Confederate Monuments and the Lost Cause

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Greetings from Charlottesville and from the colorful fall grounds at the university, whereas you can probably tell looking behind me, the leaves have turned and the area, whole surrounding area is every bit as spectacular as you remember it. In fact, today in UVA Today, there was a short video clip titled "Fall is in the Air on the Grounds." And it's wonderful.

So if you get UVA Today, I suggest you check it out because the scene around the lawn and the Grounds, this is a very special university, and this time a year it's absolutely amazing. So those of you that have tuned in, check it out in UVA Today. It's a great short video.

I'm Richard Brownlee. I am president of the Retired Faculty Association. And on behalf of your board of directors, I want to welcome you to the third in our series of monthly Zoom presentations for this academic year. I imagine some of you might actually have been wondering if we do have a president, because during the first two presentations I was missing in action. And I wanna thank Pat Lampkin, board member, Vice President Kathy Thornton, and a past president Sharon Hostler for taking over and doing such a great job in my absence. But yes, we do have a president, and I'm hoping that I will be present going forward.

Although I wasn't able to attend the first two presentations in person, I did go on our website and watch the recordings, and they were both excellent. I highly recommend them. Just go to our website, then look at schedule, past events, and you will find them with a closed caption option.

I also want to thank those of you who have contributed to our association. We're not wealthy, and since we've decided again this year to not charge dues, we need about $5,000 in donations to cover our out-of-pocket costs, including the invaluable services we get from the UVA Alumni Association who actually do all the Zoom presentations for us, and also the cost of the closed caption, which is not only available during the live presentations, it's also available if you go on our website and look at the recordings.

Now it's my pleasure to turn our attention to today's very fascinating, relevant, and timely topic. And the way if history is any indication, it probably is, this topic is gonna be relevant for some time to come. Confederate monuments and the Lost Cause. I want to welcome back board member Craig Littlepage, and I want to give a very special welcome to history professor Carrie Janney. Hello to both of you, and thank you for bringing this very informative and interesting topic to our audience today.

Craig, in the interest of time, I wanna turn the program over to you quickly so that you can more formally introduce Carrie and also give our audience a little idea of what they are about to enjoy. It's great to see you. Thanks for arranging the presentation today, in addition to doing the one a month ago, and all the service you provided on the board. So if you are ready, I will magically-

CRAIG LITTEPAGE: I'm ready.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: I will magically disappear from the screen and turn it over to the two of you. Thanks again, and we really look forward to a fascinating presentation. Take it away.

CRAIG LITTEPAGE: Thank you, Dick And good morning to all my colleagues that are viewing this and as well to our guests that are joining us as well. We are so fortunate to have the opportunity today to welcome as a presenter a very special person. She's an author, scholar, researcher, teacher, fan of the Cavaliers, among other things. Professor Carrie Janney. Thank you for joining us, Carrie. Few people would have predicted the various ways that current events aligned with the narrative of the Lost Cause. And we'll talk more about that in just a second, but first talk a little bit about you and your story. You grew up in the Commonwealth of Virginia. You graduated from UVA and returned to Charlottesville after teaching at Purdue University. First of all, what led you to study the Civil War while you were a student at the University of Virginia?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Thank you so much, Coach, for inviting me. It's such a pleasure to be part of this. I wish we could all be in the same room and to be doing this in person, but thank you again to everyone. So how did I come to study the Civil War? Well, I was always interested in history and I have to credit not only my parents and grandparents, who instilled that love of story and appreciating the past.

