>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Good afternoon, everybody and thanks for joining us today
at our Books and Beyond Program.
I'm Guyla [phonetic] Mulinar from the Center For The Book,
and I'll just tell you a little bit about our organization
if you don't know about it.
We're the section of the library, a very small section of the library
that promotes books, reading, libraries and literacy,
and we do it not just
in the Washington area but we do it nationwide.
And the reason we're able to do that is we have a state center
for the book in every state.
We have one in here in Washington, D.C. and we even have one
in the US Virgin Islands.
And that's my boss there, John Cole, who is the head
of our Center For The Book.
We also have a partnership program and we have 80 organizations
in that program and they are like-minded organizations
that also spread the word of literacy throughout the nation.
Another thing that the Center
For The Book does is we play an important role
in the National Book Festival
and this year it will be September 21st and 22nd.
And if you've never been to it, I rally urge you to come.
It's a wonderful way to meet authors and to have their books signed
by them and to hear them talk about their writing.
And what the Center For The Book does in connection
with the book festival is we invite the authors to come to the festival
and we schedule them over the two-day period.
And if you want to learn more about the Library
of Congress Book Festival, just go to loc.gov/bookfest.
Before we get started, I just wanted to ask you
to please turn off all your electronic devices and I need
to tell you that this is being recorded.
So if you ask a question, you will likely become part of the webcast.
Speaking of our webcast, we have more than 200 available
on the Center for the Book site and that's a read.gov.
So any time you see a Books and Beyond Program that you're unable
to attend, eventually you'll see it at read.gov
and you can attend it virtually there.
Today's author's book is going to be for sale outside this room
and the author will also be here and she'll be signing the book
and you can ask her questions there as well as--
after the end of this program.
A lot of times we get asked how we determine who will be part
of our Books and Beyond Program, how we choose from the millions of books
that are published every year.
And the major criteria that we use is the author must have used the
Library of Congress collections in his or her research.
And since today's book is about the Civil War,
obviously anybody doing a book about the Civil War would want
to use the library's collection
since we have the premier collection in the nation.
And you should also know that we have an exhibition on the Civil War
if you haven't had a change to see it.
And beginning March 22nd, there will be a special exhibition
of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's hand.
And the library has two of the five copies in existence.
So if you've never seen the Gettysburg Address,
this is your chance to see it.
And I also want to thank our cosponsor today,
which is the publishing office.
And we're very fortunate today to have the director
of the publishing office, Ralph Eubanks.
And he's going to introduce our speaker today.
Please welcome, Ralph.   [ Applause ]
>> It's my great pleasure today
to introduce Margaret E. Peggy Wagner whose job title officially is
senior writer and editor in the publishing office.
But if I were to give Peggy a more accurate job title,
it would be Civil War and military history expert
in the publishing office of the Library of Congress.
Peggy is the coeditor of the Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference
and the Library of Congress World War II Companion.
She's also the author of The American Civil War 365 Days
and World War II 365 Days.
In addition to her interest in military history and the civil war,
Peggy also has a great interest in American illustrations.
She's the author of Max Field Parrish
and the illustrators of the Golden Age.
So it's with great pleasure that I introduce my colleague and Civil War
and military history expert, Peggy Wagner.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you, Ralph.
Used the word expert twice so that's a little bit frightening.
I don't know how expert I am.
But thank you also to the Center for the Book and its entire small,
but mighty staff who puts on the Books and Beyond.
And as you could tell from what the Guy said,
a host of amazing programs.
I am awe of them, as are we all in the publishing office.
And thank you all for coming to what is going
to be a whirlwind hop-skip tour of the Library
of Congress Illustrated Timeline of the Civil War.
Being a presentation about the timeline,
this will inevitably involve intermittent bursts of time travel
in which we will be helped by some slides that I'll be showing,
as long as I'm coordinated enough to punch the button
at the same time I'm talking about the topic.
