{"id":5857,"date":"2015-11-09T00:00:19","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T06:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=5857"},"modified":"2015-11-09T20:44:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-10T02:44:00","slug":"pulitzer-winner-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=5857","title":{"rendered":"PULITZER WINNER: INTERVIEW"},"content":{"rendered":"

James McPherson is widely viewed as the foremost living scholar of the Civil War era.\u00a0 McPherson\u2019s book, Battle Cry of Freedom<\/i>, won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold 700,000 copies.\u00a0 Fifteen other books have come from McPherson\u2019s gifted pen (and then followed by his trusty Olympia typewriter).\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

McPherson has won many awards for his work.\u00a0 Along with the Pulitzer Prize he received the Lincoln Prize and the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

McPherson is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Emeritus at Princeton University.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The following interview revolves around McPherson\u2019s latest book, The War that Forged a Nation<\/i> (http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-War-That-Forged-Nation\/dp\/0199375771).<\/strong><\/p>\n

David George Moore conducted the interview.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: At the beginning of your book, you mention the spectacular success of the PBS documentary on the Civil War by Ken Burns.\u00a0 Recently, I heard Civil War historian, Gary Gallagher, level some criticism about that documentary.\u00a0 As you well know, other historians have also weighed in with their own concerns.\u00a0 What are your thoughts about the portrayal of the Civil War found in that documentary?<\/strong><\/p>\n

McPherson: I also have a couple of\u00a0criticisms of the Ken Burns documentary, but they are not necessarily the same as those\u00a0by some of my colleagues.\u00a0 The narrative script had a substantial number of minor factual errors–no single one of them would have merited criticism, but the cumulative effect marred the presentation.\u00a0 Ken should have submitted the script to a careful reading by a couple of Civil War scholars.\u00a0 Secondly, some of the photographs did not illustrate the particular events being described by the narrative–they were of another event or scene entirely.\u00a0 Only those who were familiar with the photographs would have picked up on this, but these (relatively few) cases also were jarring.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the same time, however, I think some of the criticisms canceled each other out: some southerners found it too “pro-Northern”;\u00a0others found it “too Southern.”\u00a0 Some found that it emphasized slavery too strongly; others that it paid too little attention to slavery as an issue that caused the war and that the war had to address.\u00a0 Another criticism is that it largely ignored Reconstruction, and focused instead in the final episode on postwar reconciliation between veterans of the blue and gray.\u00a0 I don’t agree with these criticisms–the purpose of the series was to present to a large television audience, only a fraction of which was greatly knowledgeable about the Civil War, the story of that titanic and momentous conflict.\u00a0 The series succeeded spectacularly in achieving that purpose.\u00a0 It aroused the interest of millions of viewers, many of whom went on to learn more about the war by reading books and articles, visiting battlefields, and the like.\u00a0This in itself was a great boon to Civil War studies.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: What is the significance of the \u201cUnited States\u201d going from a plural noun to a singular one?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

McPherson: Before the war, the words “United States” were usually construed as a plural noun.\u00a0 Local and state governments touched the lives of the average person much more closely than the national government; the identity and allegiance of most people\u00a0was to their state or region more than to the nation.\u00a0 The U.S. was a rather loose federation of states; the Bill of Rights was a restraint on the powers of the national government\u00a0in favor\u00a0of state and individual rights.\u00a0 Nationalism existed, as was proved in the crisis of 1861, but the experience of war greatly strengthened it.\u00a0 The North went to war in 1861 to preserve the Union, but came out of the war as a unified Nation in which the national government was far more powerful in 1865 than it had been four years earlier.\u00a0 In the generation after the war the United States was\u00a0(not were) on its (not their) way to becoming a world power.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Did both the North and South believe themselves to be following the direction of the Founding Fathers of our country?<\/strong><\/p>\n

McPherson: Both the Union and Confederacy wrapped themselves in the mantle of 1776 and 1787, and professed to be fighting for the ideals and institutions established by the Founding Fathers.\u00a0 Just as the Revolutionaries of 1776 claimed to be seceding from the tyranny of the British crown and Parliament, the Southern\u00a0disunionists of 1860-1861 claimed to be seceding from the potential tyranny of a federal government under Abraham Lincoln and his party.\u00a0 But Lincoln and the Northern people fought to preserve the creation of the American republic from dismemberment and ruin, and therefore to preserve the legacy of 1776.\u00a0 Confederates claimed to fight for the Constitution of 1787 with its protection of slavery and state rights; Northerners professed to fight to defend that Constitution from the destruction that would be the result of the breaking up of the Union that the Constitution had created.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Andrew Delbanco of Columbia has famously said that Americans believed in the providence of God before the Civil War and then in luck as they surveyed the war\u2019s aftermath.\u00a0 Seeing the scale of carnage rattled many people.\u00a0 How much does the Civil War still shape the American consciousness about God and country?<\/strong><\/p>\n

