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JP:    Yeah, I see a similar dynamic between the hard war and then the hardening of diehard rebels against the Union. What’s really fascinating in my work is, I realized that, while the young officer class from slave-owning families, the last generation, they sort of create a corps of diehard rebels, but the characteristics of who was a diehard rebel and what they believed in meant that you didn’t have to be a slave owner, you didn’t have to be highly educated in order to join this group. For instance, one of the beliefs that kept these men fighting to the bitter end was the constant faith that God was on their side. And southerners didn’t have to be slave-owners to believe that God was on their side. This hatred of Yankee policy isn’t restricted to men who were slave-owners. That bitter war affects southerners of all classes and so the war—while there are a lot of class struggles within the Confederacy, I think within the Confederate army there’s surprising unity among classes within this diehard cast of men. You didn’t have to be a particular rank to think, falsely, that you had won a battle, but in fact it was a draw, for instance. Or to believe rumors from far away that were false. Slavery’s an important part of this equation, don’t get me wrong, but you didn’t have to be a card-carrying slave-owner to join the diehard rebels.

ASD:    I think it’s crucial—and you do this more, I think, than I do—I sort of suggest at the end that to be able to connect this narrative to the post-war narrative, because if we still are buying in to the brothers’ war narrative, the post-war period becomes very difficult to explain. I mean there’s obviously going to be—

PC:    Explain the brothers’ war narrative.

ASD:    The brothers’ war narrative is the idea that the Civil War is a kind of temporary interruption that involves essentially Americans squabbling about American issues, but that at heart we’re all on the same side and the Civil War temporarily divides us, but that we come back together again immediately after because we hold the same core values. The more you talk about snowball fights between camps or trading, the whole thing begins to look like a giant sporting event.

JP:    I would say even more than that, I would say that the brothers’ war narrative implies that it’s a family at war and that the survivors of this conflict are brought closer together by the war itself. So this nation becomes stronger, like the end of Battle Cry of Freedom, [talking over one another] it’s the modernization of America and America becomes a powerful nation propelled into the twentieth century because of this civil war.

ASD:    And if that’s true, then all of the tremendous problems that follow Reconstruction, then the only explanation is that the changing nature of race relations in the South, and obviously the rise of freedmen, the status of freedmen, this rise of slaves, that challenges the white South in fundamental ways and a great deal of the violence and the chaos in the post-war South can be explained that way, but not all of it, and particularly not the kind of intense hostility toward the Federal government that I think is really sort of developed, gestates, during the  war. And you can’t pretend that it ends at Appomattox. We finally now got a clearer picture of what actually happened at Appomattox, and it isn’t the sort of weepy and heroic brothers giving each other a high five and saying that was a good show and let’s go back to the farm. William Marvel’s book shows us, in fact, at Appomattox it required hundreds of armed guards to keep the armies separated because commanders were afraid that hostilities were going to break out at any time. His book very carefully shows us just how tenuous the peace was at that moment because these were guys that were trying to kill each other for four years.

JP:    And I think his book foreshadows the fact that seems obvious, especially now with our war in Iraq, that you can’t really separate the war from Reconstruction, that it is a continuation of the war, and that the war doesn’t really end, some aspects don’t really end for a hundred years. But the end of Reconstruction is really the end, a more appropriate end to this official conflict.

ASD:    Right. You can see the problem looming, which is that during the war, what the North calls war-time reconstruction, southerners call occupation and invasion. They have fundamentally irreconcilable perspectives on what’s going on, and that begins in ’61 at Port Royal, and certainly by ’63 in places in Louisiana, Tennessee, and it presages great problems once the war is over and this is now going on actively.

JP:    Eric Foner did some of that. He starts his book on Reconstruction in ’63, but Civil War historians need to finish their books much later than they do, maybe ’68 or even longer, in order to complement that approach.

PC:    How would you respond, though, to a critic who would say that both of your interpretations resurrect the Lost Cause image of Confederate soldiers as this noble band of brothers who were united to the end, that this was again based upon heroism and shared sacrifice. It seems to me that your conclusions tend to support a Lost Cause view of the war that professional historians have actually tried to dismiss.

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