My parents took us to Yorktown and Jamestown and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, all of those places, Mount Vernon, but I also had a fourth grade teacher who was instrumental and she would tell stories. So I loved history from a very early age. I couldn't wait to get the fourth grade because we did Virginia state history in fourth grade. But I was a government major undergrad. I was going to law school. I was gonna follow in the footsteps of my father and grandfather, and my fourth year I took a class pass/fail by a guy some of you may have heard of. I think his name is Ed Ayers, something like that. (Richard laughing) And it changed my world. I took that class again. I took it pass/fail. It was my fun class to take. And I thought you can get paid to do this for a living? Now, granted I was blissfully ignorant of the academic job market, but from that path forward, it was too late to apply to grad school at that point, so I was already working for the National Park Service, continued to do so, and applied to PhD programs. So, it's very unusual to go to the same place for your PhD program that you did undergrad. But again, I was a government major. I had had Ed, I'd had Grace Hale as history professors, and that was it. And so it was a whole new world and I stumbled again, blissfully ignorant of what it meant to be an academic in terms of the job market, but that was my path.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So you studied as an undergrad and as a grad student as well, and ended up falling into kind of the Civil War space. How has your perspective on the Civil War changed from when you were a student to where you are now as an expert in the topic?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Oh, in so many ways that I can't even begin to account for them. But understanding the complexity and nuance, I probably wanted to go to law school for many reasons, but I thought, like so many people, that the Civil War was guns and flags and battles, and that was all there was to it. And actually when I came to grad school, I was gonna study 20th century Southern history, and kept getting pulled back into the 19th century. And I firmly believe that the Civil War was the most important event in American history. Even more so than the revolution. I can take on Alan Taylor and others. But it was that moment when democracy truly, truly was threatened. And we can talk about the reverberations that that still has today. But I think it's the complexity and the fact that something that seems so simple, something that buffs study becomes an avenue for understanding almost every aspect of the American experiment of American history, from race to religion, to gender relations, it's all there. And I think you can never finish unpacking and discovering all the many ways, that it's still with us today.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So we're gonna get into the Lost Cause and the monuments and all the other angles of those topics, but let's go back to August of 2017 and you're teaching at Purdue in West Lafayette, Indiana. You hear the news about the chaos and tragedy that's unfolding in Charlottesville, in part due to the controversy surrounding monuments. As an historian and a scholar, what went through your mind when you processed the news about what was happening?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Well, we were actually on a family vacation in North Carolina at the beach. Was with my father and brothers, all UVA people, all people that hold Charlottesville very close in our heart, and we all sat watching and being incredibly emotional. And I think in that moment, I wasn't a scholar. I was someone who loved this town and this university, and was kind of hit upside the head by the level of violence and brutality and the things being spewed, the symbols that were on display, in this place that I loved so viscerally. And when I got back to West Lafayette, one of the first things that I was part of was putting together a teach-in and thinking about what Charlottesville, and I mean, it still bothers me to this day that when people say Charlottesville, that's what they're referencing, August 11th and 12th. But I put together, along with members of the African-American Studies department, some people in political science, we put together a teach-in where we addressed what was going on here and covering every facet, from the rise of the alt-right to Lost Cause and ostensibly a demonstration that began to "protect" these monuments. And that was my first kind of foray into stepping into thinking about how to comprehend this as a scholar and how to comprehend this as a teacher, and how to use that as a moment to have these difficult conversations with not just students, but the lay public about what all of these different things coming together and how they're all interconnected, and the ways in which they're not, as well, being weary of making connections that don't exist.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So, help us then understand the difference between history and memory, and why this distinction matters, particularly in relationship to the Civil War. What is memory?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Right, so I'll start with history, 'cause that might be easier to understand. So history is what happened. It is interpreted. It is, what happened doesn't change over time, but the way in which people understand it and the way in which we explain it changes with more information, with new context, but history, what happened doesn't change. The way that we interpret it can change. Memory is something that tends to be claimed. It tends to be claimed by groups and it's wrapped more in mythology and it's passed down from generation to generation. And so when I say that it tends to be claimed, it's this is ours, this belongs to no one else. History, you know, doesn't belong to anyone. It's there. And so I make a big point in my classes of teaching the difference between here's what happened, here's what we understand to happen, and here's how we can explain why it happened versus this is something that is felt and something that is protected. I think when you hear people using words like protection, they're really talking about memory. They're holding something sacred and sacrosanct. History isn't sacred. And so it's not just the Civil War. We can talk about whether it's the American Revolution or the "pioneer experience". All of those things have been wrapped in myth and mythology that then become more part of memory than the historical event or events that happened.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. So you wrote a book, "Ends of War," and the context of it being the Lost Cause and related topics and the history memory topics. You wrote in your introduction, and I'll quote, "The immediate aftermath of Appomattox confirmed that a deep and abiding commitment to the Confederacy had not ended with the surrender. In some ways it had only begun." End of quote. So my interpretation is that there's a suggestion that the end of the Civil War and the Confederacy has actually served as kind of a launch for an extreme right movement. Is that a fair interpretation?

