Where he had the good fortune to stay under gary gallagher. He is the author or editor of five books, including the last generation. Young virginians in peace, war, and reunion. Published by unc press in 2005. He is also one of the series editors for you and see presses for civil war series and i know him best in this capacity. He was my editor for midnight in america and i can tell you his thoughtfulness, his careful attention to detail and generosity with sources made my book a better book. Today, he will tell us about his most recent book, the war for the common soldier which was released in 2018 as part of the prestigious little field series with unc press. A review in the Civil War History recently concluded quote, it is appointment book, full of pathos, which vividly bears out carmichael steams and brilliantly eliminates the mental struggle and coping mechanisms of civil war combatants. It will prove a valuable work for anyone concerned with the live experience of the civil war soldier. Please join me and welcoming peter carmichael. applause good morning. Good morning. Every time his thoughts drifted to past battles, new yorks charles hand started to tremble he had passed through the ordeal of the Overland Campaign during the 64 with his comrades of the one 47th new york, and even though he could not shake the dark memories of what he had seen and done, he looked back on the battles in the wilderness of spots elena with a sense of surprise. That was a place where he had earned his badge of manhood. Something that had eluded him before the war. He had believed people didnt have a high regard for him, including his family. He once wrote to his wife, he thought of himself as the black sheep. It appears that was largely because he had struggles with alcohol. In the summer of 1863, he was drafted into the army of the potomac, his first day in the army, he arrived in new york popped off the train was given a blanket, ordered to sleep on the ground and woke up the next morning, wrote his wife a letter, explained to her that he needed to get out of this fix. Arriving with the rest of the army his situation did not improve. In fact his frustrations boiled over in december when he wrote to his wife let the force be with me technology is not my friend. All right. He wrote, curse it be the day that i saw my name john drawn as a conscript. And then be the hour that i made my mind to come as a drafty. I think sometimes if it were not for you and my children i would blow out my brains. The south, the war and everything that had to do with getting it up. He was incredibly blunt. He told his wife most any fool could be an officer but it takes a smart man to fill the place of the province. As harsh as this criticism was it was reserved for abraham lincoln. I am certain he considered himself to be not partisan. He told his wife that he was no freedom shriek or which of course no abolition and no union savior. The title of the book. Edited by katie all dredge. She purchased a house in moral county new york. She was going through the attic of this house and discovered a box. It was a box stuffed with a bunch of letters it was an incredible find. Katie hodge rich her profession, its being in a marathon. She came without any professional experience and did a remarkable job. Esther, she knew that any letter from her husband was not going to be a boring read. He would not talk about the weather or his problems. His letters spared no one. As i said before, lincoln was his favorite target. August 1st 1864, for the army are getting sick of such work i think abraham has cashed his political throat till there is no used to trying to save his life. The army will vote against him. Four to one. By the time he forces 500,000 more in the army his political death and damnation will be accomplished beyond the hope of salvation. Reelection came a little more than two months he became a political chameleon. There is no mental policy left for us he wrote, we have but went chance to choose first, of lincoln and the universal rights of man, let it cost of blood and treasure when it made to maintain them, or mcclelland and another compromise with the devil by which man is degraded and brought a little near to the devil and in everything. If lincoln is elected today, the war with the johnny rub is but childs play. For they will see that there is a spirit in the free man of the north that will not be defeated. A spirit that is bound to win. Now his words would suggest that he had become a die hard republic republican and supporter of old abe lincoln. It is reasonable to assume that in casting his ballot for abe, he came to support the hard work policies of the republican party, including emancipation. In fact many historians would point to him and suggest that he became a republican even after the war i know a little about his life after the war except that he continued to struggle with alcoholism. I can note this. After his vote for lincoln, he still believed that emancipation and the employment of black trump is not the best course of action. The person who reminds us to look at the soldier vote in 1864 with caution is none other than jonathan white. He makes the point that a democratic soldier who voted for lincoln should not be interpreted as a conversion to the republican party. Even if jonathan was not within my line of sight and the organizer of this advent