 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman from the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And we're here today to talk about the historiography of the American Civil War, slavery in the American Civil War. And by the historiography, we mean the way historians have interpreted the events of the 1850s and 1860s. The historical interpretation has changed dramatically. Some American historian said that history is past politics. Faulkner said the past is never past. In understanding the American Civil War, Americans have interpreted it in the light of the politics of their own time. What happened then is almost irrelevant. It's kind of interesting that if you go to American high schools these days, as most of you did, I imagine, American history is taught in a two-year sequence. The first year ends with the Civil War, which means classes usually don't get to the Civil War and don't discuss slavery in the Civil War. The second semester usually starts with reconstruction after the Civil War, which is usually glossed over very quickly so that you can move on to the stuff that the course is really about, since reconstruction is by its nature backward-looking, looking towards the Civil War, which is the previous year's material. This is deliberate. Americans nowadays are very conflicted about the Civil War. You have these people driving around in pickup trucks with Confederate flags in parts of these United States that were unanimously pro-union. What does it mean to have a pickup truck with a Confederate flag when your grandparents fought for the Union? Their Civil War re-enactments all the time. Two-thirds of the people show up wearing gray Confederate uniforms. What's this about? I mean, the Union won. How is it that in the history for many people, it's the Confederacy, the good guys? I don't know, but some of that has to do with the teaching of American history and how the writing of history has changed. After the Civil War, the Civil War, keep in mind, it was horrible. More Americans died in the Civil War than in all of America's wars put together. More died in the Civil War than World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, the Persian Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, the Revolution, the Mexican War, all put together. Which meant that for the people writing about the Civil War afterwards, there's always been a matter of justifying what happened. How can we look the widows and orphans in the eyes and say in our history books that this was all a big mistake? The first historians in American Civil War, people like James Rhodes, were Northerners. My professor in college called them the court historians, Republicans, often former Union Army officers who justified the Civil War as good and honorable, and explained that reconstruction after the Civil War failed because, well, the blacks weren't quite ready, but it was an honorable try. It was all good. Civil War historiography written by these people, it was all good, slavery was bad and moral. It had to be ended. The Civil War ended it. That was good. The point of this history was to make the country feel good, or at least less bad, about the Civil War. And when they talked about the country, when I say the country, I mean the north. Not the south. The south was all bad. This changed in the 1890s with progressive history, which for these purposes meant southern revisionism. Only what happened in the 1890s and later was the reunification of the United States. The Civil War generation was dying out. Their children wanted to put together the country. To do this, you had to reinterpret the Civil War, since the Civil War historiography written by the court historians was all about the north, good, the south, bad. That's not a basis for national unity, at least not national unity among the whites. Might be good national unity among the blacks, but not among the whites. The key historian here was a man named Ulrich B. Phillips, student of progressive economist Richard Ely, a progressive himself, close friends with his former graduate student, Paul Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States. Phillips went from Johns Hopkins to Wisconsin on to Yale University. He published the most important work in the first half of the 20th century, American history, American Negro slavery. You can still get it. It's still in print. This book tells the story that slavery was good, it was benign. Slave owners were humanitarians. They ran slavery as a great school, quote, the best school yet devised to train a primitive people in the ways of civilization. Slavery was good. The north made a mistake. The north misunderstood what was going on. The north got all upset about something that seemed not good, but really was good, because the north didn't know about the blacks. They didn't understand how primitive they were, how incompetent. The blacks needed to be kept in slavery to train them in the ways of civilization and to protect them because they were incapable of managing on their own. Left to their own incompetent and thriftless ways, the Africans would not be able to support themselves and would die out. They needed the slave owners. Phillips argued that the north made a mistake, misunderstood, it was a well-meaning mistake. The south fought to protect its way of life because the south, southern whites, understood that this was the right thing to do. Southern blacks often understood that it was the right thing to do. The Sambo image is Phillips' book and the books are written by his graduate students. Reconstruction was a huge blunder because the north handed political power over to these primitive, incompetent people. Of course, we needed the Ku Klux Klan to come in, fix things, put the blacks back in their place, which is better for them, better for the whites. The north, Phillips argues, finally after 1890s, finally started to understand what it's like because the north is being filled with these immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Jews, Italians, primitive peoples just like the Africans in the south. This is a finally understanding that we can't have this popular democracy. We need white Protestants to be ruling the country. That's what Phillips wrote in American Negro Slavery and his writings about the Civil War. And that's what Woodrow Wilson taught at Princeton and in the White House. When the famous movie Birth of a Nation came out with the hero being the Ku Klux Klan, Wilson screened it in the White House, invited the cabinet, the Supreme Court, the leaders of the House and Senate, and Woodrow Wilson, America's only PhD president, got up and told everyone this is the way it really was. The Ku Klux Klan saved civilization from the mistakes of reconstruction. We're going to pick up and talk more about Phillips, some more in the next class. Thank you very much. Have a good day. Bye-bye.