CAROLINE JANNEY: It's a long launch, but yeah, so this is my most recent book that looks at what happened after Appomattox, what happens to a rebel army after a civil war, and so the weeks and months after Appomattox. And even though I have spent the better part of 20 plus years thinking about the Lost Cause and Civil War memory, it wasn't until I dove down into the research in that immediate, I even, I'm not even sure I want to call it post-war period, but the post-Appomattox, the post surrender of of Lee and his army. It's refusal to admit that not just defeat, but that they were on the wrong side of things, and this kind of digging the heels in by Confederates, former Confederates, rebels, and this defense that becomes wrapped around it that they use as a mantle, that they use as a protective shield to justify so many things, but never thoroughly defeated. I don't think there was ever a golden moment when Confederates were so thoroughly defeated that they were willing to accept any circumstances. And so we can see that pushback right away. We see that pushback with black codes that are issued in the summer of 1865. We see that pushback and reelecting Confederate officials to Congress in the fall of 1865. So they will concede that they lost on the battlefield, but not that their motives, that their cause had ever somehow not been righteous.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So one of the things that would intrigue me to hear about is what you found as some of the major challenges that you had in writing the book. I mean, the research and the detail, the conversations, the meetings, the negotiations are all things that you go into in great detail of the book. And maybe I'm answering the question, but for you as a writer, and you've done this before, was there anything unique about the research and writing of this book in comparison to some of the other works that you've done?

CAROLINE JANNEY: So, anything unique in that regard? I spent a lot of time at the National Archives for this project and used many more government-produced records. They're produced by the Army for the most part, but that in of itself lends, well, it lends itself to a different not only type of research, but then type of questions that you're asking and the type of answers that you get. And I would say that the most challenging, two things were challenging about this particular project. One is balancing the social and cultural aspects with the legal history and how to understand the two, how to understand the dispersal of people and then the legal ramifications that were at play. But the other big part of the story that I wanted to make sure I included was the home front, and specifically African-American experience. And those voices are simply so much harder to find. And think I found ways in which I could use reports from African-American newspapers, accounts from members of the United States Colored Troops, so the African-American soldiers in the Union Army. And then some former Confederates were very, we might call them bold. I don't think they thought they were bold, but matter of facts about the violence that they committed against African-Americans, both civilians and soldiers. And so by their own accounts we know some of these stories. So those were the probably most challenging aspects.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. I want to also ask our attendees to think about questions that you might have, and if you have questions for Professor Janney, that you can use the chat function. Send them to me via the chat function, and we can get those questions answered by Professor Janney. Carrie, what do you think has to take place before we see some of the polarization and this new version of what I call kind of the new Lost Cause, but before this movement loses some of its steam.

CAROLINE JANNEY: So there's two different things I think going on here. One of the things, if we're talking specifically the Lost Cause, as in the Confederate Lost Cause, and the way in which that has played out in Civil War memory in American, how Civil War memory has played out in American history, there's an arc that happens, and I'll sketch that very briefly. And that is after the Civil War, Confederates will develop and embellish this notion of what we call the Lost Cause, which is the best case scenario. I think the easiest way to think of it is this is the best case explanation for why Confederates fought and why they lost. And this argument, this justification that they tell themselves changes over time. If people are interested,

I can go into the various aspects, the various tenants of that, but they're constantly being pushed back and they're pushing against the Union version of what the war was about that says the war was first and foremost about preserving the Union, and eventually about ending slavery. And there's a third component, which is the emancipationist's cause. So this is people like Frederick Douglass, who are from the get go saying this war was always about ending slavery and the goal was always emancipation. These three are competing with, of course, the white version, so Unionists and Lost Cause really being the dominant voices.

But the Lost Cause isn't something that most Union soldiers, that most families of Union soldiers are willing to address. So this notion of reconciliation that both sides agree to forgive and forget, and we're all just one big happy family, that's something that's more of an act. It's not really a belief. The Lost Cause will kind of dip, but then it will gain some credence in the early 20th century. And here we have popular culture to thank. In particular, "Birth of a Nation" in 1915, and "Gone with the Wind," the book and then the film in 1939. And with that, this white Southern interpretation of the Civil War seems to gain a national audience. And by the time we get to the 1960s, that also is very much the Lost Cause sets aside reconciliation as the two main ways that the country is thinking about and remembering the war. But what I have clearly seen, and I teach courses about this, I try to track the changes. That the Lost Cause has fallen out of favor among the vast majority of Americans, white and black, even among the vast majority of white Southerners.

