He serves as the he did his graduate work at the university of pennsylvania where he focused on the history of religion. He also holds a master of divinity agreed. His roster of publications is so long that i am not going to even try to read them all to you. Lzo. Com go to allengue and get a full accounting of not only his publications, but other salient elements of his biography. What i am going to do here is mentioned five books. I think there especially pertinent. I will read them in order. First is called Abraham Lincoln, redeemer president. Lincolns emancipation byclamation published simon schuster. It brought him his second again price. Lincoln and douglas. Published in 2008. It did not when the lincoln prize. [laughter] the next came out from Oxford University press in 2012. In the fifth title is invasion. , the last it brought a third wink and prize to alan. Is currently working on a biography of robert e lee. T will be published b he and i will talk about his work today and about the field of civil war eras teddies more broadly. A questionegin with relating to the opportunities for people in our field to reach a broader audience. Allen writes for National Newspapers and other publications. You have reached a broader audience and i would like your thoughts whether this is something we should strive to why you do it, how effective you think it is, and what it yields for our field in terms of disseminating really good scholarship to a broader audience. Allen first of all, thank you for the opportunity to be her. Toecially to the center and everyone here who has stephanie, to everyone who has made my visit here over the last several days such an exceedingly pleasant one. And you have sneaked in some research as well. Allen i have been within the reach of many manuscripts. Some diaries and whatnot. Looking at what people are i amng and saying arid particularly glad to be here on this airy significant and significant day. One of the greatest days in American History. I am noticing that people are starting to look at each other like is this the fourth of july . It is september 22. Gary we did this on purpose. Allen it is the 155th anniversary of the preliminary emancipation preparation. Writing about that back in 2012, in the wall street journal got me some unusual responses. I got a death threat. Often happen to people writing on the wall street journal. They get other kinds of threats i suppose, i imagine i succeeded in injurings someones sensibilities. In a way, it testifies to the fact that did you say it is thought it was a good thing . I did. That upset someone. What it speaks to is the fact that there is a large audience among americans for trying to understand our history. How do we identify as americans . We do not identify as or shouldnt on the basis of a language, and ethnicity, and established religion, of race or any of those things. What identifies us as americans . Fundamentally, lincoln now that in the gettysburg address. What identifies us as americans is a proposition. That all men are created equal. The history of how we have unfolded and lived with that proposition is really the most important aspect of our identity. When we write about our history, we are not just doing into query and is him. Antiquerianism. I regard what i have done in the popular press as being two sides of one coin. To do we explain ourselves ourselves as americans . That should draw in more than an academic audience. That should draw in all of us. That is what touches all of us and that is what identifies all of us. For the journal of the early republic, or for civil war history, or if im writing for the wall street post,l or the washington i regard those as being part of an overall endeavor. It is our constant reminder of and what of who we are we are dedicated to. That is something that involves more than academics and college students. It is something which embraces all of us. I think it is important especially for historians like ourselves to be able to speak to everybody. We are speaking to our identity as americans. We are speaking as citizens. There is one and only one identifier of an american. That is that you are a citizen. To be a citizen and the American Republic is, in my book, about the brightest privilege. Gary we are especially well positioned to reach a broader audience because we can see our daytoday life. Including responses from some , talking about secession. Texasbama was in office, secession. You dont have to look far in american policy to find echoes of the civil war era. Allen there was an oped in the yesterday ine said the lead of the oped that california is a you First Century state which is mired in a 19th century country. Therefore, it should separate itself. That is a way of saying california is an entirely different culture from the rest of the United States. I thought, that is exactly what they were saying in South Carolina in december of 1863. Gary i want to ask people if they were trying to strive to emulate South Carolina in 1863. Allen long term it not turn out so well for them. But it does come back to the fact that so often, questions that we think are uniquely current and modern really have long roots. Sometimes they are replicating the rhetoric. Gary there is almost nothing new. It seems new if you dont know anything. Allen this is because the fundamental questions posed by the american experiment really do not change either. We really are all about the business of debating that fundamental proposition. In a sense, it is not a total surprise that the kind of rhetoric and assumptions, stances that you hear people strike today will find uncanny and unnerving echoes of those 150155 years ago. For the historian, we have to signal this is what the relationships are. Be careful what you wish for. Whether it is the sacramento bee, or the charleston mercury. Gary when you write, do you write specifically with more than one audience in mind . Obviously your books are reviewed in deep mainline scholarly journals. You have one or the other of the audiences in mind . Allen i cant say that i think about it. Whatimes i have asked, kind of schooling did you have in writing. How do you go about the writing . To that i can only shrug my shoulders. I never had a writing class. I never had someone instruct me. This is a you write this. This is how you write that. I have no better explanation simply to say i want to explain something to people. I want to communicate. I look for ways to do that. I dont have a better explanation. Gary you probably read a lot of good writing. Allen i think i did. I am probably good at imitating. More nothing in my mind complicated than that. I cannot make it more complicated. Gary i wont try to make you more complicated. I do question i want to get to. Did you wake up one morning and think, poor Abraham Lincoln, he just has not gotten enough attention from writers. I think i had better write a book about lincoln. What brought you you are trained as a historian of religion you wrote about Jonathan Edwards. How do you get from Jonathan Edwards and religion to Abraham Lincoln . Allen well, it is a little unusual. But not more unusual than a chess game. Vesre are a few strange mo that have to be made. I wrote my dissertation on Jonathan Edwards and free will and 18thcentury moral philosophy. Gary that they titled made for wide, public consumption. [laughter] is that in the 19th printing now . [laughter] they actually did do a second edition. [laughter] gary the one with Matthew Mcconaughey . [laughter] allen and the one with nick nolte as george whitfield. But, i had written the dissertation which was then published by wesleyan university. The problem with free will and determinism seem to be a perennial philosophical problem. Maybe not the same thing you step night reading about. But, perennial. I planned to write a followup volume. A Jonathan Edwards 2. 