who invited me here, even if all those things were true, i would still be up here to tell you that jonathan is right that a vote for lincoln from a democratic soldier cannot be interpreted as a switching of party affiliation. I will not summarize jonathans book free. I believe on monday there is a panel devoted to the election of 1860 and 1864 i will let them talk about those details. I will say simply this. I use jonathans own words to summarize his arguments. I argue. Im not arguing, its jonathan. I argue that Union Soldiers were more likely to vote for republican candidates during the war because of their hatred for than their support for republican policies. Jonathan im sure all of you have read his book, if im not im sure there are some. Jonathan youre doing a good job here. You will find that there is ample evidence. Letters, diaries from democratic soldiers who support jonathans argument. But, i feel im starting to break up with you. Here is the but. Its not you, its me kind of thing. laughs but there is also ample evidence from the Union Soldiers who were also democratic that they infected make the conversion to republican policies and believed earnest sleet and that to break the scholarly logjam. When both sides of the argument draw from the same evidentiary base. I am not trying to suggest to you that soldier letters were homogenous. They certainly are not but the problem resides in the fact that we have an oceanic amount of source materials to deal with. That is really where the challenge resides because any historian, if they are diligent enough, they can sift through this heavy volume of source material and if they are patient enough they will find that nugget of information is going to fit their argument. What to do . 2011 the historian joseph, he hit the methodological problem right in the bulls eye and i should add, on soldiers studies tremendously influential, in fact his book to the sea and beyond published in 1985, it is the first book to take seriously the ideas of the common soldier. James makes pierson its a great book. Heres joe here is joe solution to the methodology chuckle issue. I believe to a great extent some more scholarships that focuses on soldiers a stuck. Reflect on the soldiers memoirs and make claims that his opinions represent most or even a substantial portion of those soldiers if a scholar searches long enough, he or she will find evidence to justify equally any contemporary attitude any argument the scholar may pose, regardless of its representatives. For that reason a valid statistic may break that scholarly long gem i have that quote for you all to read there it is and it is gone we are back on track. Whats this lincoln thing up here . What is this about . Nothing. Okay. Theres a Little Lincoln here on the podium. Inspirational. I dont believe that the Statistical Analysis i dont think that is broken the large. And i think it is impossible to find a representative sample. In fact none other than james mick fierce and he makes a point in 1997 when he asks the question how does one analyze the thoughts and feelings of some 3 million men who served in union and confederate armies how does one do it . That is what mick fierce and asked the answer. Modern posters do so by selecting a representative sample that stance as the exact epitome of the whole. I cannot construct such a sample of civil war soldiers, mick fierce and rights, the best i can do is select a quasirepresentative group of soldiers whose letters or diaries have survived and read those documents with a discerning eye. Historians, all of us have been deeply influenced by mick fierce ands work, and that is a good, thing but and following in his wake, i am afraid that we in fact have overlooked his caveat about representatives and instead we continue to do what . We continue to go down that endless road with the hope that we will find that common soldier im not suggesting to that the search for the common soldier has been fruitless one. We know a lot about the common soldier. I suspect we can all agree upon that they were deeply ideological and political we can agree. That slavery mattered a great deal to both. Sides we can agree that they had issues of honor and manhood it was elemental to have these men understanding themselves. This body of literature, it matters but obviously i have some issues with this because i think the focus on motivation, why men fought, that it has not uncovered the life of the rank and file as it was lived. In many cases the scholarship that focuses on soldier motivation, it disconnects soldier thoughts from the lived reality of those men. So what we get instead as we get snapshots. These snapshots create a static view of the common soldier and those snapshots reinforced the great myths of the civil war, and that is the dutiful common soldier who pressed forward out of a great sense of obligation, and he is clear minded and what he did. Im going to suggest to you there is a different way of approaching, this and that different way of approaching this is to make sure that we situate the words of the common soldier within that mans lived conditions or material conditions that we are more sensitive to that and more importantly we are more sensitive to the long history of these individuals soldiers i am suggesting that the way out of this is case studies. Historians called the micro history. These cases