♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello.

I'm David Rubenstein.

Want to welcome you to a very interesting conversation we're going to have with Drew Faust, who is the 28th President of Harvard, and also the Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

We're coming to you tonight from the Robert H. Smith Auditorium of the New-York Historical Society.

Welcome.

(applause) RUBENSTEIN: Drew, thank you very much for coming this evening.

FAUST: It's a pleasure.

RUBENSTEIN: So why don't we talk about history, your life as a historian, and particularly this book, "This Republic of Suffering."

Well first, uh, you grew up in Virginia, and were you always interested in being a historian, or how did you come into being a historian?

FAUST: In some ways it was inescapable because I lived right in the middle of so many Civil War events.

I lived on the Lee-Jackson Highway, I lived in the community where, um, guerrillas, Mosby and others had raced back and forth through Ashby's Gap, uh, and down the Shenandoah Valley, and on weekends the family activity was often to go visit a battlefield in the area.

And I also grew up in the years just leading up to the, uh, 100th anniversary of the Civil War, and so there were lots of reenactments, a reenactments of John Brown's raid in Charles Town, not far from where I was growing up.

So I was surrounded by history.

RUBENSTEIN: Now your ancestors had fought in the Civil War or not?

FAUST: Yes, they had, on both sides of the family... RUBENSTEIN: On both sides.

FAUST: But different sides of the war.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

But you're growing up in Virginia and you're visiting Civil War sites.

Did your family say, "Well actually we could have won this war in the South if we had done this?"

Or they didn't, they didn't take a sides at that point?

FAUST: Well the person who was probably most actively engaged in these questions was my older brother, and so we played Civil War all the time in the woods around the house, and I had a little rifle, I had a BB gun.

It's a good thing we didn't shoot each other, but my problem being younger was that I always had to be Grant and it was...

It was a long time before my brother told me that I'd actually won.

I don't think he ever told me.

I think I figured it out somewhere else.

RUBENSTEIN: So, ah, you went off to Bryn Mawr... FAUST: I did.

RUBENSTEIN: And did you major in history?

FAUST: I did.

RUBENSTEIN: And then you went to get your PhD at the University of Pennsylvania?

FAUST: Well I worked for a couple of years first.

I worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and then I decided I couldn't stand not being in the Academy and I went back and got a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.

RUBENSTEIN: And you specialize in history, and, and you specialize in the antebellum South and Civil War area?

FAUST: Mm-hmm.

That was my interest.

RUBENSTEIN: Do you think in hindsight that, that the people who lived in the Confederacy ever believed that Lincoln was going to, ah, in effect, fight a war of that magnitude, or did they think they could secede and that would be the end of it?

FAUST: I don't think people on either side, North or South thought that a war would occur after secession, and they certainly didn't think that a war of the magnitude that unfolded would occur.

There, the quotes from, for example, James Chestnut in the South saying he would drink all the blood that would be shed in the war, expecting there to be none... RUBENSTEIN: No blood.

FAUST: And people in the North felt that, um, the South would quickly be brought to heel.

You, you'll remember stories about Bull Run, First Manassas, and how people took picnic baskets out from Washington because they thought the Confederates would be routed and it would be a simple afternoon and that would be the end of it, and of course... RUBENSTEIN: That was the first battle of the war, and... FAUST: First major battle of the war.

RUBENSTEIN: And people came out just to, like a spectator sport.

They didn't realize people were going to be killed, and they thought the South'll win, that'd be the end of the war.

FAUST: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: Well in hindsight, um, now with all this history behind us, uh, do you think there's anything the South could have done to actually win the war?

FAUST: I do.

I think we now assume that the war was going to go the way it did, um, because of the enormous superiority in numbers and productivity in the North.

But Lee's plan, Lee's hope, was to be able to undermine the morale of the North and have the North give up.

So if we had had a different president, somebody who had been willing to compromise, if McClellan had won the election of 1864, there might well have been a compromise that would have allowed the South to leave, and Lee was assuming this or counting on this, and that's why he was willing to take such enormous losses, 'cause he thought if he could just have a dramatic enough victory to dispirit the North, then, um, the North would give up.

