Booming cannon fire was conspicuously absent as the Civil War once more returned to South Carolina when USC’s second annual “Conversations on the Civil War” lecture series kicked off Tuesday night. The series’ host, Walter Edgar, engaged Tracy Power, assistant professor of history at Newberry College, in a discussion of solider life in the Civil War.
This year’s “Conversations” focus is on the year 1864, a year which marked the end of the battle between Union and Confederate forces, and included events like the Wilderness, Cold Harbor and the battle of Atlanta.
Power’s book, “Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox,” was the main focus of Tuesday’s lecture and focuses on the everyday life of Civil War soldiers, particularly those who fought under general Robert E. Lee.
Quoting real wartime letters, the book received almost universal praise among Civil War historians, finishing in second place for the prestigious 1999 Lincoln Prize.
Lee’s army is famous for fighting the majority of major battles on the eastern front of the war, despite being often outnumbered and out-supplied. In 1864, the year on which Power’s book primarily focuses, the army engaged in intense trench warfare in an attempt to defend the Confederacy’s capital from Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Potomac.
Power exhausted many of the South’s leading document repositories as he searched through thousands of letters from Lee’s soldiers. Many of those letters detail increasingly low morale as the fighting worsened, and others mention deteriorating supplies of food and clothing.
Reading short passages from the book and answering questions fielded by Edgar, Power also commented on the “remarkable” ability of soldiers in Lee’s army to maintain high morale, despite facing hardship.
That perspective, reinforced by letters that exhibit humor and joviality, is only the first to be addressed by the lecture series, which will run until Feb. 11, with a session held each Tuesday night from 5:30-7 p.m. in Capstone House’s Campus Room.
Upcoming sessions will include guest appearances by celebrated Civil War authors Jack Waugh,author of “One Man Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln’s Road to the Civil War”; Melissa Walker, famed for writing about the role of women of the South; Craig Symonds, author of “The Civil War at Sea”; and Carol Reardon, author of “Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory.”
The lecture series is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences’ Institute for Southern Studies. It is free and open to the public, though preregistration is requested.
Those unable to view the sessions live will also be able to listen to them on the weekly ETV radio show “Walter Edgar’s Journal.”