What the Civil War Can Teach Us, with Kevin Levin

While Bo was out of commission, Joey was joined by historian and educator, Kevin Levin for a discussion about Civil War memory and how relevant the lessons of the war are a century and half later.
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Whole crew, that whole crew, talking about whole grew.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Everybody's the whole.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Crew, a history pod past, going back to the past,
when the little best past.

Speaker 4 (00:33):
It might lead you a gas are you backing Spier?
But you'll never get tired.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Of whole crew, that whole grew.

Speaker 5 (00:48):
Top scholars on show with Joey and Boo, that whole crew.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Whole crew.

Speaker 6 (01:03):
Welcome to a special episode, a regular episode, a bonus episode,
whatever of Homebrew History. Is your host, Joseph Freaky. And
you will notice, dear listener or dear viewer already you
have seen bo Is not by my side. Bo Is
on other duties, hasn't signed for tonight. We've had a

(01:23):
little special recording, had to flex things in the schedule
and it ended up being someone's birthday and he has
to make a big deal about his birthday. So we
are joined tonight by Kevin Levin. Kevin is the author
and just incredible writer on his own subpects of a

(01:44):
War Memory, which I have been subscribed to now for
I mean, I was on there when it was this
CW memory, you know, a long time ago. So it's
been at least maybe eight or so years that I've
been reading what what Kevin's put out there. He's also
the author of I think one of the most brilliantly

(02:06):
named books ever, searching for Black Confederates, the Civil Wars,
most persistent. Yeah, and it is a delight to finally
get Kevin on Homebrew history.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Great to be here, Thanks so much for the invitation.

Speaker 6 (02:20):
Yeah, so I thought we talked about tonight. It's just
a little bit about Civil War memory in general and
kind of roll through a little bit of the work
that you do and where civil war historians, republic civil
war historians, academic civil war story for ourselves these days.
But I want to go back and just a little bit.
You know, when I first started reading from your blog

(02:42):
and started picking up little bits and pieces of the
nuggets that Kevin has been dropping for so long, I
was reading it from a very different perspective maybe than
I haven't. And I want to be very honest, and
I think this is great, that this character development is
what we call this. But you know, when I first
started reading your bog, Kevin, I was still involved in

(03:05):
the Civil War living history community and on table communities,
which always said things like, you know, you got to
watch that that Levin he's a revisionist. You know, he's
this that he's woke, you know, back when it actually again,
this shows this shows how long I've been reading. You
were pal correct.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
That's right, that's that's right, right, right, So now it's wow.

Speaker 6 (03:30):
Now, So what's what's fun about this is the more
and more I read, the more I was like, you know, actually,
I think you guys are just wrong. Kevin might be
honest something here, and it's you know, it's amazing, no, right, yeah,
so I do want to be honest with you. When
I first started reading, it was like, I guys, this

(03:51):
guy yeah too, and then it very quickly became well, actually,
you know he's he's right. So when you get out
of that echo chamber, you get out of there. So
that's my first question to you is when your readership
is maybe that's not where I want to go, is,
how do you how do you think that we bridge

(04:13):
that gap?

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Right?

Speaker 6 (04:15):
How do you bridge that gap? Because there's little pockets
of Civil War history enthusiast, right, there's the guy that
watches Ken Burns and can quote shelter Foot with the
rabbit numn there story and all that right off the bat, right,
and then there's the academic right and and you know,

(04:35):
we both know Scott. You've met Scott bump Us uh,
and I've known Scott for a couple of years now.
Scott and I we can relate on so much because
we kind of operated in the same circles. And now
on the outside of those circles, it's like, whoa, whoa,
wait a second.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
Now your thoughts on that, you know, Yeah, that's a
really interesting way to start off. I'm glad you're asking
this question. And I mean, I started blogging in two
thousand and five, and at the time, I was a
full time high school history teacher in Charlottesville, Virginia, and
I had just finished a master's degree in history, and
I had focused on the Civil War. I had finished

(05:19):
a thesis on the Battle of the Crater and William Mahone,
which eventually became my first book. And I was trying
to figure out at that time because I wasn't leaving teaching.
I loved teaching, but I also had this really deep
interest in Civil War history and specifically the study of
memory of the Civil War, and I was trying to

(05:40):
figure out, well, how do I continue this, how do
I continue to sort of not only feed my own
interest in this stuff, but connect with other people. And
so blogging had really just started to take off. I
didn't know much about it, but I think I just
one day decided, well, let's give this a shot and
see what happened. And you know, to make a long

(06:02):
story short, within a relatively short period of time, I
had sort of accumulated. I had sort of brought together
a really interesting audience that I did not anticipate at all.
On the one hand, I had a lot of you know,
what you might call Civil War enthusiasts, people that we
both know and relate to. I had, you know, teachers

(06:24):
that read my stuff. And then the other part that
was interesting was academic historians started reading my stuff and
that I was really sort of surprised by. And there
were some really early readers, I mean, historians like can
know if you're in the Civil War historian field, you know,
the late peak Carmichael, people like that who took an

(06:45):
interest and I and as a result, I found it
interesting to try to find ways of connecting people. Right,
So in the comment section, you know, people were talking
to one another and I just thought that was absolutely fast.
On top of that, I had people who were you
might call a sort of modern lost causers, neo confederates, who,

(07:08):
as you've already referred to, you know, have taken sort
of a negative view of my efforts, which I find
interesting for a number of reasons, and perhaps we could
talk about it. But I've always seen my role online
and especially my work beyond blogging, as trying to relate
to different groups of people, trying to connect people whenever possible.

