it was hosted by the historical society in richmond. >> confederate general edward porter alexander competed in all the great battles as well as tennessee in late 1863. alexander wrote two books still regarded by many scholars as the most influential of the personal accounts to come out of the civil war. in today's lecture our renowned speaker will assess alexander. books and how they continue to influence historians and other writers. dr. gary w. gallagher is the john now professor in history of the american civil war at the university of virginia and, of course, a very great friend to the virginia historical society. he's spoken here on several occasions and, of course, conducted research here in our rich holdings of civil war manuscripts. in fact, he was a member of the inaugural class of our melon fellowship program back in 1988 and i won't tell you how old i was at that point. but we were very glad to have him then as we are today. gary is also the collections of the confederate literate society for his numerous books and his essays. that collection, as many of you may know and hopefully heard us talking about this as we're so proud, will now be housed here at the virginia historical society, where it will be preserved, catalogs and digatized as part of a new civil war research center. and this is the important part, this will be through this partnership the largest private repository of civil war archives in the world. [ applause ] as you might imagine, of course, that comes with a great cost and lots of work. this is a $3 million effort to provide storage and process and catalog this collection and endow this remarkable resource so it could be allowed to the largest audience here in virginia and around the world. we're well over halfway there and we welcome your help. professor gallagher who is with us today has received many awards for his research and writing and the prize for the best book on the civil war, the williams woods award for contributions to civil war studies, the lincoln prize and the fletcher pratt award for the best nonfiction book on the civil war. he was also founder and first president of the association for the preservation of civil war sites and served on the board of directors of the civil war trust. we are so honored to have him with us today. please join me in welcoming professor gallagher. >> i'm going to switch microphones here. i'm delighted to be here. it's always fun to speak at the vhs and to speak in this room. this is a great room. jamie wouldn't tell you how old he was when i was a melon fellow here. i'm going to reveal that i had brown hair when i was a melon fellow here. it was a very long time ago, indeed. it was about that time, also, that i gave a lecture in the mural gallery here, which i don't think happens any more. a lecture about the lost cause so the vibe in that room was just about right. for that lecture. and i think the vibe in this room is perfect because it's filled withed a quarian book sellers in addition to all of you who are just friends of the library and interested in history and i'm going to talk today about the best confederate memoirist. edward porter alexander. that is not just my view, but a unanimous view of what books soldiers wrote. porter alexander stands by himself. these two accounts are simply unrivaled among those published by men who fought for the confederacy. they were written over the course of a decade beginning in the late 1890s. but they appeared more than 80 years apart. appeared in print more than 80 years apart and military memoirs of a narrative was first published in 1907, fighting for the confederacy the recollections of edward porter alexander was published in 1989. alexander brought to his books a gift for describing key scenes in dramatic and memorable fashion. and the perspective of one who literally fought from monases to aplumatics. he served on the staffs of generals pgt beauregard, johnston and r.e. lee before distinguishing himself as the finest artillrist in all of the confederate army, not just in lee's army, but in the confederacy. although in our confederate during the war he wrote with almost none of the lost cause special pleading that was evident in the writings of most of his former comrades. my goal this afternoon is to convey a sense of why alexander's books are so remarkable. and to that end, i'm going to start with a little bit of bigraphical information about him before moving on to address how he wrote the books and what audience he had in mind for each of them. he had very different audiences in mind. i'm going to close by reading a few passages from the books that will illustrate some of their great strengths. they'll illustrate his narrative skill. i'll open and close with three of his finest narrative passages. they're great, they're gripping, they're fine narrative but also with almost every part of his book, this is true, they convey interesting information about the army, its makeup and its character. i'm also going to use passages that illustrate his willingness to convey the hard or what in the current term would be called the dark side of the civil war. he didn't shy away from that at all. i'm going to quote a couple passages that show his sharp criticism of lost cause icons. r.e. lee and stonewall jackson at a time when most former confederates simply didn't do that. he's not all alone in his willingness to do that, but he doesn't have much company. it's a very small treehouse that they're in in that way. and then i'll also offer a couple of other passages that just illustrate how he deviated