That rhetoric has really been marginalized, and we saw that in the sesquicentennial in 2011 through 2015. So the Lost Cause in terms of Confederate ideology has very much been marginalized. But what we have going on, there's been a lot of discussion about whether some of the current political debates, the partisan divide, whether there is another version of the Lost Cause, and I would say that they are related in the sense that they use many of the same tactics. They employ, in particular, the former president, employs many of the same tactics that Lost Cause advocates did. He likes to silence anyone who objects to him using terms like rhino.

Anyone who is no longer loyal gets kicked out of the mainstream. So there's some parallels here, but we need to be very, very careful in drawing direct lines from the Lost Cause, the Confederacy, to partisan debates today. They absolutely overlap. They absolutely overlap. But if we want to be thinking historically and thinking about context, we need to be very careful of how we connect those lines and when there is a causal relationship and when there's not.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. We can have a broader discussion at another point about this reconciliation before we try to move forward and so forth and so on. But we have a question from one of our attendees, and the question is this. How did your identity as a white Southern woman color your engagement with the research and the writing of your book?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Yeah, and I would say that probably much more so for my first book, which was my dissertation that looked at Ladies' Memorial Associations. These are former Confederate women, and maybe the word former doesn't even apply, but Confederate women after the Civil War is over who initiated the project of creating Confederate cemeteries. So just like the one that's here on Grounds, that was created. In fact, that was the first thing that I wrote about as a fourth year undergrad, the Ladies' Memorial Association forming that cemetery, and then they also started the practice of Memorial Day. And I think I came to that project in part because I didn't understand why it was white Southern women who were so much at the forefront of this. And it absolutely was about my own identity of struggling to understand why it was women, why former Confederate women, white women felt the need to do this. And so that's the way, it's kind of these these personal questions. I grew up in a town that I used to joke had as many Confederate monuments as it did stoplights, which was two. And I didn't understand as a kid, despite being surrounded in the Shenandoah Valley by the Civil War, I didn't understand why there were monuments to a defeated people. And so that's the way in which it plays in with my trying to kind of understand where in the world I come from and why these people that in many cases were in fact, my ancestors, why did they do these things. So, struggling to comprehend that.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. And you and I had a brief conversation, but we have a question with regard to the research that was done that finds a quantifiable connection between Confederate monuments and the prevalence of lynching. And you reacted to that in terms of your perspective as a historian. Can you maybe give us a little bit of insight on that?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Right, so maybe all people say this in different disciplines, but I wish they had consulted a historian on this project because I have so many questions about it. The conclusion that they come to is that if a county had a higher number of lynchings, then that county was likely to have a Confederate monument, and they admit that there's no causal relationship there. I don't find that surprising, that counties that had high numbers of lynchings therefore are likely to have a Confederate monument. That plays in perfectly with what we might expect. If they had asked the question the other direction, I think that might've offered more fruit. That is, if they had asked if a county has a Confederate monument, is it likely to have a strong history of lynching, that we might've seen those connections more. And if you look at their map, it suggests that that's not the case. So I'm not sure that their evidence bears out the claims that are being made by, and to be fair, they hedge themselves in the, the actual journal article and some of the news reports have drawn this direct line. I have other questions as a historian that I would ask, such as are the counties with the highest number of Confederate monuments, what was the percentage of men from that county who fought for the Confederacy? What was the percentage that survived as veterans? What was the economic base of that county? 'Cause these monuments don't really go up until the early 1900s. They take lots of money. You have to raise money to groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy that are doing it. So I don't disagree with their conclusion that there is, that white supremacy and racism is tied up in this, but I don't think the evidence as it presents itself right now makes a lot of sense out of context.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay.