get us out of these methodological conundrums. Out of the methodological conundrums because when you move that letter over an extended period of time, you can see how ideas and actions were constantly changing and reworked within the flow of events. This case study approach minimizes the cherrypicking that has plagued historiography. My second recommendation, and i will be honest with, you it is the purpose of my top. It is quite simply. This i believe that when we approach the study of the common soldier, that we should seek the totality of that mans experience. What i mean by the totality of that mans experience is that we have to situate the writings within the physical environment. As i have mentioned, but also their emotional as well as spiritual worlds when. We do that we will be able to dig deeper into the inner life of the rank and file. It is sunday morning, it is early, maybe too early for academic jargon. Bear with me please. Some are frustrated with the anti intellectual exam when an idea or concept is put forward and dismissed. The academic jargon im about to put forward, it does not roll off the tongue. It is called contradictory consciousness, and i can see some restlessness already in the audience. Hang in there with me. The idea of contradict thierry and consciousness was devised by tea jay leaders. It is a complex mental and emotional state with historical actors self described actions are not always in alignment with their stated beliefs and values. Let me give you an example. Members of the rank and file, they might extolling the bravery and suffering of comrades in the field, but in the very same letter, they might also express their apathy and frustration for the very purpose and direction of the war itself. What contradictory consciousness reminds us of is that abstract ideas were not enough to guide man through the daily challenges of soldiering. And what contradictory consciousness reveals to us is a spontaneous philosophy that we can find on both sides, and a spontaneous philosophy that can be best described as pragmatism minnesota soldier first minnesota soldier phillip hamilton, survived the attack at gettysburg only to be killed july 3rd he wrote shortly after first mass, we want a man of greater flexibility of character, a man of rough and ready energy who knows how to adapt himself to circumstances. Adapt himself to circumstances. That is the core of pragmatism. The worth of and idea dependent on its functionality, its rationality, whether its served the cause. It advanced toward victory let me give you another example of the flexibility of thought revealed in pragmatism. 1861, both sides enter the war with a fairly rigid understanding of courage and cowardice. There would be no gray area a man who was courageous was a man always facing the front. A man who was calm under fire, a man im who does his duty. That notion of courage and cowardice during the course of the war was amended. It became more flexible, more attuned to circumstances. To give you an example, i will quote from a georgia officer in 1864 who is writing about a comrade who got wounded. This was a joke and they all laughed at this. A joke that i suspect not many would have laughed at in 1861. This georgia soldier recounted that one of his men got shot in the arm. He then he turned to his comrades and yelled, here is my 30 days furlough, and just at that moment another ball hit him in the leg, causing him to drop on the ground. He then cried out, furlough extended 60 days, but that will do. I dont want any more. We know, and this is something we could possibly talk about in the end of my presentation, that the word trauma was not part of the vocabulary of the soldiers. That our tendency to attribute ptsd to these men comes from a good place but i think the diagnosis is almost always a historical. What we need to understand is that these mended a just in time, that they understood there is only so much that a man had to give in a time of combat and those adjustments and that flexibility dictate dedicated by dictated by circumstances is at the heart of pragmatism. I want to give you an example of pragmatism and how its shaped the wartime politics as well as political loyalties. Im going to focus on a couple William Stanford and james stand. For jane and william standard were from lewis town illinois it is an area filled with anti war democrats it was the smattering of republicans as well. The standard family was somewhat divided williams standard was that he was a strong democrat. His wife jane came from a republican family, and during the war she managed to shed those beliefs and became a stalwart democrat as well, their correspondents is quite remarkable it. Was recently published under the title infernal war brilliantly it did as well. Why is it so unusual this because it is hard to find twoway correspondence because many soldiers destroyed the letters of their loved ones because they never wanted to be captured and that the enemy could find them. It was rare to find a twoway correspondence letter from into chain are remarkable. I will just quickly make this point and writing this book that took a fair amount of time to do. Many things that i thought i knew about the soldier experience of course were challenged. And i think the thing that really struck me is you cannot understand these men unless you understand there are households, their