0. To bring the discussion of the problem into modern philosophy. Working on this project, this was in the mid90s. I knew that Abraham Lakin had some things to say on the subject of free will and they listened. I had some familiarity with the lincoln. I thought it would just the book up. Here is a book on philosophy, determinism, and other sleepy subjects. To be able to interject Abraham Lincoln would put some things in it. With that the clever of it . I ended up writing a paper on lincoln and determinism. What he called his doctrine of necessity. He told people he was a fatalist. Springfieldaper and illinois. To my surprise, it was well received. The book publisher got in touch with me. Would i be interested in writing a religious biography of Abraham Lincoln . I said no. I had seen a number of writers get swallowed up in a swamp on that subject. I did not want to do that. The publisher got back in touch something later. What i do this biography of lincoln . I said no. Finally a friend of the publisher called me up and said if you dont do this book, theyre going to give it to another professor. Gary someone you knew . Allen yes. The hand hit the forehead. I got back in touch with the editor in chief of this publisher and said to him i will make a deal with you. Intellectualas an biography, not just about religion but all of the other intellectual influences on lincoln. To treat him as not just a political f figure. Having gotten my hand in the cookie jar, so to speak, i could not get it out. One lincoln book became another, became another and so on. No, i never have actually gotten back to writing that free will to. 0. I can infer from the way you are talking you think there are more elements to lincoln that deserve further study. You havent been exhausted . Allen i think so. Lincoln is an extremely complicated and complex and eventual. People underestimate lincoln because they think that he is just the 16th resident. He was just the civil war president he was just a lawyer. That misses. T mouth man. A shot anyone who took a lincoln for a simpleminded man would wake up with his back in a ditch. I think that maybe one of the truest things ever said about him. Educationan of maker of meager education. Curiosity. Ordinarily in his secretarys diary in in3, an incident recorded which the tycoon and i had a forssion about phylology, interestinga has a curiosity. It is the study of religious. Lincoln had intellectual curiosities in so many different directions. He was not a philosopher. He was not what we would call an intellectual. He had curiosities that way. He liked to pursue them. Interviewid in an with noah brooks, what were the most influential books in your life . Lincolns reply was junior. He said, butlers analogy religiona singularly important text. Mill, onstuart liberty. Today it still functions as a major text for people thinking libertarianch, political philosophy, and then he added and i always wanted to get at president edwards on the will. Yes, go. Ught but the thing is what this suggests is here is a man who does not simply say i read the newspapers or, i read the funnies and do the crossword puzzle. A man who has ambitions to penetrate some serious intellectual questions. It is part of lincoln that weakness because we are so impressed by the folksy, that isor, shrewd the link and we are most familiar with. We dont often see the lincoln that his closest friends had a peek into. How do you explain lincolns facility with language . You can talk about his other attributes. You have talked about others of them. His ability to deal with complicated issues and render them in very brief text inline or make a can soar point with an effectiveness that almost no one else has been able to match. How do you get from the second inaugural with someone with lincolns background in education . Allen gary john stuart mill, i dont think no. That shaped him as a communicator was having to be a trial lawyer. He spends virtually all of his professional life as a lawyer trying courses in county courthouses all across the state of illinois. Being in the courtroom. He enjoys being in front of a jury. But he also knows that these are he has to persuade. This is an age when juries were significant for two things that we dont often get today. In these county courthouses, a jury would often be summoned from bystanders at the back of the room. You could have almost anyone sitting in the jury box. You had to be able to communicate with them. You had to be able to do it fast. If you could not make yourself clear, you are not going to be a functioning, profitable lawyer for long. He had to learn how to communicate directly with people. His partner of many years, William Herndon said that was his real passion. How to make something Crystal Clear to people. He said lincoln would tie himself up in knots and the office and would sit there concentrating. ,ow to get an idea into a small easily understood word. He was so effective added that there is a story of him saying the judge interrupted him and said all right, lincoln. Thank you. So clearly the case that he was not even finishing his Opening Statement before he won the case. Capacity toonderful open an idea and put it in these wonderfully clear terms. A lot of that comes out of his experience as a trial lawyer. Another comes out of the mans logical bent. He put himself to the discipline of logical expression. It was once said by someone in their autobiography, who had listened to the lincolndouglas debates. If you listened to lincoln and douglas for five minutes, you would always take the side of douglas. Douglas was always about passion. He was about shaking that huge mane of hair. But if you listened to them for half an hour, you would be taken by lincoln. Lincoln, even though he spoken this high, reidy, nasally tone , he always set things out like bait on a hook. Logically speaking, once he got that hook in your mouth, all he needed to do afterwards was real the thing in. Then, you were his. He would state the case in such a way that it was absolutely logically irresistible. Logic. That bent for for lining things up. He was not a man of passion. Headon once said that his ruled his heart to radically. He was not a man of emotional appeal. He could be eloquent, but eloquent and an extremely reasonable way. When you look at the second inaugural, it is eloquent, but it is eloquent in very logical ways. Understande if we if we is like this see this war as the payment, the drawing of blood through the sword to pay for the bond mens unrequited labor. For every drop of blood drawn by the lash. That is eloquence. It is also logic. When you listen to it, you cannot resist at the end. He has got you. Gary it is logic, but it is is a daring it move on his part. That is not what most of the people and that audience wanted to hear. That they were as culpable as the rebels . Allen and he knew that. Gary how may people would be willing to do that. That is a remarkable speech on many levels. Telling people exactly what they dont want to hear. They want to hear there will be retribution. God was on our side. God willt ties chastise the