(07:32):
We all have a shared interest in this, in this history,
and I think we all stand to be able to
learn something from one another. So it's been a real
it's been a fascinating journey, one that I did not
anticipate twenty years ago. I mean, this coming November will
be twenty years of writing my blog Civil War Memory.
It's been a wild ride.

Speaker 6 (07:54):
And now it's it's migrated to substack, but doesn't take
away the Yeah right.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
It's same thing, really, I mean, it's just different platform.

Speaker 6 (08:01):
Yeah, So I guess let's let's dive into because you
kind of you broached it. We teased it a little bit,
is you know, and I guess full transparency most listeners
know this. But if you happen to come across this
for the first time. I likewise spend a lot of
time in the Civil War field. I'm public historian. I

(08:22):
worked at the Battle of Franklin Trust organization that has
taken its fair share of flack for talking about slavery,
mentioning you know, the causes of the war, talking about
the lost cause, talking about monuments and memory and the
myth of reconciliation. So full transparency.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Right, I've got.

Speaker 6 (08:40):
An email, a folder of emails that's like this thick.
There's nothing compared. I was only there for three years.
It's nothing compared to like Eric, Right, he's got filing cabinets.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
Poor guy, a poor guy. Yeah, but how do.

Speaker 6 (08:54):
You you know? What do you what do you say?
What do you think? When you when you're on the
receiving end of these, we'll call them attacks, you know,
the intellect, attack on interpretation. But then two sometimes you're
kind of personal attacks. I can't Yeah, I've been called
you know, X, Y and Z. Right, But you know

(09:15):
it's not just like, let's bad mouth people. But you know,
if you're out there, you're working, you're trying to get
people to come to an understanding with arguably the most
defining moment in the history of the country, certainly of
the nineteenth century. Yeah, you have to be honest about it.
And all of a sudden you're being confronted with the longest,
most difficult obstruction in history.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
How do you do it? Yeah? So I think the
first thing I would say is that when I look
back on my interactions over the last twenty years, I
have to say the vast majority have been positive, Right,
I mean, obviously the negative ones stand out. And I
also have a long you know archive email archive that

(09:57):
goes back all the way, and you know, on occasion,
I will sort of, you know, just old time sake, right,
sort of go through it, pick out my top ten
list if you will. Maybe I'll do something like that
for the twentieth anniversary of my my blog. People will
enjoy that. But I think I think those moments, you

(10:20):
know that you're describing that we've all experienced, I think
those are moments where that reflect They reflect the number
of things. One of the things that it reflects is
the fact that there are people out there who take
a very personal interest. There's a very deep personal investment

(10:42):
in this history, and that could be for any number
of reasons, but overall, I think it's because they're preferred
narrative of the Civil War era reinforces or feeds something
about how they see the world today. It might be
a very direct connection to current politics, right There are

(11:04):
plenty of examples of that, and quite often it might
be because that individual has an ancestor who fought for
the Confederacy, where there's some other connection to that period
of time. And I think, you know, when I'm when
I'm writing online, and I should say I used to

(11:24):
hear from those people a lot more, you know, five
years ago and back than I do now. But when
I would hear from them, I would try to be
as understanding as possible. As long as you are respectful,
I will engage. Once you sort of move beyond that,
you know, obviously game is over. But I always try

(11:46):
to remember that, you know, they're coming at this from
a perspective that again I could learn something from, maybe
not content related, but just in terms of, you know,
one's attitude towards the past, which I find really interesting
as someone who studies you know, memory of the war
and and so yeah, I mean those can be very

(12:09):
uncomfortable moments, but you know, again they sort of pale
in comparison to the positive interactions. And you know, there
is no other event in our history like the Civil
War in the sense that you know it is as
it is very much our felt history, right, and that

(12:31):
manifests itself in so many different ways, and you know,
it's it's still with us in many ways. I mean,
I think it's changed over time, you know, given each
generation and the further we are removed from that that history.
But you know, there are still people out there who
are who are deeply invested in it.

Speaker 6 (12:54):
And I think that's the thing that always struck me
in my dealings with the public leads. You know, who's
going to show up and take a tour, right, So
you start, you're talking, and you're giving family background, you
talk a little bit, and you know, all of a
sudden you're ready to start talking about getting us geared
door as the war and you say, you know, by
eighteen sixty the Carters were here and there were twenty

(13:15):
slave of men, women and children here. And you can see,
if you're skilled and quick enough, you can see the room.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
Yeah, you can read it.