wives and their families. That connection is elemental to fully appreciating how the rake and file made sense of the war experience. Here is a classic example of where the source material, or i should say with source material is available to us, has distorted our view of the civil war passed. The fact that we do not have a lot of access to these letters, we have a fair amount out there. Im not trying to diminish that, but the fact that not a lot of that is available and published has led us to do what . Too often push women and the household to the margins. I would say these letters between the standards reminds us of how vital that leakage between women were during the war. Jane and william, they are hotheaded people. They are prone to using colorful language, i will probably say this twice we will encounter some words we do not use and i am reluctant to use and public settings, but i do because to take away their languages to dilute the power of the racism that was animating their political beliefs. For i want to make it clear, it was not a love of union that propelled william to join the 130 illinois ends in august of 1862 he. Was plagued by financial deaths he had been a sheriff before the war and had a number of lawsuits that had been leveled against him. I suspect he joined, really out of the financial necessity. He joined at the age of 40, about 15 years 15 years older than the average and lusty, and i think it was to escape creditors he. Did not transform into a patriotic soldier he was not die hard democrat. He despised lincoln and wrote this not long after his enlistment. A i am truly sorry that i did not that i was that i did not take your kind advice and stay at home and read my chances at the draft i see. That the abolition congress was going to pass a conscript law and that will not believe in an able bodied men at home in the north. Their policy seems to be to take all the white men and kill them off for the sake of freeing a few nigers. I dont feel Like Fighting to free nicolas at the expense of my. Life here is a classic example of cherrypicking. This is an important point. This is a hardcore principle he believed, and but in that very same letter he wrote at length about the in humanity of war, and that as christians should not be killing each other. Again, i want to be sensitive to all of this. We try to make sense of these letters, and we have to make choices in terms of what we bolivia are the salient points of principles that drove these individuals, that shaped their understanding of the world, and it is hard to do. You cannot do it all. Heres a great example. Certainly this is an important point. But even in this one letter, there are other aspects and standards, other perspectives, i should say, that i might not have given due attention to. I want again to make a point that i think it is also a mistake to reduce the motivation of democratic soldiers to racism alone. His words have to be situated within the physical and sensory world of the army and the sounds of soldiering were extraordinarily important to standard and reminded him of his own confinement. The endless drumming frayed his nerves he. Could not stand the monotonous tones because it drove into him that he was no longer the master of his own body. Nothing arouses us but the tap of the drum. We are drummed out of bed in the morning, then drummed to breakfast then to guard, then to dinner, then to the battalion shrill, then to the parade then to supper and to bed again. In fact we despise the sound of the drum laughs none of this aroused his patriotism or soldiery instincts the. Standard knew that he had entered an alien world when he entered the army and that that alien world would present the eye with horrid sites, pollute the nose with horrid smells and bombard ears with savage sounds. Mark smiths the historian reminds, this union and confederate volunteers lost their senses when they entered the ranks. Both sides worried that that would be the first step to losing ones independence as a man. Again, i want to make the point to claim, that standards opposition to lincoln stems entirely to his fidelity to democratic principles or his vicious racism, that is only half the story. To fully understand how standard and other soldiers thought, how they thought and not just what they thought, we must account for the Natural Environment and sensory world and how it affected a soldiers outlook. When standards 103rd illinois entered mississippi in the fall of 63, he discovered that he had more to hear from the heat and swamps and then he did the confederate soldiers. He wrote his sons quote, it is very warm down here, so hot that at noon a man can hardly live. In fact many were perishing, not from the heat, but from sickness. Standard walked into a hospital to see some of his failing comrades he could. Barely look at them. He said they were pale and sinking fast. Utterly helpless. He could not imagine a worse place to die. It was and it is important to, note that nauseating smells of death, that stench it reminded standard of the degeneration of the war itself. When he left the camp, i should say the hospital, he then walked into, camp his mood did not improve wherever he looked he saw Union Soldiers, he called them lincolns hirelings, he said they were dress than lincolns closed dress than lincolns caps, he felt that in fact, they were confined