 I'm Phil Barnes and it is my privilege to chair the UT Alley Enrichment Committee. Dr. Mark Lawrence, the director of the LBJ Presidential Library and himself and widely respected historian is the host for each of these interviews, focusing this year on presidential decisions of war and peace. From these conversations we are learning just how complex and often difficult these decisions were and perhaps we can take away lessons for today and tomorrow. Let me remind you that as a participant in this webinar you may present questions throughout the program for our Q&A segment by using the chat function to write and submit them. Our Q&A host again today is my UT Alley colleague, Sandy Chris. Elizabeth Varan is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and specializes in the Civil War era in the American South as well as other cultural history. She's the author of numerous books most notably including the award winning Appomattox, Victory Defeat and Freedom at the end of the Civil War. Lee's surrender to granted Appomattox, as has been written, evoked a highly gratifying image in the popular mind. Many believe it was a moment that transcended politics, a moment of healing and a patriotism untated by ideology, but in reality that was a myth. The myth of Appomattox as the underlying reality was quite different at this moment when the Civil War ended. For Grant and for most of the North, the Union victory was one of right overall, a vindication of a free society for many African Americans that surrender marked the dawn of freedom itself. Robert E. Lee, in contrast, believed that the Union victory was one of might over right. The vast and personal rapacious Northern war machine had simply worn down a valorous and unbound south, forced to surrender, but never defeated. Lee was committed to peace, but also to the restoration of the South's political power within the Union and the perpetuation of white supremacy. Lee's explanation of the war's end, built in large part on exaggerated, if not sometimes fabricated information about the war itself, especially the disparity between the size and commitment of the Union army and the Confederate army, paved the way for southern resistance to reconstruction and frame much of the debate about how we treat and teach history today. This is the important historical context for our conversation with Elizabeth Warren about decisions for peace at the end of the Civil War by both presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. So I'm delighted to welcome for today's interview Elizabeth Barron, the author of Appomattox, Victory to Feed and Freedom at the end of the Civil War. And now to Mark Lawrence. Well, thank you very much, Phil, for that wonderful and thoughtful introduction and welcome everyone. It's wonderful to have you all back for the second week of our program and welcome in particular to Professor Elizabeth Barron. Liz, it's great to see you and I really, really appreciate your willingness to be here with us today to talk about your specialty, the American Civil War and especially, as Phil mentioned, the ending of that war and all of the contestation and controversies that ensued in the years thereafter. It may be true that all peace agreements are both ends and beginnings. They're the end of the fighting, of course, but also the beginnings of new contestation that the war has left unresolved. I think we saw last week for everyone who attended our session with Professor Laderman how the end of the First World War, the greatest war, the world had ever seen, gave way to lots of controversy and contention that many would argue in turn, fed into the tensions that contributed to the outbreak of another world war only a couple of decades afterwards. In any case, Liz, you write of Appomattox in a line that really caught my eye. The surrender was not just an ending, but a beginning, an inherently political moment that set the terms of an unfolding debate about the meaning and implications of the war. And let's get us let's get rolling by by connecting the history of the Civil War a little bit to our present moment, and then we'll we'll dive back into history. Is it fair to say that Americans are still having this debate about the Civil War in the 21st century? Absolutely, Mark. And and broadly speaking, I can observe as many Civil War historians have done trying to account with the for the perennial fascination Americans have in the Civil War. It fascinates us because of the ways that the core issues at the heart of the war, defining citizenship, race relations, freedom, the scope of federal and state power, these remain contested. And we can certainly come back around at the end of our conversation about 1865 and its aftermath to modern day lessons learned and reverberations. But specifically what I had in mind when I observed that Appomattox was a beginning, not just an ending with some of the themes that Phil Barnes previewed in his in his opening comments, that it's a political moment, not the gentleman's agreement of myth and memory, right? With Lee and Grant shaking hands and and and bearing the hatchet and and you know, healing and and reunion, you know, seated at that moment, I make the case in this book that at Appomattox, as these two men meet, claims are staked, political claims are staked that really do shape the post war period. And as as as Phil began to explain, those claims that are staked are competing interpretations of what has just happened and what its meaning and implications should be for American political life in particular. So Grant and Lincoln grant very much with his surrender terms, we'll talk about some of the details as instantiating Lincoln's will and intentions with regards to the wars. And Grant and Lincoln see the Union victory as a victory right over wrong, as Phil said, and specifically what what I meant in in sort of that formulation was for Grant and Lincoln, the Union victories of vindication of free labor society and and its productivity and its and its dynamism. We see that in the in the in the sort of size and strength of the Union army, they certainly saw it that way. It's a claim about the vindication of majority rule, they very much believed and this is a threat. I'll we've throughout our conversation of central Union assumption and Northern assumption was that secession was the work of a small band of conspirators, elite slaveholders, secessionists who had kind of cast a spell over the whites other masses, and led them down, you know, a path of of defeat. The claim that they staked in arguing that the Union victory was a vindication of majority rule and of a free labor system meaning a system in which people are remunerated for their labor as opposed to a slave labor system. The claim they were staking was that that victory had given them the right to remake the South and and a mandate in which defeated Confederates must yield to the new order. So Lee, Jefferson Davis Confederates see this Union victory in very different terms from the very start. As a victory, not of of might overwrite, or rather, not of right over wrong, but one of might overwrite as Phil began to explain, and they're staking claims of their own. The claim that's at the heart of the lost cause ideology that military defeat on the part of the Confederates wasn't a moral defeat, it wasn't a defeat of their principles, a defeat of their armies, but not of their principles, that the cause was in a sense not lost, so somewhat counterintuitively, the essence of the lost cause ideology is that the cause wasn't wasn't lost that it could still be one in the realm of politics. And at the heart of that, that idea of the Union victory as a victory of might overwrite, right over wrong was a Confederate argument which Lee begins to state even in his farewell message to his troops and what she refers to the Union victory, relying on the overwhelming numbers and resources as he puts it of the Union army. It's an argument that the Union victory was as a victory of might at its heart illegitimate and that the Union did not win the right to remake the South. So in a sense, we're still debating all of this because these were claims and debates that are preceded by these claims about whether the Union victory had conferred a mandate on the Union, whether the Confederate cause was legitimate and had retained any legitimacy, whether the Union and Confederacy could share the moral high ground. And this becomes, you know, a