I have to tell you that this is bittersweet. In 1987, Armstead and I were married in the Colonnade Gardens right at the bottom of the stairs there. It was a beautiful, clear afternoon like this one so looking out really brings back what was a very happy memory. So this is a special occasion for a number of reasons. I am going to begin by telling you a little bit about Armstead. Some of you knew him and some of what I am going to say won’t come as a surprise, but for others, it will give you, I hope some small sense of the kind of person that he was.

He was born in New Orleans on April 30, 1947. He took pride in telling people he was born in the Charity Hospital, which as you all now know, no longer exists. He was the second child of a Lutheran minister and an educator. I used to tease him that he was the very first black Lutheran that I had ever met. He remarked on one occasion that at one point, 25 percent of African-American ministers in the Lutheran church were members of his extended family. Because of the amount of work that Lutherans had done in Alabama and the impact that the Lutherans had on his family. He attended segregated elementary and secondary schools in New Orleans and Memphis. After graduating from the Hamilton High School in Memphis in 1965, he was admitted to Yale College as one of eight young black men in an entering class of sixteen hundred. He told me that he was the first black person - the first black male - to be admitted to Yale from a segregated school in the South. It seems that as a youngster, honestly, he used to read the encyclopedia and so his knowledge of trivia far surpasses anybody that I know including my own of course and I think I have a substantial amount of trivia stuff rattling around up there.

He received his B.A. in History from Yale in 1969 with Honors having completed his term there by being Designated Scholar of the House during his Senior year. He created a monograph entitled “Civil War and The Demise of Slavery in the Mississippi Valley: 1861-1865”. As an undergraduate, as you’ve heard, he helped design the Undergraduate Program in Black Studies at Yale and co-edited a formative 1969 anthology entitled “Black Studies in the University, A Symposium”. I think that it is still available and at least is listed at Amazon.com. He came within one course of completing requirements for a Master’s degree in Theology from the Yale Divinity School before opting to pursue the Ph.D. in History, a degree that he received in Honors in 1977 from the University of Rochester. He studied there with Eugene Genevoise who was very influential on his thinking in many ways. He taught at a number of institutions including UCLA from 1973-1980. His work at UCLA at administering ethnic studies brought him to the attention of UVa.

He joined the History Department here in 1980 and in 1981 he founded the enterprise that was later named the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies. Under his leadership, the institute built an internationally respected program in African-American studies. Significantly, one of his more controversial policies in building that program, though it made complete sense from was Armstead’s point-of-view, was his belief that white scholars should be included in the scholarly pursuit of African and African-American studies. Armstead never allowed the appearance of the package to detract from the quality of the idea.

A little bit about our relationship. I first met Armstead in the Fall of 1985, shortly after I had become a real person at the Law School. I came here as a visitor in 1984 and I spent a year here and near the end of that term, they extended to me an offer to remain with tenure and I said of course, why not? It seems like a very sensible thing to do and so at that point, as I say, I became a real person. My appointment had entirely escaped his notice initially thereby causing him to declare me a non-person. That is typical Armstead. We met. He asked me what my name was. He asked me what my association with the University was. I told him that I was a member of the Law School faculty. He announced that I was not because he had not heard of my appointment. In spite of that, we became friends. Soon he began describing his work in the Civil War period and his holistic vision of what that written history should reflect. His approach seemed to be obviously correct and I will talk more about that in a moment and of its enormous intellectual importance.

We were married as I said outside here in June of 1987. Our marriage ended with a shocking and untimely death in August of 1995. I lost the love of my life and my intellectual partner. The work that he had described to me in such detail and on which he had continued to labor throughout our marriage was unfinished. I was determined, if at all possible, to see it through. In 1996, I gathered up all the pages of the unfinished manuscript that I could find and I made my way to the University of Virginia Press. Through the efforts of the Press and with the support of the Woodson Institute, the History Department, and the President’s Office, we now have the completed volume that captures to the best of our limited ability, his intellectual vision.