rebels. He did not say that at all. Megan was complement it. Lincoln thanked him for the complement but he wrote back and said i dont think that people heard what ihave had to say. No one likes to be told that god has a controversy with them. But, it was something that i thought needed to be said. I was the one who had to say it. Gary thats ace thats remarkable speech on many levels. If you put it alongside the emancipation proclamation come you could not have a stronger contrast between this language and what some people compared to the bill of lading. Allen but they are two different documents are gary but i have heard that. What i want you to do is you have written a book about the proclamation. It has been interpreted many different ways by scholars as meaningless, not doing what it should do, not having that great of an impact. Other saying it is everything. Ont is your shorthand take the importance of place in the much harder space . Allen it was the single most profoundly effective president ial document ever written. I think it is largely because so you think it is important. Allen at least moderately. [laughter] the language of the in as a patient proclamation of the immense patient proclamation disappoints people. It has all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading. Right off the bat, that made my antennae quiver. A bill of lading is not an unimportant document if you are in commerce. What is the emancipation proclamation . Is it a rhetorical Statement Like the gettysburg address . No. The gettysburg address is a marvelous, beautiful prose. But you cannot take it into a court of law and do anything with it. Pulls you overr on the interstate, you cannot try to recite the gettysburg address. The trooper is only interested in the statute. The emancipation proclamation is about the statute. To be carefully honed and crafted so that it survives challenge in the courts. Lincoln knew this. President s. Re only keenly aware of the fact that as president of the United States, he did not have the authority to emancipate anybody. Normal circumstances. The war changed the circumstances. As commanderinchief, he may have powers that, in times of peace he would not have. In time of war, there are work powers. His emancipation one of those war powers . We dont know. Lets find out. Who will be the arbiter . The federal courts. If lincoln, so to speak, pops off and simply throws open a window in the executive mansion. Nd yells free the first thing that will happen is that slave owners are going to flock to county courthouses and ask for injunctions. What is more, they will get them. Then there will be appeals and they will go through the courts. They will wind up with the United States Supreme Court and by the way, who is the chief justice in 1862 . Roger b tawny. He has really shown himself to be a friend of emancipation. Inlincoln makes one slipup crafting and emancipation proclamation, that would be raw meat to roger b tawny when it ends up on his desk. Proclamation on his war powers which treads very carefully about who is free and who is not here it this is why there are these exceptions. Where the emancipation proclamation does not apply to , delaware,entucky maryland, missouri, why . They were not at war with the United States. Gary places where the government was in control. Oren wherever the courts military were back in control and a civil process existed, he is aware his war powers no longer are functioning. He cannot take the chance that if he makes an assertion in those areas come up that might be the stick that roger b tony eats the entire project with. If he gets that stick in his hand, he can disrupt the whole process of emancipation for lincoln has to be very careful and how he crafts the proclamation. It has to stick, it has to work. It is only at the very end that he allows himself one small moment of eloquence. That is when he says at the very end, believing this to not only be a constitutional process but in active justice, invoking the favor of almighty god. The its the only moment he lets himself do that. The rest of it, yes, it is as dry as a legal document can possibly be, but that is because it is a legal document. It has work to do and whats more, that work is extremely effective. Gary theres also a political dimension to this. Casting it as a military necessity is the only way he could make it palatable to any democrats. He needs democrats as well as republicans. Allen and to a federal judge. Because people read, this is done as a military necessity. Sometimes people conclude, his heart was not in it, it was not an act of justice, he was only doing it to find another way to win the war, it is pure cynicism. No, it is not. He is once again being the lawyer par excellence. The only way he can lay a finger on slavery is by military necessity, as commanderinchief. Gary which is only useful if there is a war, which is why you have to have the 13th amendment. Allen someone might ask, why doesnt he cut to the chase and get the 13th minute in 1862 . The answer is, do you seriously think he couldve gotten it through congress in 1862 . As it was, it barely squeaks by in 1865 by a margin of two votes. Gary the 13th amendment voted on in 1862 would have guaranteed slavery. Six states ratified it. Allen in 1862, there was no more chance of a 13th amendment, and amendment abolishing slavery, then there was a grizzly bear dressing in a tuxedo. It was not going to happen. The political environment changes. It does not change quite as fast as he hoped it would change, in 1864, when the idea of an abolition amendment is floated again by james actually in congress, it fails then, too. It is not until 1865, after lincolns reelection, when he is able to say in december of 1864 in congress, the people have spoken, we have been reelected, it is time to get with the program, lets get this 13th amendment. It is only then and after lincoln, shall we say, gets political with the number of people in congress that the 13th amendment finally does get past, passed, and even then by the narrowest of margins. Gary even after he pitches it after the great republican victory in the election of 1864, when he sends his last message to congress, he says and a great war like this, everyone has to agree on a goal, and that goal is union. We need the 13th amendment to help achieve. Even then, he is trying to bring in the greatest possible number of supporters. Allen he has to, he beats all needs all of those votes. But once he gets them, he is able to say, this is the kings cure for this evil. Because the 13th amendment obviates any attempt from the federal courts to turn back abolition. The emancipation proclamation, he thought he said, he thought the courts would approve it, he thought it would prove constitutional. He himself was convinced it was constitutional. But he had to admit, i am not sure what will happen once the shooting stops. I cannot guarantee that. What he really wants is an amendment to the constitution and thats what he gets in january of 1865. Thats really what the spielberg movie was about. Gary we might talk about that later if we have time. I hope to get there. I want to move on. He picked lincoln not because you didnt think there was not enough written by him. What about gettysburg . I have the last bibliography of gettysburg, it is 13 years old. 6193 titles in this bibliography. I can imagine you did not wake up and think, no one has written about gettysburg, i better write about it. What brought you