>> Well, let's start.
This is a, what is today?
April the 24th, 2024.
We're in the KSU Archives.
The interview today is with Dr. Brian Steel Wills
who has been the director of our Center for the Study of
the Civil War era which is quite a name since 2010.
You were not responsible for the name?
>> No, I inherited the name.
>> You inherited the name.
But you've been here since 2010
in Virginia for a number of years before that.
>> Yeah.
>> And let's just start with your background.
I know you're from Virginia,
you got a Bachelor of Arts with
Honors from the University of Richmond in 1981.
Let me just start by asking,
were you a traditional age student?
>> Yes.
>> So you didn't do any military or anything beforehand?
>> No. I went straight from high school to college.
>> Well, why don't you talk a little bit
about where did you grow up in Virginia and
why the University of Richmond and a few
things about your background that you think are relevant?
>> Okay. When you say relevant,
I guess it depends.
If you want to do a life's history,
I guess they're relevant if you want to
do something like what we're doing with archives.
I'm not sure how many care,
but I'll go ahead and tell you that-
>> What shaped you?
>> I knew where you were heading with that
that's why I was joking about that,
but I started out on a farm
in Virginia and growing up on peanut farm.
And in the traditional days when you've stacked peanuts;
so some of the most beautiful vistas are
these beautiful stacks of peanuts in the fields and
my dad had me doing that as early as
possible and involved in tractors and other things.
Then we had horses.
My dad raised and trained Tennessee walking horses.
I was, I call it the designated shoveler,
the one that went into the stalls
and made sure that they were clean.
And my dad did supervise that,
make sure that I did what I was supposed to do
and didn't just lark the whole time away.
>> So that was his primary occupation?
>> Yeah, he was a farmer, and my mother was a teacher.
>> What part of Virginia?
>> Southeastern Virginia.
The tidal area is Suffolk, Virginia.
>> Okay.
>> In fact, my second book was
The War Hits Home on the Civil War in
Suffolk particularly the Long Street
1863 campaign to that area.
I always wanted so badly for
something big to have happened on our farm,
and I would go out as a kid looking for
either Indian relics or
Civil War relics and nothing
seems to have happened on our farms.
[LAUGHTER]
>> No spent shells.
>> No spent shells,
no materials that you could take back and show
everyone what great location you lived on.
>> When I was preparing question though,
I had my geography all mixed up.
I thought you were probably writing
about where you were teaching,
but you were in Southwest?
>> West. Yeah, I was in Southwestern.
>> So you went from Southeast to Southwest?
>> Well, I stopped in the middle at Richmond so
I did went across the state.
>> Okay. Richmond's in the middle?
>> More or less.
>> North and South. [OVERLAPPING]
>> Well, between Suffolk and Wise,
but the Wise Virginia which
is where, of course, my farm is where I worked
for 17 years before I came here is
closer to six other state capitals than their own.
They're closer to six other state capitals.
That's that far west.
If you took a ruler and drew the line,
you would actually go to Detroit Michigan with that line.
So that's how far West you are.
People don't realize that you're that far West.
>> So let's see Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana.
>> West Virginia.
>> West Virginia, of course.
>> Yeah. I guess I'm trying
to think of what else, but supposedly six.
But they've geo-mapped it,
so I'm not trying to create the history there.
But they've geo-mapped that that is true.
Because Richmond is six hours away.
So if you're anywhere within six hours and see Roanoke
is three hours northeast of Wise, Lexington,
Kentucky is six hours Northwest of Wise, and Knoxville,
Tennessee is three hours Southwest of Wise.
So you have Knoxville, Lexington,
and Roanoke overall in a three-hour trip from-
>> You say Richmond?
>> Richmond is six hours so you have to go
>> You're traveling pretty fast
to get there in six hours.
>> You really can make it.
>> Okay. How big
were your family farm when you were growing up?
>> We had 90s plus acres.
So we had a lot of land;
a farm of cows and pigs.
We had pigs, we had horses, of course,
we had peanuts, we had corn, soybeans.
Dad raised watermelons at some point.
We actually took trucks to
the DC suburbs and sold
watermelons and all kinds of stuff.
He was a real go getter.
And then he also was
an oil distributor for a period of time.
So he would do oil
and then he was fertilizer distributor.
So in other words, he spread fertilizer to make sure
that again the crops have the best soils to work with.
>> What's your father's name?
>> Curtis.
>> Curtis Leonard Wills junior.
>> Had the farm been in the family for generations?
>> I don't know generations,
but it's certainly been around.
My grandfather lived on the farm as well.
>> So you couldn't help but be
interested in the Civil War I guess in that location.
>> You really were interested in
history because of Virginia.
Virginia is just a seed of history
especially early American history.
So you were there because
of Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown,
right in the heart of a lot of things that
happened not necessarily Civil War although of course,
once you latch into history you can't help but
get in addition to George Washington and Patrick Henry,
you get Robert E. Lee,
and Stonewall Jackson, and Jeff Stewart.
>> Do you have any Civil War ancestors in your family?
>> Yeah. Actually, I did.
Interestingly enough on my mother's side,
I had a member of the Confederate Navy.
>> Oh.
>> He was Charles Hasker.
He had come over from England.
>> Charles?
>> Hasker, H-A-S-K-E-R.
And one of the programs I did for
the symposia as I've tried to do different programs.
So the year was on Charles Hasker
so that they'd learn about who he was.
But he was actually a boatswain on the Virginia.
Virginia has the Merrimac.
So if you have to talk about the
Merrimac and the Monitor;
the ironclads, the Merrimac
is renamed Virginia, and he was on that.
And then he became a lieutenant and
the Confederate Navy ended up being
at Drewry's Bluff after
they destroyed the Virginia and
helped keep the Union Navy away from Richmond and
then went to Charleston and actually volunteered for
a stunt on one of the trial runs of the Submarine Hunley.
And he will be in one of the seats
that enables him to be able to
escape because in both of the trial runs,
it goes down and drowns most of his crew.
And he got out by virtue of being able to get up through
the hatchway enough that
the hatch cover came down on his leg and trapped him,
but they weren't that far out and when they settled,
he pulled the hatch cover off and swam to the surface.
He was the only man who went to the bottom
and came out and lived.
He lived past the Civil War.
He was very productive and very
interesting and did a stereopticon type of
presentation on the Confederate Navy compared to
the modern US Navy in the Spanish American War era.
>> What's your mother's name?
>> Harriet with one T.
And she is a Steel,
Harriet Steel which is where my metal name comes from.
And actually, I had a relative,
Charles Steel who was a colonel and was in
World War II in the Pacific and he ended up
being captured in the Philippines and
taken on the Baton Death March and managed to survive
it all somehow and
survived incarceration
in the Philippines through the war.
He was a skeletal type
of person when he got out, but he was living.
And one of the people when he came back,
I don't know if it was in San Francisco
or where it was I habit of clipping,
and said, "Colonel Steel,
what are you planning to eat?
When you're back in
the States, what are you planning to eat?
He says, "Brother, it won't be rice."
[LAUGHTER]
>> Well, now, I guess you were born about 1960,
'61 somewhere in there.
>> No, I'm a 1959 baby.
>> You and Randy are both '59.
He's a year older than I am.
He's actually born a year before me.
'58? I thought you were born in '58.
>> I was born January 7th, 1959.
>> We're talking about Randy Paton [OVERLAPPING]
>> Dear friend. I knew him.
He was my office mate at University of Georgia,
and we've been dear friends and close ever since.
>> So 1959 and you graduate 1981,
you're a traditional student at University of Virginia.
I'm assuming you're a history major.
>> I was at University of Richmond and,
you asked why did I go to Richmond.
Richmond, of course, back then was
still considered a Baptist school.
I was a Baptist.
I got all the Baptist scholarships you could get,
which amounted to a couple thousand dollars,
and of course, Richmond was much
more expensive than that.
We ended up having to put a lot of money in,
and my dad basically said,
"I'll make sure you get college education,
but after that, you're on your own."
[NOISE] And so for the quite expensive time of Richmond,
I built up, of course,
the traditional debt that one gets.
But I was very fortunate,
because my first book was on
Nathan Bedford Forrest and it was
a pretty good seller and it ended up
enabling me to make enough money
to pay off my college debt.
>> Well, I was just saying [OVERLAPPING]
>> So I didn't have to wait for
Joe Biden and all of that. [LAUGHTER].
>> I was thinking the other day, you're
probably still making a lot of
money off of royalties or
all those popular books that you've done.
>> Well, they're better than some of
the things you could write, I guess,
and one of my professors at Richmond said,
I just got my royalty check for $0.50 and so
I've done a little better than that, but he's right.
It's hard to just make money.
You not the Grishams and and the other people that
make all the money off novels and all of that stuff.
>> But I imagine
probably most of your books are still in print.
>> They're still in print.
The Forrest book was retitled
and published by a different publisher,
but they're still in print.
>> Well, I guess we've talked about
how you got attracted the history.
You didn't have a choice where you were from.
I did have another question.
What about the military?
Did you ever have
anything you've written all your life about the military?
I don't think you ever served,
did you ever? [OVERLAPPING].
>> The closest I came was
a seasonal at the Petersburg Battlefield Park,
[LAUGHTER] and I was serving on
a Confederate artillery piece,
and for five summers,
I fired the artillery piece for the visitors,
and then the Coehorn mortar,
which is homage to
the siege part of the Petersburg battlefield.
And I loved it. I brought a little show and tell.
Here's my picture of me on the horse
with one of the horses as a Artillerist.
I don't know if you can zoom in
on that and get that or not,
for the folks that might want to see that
for an archival purpose.
>> Where are you in the picture?
>> In the middle there.
Right in the middle with this hat on.
It's hard to see, but anyway,
I'll pass it on and let you look at it for fun.
But one of the things that I did as a summer job was
this artillery position with
the Washington Artillery from New Orleans, Louisiana.
So we had fun with that.
And I even brought my own horse one summer,
and worked one summer on the battlefield with my horse.
His name was Danny Boy.
And Danny was a very wonderful horse,
very pleasant disposition, did not scare.
He was good around children,
which is always a good thing.
And he was a pleasure walker,
not the big show that my dad rode.
He rode the ones that I can't even sit on them.
I don't really care that much for him,
but he loved them and won
a world championship with one of them.
One of his championship horses was
called a Southern Colonel.
And he actually won a world championship
on a Southern Colonel.
But he would go to Shelbyville and
to the national events and all that stuff.
And horses were work to me and Danny was the exception.
I enjoyed Danny.
And he and I were good buddies.
We did a lot of stuff and rode,
and went on the farm,
but then he went to Petersburg that
one summer and we had a great time.
>> Fantastic. So you go to
the University of Georgia straight from
Richmond or is there a gap in between?
>> There's a gap in between. What did you do?
Well, aside from military service
in the Confederate Army,
which always jokingly said that it was interesting to get
paid by the United States government
to be a Confederate soldier.
And I shouldn't complain too much about taxes,
or having done all that.
Also, one of the other interests,
I've always had interest in politics, too.
I was in student government at Richmond,
but I'd actually been a page where I actually assistant
postmaster in the House of Delegates of Virginia,
and I thoroughly enjoyed that in
the '70s as a young person.
So I kept being interested in that thing,
but I had a professor at Richmond who said,
"You would have to do the things you don't
want to do to be in politics."
And he knew that if there were a lot of
things that I would have trouble with,
because I would draw
the line that I'm not going to do that,
it's questionable or whatever.
He says, "Do you really want to be in
politics given the things you would
have to do to be in politics?"
Now, we all know that there's no politician like that.
That all politicians are selfless,
all of them work for the people.
We know that. So I don't know what he was talking about.
But, I got the point and I decided,
of course, to try something different.
And my last year at Richmond,
and in the interim time period,
and I'll cover two things with that.
One, I was in theater, and I love the theater.
And I was actually an award winning theater person
because I did an Irish priest who was the family,
a friend of the father and
son who couldn't talk to each other,
and communicate with each other and
tell each other they loved each other.
But the boy was coming to America and leaving Ireland.
So was Philadelphia here I come,
and I was trying to reconcile them before he
left and he'd never see his father again.
And I won a Cameo award for that,
because I could do Cameo.
I couldn't remember the lines well enough
to be real characters.
So that was a Cameo.
I'm always good at scenes.
So I could do a scene. And I enjoyed it.
>> Imagine you not being able to remember the lines.
>> I'm terrible memory.
Yes. Terrible memory. I have to keep at it,
and that's how I remember it.