He begins by recounting the events surrounding the fall of Fort Sumter at Charlestown Harbor, South Carolina in 1861. At 3:21 a.m. on Friday April 12, 1861, a delegation of three men from the newly declared Independent State of South Carolina rode out into the Harbor of Charlestown to Fort Sumter perched on a manmade island. The carried a written demand to the Garrison Commander to surrender within the hour or face massive bombardment. Ever since South Carolina succession on December 20, 1860, Major Robert Anderson had refused to surrender to the Union claim, he would not surrender now. At 4:30 a.m., cannon number one fired a solitary signal shot at Fort Sumter. The fiery arch rising high above the harbor. The honor of touching off the spark had been granted to a Virginia patriot. Edmund Ruffin of the Palmeado Guard, in honor of his long advocacy of the cause of Southern nationalism and independence. Over the next day and a half, the outgunned Union defenders fought bravely. At 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 13, a Southern shell severed the pole that bore Fort Sumter’s flag. Distressed at the sight of Old Glory flutter to the ground, Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas rode out on his own to urge surrender. Major Anderson, assessing the damage agreed to Wigfall’s plea on the condition that his command be permitted to strike his colors in a formal hundred gun salute to the flag. This ritual act of surrender became a deeply symbolic first shedding of blood when a cannon at the fort exploded killing one soldier and wounding six others. The Garrison buried his fallen comrade and abandoned the fort and the Confederate flag and the Palmeado flag of South Carolina were hoisted together in place of Old Glory.

I have to say, you heard me refer to a Wigfall here, my family name, paternal family name is Wigfall. And we suspect, okay? Most of us are familiar with what ensued during the next four years. The direct carnage from 1861-1965 is undeniable. By the time General Lee surrendered to General Grant in April of 1865, there had been nearly 1,100,000 causalities and more than 620,000 lives were lost. Now remember that the entire U.S. population in 1860 was less than 40 million. This means that roughly five percent of the population was directly adversely affected by combat. Indeed as Armstead noted, this six hundred thousand figure exceeds the combined total of all other American wars up to Vietnam. Total causalities in the Civil War’s bloodiest battles, even now defy imagination. More than 50,000 at Gettysburg. 22,000 in one day at Antithem. 23,000 at Shiloh. 25,000 at Chickamauga and 10,000 Union soldiers plus 1,000 Confederate soldiers in 20 minutes at the Battle of Cold Harbor, right down the road here.

You should know that I never heard Armstead during the years that I knew him criticize or minimize the courage or the quality of sacrifice of those who fought for either side during the Civil War. He simply never embraced the explanation that the Confederacy’s loss was solely the result of the North’s military might. Rather, he recognized that those directly embroiled in the fighting were more than mere combatants. They had lives before the war and were very much the product of those experiences. And throughout the war, those who escaped or survived harm maintained ties with family back home. Of equal import, as has been true of war across the ages, and continues to be the case today, there are no statistics on that war’s collateral damage as we have come to use that term. The sufferings of non-combatants. We can never know the full extent to which lives were forever altered for good or ill by the forces set loose by that horrific clash, but of this we can be sure, as was true of the combatants themselves, the lives of those left behind were similarly affected and changed both during and after that conflict.

The power of Armstead’s intellect and his command of his field were forever impressed upon me when roughly eighteen months after we met, he regaled me during a drive from Memphis to Atlanta for eight enthralling hours with a detailed history of the region through which we were passing. His presentation included topography, demographics, resident socioeconomic descriptions, and extensive descriptions of the conditions of battle including such things as the number of foot soldiers, how much calvary, who had what arms, where the critical placements were, what the weather was like, what the crop conditions were like, the status of slave activity, and so forth. He embellished his presentation with their stories. Now anybody who knows Armstead knows that this is in fact. He was entirely capable of this. It was quite astonishing. These anecdotes recalled from diaries, letters, newspapers and other writings of the period, information that he had internalized during long hours of archival research in the Library of Congress and in state libraries across the South. It was truly a tuitive force and it made history come alive for me in a way that had never been true before. In essence, he presented his book to me during that drive.

This brings me to the heart of his effort, from my view, it seemed to me that much of Civil War history is focused on the military experience. Armstead deemed a predominantly military history of the war too narrow. He wanted to weave the lives of those embroiled in this conflict both directly and indirectly into a coherent whole. He wanted to bring the roles played in the struggle by blacks and women into focus. He sought to humanize the combatants by writing about the complexity, motivation, action, and interaction of factors that play in those nineteenth century lives. He set out to accomplish this through a painstaking analysis of primary sources reporting social, political, and military events on the Western front, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. In attempting to do this, as was his style from the Scholar of the House Project forward, he sought to resurge the project to the bottom. In other words, if he had a pile of papers, he never considered himself finished until he got to the last paper in the file.