from what people generally expected to get in an account written by a former confederate. before getting on with the substance of my talk, i am going to give you two personal observations and one is that i spent four years editing fighting for the confederacy. i worked on them through the late 1980s and of all the projects i worked on in my life, that is the most enjoyable. the only one i ever worked on where i literally was sorry to finish. usually not only happy to finish it, but staggering to the end and wondering if life is worthwhile. but with fighting for the confederacy, it was absolutely not that way because i knew i wasn't going to be in alexander's company any more. the other thing is, and i think this will probably be of more interest to this audience than most audiences because of the book sellers here, as a confirmed bibliophile since i was ten years old, i had the chance to own many copies of military memoirs of a confederate. two of them very special copies. one is the only first edition, the 1907 edition that had a dust jacket on it, the person who sold that book to me is in this audience, steven roe and porter alexander's own memoir which had his annotations throughout it. two very nice copies to own and now i'll stop talking about that. and let's get on and talk about him just a little bit. just to set the scene. he was born into a prominent slave-holding family in georgia on may 1936. he received his education from tutors at home before he went off to westpoint. went to west point in 1853 and graduated third in the class of 1857. he was marked from the beginning as someone who was going to go somewhere. in the three years following his graduation, he taught for a while at west point, he participated in the last phase of the mormon war and then assisted albert j. mier in developing the wigwag scission of motion telegraphy that would be so widely used during the civil war. he was a political moderate, but he left the united states army. he left in february of 1861 and made his way here to richmond. upon arrival found out that he had been commissioned to captain of engineers in the confederacy's fledgling army. no other confederate officer played more varied roles or worked, i think, as closely with so many prominent officers as e.p. alexander. i think he was in a class of one in that regard. he joined beauregard's staff. in june of 1861 and then made him chief of ordinance in his army. and he held both of those posts in joseph johnston's army subsequently and then under r.e. lee and the army of northern virginia after that and he served in both those capacities through much of 1862. he did so during the peninsula campaign, during the seven days, second bull run and during the maryland campaign of 1862. and while doing all those things, he also was frequently called upon to perform engineering tasks of various kinds. he was really smart, he knew he was really smart and you could tell that he probably found ways to let other people know he was really smart. but he was really smart. and so people valued him and they asked him to do a lot of things that weren't necessarily directly related to what hidz official portfolios were within the army. lee was one of those. lee and the others, however, while he was doing all these other things, figured out where his real aptitude lay was with artillery. and that the place that he probably would yield the greatest significant service to the confederacy was in the army's long arm. we have no more accomplished officer, wrote chief of artillery wilson nelson pendleton in recommending that alexander be promoted to command one of the battalions of artillery. alexander had been one of those who helped put forward the plan that gathered the batteries of the army into battalions in the autumn of 1862. which was a much more efficient way to deploy artillery. it's one of the great innovations for the artillery during the war and alexander's imprint was on that. now he has been given a battalion of artillery and lee thought that is where he belonged. promoted to colonel and had a secure place in the branch where he would make his reputation. the most famous historian of the artillery of the army of northern virginia, jennings c. wise wrote of alexander he was far and away the superior of all others in this arm. he was the best confederate artillrist. i've made that point four times. i'm going to assume you listened to at least one of them and i won't tell you again. but you can file that away. he's the best confederate gunner. that's five times. he immediately excelled in his new position. he placed the guns at fredericksburg that played such a significant role during the battle of fedricsbering on december 13th, 1962. he was the key person in massing confederate guns at chanlersville and that key part of ground that gave the confederates one of the few opportunities during the entire war to achieve artillery superiority on a major battlefield and also most famously was in charge of the prepicket ped grew assault bombardment on july 3rd, 1863. he's everywhere in lee's campaigns as i said. he's in the first corps but while half the first corps was down near suffolk near the chancellorville campaign, he was with the army. he's with them all through those campaigns. went off to north georgia in september of 1863 with long street and he just missed chig mogga and later at knoxville toward the end of the year. on all those fields, he functioned as the tactical chief of artillery in james long street's. he's not the senior officer and not in charge of the first corps