subject of debate very, very, very soon and very intensely Frederick Douglas will observe famously in 1878, 13 years after this Appomattox agreement at the end of the war, the Union victory, Douglas, the great black abolitionists will observe there was a right side in the late war and a wrong side and no sentiment ought to cause us to forget it. And Douglas feels it's necessary to make that observation because he feels that already by 1878, Americans are starting to forget it. That the image of the war as a vindication of the Union cause of the free labor system of majority rule is faded and contested and under fire. And so, you know, in that sense, the ending of the war is very political as appealing as the image of a kind of meeting of the minds between me and Grant might be. It always struck me as completely implausible. These men were warriors, you know, to the core, both of them, and each deeply committed to his respective cause. And that commitment didn't evaporate at the moment they signed those those those piece of terms. So fantastic. So lots here to get into in more detail. Take us back to 150 years. And let's talk for a minute about the actual circumstances that led to the end of the Civil War. March and April 1965. Why was it that these weeks brought about Lee's surrender? Tell us a little bit about the military situation. And why this is why this brought an end to the war? Yeah, it's a fascinating sort of final act here for the war. And and and it's so easy to sort of imagine, if we think about earlier, so called turning points, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and so on, that people are marking off the days until Appomattox at that point. But there was nothing inevitable about about any of this is all contingent quite dramatic. So the the month of April, 1865 brings in an effective end to the war. And I'll talk about armies that were still in the field and what the what the surrender meant for the Confederate Project of Independence in a moment. But it brings this moment of reckoning, because the Confederacy is spent largely at this at this point, Grant's strategy of attrition and the Eastern Theater of War of just hammering at least army knowing that Grant could replace lost men and we could not had worked. And one thing I would emphasize in keeping with this idea of the Union victory as a vindication is that it's not just the Union's superior numbers and resources again to quote Lee, that result in that demise of the Confederate army, it's also the Union's superior leadership that Grant and Lincoln and Sheridan and Sherman have this intense command harmony, they settle on a strategy for winning the war. They're all committed to each playing his part. Sherman's success in the Atlanta campaign is marched to the sea. These things help to affect Lincoln's reelection. Sheridan Phil Sheridan in the Virginia's Valley, I'm sorry, I have a light here that goes off automatically if I don't move from time to time. So I've got to occasionally you'll see me wave or move as a consequence. The Sheridan and the Valley destroying southern infrastructure to starve Lee's army. And then finally, Lee's army pouring out of the trenches of Richmond and Petersburg as Grant's long siege finally breaks Confederate lines and heading west in a dramatic retreat across the central Virginia countryside to Appomattox, a sleepy little hamlet in the middle of Virginia. And again, the Union army's skill and determination key in this last campaign, this Appomattox campaign, they chase Lee down and they block his escape route. He had hoped to link up with Joe Johnston in North Carolina and to fight on. But the Union army catches him, Sheridan and Grant, crucially and symbolically very important detail here is that among those Union soldiers who who wage this last Appomattox campaign who catch Lee block his retreat route are African American soldiers in the US Army USCT units so called and for them, the symbolic importance of being in that group that had brought Lee to heal was naturally a very, very, you know, a very sort of important and portentious contribution that they had that they had made. So the the Army of Northern Virginia Lee's army is is brought to heal by Grant's army because of the superior numbers and resources and the determination and skill of the Union forces. If those closing stages of the war had unfolded in somewhat different ways, could you imagine that the war could have continued for a significantly longer period of time? And I guess this is a way of getting at just how important the sheer manpower disparities and industrial capability disparities mattered to the outcome. They mattered. They mattered a great deal. And certainly Confederates debated in those final days we debated and discussed with his his own high command whether they should fight on a guerrilla warfare melted to the countryside and keep fighting in that way. We rejected that in part because as a number of people said he felt it was dishonorable but also in part because he knew that Confederates had tried that and it hadn't worked. There was a lot of guerrilla warfare particularly in the in a sort of borderlands places like Missouri and and the Union had developed effective counterinsurgency measures so that you know that would have that that that that was not a path to victory and Confederate independence and Lee was was was was well aware of that. All of this of course raises the question gets takes us back to the origin of the war off and have students ask me you know the north has a much bigger society a much bigger army couldn't Confederates crunch the numbers what do they think they were doing and provoking the war in the first place and of course they had believed they could win and that they would win and there were many perceived and imagined advantages that they had and were counting on they were hoping for foreign recognition they hadn't mind the example of the American Revolution and the small band of patriots to find the British Empire and all the rest but particularly relevant for our conversation here Confederates had hoped and Lee very very much was in this particular camp had hoped that they might divide the north that Confederate victories that the that the costliness of the war that the scope and duration of the war might wear away the north's will to fight to make the required sacrifices to bring victory and that that well declining morale in the north particularly if they're Confederate victories in the north hence these invasions of Maryland and Pennsylvania Antietam and Gettysburg they had hoped that perhaps northern voters would turn against Lincoln turn against the Republican Party throw Lincoln out of office maybe the opposition party the northern Democrats who had commanded 40% of the northern electorate you know Lincoln we we think of them as a as perhaps our greatest president and a and you know legend and icon and so on but he was very embattled in his own day even in the north with critics on on his left and and right and those critics on the right Copperhead Democrats really some of them seemed quite willing to to negotiate a peace with the Confederacy perhaps even a piece that accepted Confederate independence so Confederates all along were hoping against hope that that the north would be divided and so when I focus on the importance of leadership and accounting for this final victory I have in mind the guy who's you know bust is behind you there in the background of course Lincoln who's who whose leadership was crucially keeping the north together and preventing these fault lines from dividing the north in just such a way that that the Confederates hope it might it might wonderful thank you so tell us about the agreement that generals Lee and Grant reached at Appomattox what did it specify so you know famously Grant's terms are exceedingly lenient this isn't keeping with with Lincoln's wishes and with some precedents during the war the Confederate soldiers are essentially sent home of no punishment no recrimination on the promise that they will obey the laws of the United States including of emancipation measures and so on and that they will take up arms against the United States again a pretty low bar and that leniency it's very important to note again to understand what a kind of politically fraught moment this was even the leniency had political motivations and could be spun and interpreted politically Grant's motivations Lincoln's