But the other thing
that I did that was the interim thing,
was I was the research assistant for
the Virginia Baptist Historical Society,
which was housed at the University of Richmond.
And I worked there for
a couple of years and really enjoyed it,
did the archives and whatnot with
the Baptist and also was the university archives.
So we collected all kinds of things from old,
memorabilia to hymnals to papers,
we had pulpits like
an old church would might have a pulpit,
that they wanted to save,
and we got that and put it back
in the storage area and so forth.
So a lot of stuff with Lottie Moon,
the missionary, and just a lot of things.
It was really great and I enjoyed it.
But two years I was ready to go to
grad school and try something different.
[LAUGHTER]
When I got ready to leave,
they threw a party,
which I thought was very sweet
of them. They threw a party.
A guy named Lynn Dickerson,
L-Y-N-N D-I-C-K-E-R-S-O-N, was
a professor at the University,
but he was also a preacher.
Lynn came up to me and he said,
"Brian, we're going to miss you terribly."
I said, "Dr. Dickerson, that's so kind of you to say."
And he said, we will never find
anyone who will work for as little as you do.
[LAUGHTER]
So there you go.
So then I went to grad school so I could be a high paid college professor.
>> And you were very naive at the same time?
>> Well, I also
thought about maybe teaching in high school,
and I had played football in high school.
I was a linebacker and full back.
And not too bad,
but short, I was mostly mean but took me in a short.
And pretty good, I thought but not good enough.
And then I got a helmet and the knee in
my senior year and back in those days,
it was Frankenstein stitches
if you wanted to have surgery.
And I didn't want that. Now today, it's pin prick.
They go in and do all kinds of things.
But back in the day,
I just I retired.
And rather than go on
to try to be in a college somewhere,
even a small college.
I ended up retiring, but I've never
given up my love of football and love of sports.
And been involved with
football all my life one way or another.
In fact, at University of Virginia's College at Wye,
which is where I ended up
going and teaching for 17 years.
I actually for a period of time,
was there radio color commenter,
and then I was also their play-by-play guy.
When I would do radio the people would always tell me,
we learn more history than we do football.
Because I was always throwing in history stories
whenever there was a because you
can't have dead time on the radio.
Cannot have dead time.
So if you don't have a commercial,
if you're not on a commercial,
you have to keep talking and so I would talk about.
>> So you're saying this
reminds me of Math and [inaudible]
>> Whoever sometimes it would be.
I sometimes I'd say we're going to attack
them both ways a Forrest would say.
Charge them both ways.
>> Douglas Southall Freeman. Is that right?
>> Yes.
>> He was in Richmond.
>> He was an editor,
newspaper editor, and writer of cause.
Robert Bagley and others. Award winning.
>> You were aware of him when you were going through?
>> No. My mother actually grew up in Richmond.
Before she came and went to
school and did all the things and married my dad.
And it was a fun story there too because
she was a nutritionist for
the local girl scout camp and so she was buying
produce from local farms for the girl scouts.
And she went out, she saw my dad on
a tractor with no shirt on.
And she said I fell in love. Fell in love.
Then they started according and been married,
and they were married for a good long while.
My dad has since passed away,
but my mother who was 96 years old,
still living, still playing bridge.
Still doing everything, teacher for forever.
She taught for more years than I've taught.
>> What did she [inaudible]?
>> Mostly fourth grade, but different levels.
And she was the one who would take groups at
fourth graders to Jamestown or Yorktown,
or Williamsburg, or wherever.
And so that was part of the allure there too.
Plus, she sold child craft and world book.
And child craft was
the supplemental volumes you
could get on science or anything.
And there was a history one and one on great people.
I think they called them men back at the time.
I know what I'm saying. And I
read that and it was fascinating.
And I saw just great stories
about people like Robert Lee,
but they weren't necessarily civil war stories.
The one about Robert Lee was when he was in Mexico.
And it was about him being out on
a scout and then having to hide
behind a log while the Mexican patrol was in the area.
And then the mosquitoes,
which apparently in Mexico,
like the state bird,
were tearing him up,
but he was disciplined,
and he was lying there and not moving and whatnot.
And then when they went off,
and one of them actually sat on the log.
And then when they went off,
he got up and went back and reported to Winfield Scott,
what he had what he had learned.
So I mean, you can't help.
Again, the personalities of Washington and Patrick Henry
and Robert Lee or Richard Harry.
Light Horse Harry Lee.
>> Did your mother teach you in the fourth grade?
>> No. And if she sees this, she'll understand.
But it was a miracle that they understood that I
did not need to be with my mother in school and at home.
>> Correct.
>> That that was not necessary.
And that that would actually amount to
something that would probably
be against the Constitution.
>> Maybe even child abuse.
>> We don't believe in torture.
>> So why you at the University of Georgia?
>> Well, I went to the University of Richmond,
I was in a private school.
I love the school. I had great times.
There were also moments I
questioned what I was doing there.
It's like everything else.
You have those days where everything's going well,
those days where you're looking around wondering,
what in the world am I doing?
But for most part, I love
the school and I love the department.
Great department. I had a guy named
Ernie Bolt is my major professor there.
Ernie Bolt, B-O-L-T,
was just a super super guy.
Harrison Daniel was their Civil War guy.
And Harrison had a very dry sense of humor.
Ended up being a lot more complex than I ever dream
because you never really
knew because his idea of humor was.
So the slaves were sometimes named Cesar.
And he thought that was funny.
But you just look at him, well,
doctor Daniel, that's interesting. That's fascinating.
But he was passionate loved,
of course, chaplaincy and religion in the war,
but he loved baseball.
It was just a fascinating thing to see and
learn more about these people through the years.
My best favorite professor there was
a guy named Martin Ryle.
R-Y-L-E, who taught Soviet history.
And I took all of his classes,
and we went to Europe together and had
a great time and it was my first overseas trip.
And I'll never forget I went to
LaGrand Place and looked at all of that,
just the most beautiful stuff in Belgium.
And he said it was the first time I'd
absolutely been quiet.
And for a little minutes,
while I didn't know what to say.
But I love Versai.
I think I must have been a stable boy
at Versai because I really have
an affection and an attraction to Versai.
But we went all over.
>> Had a previous incarnation.
>> We were doing, I'm interested in stable,
so I tied the two together.
But anyway, we were on a trip in that case for
school to look at some
of the international organizations,
so we went to Belgium and Austria.
You went to places where there were Intern at Switzerland
where there were international organizations.
So it was wonderful and that was my first trip.
And I had an aunt. I say Aunt.
A-U-N-T because I don't have
little relatives that crawl underground and
eat many times at picnics.
But my aunt was very
generous and gave me the money to be able to go.
So otherwise, I couldn't have gone.
So it was a wonderful trip and I love that.
But all of that ties back to Georgia because in Richmond,
private school with Harrison Daniel,
we were reading the Confederacy as
a revolutionary experience written by Emory Thomas.
And then He said,
"You need to go to a school at
your next level that goes up a notch from Richmond".
Now Richmond was a great school,
but he understood that you
might want to go somewhere else.
I applied to North Carolina
to apply to Emory in Atlanta.
And I applied to University of Georgia.
And he said, it would be good if you go to
a public school because then when you come out,
you can show you were functional,
you could work in a private school.
You can functional, you could work in a public school.
And to work with a professor that has
the cloud that can help you would be good too.
So I was treated at Georgia like a person.
I thought they were wonderful.
Emory, it was just very distant and numbers,
you're Number 536 and all this.
I was at Duke, I should have said Duke.
At Duke, I was not going to get
any money for a year because I
didn't give anybody money the first year.
Well, I'm a farmer's son,
my mother is a teacher.
We don't have any money. I've already been told,
when you leave undergraduate, you're on your own.
I can't afford to have paid that bill.
So I had to automatically rule that out.
And then I got a call from Emory
after I had accepted at Georgia,
and they said, we have some coat money freed up.
And we will bring you and let you come here, and I said,
I've already accepted at
Georgia and I'm planning to go there.
Well, you don't have to now.
I'm going to tell you right now,
that doesn't ring well with me.
There are certain attitudes.
>> Why do you want to go to [OVERLAPPING].
>> Why do you want to go to U
of G when you don't have to?
You don't have to do that now.
You can come here. And Martin Ryle had been at Emory.
And so he was the Emory connection.
And I wanted to go to Emory,
but again, I couldn't have paid for it myself.
And then I was treated so well at Georgia,
maybe not so well at Emory,
and then here comes this entitlement type of thing,
and I said, no, I think I'll stay,
and I'm glad I did.
I mean, I stayed and then
the question was whether I was going to
go on after my masters to somewhere else.
And I thought about studying under
a guy named Tom Connally,
who had written some really big stuff
on the Western Theater of the American Civil War.
And he was very close friends to Emory Thomas.
He and ET were very close.
But I am eternally grateful that Connally told Emory,
I just don't think I want any more students.
And that was good because within a short time,
frankly, he was sick and he passed away.
So it would have been an upheaval.
Now, he was at South Carolina,
again, another fine institution.
I'm sure I made out just fine.
But then I stayed on at Georgia and got my MA
and PhD at Georgia.
>> Did you know that Emory Thomas was born in Richmond?
>> Yeah. Now, I knew that they took Virginia Connections.
He went of course to UVA.
I knew he had all these Virginia connections.
I was happy to be
a student of Emory Thomas and very pleased.
>> He even wrote the dissertation
on Richmond in the Civil War.
>> And then he turned that into a book. Yeah.
>> Okay. So you go to UGA.
Emory Thomas becomes your mentor there,
I guess, major professor.
>> He becomes my major professor.
I think it's interesting you choose
the word mentor because in so many ways,
the man probably gained the most
from my teaching and what I used in the classroom.
And this is no shot
at Emory because I loved Emory Thomas,
I love him, and he was a great major professor.
But Newman V Bartley,
Bud Bartley, was really influential to me.
And of course, he was Randy's major professor.
Everything Bud taught, I took.
And you had to be on your Ps and Qs with him.
You couldn't go into classroom
and not know what you were talking about.
He would not be kind.
He could be pretty exacting when he wanted to be,
but he was a great person and I love Bud to death,
and he in so many ways was
as much an influence on my teaching as anybody.
But he will tell me at a later point,
of course, Civil War is irrelevant.
It has no meaning,
no importance at all.
>> He said that?
>> Of course, you know, he was teasing me.
>> Okay.
>> He was teasing me to try to play off the notion that,
of course, his interests are New South and other things.
And so I just told him,
I said, Bud, it's fine.
You think what you want.
Civil War and civil rights go hand in
hand and you can't have one without the other.
>> Okay. So those are your major two professors at UGA?
>> Right. And of course, I took other people.
You had to take a lot of different people.
Well, of course. But you know,
those were the ones I took the most,
and I was associated with the most.
>> Yeah.
>> I didn't see Bartley listed under
the Emeritus faculty at UGA now. Is he still alive?
>> No. He passed away.
>> Okay.
>> He's been passed away for a while.
>> Really?
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. Yeah. I guess he was Randy's major professor.
>> He was. But he was funny now.
You talk about somebody again,
that just didn't fit any of the profiles because here's
a man who studied history the way he did,
and yet he loved Georgia football.
So he would investigate who did they recruit,
where the team stands and so forth.
He'd been the last person
that you would have thought would
be interested in sports and
football but he loved that thing
and really was on top of it. But he was funny.
We had a gathering.
Another reason that I loved being a Georgia,
one of the Emeritus professors there was very
kind to grad students and believed Ben Wall, Doc Wall.
I don't know if you knew Bennett Wall.
>> No I didn't. But one of the fine people.
And he believed that grad students were people.
And so he would invite us to
his house and we would have parties.
And I never forget that when I announced to Bud Bartley
that I did not drink beer
because I just didn't like the taste of it,
he says, Mr. Wills,
you're the biggest waste of
a beer drinking body I've ever seen.
I'm not against alcohol drink.
It just wasn't my drink of choice.
>> I didn't go to UGA,
but they had some really nice faculty there.
>> They had a great faculty,
and it was a great department.
It was at the time, I think it was at its peak.
It really was at its best.
And I'm not saying compared to today,
because I'm not aware of how they stand today,
but at that time,
they were really an outstanding department
across the board
with reputations and scholarship of all areas.
>> Yeah. I used to see
Kenneth Coleman and Fantasy scholars.
>> Yeah, fantasy. I took fantasy.
>> Whatever Georgia historical society.
>> I took quite a few of them.
>> And a bunch of other faculty there,
Jim. Was Jim Cop [OVERLAPPING].
>> Jim Cop was not a student.