A little caveat about those slides,
most of the illustrations you'll be seeing are in fact reproduced
in the book, but there are about five of the illustrations
that are not reproduced in the book and they're sort of just
to set the tone and to introduce you visually to people
that are included in the text of the book.
So having said that, let us take our first bout of time travel
and go back with me now to the late spring of 1861.
We haven't gone very far geographically.
We are still in Washington, D.C.
and some enterprising person has hauled a giant camera
up to the top of the capital building.
And here we see a view from the capital of the south--
looking to the southeast where, in about 150 years,
the Madison Building will be situated.
Turning his camera around, which could not have been easy
with the giant cameras they had at those days,
there is a view of northwest Washington.
So it is a capital city recognizable as such,
but not quite our capital city.
It's now-- the war is about six weeks old,
military forces are still being organized,
people on both sides still assume that the war will be short,
possibly over by Christmas and that their side will win.
But in Washington, there is anxiety in part
because of where it is situated.
It is flanked on one side by the Confederate State of Virginia.
It's embraced everywhere else by the State of Maryland,
which is a Union State but is filled with Confederate sympathizers,
some of whom have already attacked troops heading for Washington.
There was stone throwing incident on April 18th and then
on April 19th there was a major riot, which resulted in 16 deaths.
Nevertheless, today, June 1st, is very quiet
and the weather is much better.
Please ignore the scene beyond the windows.
It is a pleasant day.   People have gathered on the lawn
of what is then called the Executive Mansion, what we now know
as the White House, to enjoy a concert by one of the bands
that are coming to Washington.
It's probably not this band that is giving the concert.
It could be the US Marine Band,
but music will play a very important role in the Civil War.
Today's program will probably not be the Marshall Airs
that we're familiar with from the war that developed through the war.
Probably it was a combination of classical heirs and some
of the sentimental tunes such as Home Sweet Home, that are popular
in both the North and the South.
Suddenly, our concert is interrupted by rumbling,
which could not possibly on this pleasant day, again,
don't look out the windows, could not possibly be thunder.
So people-- the concert ends prematurely, people dash to rooftops
to see the battle that they assume is going on, only to discover
that Union artillery men just across the river
at recently occupied Alexandria, Virginia,
are just testing their guns.
The operation to take Alexandria took place about seven
or eight days before and it resulted
in the Union's first well-known casualty,
the dashing young Colonel Elmer Ellsworth,
who was shot by Alexandria innkeeper James Jackson
after Ellsworth had the temerity
to remove a Confederate flag from the top of his inn.
One of Ellsworth's men,
Private Frances E. Bronelle [phonetic] immediately
dispatched Jackson.
A protg of President Lincoln, for whom he had served briefly
as a law clerk, Ellsworth had celebrated
for the military drill team that he had organized before the war,
and he had more recently organized the regiment of volunteers
that he was leading when he was killed in Alexandria.
Even more than the deaths of the four soldiers killed
in the April 19th riot in Baltimore, 12 of those killed were rioters,
this single death shocked and was widely mourned by the North
with the possible exception of 75 year old general
and chief Winfield Scott.
No one at that time envisioned the long rending list of killed, wounded
and missing that would become the norm in this bitter war
of Americans versus Americans.
Ellsworth was killed on May 24, 1861.
At about the same time, Abraham Lincoln is trying
to understand what it will mean to be a commander and chief
in a wartime environment and he's also, of course, still trying to set
up his own administration and making political appointments.
One of the most important appointments from our point
of view here at the library is the appointment
of a new Librarian of Congress.
This fifth librarian, James G. Stevenson, who lobbied actively
for the role, was actually trained as a physician.
He was from Indiana and he's a fervent republican
and apparently he spent most of the time, in his time in Washington,
serving in local hospitals as more and more sick and wounded came in
and he also served as an aid to camp with Union armies
in Chancellorsville, at Gettysburg and elsewhere.