motivation was not to exonerate the Confederates to suggest that there was a you know moral or political worth to their cause the purpose of leniency was to affect their absolution and their repentance you know change hearts and minds as we might say in the context of modern warfare and they expected them and hoped that the magnanimity would be rewarded by compliance you know and by an accession and yielding to the changes that had come and were coming so the magnanimity itself the premise for it was an idea that was at the heart of the union war effort I alluded to this briefly once before but but this is just underscores again how we can't really talk about the ends of wars without understanding the beginnings of the war aims and the evolution of war aims Lincoln and Northerners had conceptualized the war as a war of deliverance to deliver the southern masses from the slaveholding elite and they believed that that perhaps this these magnanimous terms could be the sort of crowning uh uh you know a policy here for this war of deliverance change hearts and minds prepare the way for uh for the peace and I want to ask you to take us further into Lincoln's thinking in just a minute but before we get there um help me understand something that I find puzzling about the civil war and for that matter many for that matter many other wars how is it that this landmark surrenders defeat of Confederate forces in one specific location how did it lead to the general surrender of Confederate armies across the south because after all not every Confederate soldier was yeah great great question so um the war the the surrender is we describe it as kind of the effective end of the confederates bid for independence but it doesn't end armed struggle there are other armies in the field Joe Johnston's army in North Carolina Edmund Kirby Smith and the West as you all in Texas know so well it's not until June 19th 1865 that Union forces are able to liberate Galveston hence Juneteenth the roots of that that holiday and that that freedom day um so uh uh it Appomattox April 9 1865 doesn't end the fighting but it is that a domino that falls that leads to the fall of the other Confederate armies the surrender of the other Confederate armies and the reason is that Lee's army had by this point become essentially the focal point of Confederate nationalism in the eyes of Confederates the hopes for uh for Confederate independence rested on Lee's army his ability to defy the odds to to to um you know prevail over overwhelming numbers to hold out uh and so on and so um given given the the symbolic importance of Lee as a symbol of unity um the fall of his army was was uh again the first of a series of falling dominoes okay so a few hundred miles away from these dramatic events sat President Lincoln and in Washington or or they are about tell us a little bit more about how his thinking changed over the course of the war about what peace should look like so Lincoln had always been in favor of what we might call a soft peace so again working on the assumption that secession was the work of a small band of conspirators who had duped and seduced uh uh the southern masses uh into uh into uh accepting secession um Lincoln was keen on restoring states to the union as quickly as possible and as a consequence even while the war is being waged we have an experiment in wartime reconstruction in union occupied areas of the south Lincoln puts in place a a uh a process for bringing those occupied areas back into the fold a big experiment of Louisiana where union or occupation early in the war of New Orleans uh and the presence of some white southern unionism leads Lincoln to believe that this experiment can take root we can see Lincoln's desire for what we might call a soft peace obviously the most famous rhetorical expression of this is his statement in his second inaugural about malice towards non-charity towards all that was the spirit in which the peace would be would be forged we can see the policy aspects of this spelled out in uh his December 1863 proclamation of amnesty uh it's it's a move of Lincoln's that's that's sort of little known and little understood but but very very important December 1863 he essentially um offers a return to the fold return to citizenship return to their previously held rights not the right to hold slaves as emancipation is already uh union policy but all other uh rights right to voting and property holding and so on to confederates who take an oath of of present and future loyalty uh and uh he hopes that once the 10 percent of the antebellum voting population the 1860 electorate in any given southern state has taken that oath that that vanguard that 10 can begin a process of of of having that state reenter the union and again Louisiana was the major test case for this so the Appomattox terms in a sense the leniency the go home obey the law and and there'll be no reprisals no no no punishment no um economic price or political price uh uh to uh to pay um that is is uh you know not surprising he had showed his hand not only in his malice towards non and charity towards all uh dictum but also in his proclamation of amnesty and Lincoln hoped and again part of what I'm I'm suggesting here is that there's this um idealism seems almost naive in retrospect Lincoln had hoped that Confederates would would take him up on the offer that they would flock to the banner the union troops were given copies of this 1863 amnesty proclamation to leave in southern houses to distribute uh in the southern army uh and and so on to try to try to get the word out uh it was very disappointed when he found that you know fell on on deaf ears Confederates were committed to mostly you know kind of last-ditch mentality to fighting to the bitter end uh and and very few took him up on his offer but but the the persistence of the belief that hearts and minds could be changed is quite intense quite surprising I wrote a book called armies of deliverance about this notion of the union war is a war of deliverance and and the resilience of that notion now um that all of that said Lincoln's views had changed over the course of the war and and the most important change of course is that he'd come to believe that some hard war tactics were necessary to to uh secure the victory that would then result in this soft piece and the hard war tactics were a targeting of southern infrastructure a targeting of southern morale a targeting of southern property a confiscation policy that um was a opening wedge towards emancipation and then the emancipation proclamation itself which Lincoln initially justified to the northern public is a war measure under his powers as commander in chief to hurt the enemy by undermining the enemy's economy in a cost economy based on on slave labor so he had come to believe to believe emancipation was a necessary tool but he'd also come to believe at the very end of of the war and then really the first time he expressed is this belief is in the days before he's assassinated he had come to believe that um uh some African Americans should perhaps vote be part of the body politic that part of that vanguard that's going to bring those errant southern states back into the union uh and he makes famously in his last uh speech um uh uh after he's heard the news from Appomattox uh April 11th he makes uh uh a his first um uh sort of gesture at the idea that perhaps black suffrage is something that should be considered especially he says uh suffrage voting for union veterans African Americans who fought in the union army all together there were 200,000 of them and they've been utterly crucial um so he had come to uh to see those southern blacks unionists um as as um you know a crucial part of union victory and as and as a part of the southern body politic so a great deal of your really fabulous book Appomattox which i happen to have right here um is is taken up with exploring how different elements of the american population understood Appomattox and thought about the meaning of the war in the immediate aftermath i i know you could speak lives all day about any of these strands of thinking but in a nutshell i mean they spent they range from the copperheads the democrats the northern democrats to moderate northerners died in the wool confederates african americans right there's a whole range i wonder if you could speak about that range and tease out some of the complexities of uh the ways in which even in the