Speaker 6 (13:22):
Well, the change very very quickly, that's right, And it
doesn't I don't think it always comes from a place
of malice, and I don't think it always comes from
a place of you know, oh, I got to help
listen to this. Sometimes it comes from I'm uncomfortable with
this conversation because what I don't want is to be
chastised for the actions of people one hundred and sixty

(13:44):
years ago, which is fair. I mean, that's fair to say, right.
And then the other part of it is, you know,
I don't want to hear about how this is my
fault or anything like that, right. And then the other
piece of it, I think is the uncomfortability. And this
is a common station that you know, I've seen you
have on on Civil War memory. I've seen, uh, you

(14:05):
mentioned him, So I'll bring him back up. The late
Pete Carmichael talk about difficulty in modern times talking about
race in the nineteen yeah, and talking about it today.
It becomes an uncomfortable conversation. But I think that's part
of the necessary bit of learning, and certainly the necessary
bit of interpretation is the uncomfortable part.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
Yeah. Oh, absolutely, I think you've you've sort of you've
nailed it, and I've I've seen people I've seen that
that that that level of uh, discomfort or that you know,
I've experienced that discomfort with others, and again it comes
in different ways. I think sometimes it's it's as innocent

(14:49):
as well. I've you know, I've always thought about the
Civil War, as you know, the war of the common soldier, right,
in other words, something along that you know, reconciliation narrative
that you know has us think of remember and commemorate.
The war is simply a war between soldiers on both
sides who fought bravely, but we're not going to sort

(15:11):
of delve into the respective causes for which they thought.
Sometimes it is you know, as you pointed out that
that feeling of personal responsibility, I've never really quite understood that.
I think one can you know, acknowledge a sense of

(15:32):
responsibility simply as you are part of a nation that's
whose history includes the history of slavery, the history of
Jim Crow, and as a member of a nation with
a history, you have to take some ownership. What that means,
of course, is something worth discussing. I mean, one of

(15:55):
the things my wife likes to say to me, she's
from Germany, and she she noticed this very early on,
as you know, I was taking her to some of
these historic sites, and you know, one point she commented
that you are cut. She said, your country has no
sense of collective shame. Right, So there's a comparative attitude
between you know, what she perceived here regarding you know,

(16:17):
Americans and their history and back home in Germany obviously
thinking about World War two. So yeah, I mean it
is you know, when you are when your collective memory
is so deeply embedded in this notion of American exceptionalism,

(16:38):
that we are the leader of the free world, that
that there is a natural progress towards greater freedom. We're
always sort of freedom is always expanding, right, right, We're
never sort of taking a step back. Well, of course,
when you you know, acknowledge that history is more complex

(16:59):
than it is muddier, you know that that is possible
you can take a step forward and two three steps back.
You know, that can get very uncomfortable, right, And we're
seeing that right now. I mean that is essentially you know,
in my mind, that sort of encapsulates the kind of
politicization of history that we're seeing right now, whether it's

(17:23):
how we teach or you know, how we should celebrate
the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the United States,
which is, as you know, ongoing.

Speaker 6 (17:33):
Yeah, and I think you kind of alluded to this
a minute ago, and I meant to bring it up then,
but you talked about how the Civil War gives us
our first kind of it's our felt history, our corrective memory.
Right then, you know, to paraphrase Robert Penn Warren, it
was time right that that as a nation we had
some shared suffering. But out of that suffering, you know,

(17:57):
I would always say that, you know, out of the suffering,
hundred seven hundred and seven hundred and fifty thousand men die,
the nation is saved. Slavery is abolished, and very quickly,
within a five year period we three three amendments to
the Constitution thirteen, fourteen and fifteen that abolished slavery, and
by eighteen seventy five years extend voting rights to black men,

(18:20):
which is forward right.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
No one would have anticipated sixty right.

Speaker 6 (18:27):
And then all of a sudden we end reconstruction. And
I think, really we talk about problems with Civil War memory,
how much of the problems with understanding the Civil War
and thinking about it in our day to day life
go back to reconstruction.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
Even sure, Oh, I think a lot of it. You
what you were just saying about about sort of the drastic,
the radical change that took place between you know, the
beginning of the war and not just the end of
the war, but then moving of course into the post
war period. You know, go to eighteen seventy obviously again

(19:04):
the fifteenth Amendment, but you know, take a couple of years,
go a couple of years back to eighteen fifty eight
in dred Scott, right, I mean, the Supreme Court declares
that African Americans are can never be citizens, right, And
of course ten years later, twelve years later, we see
that change. It's interesting because you know, we've already sort

(19:25):
of talked about this kind of this the sense of
the Civil Wars are felt history as sort of geared
toward that lost cause that you know, people are deeply
invested in this history because it's a relative or whatever
it is, that personal connection. But I find in the

(19:47):
last few years that there is another kind of distortion
of the Civil War era, and it comes from the
opposite side of the spectrum, if you will. And I
think it's the failure to acknowledge change over time, right.
I think Americans right now are just you know, many
Americans I should say, not all, certainly are you know,

(20:09):
experiencing a sense of doom and gloom right now. And
with all of the recent news, especially on the racial front,
over the last few years, I think it can seem
to some people that, well, nothing has changed in the end,
that we are as I hear all the time, and
it drives me nuts that we are still quote unquote

