A House Divided – Your Comprehensive Introduction to the Civil War
Video Transcript
Introduction: Interviewer: This is a question and answer session with Jonathan Daniel Wells, the
author of Routledge’s new textbook on the Civil War and Reconstruction, A House Divided. Hi Jon!
JDW: Hello!
Interviewer: Please introduce yourself, and describe your background and your own research.
JDW: My name is Jon Wells, and I am Associate Professor of History at Temple University. And I
specialize in 19th century America, particularly the South, and slavery, and the mid 19th century,
particularly the Civil War era.
Question 1: And why did you decide to become a historian?
JDW: Well, uh, that’s a complicated question, but one of the great things about being a historian is
that you get to research, and study, and read about, and of course write about all different aspects
of history. If you’re interested in political history, you can do that; if you’re interested in the history
of music or art, you can engage in that kind of study, and I’ve always been interested in the past, and
particularly the way in which the past has shaped the present.
Question 2: So why do you think students should study history today? And the Civil War in
particular?
JDW: Well, students should study history because that’s, in part, the way we understand who we are
as a people. For example, if you woke up one morning and had amnesia, and you had forgotten all of
your previous experiences, you would lose to a significant degree, who you are as a person, because
those experiences shape your evolution, your development, your course of life. And the same thing
is true on a national scale. If we don’t understand or appreciate our history as a country, we
certainly lose a sense of where we have been as a people, both the triumphs that history represents,
as well as the trials and failures of our nation in the past as well.
Question 3: And do you think the Civil War really brings those themes to the forefront?
JDW: Well, there are a lot of reasons why people study the Civil War. In fact, in some ways the Civil
War is as much studied today as it ever has been, even 150 years later. Part of the reason why the
Civil War still attracts the interest and attention of not just scholars and students, but also ordinary
citizens, is because of the massive suffering that the war represents. Previous wars in American
history have almost exclusively taken part on foreign soil. And while not minimizing the loss of life
that World War II represents, or America’s involvement in World War I or even the War of 1812
represents, the Civil War represents death and destruction on a scale beyond any comparison with
any other war in American history. And in part, that’s because it was fought on American soil. 9/11,
when that horrific incident happened in Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C., and of course the Twin
Towers in New York City, we as a people felt somehow violated, that we were unaccustomed to
having the experience of war on our soil, in our backyards, in our cities. And in the Civil War, of
course, that happened on a daily basis, for four long years. But of course there are many, many
other reasons why we study the Civil War. One, there were questions that still emerged out of the
Constitutional Convention that were not settled by the Constitutional Convention. All of those
questions about slavery, about States’ rights, about the right of a State to make different decisions
than the Federal government wanted it to make, all of those questions remained unsolved,
unanswered by 1860. And to a significant extent, those questions were answered by the Civil War.
Slavery, of course, with the 13th Amendment, meant that there would be no more slavery as a result
of the end of the war. States would not have the right to secede or withdraw from the Union at will.
So those questions were solved. But of course, new questions were brought up, were arose, even as
old questions were answered. New questions like would African Americans and white people in the
United States be able to live together peacefully? Would they be able to work side by side? Live in
the same communities? And of course until very recently, to a great extent, the answers to those
questions were “No.” But even as the Civil War answered some questions, it resulted in creating new
questions as well.
Question 4: Why did you decide to tackle a book on the Civil War for students in particular?
JDW: Well, the Civil War is a difficult topic for American history students, for a number of reasons.
It’s very difficult to understand how, for example, Americans fought side by side, North and South, in
the Revolution, they fought side by side, North and South, in the War of 1812, and yet, just a few
short decades later, they were at each others’ throats to the extent where we had four long, bloody
years of civil war. So to try to understand why Americans decided that war was the only option; that
peaceful means that had usually settled previous controversies, political compromise, for example,
would no longer suffice, that’s a very difficult thing for anybody to understand, not just students, but
historians. And that’s one of the reasons why historians spend so much time thinking, and talking,
and writing about it. So I thought having a Civil War history textbook that addressed some of those
key questions would be interesting to write, and hopefully interesting for students to read.
Question 5: So what makes your book stand out from most of the other Civil War textbooks on the
market? What makes it different?
JDW: Well, of course, there are a number of excellent Civil War textbooks from which students and
faculty members can choose. One of things that I really set out to do when I began working on this
particular textbook was to create a balanced approach to the war, as much as one can in a single
volume. On the one hand, of course, you will learn a great deal about Civil War battles—the
important battles—Antietam, which witnessed the single bloodiest day of the Civil War, the battle of
Gettysburg, which was the deadliest battle of the entire war. Students who read this textbook will
understand and appreciate the importance of the battlefield strategy, the battlefield suffering, the
maneuvering and the very difficult decisions that officers in the military on both sides had to make.