artillery john b. walton had that position. walton was a friend of long street this was a difficult situation. made sense in a practical way because the best person is in charge when it counts the most, but he's not really in charge all the time. there was a little bit of tension there. and that was resolved, that situation that involved frustration in several directions. that ended on march 19, 1864 when he was promoted to brigadier general and the official head of the artillery in james longstreet first corps. only three brigadier general and alexander is one of them. he maintained his high reputation throughout the overland campaign and the siege of petersburg and was on the retreat to aplumatics, as well. drawing on his engineering expertise, he helped lay out part of the defensive line here in richmond in the last part of the war. and lee eventually put him in charge of all the confederate artillery between the james and apmatics rivers. as the army made it way and went on the 9th of april, federals were pressing from several directions against lee's troops there. porter alexander drew the last battle line of the army of northern virginia. and thus ended this memorable military career of e. porter alexander. despite the demands of his successful post-war career, he was an educator and railroad executive after the war. i won't go into that. despite the press of supporting his family, he had a large family. he found opportunity to study the campaigns of the war. and he initially was going to write a history of the first corps. longstreet wanted him to do so. but he found he was too busy with other things so he didn't push through with that and also couldn't find enough materials corresponding with the number of former comrades and didn't get as much material as he wanted. so he dropped his plan to write the history of the first corps. banded it in the late 1860s. but he returned to the history of the war in the 1870s and contributed several pieces to the southern historical society papers, he contributed two to the century company's landmark series battles and leaders of the civil war and he began thinking about perhaps writing more than just essays. in all of the things he wrote, he showed a scrupulous attention to detail and an absence of special pleading that showed him to be very different from most of the men who were writing about the war. most people sought to get even. i haven't had a chance to get even with him and i'm going to get even with him. i'm going to write this article and, boy, it's going to feel so good to get even with him and he'll know how good it makes me feel and that will make him feel even worse. life is rich. robert underwood johnson who was one of the editors of "battles and leaders" described him as a man of such integrity and candor that anything he writes may be relied upon. alexander undertook a full scale of the war in the late 1890s. help adjudicate a boundary dispute. he went down in 1897 and he hadn't been there long when he got a letter from one of his daughters and two lenler books. papa, you said you didn't have time to write your reminiscences and now i know you do and i want you to start writing them. i want you to write them for us, meaning the children. and, so, he decided that that would probably be a good idea. he did have a lot of time on his hand down there. he had a small library that included the one volume version of "battles and leaders" and brief diaries that he had kept during the war, he corresponded with some fellow confederate soldiers as he went along and he began to retrace the campaigns of the army of northern virginia. he intended to let no one but his family read this account. that is exceedingly important. he's not writing this for publication, he doesn't think anyone is going to read this except his children and eventually their children and perhaps a very small circle of his closest friends. no one but his family would see the finished project. but he still wanted to get things right, as he explained to one of his sisters. he said, i intend not to publish but only to let my children see these. so of course they're very personal. he wrote to his sister. but although they were going to be personal, he said that he wanted to get things right. and he said, i've written along with my own little doings a sort of critical narrative of the military game, which was being played. and i have not hesitated to criticize our moves as i would moves in chess. no matter what general made them. upon returning home, he said, he would res have the manuscript, he wanted to finish a first draft before he left nicaragua and thought when he got home he would take his time and really polish it and then let his family see it. he said, i'll just fill in some gaps once i get home. he thought it would take two years. well, he did finish the draft just before he left graytown in october 1899. it was 1,200 pages long. just a shade more than 1,200 pages long. he has a beautiful hand. when i edited it one word in 1,200 pages that we couldn't figure out. one word and it's not like jubeles idea was i don't want anybody to read what i'm writing. porter alexeneder took a different view. how about writing in a legible hand. it's 1,200 pages long and offered enumerable insights into lee and his campaigns, as well as a bountiful supply of anecdotes about alexander's activities. bluntly honest in a text that he believed very few people would ever see, except family and friends as i said. he dissected campaigns with a very impartial and analytical eye. it's unlike anything else in the