and that this was a punishment that he equated to enslavement. Standard neared the breaking point in the fall of 1863 he. Confided to his wife the following, and again i want you to know that it is extraordinarily open and his admission that his emotional state was unraveling. Everything is a perfect drag with me. My body is well, but my mind is almost wrapped to. Piecess what a confession. This idea that civil war soldiers close themselves off to their family members, that they became hardened, it is simply not with the evidence suggests. Its just the opposite, again, the connection, that linkage to the household, the family. How vital it was. I perfectly discussed this, i long to see the date come when i will again be free and not subject to any military rule. A man is better off in jail we have to submit to rule of men that are not capable to rule dogs. And had no feelings for a man whatever. Now one might say, what standard has is a bad case of nostalgia, and i will be brief about this point. The emotional world that these men live. When you deep dig deep into that emotional world you see its more than a home sickness. The idea of nostalgia for standard and others is that the world a when it was a world wrecked by. War family values and connections they so treasured. When we see Something Like nostalgia, it is not necessarily a political, in fact it is the opposite. If you want to appreciate standards rage toward the lincoln administration, it is inseparable from the nostalgia that he felt in mississippi. Standard had many other dilemmas to face and we can maybe talk about that in the question and answer period, the dilemma being how to survive in the field when the army did not pay the man on a regular basis or feed or clothe them properly. Time and again on both, sides i have found that these men, what was their preoccupation . There preoccupation was scraping. By the army that had violated its covenant, a covenant to do what . To take care of the rank and file, that simply did not happen. It was that situation for standard in the ranks, it reminded him of the struggles that his wife was enduring. I mentioned to you that she had financial troubles. He left her with and when he joined the army, and so she found herself getting up at five in the morning, working in the fields most of the day to come home that evening and to have to cook dinner for boarders so they could make ends meet. She was also trying to find a school for her children, particularly for one son she was frustrated by that and complained to william. There has not been any schools here this winter. Work is crap. I was speaking for everyone in education right now when i say, i would like to know her assessment module. laughs she fantasized about william deserting, and they went back and forth creating all kinds of scenarios, they even talked about him getting captured on purpose. I will spare you all those details except again, to capture one moment in which this exchange was so vital to how william understood the war and his political take on this conflict. I should note, that even thought about fleeing to california that was one idea they had. Then she wrote to william, i think how about that . Whats going on . There you go. Here is william and chain. I think you might play sick long enough to get out of this grave. I think when i come down, i will bring a box of hoop skirts and you a pair of boots, and enough calico to make you a pair of breaches. Maybe you will want to wear the petticoat and let me where the bridges. Obviously that was a fantasy of hers that was not going to come in handy or real for her. She concluded by saying, what do they look after when they and suspect . I would like to know if any of them has got the great backs or the clap down there. I discovered many cultural gaps in those days. None of them knew what the clap was or they pretended they did not know. I dont know what he said to her but again, it was the Financial Issues that troubled william and that is why he stayed in the ranks. But heres what else happened he changed during the course of the war. We can capture that change by looking at the long history, by not cherrypicking. And when we look at the long history, we see he became a good soldier and took pride and had deep resentment not for the copper heads, because he was sympathetic to them actually, but to republicans who were not doing their part and staying back. Home so the pride that william felt as a soldier, it did soften some of his views toward, lincoln but again he never ever made that conversion. In fact he got very angry. Let me read this to you all. He got angry when a later came to him and his republican relatives on his wifes side did not even bother to inquire about how he was doing. In a rage, he wrote back and said, i think that manual, that was the relative. Manual could have said a word or two to me but he did not to. And he feet dont like me, he may kiss my butt. If mine is not black enough, i will bring him a niggle which and i can home he can kiss her but. He is a foul racist, and so is she. But i want to say again to you, all this racism was wasnt dictatorial in terms of how he made his political decisions. This will come to a great surprise to you all. He looked into becoming an officer of a you as cte or a black regiment. God help those poor man if you ever got that shock but he didnt. He wrote