(20:30):
fighting the Civil War, right, that reconstruction was a complete failure,
that nothing good came of it, that it was it
was inevitable that it would fail. Right. All of these
are a kind of you know, self serving narrative that
we deploy to explain the present. But I think, like

(20:53):
the Lost Cause, it doesn't really identify acknowledge again the
complexity of that time period. And I think that is
the struggle that that's you know, as a historian, as
an educator, I confront all the time that you know,
on the one hand, people certainly need a useful past,

(21:18):
a past that helps them get through the day, if
you will, and explain what's happening. That's a natural urge,
I think. And at the same time, I think it's
that at the same time, I think we need to
remind people that that's not necessarily what you might describe
as a critical examination of history. That's not what historians

(21:40):
are doing when they're doing history, right, And so I
think there's there's often a you know, we're often talking
past one another, at least when I'm talking to people
online on social media trying to get them to take
that next step, And that's another place where you can
and end up having very unpleasant conversations.

Speaker 6 (22:04):
I feel like the social media front of history and
the public history of front of history can kind of
almost meld with one another because you see a lot
of the same interactions. Right, I don't want to hear this.

Speaker 7 (22:18):
I don't you know, you don't know what you're talking about,
which is crazy, crazy audacity to have in front of
a group of twenty peoples, Like I clearly no more
than you do, you idiot.

Speaker 6 (22:31):
You know, And that's being nice. But you know, the
idea that reconstruction failed totally, right, I think completely disregards
the work of reconstruction. Yeah, I would say, you know,
to the person that says we're still fighting the Civil War,
I would say, no, I think we're finishing reconstruction. You know,

(22:56):
we're continuing reconstruction. And one of the things I used
to groups was, you don't get to the modern civil
rights movement of the nineteen sixties without going through the
first civil rights movement of the eighteen sixties. You have
to have that, But it doesn't mean that it works.
Right the Civil Rights School eighteen seventy five is crushed
by Jim Crow. Yeah, but then there's still voices of

(23:19):
protests that come out from the regions.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Not yeah, it never stops, right, I mean, because that's
how that's the narrative that you know, if you did
pay attention in your high school history class, that's the
narrative you learn that somehow reconstruction ends, Jim Crow takes over,
and it's kind of like the Dark Ages, right until
you get to Brown v Board event or something in

(23:43):
the mid nineteen fifties. Right, Well, if you actually do,
you know, open the hood and look under, right, you're
going to see a great deal of civil rights protests
right through that period. One of my favorite speeches by
Frederick Douglas is a speech that he gave within a
few months of his death eighteen ninety five, and he
was helping to dedicate a new Black School in Manassas

(24:06):
of all places, the sight of two major Civil War battles.
And at one point, you know, it's a wonderful speech
to read. And at one point he sort of he's
got students in front of him and teachers in the
broader black community, and he looks at the kids and
he's like, well, you probably wondering, you know, what is
my advice for you? How should I see the future? Here?

(24:28):
You are these, you know, students, you still have your
lives ahead of you. What does it look like for
us right What should we be looking for? What will
our lives turn out to be? And he's very, very positive,
He's like, this is the best time to be alive
right now. Now, this is You might be surprised by
that because it's eighteen ninety five and for a lot

(24:49):
of people by that point in time, everything has shut down,
right at least in that general area of time, And
that's not Doug his attitude. And so I guess it's
also a reminder that we do need to, you know,
look at how people experience the world from their viewpoint, right,

(25:11):
rather than knowing how the broader story turns out from
our perspective, our vantage point, and I think that when
you do that, you find a much more dynamic kind
of story that you can tell, because, of course, no
one knows what's going to happen tomorrow, no more than
we do right now. Take any you know, major issue

(25:34):
that we're confronting right now, and no one knows how
it's going to turn out tomorrow or the next week
or the next month. And that's I think sometimes you know,
worth acknowledging that fact in the people that we study
in the past.

Speaker 6 (25:50):
And one of the things I appreciate about your writing
and the work of so many of our more modern
scholars is that they're taking that approach of trying to
place people within the context of the time that they lived.
But there's a propensity really in the kind of the
popular culture, the everyday reader. They want to kind of

(26:13):
look back with the hindsight of one hundred and fifty
one hundred and sixty years and talk about how reconstruction
either failed or how reconstruction was so oppressive and so appalling,
and there's never the middle ground that talks about, you know,
what did the soldier who was in the you know,
the sixty fifth Pennsylvania, what did he think about when

(26:36):
he went home and it was eighteen seventy two and
people were already starting to forget the war and put
it behind them, and there's an economic panic coming the
next year, but he might not ever realize that in
the moment. And then all of a sudden, it's the
eighteen eighty and he's going into a soldier's home because
he can't cope with what he experienced. And people would ask,

(26:57):
you know, what did you even do? You know, you
won the war, but you couldn't win the peace. Yeah,
And that's one of the things I love about Brian
Jordan's book Margin, where he talks about these men sat
around with empty sleeves and stood at the base of
monuments dedicated to their regiments, and none of their generals,