RUBENSTEIN: One of the ways that he was trying to do that, I believe, was to go into Northern territory and, uh, kind of surprise the North, and that's what he really tried to do at Gettysburg.

Had, uh, the South won at Gettysburg, the Confederacy won, do you think that would have ended the war?

FAUST: It might well have.

It would have depended of course on whether Lincoln was able to press forward in spite of the kind of demoralization that that would have brought about, but both with the feint up northwards to Antietam in the fall of 1862 and then again the following summer with Gettysburg, Lee was trying to make a point and bring the war home to the North in a way that would undermine the commitment to the conflict.

RUBENSTEIN: So, you're a historian and not a predictor, but let's suppose the South had actually won the war.

Where would the country be today?

Do you think we'd be two different countries or do you think we would have come back together again?

FAUST: During the 1960s there were a lot of speculations and a little book by, that David Donald put together, a professor at Harvard, about what would have happened if the South had won, and so there's been a lot of ruminations about whether we would have just Balkanized all of the Americas.

Would then there have been other secessions?

Would the West have been a separate country and New England a separate country?

How long would slavery have lasted?

Um, I'm not a predictor, as you say, but it, I don't think that there would necessarily have been a reunion and the nation we have today.

I think the war was necessary to preserve the Union as we have known it.

RUBENSTEIN: On slavery, um, some people say the war was fought for slavery, some people say it was fought to keep the country together.

In your view, in hindsight, was the war really fought over slavery, and is that was secession was all about?

FAUST: Yes.

I think there's no question about it, and one of the most powerful pieces of evidence is the, um, actions taken by different state conventions who had voted in favor of secession sending representatives to other states to urge them to also secede, and their arguments were all about defending slavery.

If you look at the language explaining secession in the Southern states and the kinds of persuading they tried to do to bring other states into the Confederacy, it is the notion of slavery, to quote from Alexander Stevens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, slavery was the cornerstone of the South that needed to be preserved.

RUBENSTEIN: So do you fault the Founding Fathers when they drafted the Constitution for not eliminating slavery, or would we not have had a Union or a Constitution had they tried to do that?

FAUST: It's an interesting question to say how, how much more wiggle room they might have had than, than they exercised.

There were a lot of compromises, as you know well, Three-Fifths Clause, et cetera, to try to bring all these states together, and yet, um, adjust to their very different attitudes of whites North and South, um, towards the slave institution.

There was an article that I always assigned to students back when I was teaching Southern history, um, many years ago, before I took on these other, um, adventures, and it was written by a man named William Freehling who was a long-time professor at, ah, Johns Hopkins University.

And what he did in this article is he went through all the compromises in the Constitution but pointed out how ultimately they were going to put slavery on a path towards extinction and that they were going to require that this issue be resolved, and so his defense of the Founding Fathers was, they did as much as they could at the time, and they also set up a situation in which slavery ultimately would have to be confronted and shut down.

It's an interesting argument.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, when Abraham Lincoln was running for President in 1860, he didn't say, "Let's abolish slavery."

He actually said he would support the then-proposed 13th Amendment which actually, um, said that slavery would remain part of the Constitution.

Um, why did he change his views on slavery?

FAUST: One of the really wonderful aspects of Abraham Lincoln is how he learned, and when you look at Lincoln's experience during the war, you see him learning from experience both as, um, he understands military matters better and ultimately finds the general that can win the war, but also how he sees slavery differently, and how he sees this opportunities to act against slavery differently.

He did not think that the nation could survive half slave and half free, as he said, but he also knew at the beginning of the war or before the war, when he was elected, that he did not have the foundation on which to attack it, and so his position had been: it shouldn't expand any further, but he wouldn't interfere with it where it already existed.

When the war broke out and he saw that he could define slavery as an instrument of strength and war power for the South...

In other words, having slavery enabled the South to mobilize more white men for the military, he could then define slavery as something that had to be defeated in order to enable military victory, and that gave him a new angle that he was able to use that wasn't available to him before the war.

RUBENSTEIN: Now he only had a second-grade education, more or less, although he read a lot, um, but he was a great writer: the "Gettysburg Address", the "Second Inaugural Address", do you think if he had gone to Harvard and had a Harvard degree...

He could have been a better writer?