on september 24th, i am a very good abolitionist while i am in the army. Mr. Standard voted for lincoln, but if you read the entire letter, he wrote at the end, i plainly dont like abrahams way that i do the war and i would be glad to be out of it. What is to be made of all this . I dont think jonathan could find a stronger example than standard to advance his argument. Jonathan, as we know, believes these democratic soldiers voted for lincoln out of hatred for copper heads and he is absolutely right about that. But as we see in standard, here is an example of a man who voted for lincoln not out of his hatred for copper, heads but out of his hatred for republicans who stayed home and and this of course is the punchline to all of this out of pragmatism. Standard as these other men realized, may maybe loathed lincoln but understood a vote for lincoln was the sure assist way to bring this war to a successful conclusion, and to bring this word to a successful conclusion is going to hit mr. Standard back to illinois and back to chain. When more other thing i just came up with. He wrote about republicans and democrats. They said he said, they in the same quill. To conclude with this, how do we understand the significance of standards vote for . Lincoln i want to argue forcefully that any ballot cannot be seen as a transparent window into his motivation, and i beg of all of us as we are having an election looming, upon us before we know it, that the protectionist that the reductionist thinking we see time and time again with our journalists, i dont care if it is fox, cnn, msnbc, red and blue is doing a great disservice to our democracy. It is doing a great disservice because it is making people one dimensional. I suspect a man who votes for trump in michigan is very different from a man who voted for trump down in louisiana and the list goes on. This vote in 1864, this vote, not a transparent window into soldier motivation, but rather, it has to be situated within the long personal history. A history that shows that for all man, being a soldier was never a state of being but also a process of becoming. Like all soldiers, standard adjusted to the ground conditions of war, rejig ring his sense of duty and political Loyalty Without regard to any abstractions. His example reveals that the calculations of soldier loyalty were far more complex than knitting together ideologicals statements and motivational factors into some expression of identity or nationalism to persevere and survive, soldiers were constantly remaking themselves as circumstances dictated. Standard made that point to jane in his final letter, weeks before he was mustered out of military service. Perhaps, you will hardly believe me when if i tell you that i have seen the time often since, i have been in the service that i have only one shirt, and that one so full of great backs, that i could pick them off by the dozen, and no socks, and the butt of my pants out, my heart was almost gone, but i tried to keep my head above the water, and i am still alive and kicking. Thank you. applause . We have times for questions. Please come to the microphone and please make sure to ask a question when you come to them microphone. Hi pete. Great lecture. Salient point which we try to make to our students all the. Time you cannot look at people in a one dimensional way. Context matters. Im glad you spoke into that. It is a future question. When we were talking about not cherrypicking and we have all this rich information about what about now and what suggestions do you have for future historians who will be documenting this time when everything will be digitized and people are testing. It is not captured on paper. It is not going to be a traditional type of history historiography. What suggestions could you make to future historians . I will give you a copout answer and say i am a 19th century historian, so good luck to those who are digital. There will be challenges but you know, im quite certain there will be ways in which even those sources that we all know and seem still fragmented to us, that we will be able to find ways to be able to bring that context. I have no idea what that could possibly look like and it is beyond my pay scale to imagine, but i will say you have asked a very good question and it will be a challenge for scholars, thank you. Great lecture. I, i wonder if in the course of your research, you looked at the literature of other common soldiers, u. S. And foreign, and other combats . If so, what commonalities and differences did you find . Do you find between those literatures and the civil war . I think that is a fantastic. Question some scholars have all ready addressed that. The book is has an unusual title. It does that comparison between the civil war and vietnam. It is by harry dean junior. It is called shook over hell. It is still in print. I did not do it for my book to answer your question, but in to cite deans book, he does believe. It he is correct to suggest that civil war soldiers did not suffer from ptsd and that that is absurd. That label has a specific context, not the context of the civil. War the words that civil war soldiers often used were, broken down. That is what you would apply to an animal that you had driven into the ground on the farm. Broken down. The physical, emotional, spiritual, completely collapsed. I can go back to dean, he has poignant