to gettysburg . As a topic. Allen why did mallory want to climb Mount Everest . Gary was there a book about gettysburg up there . I dont know. [laughter] gary he never found it. Allen because it is there. Why write another . Why add to this enormous corpus . Gary much of what has been written about gettysburg is, shall we say, forgettable. Allen i wont try to identify those parts. One thing i thought was going to be important about talking about gettysburg was what i would call the new military history, beginning with john keegan, patty griffith, british writers who imported a good deal of what we might call social history into the writing of military history. Paying attention in military history, not to the kind of things that have been done over and over again, which is to say, rectangles moving around on maps. That has been done ad nauseam. That is true. What keegan and griffith and holmes and people of that school wanted, what was the experience of a battle . What is the face of battle . What does that look like . Keegan did a marvelous job by taking three different battle scenarios, separated by the centuries. In them, he asked a whole different set of questions. Not what general commanded this brigade to do that. Rather, it was what the experience was like, what did it sound like, feel like. How do people behave . How were they organized, disciplined . How did they respond . How did they respond to their ncos . There was a galaxy of questions about the experience of battle which had never penetrated a lot of American Military writing, and especially about civil war battles and gettysburg in particular. I wanted to take those kinds of insights and explore gettysburg with them. That in large measure is what the book is about. There are lots of rectangles moving around on maps, but what i really wanted to explore was things like the sounds of the battle. The weird harmonic made by bullets striking fixed bayonets, like tuning forks. Or the peculiar sound like broken china of the bullets striking teeth. The weird sound made on the rose farm on july 2 by the farm bell being repeatedly struck by bullets from both sides. In the middle of an environment where people are fighting for their lives. Those are the kinds of experiences of the soldiers on the ground that keegan had described and which i wanted to explore. Because i greatly admired how keegan and griffith and holmes had done their work. That was the first thing. The second thing was politics. What i wanted to write was a political history of the battle of gettysburg, because it was a political war, and the people involved took their politics into the war with them. When we think about politics in the war, we think almost exclusively about George Mcclellan and lincoln. But mcclellan is only one face in a crowd of politically motivated generals. And over and over in the battle of gettysburg, people are making ostensibly military decisions that are really political motivations, and i wanted to explore the involvement of politics with what is ordinarily treated as being a straightforward military story. Gary the army is still, to a significant degree, mcclellans army. He created the culture in the army and it was powerful. Allen you could plot the political identities and allegiances of the seventh infantry corps of the army of the potomac on the way to gettysburg along a spectrum. A spectrum that would run from the most ardently abolitionist. Gary howard. Allen in the 11th corps, no question. Also, you would get dan sickles in the third corps. Whatever else he lacked in terms of military acumen, and he lacked a lot of military acumen, he was a political general. He was, in fact, the worst dream of George Mcclellan. He was a turncoat democrat. He was a war democrat, a ferocious supporter of lincoln calling for abolition. Whatever else he did wrong, he did that right. That is one end, and the other end, you have the second corps of the army of the potomac, commanded by hancock, one of the most ardent mcclellan followers. Ardent democrat. Sedgwick comes in, the six corps, and george sykes in the fifth. Somewhere in the middle you might have John Reynolds and the first corps. Reynolds is the pennsylvania democrat, but he has a number of abolitionists in command. John cleveland robinson, james wadsworth. You plot the politics of the seven army corps, and that tells you a good deal about the kind of decisions being made on the battlefield. Gary do you see a difference between the army of the potomac and the army of Northern Virginia in the degree to which they were politicized . Allen they are both highly politicized, but the issues are different. In the army of Northern Virginia, the real questions swim around a, virginia and the dominance of virginians in the high command of the army, and b, whether you are sufficiently ardent about secession. This is why North Carolina units always had a hard pull of it in the army of Northern Virginia. They were widely suspected of being halfhearted on secession. North carolina was the tail end of secession. 20th of may, 1861, a lot of people in the army of Northern Virginia strongly suspected that north carolinians cannot be trusted. Then there is the virginia problem. So many of the people populating the upper echelons of command are virginians, and that is especially true in a p hill and richard whewell. If you start with long street, not a virginian, and you go down the command list, it is one nonvirginian officer after another. Lots of georgians and south carolinians. Mississippians. Gary ardent fire eaters. Allen but always feeling they are somehow secondclass confederates in this army dominated by virginians and they dont always deal with that terribly gracefully, nor do the virginians. The virginians are not shy about letting other people in the army of Northern Virginia feel they are somehow along for the ride in the heavy lifting is being done by virginians. Gary did you find any surprises working on your book . Allen constantly. Gary give us some examples. Allen the story that most people are familiar with in the battle of gettysburg, it comes from rod maxwells movie, it is little round top. Gary i think the western world allen i think that is a little too far. [laughter] allen lets stay with saving america. Gary he is an academic, for gods sake. Allen thats what my twelvestep process is about. [laughter] allen but no, people are familiar with it because of the movie and a wonderful book. And all honor, it was the right thing at the right moment. What i thought was important to put attention on was how chamberlains story gets replicated so often and in so many different places on july 2. In this sense, he is only one example of how, when the command structures of the third corps and fifth corps are going to pieces, junior officers, people who are just a couple months out of clerking in their fathers law office, take charge of an operation and instinctively make all of the right calls and keep saving the day time and time again. It is not just chamberlain on the south face of little round top, it is Patty Orourke showing up at the last second just smack into the texas brigade. It is the first minnesota. It is Samuel Sprague carroll sprinting across cemetery hill, to run into them just as they are about to overrun the gun emplacements. Gary it exactly what the 20th maine did. Allen my favorite story is about the 19th maine, a second corps unit, in which hancock at had posted to cover one or two of the artillery batteries that were