McPherson: During the war, most people on each side believed that God was on their side.\u00a0 Confederate defeat shook this faith in the South, to be sure, but the emergence of a “Lost Cause” mentality in the decades after the war which championed the idea that the Confederacy had fought nobly for the right even though they were overpowered by the Godless North helped reconcile them to defeat.\u00a0 In the North, victory reinforced their faith the righteousness of their cause; the continuing popularity of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” has sustained that conviction right on down to the present.\u00a0 Lincoln famously argued that God had his own purposes in the war, of which the most important was to punish all white Americans, Northern as well as Southern, for the sin of slavery.\u00a0 As Lincoln himself acknowledged, that was not a popular idea then, and perhaps is not popular today, but the recognition that the war purged the nation of the guilt of slavery that had made a mockery of its\u00a0claim to be\u00a0“the land of the free” has helped to inspire American nationalism ever since the war.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: My own marginalia by your discussion of McClellan\u2019s leadership is \u201cpresumption, paranoia, and pride.\u201d\u00a0 If my three p\u2019s are somewhat accurate, could we say that Grant is somewhat of the antithesis to McClellan?<\/strong><\/p>\n

McPherson: The notion that Grant’s personality and leadership were the opposite of McClellan’s “presumption, paranoia, and pride” is an excellent one.\u00a0 In all of these respects, Grant indeed was the opposite of McClellan.\u00a0 He worked his way up from colonel of an Illinois regiment to general in chief of the United States armies step by step, earning these promotions by achievement rather than favor.\u00a0 He never expressed jealousy of fellow officers or criticism of his superiors in the paranoiac manner that McClellan did, and he was modest about his success in contrast to McClellan’s exaggerations of his limited successes and boasting (in letters to his wife) about them, while he blamed others for his failures while Grant took responsibility for decisions (as at Cold Harbor) that resulted in failures.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Lincoln evokes strong emotions among Americans.\u00a0 Opinions about him range from our greatest president to characterizations bordering on the demonic.\u00a0 How high do you rank Lincoln\u2019s presidency and why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

McPherson: I would rank Lincoln’s presidency as the most important in American history, or at the least equally important with George Washington’s.\u00a0 Washington’s leadership launched the nation; Lincoln’s saved it from dissolution and purged it of the curse of slavery that Washington and the other Founders had been unable to eliminate from their new nation.\u00a0 Much of the criticism of Lincoln has focused on his alleged violations of civil liberties during the war, but in fact these violations were considerably less than those of the Woodrow Wilson administration during World War I and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during World War II, even though the dangers from internal dissension in a civil war were greater than those during foreign wars.\u00a0 Lincoln managed to lead the nation through a crisis that preserved its national integrity and ended slavery, and did so in a manner that also preserved democratic institutions.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Much has been written about the Civil War.\u00a0 What are a few areas (people, ideas, or events) that have not been well covered?<\/strong><\/p>\n

McPherson: So much has been written about the Civil War that it is hard to identify areas or individuals that have not been well covered.\u00a0 Two areas that have received some treatment, but would profit from more are the environmental impact of the war and the story of refugees in the South.\u00a0 How serious was deforestation of large parts of Virginia, for example, or the marching, camping, fighting, and marauding of armies over thousands of square miles of farmland and woodlands?\u00a0 How long did it take the environment to recover?\u00a0 With respect to refugees, how many people were uprooted by the war?\u00a0 How many families left home to escape the ravages of war?\u00a0 How many of them died?\u00a0 What about slaves fleeing their homes in search of freedom?\u00a0 Is it possible to estimate the numbers of refugees, black as well as white, during the war?\u00a0\u00a0 What about mortality among them?\u00a0 We know something about the mortality of blacks in contraband camps, but what about Southern whites who took to the roads?\u00a0 The current focus on\u00a0refugees fleeing the Middle East and Africa suggests that a more intensive study of refugees during the chaos of war\u00a0in 1861 to 1865 might add an important dimension to our understanding of the war.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James McPherson is widely viewed as the foremost living scholar of the Civil War era.\u00a0 McPherson\u2019s book, Battle Cry of Freedom, won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold 700,000 copies.\u00a0 Fifteen other books have come from McPherson\u2019s gifted pen (and then followed by his trusty Olympia typewriter).\u00a0 McPherson has won many awards for his work.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-history","category-interview"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5857"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5860,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5857\/revisions\/5860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}