>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Silence ] >> John Cole: Good afternoon, everyone. There are a couple of still some seats in the middle for those who are looking for them. About five or six. We're pleased to have a wonderful crowd here to hear our distinguished speaker. I'm John Cole. I'm the Director of the Center for the Book. There's, excuse me, there's seats in the middle if you'd like to come all the way across. Thank you. I'm the Director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, which is the Library's reading promotion arm. We promote books and reading and literacy in libraries on behalf of the Library of Congress around the country primarily through networks of state affiliates and also through national reading promotion partners. We work very closely at the Library of Congress with the National Book Festival. The Center for the Book actually handles the author coordination and the Pavilion of the States, which is a wonderful place for our state Centers for the Book and state libraries to come each year to the book festival and with the state table show off what they do in the state, talk about book culture in the state, and it's all driven by a US Map that has the outlines of the states and if a child can drag his family to every single table, they can get a stamp on the state and fill out their state map. So, there's a series educational purpose to this as well. Here at the Library, our major, one of our major activities is the Noon Time Books and Beyond Talk, and I thank you for joining us again. These talks are always connected in some way to the Library of Congress. Sometimes, first of all they're all new books and their author or the project was connected to the Library most often through the use of our magnificent collections in all kinds of different subjects. Sometimes it's the reason of a project and in this case of Adam Goodheart there is a special project I'm going to mention in a minute. We do film all of these programs so I'd like you to turn off all things electronic. The format will be for Adam to speak for perhaps 40 minutes or so and then open up for questions and answers and with the book signing starting out behind in the foyer at about 1:00. We will have time for a discussion as I said and if you have a question, please feel free to answer it but you're asking the question also gives the Library permission to use your question and your answer and your participation on our videotape, which we hope will appear on the Library of Congress website just a couple of weeks after the talk. The Facebook is also part of the Center for the Book. I almost forgot. We have a Facebook page which is called the Books and Beyond Facebook Page where we not only have information about past talks in this series, but we look ahead to future talks and, of course, you have a chance to add your comments, your thoughts about the speaker. You also can learn about what we've had in the past. This is around our 260th Books and Beyond Talk. We've been doing them since 1996, and we have developed a wonderful website, electronic presence, for our speakers, and I must say that the same thing is true for the National Book Festival. Very few people realize that we have been videotaping author presentations at the book festival since the first one in 2001 and the actual count of different authors who appeared at the book festival for whom we have 30-minute presentations is over 700 now. So the website of the Library of Congress is a wonderful resource for snapshots of contemporary American literature and contemporary American writers. Adam Goodheart is a historian, Adam's a journalist and a travel writer. He writes a continuing column on the Civil War for the New York Times online. H has written for National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, the Atlantic, GQ, and the New York Times magazine among others. He's also worked as an editor of the Off Ed page for the Times and as a book reviewer for the Times and the Wall Street Journal. Whoops, and the Washington Post. Lots of places. Adam lives in Washington, D.C. and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. For many of you I think probably know Adam is the Director of Washington College CV Star Center for the Study of the American Experience. I first met Adam through a Library of Congress connection. Adam was involved with a magazine of the Library of Congress called Civilization that had a short life, well, it had a six year life. It was created in 1994 and the first issue appeared in November/December of 1994 and for some of you this will remember you will remember the first issue with you know who on the cover. Not Adam, Tom. [laughter] But Adam served as, is listed first among the associate editors of the magazine and was with the magazine he told me he reminded me this morning up through 1998. The magazine itself sadly died in the Year 2000 following unfortunate record that the Library of Congress has built of magazines that we pretty much elected to terminate for hopes of another kind of magazine and the result, of course, is that we today sadly have no magazine but it's the electronic age and there are a lot, lot of ways to keep track of the Library of Congress and its history and its influence, but Adam went on to become a freelancer and has really been a wonderful writer and one of the reasons that we are so pleased to have Adam here for his book kind of the back story of the Civil War in many ways. It's a story of the year of 1861 through the stories of many citizens whose lives were not just involved in the war but in the end influenced the war, and I have not read this yet, but I've looked at the reviews, I'm very eager to read it, and one of the reasons is this link that Adam makes through this excellent writing about the people and the war and the change in the generation that decided to go to war and to fight the war sort of breaking roots with the previous generation. I could not resist just I warned Adam I would do this, setting him up in some ways but these were three short snippets of the reviews, the excellent reviews that he's receiving. The review in the New York Times, which was by Debbie Applegate, one of the quotes I selected was that, "This book, in this book the author gives us, takes us on a far-flung journey with a narrative of tension and suspense by religiously following two fundamental rules of the novelist. First, he makes the readers care about their characters and then he makes them unforgettable." Richard Van Crammer [phonetic] says this about this particular book. "Adam Goodheart brings to this book a rare combination of talent, passion and precision as a historian, grace and generosity as a writer; 1861 puts us in the young nation that was about to shed