story and I don't want to take really any more time on it you can read a book called racing reunion if it ever so moves you.

spk_0 I want to get to our review yes I am getting to our review but I do want to leave you with this thought two images if I can.

spk_0 Three images actually or two metaphors one I guess isn't quite a metaphor in the second chapter of Du Bois is the souls of black folk.

spk_0 Okay I'm going to test you how many of you have read souls of black folk. We got work to do it you know when should have a degree from you without reading souls of black folk no one should have you a citizenship without reading souls of black folk but since I don't rule the world who cares.

spk_0 Chapter two of Du Bois's masterpiece is an essay he called the dawn of freedom he starts out ostensibly as an essay on a kind of a little history of the Freemans bureau and a little take on reconstruction but he turns into much much more he turns it into a meditation not unlike Ken Warren will do in 1961 but a meditation on the meaning and memory of slavery the civil war and reconstruction.

spk_0 And he goes into a discussion as only Du Bois could because Du Bois is really a poet historian or a historian as poet he begins to discuss how bleak life actually is on the ground in the south not just for the Freedmen as sharecroppers but for whites as well.

spk_0 The poverty as a black and white thing he says he's got another chapter to come in the book called the black belt where he shows that the poverty of something southern is share if they would.

spk_0 And then he stops and he says in effect see this picture with me through what he calls to figure.

spk_0 He says there are two figures in his view that typified the post war era and the power of its legacies here's the passage two figures says Du Bois quote the one a gray hair gentleman whose fathers had quit themselves like men whose sons lay in nameless graves who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill.

spk_0 He stood at last in the evening of life a ruined form with hate in his eye.

spk_0 Your first figure is an old white man probably a former planter who's lost everything he's bitter I mean he's really bitter.

spk_0 He feels a burden of southern history.

spk_0 And then Du Bois says in the other form hovering dark and motherlike her awful face black with the mists of centuries had a four time quail that that white master's command had been in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife.

spk_0 And I too at his behest had laid herself low to his lust and born a Tony manchild to the world only to see her dark boys limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders writing after damn nigger.

spk_0 The second image in a old black woman former slave.

spk_0 Mami but also broken no future.

spk_0 Nothing to know where that son might be and the son is probably dead.

spk_0 But Du Bois presses the issue Du Bois had a genuine sense of tragedy and he didn't care sometimes whether he gave you a half of his life.

spk_0 He pressed the issue he says then these were the saddest sites I'm quoting of that wofel day.

spk_0 And no man clasp the hands of these passing figures of the present past legacy were past and present meet.

spk_0 No man clasp the hands of these passing figures of the present past but hating they went to their long home and hating their children's children live today.

spk_0 Now unmistakably Du Bois is using that language of clasping hands for a purpose because by far the most ubiquitous image used in all the blue grey reunions by the 90s.

spk_0 He first wrote this essay in 1897 and revised it for souls of black folk in 1903.

spk_0 But the most ubiquitous image in all the blue grey reunions was then in fact the slogan was clasping hands across the bloody chasm.

spk_0 And the shaking of hands of the blue and the grey the old confederate vets the old union vets was always the photo op.

spk_0 And it's all over the ending of Burns's film.

spk_0 How could you and how can you resist it?

spk_0 In some ways what can be more beautiful than old old men chess full of metals shaking hands across the walls they try to kill each other old.

spk_0 There's something human about that that we can't quite resist.

spk_0 But Du Bois says you know what there are two other kinds of veterans of the civil war and no one's ever clasped their hand.

spk_0 And then I would just ask you to think I don't not doing this for any political partisan reason.

spk_0 I don't know if you've read it but at the very end of Barack Obama's race speech.

spk_0 I'm talking about Obama now as a historian not as a candidate. He's got enough problems with them.

spk_0 Reverend Wright right now.

spk_0 But this is Obama the writer.

spk_0 And I don't know if he read chapter two of souls before he wrote that speech in Philadelphia a month ago.

spk_0 It doesn't really matter if he did.

spk_0 I don't remember if you read to the end of it if you've read it or if you heard it.

spk_0 I've actually never heard of it. I've only read it.

spk_0 But the way he ends that speech is the way a lot of politicians get up on the stump and talk.

spk_0 And at first you're ready to dismiss it. It's another one of those stories of,

spk_0 I met somebody on the campaign trail and here's what she said to me.

spk_0 She had this terrible story to tell. Let me tell you her terrible story.

spk_0 And you start tuning out of the, oh God here comes another story of old aunt something or other on the welfare or whatever.

spk_0 But now it's a story of a young 23 year old white woman named Ashley Bahia,

spk_0 who is his campaign manager in Florence, South Carolina.

spk_0 And he remembered the story of when he, during the South Carolina primary.

spk_0 He was doing an event in Florence, South Carolina.

spk_0 He meets Ashley and Ashley tells him her story and that story is in brief that she grew up with a single mother, poor.

spk_0 Poor white girl in the South. At age about 10 her mother got cancer, lost her job, family went bankrupt, etc. etc.

spk_0 In order to help out her mother she told the story of eating nothing but mustard and relished sandwiches for a year or a year and a half.

spk_0 Apparently her mother survived, but they never really survived with the bankruptcy.

spk_0 But somehow as she got older she got interested in politics.

spk_0 Now that's a white working, lower working class, poor Southern girlhood every right to be in that group.

spk_0 Obama had described earlier who are the whites in America with a lot of resentment about all the racial changes in America.

spk_0 Instead she becomes his campaign manager and she put together this whole gathering in Florence and some I don't church hall or wherever they were meeting, mostly black folk.

spk_0 And then Obama describes how everybody in the room had to go around and say why they were there or what issue they were there for.

spk_0 And he says with quite some directness that most people did what most people do. They name a single issue. It's about them.

spk_0 It's about us right? Not about the common goods, it's about us.

spk_0 I want a better job, I want health care, I want that, I want I want I want.

spk_0 Okay fair enough. And finally come around to an old black man who's sitting there kind of at the end of the aisle.

spk_0 And he's asked so why are you here? Obama doesn't even name him.

spk_0 He says I'm just here because Ashley brought me here. I'm only here because of Ashley.

spk_0 Now Obama says in effect he develops at the end of the speech a refrain about not this time. He says not this time.

spk_0 We're not going to let race divide us this time like Du Bois' two figures hating to their death and hating their children's children live today.

spk_0 Well here are two children but not what he's reversed. We got a young white woman who should have been in the resentful white working class.

spk_0 And an old black man who no doubt grew up in Jim Crow and probably have told the story after story of the denigration or destruction of his dignity for the first 45 years of his life.

spk_0 But he's there because of Ashley.

spk_0 Thank you.

Lecture 27 - Legacies of the Civil War

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