(27:17):
none of them to their to the cause the preservation
of the union or emancipation or anything. And you could
ask what did you even fight for? In the same
way that nobody ever bothers to ask what a formerly
enslaved person now living in freedom is thinking throughout the
eighteen seventy and eighteen and that it seems like there's
this big, almost a big gap right smack in the

(27:41):
middle of it. Or thinking about the Civil Wars.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
It speaks to this. You know, there's always this, if
I'm following what you're getting at here, there's always this
sort of tension between on the one hand, wanting to
say something, you know, wanting to create some level of
synthesis you know, coming out of your research. Right. In
other words, if you're studying say, for example, as you
mentioned civil war soldiers, I mean, as you well know,

(28:09):
there's a real deep body of really good scholarship about
Civil war soldiers, and it tends to take the approach of,
you know, you have a couple questions. You you know,
you're going to pose to the evidence, and what do
you do. We look at diaries, we look at letters,
and we sort of pick and choose, you know, what
comes out of it, and we try to sort of
create some kind of coherent narrative. And then at the

(28:33):
same time, of course, you know, you have to acknowledge that,
you know, when you look at the individual, right, that's
a very different experience over the course of the war,
what what he experienced. And then certainly, as scholars have
have increasingly shown over the last few years, you know,

(28:53):
their post war experiences, which are you know, so dramatically
different where you after the war. You know, your political affiliation,
whether you are disabled physically or psychologically, or perhaps both,
your race. Right, the experience of a black Civil War

(29:14):
veteran is very different from a white Civil War veteran
for obvious reasons, also being able to land a pension.
You know, once pensions become available. So I mean the
individual experience is it's always I think helpful to give
you an example, I am editing a collection of letters

(29:36):
from a South Carolinian named John Winsmith. He was a
captain and die hard Confederate on the eve of the
war and right through the war. His letters go right
through September eighteen sixty four. And this guy brought like
three or four body servants with him into the army.
He is committed to slavery from beginning to end, as
was his father. In fact, his father was serv being

(30:00):
in the South Carolina Assembly and actually proposed the resolution
for secession. So this is I mean, they are die
hard through and through. During reconstruction, both the father and
son become radical Republicans. I mean it is. You know,
I'm still trying to figure out how to explain this transition,

(30:23):
but when you follow one individual through this this incredible
time period, there is so there is so much more
to confront as a historian because you're really sort of
trying to understand how an individual life, you know, experiences,
how a specific person experiences such dramatic events, right, and

(30:48):
how they are impacting events events are impacting them. I mean,
it is a whole different ballgame. And so yeah, I
mean there and there is so much to write about
when it comes to this time here, and also because
it's so relevant to today. And I think I think
that gets us back to the fact that for a
lot of people, you know, looking back on who are

(31:10):
not necessarily students of history or obviously historians, but who
are aware of the past, they want something that is
going to be that is going to be useful, right.
They want something that is going to explain what's happening
right now to make that bigger connection. So yeah, I
mean it's all kinds of challenges.

Speaker 6 (31:31):
Yeah, So we're going to take a quick commercial break
and when we come back more with Kevin le then
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(33:51):
back with Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory. You can
find Kevin on substack and you can pick up his books.
There's another one on the way right, because we've got
the Robert Goldshaw biography on.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
The one hopefully early next year.

Speaker 6 (34:06):
Yeah, amazing, amazing, And I wanted to pick your brain
about that a little bit, because, yeah, how do you
write about Matthew Broderick.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
Right right right? No, No, it's it's I mean, there's a
wonderful I've posted this on my uh on my blog
a couple of times, but there's a wonderful side by
side of Matthew Broderick and Robert Goldshaw. And man, they
do really look alike. They they nailed it, They really did.

Speaker 6 (34:34):
So how do you you approach the story that has
been so kind of encapsulated in a movie, really, because
I think that's a lot of people's first exposure to
the United States Colored troops and their service during the war.
Is the film, which, let's be very straightforward, is an
excellent film, It's the best. But how do you how
do you separate the man in the movie from the

(34:56):
man in reality? And I feel like that has to
be a challenge when you can consider the way that
he's melded into the story of the fifty fourth Massachusetts
is very different maybe than his upbringing.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
Oh absolutely, I mean the movie. What's so fascinating the movie,
doesn't I mean the movie alludes to his upbringing. I mean,
obviously some of those early scenes, especially when he's back
home and receives word that he's been offered the command
of the fifty fourth. Of course, Shaw was actually in
Virginia in camp. His father came down to notify him

(35:28):
that the governor, you know, was going to make him
an offer, and so you get a sense of his
upper class background in Boston, although the family had moved,
you know, by that time, they lived in Staten Island.
But you know, it's so the movie gets that part right.
But I mean, look, Hollywood has its own agenda when

(35:51):
it comes to making movies that are set in history,
and you know, that agenda rarely includes the kind of
commitment to the truth as historians understand it. And I
understand that. I accept that. In fact, you know, I
don't watch, you know, movies about history, you know, because

(36:14):
I'm interested in history. I watched those movies because I
hope they're entertaining and they might inspire you to read history.
But you know, I had moved to Boston in twenty eleven.
I've been living in Virginia since two thousand and so
all of my research was really centered on Virginia and
the Confederacy. I was just fascinated with all of it.

