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JP:    Yeah.

ASD:    Because the preservation of democracy is what will eventually create freedom everywhere in the world.

JP:    Right.

ASD:    And for a variety of reasons I’m actually—I have an idea to do an essay on this—I think it’s crucially important to historicize how the meaning of the war has changed over time. For most white Northerners I think it was Union, and today that explanation makes no sense to people. Students look at you sort of befuddled because they assume the inexorability of the United States. How could the United States ever really split apart? It seems impossible to imagine. But of course, if you look at Latin America or even Europe it’s perfectly feasible that if the South had successfully split, the West would have split away; we would have ended up with maybe five or six sub-nations within the area that is the continental United States.

JP:    I think what you’re talking about—McPherson does treat this in an interesting way in Battle Cry of Freedom when he talks about if you could look Lincoln’s speeches, when he uses the term “Union” and when he changes to “nation,” that by the end of the war, the Second Inaugural [Address] for instance, he’s not using the term “Union” anymore, he’s using the word “nation.” And then Shelby Foote adds on to this, the difference between United States are and the United States is, becoming a singular nation. That, along with emancipation, I think, in the traditional narrative, is the great gain of the Civil War, the reason why all this bloodshed was worth it, that we become, for once and for all, a nation that can never imagine doing this again.

ADS:    But this is where I think it’s problematic, because a lot of white Northerners weren’t interested in emancipation, they didn’t really own it until the war had finished positively. And if it had degenerated into a guerrilla struggle in which tens or hundreds of thousands more had been killed, or a race war, then they would have basically disowned emancipation and left it in the hands of radical Republicans as a misguided strategy that ended up bringing more devastation.

JP:    Do you think so? With one hundred and eighty thousand black troops?

ADS:    I’m not arguing that it was strategically feasible for that to happen, but if the whole dynamic had spun out differently—

JP:    I guess what I’m saying, is I think that the number of volunteers and the sacrifices by black soldiers made that impossible politically and socially. They might not have been committed to racial equality, certainly not in 1865, but—and I don’t mean to get in conjecture gear—but if the war really had gone on for much longer, I think the sacrifices of black troops would have maintained emancipation to the bitter end. I don’t know that they could have, or would have, gone back on that.

ADS:    I think you’re probably right, although there are an awful lot of Republicans even pushing Lincoln to drop emancipation in ’64 from the Republican platform. And we know now reading Lincoln that he was committed to that all the way along and he had said he wouldn’t do that. If it had been somebody else in office that sort of weighed the political advantages, they might well have done it. And obviously the war has to end with the North victorious for this to mean what it means. So for me it’s more the intellectual challenge of trying to figure out how you establish this question’s meaning and how much of it is driven—it’s all driven by hindsight so I guess I shouldn’t be upset. Our meaning is different than the meaning of the people who fought it, but much of Civil War popular discussion is a struggle over defining that meaning and it’s inhibited by this recognition that the meaning changes.

PC:    You both conclude that this celebration of emancipation is very much after the fact and that we should take people to task for not—particularly in the North—for not embracing this revolutionary achievement. I guess I’d like for you both to speak to just how you feel about history as something that should be celebrated

JP:    Well I would say, from the academic perspective and in my classrooms as a professor, I discourage my students from celebrating history and instead I would rather have them study it. You can love history but not celebrate it. Ask lots of questions, dig into the research, read a lot about the past, never be satisfied that you have the whole story, and maybe some people when we study the past closely, become more complicated and aren’t the simple heroes that we loved in our youth, but other people will surface that had never been noticed before, and they become heroes. So I think it’s important to be critical or even hyper-critical as you say. But again, it’s to know the past, not to celebrate it, and not to judge it either. I’m not holding nineteenth-century Americans to a twenty-first century standard, but I think by not celebrating them but showing how they really were, there is a political dimension to that that perhaps America will be better off if it doesn’t celebrate its past but keeps this critical eye and [is] always eager to inquire and ask more and more questions.

ADS:     I think part of the problem is that there are different kinds of history. There are different stories and different kinds of history, and the kind of history as a way of thinking about the world is an analytical tool, comparable in disciplinary terms to sociology or philosophy, anthropology, all of which have their own methodologies, their own ways of thinking about the world. We happen to be historians because we think that it is essential for people to think historically, which means probing the explanations of why people have acted as they have and how those actions have shaped countries and societies and values over time. And that requires, as Jason said, sort of total detachment. It requires a purer kind of detachment—the myth of perfect objectivity aside—it requires a focus not on judging—and I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that white Northerners should be scorned for not adequately celebrating emancipation. Many did, of course, but many more had other values and it’s not my position to say whether those are right or wrong. Those were the values in that society. So our first instinct as historians is to teach students how to think historically, and in this sense it’s to explain actions. But at the same time, there are narratives that come out of local history that may explain how schools are named that may celebrate the accomplishments of local people, and then there are national histories that emerge out of Fourth of July parties, out of Memorial Day parades, that operate at a level that should at some point be able to touch that analytical history, but that might spend time valorizing and creates heroes. And those things are obviously central to how nations are constructed. The big story in this is of course is the creation of history as a modern discipline, which essentially rejected the notion that our job as historians is to create in people patriotism and blind loyalty to their nation. This is because history is a product of the rise of nation states in late-nineteenth-century Europe. And we’re a hundred years passed that or more, and so historians are thinking much more analytically. But, there are multiple kinds of history and what I would hope is that you have people who are able to do both, essentially. I think this is the point that Jason was making, is that if they can think dispassionately and critically about events while at the same time taking a kind of responsible measure of pride in the accomplishments of people with whom they share a lot and with whom their ancestors shared.

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