Fortunately, with a great deal of foresight,
in September 1861 he hired as assistant librarian,
the now legendary in the library, Answorth Wren Spafford [phonetic],
who ran the day-to-day operations of the library, and then in 1864
after Stevenson resigned he became the sixth Librarian of Congress.
The 70,000 volume library was, at that time of course,
located in the capital building, which was undergoing renovation,
most particularly it's dome.
His old dome was being replaced by a new,
stronger, larger cast iron dome.
So you can imagine that the banging and the shouting and the carrying
on that was going on in the capital at that time
that had absolutely nothing to do with politics.
For a time also the capital building served as a baricks for some
of the troops that were coming into Garris and the city.
Trooper who, according to the architect in charge,
Thomas U. Walter, were not overly respectful
of the august surroundings in which they found themselves answering,
for example, "the call of nature
" however circumstances seemed to dictate.
The smell is awful, Walter growled to his wife
in a letter of May 8, 1861.
The building is like one grand water closet,
every hole and corner is defiled.
There were also, of course, also happier odors in the building.
For a little while actually, there was a bakery set
up in the lower floors of the building to bake bread
for all the troops that came into town.
From a librarian's point of view, this was a very bad thing
since the ovens were directly under the Library of Congress.
Fortunately, a congressman started complaining
when the bread wagons were cluttering up the driveway.
So that enterprise was moved out of the capital.
So operating within-- with these and other distractions, Stevenson
and Spafford oversaw the beginnings of the Library
of Congress' Civil War collections, which today, 152ish years later,
constitute one of the greatest collections,
if not the greatest collection of Civil War materials in existence.
This amazing trove, which continues to grow,
helps us to understand how the war unfolded its amazing complexity
and how it was viewed by how it affected and was affected
by the people who lived through it.
>> Drawing from this amazing resource,
the Library of Congress Illustrated Timeline of the Civil War,
like the library exhibition, the Civil War in America
for which it is a companion and a compliment,
commemorate as the library is uniquely capable
of doing the greatest and most costly struggle in US history,
judging the cost by the number of American lives lost.
The war is also, of course, a tremendous significant turning point
in the development of the United States of America,
a struggle at first to determine the fate
of the young democratic republic and eventually also a struggle
to end the cancer of human slavery that had been festering
in the body politic for more than 200 years.
Like the exhibition, the timeline was a collaborative effort.
It was a collaboration, first of all, between the publishing office
and our private sector publisher, Little Brown.
It's a collaboration within the publishing office and those
who created the book, between author, historian,
Gary W. Gallagher, who wrote the introduction, and was kind enough
to look at the text as it developed,
and with the amazing history detective and ace picture editor,
Athena Angolos, with whom I've been lucky enough to work
on several projects and who happens to be here today.
[ Applause ]
>> I also like to think of the book as a collaboration
between the people today and the people of the Civil War era,
who by their actions and the records they kept help inform us
about how the United States came to be the country it is today.
The book comprises four chapters and three sidebars, and the sidebars are
on reporting the war, photographing the war
and uncaring for its casualties.
Using a very meaty timeline format, and I have never ever been accused
of being turs, enhanced by exerts from diaries and letters and more
than 350 illustrations, all drawn from the libraries collections,
this format allows the contemplation of a variety of simultaneous events
which in turn helps demonstrate the massive impact
that the civil war had on so many aspects of the lives of Americans
and aspiring Americans, children as well as adults, civilians as well
as soldiers and politicians.
And civilians were affected in very many wars.
Here we see evidence of civilian backup for the military effort
and their support for the soldiers.
Here we see a scene that shows a more adverse affect
The war also, of course, affected women as well as men.
On February 10, 1863, confederate nurse, Kate Cumming,
departed from her detailed chronicle of hospital experiences to write
in her excellent diary, which was published shortly after the war,
of a wartime phenomenon experienced almost exclusively
by the people of the South.