trying to cover the disintegration of the third corps. Out of the smoke and melee and confusion that prevailed in the Late Afternoon and early evening of july 2, coming out of that is andrew humphries, commanders of one of the divisions. The division has gone to pieces. It has been ripped from the abdomen to the sternum out on the road. Humphries, he is a philadelphian. He is a very talented engineer, but on this afternoon, he is out of his mind with panic, grief and fear. He stalks to the 19th maine and tells them to fix their bayonets and use them on his retreating division, the soldiers, the unorganized mass that was fleeing all around them. Turn their weapons on the fleeing soldiers. He is stalking down the line and telling them to use the bayonets on these cowards. Behind humphries is the commander of the 19th maine, Lieutenant Colonel francis heath. He is exactly one of those people who had come from his fathers law office in portland, maine a few months before. He did not come to gettysburg to shoot down or bayonet his own colleagues, his own fellow soldiers and arms. He was walking behind humphries while humphries was raving like a madman and saying, dont listen to him, dont pay any attention to him. I think that was one of the bravest deeds on the field that day. Gary a great story and it illuminates the difference between citizen soldiers, which he was, and humphreys, who was a regular soldier and took a different view. Time is slipping by quickly. I want to get to your current project, and i have other things i want to get to, as well. I want to make sure we talk about lee a little bit. I dont know how long ago you chose lee as your subject, but events of the past several months have certainly cast him in a different light in the minds of many people. Im just wondering, i will make it a twopart question, why did you select lee as a topic and have you changed your approach to him at all in terms of what you think you need to do in light of recent events . Not just here in charlottesville, but many other places, as well. Allen i came to the lee project because i had a vision. It had appeared in the middle of the night and general lee came to me and said, not enough has been written about me. [laughter] allen seriously, i am a yankee from yankee land. Gary you are from philadelphia. Your story about which regiment you selected. Allen thats right. We were talking about this over dinner. On facebook, a friend had posed a question, if you could be a member of a civil war regiment, which would you choose . A lot of people said i would be part of the 26th North Carolina, the 24th michigan, the 20th maine. And i responded and put down, 45th United States colored troops. Because i am a yankee from yankeeland. It sometimes baffles me to try to understand what the other side of this great controversy was fighting for and what it was doing. Especially robert e. Lee, who had been a serving officer of the United States army for all of his career, had distinguished himself in the war in mexico, had been superintendent of west point, was handed a colonels commission in 1861, of the first cavalry. And resigned and went and became general robert e. Lee and eventually general in chief of the confederacy. My father was a career army officer. My son is a career army officer. I have taken the oath, three generations of my family have taken the oath. What really puzzled me, the burr under my saddle was, how you understand this, how do you write the biography of someone who commits treason . And i am conscious of the fact that sitting here in charlottesville, that is not an easy thing to say, and yet i dont think that anyone honestly can slice it or dissect any other way. He was never convicted in a court of law, he was indicted but never convicted. But he raised his hand against the flag my family has always served. And which i, as a citizen, expect to be protected by. How do i understand how he made that decision and then did the things that he did . I could very easily simply dismiss him as a monster, and there have been some traitors in the past who really have been, scoundrels like burr. The grandson of Jonathan Edwards. What i know of lee, he was not aaron burr. He was not the whiskey rebels. Gary his idol was George Washington. Allen yes how do you understand what lee did in his life and career and then what he did at the very end of his service as a general, and in the five years remaining to him when he was the president of Washington College . That is not an easy portrait to assemble. The different pieces of that mosaic do not fit into an easily comprehensible puzzle. On the one hand, i cannot get around, and i do not think anybody can get around the fact, that lee consciously made the decision to fight against his country. Now, there are reasons you can line out, and lee like them out lined them out in spacious detail. Gary he became an ardent confederate. Allen i know. He became more of an ardent confederate nationalist after the war. Gary but he was pretty ardent during the war. Allen here is someone who also all through the war is telling people that he does not really see how the confederacy is going to win the war. At appomattox, what he said to William Nelson pendleton, i knew it was all going to come to this. This is not an easy person to get into an algorithm. On the one hand, yes, he does something i, at the bottom of my abolitionist soul, i find deeply reprehensible. At the same time, i also know that what he did at appomattox was to save the country from a nightmare infinitely more unspeakable. When Porter Alexander made that offer to him, lets break up and head for the hills, all lee had to say was one word. All he had to say was yes. Not only the army of Northern Virginia but every other confederate force would have followed suit. The results. If we think during reconstruction, the ku klux klan and the red shirts, if we think they were a problem, they would have been a sunday School Picnic compared to what wouldve happened if the confederate armies had taken to the mountains the same way john brown wanted to go. If they had taken to the mountains and waged a guerrilla warfare that could have lasted decades, maybe jumped generations. We could still be fighting it. Look at what happened in missouri, in tennessee during the war. It was the war of all against all. Missouri had descended into a nightmare. Take missouri, play it out for one or two generations across the southern rim of the american continent, and that is what wouldve followed downstream from lee saying that one word. Gary because he was the most important confederacy and have had been for a long time. Allen he was the confederacy. Gary some people dont agree with that but they are confused. Allen henry wise was not right a lot, but even if a broken right two times per day. All lee had to do was say yes, and we would be living with a nightmare that could have extended as far as the most reprehensible racial genocide. Look at yugoslavia, the serbs, the croats. That took International Intervention to terminate. What were those people talking about . Controversies, battles, massacres over 400 years. David reif, and a wonderful book called in praise of forgetting, which i wish could be mandatory reading for a lot of historians, he talks about his experience as a journalist in the midst of upheaval in the 90s in the 1990s. , someones, going out floated a piece of paper into his hand. It had one thing written on it. 1453. In other words, the day when islam