immediate aftermath of the war this debate was already bubbling to the surface yeah absolutely this goes back to our our simple observation that the surrender is a politically charged moment and again how could it not be uh the all of this um uh peacemaking got filtered through party politics and was highly charged uh uh in in that in that sense so blinkin's party is the republican party the republican party believes that um that the the union victory hasn't only vindicated the free labor system a majority rule but it's handling of the war effort that it is the entity that ought to control the government uh and and control the control of the the the peace process and so we have republicans both moderate and radical republicans that eager to uh to um uh to you know maintain political control to not let it just fall back into the hands of those whom they have vanquished or of those the northern democrats copperheads who have been a really unruly at times and as republicans see it disloyal sort of fifth column copperhead democrats they're essentially the as i said 40 of northern voters were democrats they fell into two categories war democrats were those who really supported the union war effort fought and died for it um were committed to it they just often disagreed with blinkin about means to the end of of union victory but there were some so-called copperhead democrats it was a derogatory nickname for them um who were really confederate sympathizers and and and who were so critical of blinkin of emancipation of the of the union draft of various union policies um that they seemed willing to sacrifice uh uh um uh sort of union victory and and to negotiate a peace with confederates that conceded a confederate independence not surprisingly uh these copperheads um uh essentially buy into the might overwrite confederate interpretation of of union victory because they don't want the political opposition the republicans to feel like they have a they have a mandate they want to undercut uh they want to undercut that that mandate so we have a uh you know a political rivalry partisan political rivalry as a key setting here african americans again 200 000 african american men in the union army they fight in in all the sort of theaters important theaters at the end are there at Appomattox itself and they believe that the surrender first of all is a freedom day one of the biggest sort of surprise discoveries i made when i wrote this book about Appomattox was that april 9 1865 that day we surrendered a grant loomed really large in african american committee communities across the country as a freedom day um you know we associate emancipation with the january 1st 1863 emancipation proclamation with which lincoln promulgated and that announced his intentions to use the union army as an army of liberation but in places it didn't control it couldn't penetrate freedom was theoretical de facto freedom followed the union army it's only where the union army was present to enforce freedom uh that that uh and you know hence the meaning of juneteenth and the arrival of the union army in galveston um so Appomattox was a freedom day that um symbolized particularly for african americans here in central virginia where where grants the presence of grants army that brings a de facto freedom it symbolized the realization of the promise of lincoln's emancipation proclamation and they believe that that their contributions to the union war effort which were which were massive uh there's a mass exodus from farms and plantations as as enslaved men and women flee seeking refuge with the union army during the war they then contribute to union victory as spies and scouts and nurses and soldiers and in countless ways destabilizing slavery throughout the south and they believed understandably that that had entitled them to full citizenship so again different interpretations of what what the what the surrender meant it just as these different lines of interpretation or you know bubbling to the surface and intensifying um in aftermath of the war comes the assassination of abraham lincoln just five days after Appomattox um talk a little bit if you will about how that assassination figures into this bigger story both in terms of how this act by a confederate sympathizer against the federal government's leader um affected kind of the the balance of different lines of debate about the war but also about talk also about the man who replaces abraham lincoln andrew johnson and how having him in the white house changes the whole equation of what reconstruction would look like a great question and again it's important to note that john wilk's booth's assassination of abraham lincoln is a political murder motivated by uh booth's uh confederate sympathies and by his um loathing of lincoln's policies particularly emancipation booth is in the audience when lincoln uh says that he is contemplating uh black suffrage and and uh and uh booth is is um is uh deeply opposed to any challenges to white supremacy and his murder of lincoln is is uh is an expression of booth's own uh commitment to white supremacy so um lincoln's i mean it's it's it's uh it's it's just such a such a tragic moment he had sort of seen the proviseland of union victory but only for five days before his life is is uh is taken and naturally northerners are shocked by the assassination they are uh you know sent into a kind of spiral paroxysms of of grief and there are calls right after the assassination but for a harsher policy you know maybe leniency wasn't such a good idea man maybe these people don't deserve magnanimity maybe it's not going to work um and and and uh you know those who who believe that the leniency was misguided those voices will persist they'll they'll um uh you know be a part of debates about reconstruction and what shape it should take but what surprised me in looking at this aftermath is that there was a kind of call and response those who said uh perhaps magnanimity was misguided were answered by those who said the best way to honor lincoln and his memory is to remain committed to his vision of malice towards non-charity towards all committed to his vision of of of magnanimity so johnson lincoln's vice president very consistently at polls uh at the top of polls you know modern polls about who's our worst president and i said you know said to say he very much earned earned that designation um he uh was a fascinating man a wartime unionist and old jacksonian democrat southerner from tennessee southern senator who had um not gone along with secession but defied it partly because he had long-standing resentments of the sort of planter elite as a man from the yeoman class um and he had been put on the ticket by lincoln and the republicans in part in deference to this idea that there was some latent southern unionism that might brought to be be brought to the fore some latent loyalty that maybe could be excuse me again this uh maybe brought to the fore um you know if there's a southern unionist johnson on the ticket there was also hope that war democrats would be attracted to him lincoln runs for reelection in 1864 not as a republican but as a representative of the national union party uh and johnson is supposed to sort of symbolize the big tent uh that that party represents a patriots committed to victory so after the war johnson very quickly shows us true colors he's an erratic personality all kinds of problems just at the level of sort of personality and sort of political skills but the core problem is that as it turns out he has a very narrow definition of black freedom narrow meaning of freedom only to work for wages but not not for anything else not to have a voice in american politics not to have social or political equality not to be considered part of the body politic or you know brethren uh in in in the national uh fold um and this um means that he opposes any any radical or thoroughgoing remaking of southern society uh and he very quickly begins to curry favor with the x confederate planter class um he's committed to a policy of leniency and forgiveness but he goes much farther than was reasonable or than Lincoln would have done he promulgates his own amnesty proclamation it offers amnesty to those who've taken oath of loyalty to the union and it stipulates that the higher up leaders of the confederacy the political leaders the generals and officers the very wealthy would have to come to him president for personal pardons and