It is remarked that there never were so many women
and children traveling as there are now.
Numbers of ladies whose husbands are in the army have been compelled
to give up their homes for economy and protection
and seek others among their relatives.
We have a large floating population, the people who have been driven
from their homes by the invader.
Just a few months later in October 1863, Union poet and nurse,
Walt Whitman, who often wrote of the terrible damage the war rout
on the bodies and minds of civil war soldiers revealed in a letter
to his mother that he and other hospital workers from far
from immune from the suffering that surrounded them everyday.
It is curious when I am present at the most appalling things, deaths,
operations, sickening wounds perhaps full of maggots.
I do not fail although my sympathies are very much excited,
but keep singularly cool.
But often, hours afterwards, perhaps when I am home
or out walking alone I feel sick and actually tremble
when I recall the thing and have it in my mind again before me.
A number of topical threads weave through the timeline.
For example, one thread is the long--
it follows the long and uncertain road to emancipation and the passage
of the 13th amendment and the parallel struggle
of free African American men of the north and of the librated slaves
who were first known as contrabands and later, after issuance
of the Emancipation Proclamation, as freed mens, their struggle
to be allowed to risk their lives as Union soldiers, with the support
of black women, who like their white counterparts, served as nurses,
laundresses, teachers and spies and who formed their own contraband
In January 1862, eight months before issuance
of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, activist, John Rock,
who in February 1865 would become the first African American admitted
to practice before the US Supreme Court condemned the continuing
effort in the north to encourage free blacks to immigrate.
And that program to encourage immigration had been ongoing
since 1817 when the American Colonization Society was formed.
Rock said, does anyone pretend to deny that this is our country
or that much of the wealth and prosperity found here is the result
of the labor of our hands, or that our blood
and bones have not crimsoned
and whitened every battlefield from Maine to Louisiana?
It is true, a great many simple minded people have been induced
to go to Liberia or Haiti.
But be assured, the more intelligent portion
of the colored people will remain people will remain here
where we have withstood almost everything.
In February 1865, about two weeks
after Congress passed the 13th Amendment and sent it to the states
for ratification, former slave, Suzy King Taylor, by then a nurse,
laundress, teacher and according to her memoire,
an excellent tearer downer and cleaner of rifles and muskets,
was then with union forces that occupied Charleston, North Carolina.
There were some black regimens that were included in this union force,
and the war, of course, had started
in Charleston almost four years before.
In her post war memoire,
she reported on the black trooper reception
by white Charlestonians whose own troops had set fire
to material they did not want to fall into Union hands
as they retreated from the city,
fires that promptly started burning out of control.
When we landed, our regiment went
to work assisting the citizens and subduing the flames.
For three or four days the men fought the fire, saving the property
and effects of the people, yet these white men
and women could not tolerate our black Union soldiers,
for many of them had formerly been their slaves,
and although these brave men risked life and limb to assist them
in their distress, men and even women would sneer
and even molest them wherever they met them.
Another important thread, of course, follows the ever more terrible storm
of military and naval engagements as well as the Union
and Confederate political struggles surrounding them.
The book follows, for example, Lincoln's struggle
to find an appropriately aggressive general and chief
after Scott's resignation in November 1861.
And my only editorial comment on the relative merits of his first choice,
General McClellan, as opposed to his final choice, General Grant,
will be seen in the relative size of the photographs here.
The book also-- gave myself away--
the book also follows the sometimes controversial activities
of the US Congress Joint Committee on the conduct of the war.
And in the South, it notes Jefferson Davis' tendency to act
as his own secretary of war, something that no doubt contributed
to the fact that in four years there were five secretaries of war
in the confederacy, six if you count one gentleman
who served for four days as acting.
It also notes Davis' tendency to criticize almost all
of his commanding generals with the exception of Robert E. Lee,
who after serving as Davis' personal military advisor, assumed command
of the Army of Northern Virginia in June if 1862 and proceeded to make
that army the very heart of the Confederate military endeavor.