conquered constantinople. These people have been at this, their memories are going back and uncovering a scab of a 400 years. Could we have done something of the same . Im afraid we could have. And the only thing that stood between that and living today as we do was the one word. Am i exaggerating . No, i dont think i am. That one word that lee couldve spoken. Gary you are answering and asking your question, so i would just sit here. [laughter] gary i think you might be exaggerating a little bit. But it is incredibly important and it wouldve been hard to pursue that kind of warfare if he had said no. He did say no. Allen lets put it this way, maybe it would not have been that bad. Should we take a chance . Gary no. I think you are giving him credit for that. Envisioning is this going to be a full biography . Are you going to take them through all of the campaigns and mexico . Allen yes. Gary and Washington College. Allen which i think are the five happiest years of his life. I think when he goes to lexington, first of all he leaves all of the virginia he had once known and which now for him is dead. He goes to the valley where the where the social mill you the first time in his life he has a free hand. It is not like the superintendent of west point. He is free to be the kind of person he wants to be and he is extraordinarily successful as a college president. He is a very Progressive College president. He is getting rid of the old curricula. He is bringing in studies in journalism, and law. He is doing things in the valley that Charles Norton elliott is doing at harvard. He is cutting edge in terms of pedagogy. He is successful as a fundraiser. Especially with old northerners. Allen he gets all of these people to contribute huge amounts of money. To Washington College. He is very successful at it. I think it provides him with some of the greatest satisfaction he has ever had in his life. Im going to change our spotlight to something that may be of interest to me. Think one of the greatest deficiencies in the literature on the civil war is the relative inattention to religion. As a factor. I think the really important books on religion and the literature that brands to 60,000 or 70,000 volumes would not take up one side of the table to that side. And the vast literature deals with a population in the United States and the confederacy that talked about religion a great deal. Historians seem to filter that out and say it is boiler plate and i amboilerplate guilty because religion is too complicated. I dont want to think about coming to terms with that. Historians shyf away from this because it is easier not to deal with it. I want to know if it is relatively underappreciated in literature and second, why you think that. I think it is underappreciated. I think there are several salient books on the topic. One comes to mind. ,t is james moore heads american apocalypse. And mark knowles book on a theological interpretation of civil war. The larger issue of religion in the civil war has been neglected because of one thing. It requires a lot of Time Investment to try to understand the streams and rivulets of religion in the 19th century. Also because, in a way, for many secular academics, it is simply not a subject they really want to touch. They regard it as being somehow radioactive. I remember as a graduate student, that good man who was the chair of the graduate program when i was a student, who said to me very earnestly, you have to understand that even so much as the whiff of religion on your resume is the kiss of death. He was telling me that a little too late after i had written that dissertation, but it is true. And that has been a constant problem that ive had to deal with. People will say, or at least they said earlier on in my career, you are a religious historian. What they really meant was, you must be one of those kooks. And sometimes they were not all that discrete in communicating that. I almost wanted to say, here, hold on a minute, i need to go get my snake so you can watch me hold it. Sometimes i think it would been worth it to get a snake. Gary but if you are writing about lee, you have to deal with that. Allen people who try to write about the American Experience in the 19th century and subtract religion from the formula are going to wind up with no fish on the line. The reason is because religion, especially protestant christianity, formed the cultural matrix in which people lived and breathed and had their being. When the American Republic was founded, it was founded by men of the enlightenment, people like Thomas Jefferson who really believed that the American Republic was going to be an exercise secular enlightenment. Even those who have some kind of religious affiliation had a very modest one. I mean washington is an example that way, but what happens in American Culture is very surprising, because despite jeffersons prediction in the 1820s that no young men living today will die without becoming a unitarian, that turned up totally different. Gary unitarians have gotten more attention than their actual importance i would say. Allen because they wrote so much. And there are so many of them at harvard. Gary they did. Allen the longest context is to see that what happens in American Culture in the 19th century is this extraordinary eruption that we sometimes call the second great awakening but was really a series of eruptions from the 1810s to the 1850s. And when you look at the kinds of numbers that, for instance, john butler talked about in his book, awash in a sea of faith, the numbers are extraordinary. Churches founded by the four principal denominations, protestant denominations, group grew at a rate of approximately 300 times greater than the increase of the american population. The influence of American Religion at every level of Popular Culture and elite culture is extraordinary. Go from college to college in the 1840s and 1850s and almost all of them are run by clergyman, staffed by clergy as professors, and what they are teaching is a religionized version of natural law and natural rights. It is the matrix in which americans in the civil war era find their bearings and their relationships to each other. And when you read the enormous volume of soldier letters and soldier diaries, you are simply overwhelmed to the degree which religion was the inflection. Gary many soldier studies do very little with religion. They have chapters on many other parts of soldiers lives and attitudes. Allen theyre looking for what they think is the exciting stuff. That is cholera, bedbugs, bullets. They are passing by the religion as though they did not hear it. But that is a deliberate choice. That is a deliberate choice professionally. I think it is a mistake. Something else that has to be seen here is not just the context that religion poses for the war, but what does war do to religion . That is yet again an important story, because i think the civil war has extremely negative impact on that religious culture. I think the people who go through the war have a lot of the assumptions that religion had equipped them with ripped out of their hands, a sense of the regularity of the universe, a sense of its predictability. James garfield once made a comment that after his first sight of the battlefield, the sight of men killed by other men, garfield said that something went out of him and never came back again. Some sense of the sanctity of life and its divine origins. And garfield had been raised in the disciples of