examples from man who were committed to what they called and asylum in the state of indiana, and the records are of the family members who had to commit their loved ones. It is heartbreaking. A man who was in Anderson Ville and his daughter said that whenever he met, somebody he would immediately start speaking about his anderson bill experience, and then he would take them behind the house and he had recreated a model of anderson bill and he would take people around. Again, i also remember a fellow i met some time, ago 20 or 30 years ago in richmond. I met an elderly man who remembered forest stewards. He remember his. Wife he also remembered walking by the old soldiers home and he said at night, you could hear these meant screaming out from nightmares. No one is suggesting these things did not happen to these, men but the culture was a different culture than ours. The medical understanding of their bodies was very different. That opening line i read to you when he wrote that when he thought about battle, his hand started to shake, that it is the only person i have encountered who connected a memory to a physical battle. I remember an indiana soldier, he wrote to his wife and said that all he could do was stare out the window and think about the war that he could not really focus, and that he could not keep his hands straight when he was writing, but he didnt write to his wife it was because of what i saw and what happened. They had a difficult time making that linkage. First of all, i will leave it at that. First of, all greatly enjoyed your book and your presentation. The major themes you addressed, and really draw way more attention than what that received in the past regarding how to look at soldiers letters and think about those questions pragmatism, and the term used today, contradictory consciousness. You get an a for this class. It really provides a framework for looking at a whole bunch of other related things and soldiers letters and so. On when you have more, time if you have 15 minutes i would love to visit with you about related projects. Quick question you talked about case teddies. Describe what you think would be a meaningful case study and what it would look like from a historical methodology point of view but also potential outcomes for contributions. My case study approach came under a fair amount of criticism from my readers. I think they were on very solid ground in their concerns. I did not have a strong methodology behind. It i want to make sure that the book reflected the geographical distribution of men on both sides as well as class. Background that was critical but i needed poor soldiers and even had illiterate soldiers who left bodies of correspondents. They spoke their letters to semiliterature men. Thats what i wanted to have, but what was the deciding factor i wanted to sell a set of letters that would extend over a period of time so that i could see the many faces of soldiering. I did not have any elaborate criteria for why i picked the man that i picked because im not trying again to claim that these men are the common soldiers. I keep suggest suggesting im not sure where it gets us, this pursuit. But when we drill down and look at the life of an individual man that we can see, it is a pinhole. Within that bigger world. That is the bigger world of culture, of military discipline, so we can learn a great deal, not just about that one little person, but we can learn a great deal about the entire world that all these other men inhabited, and this is the final point. The when i try to do on the battlefield. When the way to approach the common soldier what that looks like its that we should remind ourselves and remind our audiences and viewers that we went to recover stories of historical actors who occupy the same physical space at the same time. That two very different meanings from it. One more. You talk about one dimensional political outlooks and all. Given the tragic failure of reconstruction and the success of the confederacy in virtually destroying the birth of reconstruction, and we are here as lincoln friends and scholars or whatever, but recently, the governor of tennessee proclaimed Nathan Bedford forced bay, that nathan, for those who dont know, was a millionaire slave trader, who as a confederate general, kilt several hundred Union Soldiers and was the founder of the ku klux klan. Yet today, where is our message about lincoln . Yes, i am glad you brought up forced. We differ a little bit here. Times have changed radically. When i started doing this i was 19. It was 1985. That lost cause perspective prevailed. But times have changed. You certainly can find more rearguard actions that we see, these neil confederate rise to the top. My final point i will lead to a nice segue. Armies of deliverance. Lets not lose sight of what they did. Even in reconstruction, despite the counter attack by former confederates, they could not do two things. They could not break up the union again, they could not enslaved African Americans again. The price of blood that the northern armies paid, i think that in the end, it was in fact worth it and i think the pillar political outcome a reconstruction thank you again so much. applause the civil war, author Elizabeth Varon talks about political rhetoric used in the union during the civil war, which, she argues made northerners believe they were saving tou