CAROLINE JANNEY: That's the historian, that's what I do.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. And in August of 2020, you penned a Washington post article, which, the title of it, "The South's Mythology Glamorized a Noble Defeat. Trump Backers May Do the Same." That was in August of 2020 before the election, and we have seen this stuff kind of play out over the last couple years as it relates to some people's denial that the election was lost. It was stolen in their minds. Take us back to when you wrote that and what you were, how you made that projection, that Trump backers may be looking at the same sort of rationale as what we have seen in the aftermath of the Lost Cause and how that seems to be just simmering at this point.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Right. It seemed to me that all the signs were there, that there was an excuse in the making, a myth in the making, if the election didn't turn out the way that Trump and his supporters wanted it to. That there were already these messages being sent out about fraud in the election. There were already messages about those who were being disloyal. And we, again, I'm very cautious of drawing a direct line from the Confederate Lost Cause to conversations about, or allegations, I should say, about a stolen election, but the same methods were at work here in terms of building a popular consensus, that these that had almost no basis in truth, but people could latch onto them and believe them, and that's precisely what the Lost Cause did. If you say something loud enough, long enough, even a small, but vocal minority can have a big impact, and where the Confederate Lost Cause is concerned, we saw people even before the surrender at Appomattox saying, oh gosh, like, if we're gonna be defeated, it's because they have more resources than us. And if we are defeated, that's the only reason, which becomes a central tenant of the Confederate mythology. And so we saw that buildup. And in order to get a myth to work, you have to have enough buy-in from the get go. And so by putting it out there, even before the election happened, people were willing to grab onto it. And as we've seen, it's only exploded since that time. So again, scream it loud, scream it at the top of your lungs, say it everywhere, and again, the same methods that we see with the Lost Cause.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So in a sense of self fulfilling prophecy.

CAROLINE JANNEY: I mean, I could be very, very wrong if the election had gone another way, but I felt like that I was seeing these patterns that were recognizable.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. Here's another question by one of our viewers. Can the Civil War be viewed in a wider sweep of human history and essentially economic tribalism, which is a millennia old phenomenon? Can we contract the roles of individuals and whole populations in such conflicts?

CAROLINE JANNEY: That's a big, broad question, but what's the phrase about economic tribalism? Is that the phrase?

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah. Can the Civil War be viewed in a wider sweep of human history and essentially economic tribalism, which is a millennia old phenomenon?

CAROLINE JANNEY: I mean, perhaps, because, I say that hedgingly. I have to think about this a bit more, but thinking about the way in which most wars, many wars, most wars have some sort of economic-

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Right.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Root.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Indications, yeah.

CAROLINE JANNEY: I mean, that is absolutely the case where the American Civil War is concerned. It is about the extension of slavery into the free territories. And even though the vast majority of white Northerners were not opposed to slavery, and certainly were not on board with civil rights or equal rights for African-Americans, they didn't want to have to compete with slave labor. They wanted free labor, meaning free white men performing labor for themselves. So, yes, at its heart. Now, there's so many other issues around that because slavery was not just an economic system in the South. Every aspect of life in the South, whether you were white or black, was bound up in slavery. Religion, gender relations, labor relations, every aspect of life in the South was bound up in slavery. So we can't boil it down to just economics, but sure, I will say that that is certainly one way that we can understand the American Civil War.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. Have you seen a New York times article, an essay today by Noah Feldman, and it's regarding Lincoln as a dominant force of making the constitution what it is today, and do you agree with this analysis? And the fact that you haven't seen it might be difficult for you to comment on that, but that was a question that just came in. Let's see. We have another question regarding someone that grew up in the state of Pennsylvania. And the question is this. I grew up in Pennsylvania, Union state, yet I was taught in high school in the mid-'60s that the Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery, and that Robert E. Lee was a brilliant general and honorable man worthy of admiration by all Americans. Why was this Southern narrative so prevalent in the North?

CAROLINE JANNEY: So, there are two parts to that. This is a fascinating question. The notion of Lee as an American hero had gained credence by the turn of the 20th century. And many of you are probably familiar with the fact that Lee was one of the two statues that Virginia had in the U.S. Capitol recently removed. But there's a reason that it was Lee. There were gestures in the 1920s, early 1930s. Arlington Mansion, which had been Lee's home, was dedicated as a shrine to Lee by the U.S. government. And so there was a great deal of sentiment. In fact, we can go all the way back to 1870, the year of Lee's death, that he was heralded as a national hero by many in the North, mostly Democrats in the North. But nevertheless, there was this notion that, in fact, he was an American hero figures back pretty early. So I'm not surprised by that part of the education that this person received. That doesn't surprise me at all. There are plenty of people who were praising Lee very early on. There was an effort at Gettysburg. The Lee monument, the Virginia monument, excuse me, that has Lee on the top.