He had been a student,
but he was already out,
and so I didn't know Jim that way.
I mean, I knew him because of
the Southern historical and other things.
And by the way, Doc Wall,
when we went to the SHA,
Georgia was still heavily connected to that.
And so even then, I mean,
now it's under other people,
but under Will Holmes,
And then other people have since taken that mental,
but Will was the main one.
But Doc Wall would have us in
his hotel room because he would throw a party there too.
He liked to have a party.
He has connections to Tulane,
he had connections in Kentucky.
He had great stories about
different personalities of Bear Bryant
when he wasn't at Alabama.
But anyway, the point is that he would introduce
us to famous people that we wouldn't have met otherwise,
and who then we could talk to as real people.
And it was great. And so he'd say,
John Hope, come over here.
That's John Hope Franklin.
>> Yeah.
>> And my gosh, you're meeting John Hope Franklin.
>> [inaudible].
>> He was more business.
He did history on Exon, I think.
>> Okay.
>> So all kinds of stuff that
he did was more business, I think.
>> Okay. So it sounds like you had a good time at UGA?
>> Yeah. And then John Ensco was
perfect. He was a great colleague.
>> I was wondering.
>> And Ensco and then I worked at
the Georgia Historical Quarterly.
I was an assistant there and worked
with John and Sherry Dandy and a few others.
So it was great.
I never forget one time.
We brought in William McFeely from Metal Holyoke,
and they brought him in,
I think to try to get the Pulitzer Prize,
heft and all that stuff,
and he came for a period of time.
And I never forget he came in one time and he says,
''Brian, can I borrow your office?''
I said, ''Doctor feel sure you can.''
Well, he went back in there and he was
excited and you could hear him and all that.
I said, ''Are you okay?'' He says, ''I'm fine.
I just had to work things out.''
I said, ''Well, I understand that.
I do understand that,
but I'm glad you were able to do that.''
I was glad I was able to help out.
But McFeely was potentially going to be on
my dissertation committee when I did
my dissertation on
Nathan Bedford Forrest because Emory said,
''Why don't you just pick some aspect
of Forrest life and write about that?''
I said, ''No, I want to do the whole thing.
I'm just all or nothing. I want the whole thing.''
So I was going to do the whole life of Forrest
and so he was going to be potentially on the committee.
When he went into this thing with Forrest,
I think he just decided
he didn't want to have
anything to do with that even if it's just.
>> Forrest is pretty controversial?
>> Well, he was, but the point is is that
McFeely just didn't want to have anything to do with him,
and he would he came in with this yellow pad,
all these comments and turned red faced and turned,
got excited and finally blurted out.
Forrest was worse than Hitler.
And I said, ''Dr. McFeely,
I think that's letting Hitler off pretty easy.''
Because as bad as Forrest was, he was no Hitler.
Now, Forrest is controversial;
slave trader, Fort Pillow,
first grand wizard to the clan.
He did not found the clan.
>> Yeah.
>> It found him, but he was in it.
So he was controversial, but I said,
what we need to do is understand
these people in the context
of their times and see what we can learn from them.
And also, of course, what we can learn about what
we don't want to have happen, again.
>> Did you take any psychology
along the way because it seems to me
Forrest would be a prime candidate
for a good psychiatrist.
>> He probably would sit
down if he didn't strangle McFeely.
>> It seems like he is constantly mad at somebody.
>> Well, he had a lot of stuff going on.
He had a lot of internal demons,
and I think he was one of those personalities that
didn't brook much nonsense
and unfortunately had a tendency to
express that in a very overt way.
>> I don't know whether you would
know anything about this,
but I'm thinking back about 70 years now.
When I was in elementary school,
I remember reading a children's book
on Nathan Bedford Forrest.
>> Sure.
>> I was talking about his hard upbringing.
>> Sure.
>> And you know back 70 years ago,
here's a great man that
came up the hard way type of book.
>> Well, the focus there was Lincoln Esq,
grew up in that hard scrabble life made good, etc.
Of course, he was an exceptional soldier,
but the personality that made him a good soldier
made him problematic as a person as a citizen.
But it's funny, Forrest was more
complex than people give him credit for.
He toward the end of
the war will write a letter to his son.
Now, keep in mind that Forrest
has six months of formal education.
So he wrote the way he spoke.
Fight is F-I-T-E, fight.
So F-I-T-E is what he wrote.
>> So why don't we spell it?
>> But he would spell it out.
He would spell out
his letters if they're original
to him, the way he pronounced it.
And if it's perfect,
you knew a staff person or a clerk wrote it.
But he would say he would tell them clerks what to say.
And that if they didn't give it the right pitch,
he'd give it a new tune.
So he'd make them say what he wanted.
And in this letter,
he tells his son,
I don't know what will happen to me once this war
is over and what my fate will be.
But in all things,
be more like your mother.
Well, his mother was
a much different person than Forrest when
he met his future wife and went to court her,
the guardian of the future wife said Forrest,
you cuss and gamble and Mary Ann is a Christian girl.
And he looked at him and he said,
''I know that's why I want her.
That's why I want her.'' He knew what he was,
and he knew what she was
and that she would make him better.
And so here he's telling his son,
don't do the things I did,
don't make the mistakes I made.
Don't make the choices I made,
be more like your mother.
And so it was a funny letter.
He, of course, did survive the war and
did live a little while after,
lived through reconstruction, 1877.
>> He didn't live that much longer, though.
>> No. He didn't live as as long as some.
Obviously, some lived into the next century but.
>> What happened to him?
>> We don't really even know there's a lot of
speculation about whether he had
some complications from like
diabetes or whatever. We don't know.
He had a condition where he literally could not
absorb nutrients into his system.
And so even though he would eat and he went
away at the toward the end of his life to
some of the springs to try to recover
his health he couldn't sustain weight.
And he just deteriorated to the point
that he basically died.
He basically starved himself to death.
>> Do you get any static from doing a biography
of Nathan Bedford Forrest from your faculty?
>> No. The only person was McFeely.
And then I'm sure I've had some issues since because I
wrote about him with other later situations,
but I would never know it.
Most people that are going to hold Forrest against
me won't tell me that to my face.
>> Really?
>> Yeah.
>> Well, I mean, you're trying to be objected.
>> I was trying to be and I thought he really
needed to have a serious treatment.
It been a really good book that had
been out but it came out around World War II.
And I thought it needed an updating
and so I was really interested in trying to do that.
>> It was pushed very quickly and by
HarperCollins, that ain't bad.
>> No, that was a big deal. I was very lucky.
So you get the degree in '91,
'92, the book cover?
>> That's right. I was very lucky.
>> So you must not have had to do
too much editing to the book?
>> No. I had to do some work
and I had had a little bit of work to even get
a dissertation finished because there was
some people thought I needed to say more at Fort Pillow,
and I needed to say a little more about the clan.
And so I said a little more about
Fort Pillow and added one sentence
in the other stuff it was all
of a sudden, this is what we wanted.
This is good.
You've covered it well.
>> Well, for HarperCollins
main selection history book club.
>> It was a big deal. I was very very lucky.
And didn't write for a little while after
because of school and I was busy
trying to do my lectures and just
become a professor and all of those things.
I did leave Georgia and took
two years as a visiting professor at Georgia Southern.
And so I was at Georgia Southern for
a couple of years and then I was in
a three year appointment that I
didn't want to get into the third year and be desperate.
So I was looking at jobs,
but I didn't want any job.
I wanted jobs that I thought I would go
to or I would be willing to go to,
and I looked at four different schools
and one of them was the one I ended up going
to Clinch Valley College
of the University of Virginia as it was at the time,
the University of Virginia's College of Wise now.
>> So it's a Clinch Valley College?
>> It was Clinch Valley College
of the University of Virginia at the time.
That was its original.
>> That's a tongue twister.
>> Yeah. And that's why they wanted to change it.
And of course, it still became a tongue twister because
the University of Virginia's College at Wise
is a tongue twister too.
It's not like in all things,
our Civil War Center became Civil War Center,
UVA Wise became UVA Wise.
Clinch Valley was always known as CVC.
They just shortened to CVC.
But one of the school would have
a Chancellor because the school
answered to the president of University of Virginia.
So you would have a president at University of Virginia
and a chancellor of Clinch Valley.
And one of the chancellors had worked with
the president at UVA and
he wanted a real close connection,
and that's why the name
changed and became a really big deal,
but they did it. They executed that.
>> Yeah. You changed the title when it was
reprinted in 1998. Why the change?
>> I think that's very perceptive of you, and of course,
it shows you the power and strength that an author has.
The book came out,
A Battle from the Start;
the Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And I like the title.
He had said, "I did not come up with that title."
Somebody said, "Why don't you use that?"
I said that is a great title from
the original press, HarperCollins.
He had said, "My life has been
a battle from the start, " so it was perfect.
Then Kansas bought the rights and they said,
"We'd like to republish your book,
but we want to change the title."
>> They've done a lot of civil work [inaudible]
>> They did. And I said,
"I want to keep the title," and they said,
"We want to republish your book."
I said, "You don't understand.
I want to keep the title."
They said, "We want to republish your book."
[LAUGHTER] So I got that I was going to
have to change whether I liked it or not.
So then the decision was made to find
some way to put either Confederacy Civil War
or something in the title,
because that way they thought it would sell more.
And so somebody might
not know who Forrest was. That's exactly right.
So Confederacy's greatest cavalrymen,
which is an ironic thing because
he really wasn't a classic cavalryman.
He took horses as mobility,
transportation, get to the battlefield.
Every fourth man stays behind,
holds the four horses while the other three
go on foot and fight on foot.
And that was more of the traditional
way Forrest would fight.
>> So you're saying he's not that great?
>> No. I didn't say he's not that great.
I said he's not a traditional cavalryman.
So he's do very different things.
He was very great, he was very positive.
As he will say towards the end of the war
when he's finally beaten by James Harrison Wilson,
"You're the only one who's beaten me
first and last in this war."
So he'd been pretty successful.
Now, he'd actually lost a couple of battles,
but he found ways to blame somebody else.
And he survived one battle,
and so because he survived and live to fight another day,
he claimed that as a victory,
but he was the kind of guy who had all these sayings.
He supposed to have said,
get there first with the most as.
He didn't just say is this that way,
because who talk is that way.
And remember he was the kind of person who
cut words down, fite F-I-T-E.
He would cut words down instead of spreading them out.
So he would be the kind of person who
would have said something similar,
but did it very different style.
I found a conversation
with him and other Confederate generals who
were sharing their secrets of success after Chickamauga,
in the Atlanta area,
and one of the one of
the comments was, "How did you do it?"
He says, "Well, I'll tell you my IDEE,
I-D-E-E. I'll tell you my IDEE.
I try to get there first with the most and
then if I can't whoop them, I'd run them.
And I think he said that,
because that sounds more like him.
But he was very fascinating guy.
War to the knife, and knife to the hill kind of guy.
>> So he actually said fast with the most.
>> He said fast with the most,
but I think he was then saying even better.
If I can't whoop them, I run.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Now, after you got here in 2014,
that it comes out, the river was dyed with bud.
Getting a little bit out of order,
but it's on Forrest.
Of course, this is about Fort Pillow,
and that's I guess one of
the biggest marks against them on his records.
>> Sure.
>> Well, I guess my first question is,
why the second book?
Did you just go into more detail?
Did you change your interpretation
by the time you got to this book?
>> That's a good question, too.
The answer is that I did not
really change my interpretation,
but I gave more detail and more explanation.
Fort Pillow in the biography is one chapter.
This is a book, but it's not
really just about Fort Pillow,
it's about excess and warfare.
>> It said.
>> So I started with the Revolutionary War,
and some of the things that were happening with that,
that showed excess in warfare,
I went all the way to World War 2 in Vietnam.
But the World War 2 Vietnam and
the Revolution were just the beginnings
and the ends of the book.
>> Well, of course at Fort Pillow is
where supposedly they were trying to surrender
and Forrest doesn't accept their offer to surrender,
but spotters them.
[OVERLAPPING]
>> That's not right.
So let me go ahead and help you. I'll help you quickly.
>> I'm just saying this is the way it's come down.
>> Well, I know what the way it's come down,
and that's why I wrote the book.
You asked me why did I write the book.
A person had come out with
a real tough interpretation
on Forrest and basically said what you just said.
And I said, I know I've written about Forrest.
I know what I think happened,
I'm going to look at it again,
I'm going to look at it even more closely,
I'm going to look at it from many new sources,
and I'm going to see what else I can come up with.