literature. r.e. lee, stonewall jackson and others came in for very close analysis. he admired both of them a great deal. tremendous amount of praise for lee and jackson in his manuscript. but also very telling critiques of them. the distortions characteristic of southern accounts influenced by the myth of the lost cause have almost no place in the graytown recollections. almost none. 90 years after alexander wrote them, as i already told you, unc press published them. this very long period when nobody, literally nobody knew this existed. the only reason i found out about it because i'm going to mention steven roe twice today because he saw a passage from what became fighting for the confederacy and showed it to bob who showed it to me and we talked about which one should try to edit and because he's such a stonewall jackson guy and this was the first instead of the second, why don't you go look in chapel hill. he wouldn't have said that if he had known what was there, i think. bob deeply regrets he didn't do this. but he didn't. i went down to chapel hill and spent a week and gave myself one week to see if i could figure out what this was. what had happened is that the manuscript for fighting for the confederacy had been pulled apart and the chapters filed with topical chapters with other alexander writings and this 1,200-page manuscript disappeared and people who did see pieces of it believed it was just a draft of military memoir. i found the key in letters to his wife. he would send chapters home and i found one that said i'm sending the gettysburg chapters. it's 115 pages with two maps. and i went and found 115 pages with two maps and then began to look for other pieces and this was literally friday afternoon when i found this letter. i was on the last half of my last day. i extended my visit and very quickly, i had a manuscript that went from page 1 to 1,200 of the entire manuscript. it was just, it was remarkable. it was fun. some might say big fun. at any rate, that is the first, the graytown reminisces are, which would be published so many years later as the basis out of which military memoirs grew. the deaths of his wife in november 1899 and of a daughter just five months later, cast alexander into a very depressed place. it took him a number of months to pull out of it. what really pulled him out of it in the end was the decision to revise his graytown reminiscence into another book. he decided to make it a different kind of book. he talked to some leading historians and frederick bancroft and always dangerous to talk to historen is. he talked to them and they said, yes, this is interesting, but get rid of all the personal stuff. nobody cares about that. why don't you make this more a history of the army of northern virginia and that's what alexander decided to do. he took out most of the really personal stuff. he left some in but took out a lot of it and made it more an analytical almost scholarly history of the army of northern virginia. took him six years to work through all of this. the revised text for military memois differed from the manuscript in several different ways. i'll give you a few of them. i told you one. most of the personal stuff is gone. a lot of the really blunt assessments gone. he toned those down. still very critical in military memoirs, but not in the kind of language he used in fighting for the confederacy. he often softened or cut some of his most critical passages. the original allocated about 30% of its text to events before gediesbering and military memoirs about 57%. they both gave about 13% to gettysburg and graytown manuscript had about 47% after gettysburg and military memoirs about 28%. scribners as i already told you published in 1897 and it made an immediate impact and gained the status very quickly of that overused word classic. something can be a classic now, you know, on thursday. it happens on monday. oh, it's a classic. three days later. if that's a classic, what is an actual classic? anyway, this one was perceived quickly as a classic. theodore roosevelt informed alexander shortly after the book appeared, quote, i must write to tell you that i have thoroughly enjoyed your military memoirs. the army and navy journal pronounced it, quote, one of the most valuable of all books on the war. although many southerners complained of alexander's sometimes too harsh evaluations of lee or took exception to his lack of regret over the demise of the confederacy, even most of them generally admitted a very deep admiration for what alexander had accomplished. later historians echoed that initial enthusiasm and a reprint of military memoirs, there have been many reprints, but t. harry williams wrote an introduction to indiana press that came during the centennial years. willem is was one of the towering figures in civil war scholarship at that point. williams observed, quote, probably no book by a participant in a war has done so much to shape the historical image of that conflict as alexander drew lessons from the battles so a lesson can be drawn from his book. namely, that the finest military history may be written by a soldier who is also a scholar. the principle criticism by modern historians, this is pre-1989 was that alexander hadn't put enough of his own experiences in this book. we wish we had gotten more from him. and, of course, that criticism evaporates when you put fighting for the confederacy alongside military memoirs of a confederate because there you get both things taken together. these two books complement each other beautifully and constitute a matchless