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U.S. Grant History Chat, Episode 1: David Silkenat
Transcript
- All right there. Hello everybody. This is Nick Sacco with Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri and today is pretty exciting. This is gonna be the first of a series of chats with historians over the next few weeks. We're calling it the U.S. Grant History Chat. And our first guest today is historian David Silkenat. He is a Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Dr. Silkenat wrote a book recently entitled "Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War." So with Ulysses S. Grant being involved in a number of surrenders during the American Civil War, it only seemed appropriate to have Dr. Silkenat join us today for this interview. So thank you for being with us here today and just to kind of kick things off, it's rather interesting that you're teaching the American Civil War in Scotland. So I think our viewers would love to kind of hear about what that's like teaching in Scotland and what kind of sparked your interest in the Civil War in the first place?
- Well, thank you very much, Nick. It's really great pleasure to be here. So as you can probably tell from my accent, even though I teach in Scotland and I've been teaching here for seven years now, I'm not Scottish. I'm from New York City originally.
- Okay.
- And teaching here has really been amazing. There's actually a huge amount of interest in the American Civil War in the UK generally and in Scotland. We have a huge number of students who were interested in studying it, both the undergraduate and graduate level. We actually have some Civil War sites connected to Edinburgh. We've got the Scottish American Civil War Memorial here not far from me which is an enormous statue of Abraham Lincoln. So you can come to Scotland and see that. We also have a somewhat smaller Confederate monument too. So we've got all kinds, Frederick Douglas lived just around the corner from me for a couple of years. So we've got actually some Civil War connections you know, even thousands of miles away from the U.S. So you asked about sort of how I got interested in the Civil War. I think it sort of happened by accident like it is for most people, but there's sort of two moments that really in my life that drove me to the Civil War. One, I went on a class trip when I was in eighth grade and I was from New York City, went down to the Shenandoah Valley, I think we ended up going to Antietam. And this was about the same time that the Ken Burns documentary had come out and Glory had come out. And so that was just a really sort of pivotal time in my life sort of thinking about it in retrospect. And I guess the other moment is I went to Duke University as an undergrad. Not far from where we lived is Bennett Place, which is one of the, thinking about the book I'm talking about today, Bennett Place is the site of one of the big surrenders at the end of the Civil War and I became fascinated by that site and what it meant then and what it has meant over the past 150 years.
- Fantastic, yeah, that's a, I think very common story with a lot of us. And I remember it took me a little longer to get into the Civil War, but when I was a kid, I mean Glory was just one of those movies that really stuck out and really sparked my interest in history more generally. So kind of a similar story there as well. Absolutely. So in reading "Raising the White Flag", I thought your introduction really did a nice job of summarizing some of your larger arguments in the book. And, you know, in the introduction that one out of every four soldiers in the Civil War surrendered at some point during the war. It's just an astounding number of soldiers who were part of a surrender in some way. And so that sort of sparks this question about what made the nature of surrender during the Civil War so unique with such a high number of soldiers participating in surrender?
- Well, and not only so many soldiers surrendering but they're surrendering so often, right? So this is a war that starts off the way we usually conventionally describe it. It starts off with a surrendered Fort Sumter. It ends with a series of surrenders, the Appomattox Court House and Bennett place, and a few other places. And in between there's lots of sort of the pivotal moments of the war are defined by surrender, whether it's, you know, in Grant's case in Fort Donelson and in Vicksburg, but in dozens of other, they're surrendering a lot. And so one of the things I've tried to sort of figure out in the book was why was it that surrender was so common? Why is it that, you know, that there seems to be more surrenders in the American Civil War really than any other war in human history that at least that I've been able to find. If somebody has a counterexample, please let me know. I've been trying to find one. And there's a couple of reasons why surrender is so common in the Civil War. One is I think from the very beginning there's a common understanding by both Union and Confederate officers and soldiers about when's the right time to surrender. What happens when a surrender happens. The language of surrender becomes very familiar to soldiers on both sides. And they understand when you're supposed to surrender, when you're not. And there was a conception that one could surrender honorably. That really runs throughout the entire war. So if you think about Major Anderson, Major Robert Anderson when he surrenders at Fort Sumter, he is greeted