Other political struggles dealt with conscription, financing the war,
the suspension of habeas corpus, the feeding in the South, the feeding
and supplying of troops that were increasingly pressed, troops as well
as civilians, as well as matters more closely--
directly related to the war, including in the North,
passage of such hallmark US legislation as the Homestead Act
and the Land-Grant College Act.
As for combat itself, in many cases we can see battle action
through the eyes of the north's stellar special artist.
And this is a scene by Alfred Woed [phonetic] that he made right
after the Battle of Antietam,
the single bloodiest one-day battle of the war.
The library's collections also allow us to experience combat via accounts
from both sides of the battlefield.
Plucking one example from many, and I may have plucked it
because I'm very fond of both the participants I will be quoting,
the December 31, 1862 through January 2,
1863 Battle of Murphysboro or Stones River,
Tennessee was a narrow Union victory welcomed by Lincoln
after the traumatic loss at Fredericksburg,
Virginia about two weeks before.
It began in a very poignant civil war fashion as the armies settled
into position and they joined in singing Home Sweet Home.
The battle itself was anything but sweet.
The armies of each side suffered 30 percent--
more than 30 percent casualties-- killed, wounded and missing.
An 18 year old confederate lieutenant, James B. Mitchell,
is in the thick of things with his Alabama regimen on one side
of the battlefield as he very shortly reports in a letter home.
The balls flew around us like hail stones.
Our company suffered very severely.
Six men were killed outright and 14 wounded.
Two men next to me were shot dead in their tracks.
One receiving a ball in his breast and the other
in his head and his brains came out.   I saw it myself.
At the same time, a ball passed through the coats I had on,
my overcoat and blue frock coat, but thank god I was not hurt.
As night falls on January 1st there is a lull in the fighting,
in the increasing cold and darkness, no warming fires are allowed.
Mitchell and two comrades, and this is a quote, "slept by turns wrapped
in a wet blanket and sitting up by the side of a tree."
>> Meanwhile, across the battlefield,
Union Brigadier General John Beatty pauses to write in his diary,
which he published about 15 years after the war.
Both armies want rest.   Both have suffered terribly.
Here and there little parties are engaged burying the dead,
which lie thick around us.
A little before sundown all hell seems to break loose again and for
about an hour the thunder of the artillery and volleys
of musketry are deafening, but it is simply the evening salutations
of the combatants.   The darkness deepens.
The weather is raw and disagreeable.
50,000 hungry men are stretched beside their guns again
on the field.
Fortunately, I have a piece of raw pork
and a few crackers in my pocket.   No food ever tasted sweeter.
Americans are not the only ones closely following the progress
of the war.
Governments and people around the world are extremely
interested observers.
And the timeline of the diplomatic efforts made by both Wilmington
and Davis administrations to elicit or prevent various actions
and reactions from the European powers, particularly Brittan,
which controls the world's largest navy, and France,
which throughout the war had an army operating just across the US boarder
in Mexico, while back in France its commander and chief, Napoleon, III,
who was no friend of democracy, looked hungrily at US territory.
Excuse me.   The European powers were antislavery
and the Unions gradual move towards abolition had an appreciable affect
on international relations.
Still, most aristocrats in Britain and France hoped
to see the great democratic experience-- experiment, pardon me,
that was the United State permanently dismembered.
Many non-aristocrats, even those whose livelihood was being affected
by the war, hoped to see the experiment preserved,
especially after abolition of slavery became a Union war aim.
In January 1863, after Lincoln issued the final Emancipation
Proclamation, the people of Manchester, England,
a textile manufacturing center, intermittently hit hard
by the dearth of southern cotton, sent the president a letter--
President Lincoln, of course--
stating in part, since we have discerned that the victory
of the free north in the war which has so sorely distressed us as well
as afflicted you, you will strike off the fighters of the slave.