its skin and begin life as something new." And my final snippet comes from Anne Fadiman, another editor at large for Civilization Magazine that I've known since the civilization experience. Anne says, "1861 isn't merely a work of history, it's a time travel device that makes a century and a half fall away and sets us down eyes and ears wide open right in the middle of the chaos and the glory." Please help me welcome Adam Goodheart. [ Applause ] >> Adam Goodheart: Thank you, sir. Thank you, John, for that introduction and it's a pleasure to be welcomed by and associated with the superb work that you do at the Center for the Book and thanks to all of you for coming. I love this little theatre. It has this great intimate feel to it and I think I haven't been to an event here in a few years because I was so busy working on my own book, but I think the last event I came to was this very obscure Soviet film where there were like three of us in the audience. [laughter] So it's great to see a full house. Speaking of full house it looks like we have just about exactly the same number of seats as there are people in the room, which must be a message from the gods that maybe if you folks wanna come by I think they're on this side so please don't be shy about coming over and scrunching, scrunching in. It may be uncomfortable on the steps there after I've been droning on for a little while so. Great. Yeah, there are more over on this side. Well, uhm, it's great to be here. As John mentioned, I have been coming to the Library of Congress since I was a pup. Civilization Magazine was my first job out of college and it was incredibly exciting place to be and even after lo these many years lo these many years. My gosh, 17 years ago. I still just feel excited and I feel privileged every time I walk into this place. This book really wouldn't and couldn't have happened without the Library of Congress. I really wrote I would say about 98% of it sitting over in the main reading room. I see some familiar faces from the main reading room here [laughter] who probably recognize me as that guy who came. I realized at a certain point that there wasn't too much anymore to distinguish me from like these weird old guys who hang out in the library with all these plastic guys full of papers sort of muttering to themselves. [laughter] That was when I started to worry about myself a little bit. [laughter] But the main reading room is just such I'm sure as most of you know such a great place to work surrounded by all these other writers tapping away at their laptops able to sort of snap your fingers and summon up almost any book that you'd like to have and best of all is just that room itself because, you know, every time that I would, you know, sort of start to drift or want to check my email or something like that I would look up and there was like Cleo or Demosthenes going, you know, get back to work. [laughter] Okay, okay, okay. [laughter] So it's just a great place to work. Not to mention I can't slight all of the other reading rooms. I see my friend, Lynn Bruno, from the manuscript room, and I've just had such adventures. I also see my former student who should come down and scoot into one of these remaining chairs here. [laughter] >> [Inaudible] telling me what to do. [laughter] >> Adam Goodheart: Always. [laughter] Yeah. [laughter] So, I've had so many adventures in this place. I just remember the day I was looking through the papers of Major Robert Anderson the commander of this little Union force at Fort Sumter, and there was this paper, this sort of lavender blue sheet of somewhat faded note paper and it was a note written on behalf of General PGT Beauregard the Confederate Commander in Charleston Harbor, and it said, "Dear Sir, we have the honor to inform you that the firing will commence in exactly one hour from this time. We remain, Sir, your obedient servants," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. [laughter] I just said, wow, this is the piece of paper that started the Civil War right here in my hands and I can't think of too many other places where you could just sort of walk into the room, fill out a call slip and there it is or having Alice Birney, the curator of the Whitman Collection, bring out Whitman's own pocket notebook that he was carrying around with him during 1860 and 1861. It's the sort of worn leather folded notebook and you just hold it and you think of it sort of, you know, rubbing up against Walt's chest and his overcoat and kind of feel like you're right there, right there in his pocket with it I guess. So, anyway I'd like to say thank you to the Library; a very heartfelt thanks. But I'd like to tell you a little bit about this sort of the deeper genesis of this book. The germ of it, the seed of it, wasn't planted here in the Library of Congress much as I would like to say that it was. It began a long time ago. I'm not somebody who considers himself a Civil War buff. In fact, that word buff kind of gives me a rash. [laughter] Somebody recently asked me could I sign the book to, his book to a fellow Civil War buff? And I said can I say enthusiast or student of the Civil War? The reason for that, you know, like anybody who is fascinated with American History, who loves American History, I am endlessly fascinated with the Civil War, but my first Civil War experience or encounter came about on an 8th grade trip to Gettysburg. How many of you took like 8th grade or 7th grade trips to the Gettysburg Battlefield? Or how many of you ever visited Gettysburg at all? Wow. Okay, just about everybody in the room. Well, do you remember at Gettysburg before they just did this sort of major overhaul of the visitor's center there was this electric map? Do you remember the electric map? >> Yes. >> Adam Goodheart: And you would go in this 1950s voice would intone welcome to Gettysburg from July 1st to July 3rd, 1863, blah, blah, blah and these light bulbs would light up and there were red bulbs I think for the Confederacy and Blue blubs for the Union and this 1950s voice would narrate sort of stage by stage as these little lights go [making sounds], you know, and the Confederates attacked Little Round Top and you see them [making sounds] and the Union repulses the attack. [Making sounds] [laughter] And so that's kind of, you know, how I thought about the Civil War for a long time. I thought of it as the sort of little lights going back and forth. Frankly, that was never particularly what interested me, you know, I can never remember who attacked Little Round Top and who repulsed the attack on Little Round Top and whose cavalry came charging out of which woods against which hill, but the sort of rebirth of my adult interest in the Civil War came in a very different place. Just about three years ago some