FAUST: We probably would have ruined him.

RUBENSTEIN: Really?

Okay.

(laughter).

So, let's talk about the Civil War, death, and what you've talked about in "The Republic of Suffering".

It's a very interesting book that describes in gruesome detail how people died and the massive way that never, the world had never seen before.

So at the time of the Civil War there were roughly 22 or 23 million Americans, something like that?

And 4 million slaves, roughly.

FAUST: Mm-hmm.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So how many people died during the Civil War?

You had roughly what percentage of the population died?

FAUST: Well when I wrote this book, which was published in 2008, the generally agreed-upon figure about the number of deaths was 620,000, and just a footnote, we don't know.

We do not have accurate counts, um, because there was not adequate record keeping.

But the generally-accepted number was 620,000.

In the years pretty soon after I published this book, a lot of modern demographic techniques were used to re-analyze some of the elements of Civil War data, and now the estimate is more like 750,000, so that is the number that, I think, is, is most widely used now for the, the extent of Civil War death.

About two and a half percent of the population.

Today, over seven million dead.

And that's... RUBENSTEIN: In other words, today if we had two and a half percent of our population killed in a war today, that would 'bout seven million people, right?

So that's, you know, and 9/11, as terrible as it was, it killed, I think, in, in the Two Towers roughly 3,000 people.

Um, in all of our wars put together, not counting the Civil War, we haven't lost as many people as we lost in the Civil War.

Is that right?

FAUST: That's correct.

RUBENSTEIN: And the reason so many people died, it's not only because the war went on for such a long period of time, but it's because military armaments were so much better than they had been in the Revolutionary War.

Is that part of the reason?

FAUST: There were a number of reasons.

One was simply the scale of the war, the mobilization through the draft and volunteering of mass armies.

The armies were bigger than they had been in any previous war.

So the scale of participation and the scale of loss were in some ways, um, consonant with one another.

Another element was disease.

When you get that many people out of different parts of the country, you bring them together, first they get the measles, people die of that.

Then they don't have an understanding of germ theory, so they pollute their own camps, they die of typhoid.

There is not antiseptic surgery so people die, uh, from surgical intervention, so that was another element of it.

But there's also a change in the technology of war with increased firepower so that soldiers were exposed for longer to more firepower than had previously been the case, and that, of course, increased the death rate as well.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about what happens when people were, uh, killed.

Historically, in the Civil War, uh, we didn't really have a system, you point out in your book, for, um, dealing people who died, because in the Revolutionary War very few people, people relatively speaking, died.

Um, I guess they were taken back to their homes when they died, but here we had a different problem: massive numbers of people were being killed, and the wars are still going on, the, the battles are still going on, so what happened to the dead?

They just stayed there?

Or what, what did people do?

FAUST: What I was so astonished to find when I started doing research on this book was the absolute absence of any kind of systematic procedure for dealing with the dead, and that is consistent with the lack of anticipation of the scale of the war, when these deaths happened, first of all, people were away from home and death was something that was meant to take place at home in the 19th Century, so that was very disconcerting.

They, people did not have identity badges or dog tags.

There was not a graves registration unit within military units, so no one was assigned to get the names of the dead, write to their next-of-kin.

There were often not burial units.

They were simply soldiers who, after the battle, when the victor, North or South, held the field then all those dead bodies, something had to be done with them, and so soldiers would be detailed, sometimes prisoners of war, "Get rid of the dead."

And so that did not usually include any kind of systematic counting or, um, identifying or praying for or having funeral services for or marking graves.

It all was an invention in the moment... RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so let's suppose in Gettysburg you have about 7,000 were killed, something like that?

And 3,000 horses.

So they're lying at Gettysburg.

What did people do?

Did they bury them right there or they just left the, the troops there and they went about their business?

What, what happened?

FAUST: It depended whether the dead were Confederate or Union.

In, at Gettysburg the Union held the field and so there was an effort on the part of units to find the dead of their unit and give them some kind of decent burial, which would mean usually wrapping them in a bag of burlap and digging a hole, an individual hole if you could, for your own men.

Men from the other side you usually lined them up by pulling, bending your bayonet and pulling them along and getting them in a big line and throwing them all into a pit.