contribution to the literature on the military side of the war. okay. now, i'm just going to read you some passages from the two books to give you a sense of why i think it is so good. i'm going to open with a passage from "military memoirs" dealing with fredericksburg. not the battle on december 13th, but the scene on december 11th, 1862 as the united states army, its engineers are throwing pontoon bridges under fire across the raphanock river and alexander has an incredible view of what is going on. the scene at fredericksburg is never duplicated anywhere else in the world. this vast theatrical situation where you can see more men than you can see at any other place at any other time in the war. absolutely unmatched. nothing even close. here's how alexander talked about it. the union artillery is bombarding the city because confederates are using buildings in the city as shelter to resist the bridge builders on the union side. the city accepted steeples still vail veiled in the mist and incestantly showed the round white clouds of bursting shells and out of its midst soon rose three or four columns of dense, black smoke from houses set on fire by the explosions. the atmosphere was so perfectly calm and still that the smoke rose vertically in great pillars for several hundred feet before spreading out in black sheets. the opposite bank of the river for two miles to the right and left was crowned at frequent intervals with blazing batteies in cloud of white smoke. beyond these the dark blue masses of infantry and compact columns and numberless parks of white topped wagons and ambulances masked in orderly ranks all the completion of the bridges. the bridge shook with the thunder of the guns and high above all, 1,000 feet in the air, hung two immensed balloons. the scene gave impressive ideas of the discipline power of a great army and of the vast resources of the nation which sent it forth. it's an amazing scene of what could be seen that day. let me give three examples now of how alexander was willing to reveal the really hard sort of blood thirsty, unpleasant part of the war. the first one is from may 3rd at chancellorsville. just after his guns have achieved superiority over the union guns at fairview, the united states army's in retreat, hooker has been stunned by a round, the federals are retreating towards the north and alexander moves into position and i'll pick up his writing right here. by the time we could get over the enemy had abandoned its 25 gun pits and we deployed and open on the fugitive and artillery, weapons and everything swarming about the chanlersville house and down the broad road leading them to the river. that's the part of artillery service that may be denominated pie and swarmling fugitives who can't answer back. one had to pay for that pie before he gets it so he has no compunktion of chivalry. we ceased firing and ordering the guns to follow as they could limber up, i galloped forward to the house. several wounded soldiers lying who had been courted inside and hastily removed when it caught fire. i remember knowing a beautiful newfoundland dog which had been killed also lying in the yard. after a while, general lee and his staff road up and, once more, those two portions of his army were united. you don't get many people who are quite so frank about how much delight they take in killing people who are moving away from them. and not in a position to fight back. alexander is very blunt about that. he is also very blunt when he describes the fighting at the battle of the crater. at the end of july, 1864, the first time that the army of northern virginia ever ran into significant numbers of black troops on the federal side, usct units on the federal side and he is very matter of fact in fighting for the confederacy about the impact that that first confrontation had. there were comparatively very few negro prisoners taken that day. the first occasion on which any of the army of northern virginia came in contact with negro troops and the general feeling of the men towards their employment was very bitter. the sympathy of the north for john brown's memory was taken for proof of a desire that our slaves should rise insurrection and massacre throughout the south. the enlistment of negro troops advertisement of that desire, and encouragement of the idea to the negro. that made the fighting on this occasion exceedingly fierce and bitter on the part of our men. not only towards the negros themselves but sometimes even to the white men who fought alongside them. some of the negero prisoners who were originally allowed to surrender by some soldiers were afterwards shot by others. and there was, without doubt, a great deal of unnecessary killing of them. matter of fact, this is what happened. i'm going to describe it and then he's going to move on. this is a very unusual kind of passage to find in a confederate memoir. i'm also going to read, he was also willing, he didn't dress up language and they didn't really abide by the victorian conventions, especially not in fighting for the confederacy. that last passage was from fighting for the confederacy and so is this one. he is willing to put, i mean, we all know the 19th century americans have all the words that we have. every word we have, they had. and they used all the words that we used and if we had wandered around a battlefield we would have thought, my goodness, f-bombs everywhere as we're going around here. well most people wouldn't put that kind of language down. and i'm not going to put every kind of language down, but here's porter