of my students at Washington College and I were exploring a very ancient crumbling house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland near Chester Town where Washington College is. For those of you who know the Eastern Shore at all, it's a very different place from Washington. I sort of lived between the two places and when I'm crossing over the Bay Bridge it's my bi-coastal life I call it. [laughter] I sort of feel like I'm just going, going hundreds of miles and even more significantly hundreds of years away. It's a place of these little colonial villages on sort of sleepy title river titles and ancient crumbling houses. There's one particular ancient crumbling house that I had been bringing my students to for years. It's a house called Poplar Grove and it's been in the same family for 13 generations, which even by Eastern Shore of Maryland standards it's a lot of generations, and I'm friends with the family. They kindly let us explore, and I had seen and I had poked around a bit in these old family papers that were up in the attic and these sort of deteriorating family documents, but I had never really gone through them in depth. Three years ago I brought a group of my students there and there was one particular student, an exceptional, exceptional guy who got very interested in these papers and wanted to write his final essay for the course using these papers. He actually was, is a Marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, very interested in military history, had heard that there was an interesting story about the beginning of the Civil War that had to do with this family and said he wanted to write about it and he would use these family papers, and I said, gosh, Jim, you know, there's 350 years' worth of family papers up here in this attic. They're all stuffed into old, you know, tin cans and peach baskets and boxes all jumbled together, you know, there's no guarantee that we'll find anything from the Civil War let alone about this story. He said I don't care. I want to dig around anyway. So, I said, okay, Jim. I'll come here with you, spend a couple of hours on a Saturday morning and we'll poke around and see what we can find. So we go there and, in fact, one of the first things that we unearthed was this very tightly bound up bundle of papers tied up with a yellow ribbon, yellow silk ribbon that clearly hadn't been undone in well over a century and written on the outside was a little inscription with the date 1861 on it and it said regarding William Emory's resignation from the US Army 1861, which was exactly the story that Jim was interested in, and I just looked at this and I handed it to Jim I said Jim you should know it's not always this easy. [laughter] Except at the Library of Congress I should have added. [laughter] So we proceeded. We opened up this stack of documents and inside it was an extraordinary tale and it's a tale actually that didn't make it in except for a couple of pages of my book, but really inspired me to write it. It's funny how these things that you discover sometimes they can give rise to something without actually making it much into the finished product, but the particular story was about a man who was a member of this family from the Eastern Shore who had joined the US Army, had a career with the US Army for about 40 years, ended up at the beginning of the Civil War stationed out in remote Indian Territory at a fort in what's now Oklahoma. As the war began, as the secession crisis unfolded, he was trying to decide what he should personally do with himself, and he was hearing all these conflicting reports from back east. He was feeling pulled in several different directions at once as he wrote to his brother and to his wife back in the east. For one thing he was a southerner, considered himself very much culturally a southerner, came from this plantation on the Eastern Shore. His brother still owned this 1,000-acre plantation. He had grown up with slavery with his family owning slaves although he actually sort of at least he claimed after the war secretly always harbored doubts about slavery. Secretly always felt that it was wrong and that eventually it should disappear. So, he felt ambivalent. He also, but he also felt very loyal to his state and he didn't know which way Maryland was going to go in this crisis at that point. He also had a lot of personal friendships. He was very close friends with Jefferson Davis, he knew Robert E. Lee, Joseph Johnston, a lot of these great figures of the Confederacy and yet on the other hand here he was considering betraying this flag, the Stars and Stripes, under which he had served ever since he was a 14-year old cadet first putting on the gray uniform at West Point and he felt very pulled this way. He also was thinking about things that you might not necessarily expect. He was thinking not just about these ideological concerns, political considerations but also very personal sort of selfish things. What does this mean for me and my career and my family? If I join the Confederacy, am I going to be the founding father of a new nation? Hailed as a hero for generations much as my grandparent's generation was for the American Revolution? Or will I be damned as a traitor and possibly even hung from the nearest tree? So, his wife wrote to him at one point. His wife was a Philadelphian, great granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, but she was actually kind of ready to go either way. She was very pragmatic, you know, very sort of opportunistic and she was ready to go with the south if he wanted to and she writes she said, "It is like a great game of chance." It's like a great game of chess. That phrase really stayed with me. It really just suddenly opened up for me what that moment felt like for millions of Americans not just the military officers or the politicians, but people who didn't know what was going to happen next and it made me realize in a way that I hadn't before that the Civil War wasn't just something that was a matter of red lights and blue lights marching across this electronic battlefield, but also a much more nuanced conflict that was fought within millions of American hearts and minds and families and communities and that was the kind of story that I decided to tell in this book to try to capture that moment, to try to take the story and the heroism for that matter beyond the usual battlefields to talk about very individual personal internal conflicts and also to talk about something else that I really saw and see as happening in America at that moment and that was a sort of a great generational shift that was going on. You know sometimes I feel like we have to be skeptical of this talk of generations in American History, but sometimes it really seems to apply and