So the book was about excessive warfare,
which is also deals with
other things even during the war that are not
related to Forrest and to some things that he was
accused of in different places.
So one of the places that's supposed to have been
really horrific in terms of mercilessness is the Crater.
Well, the Crater is never looked at as in Petersburg,
is looked at as a place where war crimes took place.
And yet Fort Pillow is,
basically supposed to be this massive war crime.
Well, two things to keep in mind.
Number 1, Forrest went
there to capture a fort he didn't think would
put up much resistance because he did not
have respect for the troops that were garrisoned there.
>> [inaudible].
>> They were either literally half Tennessee Unionists,
traitors in their minds, of course,
because they had not signed up
the Confederacy, and/or Black troops.
So they're half and half.
And he didn't think they'd put up a fight.
So he didn't expect much to it.
He says they have horses and guns that we need.
So he was going to capture the fort to take
away all their horses and gun.
If he had been wanting to wipe the fort out,
then his goal, Forrest was usually pretty clear,
and usually pretty straightforward.
"I'm going to wipe the fort out." He didn't say that.
He says, "Have horses and guns that we need."
And he clearly made it an
understanding that he didn't think there
would be much of a trouble getting it.
He didn't think there could be much of a fight.
These were not the soldiers
that he thought could stand up to his troops.
When they got there,
Forrest was not there.
The Confederate surrounded the Fort,
and fired into the fort.
This is a long story made short.
The big Earth works on the very outside
would have to have about 10,000 men to hold.
The Yankees didn't have that many men.
They had less than 1,000.
So they have only a fraction of the men
they would have needed to garrison the entire thing.
So they don't have anybody on the outside works.
There's a middle set of works
that was on higher ground than the fort,
that they occupied, the piece
of the ground they occupied.
They had some pickets on that,
to warn them if something was coming,
to tell them that trouble was there.
The commander of the fort,
who was a Tennessee Unionist said,
"I don't expect any trouble.
There's nothing in the in the region that tells me,
I even need to be worried about anything."
Well, of course, then far as people show up,
he had a little more to worry about.
They run the pickets into the fort.
Now they hold the high ground.
They can literally fire down into the fort.
So they're firing at the fort,
Forrest comes in later in the morning,
investigates because he never went to
a battlefield and he didn't look at it for himself.
He didn't trust anybody doing it as well as he do it.
He has two horses shot at from under him,
in the course of this investigation.
If you've ever come off
a horse when you didn't intend to,
you don't feel very good.
You're banged up, you're beat up.
He didn't think they were good opponents to start with,
worthy opponents in the sense
that they put up much of a fight.
And he's sore and he is beat up.
So at the end of the day,
when the final attack comes,
he sends in the attack,
he does not lead the attack.
Now you can always argue he was
trying to preserve his deniability.
He wasn't thinking that way.
He doesn't think that way,
if he wanted to lead him, he would have led them.
He sends them in to overwhelm the fort.
Now, again, it's a complicated story.
They sent in surrender demands.
The Union refused to surrender.
Because in part, the Tennessee Unionist commander,
and this is complicated, in this sense,
the commander who had been in charge of
the fort actually had been an old army sergeant,
knew a little bit about stuff,
knew what the war was about,
knew what he needed to do.
He is killed at the early part of the engagement because
he's behind one of the embrasures cannon openings.
And one of the sharpshooters from
the high ground targets the men working the cannon,
including this officer and kills the commander.
The Tennessee unionist that was
not in command then becomes commander.
Tries to pretend as if the other guy is still living,
and sends back this communication as
if this dead man is communicating when,
in fact, it's this other guy.
And he says, "No,
I'm not going to surrender because they had a a plan."
That if they got into trouble,
there's a gunboat in the river,
they would retreat to the gunboat,
and the gunboat would cover them until help came.
>> But the gunboat didn't show up.
>> The gunboat was out of ammunition.
It had fired all morning long,
and didn't have enough ammunition,
and the gunboat got back to
his gunboat away from the shore,
so that it couldn't be captured,
which when they broke from the fort,
the Confederates overcame the rampart
and the Yankee commander,
this Union commander said, "Boys,
it's every man for himself."
But when you got that kind of
leadership, you know where you're in.
Now they're all running out of
panic to get down to the bottom.
Well, Forrest has sent two forces
on either end of the landing,
so that they could cut the retreat off.
And those troops fire into the retreating federals,
killing many of them or wounding them.
And then others are trying to swim,
some of whom, many of whom cannot swim and are drowning.
So there's people dying left and right,
as part of this combat.
Two things. Number 1,
they panicked and broken.
Number 2, remember
the sharpshooters had been shooting at them all morning.
Where does the sharpshooter hit you?
Here or here. Head or chest.
What's going to kill you?
Head or chest. What's not going to kill you?
Hand, foot.
So if you look and more people are killed and wounded,
some of that's because
Forrest lost control of the battle,
and people were killed who should not have been killed.
They weren't allowed to surrender,
but it was on a case by case situation.
Now, you say, "Well, why didn't Forrest stop that?"
Forrest went into the fort after it had fallen.
He sees the gunboat,
he's already had two union gunboats
cause him difficulties in another location.
He doesn't want this one to cheat him out of his victory.
So he's focused with artillery from
the fort on the gunboat instead of
focusing on what's happening around
him or even on the landing below,
where he doesn't see what's happening.
So he wasn't doing his job,
but he also wasn't directing a massacre.
And then one of the surgeons comes up and says,
General, they're killing people down there.
And he says, well, who are you?
He says, I'm the surgeon of the post.
He says, well, if you Yankees are part of this force,
we're going to fight you till
the yonder flag comes down, till you surrender.
And he says, I'm not a union,
I'm not from the Tennessee.
I'm not a West Tennessee unionist.
He says, well, you're the commander of Negro troops,
and I ought to kill you for that.
He says, no, I'm actually not with them either.
Well, he's not a Tennessee unionist,
he's not a leader of the Negro troop.
Who are you? He says,
I came from Iowa.
Well, that threw Forrest.
He didn't know what to say about that.
So he looked at him and said, well, if you people
in the Midwest had stayed out of this,
we would have won this by now.
[LAUGHTER] And then he lets him go and
takes him to the rear where he's safe keeping.
If he feels like this guy
who has just told him bad things are happening
is a witness to a war crime for which
he's responsible, what would you do?
He wouldn't be going back to the rear and safe keeping.
I would make sure he didn't get there when he stayed,
survived the battle, survived the war,
and wrote about it after the war.
It's just a more complex.
I think Forrest lost control of the battle, I really do.
I think bad things happen.
People did things they should not have done.
But then the other thing about battles,
if somebody's trying to retreat and somebody's
trying to shoot and somebody's trying to surrender,
do you stop to try to determine which of
those things they're doing or do you just shoot them?
>> So it's about more complicated.
>> It's very complicated.
>> I understand. Well,
you're at Ways from 1992-2010.
And how big was the college when you got there?
>> It wasn't but about 1,200 students.
It got to about, I think, almost 2,000.
It's back down a little bit now,
but it was around 2,000 at this time.
>> You actually wrote a college history?
>> Yeah, I wrote the history of the college.
It's like you've done for Kennesaw.
I did No Ordinary College.
>> What made it not ordinary?
>> Well, it was a outreach to
the Cal Fields region by the University of Virginia.
In fact, the University of Virginia would
say we don't have branches.
We don't want branches.
So it was never a branch but it was an outreach by
the University of Virginia to a region
that did not have access to public education.
So it was a real mission-oriented thing.
And it grew on its own and then when
the Commonwealth of Virginia
created the community college system,
it had the choice of either going into
the community college system or going independent.
And it had enough clout because it really
had some good friends
in large part because of
its long-standing chancellor, Joseph Smiddy.
Papa Joe Smiddy was its long-standing chancellor,
very popular in Richmond rather, lot of friends.
He gets the exception for CVC,
that they will continue to be part of UVA
but they will be still a two-year college.
And then eventually it became a four-year college.
So it's a four-year college but still connected.
>> When did it become four-year?
>> Well, I'd have to go back and go through
the timeline for that.
It's been a while since I've thought about that timeline.
But years ago, it went to four-year
pretty quickly after that community college shift.
>> Was it a two-year when you went there?
>> No.
>> It was already four-year.
>> It was a four-year long,
four-year when I went there.
It was long four-year. And Papa Joe had already retired.
He ended up being an Emeritus chancellor longer than he
was a professor of biology and chancellor of the college.
He was also my father-in-law.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Is that right?
>> I love Papa Joe. He was a World War II veteran,
one of the finest people I've ever known,
an entertainer played the banjo.
One of his favorite lines was,
hold my banjo and I'll hug your wife.
And he was just a real character,
just one of the finest people.
We went to Ireland,
he and his son and I and we walked
into a pub and one of the pub people looked up and said,
oh, my God, the Hillbillies are back.
[LAUGHTER]
Because he never went
anywhere he didn't bring the banjo and
play and do so they loved him.
People loved him.
>> So the Quench Valley College goes back a long way.
>> Well, '54.
>> '54.
>> I can recommend a history.
>> You recommend it, go ahead.
[LAUGHTER] Well, you also let's say,
I guess while you were still at Why as you
wrote the book on the Civil War in Southeastern Virginia.
>> That was my second book.
>> The War Hits Home.
Then I sent my parents a copy on September 11, 2001.
So it's the most interesting thing that on 9/11,
the 9/11, I sent them a book called The War Hits Home.
>> University Press of Virginia, did you?
>> Yeah.
>> All your books have been
really remarkably good publishers.
>> I've been very lucky, now, I've been very fortunate.
>> And you were department chair for a while there.
>> I was chair of the department,
I was chair of the faculty senate.
I've been in a little bit of everything.
I was one of the representative to
the faculty representative of the Honor Court,
which was very important to me at Clinch Valley UVA Wise.
>> While you were there, you also
wrote the book about cinema,
the Gone With the Glory: The Civil War in Cinema.
>> I love that book. It's a little book
but it's a fun book.
>> Gone with the glory because
the films don't glorify the Civil War anymore?
>> No, gone with the glory,
meaning that when you're
trying to assess them, is historically valuable.
You don't have much to work with because
history has a tendency to be a second nature.
As one of the people that did movies years ago said,
if Reda wanted historians to make films,
we'd have never made any.
[LAUGHTER]
>> A little play on Gone With the Wind, I guess.
>> Well, I was playing off Gone With the Wind and then
I was trying to figure out what cover I should have,
and I was going to put some
Gone With the Wind thing and I thought,
since I'm using a play off the name Gone With the Wind,
I'll put John Wayne.
And so I put the horse soldiers.
So that's on the cover there, the horse soldiers.
And then if I'd known I was going to be here,
I would have done something different.
But actually, what's funny is I was
here before I knew I'd be here.
I came to give a program,
one of the symposia was on Forrest.
And I came to do that with John Faul.
>> I think that's in 2006.
>> I think so or '07, something like that.
But it was no thought that I'd ever come to Kennesaw.
I just was talking about Forrest and coming in.
Back in the day, he went to
the Jolly Lodge, which was nice.
It was nice to go to the Jolly Lodge.
I hope one day that's made more
possible for ordinary citizens.
>> Is it not possible to go there?
>> I think it's all really up to the president now.
I don't know.
[LAUGHTER]
I would say quote me or don't
quote me, but you got me on film.
>> You don't go to do the job you like a lot.
>> Not anymore, but in the day,
actually there was some programs
we did when I first came.
School was very different when I first came.
Dan Pap was a super president involved.
He actually came to some of our programs and staff rides.
Was very involved in that way and just a great guy.
And the Dean, Rich Vendrof was very supportive.
Then when we got Robin Dorf,
he also did some things because
we took the staff ride idea
and really ran with it from him.
He was the one who helped push that idea.
And we're still doing it.
>> I'm impressed that you
said that Vendrof was supportive.
>> Yeah, very supportive.
>> That's great.
>> He's the one that hired me,
so I felt close to him in a lot of ways.
Hermina was here at the time,
[NOISE] I brought another show in town.
Here's a picture of Hermina and I with Andrew Young.
I had a great visit with Andrew Young.
>> It was Hermina Glass Avery at that time.
It's a different last name probably.
>> That's true.
>> What was it, Hill?
>> Hill, I think.
>> I remember I worked with her on some of those symposia
that she got a lot of
black history into them for a while.
>> We all tried to cover all the grounds.
One of the first ones I did when we got here,
was from civil war to civil rights.
And we were trying to cover a lot of ground.
But it's been a very
great opportunity because, of course,
in wise you were, 5.5-6
hours from anything of any significance in the Civil War.