alexander describing a situation at first bull run late in the phase of the battle, that battle where a bunch of civilians came out to sort of watch the big climatic battle as you all know and one of the civilians was a congressman from new york and he was going to be captured by the confederates who happened to be part of a unit commanded by elerbee b.c. cash. and alexander comes up while this little drama is playing out late in the battle. and as he reached the rear of the eighth infantry, i will pick up his narrative. there i saw a very fine-looking sergeant major come out of the woods on the left with a small man in citizen dress and take him before the colonel at the head of the ridgeimate. red headed, red faced, light grayed eye and strong featured and as i approach him that afternoon, his face was as angry looking as a storm cloud and he had drawn his revolver and he was trying to shoot the little civilian who was ducking behind the sergeant major. the colonel was swearing with a fluenceancy which would have been credited to a wagon master. you came here to see the fight, didn't you? i'll show you and the colonel spurred his horse around to get a better angle on the little civilian. alexander tried to intervene, you know, i'm on beauregard's staff and you might want to keep that in mind, colonel. came down here to see the fun, said colonel cass. came to see us whipped and killed. if it was not for such as you, there would be no war. you made it and then come down to gloat over it. i'm going to show you and, again, cash tried to shoot the little man who was evidently, i love evidently scared almost into a fit. once again, alexander said, as students would say, well, i won't try to quote this. calm down, colonel. you're not supposed to be executing people on the scene. and cash, calm down a little bit. and then he turned to the sergeant major and said, turn him over to the marshal and then hunt the woods for senator foster. he's hiding in there somewhere and go and find him and if you bring him in alive i'll cut your ears off. that's not a side that we see often of confederate officers on battlefields. he's being harsh in his language. i don't think there was a safe space for alfred e. lee on that part of the battlefield that day. i think he was feeling a microaggression from colonel cash and porter alexander leaves us a wonderful account of that little drama. he was also, as i said earlier, willing to criticize even the most iconic of the confederate leaders and, so, let's pick two at let's pick two at random, okay, lee and jackson among the iconic leaders of the confederacy. let's start with lee, this is porter alexander talking about lee at gettysburg, this is from fighting for the confederacy. on the first day question had taken the aggressive all though reading general lee's report suggested the aggressive on the second day seemed forced upon him, yet the statement is very much qualified by the expression, quote, in a measure. and also by the reference to the hopes inspired by our partial success earlier. i think it must be, frankly, admitted that there was no real difficult whatever in our taking the defensive the next day in our maneuvering afterward as to have finally forced mead to attack us. i think it reasonable to estimate that 60% of our chances for a great victory were lost by our continuing the aggressive. now this is written at a time when most former confederates are explaining gettysburg as it's james longstreet's fault before that it had been jeb stuart's fault, it will be everybody's fault but r.e. lee's fault. and here we have porter alexander going no, this is what's going on. it's lee's fault. he also had harsh things to say about stonewall. it's not hard to be critical of him at the seven days. if anybody serving under him behaved the stay stonewall jackson behaved he would have arrested them and maybe run them out of the army. there's an aside that porter alexander didn't put in the text of the fighting for the confederacy but wrote it off to the side on the paper he was using. he said there were several members of r.e. lee's staff who wanted to bring charges because of his actions and lee basically said what good would that accomplish at this point? lee was more sophisticated about that than many people but here's how he described jackson at the seven days. lee then took himself off to the fartherest flank as if to leave to jackson the opportunity of the most brilliant victory of the war. jackson's failure is not so much a military as a psychological phenomenon. he did not try to fail, he simply made no effort. the story embraces two days. he spent the 29th in camp in disregard of lee's instructions and he spent the 30th in equal idleness at white oak swamp his infantry practically did not fire a shot on those two days. alexander didn't approve of that. he's also even handed, in terms of not following usual lost cause tendencies, usually what lost cause writers did is they would try to deprecate grant as if it's a zero sum game, make grant come down, that elevates lee. you have to prevent grant wasn't great and that makes lee look better. porter alexander didn't do that. he was talking about grant's movements that brought him to petersburg the second week of june 1864. the movement that involved crossing the james with the incredible pontoon bridge. he describes it as this, grant devised a piece of strategy on his own which is to me the most brilliant stroke of the whole war. it was by somewhat round about roads but entirely out of our observations to precipitate his whole army upon