(36:37):
And you know, I had to finish my Black Confederates
book after I moved here, but I was already I mean,
moving to Boston, of course, you were surrounded by a
very rich history, and so I, you know, decided fairly
early on that my next big project was going to
be something more locally rooted. And Shaw just seemed the

(36:57):
perfect subject because, again, as someone who's interested in memory,
I can sort of use glory as as a point
of departure, because, as you rightly point out, I mean,
for a lot of people, that is what they know.
That might be the only thing they know about the
fifty fourth and Robert Gouldshaw, and so, you know, writing

(37:18):
a full length biography gave me the opportunity to really
flesh out that story. And one of the things I
was really interested in doing is trying to understand Shaw's
earlier military career, because I think most people, you know,
when they think of Shaw, they think of the fifty fourth.

(37:40):
But Shaw was only in command of black soldiers from
roughly February first until July eighteenth, what roughly six months,
But he had been in the army since the spring
of eighteen sixty one. And so I was really interested
in how that earlier experience in Virginia, mainly in the

(38:01):
Shenandoah Valley and then further east, how that experience early
on shaped his understanding of, you know, what it means
to command soldiers, and also, of course, you know, his
evolving understanding of emancipation and race. It seemed to me
only you know, if you have to sort of come

(38:24):
to terms with that earlier history if they're going to
understand anything about his last six months in command before
his death at you know, leading his troops at Battery
Wagner on July eighteenth, sixty three.

Speaker 6 (38:38):
Well, I know that there's a whole band of listeners,
and I know Bow and I are both excited about it.
Have been following along with you since you, you know,
announced that that's what you were working on.

Speaker 2 (38:47):
That appreciate it.

Speaker 6 (38:49):
He's one of those those stories of the war where
you see his picture. He's immortalized in bronze in Boston,
but you don't necessarily sheal him, right, He's this kind
of it's only yeah, you want to make the comparison
to Joshua Chamberlain because it's too easy. Yeah, but it
feels like he's in this great pantheon that you can't

(39:09):
wipe understand him in the way that you could understand
saying maybe a William Carney.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
Yeah, no, I think that's certainly true. Look, it helps, Uh,
it helps to die right in the middle of the war,
commanding soldiers on the battlefield, And just as important, it
helps to have a mother who was absolutely committed to
memorializing her son after his death, almost immediately and so

(39:39):
you know, when you when you appreciate that you know
his memory, the memory story begins to make sense. But
it also helps you to realize that there's something quite
distorted about this picture because and I think Glory contributes
this to a certain extent, but I think think there

(40:00):
is something and I think the problem is that Glory
has to compress the story in certain respects. So by
the end of Glory, Shaw has become fully committed to
his mission. He has died, you know, carrying out the
mission that he had always been intended to assume or

(40:24):
lead right namely black soldiers in the cause of emancipation.
At the end of Glory you see Augusta Saint Gauden's
beautiful relief statute that's in Boston here in Boston, and
the text the narrative something along the lines of that
the attack at Wagner sort of solidified the place of

(40:45):
black soldiers in Shaw and all of that. And Shaw
certainly evolved in his understanding of race and the men
under his command, but not to that extent. And I
think what Glory has done is it has pushed other
officers away from being more fully recognized. In other words,

(41:09):
I mean take one example, a wonderful new biography of
Thomas Wentworth Higginson just came out. Higginson is really the
He's the real deal, I mean full abolitionists. Before the
Civil War, had aligned himself with John Brown here in Boston,
had rescued or attempted to rescue fugitive slaves who were

(41:32):
being arrested and forced back into slavery. He was down
in South Carolina, commanding the second South Carolina Volunteer, is
one of the first black regiments raised down there. No
one knows about Higginson or even James Montgomery, who is
featured in Glory. But Montgomery's portrayal in Glory is the villain,

(41:53):
right and go to the famous Burning of Darien. When
you read Shaw's letters, he had a much more complicated
understanding of James Montgomery and actually admired him quite a bit.
But Montgomery, of course, is in the mid eighteen fifties
fighting against slavery on the Kansas Frontier. No one knows

(42:17):
who Montgomery is apart from the portrayal of Glory. So
it seems to me that Shaw gets a bit more
recognition in this regard than he deserves. And I think
that One of the things I try to do with
the biography is by slowing it down and by sort
of really trying to nail down where Shaw was on

(42:39):
race and slavery and commanding black soldiers. I think it
does help us get back to one of your earlier
points here tonight, which is that is that few people
could have anticipated in eighteen sixty sixty one where the
war would end up. Even by eighteen sixty Remember, the

(43:01):
war doesn't have to The war could have ended with
slavery still intact. The war had ended before the end
of eighteen sixty two. The Union is saved. That gives
Lincoln and the vast majority of the loyal white citizenry
of the United States everything they had wanted, and for
Shaw specifically, that would have been enough. Yeah. Right, But

(43:26):
the war does continue, right, it's and that's what Shaw
and so many other people were grappling with trying to
make sense of and their own place in all of that.