You have attracted our warm and earnest sympathies.
In an address to the Sanitary Commission Fair in Baltimore,
in April 1864, as General Grant was preparing
to launch what would be the epically bloody overland campaign the
following month, Abraham Lincoln said,
"the world has never had a good definition of the word liberty
and the American people just now are much in want of one",
and he continued speaking of the warring peoples of the north
and the south, "we all declare for liberty, but in using the same word,
By December 1865, when the 13th Amendment had been ratified
by the requisite number of states,
the Union had been preserved but at a terrible cost.
And historians reckon that cost to be somewhere to be 600,000
and 750,000 people killed in the armed forces.
But a new definition of liberty had emerged from the American Civil War,
one that excluded the possibility
that any American could ever again claim ownership
of another human being.
But liberty and democracy are not static concepts
or permanently secure states of being.
In a brief epilog, the illustrated timeline notes the rise in the south
as the lot cause mythology, which was promulgated by a lot
of the southern women, the very strong southern women,
as well as a lot of former southern officers, for instance, Jubil Early.
And in these pages from his scrapbook, his post war scrapbook,
on the left there's a list of people in one Virginia town
who made contributions to--
for a statute to be erected of Robert E. Lee.
The timeline also points
in the epilog toward the troubled reconstruction era to come.
So this concludes our short tour of the Illustrated Timeline
of the Civil War and I thank you for coming along on the tour with me.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
If there are any questions that I can attempt to answer about the book
or its contents or the war, please feel free.
Sir?   >> Yes. The civil war-- history
of the civil war is very narrative in nature.
And--   >> In many ways.
>> Yes, [inaudible] very much a story to be told.
As you look at it by slicing across time,
did you come to new understandings and conclusions?
In other words, what did the research in this--
this methodology teach you that was unique?
>> Well it-- every book I work on, every project I work
on teaches me something as do the people I work with,
my colleagues in the Publishing Office, and I omitted, I think,
thanking the many specialists and curators here at the library who--
who take care of the civil war collections.
Instead of a straight narrative of the history of the war,
this timeline, as I indicated a bit in my talk,
teaches me of the many different things that are happening
at the same time and that have an affect, one upon the other,
on the various streams here.
We're used to thinking of the war, or any war, I think,
in military terms, in terms of guns and drums--
as some people refer to it--
and that has for a long time been the history of wars.
We've gotten away from that in the past ten to twenty years,
perhaps longer than that, to think about people.
But here, I was able to follow the-- each individual political effort,
the effort-- the ongoing efforts that were still going on in 1865,
for example, that-- of the Davis administration was making
to get recognition-- formal recognition from Great Britain,
which was very important, and you would think
that they would have given up by the end of 1864 but they did not.
And so I think it's mostly I learned much more about how complex this was
and what a deep affect, and I'm growing to appreciate that more
and more, what a deep affect in so many areas of life the war had
and still has, of course, on American life.
Any other questions?   Sir?
>> [Inaudible].   >> Excellent.
>> I'm interested in seeing the contents
of what Lincoln was carrying the night of his assassination.
>> Yes.   >> I was wondering if you happen
to know how the library acquired those contents,
how they acquired those items [inaudible].
>> Well, Robert Lincoln did give that to the library.
But we have with us the civil war curator who would be able
to answer exactly how that came to us if you'd
like to say a word-- Michelle Crow.
>> Well, actually it's [inaudible] special collection [inaudible].
>> That's true.   >> So-- but we're very fortunately
and this is how we build our collection,
that the individuals involved recognize the importance
of their materials or their families did.
So we owe an enormous number of our Lincoln treasures and collections
to Robert Tom Lincoln who was Abraham Lincoln's only surviving son
who kept those materials.