And here, you've 15,
20 minutes, depends on traffic.
But you're 15 minutes from the battlefield,
and that was Kennesaw Mountain.
So it was a great opportunity.
When I got the offer to come here,
one of the people on the panel said,
"Why do you want to come here?"
Actually, let me rephrase it
because the way they started was,
"Why do you want to leave where you were?"
And I said, "I don't. I'm fine.
I'm happy where I'm at."
That was an endowed professor at UVA wise.
I had the Kenneth Asbury,
Chair of History, and I'm
very proud of it and all that,
and I'm busy with school and all those other things,
very involved, spoke
to groups all over Virginia, everywhere else.
So I was at home.
Why do you want to come here?
So that's another question because then I could say,
I can come to do
the entire learner campaign in two hours.
I can go to Kennesaw mountain, 15 minutes,
and in wise you were at
Bushwackers Paradise, but that's it.
Bushwacker paradise is the middle and nowhere,
where not much happened.
Although one of the small battles
was a battle called the Battle of Pound Gap,
that had James Garfield,
future president of the United States involved.
So it's interesting. A few named people came through.
>> I guess one of the questions that was in my mind,
I've been at Kennesaw for 55 years.
I know when we had 2000 students.
How did you find the time to
do all the things you were doing?
>> Well, one of the reasons I didn't write
anything right after the Forrest book came out was
because of trying to do
all those things and be involved in
the school in all the different ways,
and compartmentalizing time.
So if you're going to be in faculty senate,
if you're going to be in the honor court,
if you're going to be with all the things I was doing,
you don't have a whole lot of time to
do a lot of research in writing.
And in the summer,
the way that things were at the time,
I was under a nine months contract,
and when you're in the summer,
you're trying to scramble to
make detail and get back to get a paycheck again.
So that was always an interesting time.
And another, of course,
appeal here was that I had
a 12-month contract, and at the time,
an administrative type position because this was
a director of the center
for the study of the Civil War era.
So it was an administrative position.
That was attractive,
and the 12 months was attractive,
and it really was one of the reasons I
left and endowed chair to come here,
one of the more practical reasons
among the historical reasons.
>> Should mention in passing that you won
an outstanding faculty award in
2000 from the Commonwealth.
I did gather they did one for
every college in the system or?
>> No. It was for the entire Commonwealth,
all colleges, all public and private institutions,
and only usually around 11 people
from every school in the state would be considered.
>> So it's not just the University of Virginia?
>> No.
>> I got you.
>> Now here. Now, in theory,
you could have two or three winners from one place.
So you could have two or three different people
from UVA or something like that, in theory.
But most of them tended to come one from here,
one from here across the board.
And I was very lucky to be able to get that because,
it was a great honor to
get from the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Well, I guess I had just turned where
I was at a point where this might not have been possible,
but I got 40 under 40.
So right at the end of my time before,
I would have been not eligible for it.
So I was lucky I got
several honors that came at different times.
And was fortuitous to give.
>> You want to say something about
the Honorable Elizabeth's Wells?
>> Sure. Well, my wife was from Southwest Virginia.
I've already mentioned that
my father-in-law was Joe Smiddy.
Bill Sturgill was a member of our board.
And so they're either Sturgills or Smittys,
that have a lot of Clint's [inaudible] history connected.
And so we ended
up meeting and a couple of mutual friends introduced us,
and we ended up getting married,
and we've been married now as
of this next October, 30 years.
>> So what is that '94?
>> That's good math?
>> Didn't take you long after you got there?
>> Well, I said I want to I want to find
a wife and must have her own teeth and all the rest.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, she was really a great catch,
because she was a judge.
>> She's already a judge.
>> She was already a judge and she was very engaging
and you want to
find somebody that you can have discussions with,
and so she did not like
exactly the same things, which is good, too.
>> I'm pretty sure she told
me she'd been a judge 36 years.
>> Yes, sir. Well, I'm sure she had.
So she told you that. [OVERLAPPING].
>> She'd been married 30 and she's already a judge.
>> So that makes sense.
>> That makes sense.
>> But see, that's why I wouldn't know
for sure because I didn't know
her at the earliest stages.
>> Well, I want to ask what she ever saw in you.
[LAUGHTER]
>> I won't even try to go there because I tell her that
she's the cougar that took
the young handsome young historian.
[LAUGHTER].
>> I guess she's called presiding now or?
The Chief Judge or?
>> Well, she was at one point.
She's given that up in the last couple of years,
but, you'd have a person that's out of that level.
In the juvenile domestic relations,
she was the chief judge for
a good period of time, but it rotates.
>> [inaudible] [OVERLAPPING] Relations District Court,
30th Judicial District.
>> Of Virginia.
>> That's a mouthful too.
>> And so people asked me.
Well, I had one person says,
he doesn't even live here.
I have an apartment here.
Somebody don't want to question that,
they didn't pay my rent.
I'll be glad to have them pay my rent.
I live only five minutes away from campus,
but I do have a 5.5-hour commute home.
I go home about once every two or three weeks.
So I think of myself as a military family on furlough,
and every now and then I get home to see my wife.
Sometimes she comes down. They were very kind.
I got all of the kids,
and one grandkid to come to the last symposium we had.
As it was my last symposium
and it was a wonderful turnout.
And four children, seven grandchildren.
So I got a lot to go home to.
>> For sure. So are they all still in that area?
>> No. One daughter and
several grandchildren are in Raven County,
Georgia, and a beautiful country.
And then one daughter lives in Lakeland,
Florida with her husband and two children.
And then my son and
my other daughter are in Wise, both lawyers.
>> You've got a farm there?
>> Farm.
>> How big of farm?
>> It's about half the one I grew up on,
somewhere in the 36-40 acres.
I can't remember exactly.
>> Do you grow anything there?
>> Mostly stuff that can be cut down and fed animals.
So we really don't have anything significant.
We do have now cows on the farm.
We didn't originally have that,
but we got a big federal grant to do
some water projects and some things,
but one of the obligations
was you had to have cattle on the thing,
because they wanted to see how they
deal with these waterers and all this stuff.
And so we had new fencing and cattle.
We've always had quarter horses,
as opposed to walking horses.
So I say if wasn't even a full horse,
it's a quarter horse.
And some others, but all
of our children have ridden, my wife's ridden.
>> Well, it's remarkable since you've been at Kennesaw.
If I counted correctly,
you've got six books since you got
there. Does that sound right?
>> I put it at four only because I couldn't remember.
>> Well, the first one,
I think you probably had it written before you
got to the Civil War sites in Virginia.
>> That's a small volume.
>> Did you take Robertson's book
and revise it [OVERLAPPING]
>> And updated it, correct.
And I added a lot of stuff about
Southwest Virginia that he didn't have.
And some things about some other sites that had come
on in the Shenandoah in Central Virginia,
but updated it and expanded it a little.
>> We need to stop to repair?
Well, it's after you got here,
but I'm sure you had written
most of it before you got here.
>> The George Thomas, yes.
>> The George Henry Thomas.
>> But it came out in 2014, I want to say.
>> I've got 2012.
>> 2012. You're correct. You're right.
>> University Press of Kansas,
so you used them again.
>> Yeah, used them again.
>> I was impressed,
to say the least, with the bibliography [OVERLAPPING]
>> I loved doing the project,
and I wanted to do it
because I wanted to show a little variety besides again,
the Forrest-type person that I had written about.
And Forrest only had
six months education and this guy
had a West Point education.
Forrest did not have much writing.
Most of his writings are very narrow and very few.
>> He is also from Virginia.
>> He wrote a fair amount.
The problem was that his wife ended up
destroying a lot of personal papers after his death.
So there's a lot more I wish we had that we didn't have.
I wrote quite a bit
and he had staffers that
do have letters and some other things.
I did have some original letters.
>> And that's why it took so long
to get a major book of his [inaudible].
>> Well, there were some books on him.
And one thing I won't do in that book as
you'll notice if you read it is attack Grant.
And a lot of Thomas people attack Grant and
Grant people tend to be dismissive of Thomas.
>> I'm going to say this that in most of
your books where anybody has done a review,
they've talked about the most balanced account.
>> I try to do that.
I really try, because it doesn't do
me any good to try to sell some point of view.
I'm trying to get into their mind as much as
possible and see things through their eyes.
And Sherman is the one that I got the quote
from because Sherman was his friend and he liked Sherman,
and Sherman liked him, but
Sherman could never say anything good,
he didn't say something bad or vice versa.
So he said, well, he may be slow,
but he says true is steel.
So that was Sherman who said that.
>> When I first saw that,
I thought this is going to be a pun off of your name.
>> Well, and that's another reason I used it.
>> But of course Sherman is the one that said that.
>> But Sherman is the one that said it.
And of course, it goes with my middle name.
And I'm from Nansemond County,
which is where the farm was, Suffolk today.
>> What's the county?
>> Nansemond. The Indian name, Nansemond.
N-A-N-S-E-M-O-N-D. Nansemond if I
said that going spelling fast.
Nansemond. But it's now Suffolk,
and there's a history for that too,
which you don't want to get into.
But the point is the next county over Southampton County,
that's where Thomas was from.
So part of my curiosity was,
what made this fellow from
deep Southern part of Virginia,
almost on the border, in fact,
his home is right on within miles of
the border of North Carolina go with the union.
Why did he stay with the union when
Robert Lee and Jeff Stewart and
Stonewall Jackson and others did not?
So well, he really did see secession as a fool's errand.
He saw his duty with his country.
He did not feel the same devotion
to Virginia that Lee and others did.
And his wife was from Troy, New York.
I don't want to say that when we
marry that our wives don't influence us.
>> Well, he's right. [OVERLAPPING]
>> I would never say that about my judge.
>> What a disaster it would
have been if the South had won.
>> Well, and his point was that he
thought that it was just a terrible mistake to even
make this succession happen
and then a potential war and then the war itself.
>> The book just flapped open to
a famous picture of Kennesaw Mountain
[OVERLAPPING]
>> And Thomas is there.
He's the man who's trying to punch his way through at
Kennesaw Mountain at Cheetham Hill so that's Thomas.
And of course, Thomas is also the Rock of Chickamauga.
He's got tons of nicknames.
Old Paps, he's got a lot of nicknames.
>> Old Paps sounds like they must have liked him.
>> The men did like him.
They were happy to have him as a commander.
They were proud to serve under him.
And he knew that his army was the reason for his success.
He said my army made me.
And so he was always appreciative of his staff,
appreciative of his subordinate officers,
appreciative of the generals,
appreciative of the soldiers.
And he had a dry sense of humor at one point.
One of the men in his command,
his largest command through most of his time
was the Army of the Cumberland.
The Union armies were named after Rivers,
typically, so an army of the Cumberland.
And one of his men came up to
him and said, I want to furlough.
Why do you want to furlough?
And he says I want to go see my old woman.
And the general looked at him and says,
I have not seen my wife for three and a half years,
why do you think you deserve more than your general?
And the guy looked at him and says, well,
me and my old woman ain't that kind.
And he laughed.
He thought that was hilarious.
He thought that was funny.
We're not the kind that can stay
away from each other like that.
We're not the ones that can stay
separated for all those years like you did.
I want to see mine.
[LAUGHTER]
And he wanted to see his too,
but then he knew duty was first.
He was a real soldier soldier.
>> I guess so.
>> And it was an award winner.
I won an award with that one.
I won an award with the Inglorious Passages:
Noncombat Mortality in the Civil War.
I won different awards with
my Pender book and with some of the other books.
So I've had some success there.
>> Richard Barksdale Harwell Award for
the Best Book on the Civil War for 2012.
>> And then the Inglorious Passages
came the year that came out.
>> It's a minor part of your book,
but I did say that I have to flip through it.
There was a part in there where
you were talking about Thomas actually
seemed to grow in understanding of
African Americans because of
the war that he had a much higher opinion,
I guess, of African Americans after he saw them fight.
>> Well, I'll say two things, first of all,
he was from Southeastern,
Virginia, from Southampton County,
and his family, and he fled to the local town.
It was called at that time, Jerusalem.
Today, it's Cortland, Virginia.
But he had fled during that Turner's rebellion.
So he'd seen all kinds of
things related to slavery one way or the other.
He had given some of his old books to slaves,
to his friends to read.
>> That was in the 30s.
>> Yeah. So he'd been involved in a number of
different things that related
to the institution of slavery.
>> He would have been young at that time.
>> He was young. But his time in the war,
what you just said is important in this sense,
when he first went to Kentucky to raise troops,
so to train troops.