reading about the 1860s I just found myself again and again and again being sort of reminded of the 1960s in America. Here was a youthful generation coming up looking at their parents, their parent's generation as this sort of generation of conservatism of compromise that was leading America down sort of the wrong path and whether they were northern or southern many people felt that way, deciding that they wanted to create something new. Even sort of grooving to what the rock-n-roll was of the 1850s and 1860s this sort of romantic poetry Bryon and Tennyson and the philosophy and lectures of Emerson, the stuff that spoke to people not just intellectually but to something I think deeper in their soul. So I wanted to capture that generational transition as well and in a way I saw this generation I found over and over again references to the Revolutionary era to getting back to those values of the Revolution, recreating the kind of Revolutionary heroism and sort of leapfrogging over the generation of the parents back to the generation of the grandparents. So, anyway enough sort of prequel rambling. I'd like to read to you from a few just short just two or three pages each sections of my book, three different sections that I think sort of capture, I hope they capture each one of these generations, the grandparents, the parents, and then the generation that actually would fight the Civil War. So the first section I'm going to read is about an actual Revolutionary and it's from Chapter 1 of my book, which is called Wide Awake. "Boston, October 1860. On a fine afternoon in the last autumn of the Old Republic, an ancient man stepped haltingly onto the platform of the Boston and Maine Railroad Depot and peered around him with watery eyes. Ralph Farnham was 104 years old, but besides this extraordinary achievement, he had at least since young manhood led an unremarkable life. He had boarded the train that morning near the small farm in southern Maine from whose steep and stony fields he had eked out his subsistence for the past 80 years. Like thousands of other hardscrabble New England farmers, Old Uncle Farnham, as all his neighbors called him, woke every day before dawn, went to bed at dusk, and in the hours between lived a life that varied only according to the demands of the changing seasons. He had not been to Boston in many, many years. Now, squinting into the shadowy dimness of the station, he could see figures moving all around him; feel them clasping his hands; hear them calling his name. "Give us your hat, sir," someone close by cried out, and as he uncertainly proffered it toward whoever had spoken, he felt it grow suddenly heavier in his grasp as coins were dropped in from all sides weighting it with silver and even gold. As news of his arrival rippled through the crowd, the cheers grew louder echoing up and down the length of the cavernous train shed and even from the sunlit square beyond: "Hurrah! Hurrah for the last hero of Bunker Hill!" [laughter] Old Uncle Farnham did not tell them -- had he tried to would anyone have listened? -- that he had not actually fought at Bunker Hill, had not even fired a shot having simply watched from a mile's distance as a green 18-year old recruit while the smoke of the minutemen's volleys drifted across Charlestown Neck. Ever since a Boston paper had "discovered" his existence that summer -- as if he were one of Mr. Barnum's rare beasts -- the writers had embellished his military career more and more until, as they would tell it, he had practically fended off General Howe's grenadiers single handed. And what of it? People wanted Revolutionary heroes and Old Uncle Farnham would oblige them. He would even at their insistence get on a train and come to Boston. It seemed suddenly so important to everybody. Indeed, all across the country that autumn, Americans were always desperate for heroes, old or new, and for a renewed connection to their glorious past. The quickly dwindling ranks of General Washington's comrades-in-arms seemed to herald a larger loss; it was as though the last faint rays of the nation's sunny youth were disappearing into the horizon. Over the past few decades, more and more Americans had come to share a sense that the nation's leaders, and even its common citizens, had decline shamefully since the founding era, a race of giants giving way to dwarfish petty politicians and shopkeepers. As early as 1822, 19-year old Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing to his brother on the eve of Independence Day, quipped cynically that his countrymen had marched forward since the Revolution "to strength, to honor, and at last to ennui." In fact, the nation's antebellum political leaders were trimmers and compromisers by necessity. Men like John Tyler and Franklin Pierce -- and even those with more glowing names such as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas -- struggled to keep the fragile union of states together at almost any price. "We can win no laurels in a war for independence," Webster one admitted. "Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all but to us remains the great duty of defense and preservation." Charles Francis Adams put it more succinctly: "It is for us to preserve and not to create." Yet despite the best efforts of these skillful preservationists, the country was changing fast. The land of Ralph Farnham's youth and even that of his middle age at the beginning of the current century, had been a very different America. In those days, the tiny cabin that he had built with his own hands of logs felled from the surrounding forest, stood in the middle of an almost virgin wilderness, country so rough that only the poorest and most desperate pioneers settled there. Books and newspapers never reached him; clocks and watches were virtually unknown; a man guessed the time of day by looking at the sun. Neighbors, that is anyone within 10 miles, were rarely seen. A journey of even a short distance meant hiking through the woods along tenuous pathways and old Indian trails. When General Washington first ran for president, Farnham had walked all day to reach the nearest town and cast a ballot for his old commander. Life had been hard in those days, but independence was something tangible and real. Now the little wooden farm house looked out not over endless waves of treetops but on a deforested valley of cornfields, orchards and prosperous villages. The fast-flowing streams that fed the Great East lake were lined with sawmills, gristmills, even a few large factories. In the nearby towns were ingenious devices that he would never have dreamed of even 20 years before. Not long before the Boston trip, a man had shown up at the farmhouse and asked to take his likeness with one of the new photographic machines. The