There was a proposal as early as 1903, I believe it was, by a member of the Pennsylvania legislature for Pennsylvania to pay for a monument that would feature Lee as a gesture of reconciliation. So that part doesn't surprise me. I am a little bit surprised about the state rights argument, because that does tend to be more sectional in nature. So I can't help but wonder whether your teacher had been taught that way. Certainly the textbooks that were taught in the South well into the 1960s and '70s, that is the explanation that's used. I have several textbooks, one from Virginia and one from Mississippi, that I use in my Civil War memory class from the 1950s. That's what the war was about. And it's clear to see that that people who came of age, whether it's Strom Thurmond and others who become the resistance to segregation that they were had been brought of age on this type of education. So I am surprised about that aspect because when I taught at Purdue, the one thing that really struck me was how many of my students used first person to talk about we freed the slaves. And so there was very much a regional identity. I had to explain to them that in fact Indiana was not on board with the emancipation, but that that regional notion is in some cases still very much alive today.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. What's your view on why Robert E. Lee was portrayed as a national hero?

CAROLINE JANNEY: There are several factors that go into that. Part of it was his West Point background, and he had been superintendent at West Point. He was beloved by the men who served in his ranks. And he gets a lot of credit, and we can debate whether this is fair or not, but he gets a lot of credit for not being willing to be a vocal defender of the Lost Cause. In private he seethed about Reconstruction policies, but he refused to publicly ever condemn the Johnson administration, to condemn the federal government. And so he was credited as being someone who helped bind the nation's wounds, to use Lincoln's term, to try to heal the nation. So I think that's why so many white Northerners were willing to say, okay, what he did was wrong. It was probably even treasonous, but he is doing much to bind this nation back together. And he was seen by those in the military as a brilliant commander. And so those who were looking strictly at the battlefield could highlight that aspect without talking about his decision to resign his commission and fight for the Confederacy.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So in your book you talk a lot about the negotiations at Appomattox. Ulysses Grant was in a pretty difficult situation following the orders from Lincoln and trying to hit the sweet spot of, you know, the Confederates had lost the war, but yet there's really no tangible admission that they believed that. But talk about the awkward position that Grant was in during those conversations.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Right, so Grant is charged solely with compelling the surrender of a Confederate army, of Lee's army. He can not deal in political issues. He can't touch anything like that. He simply needs to compel the surrender. And he's giving the terms that he thinks are what Lincoln wants him to do. He also is cognizant of the fact that, and I think this is something that we lose sight of, that the goal of the Union army was to end the rebellion and reunite the country. And so if your goal is to reunite the country, you know, a massive trial for treason is only going to compel, probably lead to more bloodshed. Grant is also incredibly worried about the prospect of guerrilla warfare. And he thinks it is much more stable and predictable to compel the surrender of soldiers rather than to let them disperse and wage a different type of war. It's one thing to face armies on a battlefield, it's another to have to fight a guerrilla-style war.

And so Grant is offering terms that he believes are not only magnanimous, but will in fact convince Lee to quit fighting. He wants to end the war as soon as possible. But these terms very quickly get him into trouble. And members of the cabinets, jurists in the North are all very quickly condemning Grant's terms as much too lenient because they fear that they will protect Confederate leaders, especially military leaders, that the paroles will act as a blanket pardon and that they won't be able to be prosecuted for treason. That actually is how it plays out, but people are very worried about this. And I think we, because we fast forward into Reconstruction so quickly, we don't understand the complex negotiations and the legal questions. There's so much of this is about the laws of war and how you treat a belligerent during a war. If you have conquered, if you have won a war, you don't, you don't try your enemies. So it's this complicated dual legal status the Confederacy has, both as an enemy belligerent and rebellious citizens.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So, in 2020, there were approximately 170 monuments nationally that were taken down, removed, et cetera. Is this urgency to remove monuments helping at all in terms of the healing and the reconciliation? What is your view on what the role of this monument's removal kind of cements us in this position, this paralysis that we have right now of, you know, two very, very vocal voices about monuments should come down, we're ruining history, et cetera.

CAROLINE JANNEY: I think it's twofold. On one hand, I don't think it's a stretch to say that a fair percentage of white Southerners hadn't looked at the monuments the way they started looking at them after May of 2020, after George Floyd's murder, and after these conversations, these kinds of visceral conversations about what Confederate monuments meant to contemporary African-Americans, much less why they went up in the first place. And I'm certainly not speaking for all white Southerners, but I certainly anecdotally had enough conversations with people saying to me I simply never thought about it that way. They were part of the landscape, and I didn't think about it that way. So I think there's a shift that's going on. I think it goes back to what I said a little bit earlier that the Lost Cause doesn't have the grip on the white South that it did even even 10 years ago, that we're seeing more people questioning these things that they were taught as children or stories that were told to them by their grandparents. I think we're having more conversations. And that doesn't exactly get to reconciliation so much as a conscious grappling with the past and with symbols of the past. But the other thing that we need to keep in mind is that these challenges didn't start in 2020. They accelerated in 2020. But conversations and challenges to the Confederate battle flag and monuments go back to when those monuments went up.