So he'd been in Virginia for
a very brief period of time, Western Virginia,
and then he went to Kentucky and then he was in
the Western theater the rest of the time of the war.
Western theater is everything from
the Georgia line to the Mississippi River.
He was in that theater.
He looked at the soldiers
there as people who have to prove themselves.
They were white.
Had nothing to do with race.
It had to do with material.
Are you the right material to be a soldier?
When Black troops began to be
a factor where they could potentially be soldiers,
he wanted them to prove themselves just like
he'd wanted his White troops to prove themselves.
And so he felt that when
they did show that they could be soldiers,
not just wear a uniform,
but actually perform in battle and perform feats,
as well as any other soldier,
then that was what settled
his mind on their capabilities.
Not again because of race.
It was because they were
raw material until they prove otherwise.
And raw materials made into
soldiers was fine with him regardless.
>> What did he do after the war?
>> He continued in the military,
continued in the army,
was in South during reconstruction.
Ultimately went to California
in the last year of his life,
actually went on an inspection tour
all the way up to Alaska where he
determined there wasn't anything worth having in
Alaska and that he
didn't know why we would want to bother with it.
He did say it would have been
nice to have had that before
the war because we could have sent
all the hotheads there,
and we wouldn't have had the war.
But he would also make
a slight comment about himself because,
of course, he slow trot,
slow, slow, and all this stuff.
But he said, I traveled several thousands of miles,
which was pretty good traveling for a slow man.
So he had a sensitivity to him,
but he usually suppressed it.
And I think that was part of his problem.
He suppressed a lot,
and I think his weight in his heart cost him,
I think in that suppression.
You know how when you keep things bottled up,
that's not a good thing.
You need to let things out,
and he didn't let things out.
Forrest was the other way, let too much out.
So you can go one extreme or the other.
>> Well, you were doing about a book
a year after you got here to Kennesaw.
>> I was for a while, they were coming out pretty fast.
>> Civil War Sites in Virginia in 2011,
the Thomas book in 2012,
and then Confederate General Dorsey Pender,
the Hope of Gori,
and of course, he got killed in the war.
>> That's right.
>> 2013 [OVERLAPPING] pressed,
why did you do that book?
He wasn't the most famous gentleman?
>> No, he wasn't the most famous,
but it does go back to my second book.
He was actually at Suffolk for
a small period of time a
nd I wanted to know more
about him because he had done some of
the most interesting things in
Suffolk of a personal level
that I thought anybody had ever done.
And I'll give you the quick story
and you'll understand what I'm saying.
He was at West Pointer, very young.
He had just been married.
He had some military service in the far Northwest.
So he'd been in Washington State in that region fighting
two battles out there and
fighting in Washington State before the war.
He came back East.
He ends up in North Carolina,
which is his native state,
and he ends up being basically
a glorified drill sergeant because that's
you took people that had a military training and were
trying to use them to train other people to be soldiers.
Well, that wasn't very glamorous or very glorious,
and he chafed at the bit,
but he was writing constantly to his wife,
constantly telling her how he felt.
So you had this whole ream of
letters that was wonderful to have.
>> Which you didn't have for Thomas.
>> Which I didn't have for Thomas or Forrest.
And so it was a wonderful problem to have,
where I had the opposite issue
way too much, how do you deal with it all?
And then there was a published set of letters,
but I went to North Carolina and compared
each letter individually to the original letter.
And I found where there were
ellipses that they put things
or didn't put things in the book
published letters that I wondered, why not?
Most of the time I agreed, they didn't need.
One time, I was astonished and I'll tell you that story.
It was a story about Pender at Suffolk when he goes from
Raleigh up to there's a camp just
outside of the border of North Carolina and Virginia.
And then he goes from there to Suffolk.
So he's still a young man, a colonel,
and he's trying to get his regiment situated.
And he begins to engage with
the local community and he finds that they adore him.
And he's telling his wife who's had not only a child,
but then a hard pregnant situation
where she lost the child.
She's had a lot of issues.
And he's telling her how
people love him, how they adore him.
And he's telling them how good a time he's having.
And he says, I went to the dinner with
this and I had something with that.
And then finally he said,
he went to a dance and he danced with
this young lady and he said,
she offered to do anything for me that I wanted.
And I said, "Well, why don't you make
a sack for the hair for my wife?"
"Well, I won't make anything for your wife,
but I'll do anything for you."
And he wrote that to his wife.
>> To his wife. Wow.
>> So she put up with that for a little while.
And then on the last one when he says,
"I was at the night and dance
flirting with people," going on and wrote her.
[OVERLAPPING] He wrote it in his letters.
She sent a letter back and she wrote out the letter,
"This is how the family is doing and by
the way," and she laid him out.
>> I bet.
>> She quoted these things.
"Why in your sober senses did you tell me this?
Was it to make me jealous?
Was it to make me wish that
I was good enough for you? What is it?
Was it your ego?
What is it you were doing?"
And he tore him up.
He never dreamed that what he was doing,
which he thought was just sharing
these wide ranging thoughts with his wife
was anything of infidelity or anything
else or any question about
his love or his devotion to her.
It tore him apart.
And so he wrote at the bottom of the letter, "Tonight,
this war holds no more terrors
for me," and he sent it back.
That's the reason we have this
letter because he sent it back.
>> And she saved it.
>> And she saved it and then she saved all of it.
So that's why we have them.
[OVERLAPPING] We don't have her letters.
>> Well, because he didn't live long enough to matter.
>> Well, that's part of the problem.
But the other part of the problem is that he
wrote about once or twice a week sometimes,
literally once or twice a week.
Point is, is that later on,
he tells her that he's
more careful about what he reports and what he says.
And he says, "I was doing some things with some ladies,
but they were older ladies and it was for the hospital,"
and blah, blah. But he said and I thought this
was a classic line that the guy
left out of the published letters
is one of the chapter titles of my book,
my dancing days are over.
He said to his wife,
"My dancing days are over." And so he left it out.
So because of that Suffolk experience,
I already knew of that part of it.
I wanted to know more about it. Who was this guy?
And then when I went to North Carolina and
there's this whole box of letters,
you had all the raw material you needed.
You had all those stuff you needed.
>> He's got a screw loose somewhere it sounds like.
>> Well, bless his heart. I think
my uncle once said and
my uncle lived in North Carolina, he says,
"He was like a little innocent lamb in
the sense that he just didn't get how
dumb this was that he had done
what he'd done until she laid him out.".
>> Well, you did that book and then the River
we've already done The River Was Dyed with Blood, 2014.
That's four in four years,
and then you waited all the way to
2017 for Inglorious Passages.
You mentioned it earlier, your book on noncombat deaths.
There's so many people got sick,
I guess the unsanitary conditions.
>> Sure. Disease, of course,
killed more people by far than
bullets or shrapnel or anything else.
But I wanted to have
something that remembered as much as possible
every person who had died other than
the little list of dead people from
disease because you're going to have to group that.
But I thought I'm going to find everything else.
I'll find all the suicides and all the accidental deaths.
>> Was there lots of suicide?
>> Well, there's a bunch,
but here's my problem,
I was going to find them all.
>> You can't.
>> You started scratching the surface
and the surface got deeper and deeper,
and you and I both know if you wait for the perfect book,
it's never going to be written.
So you got to reach a point where
you've said what you got to say,
you've done what you had to do,
and you've finished and you close the book.
I'm still finding and
still getting from some other people at times,
stories about this person or
that person who drowned trying to take a bath,
who was killed in some odd ball freak accident.
My favorite by far is the guy
that's on the Mississippi River area
when he's walking with
an open cask of black powder smoking his cigar.
>> He's stupid.
>> And the diarist says "He blew his head off.
Those mortar men are said to be careless."
That was all he said but there's
that story of this guy that blew his head off.
And of course, he's just as dead as if he went
to Gettysburg or Chickamauga,
or Kennesaw Mountain or anywhere else.
>> Well, probably he's just a number of about
600,000 in the Civil War.
What number do they factor it?
>> They really push it to a million.
>> A million.
>> Yeah, they push it to a million now.
Seven hundred and fifty thousand minimum to a million.
>> Only had about 31
million in the whole country at that time.
>> It's incredible what price that this war exacted.
>> There's nothing else like it in American history.
>> That's right. No, it's incredible.
But the record keeping is so bad and
you might have people that were not ever found.
If you went into a woods and died,
they may not know you perished.
You're missing, that's all they know.
>> Yeah. And then one last book, 2022.
Have you had five years between
books or did I miss something?
But Charlton Heston.
>> Yes.
>> Running the race,
the public face of Charlton Heston, other than that,
he was in the Army Air Corps in
World War II and was
later president of the National Rifle Association.
What's his connection with all your military history?
>> Well, it's not so much because of military history,
but if you go back to that book
that I wrote on ''Gone With
the Glories: Civil War in Cinema movies''.
I love the movies,
and I love historical movies,
and there's probably not a more iconic figure
in the big epic historical movie.
>> Well, I thought he was a great Moses.
>> Well, he was a good Moses.
He was a great Ben-Hur,
he was L Seed,
he was Chinese Gordon and Cartoon.
>> I saw that he even played,
I guess on stage, the Man for [inaudible]
>> He did.
>> Thomas More.
>> He never shied away from things.
He tried different things.
There were, of course, people that said,
he's wooden, he's not really that great an actor,
but he says I'm always
striving for the perfect performance.
And I argued in the book that he's always
reinventing himself and looking for his audience,
a way to keep relevant,
the way to keep it updated, to keep it going.
And I think that the NRA just
was one of the incarnations.
He found an audience that would listen to
him and would take him seriously,
and I think he believed it,
but he believed it in a funny way.
He'd always been a hunter.
He'd always loved guns in
the sense of collecting and hunting and that thing.
But he really did love the Constitution,
and he saw the US Constitution
as one of those things worth defending.
>> Well, I gathered that he's also thinking
that somehow rather,
the ordinary folks are being left out.
>> Yes.
>> And society.
>> Yes.
>> Culture wars.
>> Yes.
>> How there.
>> How he was very much into that.
He very much, he would say, Mrs. Clinton,
it doesn't take a village,
it takes a country,
it takes a father and a mother.
He'd say different things.
But he was one of those people that really
did cross a lot of things because
he took the Hollywood contingent
on the march to Washington.
And so it's a part of this and he was
a very strong admirer of Dr. King.
In fact, at one point in the book,
you remember if you saw that,
he introduced Careta Scott King and was talking
about how exceptional Dr. King was.
So he was certainly a person who
crossed a lot of borders,
and he went to take a sandwich board.
He loved Thomas Jefferson.
So he quoted Jefferson.
All men are created equal and stand on
the steps to protest segregation.
He didn't do it often, but he said, every now and then,
I have to put the champagne glass
down and stop partying,
spending time with my own people,
and get out and do other things.
So he felt an obligation to give back to
society and to do for causes that he believed.
>> Well, I guess it made sense to support Ronald Reagan.
They had to be old friends.
>> They were friends from he had seen him
as a part of the screen actors guild.
He had thought, this is a really incredible negotiator.
He admired his skills there and he thought
this is a man that really can get things done.
And I think he looked at him as
a president that would do the same thing.
But he felt like you only have so much
of the coin that you can spend and
he was trying to be very judicious so that when
he would call on Reagan for anything or write him,
there was a very specific issue
that he thought was important enough.
In other words, he didn't want to just be seen with
Ronald Reagan to be seen with him or just go to go.
He thought if I'm going to go,
I need to do something important.
But he had worked
with the arts with Lyndon Baines Johnson.
He knew, of course, Kennedy admired Kennedy.
He had not thought much of Richard Nixon,
but he thought he's better than
the alternative, and of course,
when it turned out that he had Watergate,
then he was trying to figure
out how he could get past that,
but he was really close to George Herbert Walker Bush.
He actually became very
close to the father, George Bush.
They did a lot of communications back and forth.
And so one of the great joys for me
was not only going to the film archives
and seeing all of his personal papers and
things that had been donated and read all these things,
including the scrapbooks that
his mother put together for all these years because
his mother still came to the set until
she was finally too old to come and died.
But she was there forever.
And in fact, he was not
a young man when he did Treasure Island.
And he was playing, of course,
the character with the cane and everything else,
the crutch and everything else,
and at one point, he was down on the ground and
she was watching and drumped up.
My child, my child.
Because she thought he was down
and it was hurt and all the rest and he said,
"Mom it's just part of the role."
So here he is. He is an old man by this point,
and his mother is an even older person,
but she's still thinking of him as
her her little chuck, her little boy.