old soldier assented, put on his best suit of clothes, and sat up very straight and dignified holding his walking stick tight to steady himself as the big lens fixed his image forever on a sheet of glass." I was really excited that I actually have this image and be able to get it for the book this incredible glass plate negative photograph that, I mean it's like these 1860s photographs are so amazing. They're so high res, not a word they would have used at the time, but if you get a high res image on your computer, you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in. Literally with this one you can see the stubble on Ralph Farnham's 104-year old chin if you want to. [laughter] I did. "The visits from strangers were no longer much of a surprise anyway. His once remote hillside was now connected to the rest of the world. Any day might bring news or callers. When Farnham had first settled his land, not a single newspaper was published in all of Maine. Now there were almost 70 copying the latest dispatches from across the nation and even from overseas. The railroad passed within a few miles of his front door. He could leave home in the morning and arrive in Boston just after lunch or in Washington the following day, but such a journey still would have seemed to him nearly as fanciful as flying to the moon. He hadn't even been to Boston since he had marched they are with Captain Hubbard's militia back in the Spring of 1775." Okay, that's the section on generation number one. Now I'll go along to generation number two, which is the sort of the intermediate generation, the antebellum generation, the generation that I call the old gentlemen, which is the chapter of, the title of Chapter 2 of my book. This story actually takes place here in Washington, D.C. A lot of the book actually happens in Washington both because it was a center of so much action at the time but also because I think it's where I wrote the book and I just felt so much of the sort of tug historically of this place, you know, walking down the steps of the Jefferson Building when I left it in the evenings and seeing the Capitol right in front of me, seeing the steps where Lincoln gave his first inaugural address, seeing the field where the early recruits who came to Washington played baseball under the chestnut trees and just feeling the tug of that history I think really informed the book. So this is Washington, January 1861. "It might have seemed an unusual transaction hardly in the common line of business for a big auction house like Green and Williams with its commodious premises just off Pennsylvania Avenue halfway between the White House and the Capitol. The partnership's stock-in-trade ran more to real estate, furniture and kitchenware. These were they sorts of valuables that the capital city's transient denizens often left behind as the ever-revolving wheel of congressional elections and presidential administrations, the waxing and waning of political parties, regularly returned large numbers of inhabitants to the far-flung provinces from which they had so recently arrived. Still the potential commission on this sale was tempting since it might well prove substantial. A Negro male, just past the prime of life could fetch a thousand dollars -- the price of a modest house and lot in the city -- and the one now on offer was no common field hand, but a first-rate house servant. If a sharp-eyed speculator or two attended the sale, the price might go even higher. Shipped down to the New Orleans market, this fellow could bring as much as 1,500 or at least close to it, even if his eventual master only intended to put him to work cutting sugarcane. A newcomer to Washington that winter might have been surprised, even shocked to see a slave put on the block here in broad daylight. This was after all 1861 -- hadn't the slave trade in the District of Columbia been abolished more than a decade earlier as part of the Compromise of 1850? Indeed, it had been heralded at the time as the South's most important concession to the North. For decades, abolitionists had been wailing about the moral stain of human traffic here in the capital of the republic. Their propaganda broadsides had shown coffles of Black men and women shackled together being marched past the domed Capitol itself. Now that was all supposed to be a thing of the past. Few people, at least outside of Washington, noticed that the 1850 law did not actually prohibit slave trading itself. It simply banned anyone from bringing Negroes into the District of Columbia for the purpose of selling them out of state. That took care of those embarrassing coffles. Washington would no longer be a major entrepot for Negroes being shipped off to the slave-hungry Cotton Belt from the overstocked Chesapeake region, but it was still perfectly legal for a Washingtonian to put his house servant up for public auction and even to advertise the offering as Green & Williams did in the pages of the Daily National Intelligencer, the city's leading newspaper and a semi official chronicle of congressional proceedings. If the unlucky slave happened to turn up the following week in one of the Alexandria slave pens right across the Potomac, ready to be packed onto a New Orleans-bound schooner, well, that too was perfectly within the law. The Negro coming up for sale on this particular occasion was a 33-year old man named Willis. Selling him might even be called a prestige transaction for Green & Williams, which though large was by no means known as one of the more genteel auction houses in the capital. For this slave had been, as the firm boasted in its advertisement, the value property of "the late Honorable George M. Bibb deceased," one of the District's most distinguished longtime residents. The courtly, white-haired Judge Bibb, also known depending on whom you spoke to, as Chancellor Bibb, Senator Bibb, Secretary Bibb -- had been a fixture of Washington politics and society ever since his arrival as a young senator from Kentucky during President Madison's first term. As his respectful obituaries noted, he had been at various times United States attorney, secretary of the treasury under President Tyler, and after retiring from government service and taking up practice as a leading Washington attorney, habituated the US Supreme Court Chamber. In his politics, the late judge had been admirably moderate both a pro-slavery man and a Union man in the hallowed tradition of his native Virginia. His most notable speech in the Senate had been back in 1833 when South Carolina had threatened to secede over nullification, one of those almost ceaseless sectional crises and compromises that had preoccupied the Federal government throughout recent decades. "My voice is still for peace," Bibbs sonorously began and