RUBENSTEIN: So, um, when people were dying in these battles, did relatives ultimately come forward to try to find the bodies, and how did they know where the bodies were, and were there people that helped them find these bodies?

FAUST: Mm-hmm.

Your question makes me realize I should also amend what I just described, because if you were an officer, you would not be treated like that.

There would be usually a, uh, coffin for you.

You might well be shipped home by railway express.

There was a real class difference in how the dead of both sides were treated, and Union officers or Confederate officers might often show, uh, respect and treat the bodies of enemy officers with respect as well.

But in, um, to go to the implication of your question, because people at home did not have faith that they would be notified in any systematic way, they flocked to battlefields to themselves try to find their missing loved ones and to provide the care that they feared would not otherwise be available.

RUBENSTEIN: Now in those days, and people wanted to die a so-called "Good death," which meant that you died in a bed where you could talk to your relatives, you could say, "This is what I want to do in the afterlife, and this is what I did in the current life," and say goodbye.

Ah, it was still very, ah, important to them to make sure that their relatives had died, even in battlefield, a good death.

Could you describe how people tried to pretend that everybody had a good death?

FAUST: It was meant to replicate the deathbed scene that is such a commonplace in so much Victorian literature, because the moment of death was seen as defining of eternity.

It was, took on tremendous importance and your last words indicated whether your were likely to, um, go to Heaven or to Hell and whether your relatives were likely to be reunited with you in the afterlife.

So to record an individual's last words, to describe someone's willingness to die and thus their acceptance of God's will, all of this was extremely significant, and so often individuals in hospitals, nurses, orderlies, doctors, would listen and sometimes record these last words.

Clara Barton, who is an, an hospital nurse for the Union army, had a sheaf of little papers that she kept in a, in a pocket in her apron, and in her papers you can see these little scribbles of people's names and addresses, and some words, and she must have kept them until she went off-duty, and then she would write to the families and tell them what she had experienced as their loved ones died.

You often hear about Walt Whitman, um, and his attendance in military hospitals.

A lot of what he did was to write to the families of the men he watched die and describe the nature of their deaths with the reassurance therein of their ultimate reunion with their loved ones in eternity.

RUBENSTEIN: And it was thought it was very important to preserve the corpse, if possible, because it would be more dignified, and what happened to embalming and icing?

Did that, uh, get invented roughly then?

FAUST: Uh, embalming was just coming into, to, um, more widespread use at the time of the Civil War, but it was expensive, and so that was something that was used more by officers and upper-class individuals.

When, I said coffins were shipped home, some of these coffins were iced.

There were very elaborate technological, um, inventions to enable coff, uh, bodies to be shipped home, or they had to be embalmed, and the railway companies began to, in the course of the war, get more and more stringent about how a body had to have been, um, cared for because they had putrefying...

This is really gross.

I'm sorry... putrefying bodies on the railway, and so if they didn't say, "You know, you have to have a level of embalming," that that was very, um, unappealing.

RUBENSTEIN: Now these men were fighting each other, often very close.

Many of the people were killed in close combat.

It wasn't 1,000 yards away; they were relatively close.

Um, how did these young men feel about killing people and seeing people die?

FAUST: It was a struggle for a lot of these soldiers, and you find in their letters and diaries their descriptions of how they came to bear the idea of, of killing, and sometimes it would be hatred that it could be, it was easier when it was revenge, if people on your side have been hurt.

Um, sometimes it was religion that made them think of themselves as God's Army or Christian soldiers, and that enabled them to kill.

But you, you often find in wartime letters these kinds of expressions of anxiety, regret.

Some soldiers didn't fire at all, fired up into the air rather than kill others.

RUBENSTEIN: And, ah, what about the civilians?

A large number of civilians who were not in combat got killed?

How did that happen?

FAUST: Well we know, compare, even less about the civilians than we do about military deaths, because at least there was some semblance of a death list and a counting of the troops so that you know how many were missing.

With civilians there's often no record, and so it's a much more anecdotal sense of what went on.

Disease is one aspect of it.

Troops that were carrying disease would spread them to civilians as well.

Um, in the South in particular there are descriptions of, um, deprivation, starvation, uh, difficulties that arose from the shortages that the war brought to bear.