As they were rounded up they were given to Robert on the night
that he died-- or the night that Lincoln died presumably
or [inaudible] later and he kept them throughout the years
and wrote a little note on the shoe box
that these were the contents in his father's pockets.
And so his daughter, Mary, ultimately gave them
to the library along with Mary Lincoln [inaudible] jewelry
and [inaudible] papers came directly from Robert Tom Lincoln as well.
So that's how we build our collections,
are the individuals keep those things and whether they're famous
or whether they were soldiers, that that was more
and more what we're collecting [inaudible] ordinary people
[inaudible] own stories [inaudible] interesting as well.
>> Yes. Like, for example, my favorite person, and who I quoted
from today, Jim Mitchell, his family gave a small collection
of his papers to the library and they do reside
in the manuscript division and were able to follow that young man
from when he joined the Confederate Army at age 17 through his wounding
and capturing his imprisonment and then we also--
the papers include a certificate and a loyalty oath and a certificate
that tells us that he was all of 20 years old at the end of the war
and it also describes how tall he was and that he had dark hair.
So we're able to get, from these personal papers as well
as the official records we have and the published diaries and papers,
the general collections here contain a lot of material
that was published either during or right after the war.
And those are, along with the materials in the prints
and photographs divisions, the geography and map division,
the music division, hosts of divisions, these things,
they enhance our understanding of the war
so we get things in many ways.   Anyone else?
Yes?
>> In your opinion, could you summarize why Lincoln felt
so strongly that [inaudible]?   >> Well--
>> Can you repeat the question?   >> I beg your pardon?
Why did Lincoln feel so strongly that the Union had to be preserved?
As he was writing his first inaugural address,
he said that the Union was a lasting and perpetual thing
and that the constitution of the United States allowed for no measure
to dismember it therefore this perpetual, it was his job
as President of the United States to maintain the Union and he felt
that very, very strongly and maintained that.
>> [Inaudible].   >> Well, it was his country.
I don't know.
I would assume that was his primary motive, and of course,
he believed profoundly, being a self-taught person himself
who had achieved being President of the United States,
he felt very deeply that this great experiment in democracy
and representative government allowed people in ways
that monarchies and aristocracies did not and never could,
to achieve their dreams, what we call now the American dream.
And using as a witness his own life, I believe he felt
that that was very important to preserve that kind
of opportunity for ordinary folks.   Yes?
>> You said [inaudible] the Union?   >> Many of them did.
This was-- well, I think, and I'm not an expert on power politics
of the 19th century, but there was a great interest.
For instance, Napoleon III really did want to take back,
as he viewed it, some of American territory.
And there was a feeling that--
I think there was a knowledge that the United States was growing
in power and influence and the potential was huge and they would
like to see that broken up.
They were, of course, devoted not to representative government
but to aristocracy and this upstart nation, this--
this experiment in democracy was something
that they would prefer not to see succeed.
Those are some, if I were to venture a guess, of the reasons.
Although, you know, in some cases, again, it's European politics
where there was some trouble during the war over what is now Poland.
The European powers looked like they might be going to fight over Poland.
And so the Tsar of all the Russians, who was not all that much
for democracy, but who had, in fact, freed the Surfs in 1861,
he sent his navy to visit ports in California and in New York City.
Now in this visit, which were union ports.
Now this visit was basically to position his navy to be
in advantageous positions just in case war did break
out among the European powers.
But it also gave a huge boost to morale in the north.
And as a matter of fact, they threw the greatest reception and party
that they'd ever thrown in New York City just for these Russian sailors.
So there was a mixture of reasonings through all
of the international politics at that time.
Yes?   >> I [inaudible] different question.
You talk all about [inaudible].
I can only imagine when you talk about several thousand men,
you know, [inaudible] winter's day [inaudible] and also know that,
you know, all these men were [inaudible].
They're not on the farm sewing up the soils and--
>> No.
>> Crops. I can't imagine [inaudible] and that--
and did that slow down the war because of not being able
to feed them and [inaudible]?