>> Well, let's talk about
the center a little bit before we run out of time.
>> All right.
>> And maybe before that even,
what all have you taught since you
got to council Civil War course, of course?
>> Well, I just civil on reconstruction Old South.
And then I've taught
the more recent times the survey again.
I hadn't taught surveys since a long
time ago since UVA Wise,
but once I stopped with my administrative position,
once the rules changed on me in mid stream,
I went for a period of time
where I didn't change to what I taught and then
the last couple of years I've taught surveys.
>> Are they doing a search for somebody
to teach the Civil War course now?
>> I don't think they have anything for that position
yet because where I would retire,
they would need another year,
I think, to actually get that position.
But they were theoretically looking,
I guess, at bringing somebody.
Potentially, one of the areas was Old South.
And so theoretically, they'd have
somebody that could teach that.
Now, what they'll do at the center, I don't know.
It's going to be something that I'll have input in,
and frankly, I'm happy to
leave the folks here to make that determination.
I've done what I could to make
a strong outreach to the community,
I think, very popular.
Lot of programs.
>> Let's get into all that.
Of course, the annual symposium.
>> Right.
>> And then that started before you
got here and you've kept it up
for over 20 years altogether.
>> That's right.
>> How did the Vince Dooley
leadership conferences come about?
>> Well, one of the things I was
trying to do was to see if there were
other areas besides just a symposium.
>> Now, when I first came here,
we were still at the end of
a cooperative agreement with the National Park Service.
So we had a fair amount of money and we ended up having
programs because of the Sesquicentennial.
We had programs in the spring and the fall.
So we had actually two sets of programs.
Once the cooperative agreement finished,
I still managed to scrape enough to do
the stuff as long as there was the Sesquicentennial,
but once that was over,
we went back to just the spring symposium.
So I thought, what else can we
do and I began to look at some other things.
One of the things was a directors day,
which I was toyed with,
which I wanted to do for
battlefield preservation and some other things.
Then I was maybe interested in something leadership,
and then on collecting.
Out of those came the Directors' Day for several years,
and then I decided that that was a
bit much and we just let it go.
I had met Coach Dooley
before I knew Coach Dooley, but not personally.
We weren't close,
but I felt like if I could talk to
him and we could see if
maybe he was because he was looking
at football for chemisoul.
>> Well, he was vetting their committee and
decide whether we were going to have football.
>> Exactly. He was their big consultant for football.
And so there were a lot of reasons why I
thought it won't hurt to talk to him.
And he was interested in the history.
Always has been. He's been in
various historical events and
programs that I've been a part of.
And so I met with him and I just threw
out this idea of a leadership symposium.
And then, of course, I said,
we'd love to call it Da Vince Leadership Symposium.
Well, I was hoping that we might get
a little bit of financial support,
but I certainly was
most excited about if he was interested in us,
at least borrowing the name.
>> Well, he tamed [OVERLAPPING]
>> And he not only gave us the name,
but he was generous with his time.
He was at every single one until
he never won with us anymore.
So he was even the year before he died at
that symposium and always sat in the back
so that he wouldn't intrude and
always was very susceptible to
anybody and open to anybody
because all he had to do was go
to him and say, will you sign this?
And he signed it. Will you
let me tell you my Georgia story?
And he let them tell them.
And [LAUGHTER] he would
come in and you could tell him anything and he was
just willing to be open to you and very pleasant.
Just a super human being.
Great person. And so that was very exciting.
And then our collective showcase is
the other annual event that we carried on.
>> And if you got one coming up.
>> We will have one on June 15th of this year,
which will be my last event.
Now, the very last event,
we've agreed to partner with a group called
the Society for Civil War Women who are having
a national conference in Atlanta,
and we're the co-host of that conference.
And I said, now, you understand when they talked to me
about that two years ago
that we don't have any money to give you.
She said, "That's fine."
We don't need your money, but we need your name and
the fact that you're here and
that you will be willing to host it, you'll host it.
>> And this is the conference of Civil War Women?
>> Women. Civil War Women is a national event,
it's a national conference,
and it will be held largely off campus,
but some will be on campus.
>> Now, is this for historians who
are researching women's role in the Civil War?
>> It's both about historians that
are researching women's roles,
but also women historians.
>> Yeah.
>> So it's both.
It's society for Civil War women.
>> Women who are writing about the Civil War.
>> Yes.
>> In general.
>> Right. And so basically,
they're coming through and doing a number of things.
And Atlanta History Center is
another main contributor of co-host.
So the Atlanta History Center and
the Center for the Study of the Civil War era
are both trying to
make sure that this event could come here
to the Atlanta area.
>> So it's going to be on our campus?
>> Part of it. Yes.
>> Good. And that's in June.
>> That's in July.
So it's at the end of July,
and it'll be the last official event that I'm part of
before I retire on August 1 of 2024,
but my last event is,
the program event is the June 15th collector to showcase,
which will be at the Kennesaw Center,
the center where the Holocaust Museum is.
>> Well, you've done a lot of battlefield tours
I know and staff rides.
Want to talk about those at all?
>> We have had tremendous tours through the years.
We did a tour to Shiloh,
we've done tours to Vicksburg,
to Virginia at the end of the civil war.
I've worked for some of the top historical figures,
whether they're park service people.
Jim Ogden has been really
crucial for us and important for us.
Jim is at the Chickamauga, Chattanooga Battle field.
>> And this is Jim?
>> Ogden, O-G-D-E-N. And Jim
is just a fabulous historian and a great person.
We've done things with Will Greene,
G-R-E-E-N-E, and we did stuff with him.
He had been the executive director
at Pamplin Park in Virginia,
but he retired and then we got him to be
our top local historical figure
in Virginia when I took a group to Virginia to talk.
I did bring an old brochure,
another thing for us to focus on if we want to.
By the way, there's one of my duly leadership
symposia images that Coach Dooley did.
I don't know.
You can tell me when you've had
enough to be able to get a shot of it.
And then here is our pamphlet,
and that's Coach Dooley and Ed Barrs.
Ed Barrs was the senior historian
with the Park Service for years,
but this is Coach Dooley,
and there's Ed Barrs,
and this is a group at Shiloh,
and it shows some of those same individuals at Shiloh.
>> Is that the one that had Dan Pap in?
>> Well, Dan did our staff ride.
And so here's another set of pictures in the side,
but this is an older brochure.
It shows the old mountain logo, which has changed.
The logo has changed quite a bit through
the years from the original thing.
You mentioned that John Fowler
created the center before I came, and he did.
Of course, it came out of the symposium,
which you are smart enough to figure out there's
one year that's off on that.
It is, but it's just the way it is,
and I didn't try to correct it.
I just went with it, but there
was one year that they didn't have a symposium,
where I guess they said they did or whatever.
Anyway, it's one year off.
>> Well, Faver will have to explain that.
>> Yeah. I've had David Parker do a program for us.
We've had other people here.
Jennifer Dickie's done a program for us.
We've had really great local folk,
our own university folk do programs for us.
We're very excited about that.
>> Well, you've had great attendance.
>> We've had great attendance.
We've felt really positive about outreach.
One of the missions for the school for the length of
time I've been here is to try to
get community engagement,
adn we've certainly been
involved in community engagement.
And one of the other things before when I first got here,
I said, well, what do we do to jump off?
I did a program on John Brown because it
was just about the time of
Harpers Ferry and the Harpers Ferry raid.
Then I did an election of 1860,
and Abraham Lincoln, of course,
was not on the ballot in Georgia,
so he was not on our ballot either.
So people came by and voted and the vote went to,
not the person that won the real vote,
John Breckenridge, it went to John Bell.
Because as I laid their platforms out,
try to explain who they were and
what they were as people read about them,
they wanted the moderate person
who who was not the extremist,
and so they voted for John Bell.
And even poor little Stephen Douglas didn't win,
but I think he came in second, but anyway,
Breckenridge might have,
but the point is is
the guy that won the state didn't win it,
but John Bell won.
Then I had a night with Abraham Lincoln.
One of my dear friends, James Getty,
who's actually been in
movies and TV and all kind of thing.
And he and I did steamboats together.
I used to do the American Queen,
the Mississippi Queen, and the Delta Queen.
And he would do an evening with Abraham Lincoln.
And I said, Jim, if I get here,
I want to get you for an evening,
and he said, I'd be glad to.
And he came, he does a first person thing of
Abraham Lincoln talking about being
Abraham Lincoln and being in
the situation of the country,
and so forth, and so on.
It was fabulous and we had a tremendous time.
He has since passed away,
so I've lost him,
but just a great individual.
Again, top scholars,
James I. Robertson junior who's one of the top scholars.
He's also unfortunately passed away
[inaudible] one of the great collectors.
He's come to several of our things
and unfortunately, he's passed away.
So one of the things I guess,
to borrow a phrase from Dr. King,
longevity has its place,
but you also watch other people going on.
>> I've got a lot of Bells in my family tree,
so I think I'm somehow distantly related,
somehow rather to John Bell.
At any rate, it's
amazing how busy you've been to do all these things.
I know how much work it takes to put on a conference.
And it's remarkable all that you've done.
>> I guess the biggest thing is I felt like it's
been what Kennesaw hired me to do.
They wanted me to come.
I know Rich Bengraf said,
we're not here to get you to raise money,
that changed, of course,
but we're here to get you to try
to reach out to the community, do these programs.
And that's really been, I think,
the secret to success
here because we've been able to do the things.
There's not many other places out there.
Now, there are other centers
in other parts of the south.
Some of them are doing marvelous work, great work,
but there is no center like ours in the southeast.
There is no center for
the Atlanta campaign or the western theater like ours.
It's just nothing quite like ours.
And so I just don't think Kennesaw has appreciated
just how special this opportunity is for the university,
but I've spoken in California,
I've spoken in Michigan,
I've spoken in Colorado,
I've spoken in New York.
I've spoken in Texas,
I went to Australia and talked to
the Australian civil war people.
I've talked to just this past couple of weeks ago,
I went to London to a conference of
the civil war roundtable of the United Kingdom.
And everywhere I went,
Kennesaw State,
they've heard of us now if they
hadn't heard of us before.
>> So your administrative position changed when?
>> Well, it went midstream.
I don't remember what year it was,
but it was the whole determination that there
weren't going to be as many "administrators",
and they began to do some reconfiguring.
>> So we're doing away with centers, etc?
>> Well, that was the other thing is,
did we want centers and what would a center be?
And of course, they tried to say that you're not
a center because you never
officially were designated to center.
>> You're not officially designated?
>> That's what they kept saying, and of course,
I told them that,
I wasn't here when it was founded.
I passed through all these years and it
has gone through all these administrations as the center,
and we've certainly treated it that
way and we've continued to be involved.
That's the boss. We're still in our meeting dear. Sorry.
>> Okay. No problem.
>> Okay. But anyway,
I had it on airplane.
So it shows you. I don't know why.
Well, I'm going to take that moment to
get my drink. You need to edit this out.
You can edit the boss out.
Sorry. I'll put the time over that way.
>> Well, I know you say a lot about this.
>> But anyway, things did change,
and once they changed,
we've still tried to keep our head on
the forward lane and keep going with the programs,
and I think continue to do good service for
Kennesaw State University as if nothing's changed.
>> Regardless of what [inaudible] said,
I think fund raising was already a big part of
centers by the time
we got here because it wasn't [OVERLAPPING].
>> Well, it may have been, but it wasn't with us.
>> Yeah. Really?
>> Yeah. Because he told me that [OVERLAPPING].
>> How much do you typically raise in a year?
>> I don't know. I mean, you'd have to go back and look.
>> Okay. Not a Iot.
>. Well, I mean, it's a lot to us. All you need?
>> I mean, we've covered every cost we've
had for programming the entire time.
What we haven't covered is my salary.
And some of that's with history,
but some of it's supposed to
be covered through to the center.
In fact I was told, you don't have to worry
about being "self sustaining".
Well, of course, now we are.
You have to be self sustaining.
So I wouldn't mind it so much about all
of this except that I felt
like I was hired one way
and rather than grandfathered in till I retire,
somebody else could be hired under their way,
they changed the rules and imposed them on me.
And I do feel like that's been a struggle.
Part of my problem,
[NOISE] this has gotten
me rough neck because I got that in my throat.
Part of my problem, I had a [OVERLAPPING].
>> I've got some cough drugs.
>> No, I'm okay on that. I've got
a frog now from talking this long.
>> We've been going strong.
>> I know, but I'm going to finish this up.
>> We're about to finish.
>> I know we are, but let me finish this comment.
So a clean spot for you to start.