then spent three and a half hours professing his belief in peace and the Union, the Union and peace. A speech so worthy and so boring one newspaper noted that by the time it concluded every living creature in the senate chamber with the exception of the satisfied order himself had either fallen asleep or fled. [laughter] This is not to say that the late Judge Bibb had been a drab figure. Indeed, he was well known around town for his distinctive ways. Until the end of his life, he clung steadfastly to the fashions of Jefferson's day, silk stockings, buckled knee breeches, and a ruffled white cravat. People saw him, signed sentimentally, and knew beyond all doubt that they were gazing upon a true gentlemen of the old school. The Judge was an accomplished musician. His Georgetown neighbors were used to strolling past his fine brick house on a warm evening and hearing the strains of his violin through the open study windows. Then one spring the violin was heard no more." By the way that house still stands in Georgetown and when I was writing this passage, I was lucky enough I started doing some poking around online and found that the house was actually up for sale so I went to realtor.com and went room-by-room through Judge Bibb's house, you know, there's some great stuff you can get at the Library of Congress and some that you can't so that was really cool. "As for Willis, the Negro, he had been for some years the old gentleman's trusted body servant. It had been he who neatly laid out the silk stockings and knee breeches each morning, who put the violin away in its case, who shaved the grizzled jowls and attended faithfully by the bed during his master's final illness. On the afternoon of the funeral, it was he who prepared refreshments for the distinguished mourners gathered in the Judge's parlor including President Buchanan and most of his Cabinet. Perhaps it was a bit unseemly for a fine family like the Bibbs to advertise their loyal household retainer for sale in the public print and then to make poor Willis stand on the block at that shabby auction house as [inaudible] Green & Williams hovered assiduously pointing out his finer qualities to whoever cared to look. As a man approaching middle age, Willis may well have had a wife and children, perhaps members of the District's large free-Negro community, who would be heartbroken if he were sold south. But then, what use had the Widow Bibb for a gentleman's valet? Manumission was out of the question. Had not the late judge himself often declared his staunch opposition to the practice calling free Blacks "a nuisance to society"? There were estate taxes to think of, too; the deceased had left no fewer than 17 children, and how, pray tell, was a Negro to be divided 17 ways? Wasn't the sale perfectly legal? Wouldn't the good people of Washington in any event forget the matter quickly remembering the late Honorable Judge George M. Bibb as a selfless public servant, a kindly neighbor, an honest gentleman? Money, in the end, was money. So, the advertisement appeared in the Intelligencer for "One Negro man, named Willis, about 33 years of age and a slave for life." Below that a shorter line of type: "Also, one gold watch." So now I'll read the final short section. This is also set in Washington and this is about the arrival of this newer and younger generation enmass right here in the capital. "Washington, May 1861. During the first days of May, an unusual sight greeted visitors to the Capitol. In the great Rotunda beneath the interrupted dome, young men in gray and red uniforms and fezzes swung like merry acrobats from ropes and shimmied up pillars. They capered over the muddy grounds once observer wrote, "leaping fences, knocking down sentinels, turning aside indignant bayonets, hanging like monkeys from the outer ledges of the dome, some 200 feet above the firm set earth." Those staid classical halls had witnessed some strange things already that year. The rancorous scenes to which they had long since become accustomed -- Northerners thundering against Southerners, slaveholders denouncing abolitionists, torrents of baroque invective relieved only by occasional fistfights -- had yielded suddenly to an unprecedented calm, but now just weeks later there was neither tranquility nor rancor here. Rather it might have seemed at first glance that a flying circus had invaded the Capitol. Like the nation itself, the Capitol Building was a work in progress that spring. Several years earlier a forward-thinking Southern statesman had directed an ambitious expansion project spreading the marble wings across their hilltop ready to encompass all the delegations and committees, offices and bureaus that the rapidly growing Federal Union might require. To maintain proper scale, an architect was engaged to remove the old low-rise curve of the roof and replace it with a soaring new dome of cast iron as serenely presumptuous in its grandiosity as a Natchez cotton planter's mansion or a Newport railroad baron's cottage. Then lawmakers busied themselves with deciding what kind of statue should crown the new structure taking a break from their debates over Kansas and slavery, they found a rare moment of bipartisan accord. The nation's temple of democracy must be topped with a heroic statue of freedom that amiable and versatile goddess, but when the sculptor presented his plastered model, sectional strife erupted again. On her head the figure wore a Pileus, the Roman cap of liberty, a conventional bit of allegory, but the Southern politician, who had taken such interest in the work, a man with a fine classical education, knew that the Pileus had been used in ancient times to denote a slave who had been freed by his master. The gentleman, Jefferson Davis, then serving as Secretary of War, protested less such a blatant symbol of abolitionism should crown the very pinnacle of the republic. Now the statue, her objectionable liberty cap, replaced by a politically innocuous, if allegorically dubious Roman helmet, lay in pieces yet to be assembled at a Maryland bronze foundry and freedom's casting was being overseen there by an expert metal worker, a slave, named Phillip Reed. The Capitol dome itself rose half finished, wooden scaffolding and an enormous crane jutting up above its open shell, which seemed to hang in the balance between creation and destruction. Sage minds reflected that it symbolized the incomplete and imperiled nation itself. The metaphor, if not the building, was satisfyingly perfect. Walt Whitman although he had little use for the statue of freedom [inaudible] it as, "an extensive female cast in bronze with much drapery especially ruffles," loved the incomplete Capitol and suggested it be left perpetually as it was with the Derrick Crane a more poetical emblem of