>> I don't-- I don't-- Did everyone hear that question?
It's, the logistics of feeding the troops, which were difficult,
more difficult in the south than in the north.
I don't believe we can say it slowed down the war
because the war just kept speeding up and getting more terrible.
Of course the people of the south had a unique problem,
they were under boycott, under siege.
There was a naval blockade and also union troops were moving deeper
and deeper into their territory.   And as the war progressed,
the unions switched its tactics a little bit, or switched its manor
of making war from what you could call a soft war
to taking great pains to protect the property of the southerners
to the very hard war that evolved in 1863-1864.
And in 1864 Ulysses Grant, of course, sent Phil Sheridan
into the Shenandoah Valley, which was the breadbasket
of the confederacy, and said take what you need
and destroy everything else that could possibly be of use
to the confederate forces.   Northerners were more fortunate.
They had more people available to till the land.
In the south, one of the reasons the south touted slavery
as helping their war effort was
because slaves tilling the land would allow more white men
to go into the army.
There were more men served in the northern army
but the population was greater
in the north plus they had more technology to till the land with.
And I-- and as-- and they evolved a better system of distribution.
Quarter masters are essential to any army and--
and the US had a great quarter master in Montgomery, Meigs.
But it's also true that both armies foraged.
Grant, when he was on his second and successful foray to take Vicksburg,
lived off the land for quite a while, as did General Grant
when he was on his campaigns in the south, General Sherman when he was
on his campaigns in the south.   So there is a mixture of things.
Also railroads were important for transporting materials,
including food, and the north had better railroad.
The south tended to have different gauged railroads.
Sometimes they would have to stop at a state border and offload things
from one train and put them onto another.
All of these things are mitigated
against the south feeding its troops all that well.
Sir?
>> In 1860 Lincoln won his first election
with only 39 percent of the vote.
If he had lost that, would we have had the civil war?
>> I didn't bring my crystal ball.
I think eventually-- and this is just a personal opinion.
I think that there-- the situation had built up so gradually
and every time there was an opportunity to defeat-- was it--
what was at the heart of the war, which is slavery, in my opinion,
it was put off and it was resisted by the south.
And then, of course, after cotton became king,
then slavery really became an economic-- huge economic factor.
So the fact that many people in the north were combing away
from slavery-- well, the southerners were tending
to depend more and more on it.
I think inevitably there would have been a clash.
It would be nice to think that perhaps
down the line a peaceful solution could have been reached
but I really don't think that was possibly after the 1860s.
Sir?   >> [Inaudible].
I've always-- maybe you know the answer to this question.
>> Probably not.
>> [Inaudible] Sherman's army entered South Carolina [inaudible],
why did the union army destroy Columbia,
which I know is the capital, but did not destroy Charleston,
which was really the hot bed of succession.
And you to Charleston today, it's such a beautiful city.
>> It is a beautiful city.   >> [Inaudible].
>> My big brother lives right outside of Columbia, so--
and it's not beautiful and Charleston is
because my big sister lives right outside of Charleston.
But it is a sort of mistake--
what can be a sort of mistake that the union forces destroyed Columbia.
They did set some fires but so did confederate calvarymen
who were withdrawing from the city.
And fires, when they are set like that, tend to get out of control,
as they did in Charleston, and as they certainly did in Richmond.
Some union soldiers apparently got drunk
and disorderly and helped things along.
But it was not a deliberate attempt, as far as I know, to level the city.
That said, union soldiers, when they went through South Carolina,
because it was the state that led the secession movement,
according to some accounts that I have read including those
of soldiers who were there, officers who were there
who said their men got really more destructive in South Carolina.
And then when they-- one officer said but then
when they crossed the border into North Carolina,
they took much more care.
So part of that had to do with blame for South Carolina.
And I think I had better sort of wrap this up,
but thank you very much once again.   [ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.