christ, he was a lay preacher. The war had an enormous impact on people. It shook them loose from those religious moorings. The war was not about predictability or an orderly and regular universe presided over by an allpowerful but all wise being. What the war seemed to be was about contingency, chance, luck, unpredictability, and americans were often not prepared to deal with those things. They came out of the war not only physically and psychologically mauled by it, but they come out of it culturally mauled. The assumptions that religion had equipped them with were among the casualties of battle. Gary we have a list of questions that have come in from all of you. I am going to begin with one that is on point with your discussion of lee and treason. Lee often said that going to virginia was the only decision he couldve made. Freeman in his biography had a chapter with that title. About 30 of the virginians who were in the United States army in 1861 remained in the United States army. This question, compare George Thomas to robert e. Lee in 1861. Why did lee resign his commission and thomas stay in the army . I dont how much you know about George Thomas, but take a crack at that. Allen George Thomas was strongly tempted to go to the confederacy. He almost did. Gary his whole family did. They wrote him out of the family. Allen one thing that held him back was he had a northern born wife. That was one restraint. Another restraint was simply the oath. At the end of the day, he cannot bring himself to go back on the oath. That he believed he had sworn and he believed, as lincoln said, it was registered in heaven. So thomas stays with the union, but it was not an easy decision. Why does lee make a different decision . Lead justifies it in terms of virginia. Ive not been entirely satisfied with that as an answer, if only because lee spent so little of his time in virginia. Most of lees career is spent in other places. It is spent in georgia, in new york. It is spent in texas. St. Louis. He actually spends a fairly small amount of his life in virginia. Even growing up in alexandria, the years he grew up in alexandria, alexandria was not part of virginia. It was part of the district of columbia and people were very conscious of being part of the district. Gary pretty deep virginia roots. Allen no question. Gary but partisan roots go deep. Allen but look at the kinds of roots. Look at his father. Here is someone who gary you cant lead the state if youre in debtors prison. Allen he is a federalist mopped mobbed within an inch of his life. He is in a state where the jeffersonians are only too happy to keep them from any Political Office once he leaves the governorship. In fact, harry acquires a lot of unpopularity to suppress the whiskey rebellion in pennsylvania. That is a political mistake that virginians never forgive him for. What was it about virginia that exercised a hold on robert e. Lee . I think it comes down to something more concrete. At this point this is still a theory, but my theory is this. Lee does not own arlington. Gary he doesnt own much of anything. His whole life he does not own a house. Allen the arlington property along with the other custis properties, these all come from his inlaws, and they actually go to his oldest son by the old mans will. George washington custis lee. And mary has a life interest, but that is it. Lee himself does not have any property at arlington, he does not own anything. But he does have to be worried about what is going to happen to the arlington property. Imagine these scenarios. Let us suppose that virginia secedes from the union, he decides to stay with the United States army. What will happen to arlington . He has to worry it will be confiscated. All right, lets suppose that he decides to go with virginia. And there is secession. Maybe there will not be a war. In fact, Winfield Scott has been busy assuring people that this is not going to be a war, that there will be unpleasantness for four or five months, then maybe some reconciliation, or at worst there will be three or four different confederacies, but not a war. This is what scott has been saying to people, and when scott said something that is gospel for robert e. Lee. So lee has to think, all right, if i go with virginia, there will not be a war and i will be able to secure the arlington property for my children, and that can be passed on. I think he has a very concrete idea of what is at stake, and a lot of it is bound up with what is going to happen to those properties and how we can secure them. So he makes the decision that i think is in very large measure conditioned by what is the future of the family going to be. He is thinking of his family here. He is not thinking of himself, he will not profit off of this. Gary he mentioned his family continuously. Allen when he talks about, i cannot raise my hand against my family, he is not talking metaphorically. It is not a piece of rhetoric. I think he has something material in view. How can i keep from having happen to my family what happened to my father at stratford . Gary we will continue with our treason theme. This is, if Jefferson Davis treason trial had been pressed, do you think it would been appealed to the Supreme Court . Jefferson davis spent about two years in custody after the war and the United States considered putting him on trial. He wanted to be on trail, he thought he would be vindicated, he had a very good lawyer, an irishman from new york city who had other thoughts on how to handle it. In the end, the United States government did not bring him to trial. And did not bring them to trial because they were not sure they would get a conviction. He would have to be tried where this crime took place, in richmond. They somehow have the idea that it might be possible that one juror out of 12 would not vote to convict a Jefferson Davis. Allen do you think that might have happened . Gary no. The question is, how do you think this would have been settled had it worked its way through the courts . Because as we all know, the constitution neither says you may or may not secede. Allen the difficulty here lies in the fact that all of this has occurred before the 14th amendment. Gary every bit of it. Allen the 14th amendment is what clearly, categorically, unambiguously defines as american citizenship and the priority of american citizenship. Put that along with texas versus white, where the justice denies a right to secession, and you have a strong case against anyone, for instance, in texas or california today, who wants to have daydreams after secession, but that was after the civil war. And we dont have ex post facto convictions in american law. So it was entirely possible for davis, and in fact lee makes exactly this argument, that under the laws and constitution as they existed in 1861, his citizenship as a virginian took priority over citizenship in the United States. And therefore, and this is what he says in front of the joint committee on reconstruction in 1866. He is very clear in saying i was doing constitutionally what i was supposed to do, and that was to regard my state citizenship as having the priority. It would have been a fairly it would have been extremely difficult for a federal court to look at that, either in the case of davis or lee and to say, oh no, we are going to hold you to account. You should have known better. All the jurisprudence had gone the other way. Baron versus baltimore. Everything that had happened in terms of jurisprudence up to