Speaker 6 (43:38):
And you can you can see that throughout the war too,
with some of the bigger characters and bigger features. Right.
One thing, you know, one of the kind of the
last points we wanted to try and make with this
conversation is where do we see Civil war history? And
I want to be really specific with this one civil
war memory and the challenges that we face and understanding

(44:00):
our war today, because you kind of alluded to it,
the politicisation of history, you know, when you get pictures
of Congress, congressmen Congress women taking pictures on top of
monuments and misidentifying them as the Wilder Monument and talking about,

(44:20):
you know, distorting the facts for their their own kind
of personal satisfaction and to really glom on to maybe
the least common denominator. What do we do as historicians
and as readers of history, those of us who are
in the field, Because it certainly seems as though this

(44:42):
is a challenging time. And it's not just I'm not
just saying this because of today, right, It's not just
twenty twenty five. This has been a problem for a decade,
if not more, of this issue with reckoning with the war,
reckoning with slavery, discussing race, reckoning with race, and trying
to find ways to have a conversation about the Civil

(45:04):
War that doesn't end up with one side trying to
refight it on the other side.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Trying to Yeah, no, I hear you, I guess I
would push back a little, only in the sense of,
I don't think that what we're experiencing today in regard
to the contested nature of history, and specifically the Civil
War era, is really any I mean, certainly it's evolved

(45:30):
in certain ways, but I don't see it. We've always
it's not new. Struggled with it, it's not new, right.
In fact, I think what I find encouraging is you
know that you don't have to go that far back
to find, you know, a still a very vibrant lost

(45:53):
cause narrative that still appealed to politicians on both sides
of the aisle, right, go back to the nineteen nineties
and nineteen eighties. I mean, the lost Cause, especially in
the South, was still very much a kind of regional narrative.
I think that that has changed dramatically over the last

(46:14):
ten to fifteen years, and I think, you know, it
helps to explain why even in places like Richmond there
are no monuments anymore. I mean, I mean talk about
not being able to anticipate change. I mean I wrote
a piece in twenty seventeen for Smithsonian I think was

(46:36):
sixteen seventeen in which I said, I was basically making
the argument that Richmond has done a really good job
of expanding its monument landscape and that you know, it
serves as a model for other cities, kind of making
the case that perhaps there was a way of continuing

(46:58):
the status quo. When it comes to the con Federate monuments. Well,
I mean two, that's right, they're pretty much all gone,
and even in places like Charlottesville, Baltimore, New Orleans. So
the political leverage that lost causers once had, right, I mean,

(47:20):
in Virginia, right now, the governor may actually accept a
bill from the Assembly that denies Confederate Heritage Group's tax
exempt status for the first time. So there's another example.
He vetoed it last time last year, but it again,
it just helps make the point that, you know, what

(47:40):
was once the dominant narrative that had again political leverage,
is just I think blown out of the water. What's
taking its place, I'm not quite sure. I mean, certainly
there's a kind of a neo emancipationist narrative that reduces
I think we're once to reduce the war to the

(48:02):
issue of slavery. And on the one hand, that is
very much a corrective to the lost cause, right, but.

Speaker 6 (48:12):
An overcorrective without.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
It could right? It could? I mean the one hand,
it's refreshing. Right. On the other hand, I think it it.
I think it it puts us in a position where
we're not able to appreciate the complexity of what Northerners
or what, you know, the citizenry, of the loyal citizenry

(48:35):
of the United States was actually fighting for and the
evolution of the war, as we've already talked about. I
think it makes it more difficult to understand that you
had a.

Speaker 6 (48:44):
Great post a few weeks ago about the Union War, right,
and you quote it a little bit from Gary Gallagher,
and you use some primary source material here and there. Yeah,
And what jumped out to me is for the listeners
of the show, and I'm sure you've seen a little
bit here and there. I've researched an Indiana State senator
who goes on into the war, becomes a general. I've

(49:05):
been with George Wagner for a decade now, and what's
amazing is there's no primary source material that he leaves behind.
There's no diary, no journal, he has no memoir. He
never lives long enough to write it. But what you
see from him is a man who you point out
in that piece is dedicated to the country. He's dedicated

(49:26):
to the idea of union. And some of that comes
from cultural heritage, right. He's a second generation German American.
His father had immigrated to the United States for stability
and to be part of a union, to be part
of a country. And now all of a sudden, in
eighteen sixty and sixty one, there's this this this tear,

(49:47):
this tension has broken the back of the nation, and
you get men like George Wagner, like an Emerson Updyke,
like Ulysses says Grant, like a Robert Goldshaw, that say,
you know, you don't just get to do that, you
don't get to lead. So we start in eighteen sixty

(50:08):
sixty one.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
With that mindset, yep.