John Mitchell, the African-American editor of the Richmond Plant in Richmond, viscerally opposed the Lee monument going up in 1890. So the number of people that are willing to challenge those things has increased. But even if we look at the Confederate battle flag, keep in mind that when Atlanta hosted the Olympics in the 1990s, Georgia had to change its state flag that included the Confederate battle flag. And so there were conversations about that in the 1990s. They came back again in the early 2000s, debates about Mississippi's license plate and also about mascots, such as Colonel Reb. I mean, these conversations aren't brand new, but we have seen them certainly accelerate in the past couple of years. And they're all-

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So it doesn't-

CAROLINE JANNEY: I'm sorry, go ahead.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah, no, so it doesn't get confined to the symbols of the monuments, but the flags, the, as you said, the mascots, and we had the state of South Carolina after the mass shooting down there.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Right. That's when the flag came down.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Above the state house there. And so Bree Newsome famously ascended the flagpole and took that flag down. And Nikki Haley, a Republican governor at the time, was willing to order that the flag not go back up. So that was a 2015.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Mmm-hmm. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about your students in this whole discussion, because I know how important that is to you. Are your students processing Civil War history and making a lot of these connections with what's going on now, statue removal, denials about the election being lost and stolen, et cetera, et cetera? Are they making those kinds of connections with the history of the Civil War?

CAROLINE JANNEY: So, I haven't taught the Civil War course since the election. And so, but last time I taught it, we were talking about impeachment. And so they were making that connection-

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay.

CAROLINE JANNEY: With the current issue. But absolutely yes. They seem to understand increasingly that it's not something that is relegated to the past, and studying it isn't just studying troop movements. I'm a military historian, too. I understand all that, I do all that. I love taking them to the battlefield. But they understand and they're asking questions about how this connects to contemporary social and political issues.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay.

CAROLINE JANNEY: And they, I would say that they are even more cognizant in the past couple of years of the ways in which those connections are so relevant.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So when you started talking about your students, your face lit up, it really did. We had a presentation a few months ago regarding the impact of the pandemic on teaching and learning. What are some of the things that you took away from the 2021 academic year in terms of remote teaching? Were there any positives that came out of it from your perspective?

CAROLINE JANNEY: So I did not have to teach a big lecture class. In 2020 I was teaching the bigger lecture course, and it became asynchronous. You know, PowerPoints with me talking over them. And that connection was just absolutely lost with students, and I didn't want to have to teach a big course like that again. So last fall I had a small, it was my Civil War memory seminar. So it was 15 students. And that worked okay because everyone was on the screen and we could have those conversations. There were some silver linings, things that I hadn't considered before. Some of the quieter students that were afraid to speak up could privately chat with me and say, I have this question, but I don't want to speak up, and so I could could ask them, There were ways of pulling in students that simply aren't possible in a regular classroom. It's nice to have it as a backup, but I cannot tell you the difference of being back in the classroom. Students are overwhelmingly enthusiastic. In the mornings, you say good morning to them, and that there's a whole chorus of good mornings. And they, in individual office hours, they tell me about how meaningful all their time is here now. Whether they are second years or fourth years, they want to just get everything out of their college years that they can, both academic and social. I mean, they're telling me about participating in things they'd never thought to participate in before, because when they didn't have the opportunity, they realized how much they missed it. So they, and they've been terrific. They wear their masks, they do what they need to do, and I'm just happy to be back in the classroom with them.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Now it's an opportunity for an advertisement. Tell us about some of the great work that's being done at the John Nau Center of a Civil War History.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Oh, thank you for asking.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Tell us what it is and what you're doing.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Sure. So, the center was established five years ago by John Nau, and we have a couple of different hats that we wear. One is for the larger public. We have public programming, which will be again, back in in-person this spring. Our big annual conference will be on March 29th, and this year's theme is going to be Civil War medicine and health.