when he and his men go to New York City, immediately thereafter and he is greeted as a hero. They are treated as heroes. They have an enormous parade and rally for them in the city. If we think about the end of the war when Lee surrenders, his standing among the soldiers only increases. And there's a couple of cases when people surrender prematurely. But the standard basically was that if you were fired upon, if you realize that continuing to fight would only lead to the unnecessary loss of life, then it was appropriate that you surrender in those cases. And I think this sort of shared understanding of what surrender would look like and a common understanding that if you surrendered, you'd be well treated by your enemy. Now there's some exceptions to this, but in most cases, people who surrendered are well treated in the Civil War. So if you think about what happened to Lee's men when he surrenders, we think about Johnson's. I mean, all the other people who will surrender at the end of the war. They're all allowed to go home. We think about in Fort Sumter, they're all allowed to leave. You know, there's obviously some exceptions to this but for the most part, people surrender because they think that surrendering is a much better alternative than fighting in a battle they're going to die in especially die unnecessarily. And the fourth sort of thing that makes the surrender, I think interesting in the Civil War is the ways in which I think like everything else in the Civil War, it's shaped by race, right? The race really is a fundamental framework for how people understood surrender. And from what I've been talking about thus far, it usually applies for white soldiers. For African-American soldiers though, a very different rubric applies. As soon as the Union army introduces black soldiers, the Confederacy says, we do not consider them legitimate soldiers, and if we capture them, we're not going to treat them the same as we would treat white soldiers. We're going to return them to a state of slavery is the sort of official Confederate policy. In practice, the Confederate policies if they capture black soldiers, they're going to be executed. Which means that for certain categories of soldiers and similar kinds of things apply to southern unionists and gorillas who were also sort of seen as being illegitimate soldiers by the enemy. African-American soldiers recognize they cannot surrender on the battlefield and consequentially say, if we can't surrender, we're not gonna let Confederates surrender to us, right? We're gonna play by the same rules. And so it's really one of those interesting places to look at how race informs the ways in which soldiers are going to fight in different ways.
- Very interesting. Absolutely. So there's a lot of this that's kind of bound up in the notion of honor and fighting honorably but then knowing when to stop, but then we can kind of see through the racial dimension that there are limits to that notion of honor as well it sounds like.
- Oh, to be sure. I mean, I think the Civil War soldiers really thought of themselves as fighting in a civilized war. We had to have a conception of what war was supposed to look like. A set of rules of war was supposed to be fought according to and obviously the Civil War was enormously bloody and brutal in all kinds of ways. But it could have been a lot more bloody and more brutal than it was. You know, if we think about, you know, the Civil War is the bloodiest war in American history with three quarters of a million Americans dying, one could imagine alternative war in which surrender is taken off the table and these one quarter of soldiers who surrender, you know have to fight to the death. The war looks even bloodier, you know, imagine what Fort Donelson would have looked like if they hadn't surrendered or Vicksburg would have looked like if they hadn't surrendered or Appomattox Court House would have looked, you know, these all would have been well over a million deaths. I mean, it's hard to sort of estimate what that would have looked like but it would have been a very different war than what we had.
- Absolutely. And you could definitely see with Appomattox, you know, if Lee refused to surrender at Appomattox, who knows how much longer the war would have, that particular war with the army in Northern Virginia would have lasted.
- Well, I mean I think Lee's army was in extraordinarily bad shape, right? And so what that battle would have looked like, it would not have looked good for Lee's army. They would not have been able to walk away from that. And the fact that they were all able to receive their paroles, go home, return to civilian life, I think is really sort of astonishing. I think we, people don't take enough time to think about what that means and what the consequences of that were for not only those men but for what the post-war world looked like.
- Absolutely, absolutely. And then finally, with our last question here kind of going back to Grant specifically, I'm very interested in the case of Fort Donelson 'cause with Grant, he gains really international fame with the notion of unconditional surrender but with Confederate General Simon Bolivar Buckner, at least in his perspective, he's expecting to be able to negotiate terms with Grant, and he's sort of taken aback when Grant demands unconditional surrender. So maybe if you can kind of speak to maybe that moment and then the way that Grant and unconditional surrender maybe shape future surrenders later on in the war.