But I also wanted students, at the same time that they were learning about the battles and the
military aspects of the war, I also wanted them to appreciate and understand other aspects of life in
America, not just during those four years at war, but what people were thinking and doing both
before and after. And that’s one of the reasons why we have sections in the textbook that address
things like literature, and music, and newspaper journalism. Because, of course, there were people
who remained on the homefront. While the battles saw some of the most dramatic controversies,
and of course fighting, over the course of the war, people did go on with their lives at home.
Whether it was in the North, or the West, or the South, and they worked their jobs, they took care of
their children, they wrote music, they performed, they wrote poetry, and so to try to understand the
ways in which Americans in the mid-19th century experienced war in all of its various complexities, is
a really difficult task, but one that I tried to tackle in writing this textbook.
Question 6: A House Divided was read thoroughly by a panel of professors who teach the Civil War
and Reconstruction course. What effect do you think that’s had on your writing and the revising of
the chapters?
JDW: It had a significant influence. And students may not know this, but professors do, that it’s not
just important for students to read each others’ papers through peer reviews, but it’s also one of the
fundamental tenets of historical research and writing, is to have input from your colleagues—people
you respect, people who have written about the subject before, and Routledge was excellent at
securing the help of a number of important Civil War historians who could provide input on all the
aspects of the war, all of which I took to heart. And as historians, we rely very heavily on our own
peer reviews when we write almost anything.
Question 7: What do you think the biggest challenge college instructors face teaching the Civil War
courses today? And how do you think your book is going to help them?
JDW: That’s an excellent question. Having taught the course a number of times, I found quite a few
difficulties. First of all, when a student takes a course in the history of the Civil War era, he or she has
pretty specific ideas in mind about what they hope to get out of the course, what they know about
the war, to what extent they’ve read about it or watched movies or television shows about it; they
bring to the course a certain set of experiences and ideas about the war and what they therefore
expect out of the course. Some students really want to study military strategy, they want to study
maneuvering on the battlefield, and those students, I think, will be pleased with the textbook. But
there are other students who maybe not so much are interested in the history of the
battlefield. They want to know about it, but they also want to know about what’s going on in
American culture in the Confederacy, and what was going on in the culture in the North, as much as
they do want to learn about the history of the battlefield. So, that’s one of the chief difficulties a
professor has, in my mind, in teaching a course like this. And I think instructors who utilize this
textbook will find a book that really meets the needs and helps the understanding of students, no
matter what their background or experience with studying the war previously is. The other thing,
and along those same lines, it’s often difficult to explore the many facets of the Civil War and
particularly the 19th century, in a course that’s only 15, 16, 17, or 18 weeks long. And so, whereas
many professors, many instructors will use their lecture time in class, or instruction time in class to
focus on specific events, they can be assured that the comprehensive nature of this particular
textbook will cover issues that they’re not able to cover in class time.
Question 8: Why do you think it’s important to study the cultural history of the Civil War as well as
the battles?
JDW: Well, it’s important because there are many, many books on the military aspects of the war.
Excellent histories; excellent historical textbooks that have been written on the military
maneuvering, military strategy, and the various important battles that occurred during those four
years. There are fewer textbooks that address the war in its totality, and that’s really what we’re
trying to capture in this particular textbook. To try to get at what was it like for Southerners, white
and black, what was it like for Northerners, white and black? Men? Women? Democrats?
Republicans? Westerners? Native Americans? What were their experiences during not just the four
years of the war, but in the decades preceding the war, and in the decades once the war ended?
Question 9: Could you talk about some of the specific themes of the book other than the military
aspects, perhaps such as literature, medicine, and so forth?
JDW: Well, one of the chief ways that human beings have always experienced war is through
literature. That’s one of the chief ways to express yourself. Not just for Americans, but throughout
human history. And Americans of course were no different. Some of the most amazing writing in
American history was done during the course of the Civil War. Right before the Civil War, during the
1850s, you had some of the greatest writers and thinkers working even as Americans moved closer
and closer to the battlefield. Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, some of these thinkers were just remarkable in their ability to capture the
feelings of people during these tense times, as America marched toward war. During the war, of
course, we have some of the great literary figures—Henry Timrod in the South, William Gilmore
Simms in the South, we have Walt Whitman still writing in the North. Of course, one of the great
poems in American literary history, his Leaves of Grass, which reflects in part the assassination and
the death of President Lincoln, so it’s through literature, oftentimes that Americans express their
feelings of the horrors of war. So that was really one of the reasons why I wanted to make literature
a centerpiece of telling that story.