There was also guerrilla fighting in many parts of the border states, in particular.

Western North Carolina, Missouri, and a lot more historical work has been done recently on these guerrilla activities indicating they were much more widespread than, than had been thought in the past.

RUBENSTEIN: So talking about burials, if you were an African American, there were roughly 200,000 African Americans who fought for the North.

Um, were you allowed to be buried in the same cemetery as a white person?

FAUST: The national cemetery system that emerged from the Civil War separated black and white soldiers in burial.

RUBENSTEIN: What about Confederate and Northern soldiers?

Could they be buried in the same cemetery?

FAUST: The national cemetery system did include no Southerners.

It was only for Union soldiers.

RUBENSTEIN: What happened to the Confederate bodies?

Nobody was paying attention to them, and the South not... FAUST: There are photographs and there are descriptions of, um, Union, um, officials coming to find bodies to bury in Union cemeteries after the war, and there'll be a Confederate body lying there and a Union body lying there and the Union one gets picked up and the Confederate one is just left there.

Um, in response to this, there were organizations that emerged in the South, mostly, uh, led by Southern, white Southern women to compensate for the lack of Northern attention, Union attention.

And this is after Appomattox, so the nation's supposedly at peace.

But the Southern women organized burial societies and memorial societies, raise money and scoured the countryside around Richmond, the countryside around various other places where there were, uh, intense engagements during the war and re-buried the, um, soldiers and brought them together with private means rather than the public means of national US engagement.

RUBENSTEIN: Now after people died in the war, very often their relatives would still want to communicate with them, and the uh, rise of seances apparently occurred.

In fact, um, I guess it was, um, Mrs. Lincoln had one for her son Willie who had died, uh, during the time of the Civil War.

Ah, how popular were the seances and did they actually communicate with people who had died or... (laughter) FAUST: Well there are a lot of people who believed that they did, and it seems to me a symptom of the nation's effort to grapple with this enormous loss and to try to understand where had these young men gone and were they lost forever?

And one consoling thought was if you believed in a Christian afterlife, you believed that you would be reunited with this person, but if you could convince yourself to believe in spiritualism, then that also provided a measure of solace that you might be able to reunite with them even sooner than your death.

RUBENSTEIN: And after the war was completely over, um, then there was an effort to account for everybody that was killed, and they really try to figure out who actually died so they know who died and where they were buried.

Is that right, isn't that generally work?

FAUST: That was a Union effort that was established through a series of acts of Congress and the establishment of the national cemetery system in 1866, and between 1866 and the early 1870s there was an initiative where soldiers were sent, soldiers who had finished fighting but were now still in uniform, were sent into the South to try to find all the Union bodies that had been buried in odd churchyards or abandoned on the side of roads, and part of the motivation for this was that reports were rising of, um, desecration of Union soldiers' graves and Union bodies by angry, um, ex-Confederates, and so the notion was partly to honor the Northern dead and partly simply to protect them.

And that led to the reburial in national cemeteries of over 300,000 dead Union soldiers in those years.

RUBENSTEIN: Two most famous cemeteries in the North, I guess, were Gettysburg, and it was President Lincoln who went there and made his famous address... FAUST: And started it.

RUBENSTEIN: What was unique about the Gettysburg, uh, Cemetery, the way it was set up in terms of making everybody equal?

FAUST: That it did not separate officers and men.

It was, um, organized so that everybody who had sacrificed for the nation was treated the same.

RUBENSTEIN: And Arlington Cemetery, that was the front lawn of Robert E. Lee.

Why was that used as a cemetery?

FAUST: Well the Quartermaster General of the United States was man named Montgomery Meigs, and his, uh, son was killed in a way that he thought was really unjust.

He had surrendered essentially, he had, and was just shot after having done so, and so Montgomery Meigs was seemed to have been quite vindictive and angry about the South, so planting the cemetery in the front of, um, Robert E. Lee's house seemed to him and seemed to many, uh, a message about the resentment of... RUBENSTEIN: That Robert E. Lee would never be able to go back and live there.

FAUST: Never live there again.

RUBENSTEIN: Drew, I want to thank you for doing a great job in leading Harvard... FAUST: Thank you very much.

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