he then grants those pardons by the thousands he pardons former generals he pardons you know the confederate government elite uh and this permits uh the uh phase of what we call presidential reconstruction uh presidential meaning under johnson johnsonian reconstruction in which from 1865 to 1867 uh again no black suffrage uh as as a as a counterweight uh former confederates essentially um re take the reins of these southern governments and institute uh a series of of uh racist punitive laws but so-called black codes that to put in place the system as close as possible to slavery without being slavery uh you know by by name these larger than life figures lincoln himself of course andrew johnson baddiest stevens i mean the cast of characters is really remarkable i think can perhaps lead us to think that all of this was really contingent it really just depended on these kind of great powerful charismatic endlessly fascinating individuals but the focus on these individuals can maybe distract us from the possibility that really didn't matter ultimately who was calling the shots the um the challenges of reconstruction were inevitable in some ways the the sheer impossibility of a lasting solid piece coming out of the civil war was impossible given the fact that four bloody years of war had just been fought i wonder what what your thoughts are about that counterfactual scenario it were mistakes made that if they if they had only if decisions had only been made in different ways you know we could have been talking about a different aftermath of the civil war yeah that's a great question people often ask me you know what if lincoln had lived would he have done a better job than andrew johnson and i think he he certainly would have would have done a better job and he would have tried to find ways to to incentivize uh and motivate uh compliance to explain to the american people why change was was necessary he was he was very very very good at that uh johnson again became a sort of a a barrier um to change but um lincoln would have found the same thing that johnson and grant and other stakeholders and political leaders found and that is that the recalcitrance of for the former confederates was so great um their unwillingness uh to change the way i would sometimes put it in in uh in talks on on the Appomattox book was to say that the message of grant and lincoln with those lenient terms was we don't want to punish you so defeated its others we want you to change and the message back from those defeated confederates was that the demand for change was a form of punishment and that that's how they were going to see it now we can see that recalcitrance right from the very start part of the kind of a lost cause myth of reconstruction is that congressional reconstruction which is the answer to johnson's uh um sort of disastrous restoration of power to former confederates the confederate reconstruction when con the congress rather um uh congressional reconstruction when the republican congress in 1867 does decide to really try to remake the south particularly by enfranchising african-american men and changing the shape of the of the of the electorate um that that was punitive and and that groups like the clan came along to to sort of check the excesses of the corruption of radical reconstruction this is i've just described an old essentially lost cause myth the reality of the situation is that those groups like the clan came on the scene very early the clan is formed in 1866 during johnsonian reconstruction before african-americans can vote it's formed to preempt that change so in other words the confederate resistance to change was such that there were they immediately moved to preempt change uh and in that sense um you know structurally reconstruction was was uh was uh you know up against some really terrible obstacles you mentioned fatties stevens we i passed briefly over radical republicans these are republicans in congress who are most sympathetic to abolitionism and to an agenda that really includes a change agenda that really includes equality and full civil rights for african-americans some of these radical republicans said you know to really have a piece that sticks you're going to need to have some economic change perhaps even land redistribution some radical republicans said hey i've got an idea how about we take all those giant southern cotton plantations and we divide them up and give them to the men who you know sacrificed and died and lost limbs and so on to win the union war and save the country that didn't get anywhere because that was considered too radical and it was considered too radical among most northerners not only uh among among white white southerners and this is just a way of of sort of segueing to the fact that it's not just southern recalcitrance that dooms reconstruction it's also uh the shallowness of the white north's commitment to to to to to to to civil rights and there is a northern retreat from reconstruction that uh that is the reaction to all of the havoc wreaked by these white supremacist organizations that terrorism there's no other word that's really appropriate the terrorism wreaked by groups like the clan in the south and and i'll just you know say it should be obvious that that terrorism um uh was uh uh politically motivated and and and uh with a profoundly nefarious and cynical end that is to say the message of of groups like the clan was you can't have change because change will bring chaos and violence they then perpetrated chaos and violence and said the only way to have peace and order is by going back to the old hierarchies the old the old uh inequalities the old um white southern democratic dominance of uh of the south there's so many more um questions i want to ask you but um i want to pause here just for a minute to invite our audience to please uh put questions into the q and a that you can form conveniently at the bottom of your zoom screen i hope i see a few questions building up there already right excellent excellent um but let me ask you just a couple more while sure bring us to a conclusion uh while others are putting some questions i hope um into into the list here um going back to where we started and kind of the way that all of this reverberates across many decades and certainly um down to our own times um let me ask you about an episode there's of course pretty fresh i think in all of our memories um january 6 2021 when we saw individuals flying the confederate flag during the takeover of the capital were they in a sense making a case about the meaning of the civil war so you know making a case i'm not sure that uh that uh those were flying the confederate flag really know much of anything about the civil war so i don't know if i if i would put it quite that way but even without without knowing details they were certainly shaped by the history we've just described and it's quite clear that insurgents in january 6 who held up the confederate flag uh thought that flag was meant to symbolize racial grievance racial animus and to act as an emblem of resistance to social change which it was in the 19th century and continued to be in the era of the civil rights movement and in the era in which uh Lyndon Johnson uh and others uh were taking civil rights positions so um you know there's there's there's no question that this history reverberates i'll give you just sort of one one example the insurgents the riders there on january 6 95 percent of them were quite they were protesting the results of an election biden's election declaring it illegitimate 90 of african-americans voted for uh biden trump told that crowd to foment the riot that and i'm quoting him here quote you're you the riders of the real people you're the ones that built that nation's that built this nation so trump's message was you are the people who count this was his message to the rioters now for me as a historian you know i can hear echoes in this of secessionist arguments and it doesn't matter whether the rioters knew it or not they probably didn't but um secessionists argued that Lincoln's election was illegitimate because they argued this is a little bit of a kind of footnote to some broader secession arguments to something that's little known but among the arguments secessionists made was the fact that some northern blacks had voted rendered the entire election of Lincoln illegitimate because according to the dreads that decision african-americans were