In regard to medicine, as I’m sure many doctors would tell you, even today, during the Civil War,
medicine was still a very primitive science, and it’s a stretch, perhaps, even to call it a science,
because it was so much in its infancy. No one really understood the nature of disease, or microbes,
bacteria and viruses. Those are understandings that really don’t take place until the later part of the
19th century. So doctors, who operated on patients, most of the time without the benefit of
anesthetic, would use the same tools on one patient that they would use on another patient, and of
course, taking diseases with them on the implements that they used for the surgeries along the way.
So, medicine during the war was just a struggle to cope with the dramatic suffering that one would
have experienced on the battlefield. And women played a very instrumental role in helping to nurse
soldiers, some of them soldiers who were dying, were administered to by nurses who read to them
from the Bible, or read to them from famous novels, or newspapers, women as nurses were there to
comfort the suffering and sometimes they were the last faces that these soldiers saw.
Question 10: How far past the conflict does A House Divided go? How much of Reconstruction
does your book cover? And why did you decide to go that far past the war?
JDW: I really wanted historians who were teaching a course in, for example, the history of the 19th
century, to be able to utilize this textbook. So the text really could serve two widely taught courses
in American undergraduate education. One, obviously, is the history of the Civil War. Another would
be the history of 19th century America. So there are three chapters that really set the stage for the
war, and really try to help students understand and appreciate how America, within a few short
decades goes from a nation that’s drafting a constitution in 1787 in Philadelphia, to 70 years later or
so later, trying to kill each other. So the first three chapters of the textbook are geared toward
helping students understand the centrality of slavery in causing the war, the issues of states’ rights,
the various crises that emerged periodically over the course of the antebellum period, crises like the
Missouri Crisis in 1819 and 1820, the crisis over nullification beginning in 1828, the crises that led to
the Compromise of 1850 and all of the other factors that contributed to the coming of the Civil War
in April of 1861. And there are seven chapters which really address the war itself. So the Civil War
really remains the focus of the textbook, but there are three chapters prior to the war, seven
chapters on the war itself, and then three chapters on the post-war period. And that, in part, is to
help students understand the legacy of the Civil War. Most students know something about
Reconstruction, they know that slavery ends with the passage of the 13th amendment in 1865, and
they know that there was a difficult time for African Americans in both the South and the North in
the decades after the Civil War. And so I really wanted to try to recapture, in those final three
chapters the nature of America as it came out of the war, and the nature of the unsolved problems
that remained even as the Civil War ended in 1865.
Question 11: What sorts of features did you include in the book to help students, and what about
the companion website?
JDW: In regard to the features within the textbook itself, we’re really happy with the bibliographies
that are included at the end of each chapter. Significant effort was expended in making up
bibliographies that were current, that reflected the great new work that’s being done in the areas
addressed in those individual chapters, so each chapter, all thirteen chapters, have comprehensive
bibliographies at the end. There are also study questions, both discussion questions that students
can use and professors, of course, can use to promote discussion of various issues regarding the war
and 19th century America. There are sections on promoting vocabulary, for students who have a
desire or a need to increase their vocabulary. There are words listed at the end of each chapter to
try to help them with that. And then finally there are critical thinking kinds of questions, which
hopefully will get students thinking a little bit like historians. Trying to solve, or at least begin to think
about, the fundamental questions regarding the war. The companion website will have very useful
maps that students can use to understand the battlefield maneuvering or the geographical
significance of issues discussed in the chapters. There are further illustrations; there are interesting
pictures—all kinds of information that will help students appreciate and understand this important
era of American history.
Question 12: What’s next for you?
JDW: Well, I continue to study 19th century America. I just published a book on women writers and
journalists in the 19th c. South, which is about black and white women who edited their own
newspapers and magazines both before the Civil War and after the Civil War. And the next project
I’m embarking on is a study of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, and the ways in which the fury over
that particular piece of legislation led African Americans in the North, and many white Abolitionists
in the North, to question the value of the Union.
Interviewer: Do you want to mention the journal?
JDW: Yes! Starting in the spring of 2012, I’ll be co-editing, with David Walstreicher of Temple
University, the Journal of the Early Republic, which is a journal that focuses on American history
between the Revolution, and the Civil War. So many of the same issues that are discussed in the first
half of this particular textbook, are addressed by historians in essays and book reviews in the Journal
of the Early Republic.
Interviewer: Great! Thank you so much for your time, Jon!
JDW: You’re welcome.