petersburg which was held by scarcely 6,000 men. not only was this strategy bill -- brilliant in conception for which all the credit i believe belongs to general granted but the orders and details of a rapid movement with so mighty an army with its terrains and artillery across two rivers on its own pontoon bridges make it also the most brilliant pieces of the entire war. there's very little of that honest admiration for anything that grant did by former confederates. he also didn't buy into the, of course, the united states won because their victory was inevitable. no way the confederacy could have won, hopeless odds. fate is often brought into the pictures one of the confederate monuments is in uva cemetery where there are a thousand soldiers who died in the hospital when uva was a hospital there. that monument said fate deied them victory. fate denied them victory. if fate is not on your side, what's the point. this is the shelby foote look, the south never could have won the war, you know the rest. porter alexander doesn't buy into fate having anything to do with it. it's customary to say that prof anyone did not intend to say we should win i did not subscribe to that in the least. if it did it was unintelligent providence not to bring the business to a close, the close it wanted in less than four years of the most terrible and bloody war. while i'm on the subject i will say i think it was a serious incue bus upon us that during the whole war our president and many of our generals really actually believed that there was, under lined, this mysterious providence hovering over the field and ready to interfere on one side or the other. it was a weakness to imagine that victory would ever come in even the slightest degree from anything accept our own exertions, he wrote. i'm going to bring this to an end with two more examples of what i consider alexander's wonderful narrative ability to be evocative in a way that very few writers -- grant could match it in some ways, the only equivalent of alexander, i think in terms of the quality of a post war account is grant's memoirs on the union side. here are the two i'm going to close with. one is a passage that better than anything else i've ever seen gets at the bond between lee and the soldiers in the army of northern virginia. and the scene that alexander chose is the streep when longstreet first gets back from east tennessee late in april, 1864. they had been off -- even longstreet he was glad to be back. he wanted to get out and then thought it wasn't so bad in virginia after all. they're back, two divisions. they're down to 10,000 men the first had 20,000 at gettysburg, 10,000 here, drawn up in two divisions for a review. lee wants to see his first core men when they've come back and here -- this review took place at mechanicsville over by charlottesville, the spot from which longstreet would march to the wilderness battlefield. i can see the gate post without gate or fence marking where a broad country road led out of a tall oakwood upon an open field in front of the center of our long gray lines. and in the well remembered figure of general lee upon traveler at the head of his staff he rides between the posts and comes out upon the knoll and my bugle sounds a signal and my old battalion thunders out, the salute and the general reins up his horse, bears his head, looks at us, and we shout and cry and wave our battle flags and look at him. sudden as a wind, a wave of sentiment such as can only come to large crowds in full sympathy seemed to sweep over the field. each man held a bond to lee, there was no speaking but the effect of that was a military sack rament in which we pledged anew our lives. that's an amazing choice of words there and amazing to put in the readers' minds. lee is back with us, we're with him, been gone a long time. i'll finish with a scene here in richmond. as the city is being abandoned, petersburg on april 1st, the lines are crumbling and the word comes to richmond, this cannot be maintained we have to get out, you know the chaotic situation that day early in april, confederates set some fires you know the fires spread from below the capital down the river, the turning basin and the huge flour mills were going to go up. all those photographs of the gaunt shells of burned out buildings in richmond, those fires are blazing. and the last of the confederates are coming out of the city, you know that great lithograph coming across the bridge to the manchester high grounds in the background. here's porter alexander description of what that moment meant to him. it was after sun rise of a bright morning when from the high grounds we turned to take our last look at the old city for which we had fought so long and so hard. it was a sad, a terrible, and a solemn sight, i don't know any moment impressed me more with its stern realities than this. the whole river front seemed to be in flames amid which occasional heavy explosions were heard and the black smoke spreading and hanging over the city seemed to be full of dreadful or tense. i rode on with a heavy heart and a peculiar feeling of orphanage. it's an amazing passage to describe the kind of thing that must have been going through the minds of veterans in an army whose principle job for three years had been to defend this place and now it's over. the combination of scholarship and descriptive power ensures that readers i believe will be enlightened and entertained. they'll also come away with the feeling of porter alexander as a friend. someone who reaches out across more than a century to help us