not citizens therefore their votes were illegitimate the message of secessionists was that Lincoln was an illegitimate leader of the country because uh he didn't represent the people who count uh and and so i mean you know there's there's a there's a playbook uh and and used by those who oppose social change and we see that playbook pressed into service again and again and again we're we're shaped by history whether we know its details or not but as i heard these arguments you know you're the real people saying uh uh to a crowd that wants to deny the legitimacy of an election to me that was an echo of argument secessionists made back in 1861 and finally for me um thinking again about the end of the civil war as an exercise in peacemaking i wonder if there are lessons that flow from mathematics and everything that followed in the decade or so thereafter that are useful potentially for thinking about peacemaking and civil war is a very complicated political situations in our own day i mean certainly i think that you know one of the big lessons from mathematics and and um you know this this won't surprise you uh as a fellow historian is that you have to be prepared after winning a military conflict to fight a political battle about the meaning of the war and a kind of propaganda battle the amount of misinformation that circulated during reconstruction was staggering and that misinformation of you know promulgated by defenders of slavery by the lost cause sort of uh kind of agents who romanticize the confederacy and and who argued again that the cause could still be won by political means um their defense of slavery again the romanticization of the confederacy their denigrating of union victory all of these things um had had a cost uh and they folded a critique of reconstruction as corrupt into this defense of the of the of slavery and of the confederacy uh and and uh northerners alas proved you know very susceptible to this propaganda it went hand in hand with the terrorism campaign that that i described just to give a few sort of illustrations one way to think about this i think that's that's uh illuminating is is as follows one thing that struck me as i wrote my last few books was that Lincoln justified emancipation and the changes that it brought not only is a military necessity a way to hurt to hurt the enemy by striking at his resources but he also justified it on more idealistic grounds as a policy that would benefit all americans including and especially white southerners and non-slave folding white southerners most white southerners on the of the civil war didn't own slaves again the republican party Lincoln imagined somehow that there was a lot of latent unionism among them they were wrong about that uh but um nonetheless they felt that the system of slavery a system dominated by a small they were not wrong about this the southern states were dominated politically in the pre-war period by a small number of of slaveholding politicians those slaveholding politicians had put in place a system that among other things suppressed free speech no republican or abolitionists could get a hearing in the south because they'd be run out of town on on a rail or or worse so republicans imagined that once that secessionist elite was defeated and the south was opened up for the flow of new ideas um that um they could uh again change hearts and minds and that everyone would benefit from that one of the problems that andrew johnson represents this lincoln successor is that he rejected this idea that black freedom would bring broad benefits to american society to all americans including whites and he reverted to a zero sum gain way of thinking about race relations that any gains for blacks would come at the expense of whites this was a kind of toxic theory that we can trace back to the you know colonial period um so there's in a sense uh one way lincoln could have made a differences in pushing this idealistic case you know that he pushes in effect in the guettysburg address in the second inaugural and so on rather than reverting to the zero sum gain thinking which was very very damaging in the end but a second more um sort of a maybe smaller scale observation is you know often have people ask me um why wasn't there a kind of marshal plan for the south after the civil war you know that might have won hearts and minds and the answers there was a marshal plan for the south that was called the freedman's bureau the freedman's bureau was this federal agency that distributed rations and and rebuild communities in the south and it didn't only benefit uh african americans it also benefited whites who in many places in the south received more rations from the freedman's bureau then then then african americans did but the freedman's bureau was was kind of um undermined and swept to the side by this propaganda war which cast its agents as agents of corruption and conquest and and so on i i mean i'll end by saying i didn't i didn't mention this particular uh detail as we talked about the surrender terms themselves but it's hugely important and why you know it's always worth taking a new close look even at familiar topics so when confederates were surrendered at Appomattox paroled so uh so to speak again i'm sorry about this um uh when they were paroled at Appomattox um they were given a paper they had to sign in which they again promised to obey the laws of the united states and um uh never to take up arms against the union again and the paroled forms said that they would not be disturbed if they made and kept that pledged so as far as grant and the union was were concerned this was their their their rights and their freedom and their participation their reunion was contingent on that good behavior and the parole was a promise of good behavior in confederate eyes that form they signed was a promise that they would not be disturbed and they began to argue the moment the ink is dry on the surrender terms that any change to the social order would disturb them and therefore be a a you know a break of the Appomattox terms this is just a long-winded way of saying to say the surrender's a beginning not an end it is is to say now we start a political battle about what it means a propaganda war and you better be ready to fight that war and to win that war if you want to have a chance for peace to stick Well professor Elizabeth Varen thank you so much for all of your eloquence and and in sight of really enjoyed this fascinating conversation I want to congratulate you and simply call attention to your many books a couple that I happen to have right here are Appomattox victory defeat and freedom at the end of the civil war armies of deliverance a new history of the civil war both of which go into great detail in some of the themes that we've been talking about today thank you again Liz I've really enjoyed my pleasure I hope we have some questions I'm happy to answer them David Heath asks a question that from something that he's read in history that Grant and Sherman told Lincoln that they needed the emancipation proclamation declaration that it would be helpful if not necessary to winning the war is this correct yeah so it is true that military commanders grant and Sherman weren't in that group lobbying for emancipation there was a group that lobbied for emancipation Lincoln was hesitant as the war started to contemplate emancipation because he knew the north was politically divided that that those northern democrats for example had had no interest in emancipation and were quite hostile to abolitionism he also knew that there were slave holding border states Maryland and Kentucky and Missouri and Delaware that that had resisted the siren song of secession and stayed in the union he wanted to keep them there he didn't want to move too quickly he's lobbied by people like Frederick Douglass Douglass has a wonder of course had a wonderful way with words I quoted a once before but one thing he says early in the war is to fight a war against slave holders without fighting against slavery is but half-hearted business we better target slavery if we want to win this war against slaveholders so Grant and Sherman aren't in that class with Douglass and Thaddeus Stevens but they are in a class of union commanders who come to see emancipation as as militarily beneficial and Grant more so than Sherman on this Sherman was less enthusiastic about emancipation and all of its all of its sort of implications and