the republic than Davis' statue. What though was the meaning of the site to say nothing of the sounds and the smells that greeted visitors in May? No poetical explanations came immediately to mind. In corridors off the Rotunda, statues of lawmakers and patriots trembled precariously on their pedestals as hoards of young rowdies raced past. When a sentry tried to block a group from entering an off-limits areas, they rolled him down the Capitol steps. In the House of Representatives, they play acted a session of Congress in the course of which they elected a speaker, clerk and other officers went into full session, dissolved the Union and reconstructed it. In the senate, invaders quickly found the desk that until recently had been occupied by Jefferson Davis, still bearing a placard with his name neatly inked. A distraught custodian arrived to find the young man hacking it to pieces with their bayonets and feebly protested that it was the property not of the Confederate traitor but of the Federal government that they had just pledged their lives to defend. Ignoring him the young men divvied up the wooden fragments as souvenirs. These were the thousand soldiers of the first New York fire Zouaves, who through the infinite wisdom of military authorities, had been bivouacked in the Capitol upon their arrival in Washington two days before. They had landed in a city already teeming with soldiers so many one newspaper man reflected, "that it's customarily drab streets that last resembled in at least one respect the imperial capitals of Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg. Every third man you passed wore some sort of gaudy uniform. Everywhere, too, particularly in the grandest public buildings was the stench of unwashed bodies and fresh piss. Troops bunked on makeshift cots among filing cabinets and display cases in the Patent Office even in the East Room of the White House 20 feet directly below President Lincoln's desk. Several different regimes quartered in the Capitol. Soldiers slept under congressmen's desks by night; by day drilled hourly before the east front; in the intervening hours stretched out on the young grass beneath the horse chestnut trees heavy with pink white blossoms in the burgeoning spring. Sometimes they played baseball on the lawn where weeks earlier a crowd had gathered to see Mr. Lincoln give his inaugural address; how distant that seemed now. At night recalled one New York private, "the crimson and gold house chamber reverberated with the rhythmic breathing of a thousand sleepers until the drums beat revelry at dawn when the din of rambunctious voices began again unceasing until dusk." The irony of his location was not lost on this thoughtful recruit, Theodore Winthrop, a poet and travel writer of some repute, who had joined up with the New York 7th and who was now hunched over a lamp in one corner of the hall penning a dispatch to the Atlantic Monthly. "Our presence here was the inevitable sequel of past events," he wrote. "We appeared with bayonets and bullets because of the bosh uttered on this floor, because of the bills with treasonist stump speeches in their bellies passed here because of the cowardice of the poltroons, the imbecility of the dodgers and the arrogance of the bullies who had here cooperated to blind and corrupt the minds of the people. Talk had made a miserable mess of it." He scoffed at the departed congressman as belonging already to that by gone epoch of our country when men shaved the mustache, dressed like parsons, said, sir, and chewed tobacco supplanted now in their own inner sanctum by a boulder and more colorful generation." Thank you. [ Applause ] I'm sure some of you have to get back to the office, but I will take a few questions and try to be brief in my responses. Yes? >> [Inaudible audience question] >> Adam Goodheart: When and under which president was Jefferson Davis Secretary of War? He became Secretary of War I believe he was appointed by President Pierce; maybe somebody else with their presidential trivia knows better than I do, but I believe it was under President Pierce. >> You said something about the variety of motivations you found among the young men who were enlisting in the spring of 1861 ranging from a sense of adventure presumably on the part of many because everybody in town was signing up to, you know, more sophisticated of what was at stake and particularly whether you found many who understood that they were called upon to defend a unique experiment in government that had ramifications not just for US but for the world? >> Adam Goodheart: Yeah, it's a terrific question. I think when you talk about the variety and range of motivations that's absolutely perfect, you know, it just annoys me endlessly when these historians and they're still doing it, there's a book that just came out this month that I won't mention by name or title but try to say, okay, the Civil War was all about slavery. It was all about the Union. And, you know, it wasn't all about any of these things if you're talking about the motivations of the people who participated in it. I think that, you know, wars and perhaps crises in general tend to have almost a sort of a gravitational pull of their own that just pull people in for all kinds of reasons and all kinds of motivations and, you know, we even see this going on today in these civil wars that are going on in the Middle East. It's kind of amazing I was in a TV studio a few weeks ago at Fox News waiting to go on the air and they had the live feed coming over and there was somebody talking and saying, well, the forces of the north are fighting against the forces of the south and I'm going they have somebody else on talking about the Civil War 10 minutes before me? And then they were talking about Yemen. [laughter] So, you know, it's funny one of my best friends is a Middle East correspondent for the Times and he's been jetting back and forth to these Middle Eastern civil wars and coming back and telling me about it and it's just amazing, you know, I ask him what are people's motivations? It's very much like here people are pulled in for different reasons. Ideological, religious, tribal, familial, self-interest, and I think that was very much the case. That said I think that people were very, very much aware as you say of defending this experiment in liberty. People were very much aware of, people talked about the Revolution almost incessantly and from the very first moment, you know, it's become a fashionable thing in recent decades to talk about the Civil War as the second American Revolution. People were saying that from like two days after Fort Sumter was attacked there were people writing in the press saying this is our second American Revolution and not meaning a revolution of the south