understand some of the most important people and some of the most important events of our most transformational national event. thank you. [ applause ] >> now the good news is, the good news is that you're under no imperative to stay if you don't want to. but there is time -- is that right -- to -- two questions. all right. two questions. >> dr. gallagher, an interesting, entertaining talk about clearly a man of parts. turning from his work -- from his words to his work, you mentioned the bombardment that preceded pettigrew and picket. and some viewed that as largely ineffective. what was alexander's take on that event? >> it's complicated. he couldn't tell -- he said within ten minutes he couldn't determine the effect of the entire on cemetery ridge. the problem was mid 19th century artillery was not capable of the precision that would hit a target as shallow on cemetery ridge. he worried about how much ammunition he had and finally conveyed to longstreet that the infantry needed to get going or it wouldn't be able to support it. recently it's been shown that a part of the problem was with the fuses for the explosive rounds. they had problems throughout the war, from hazel grove, some of the commanders were so frustrated by the confederate fuses they stopped using them as rounds. at gettysburg they designated late so the full effect fell on the reverse of cemetery ridge rather than on the western side, where the fire was directed to go. jill has done work with some of the ordinance records that suggest these problems -- the ordinance side was having these problems and i think they manifested themselves at gettysburg. an ineffective bombardment. he says the bombardment, the usual time is two hours, the bombardment went from 1:00 to 3:00, alexander said it went less than an hour. i think he's someone who might have known something about how long it went. yes? >> does alexander say lee missed the best chance to win the war by failing to take grant and the flank when grant leaves cold harbor and goes off to cross the james? >> he does not say that. he thinks that the confederates lost a great chance during the seven days. he thinks -- he's really hard on lee at the seven days. i think he's maybe a little too hard because it wasn't lee's army yet at the seven days. he has a gaggle of division commanders. if the homes and -- you know you have a weak foundation. and lee corrected that. but he's hard on him in the seven days. he's also hard on him at gettysburg, porter alexander only saw his part of the battlefield. after the war he went back and said the bombardment should have been against cemetery hill because we could have achieved fire, could have had batteries from the north and from seminary ridge, all firing on that part of the line. on our part of the line we're firing on this very shallow target and then he added, and the only person who knew what the whole line looked like was r.e. lee. so again that is a criticism he has of lee at gettysburg. if you want his 100 pages on gettysburg in fighting for the confederacy are one of the very best, very best analytical take s on that that you will find i anywhere. all i did was make it available to be published. the analytical quality of his work is in a category all by itself. all by itself. among former confederates who wrote about the civil war. he's so blunt, so honest, so careful it's just simply by itself. i've now said that three times and that's enough too. thank you. [ applause ] you're watching american history tv. every weekend on cspan3 explore our nation's past, american history tv on cspan3 created by america's cable television companies today brought to you by these companies who provide are c span as a public service. week nights we're featuring tv programs as a preview of what's available. on march 5, 1946, former british prime minister winston churchill delivered his iron curtain speech. his speech is one of the cold war's most iconic speeches. to mark the anniversary we begin with remarks by former soviet leader my mikhail gorbachev. watch tonight at 8:00 eastern. i. watch tonight at 8:00 eastern. >> american history tv telling the stories of the events every weekend. coming up we're marking the 75th anniversary of winston churchill's iron curtain speech. starting saturday at 9:00 a.m. eastern on american history tv and washington journal, a live discussion with timothy rilely, he'll join us from fulton, missouri the location of the 1946 speech. at 10:00 a.m., the late margaret thatcher's lecture, as she marked the 50th anniversary of the speech and talked about how the world changed in 50 years and the 1991 collapse of the soviet union. then on sunday, at 2:00 p.m., reflecting on their grandparents, winston churchill and harry truman. and reel america features an audio recording of winston churchill's iron curtain speech. exploring the american story, watch american history tv. this weekend on cspan3. up next matt atkinson, a gettysburg national military park ranger discussing the post war life of general robert e. lee. he highlighted the efforts to promote reconciliation after the war and his time as president of washington college now known as washington and lee university. his talk was hosted by the national park service in 2015. what we're going to do today, ladies and gentlemen, is we're going to do robert e. lee in the post war years. and my coworker, chuck teague, when we were upstairs before we came down asked me if this was going to be a beautification -- did i get that right -- out

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