entailments than Grant was Grant became very although Grant was not an abolitionist by any stretch of the imagination not a particularly political guy before the war but he understands first of all that emancipation is going to undermine Confederate the Confederate economy second of all that it's going to open the door which Lincoln's proclamation does to the enlistment of African American men in the union army and Grant becomes a huge booster of this and sees it as really crucial to union victory and he knows that it's going to make the union army an army of emancipation and and infuse the war with the kind of moral moral momentum you know that that was that was key so yes and Lincoln is able he finds the example of Grant particularly politically useful because he's able to say to critics and we see him try to answer northern Democrats or like but we didn't sign up for an emancipation where why should we support this he says look my commanders in the field they're not politicians they're not abolitionists they recognize the necessity of this so it's a great question let me return to your conversation with Mark on on on Lincoln's views about the post-war period reconstruction and so forth you make the statement that there was a desire to have a mandate to remake the south a right to remake the south I just want to challenge you a little bit isn't that a bit strong I mean Lincoln in his speeches and policies on the post-war period not only seem to be soft he seemed to be a little uncertain he talked that he said he had no exclusive or inflexible plan that he simply wanted to restore seceded states and in fact with a couple of states he was willing at least temporarily to restore old south governments in Virginia and North Carolina I mean it seems to me that I just want you to talk a little bit more yeah that's a great question whether that amounts to a mandate to remake the south or something maybe a little softer and different yeah so I mean remaking the south could mean a huge spectrum of things which is where your question goes and Lincoln absolutely had a much narrower version of what what changes ought to be put in place than the radical republicans and indeed when he promulgates his his December 1863 offer of amnesty the radical republicans who are very close to abolitionists and really wanting full freedom and full citizenship for freed people for for African-Americans former slaves says the radical republicans say this doesn't go nearly far enough this is far too low a bar we should only be empowering those who have been unionist all along not people who say oh sorry I'll be good from now on we should be building black voting right into the the plan for reconstruction we should be contemplating things like land redistribution so Lincoln doesn't go there absolutely my point though is that in the eyes of former Confederates Lincoln's what we can see in retrospect seems like a pretty low bar remaking the South in the sense of getting political power to unionists the people who are loyal to the union both those who had been loyal to the union and those who now profess loyalty to the union in the eyes of many ex-Confederates that was a fundamental remaking of the South but they were not willing to you know to to abide the hostility Southern Unionism is a fascinating topic of course African-Americans were unionists and their unionism is really the kind of the beating heart of Southern Unionism and the core of it but there were also white Southern Unionists Johnson is an example they had a variety of motivations a variety of politics some were quite conservative some were more progressive using those terms in the context of what they meant at the time the divisions among them meant that they had trouble sort of asserting their own power but unionism had been violently repressed by Confederates during the war and the idea of handing power over to unionists was a pretty radical idea and it's you know so I completely agree with you there's a huge gap between Lincoln's moderate Republican agenda and a radical Republican agenda but unfortunately for the Republicans in the eyes of ex-Confederates none of these agendas were acceptable right I want to join Richard's there are a few other questions that take me in a direction I hope you're okay with me going I want to move ahead into if you if you're willing to let me do it to the period of time when Grant was president yeah so and there are other questions that relate to this should the union army have stayed in the South longer to reassure freedom for African Americans you had you had a you had different kinds of reactions the Klan did get started immediately but it seemed that there was sort of a radical uptick a few years later and the differences began to grow what caused all that and talk about Grant's leadership when he was president of the reconciliation or the reconstruction period yeah so Grant is you know fascinating a character obviously hero of the union war quite embattled president his presidency had a pretty negative reputation for a long time the some of his underlings were were were corrupt in that that tainted his presidency somewhat but on this subject of civil rights Grant was quite heroic he he he wanted to and it took him a while to to sort of to come around to see that things like Black suffrage and and and congressional reconstruction and and a a presence of the union army in the South the prolonged presence were necessary but he did through the so-called enforcement acts of 1870-71 for example try to try to break the back of the Klan to infiltrate it to stop it didn't succeed entirely but uh but um but did try that this question of an occupation of the post-war South I I mentioned that northerners imagine that secession was the work of a small group of conspirators and that the whites other masses might be brought around hearts and minds change they found and learned that confederates had been again uh uh you know very uh uh deeply committed to their own cause and not receptive to Lincoln's amnesty proclamation or to or to various sort of incentives to uh to change and um we can see this uh this both this hope of changing hearts and minds and the kind of hard wall of resistance that it that it comes up against the hard realities that it clashes with if we look at the story of a of a interesting man of hope about whom I'm writing a biography now it'll come out in the fall I hope folks will look for it and that's James Longstreet James Longstreet was a confederate general second only to to Lee in the confederate high command and Longstreet in a way that was almost singular for such a high up confederate accepted Grant's terms in the spirit the app of that terms in the spirit which Grant offered them that is to say you've lost you had a war the war was the arbitrator here of these political debates now as the losers you have to yield and if you want peace you have to accept peace on the victor's terms and try to make the best of it so Longstreet in 1867 much to the surprise and amazement of just about everybody comes out in support of Congress's reconstruction plan the centerpiece of which was African-American voting and he becomes part of this coalition a Republican coalition it included some white Southerners who came around it included newly a franchised African-Americans and it included some northern transplants to the South who tried to govern the South during during reconstruction the period of congressional reconstruction 1867 to 1877 and they did all sorts of incredible things it really is quite astonishing that we have a sort of attempt here at interracial democracy during this 10 years again it meets with a backlash both violence and propaganda from the start and we see that in the case of Longstreet he is branded a pariah a Benedict Arnold a Judas Lucifer insult you can think of is turned at him by ex-Confederates who see him as a traitor to the lost cause a traitor to white supremacy and numerous people have noted this in recent years as we've had these discussions about Confederate statuaries and memorialization no statutes to Longstreet in the South because he wasn't although he was a very high up Confederate general he wasn't useful as a symbol of white supremacy because he he decided to support the Republican experiment this will bring me back to Grant the reasons Longstreet makes this this unconventional choice are manifold I'll explain them in the book there's all kinds of personal