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JP:    We talk about this trend away from the loss of will thesis toward what Aaron and I are trying to promote, but I also think there’s this greater issue of history books that glorify the war and in the last ten or fifteen years the scholarship that is stressing the murky, dark, sinful side of the conflict. Maybe it was [Charles] Royster’s book that started it, I don’t know, but ever since The Destructive War then you have Harry S. Stout’s book that says this applies just war theory. Obviously David Blight’s book changes our memory of the Civil War in important ways that really darken the conflict. And now a number of monographs are coming out and doing the same thing.

ASD:    And I would even go back further. I think in some ways [Phillip Shaw] Paludan’s book, Victims, which is a limited book [talking over one another] an incident in North Carolina begins—because now there’s now a burgeoning literature on Civil War atrocities on both sides. His book was the first one—I actually have students in class studying this, unrelatedly. One is doing historiography and atrocities don’t figure into the story of the war—I mean, there’s a few mentions here and there, but for the most part Paludan’s book in ’81 is the very first one.

JP:    Yeah, that’s way ahead of the curve. The pinnacle of the books that sort of, I would say glorify, romanticize the war, the pinnacle is Battle Cry of Freedom and then the Ken Burns’ series and you have this zenith of interest in the Civil War in America.

PC:    And so when you say it’s the pinnacle of books, explain what you mean. Why did that resonate with the American people, Battle Cry of Freedom and Ken Burns. Why did it speak to them?

JP:    Well I wish I knew.

ASD:     I think it’s a story that makes us feel good about this conflict that was unimaginably grotesque, six hundred twenty thousand dead and hundreds and thousands of wounded, maimed for life. The story, particularly if you use as a metaphor for the United States the maturation of the individual, and this is our sort of troubled teen years in which we work out the kinks and so that the narrative basically is that we need to get to adulthood as a nation and we certainly know that the normal life pattern is to reach adulthood, we’re willing to basically accept this story. And I think you can also see this narrative in Phillip Paludan’s book, People’s War, which is a terrifically celebratory account of the success that the Union had. It is a success built on the idea that America’s modernizing itself by jettisoning this baggage of slavery that’s essentially pre-modern, that is building an integrated and unified nation, and the problem is very few of these things, particularly if you look at post-war America, very few of these bear out.

JP:    I think modeled within the epic approach to doing history is this story of progress and the celebration of nationalism, and common Americans, everyday Americans, are attracted to that. They loved it in the Civil War series and they loved it in Battle Cry of Freedom. I think the monograph approach, especially when it’s not a narrative, lends itself to a more critical gaze of the past, and you don’t have the tidy conclusion to the story that you get at the end of the Ken Burns series or Battle Cry of Freedom.

ADS:    Although I think equally important is the sort of moral justification that comes with this story. This is one of the things that I found troubling about Stout’s book is that what we can take from the Civil War is feeling good about having emancipated the slaves—though of course the only people who were interested in doing that at the start of the war were the few slaves that wanted to emancipate themselves and the few free African Americans in the North that saw this possibility. There were virtually no white people—there’s a handful of abolitionists—very few white people for whom emancipation was an important motivator for the war. Or even significant cause until halfway through. And I think to claim after the war is over that the war was a good thing because of emancipation is driven by hindsight in a very problematic way. We’ll find the justifications for the war after it finishes, and that’s dangerous.

JP:    I think his book is pretty dark. It’s a jus ad bellum look at the policies of prosecuting war that are considered just, and the fact that neither side followed these laws and what—in fact they were encoded in West Point education. So it’s not like he’s taking a current theory that’s built on the United Nations or something applying it past saying this was actually in fact read at West Point and they didn’t follow it. But his book doesn’t look at just war theory in sort of jus post bellum and jus ante bellum, looking at the causes of the war and then the way you end the war justly. He’s concentrating on Sherman and Sheridan and then Shenandoah Valley and those issues and so it kind of misses some of the greater implications of the war, which might be what you’re saying, in that we’re left wondering is it just about emancipation that redeems this war.

ASD:    I think that’s what redeems the war for us in the national heroic narrative that we have today, that’s what redeems it for us. The only thing I think that we can imagine that would redeem six hundred twenty thousand dead. But historically, I think, for most white Northerners, what redeemed the war clearly was Union. If you had asked Lincoln, he would have said that the preservation of democracy is ultimately even more important than emancipation.

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