that point gave some color to that argument. On the face of it, is a little difficult, but still, the technicalities were there. Would a jury, even in philadelphia, would a jury have convicted lee or davis . I dont think it couldve been predicted very clearly. Would a jury, even in another complication, especially in 1865 when lee is indicted for treason, because lee is indicted, is that the federal courts may not cooperate. And the federal court in this case, meaning chief justice chase. The District Court and Circuit Court that included virginia were traditionally part of the chief justices circuit. That meant chase had jurisdiction over virginia. As a circuit judge. Chase deeply objected to the existence of military tribunals and military arrests. He had made that clear and would make it clear. Chase makes it clear to president johnson that he will not participate in trials in virginia where there are military tribunals still functioning, because he regards those as an unconstitutional challenge to the authority of the federal courts. So you have got, first of all, a constitutional legal question in the way. Secondly, you have a procedural question being posed by the chief justice of the United States. Could any of this have happened . The odds start to get very long. Gary i think thats what the potential prosecutors concluded as well. We will continue where this is a seamless transition. States being supreme in some ways, the way some people viewed the situation. The question here is we associate state rights with the south. Did northerners care about state rights or state allegiance . That is a slow ball down the middle. Allen did you ever hear of ableman versus booth . Gary the short answer is, yes. Yes, they did care, and in fact they evoke personal liberty laws. Allen states rights become a wax nose that people north and south regularly invoke and then ignore as the situation demanded. When it came to owning slaves, you heard about states rights. When it came to recapturing fugitive slaves who had escaped to the north, suddenly you heard about the importance of the federal government and a centralized authority and states rights be damned. Reverse the scenario, you have a case where personal liberty laws are invoked to protect a fugitive slave. Gary against my northern states. Allen exactly. The wisconsin courts pleads states rights. That puts the court in the unusual position of being the enforcer of states rights. It really did depend on whose ox was being gored. You even see this during the war itself. I was saying this to one of your graduate students earlier today that when you look at lincolns relationship with the northern war governors, they are much more collegial, cooperative, much more lets meet together and talk this over, lets formulate policy jointly, than davis. Jefferson davis is very topdown. For davis, it was i will decide policies, governors are not more than ciphers and i expect cooperation. If you wanted to give states rights respect to either lincoln or davis, you would have to give it to Abraham Lincoln. Neither of those two had greater functional respect for the rights of the states than Abraham Lincoln, whereas by contrast, Jefferson Davis is the great centralizer imposing his will on state governments. Gary the confederate Central Government is the most powerful and intrusive Central Government in American History until deep into the 20th century on the u. S. Side. This allegedly states Rights Society put up with things that would have been incomprehensible. Allen it really depends on the issue and who would like to society put up with things that reach for the states rights argument first. Gary lincoln needed the governors. He needed the states, leaned on them. He depended on them and they functioned with Great Authority during the war. We have about three minutes left. Im trying to find a question we can answer in three minutes, which is not our strongest suit. Lets just have a brief answers. You can say one or two things. Are there any civil war, is there any civil war subject that has been exhausted, or is there always room to Say Something more . Allen i dont think people should write books about gettysburg, the emancipation proclamation. Im sorry. [laughter] allen i dont think there is an end in sight because the subject involves so Many Americans at one flash point in our history, just four years worth. When you look at civil wars in other countries, they go on for years, decades. They are spread out like the delta of a river. For us, the civil war is actually a comparatively short war in terms of the context of civil warfare. It is like a flashbulb going off and it touches so many people so quickly, so violently, and in ways that are recorded in such depth and such detail that gary there were great issues at stake. Allen with great issues at stake. I dont see a bomb in the i dont see a bottom in the barrel. Anyone who wants to write about the civil war. Yes, even if you want to write about the battle of gettysburg, you have got plenty of untouched material and plenty of opportunities and plenty of new things to say. I think the ammunition in that drum, there will be a long time before it starts to click on empty. Gary i think i will let that be the last word. Drum, there will be a long time thank you all very much for coming this afternoon. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] day, on thehristmas cspan network, at 10 00 eastern, Queen Elizabeth delivers her annual christmas message. At 8 00 p. M. Eastern, a debate regarding israel and its impact on middle eastern peace. What kind of moral or are we willing to promote. The uglying to forget. Ealities in gaza and west bank if you look at the u. N. Today, there is one country in the 90 90 at is the focus of of u. N. Resolutions and that is israel. On book tv on cspan2 at 6 30 p. M. Eastern, recalls his Bombing Missions over japan with his book the last fighter pilot. Off whichadron took whichem led them to a front. 27 fighter planes went down. 25 guys were killed. Which led them to a front. 27 fighter planes went down. 25 guys were killed. It is hard for me to tell the. Just for the sake of making something great, you learn to trust your passion. Watch monday, christmas day, on the cspan networks. After words,n astronaut scott kelly recalls his voyages into space in his book, endurance. Uris was the Third Service was the thirdrs service mission. Having been a part of that mission, talk to me what you believe to be the legacy of hubble. It is incredible. It has been up there 27 years. Getting on 30. Doing that kind of science on a daily basis leading not only the scientists experience the data they get from it which is most of the stuff you dont see, but also the public andgement that is provided let people kind of get a sense for where we are in the universe which is pretty insignificant if you consider the images. I think it has been a great success. And it was a great First Mission for me. Words tonight on cspan two. Up next, we hear about george nayeri on a trip to barbados in 1751, which gives a detailed account of his only journey outside colonial america. Traveling with his brother, he survived a serious case of smallpox while on the island. Karl watson, who serves on the board of directors George Washington house in barbados ofke about this chapter washingtons life at a symposium on the places where the first president lived and visited. It was recorded at washingtons mount vernon, virginia home. This is just und