against north but meaning that this was the opportunity for northerners, for unionists, to step up, defend their country, uphold their values and perhaps even create a new kind of republic. So that was very much on people's minds. I think they, you know, we tend to, I think there's also a kind of snobbery often when the past talks about, when the present talks about the past and tries to explain the past, we try to fit these people into neat categories, and I think we have to grant people in the past the same kinds of ambiguities and complexities and moral ambivalences that we know that we have it within ourselves and the present so I think I agree with 100%. Yes, sir? >> Did you also [inaudible] motivations of the border state people like Maryland and Kentucky and Missouri which were really the key to keeping the union together? Did you take people and incidents? >> Adam Goodheart: Yeah, I did, and you know when you talk about that and trying to get beyond those little rows of blue and red light bulbs, really you can just look at those places like even for that matter, Virginia, that were very ambivalent and there were all sorts of reasons that they were ambivalent that were fascinating and I thought almost counter intuitive. I looked especially at Missouri, which was a fascinating place where there was almost like a coup d'tat against the state government that took place on a part of these incredibly weird and colorful unionists and German immigrants at the start of the war and this incredible figure Nathaniel Lyon, who sort of sucked incessantly on hard candies and railed at people anytime that he found something to disagree with them on and it's very strange, colorful characters that the Civil War brought out, you know, Bob Dylan in his memoirs writes about how he loves the Civil War simply because of what he calls the epic bearded characters, and this guy Nathaniel Lyon definitely an epic bearded character. So, yeah, there's amazing stories, but there is some sort of counter intuitive reasons for wanting to stay in the union and one was that a lot of people felt, and I think in retrospect they were right to think this, that slavery was safer within the union than it was outside it, that this war might very well lead eventually to the destruction of slavery. People were very aware of that from the beginning in both the north and the south, and you know, they thought if we secede, then these slaves will be able to escape across the Mason Dixon Line to the north and instead of us being able ought recover them, it'll be a foreign country and we won't be able to get them back and, in fact, that was absolutely exactly what happened from the very first weeks of the war so they were right. Yes, sir? >> I'm interested in the practical. Your book does a wonderful job of weaving all of these stories. How do organize it? Is it the old index cards or was there something? I mean even within your chapters the various stories that you bring together I was really fascinated with how you organize. >> Adam Goodheart: You know I started with index cards and I got through like maybe 30 of them and I said, damn, these index cards, you know. [laughter] Just like I can't keep track of them and I can't read my own handwriting a week later, you know, so no, no index cards, although, you know, most of the writers who I admire sort of swear by index cards, but I often feel like, you know, when writers do use index cards you can almost like when you read the book hear them ruffling through them, you know, like there goes this index card, that index card. So what I did was to simply read and then tell the story. I approached this very much as a storytelling book. I wanted to focus on characters, focus on places. I didn't expect that the book would make scholars especially happy although I'm glad that so far scholars have said nice things about it I'm still bracing myself for that review in the Journal of American History or whatever where they just take apart this book for being a popular, you know, approach. So, yeah, I approach it really as a storyteller. I guess this will be my last question, sir. And gosh, it's all men who are asking questions. No, I feel like it's sexist of me. If there's a woman that wants to ask a question, I'll take one more. If there's not, this will be the last question. Yes, sir? >> I'm wondering now that you wrote one about 1861 [inaudible] the following year? >> Adam Goodheart: Well, actually if I were to continue chronologically, I would have to do 1861 Part 2 because I only actually go up to July 4th, 1861. It's a little bit of a misnomer the title of the book, and I worried about that a little bit but, you know, my editor said, well, don't worry. By the time people realize that they'll have bought the book anyway so. [laughter] So, no, but I don't expect that I'll do an 1862. I think this was really at least for right now the Civil War story that I wanted to tell. Yes, ma'am? I'm so glad. >> Are the [inaudible] planning on doing anything with their archive from the attic? >> Adam Goodheart: Yes. Fortunately, they have. We went through these papers and they were in really rough shape. I mean they were being eaten by rodents and insects. In fact, my students and I nicknamed them the mouse terd papers. >> Oh. >> Adam Goodheart: For obvious reasons. And so, you know, I went to the current owner of the papers and I said, you know, if you don't do something with these right away, your family history within a few months will be mouse terds although I actually didn't use the words polite as terds. So, anyway, he did sort of let us take them, archive them, deposit them in the Maryland State Archives. In fact, one of my magnificent former students who really directed the project, Alvin Coleski [phonetic], who is now a historian with the House of Representatives and with whom I had breakfast a couple of days a week at [inaudible] Cafe when I was working at the Library of Congress, is here and so he, you know, went through and risked the Hantavirus really to get these to where they're in the Maryland State Archives, and they've actually now also through the efforts of Washington College students been digitized and so it went literally from the attic to the Internet in a matter of months. So, anyway, thank you all very much. I will sign books afterwards. [ Applause ] >> Adam lived up to every review. It was a wonderful presentation, and I understand that you put so much into this in a creative way that I can sort of understand why you're going to move on to another topic, but have a chance to talk with him in the back. We have a little time and thanks once again to Adam Goodheart. One more round of applause. [ Applause ] [ Background conversations ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.