- Sure. So one of the things to think about with Fort Donelson, there's a bunch of things that factor into this. One is there are actually a lot of Confederates who are surrendering at about the same time. So actually just like a week earlier, there've been a major surrender on Roanoke Island in North Carolina, part of the Burnside invasion. And there's, I think a couple of things that are going on in Grant's mind. He never explains this. You know, if you look at his memoirs, he doesn't say why he demands unconditional surrender. And obviously he gets this nickname, unconditional surrender Grant, which fits with his initials but I'm not sure he actually deserves it because the other two major surrenders he's involved with are not unconditional. He negotiates terms. And that was the default, right? And all, most nearly all Civil War surrenders, the premise is the two commanding officers are sitting down to negotiate a way not to fight. And usually, one of them is in a vastly superior position to the other and that's why they're having that negotiation. But they at least, they walk through the motions of doing it as equals and unconditional surrender is seen as sort of in a front to that kind of mode of doing things. So why does Grant do this? Well I think the reason why Grant demanded unconditional surrender at Fort Donelson is because of the sort of the situation of the Fort on the river. Lots of Confederates are fleeing during the moment in which, you know, Buckner offers to surrender and then Grant writes back that he demands unconditional surrender. There are Confederates who are fleeing. Buckner was actually the third highest ranking officer when the siege begins, right? So he's got John B. Floyd who ranks higher than him. Gideon Pillow ranks higher than him. Buckner is the most military experienced of the three, but both of those men outranked him and both of them fled the fort before the surrender happens along with several thousand Confederate soldiers. I think part of what Grant was worried about was that if he went through the process of negotiation, there would be nobody left in the fort to surrender when the fort actually surrendered. If we think about, you know, Fort Henry which had surrendered just a week earlier, there's basically nobody in that fort when the fort surrenders, right? And so I think what Grant wants to do was to actually have a garrison there that's surrenders rather than having an empty fort which would be somewhat useless. So that's my thinking through why he demands unconditional surrender then. But I think it's, you know, thinking about the nickname, you know, Grant saw surrender as a way to avoid fighting when fighting didn't need to happen. And I think one of the things that people don't fully recognize about Grant, they sort of think of him as a great general and a great warrior and all these kinds of things, I think the thing that made him really the best general was he found ways to avoid war when he could. You know, and if you think about Vicksburg, he found a way to not fight a battle there and at Appomattox Court House, he found a way to not fight a battle there. And I think those are actually the moments of genius for him and the moments where he demonstrated his greatest humanity. Right? So if we think about what happened at Appomattox Court House, you know he demonstrates a great deal of deference to Lee. He demonstrates a great deal of kindness to Confederate soldiers. There's a point there which his soldiers are celebrating and he tells them not to. He says, look, these are our countrymen. We need to recognize them and not shame them in this moment. Interesting thing about Buckner though. Buckner ends up surrendering when as the two guys who are ranked higher than him decided they don't want to do it. That's actually the first of two times that Buckner ends up surrendering. The second time is at the very end of the war. He is working for Edmund Kirby Smith who was sort of at the, one of the last Confederate surrender. Kirby Smith is trying to relocate his headquarters. He puts Buckner in charge for a brief moment. And it's during that brief moment that Kirby Smith's army dissipated, he decides that they need to surrender. So on two occasions, Buckner ends up taking responsibility for surrendering when his superior officers didn't want to do it. We need to serve some credit for that too.
- Yeah, it sounds like Buckner kind of got the short straw a couple of times there during the war. Well that's really fantastic and fascinating. And thank you again, Dr. Silkenat joining us today, talking about surrender during the Civil War and Grant's role with it. Again, the book is, "Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War" published with University of North Carolina Press. And is there any way that we could, any videos or any other way we can learn more about you? Do you have a website or anything like that?
- Well, so you can follow me on Twitter, I'm at @DavidSilkenat. I also have a podcast if you want to hear more of my voice on a regular basis. I do a podcast and my colleague Frank Cogliano who is a Thomas Jefferson specialist. It's called The Whiskey Rebellion.
- Okay.
- Partially because we live in Scotland and what happened with whiskey. But we have a weekly podcast where we talk about American history and politics and try to sort of make sense of the present using the past. So yeah, lots of ways to keep up with me.
- Fantastic. All right. Thank you, Dr. Silkenat. We'll see you soon and thank you very much. Have a great day.
- Thank you very much. It was my great pleasure.
- Thank you.
Description
Professor David Silkenat of the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) joined Park Ranger Nick Sacco to discuss process of surrender during the Civil War, particularly General Ulysses S. Grant's role in the surrendering of numerous Confederate armies throughout the war. Dr. Silkenat is the author of "Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the Civil War" (University of North Carolina Press).
Duration
16 minutes, 12 seconds
Date Created
05/07/2020
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