Speaker 6 (50:11):
But by eighteen sixty sixty four their mindset has changed,
and now it's no longer just preservation of union. It's
also ending slavery understanding like Lincoln and like Douglas has said, yeah,
you have one without the other.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
I think two points, I agree with everything you just said.
Two points. I think Gallagher is right that we don't
really have a concept of Union in twenty twenty five.
The challenge for us is to understand and appreciate what
the Union meant to the loyal citizenry of the United States,

(50:47):
their connection to the revolutionary generation, especially in a place
like where I live now, Boston, right, makes perfect sense.
But I think your point about how the war evolves
is also an important one, both because again, they couldn't
anticipate the way the war would evolve, but understanding that

(51:10):
even for those you know, Union soldiers and even many
on the home front who embraced emancipation, they embraced it
because they believed it was the fastest way to reunite,
to end the war and reunite the nation, And so
understanding the kind of instrumental role that emancipation played also

(51:32):
helps us to appreciate the struggles to come, because again,
I think we run into a roadblock if we just
assume that emancipation sort of dominates the thinking of the
eighteen sixties, right, ending slavery and equal rights, then the
next hundred years won't make any sense, because that struggle

(51:55):
won't make any sense. But if you understand that Americans
in the eighteen sixties created a nation, a revolution sort
of creates a new nation, if you will, the Second
American Revolution, as some historians sort of refer to it,
and it's one that they could not have anticipated right

(52:16):
or fully understood how that would play out. Then I
think it sort of humbles us a bit more, you know,
in the present moment, and sort of forces us to
take a step back and say, okay, hold on here,
how did that happen? Right? What were the consequences? How
did Americans of various stripes try to make sense of
it all? And go on from there?

Speaker 6 (52:37):
Right, Kevin, We're gonna do two more segments here. We
have a little well word association to play and get
your thoughts on this first picture.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
So I have to choose one word or can I
just describe it? You can describe it well? Is it
a furling flag? Or is it a rising flag? Right? Ah, yes,
I know this one well, Agency, there's a one word answer.

Speaker 6 (53:09):
Agency, explain just for those who haven't picked up your
book yet, what this image is.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
Yeah. This is probably one of the most iconic photographs
of the entire Civil War. This is a photograph of
Andrew and Silas Chandler Andrew the White Man in Silas,
his body servant, or what I refer to in my
book Searching for Black Confederates a camp slave. And this
photograph was likely taken in eighteen sixty one as the

(53:39):
two were going off to war. Silas had been born
enslaved to the Chandlers in Virginia before they moved to
Mississippi West Point, Mississippi in the eighteen forties, And like
a lot of Confederate officers from the slaveholding class, they
would bring a body servant as they would call it,

(54:00):
into the army. They were attached legally to their owners.
They were not a part of the Confederate military, and
they would perform any kind of service job that their master,
you know, asked them or ordered them to do. The
way to understand this photograph, in my mind is that

(54:23):
this is another example of how of the flexibility of slavery.
So slavery expands in various ways up to the Civil War.
You think of it in terms of agriculture, you can
think of it in terms of industry in certain parts
of the South. And then once the war comes, slavery

(54:43):
expands even more to become a resource for the Confederate
war efforts. So when Alexander Stevens talks about slavery as
the cornerstone of the Confederacy. He is talking about every
aspect of the Confederacy, including the armies.

Speaker 6 (55:00):
M Well, that was, you know, exactly what I kind
of hoped, because without having the audio and the visual side,
our listeners might just be a little confused. I would
feel crazy doing Bouhicky history without bo So instead, I'm
just going to ask you what's in your cup?

Speaker 2 (55:18):
Oh, I'm going to really depress you, to disappoint you,
I should say, because it's just water right now. I'm
dealing with some really bad allergies right now. Yeah, I apologize.

Speaker 6 (55:29):
That is completely fair because Boe is the one that
can actually drink, right. He's still he can still have
a couple a couple of glasses every now. Not so
it is it's green tea for me, a Christmas mug
because you know this the season.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
You know, that's right, always the season, always.

Speaker 6 (55:49):
Always, Kevin, I want to thank you for coming on
the show. I want to thank you for joining us
on Homebrew. I think this was a great discussion, kind
of all over the place, but we got a chance
to really dive into some of the kind of the
ins and outs of what we face in the Civil
War history world and our competition with memory. If listeners
want to learn more, where can they go?

Speaker 2 (56:11):
Yeah, as you've mentioned, I do run a substack a newsletter.
Just you know, you can basically just go to any
search engine and just search for Civil War memory and
it should come up awesome.

Speaker 6 (56:22):
And of course the books are You've got your Petersburg
book out there, but I think the one that everyone
kind of runs straight too is searching for Bought Confederates
and very soon to be joined by a biography of
Rubbert coold Shaw. Hopefully, listeners, viewers, thank you for tuning in.
Bo will be back next time if you couldn't stand
listening to me and Kevin for fifty two minutes, but

(56:45):
we're gonna go ahead and hit us with that end credit. Kevin,
thanks for listening. Everyone else cheers.

Speaker 2 (56:53):
Thanks again.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
Whole crew, That whole crew talking about whole brew.

Speaker 3 (57:19):
Everybody needs to brew a history pod past, going back
to the past with the littlest past.

Speaker 4 (57:31):
It might leave you a gas Are you biting inspired?

Speaker 5 (57:37):
But you'll never get tired of whole crew, That whole crew.
Top Scholars on Show with Joey and boo, that's whole crew.

Speaker 2 (57:56):
Whole crew, yeh.