Inauguration Symposium features historical highlights

Scarlett O'Hara, Winslow Homer and Jude Law all made an appearance at the inaugural symposium held in the Robins Center arena last Thursday.

President Edward Ayers, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust and University of Virginia Lincoln Scholar Gary W. Gallagher were there too, encouraging the audience to reevaluate its popularized conceptions of the Civil War's motives and resonating significance.

The lights were dim to set off the spotlight that shined on the Richmond-crested lectern where each historian explained the themes of his or her research to a crowd of more than 500 students, faculty and members of the community.

Faust, Harvard's first female president, began the discussion with her observantion that our understanding of the past is often falsely manipulated by hindsight.

"We evaluate the Civil War through results," she said. "We forget about the contingencies and the moral meaning."

Faust described the research she did in writing her books, "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War" and "Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War" and how the stories of the people living in that era were conditioned by their familiarization with death and violence.

She encountered stories of soldiers walking across battlefields without setting foot on the ground because of the overwhelming carnage.

"The texture of experience was the presence of death," Faust said. "Bodies paved the earth."

She told the audience to consider the individual stories of tragedy that are often forgotten in today's discussions of the Civil War. She said Americans like to elevate every cost of war to an essential sacrifice, a habit that hinders our ability to truly comprehend the tremendous loss that was suffered.

"We are all survivors of the Civil War in some profound sense," she said. "We still seek to use our death to find meaning where we are not sure it exists."

Ayers began by sharing his discovery that understanding the way a war ends was often as interesting as understanding why it had begun. He said that the meanings of the Civil War and southern reconstruction were often inaccurately generalized as negative or positive, good or bad.

He observed that there had not been a popular film or novel since "Gone with the Wind" that had told a positive story about the era of reconstruction.

"Things don't often follow straight lines," he said. "I'm interested in tracing the lives of the people and the meaning of the war after the guns fell silent."

He explained how the North shaped the war's legacy to mute the debate and controversy that had clouded so much of its purpose.

"Southerners took the fall of slavery personally," he said. Many confederates believed they had provided their slaves with a better life than freedom would enable them.

"But of all the people in the world who came out of slavery, the African-Americans in southern America came out with the most success," Ayers said.

Ayers projected several Winslow Homer paintings on the two large screens that flanked the stage and described the scenarios and social narratives that each expressed.

"What do we know of the hearts and minds of those involved in that war," he said. "Our history shows us that we continually overestimate and underestimate the potential of people." Ayers concluded that a history that focuses solely on positive outcomes deprived people of the solace and hope they could render from their tragedies.

The final speaker, Gallagher, used still frames from Hollywood films to trace the common conceptions of the Civil War's meaning. He focused on films from the past 20 years since he was especially interested in how the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam affected Hollywood's interpretation of the era.

Gallagher said there were four avenues of interpretation with regard to the intentions of the Civil War and that the "emancipation tradition," which labels Civil War motives as morally infused efforts to end slavery, was the dominant conception in films.

"Most of the central characters in these films have very modern sensibilities about race that they wouldn't have had in 1865," he said. He showed images from "Cold Mountain," "Glory," "Gettysburg," "Gods and Generals" and more to illustrate how the presence of the widely-accepted "union cause tradition," which dispelled the moral implications of emancipation, was virtually absent from these films.

"Hollywood doesn't care," he said. "They don't have a didactic purpose for the most part, but they do teach people."

The symposium ended with handshakes and gift giving

The symposium, which was titled "New Perspectives on the American Civil War," was co-sponsored by the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar, The Museum of the Confederacy, The Library of Virginia and The Virginia Historical Society.