Part of our problem has been that when I got here,
I had an office assistant that was there to help me out,
and I had a number of people.
One of the first folks was
Rose Proctor who helped hire that person
in Asia core, and very helpful.
Very positive towards what we were doing.
Rose and Asia both would tell
the candidates that your job
is to help doctor Wells do his job.
And it was very important because they could
do those technical things,
because faculty can't purchase.
There's a lot of things we can't do
that I could let somebody like that do.
And I tried to tap into the creative elements as well.
So on our fliers and different things,
I always let the office assistant be involved in that.
And usually they are the ones who designed the image
and then got it sent through
design approval and all of that stuff.
Well, once I lost that full time position,
it cut back under Dean Dorf to a half time position,
and then it cut back after that to no position at all.
Well, I could get help from the Dean's office,
but I guess we can't know how that might be good or bad,
because there are times when they're
so busy and overwhelmed,
it's very hard for them to be able to
help in the time that I need something done,
because most of what I need is very specific
to certain moments of certain periods.
So the point is is that I ended up doing a lot
of that on my own for myself,
and we have what we call the Kennesaw core membership,
which we've used to raise money.
We allow, of course,
donations through the foundation,
but also donations through the bursaries office,
which of course, is not called
a donation if it goes through the bursaries office,
through the fund 1,400.
And that's been what's really helped fund our programs
and offset the cost associated with my position.
And I would again like to
think that what we've done is be
no burden whatsoever on
the university and that is what my intent has been,
to try to make it so the university's total
of beneficiary without having to worry about,
making sure that we do what we need to do.
And so in many ways,
it's been a struggle,
but it's been a great joy
because when you see the program,
and you know that happened
because of all the things you've done to make it happen,
I will say you sweat bullets going in,
but then you celebrate coming out
because it's always been we've been very lucky.
We've always had a program
you'd be proud of when it's over,
and you look back and you think,
I'm glad I did that.
There are moments when you're leading up to it,
you maybe not so happy,
but it's more of a challenge than you want,
but it's still a challenge you have to meet.
So Elizabeth's asked me when you retire,
what will you miss the most?
I'll miss the people.
I'll miss the students.
I'll miss the events.
I won't miss the bureaucracy.
I won't miss some of the rules,
I won't miss some of the other things that
happen that make life challenging and exciting.
I'm very glad that I did not
go on from being a faculty member to
being something in
a different realm because that would have been,
I think, not nearly as fulfilling to me.
But I'm sure that one of the things I can
look back at is that in every case,
we've answered the bell.
We've met the challenge.
We've done what were brought here to do,
and I'm very proud of that 14 years,
almost 15 years, at Kennesaw.
>> So I guess you're about 65.
>> No, I'm not about 65.
As of January, I am 65.
>> You are 65.
>> And I always thought you should retire when you're 65.
I thought that when I was 20.
Well, you're on Medicare now.
>> Yeah. Well, but the bad news is of course,
social security still got to go a few more years,
but we're going to work through that too.
We'll work through that. You can take it at 65.
Well, you take a hit.
The full social security is 66 and 10 for my age.
>> I think I started taking it at 63 [OVERLAPPING].
>> Sicty six and ten.
>> Well, anyway, you've won all kinds of awards.
Charles Dufour D-U-F-O-U-R Award
from Civil War Roundtable of New Orleans.
I guess that was for the Thomas book
because it came out in 2013.
>> It was really working broadly, broad work.
And then the Houston Vandiver Award
was for [OVERLAPPING].
>> The Houston Vandiver,
this is Civil War Roundtable at
Houston and Frank E Vandiver.
>> Right. And that was again,
not for a specific book,
it was for the work.
The work both at the center and publications.
>> Yeah. I looked up there.
They say on their website it recognizes
outstanding contributions to Civil War cops,
scholarship or preservation.
>> Right.
>> And Vandiver, I didn't realize this,
but he'd been president of three different universities.
>> Yes.
>> [inaudible] in Texas [OVERLAPPING].
>> Another thing that you don't
realize is that Frank Vandiver
was my grandfather. Not really.
He was my academic grandfather
because he was Emory Thomas' major professor.
So Emory Thomas is my
academic and Frank Vandiver [OVERLAPPING].
>> [inaudible]?
>> Yes.
>> Because he was the acting president of [inaudible]?
>> Yes. So Frank Vandiver
was Emory Thomas' major professor,
Emory Thomas was my major professor.
So he was my academic grandfather. [LAUGHTER].
>> How about that?
>> So I told Emory when I won that.
I said, look at what just happened.
He said, ain't that cool. [LAUGHTER].
>> Vandiver actually, he did more than Civil War.
He had a book on Black Jack Perfume.
He absolutely did. He was something else.
He was quite a scholar.
And an interesting personality, everything they tell.
I never met him, of course, so I never knew him.
But everything I've ever heard about him,
the people that did know him
said he was a fascinating fellow.
>> And also, I guess,
early member of that Houston Civil War Roundtable.
Yeah. But I'm still speaking.
I've got programs literally the next week after I retire.
I'm going to Spotsylvania to
do emerging civil war conference there.
I'm very happy with that,
I'm very excited about that.
I'm going Pamplin Park again in the fall.
They've had me there last year and they had
me there before several years,
and they have an annual symposium that
brings in top speakers,
usually six or seven top speakers,
and they're kind enough to say that I'm one of those.
They said, I think that one year they actually
did a playoff of the Magnificent Seven,
the movie, the Magnificence Seven.
So we were all excited.
Somebody asked me, ''Which character were you?''
I said, ''That's up for them to tell you.
I don't know which character it would be.''.
>> You can be your. [OVERLAPPING]
>> I'd like to be the one that lived.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Well, you got any books in the works?
>> Well, several things that I'm waiting to
retire to do so this summer, I have more time.
One of them is A Rage at the Storm,
the Emotions of the civil war,
which I'm really excited about.
I think that's going to be a way of trying
to deal with how people
lived in real time with the civil war because,
of course, obviously we know
hostility and anger and all of these.
There's a lot of
complexities to the way people felt about what they were
seeing and experiencing the war
that's made me think more about that is
the Ukraine Russia War and to think about how living
through that and knowing that
this is Day 1 and what you experienced,
and then this is Day 50 and what you experienced.
This is Day 300 and this is what you experience.
What is it like to be in that environment?
And these people did live it,
whether you were North or South,
even though Northerners didn't see
the fighting on their territory that the Southerners did.
They experienced war and all of its facets.
And so I've got stuff that deals with greed,
I've got stuff that deals with
all the different range of emotions,
compassion, all these different range of emotions,
and it's almost like a history of the civil war,
but through this emotional lens.
Then same way that I
followed through with William Dorsey Pender
from my Suffolk book,
there's a union general that was very successful and very
good in Suffolk called George Washington Getty.
Not a very well known person,
but he was involved in
a lot of activities through the war,
including being badly wounded in
Eastern Virginia in 1864,
but he was in a lot of major engagements.
And then he lived a long time after the war.
So it might be a chance to really explore that.
So many of my people,
Thomas dies in 1870,
Pender dies in the war itself.
Thomas Forrest dies in 1877.
So none of my people make it to the next century
that make it for where you can really
look at then what did they live?
How did they experience things in the post-war period.
And Getty did live a long time.
He did live a military life,
all the rest of his life was
service in the military and then he retired to his farm,
and that's where he died at his farm,
but I went to West Point years ago and you asked me,
how can I do so many books?
I try to research everything
I'm interested in at the same time,
and I put it in files. It's there.
I researched Pender for Pender,
Thomas, and Getty while I was at West Point.
I got all my West Point stuff.
I don't have to go back.
It's all in a file somewhere.
And I've already used Pender
and I've already used Thomas,
and now I just got to use Getty.
So those are the next project.
>> Well, you got to grow some hay,
I guess when you go back to the farm.
>> Grow some hay. We have horses,
cows, dogs, grandchildren.
I've got a lot of things to keep up with.
>> I've got an idea Elizabeth has some plans for you.
>> She might, but
the good news is she's got
to still work for a little while
longer and keep me up to the lifestyle to which I
should be accustomed and I can make.
>> So she's going to keep going.
>> I can be a gentleman farmer and plus I can travel.
The good thing is both of us,
part of it has been our ability to do our own thing.
And so she goes at times and
does what she wants to do and I do what I want to.
This will give me that chance to go to some of
those places that I don't think she'd really want to go,
but I really do want to go.
There are some civil war sites that
remarkably I still haven't seen.
So I've still got a few places I want to go.
>> Does she have to run for
elections or is she appointed?
>> They're appointed by the legislature.
Yeah, they're appointed.
There's not a one campaigning thing,
this is a selection election.
>> She must keep them happy to keep reappointment.
>> It's like everything else. You go through
a certain amount of stuff and then there's people that
obviously say all these things good or
bad and oftentimes quite bad,
but then the legislatures know how to take that with
a grain of salt because who's going to
say it's like student evaluations.
Who writes a student evaluation?
The student that loves you
and the student that hates you.
Who doesn't write it? Everybody else.
>> All right.
>> Everybody else.
Except few because.
>> Back in the old days,
they didn't have any choice
because they'd be paper evaluation,
and we bring them into the classroom,
professor would go out and somebody would administer.
>> Do you know that's exactly what I
did too and they always had
a 100% rate because they're there
for the exam and they got you trapped them.
You got them. Now they get online if they feel like it,
and they don't feel like it, they don't,
or they get on rate to your professor.
>> That's too bad, I think.
>> Well, there's a lot of things that are
good and a lot of things that bad.
It's just life. My father-in-law was always funny.
He had said if you only had an hour to live,
you'd want it to be in a faculty meeting
because it would seem to go on forever.
And he was always an administrator when he
said that instead of being a faculty member,
but we can sometimes drag things out and carry
things on and argue over
things that you look back and think,
we spent a lot of time on
that but the other thing
is the more change things change,
the more they stay the same.
So it's just sometimes the format and style and
technology versus really the fact
that something is fundamentally changed all that much,
but people asked me
questions you've been at all these different schools,
how have the students been?
And I said I've always had
really good students everywhere I've been,
and I've always had some students that frankly
need to be doing something else with their lives,
and some of the middle ground but I said I've
been blessed whether I was at Georgia Southern,
or at UGA or here or CBC that have really good students.
I've had some really fine students.
I've got one is presenting a paper here
shortly for what he's done in research,
but I'll tell you another thing I
didn't say that I probably should say,
I was a distinguished visiting professor
for Wofford College,
and it was arranged for me to leave.
I kept coming back for weekends to do center activities.
So I drive from Spartanburg back
here but I absolutely adored Wofford.
What a wonderful school and wonderful people.
I had a great experience there,
but it was a professor who had retired and they named
this Louis Jones professorship after him.
And they brought in usually retired professors
with some renown,
and I was lucky to be not retired yet and be able to go.
But anyway, I was very proud of that.
So I would not want my profile not have
a shout out to Wofford because I really love those folks.
>> Is that a Baptist school?
>> No, Methodist.
>> Methodist?
>> Yeah. I'm pretty sure it's Methodist.
Now, Richmond is not Baptist anymore, but it was Baptist.
>> Well, Wofford probably
are they even closely connected anymore?
>> I honestly don't know. I think they may
still be getting some funding,
so I don't know, but you'll have to check that out,
but they're wonderful folks.
>> Well, at any rate, I think we're all going to
miss you when you leave here.
>> Well, the good news is I know
the roads and I have a car,
and I can always come back.
So I've already told some of the folks
if they have something they want me to do,
just let me know and give me
a shout out and I'll try to head back in this direction.
I certainly look at it oftentimes
when I hear anything about the school.
I think about good folk here
and the folks that I've gotten to know, and of course,
always you and Randy and people that are
special to me will be folks that I keep an ear out for.
>> I hate to think how many miles you've
put on your cars over the years.
>> I put a lot. I've had a lot of cars.
And the big thing I tried to do was get another car at
just about the time it was beginning
to be too many miles.
So I didn't let it get too big before
I got because the one thing I
did not want to do
was be sitting on the side of the road.
If I could help it. [LAUGHTER]
>> Well, you can tell Elizabeth I made you
talk today and that's why you were available.
>> Sure, when I get through here,
I'll call her back telling that I'm okay.
I didn't get sacrificed.
[LAUGHTER] [OVERLAPPING] It's my pleasure
and thank you for the invitation,
and I hope that this is
something useful for folks to learn a
little bit more about another piece
of the college's history.
>> Thank you very much.
>> It's my pleasure. Thank you, Tom. Thank you.