When you go back and you look at the actual documents, many people have said since then that it was about states’ rights, but really the only significant state right that people were arguing about in 1860 was the right to own what was known as slave property — property and slaves unimpeded — and to be able to travel with that property anywhere that you wanted to. So it’s clear that this was really about slavery in almost every significant way, but we’ve sort of pushed that to the side because of course we want to believe that our country is a country that’s always stood for freedom. And … certainly it’s difficult for some Southern Americans to accept that their ancestors fought a war on behalf of slavery. And I think that Northerners really, for the cause of national reconciliation, decided to push that aside — decided to accept Southerners’ denials or demurrals.

— Adam Goodheart on why people still argue over the cause of the Civil War. The war began 152 years ago today, on April 12, 1861.

Tony Kushner talks to Terry Gross about the 16th president and writing the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated film, ‘Lincoln’:

I think that what Lincoln was doing at the end of war was a very, very smart thing. And it is maybe one of the great tragedies of American history that people didn’t take him literally after he was murdered. The inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way, without any question, was one of the causes of the kind of resentment and perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote-unquote ‘noble cause,’ and the rise of the Klan and Southern self-protection societies.

The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe, and helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering. So had Lincoln not been murdered, and had he really been able to guide Reconstruction, I think there’s a good reason to believe that he would have acted on those principles, because he meant them. We know that he meant them literally, because he told [Ulysses S.] Grant to behave accordingly.

Since we’re talking about the Civil War on the show today, I thought I’d take the opportunity to point you in the direction of one of my favorite short essays in recent memory. A few years back, Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic took a trip to Virginia with his family to visit Civil War battlefields. His blog posts about that trip are remarkable. Especially the final one. It grabs you from the first sentence: “By Saturday, Virginia was overwhelming.” A Virginian myself, I find myself rereading the piece with some regularity, and I’m always amazed at the emotional immediacy and resonance Coates brings to his writing about the Civil War.:

I love the lore of the Wilderness. Early in the fight the Union had pushed the Confederates all the way back to Lee’s headquarters. Lee stood up, about to lead the counter-charge himself, until a division of Texans held him down, “Go back General Lee!” they yelled. I think that is so beautiful, the complete disregard for logic, and personal safety. Still I see it through a cracked glass. It’s like reading a lush love story about a man and a woman, who do not like you.

Read all his Virginia posts here and here and here and here.

Above is a photograph from one of my favorite photographers (and fellow Virginian) Sally Mann. In 2004, as part of her “What Remains” project, Mann took photographs of the battlefield of “Antietam”. 23,000 men were dead, wounded or missing at the end of the day on September 17, 1861 near Sharpsburg, Maryland, making it the single bloodiest day in American history. Mann’s photographs are haunting and evocative of that horror. To heighten the connection between past and present, Mann printed the photographs using the 19th-century methods used by Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, among others.

- Nell

Our interview today is with historian Bruce Levine about his book, The Fall of the House of Dixie, so to keep with the Civil War theme we’ve got going, here’s a cool photo of a reenactor visiting the Atlanta Cyclorama by Jon-Phillip Sheridan,

General George McClellan really does see himself as the indispensable man. His resentments of Lincoln are phenomenal.  He refers to him as ‘the original gorilla,’ ‘a well-meaning baboon,’ a traitor or the tool of traitors.

— Richard Slotkin on General George McClellan and what he thought of his commander-in-chief, President Abraham Lincoln

“In 1913, there was an anniversary celebration at Gettysburg — the anniversary of the 1863 battle — and they brought these Northern and Southern veterans together, and the Confederate and Union vets embraced one another. There are some wonderful photographs, and they’re holding Union flags and Confederate flags, and Woodrow Wilson went and gave a speech, saying that the ‘old quarrel has been forgotten.’ Well, it’s very symbolically significant that excluded from that reunion were the black veterans. They were not even invited to participate. That part of the Civil War history was, for a long time in this country, simply pushed aside and erased almost completely.” — Adam Goodheart

todaysdocument:

On February 16, 1862, Union forces under general Ulysses S. Grant Captured Fort Donelson in Tennessee.  It was one of the first major Union victories of the Civil War and earned Grant the nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.

Sketch [map] of Fort Donelson and Out Works… by Lt. W. L. B. Jenney, V. Engrs., [and] Lt. W. Kossack…, 02/28/1862

Tomorrow: historian Adam Goodheart talks about his social history of the Civil War, 1861.

usagov:

Commercial lithographer Henry S. Graham printed this choropleth map showing the distribution of the slave population in September 1861. The map shows in graphic terms the density of the slave population in the Southern states, based on figures from the 1860 census. Although the development of this map was a collaborative government effort, cartographers working for Edwin Hergesheimer, U.S. Coast Survey Drafting Division, created it.

Learn more about this map and other Civil War maps and charts from the United States Office of Coast Survey.

[At Fort Sumter] the Southerners thought that they would be able to drive the Yankees off of Confederate territory and [they thought that] the North would feel like it wasn’t worthwhile to fight to bring the South back into the Union. Suffice to say, they miscalculated hugely.

— Historian Adam Goodheart on the events at Fort Sumter 150 years ago today.

Historian Adam Goodheart on the Civil War’s 50th anniversary: “In 1913, there was an anniversary celebration at Gettysburg — the anniversary of the 1863 battle — and they brought these Northern and Southern veterans together and the Confederate and Union vets embraced one another. There are some wonderful photographs and they’re holding Union flags and Confederate flags and Woodrow Wilson went and gave a speech, saying that the ‘old quarrel has been forgotten.’ Well it’s very symbolically significant that excluded from that reunion were the black veterans. They were not even invited to participate. That part of the Civil War history was, for a long time in this country, simply pushed aside and erased almost completely.”

Eric Foner, author of Our Lincoln, talks about the era following the Civil War in which former slaves were promised equal rights and citizenship. Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University.

mrsdentonorahippo:

1865. “Charleston, South Carolina. Breach patched with gabions on the north wall of Fort Sumter.” From photographs of the Federal Navy, and seaborne expeditions against the Atlantic Coast of the Confederacy, 1863-1865.

columbusdispatch:

A WTF moment if every we saw one: Reenactors of civil wars real and imagined have some fun at the Ohio Statehouse to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War Sunday, April 10, 2011. (Columbus Dispatch photo by Jeff Hinckley)

Star Wars meets Civil War. Hilarity ensues. 

Almost from the very beginning of the Civil War, the federal government had to start making policy and they said, ‘Well, we’re going to treat these people as free. We’re not going to send them back into the slave holding regions. And the Army opened itself up to the enlistment of black men. And by the end of the Civil War, 200,000 black men have served in the Union Army and Navy. And envisioning blacks as soldiers is a very, very different idea of their future role in American society. It’s the black soldiers and their role which really begins as the stimulus in Lincoln’s change [with regard to] racial attitudes and attitudes towards America as an inter-racial society in the last two years of his life.

— Historian Eric Foner, talking about the importance of African-American soldiers joining the Union Army and then changing Abraham Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery, during an interview with Terry Gross, October 11, 2010.