So we have a couple of different Civil War scholars and medical scholars coming in talking about the various, and it's not just about soldiers. Widow's pensions, widows of USCP soldiers, and the things that they had to deal with in terms of health after the war, and talking about the ways in which disability and depression became issues in the post-Civil War years. So that is coming up in the spring. We also have a lecture, another lecture in late April about the 6th Wisconsin by a very good friend of mine and colleague at Marquette University, Jim Martin. So those are kind of the public facing things that we do, but we also have two websites that we launched last spring. One is called Black Virginians in Blue, and it looks at African-American soldiers from the United States Colored Troops who were born here in Albemarle County. And so it allows us to see the lives of these men, most of whom, none of whom enlisted from here in Albemarle. They had been dispersed, whether through slave sales, or some of them had been emancipated and had moved to places such as Pennsylvania, but it allows us to look at the lived experience of people. It's local history on a large scale. We also have another one that looks at UVA Unionists.

So white men and professors who attended UVA, who fought for the Union army. Confederates get all the glory. They were the ones who had the reunions, the monuments, but there was a contingent of men who attended UVA or taught here. Tuttle, I think, might be one of the most well-known names. Tuttle dormitory was a Union veteran who came back as a biology professor in the post-war period. We have internships for undergrad students. I've worked at getting more and more at National Park Service sites. So we have them at Manassas, Appomattox, Richmond. This year we're gonna have one at Vicksburg. So lots of experiences for undergrad students and lots of opportunities for them to do research. That's just the tip of the iceberg of some of the things that we do.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: That's great. Well, you talk about your students and the work that they're doing in support of the Nau Center, and more generically, you talk a lot about your experience with teaching student athletes. And maybe you can just take a minute or two and talk about your experiences of UVA students that are also student athletes.

CAROLINE JANNEY: I have had the most wonderful experience with my student athletes. I have three this semester, and I love hearing from them about, you know, what life is like on that side. I certainly wasn't a student athlete, so I am all the more impressed with all of the things that they manage to accomplish, the hard work that they've put in on and off the field or track or whatever the case may be. And they are simply a delight. And I will say that was true at Purdue, as well. I have had nothing but positive experiences. But they also all know that I bleed orange and blue, and I'm looking forward to the first basketball game tomorrow night. But, and I tell them, tell me when you have a meet, tell me when you have this going on, and I will be there to cheer you on. I love to, you know, I had field hockey player last year and made sure that her classmates knew how well they were doing. So for me, that's my fandom and teaching that kind of goes hand in hand.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: That's awesome. Before we close, is there any closing remark that you want to make? Anything that we didn't touch on that's particularly important. I want to pitch the book once again, and here it is. The "Ends of War." And I would recommend it highly to anybody that wants to have some great holiday reading. But is there anything that you want to say to put a punctuation mark on our conversation this afternoon?

CAROLINE JANNEY: I would just go back to the difference between history and memory, as we look at all aspects of the greater world that we live in. And my other point of emphasis is that, man, this is a special place. And I just, I am so appreciative of being here, of being part of this community of faculty and students and the broader Charlottesville community. So, thank you all. It's just a pleasure to be part of this again.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: And Carrie, and behalf of the Retired Faculty Association, I want to thank you not only for today, but for your efforts in bringing great value to our students, bringing great value to the university community, not only through your teaching, but through all the work that you're doing with the John Nau Center. It's been a pleasure to have you today. This has been such a timely discussion that we've had given all the things that are going on, the Kessler trial starting, and you know, all the discussion about monuments and everything else. We probably could have gone on easily another hour or so, but your time is valuable. We're not gonna hold you any longer, but I want to again express our appreciation for your joining us today and taking some time to give us some perspectives on the work that you're doing and what you've seen over many, many years in your research and your teaching, so thank you.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Thank you.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. And with that, I'll bring our program to a close. I want to reiterate the message that Dick brought to us at the beginning, and please be reminded that the association is not collecting dues this particular year again, but we are very willing to accept any donations that you might have. We look forward to not only our next presentation, but hopefully reaching a point during this academic year when we will be able to meet in person. And with that, I will bring today's presentation to a close, thank everybody that joined us today, and as Carrie said, basketball season's starting tomorrow. Football game, big one on Saturday night against Notre Dame. And so many of our other fall sports are doing so incredibly well. Let's support those kids and those coaches that are teaching and instructing them along the way. So, thanks everybody. Look forward to seeing you in person very soon. Again, thank you, Carrie.