and political motivations but at the core of Longstreet's decision is his friendship with US Grant they were great buddies back to their West Point days and Longstreet believes that Grant's magnanimity and Appomattox may grant the the greatest man of the error and someone who who was deserving of you know of support that's great thanks for those stories look forward to that in the book so we have a couple of questioners who want to ask you what if questions what if war questions Jim Parrish and Mike Restorius one asks what if Lee had been able to link up with Johnston's army and the other asks what if Sherman had failed to take Atlanta would those I know they happen the way they happen right right right but but just in terms of just calculating impact on the war which you know a lot better than we do talk about the effect of those things turning out the way they did is yeah great question so the Atlanta question really loomed large you know in in in all kinds of political calculations because here we have the election of 1864 pending Lincoln is up for reelection some people said to Lincoln you know it's a civil war maybe you don't hold an election he said if we don't hold an election they won because we're fighting for a majority rule and for the system the founders set up to have for a peaceful transfer of power you vote you abide by the results of the election so he's up for reelection the union war effort is stalled during that summer of 1864 leading up to the election Grant and Lee duking it out in Virginia in a stalemate Sherman's Atlanta victory is absolutely crucial the Confederates are watching all this carefully because there's a school of thought among Confederates really represented mostly by Alexander Stevens a Confederate Vice President they're really hoping that if the Confederates can hold out if Sherman and Sheridan and Grant are kept at bay if they are perceived as failures maybe Lincoln won't win and a Democrat will be elected McClellan is the Democratic candidate who will come to the negotiating table and concede Southern independence so because Sherman takes Atlanta in the fall of 1864 Lincoln is able to counter the Democratic arguments to say he's able to say the war is a success the Democrats are saying the war is a failure your leadership of the war is a failure and so on Lincoln can say the war is a success Atlanta is ours and that and he rides that military tide to victory the counterfactual what if Sherman had failed to take Atlanta maybe Lincoln would have lost the election maybe McClellan would have become president would McClellan have accepted you know come signed a piece that accepted Confederate independence I think the answer to that is no I think you know despite the fact that there was some peace Democrat or copperhead voices in the Democratic Party that were quite loud McClellan would have wanted to achieve victory meaning the defeat of the Confederate independence project and the restoration of the Confederacy to the union so I don't think the fall of Atlanta would have changed that the other question was about what Lee and Johnston I mean I think in that in the in the Eastern theater there the writing was on the wall they might have been able to hold out somewhat longer but you know as people often observe that Sherman's March was targeting men in Lee's trenches in the sense that you know Georgia families South Carolina families North Carolina families in the in the in the path of that March writing their you know soldier menfolk saying you know you got a dessert then the Confederate army was was was really plagued by desertion in that in those last few months so you know given given the again not only the manpower of the union not only the industrial might of the union but the command harmony between Grant and Sherman Grant and Sherman would have figured out a way to finish finish the Confederates off yeah I've got a lot of good questions left and I've literally got time for just one so I want to continue this theme of sort of what ifs because this relates to our discussion earlier about attitudes in the south how could attitudes in the south have been different or under what circumstances could they have been different Steve Fennerty's asking did the tactics of Sherman and Sheridan this sort of aggressive to shorten the war and win the war did they have long term effects of alienating the south yeah ways that had a lasting impact that made it harder to have a better a better piece I mean I would say the answer to that is that and it's important to appreciate this so the union argues in the early days of the war our war aim is to restore the union to bring you aren't brethren back into the fold to deliver the southern masses from the southern elite Confederates and secessionists even before there's a Confederacy secessionists argue that the union is intent on waging a war of conquest and extermination and annihilation these are the words they use in essence for union victory meant a restoration of the country and an abiding commitment to the idea that northerners and southerners could again be countrymen the premise of secession was that they could never again be countrymen so even before the first shot is fired Confederates are acting as though the union is waging a war of annihilation extermination in other words the secessionists primed the pump so that union army taking down offense posts or slaughtering hogs was seen as evidence of a war of extermination that Confederates were predisposed by ideology and propaganda to believe that the union was waging a merciless war full of wanton destruction now so in other words I'm not minimizing the devastation of the campaigns of Sherman and Sheridan I'm saying that they fit a script that was pre-existing that existed even before the first battle of Bull Run you have Confederate commanders saying your enemy is waging a merciless war of annihilation and in a sense they're trying to counter the union message which has come back to the fold errant brethren again propaganda propaganda war and the other thing I'd say about Sherman and Sheridan is that and there's been a ton of work on this over the years that it would be wrong to see their campaigns as indiscriminate wanton brutality Sherman in particular is targeting it's as one historian a guy named Mark Grimsley has put it in a really great book Sherman's destruction was targeted severity he was targeting Confederate military assets first on the grounds that if you destroy property you can perhaps save lives and it's the end of the war he was targeting the Confederate higher ups and secessionists and planters and advised his men don't go so hard on people who might be unionists or potential unionists on the on the laboring classes and so on so there's a there's a method to Sherman's destruction that is that is meant to set up again maybe the biggest irony here perhaps more so than any of the people I've described Sherman believed a soft piece was necessary a hard war and a soft piece the war is your punishment but then Sherman's message all long during his march is you come back to the union and I will protect you it's your choice you have a choice and and and and so Sherman very much believed in a soft piece and he at Bennett's place meets with Johnston and offers Johnston even more lenient terms than granted offered so lenient that Johnston has to say wait a minute you know again it's really up to the civil government the politicians to decide the details here but a hard war and soft piece is a typical sort of mentality for for the union well professor I could go on and on I've loved every minute of it thank you but the clock forces me to pass you on to phil barns thank you so much just sandy much appreciated wow well this was very what a wonderful afternoon thank you so much phil thank you so very very much and of course mark and sandy you made it special many of us in the audience are members of UT ollie and friends of the lbj library or perhaps both and if not please check us out both of these organizations offer a wide variety of outstanding in person and virtual programming much of like we saw today and thank you all for tuning in we will be back same time same station next thursday january 26th at 4 p.m. for a conversation with mark selverstone also from the university of virginia about john f kennedy and presidential decisions leading to the escalation of the war in vietnam we hope to see you next time goodbye for now