He spent several summers in the stacks at the National Archives working his way through the record of Continental Army Commands from 1860-1865. He came away with stories about Sherman. When he came into the Army he was sent to Kentucky and as he scanned the amount of resistance he was facing, he wrote a series of reports in August of 1861. He wrote that it would take fours or five years and probably two million men in the Army before the North could subdue the South. When they got this, the people in Washington thought he was suffering from combat fatigue. They said, “He’s become mentally unbalanced from the strain of the work, he must be relieved” and that’s what they did. They relieved him from his command and sent him back to Saint Louis to cool out.

Now we know that Sherman was right. He was one of the great strategic minds of the war, but at the time people were thinking the war would last a month, ninety days at the most. How about Jefferson Davis? He didn’t want to be President in the first place. He and his wife were actually in the rose garden at their plantation when the message came from the Confederate Congress in February 1861 saying we need you to serve. Am I ready to be General and Chief?, Davis mused. They said no. They wanted him to be President. He wasn’t every good as an Army politician, but there wasn’t anyone else who had his range of experience to command the necessary support. Indeed in the very first pages of the book, he uses the voice of a young woman to remind the reader of the deep interest in events the of the day and the perceived effect of the fall of Fort Sumter and here’s that quote. Emma Holmes, the daughter of a Charleston physician who lived within earshot of the fort wrote in her personal account of the bombardment.

"Though every shot is distinctly heard and shakes our houses, I feel calm and composed. There are some few ladies who had been made perfectly miserable and nearly frantic by their fears of the safety of their loved ones, but the great body of citizens seems to be so impressed with the justice of our cause that they place entire confidence in the God of battle. Everyday brings hundreds of men from up country and the city is besides filled with their anxious wives and sisters and mothers who have followed them.”

As his research continued in archives and state libraries across the South reading history, soldiers’ letters, diaries, slave letters, government reports, newspapers, and anything else that seemed relevant, he came away with questions. What about the heroines and those who were the faceless masses upon which Southern agrarian success was based? Why did the Civil War take place when it did? Why did political speeches begin with Ladies and Gentlemen? Women after all were officially non-persons. They couldn’t vote. Armstead’s observation: it’s ridiculous to think that a man leaves his house in the morning, then comes home at night and a woman has no say at all in what he does during the day. Indeed, on the basis of writings like the following, he ultimately concluded that some of the strongest successionist language of the day came from women. A couple of examples, from Fernandina’s East Floridian. This was drafted by orders of a planter.
“ To our aged matrons here and throughout the South, we would recommend to reserve your crinolines to resent the Southern politicians who have compromised the way the rise of the South.” And from a Montgomery lady, “A few days ago, we could not be persuaded that the election would terminate as it has and the wearing of the blue carcanet, which seems to become something of a symbol, seems rather premature. We could not believe the Northern states would so sin against themselves”.

This is after the election of Lincoln: “We have relatives in the cold North who love as we do the sunny South, but submission is out of the question.” Degradation like that they would flush to witness. “We hear that there are some who still waiver seeing no cause for succession. Heaven forbid that greater cause be given for an exhibition of self-respect. He suggests that in a culture like the South, political questioning by a woman of a man’s own social class, of his will and ability to protect his family would be hard to resist and would prove to be an equally powerful stimulus for volunteering in military service. And the questions continued. Why did half of Southern white males between eighteen and forty enlist as soldiers long before the first battle of the war was fought? As he sought answers to these and related questions he discerned patterns in the stories. He saw commonalities in the concerns, fears, objectives, of definable groups in the South and these commonalities cut across state defined geographic boundaries. True enough, there exist evidence of widespread support for succession initially. The following passage reflects that reality. Edmund Ruffin, again one of our fire-eaters of Virginia. That leading fire-eater had expected John Brown to raid at Harper’s Ferry to stir the sluggish blood of the South and his expectation proved prophetic.

Public fervor in the South for succession seemed to reach a peak in Texas, where in September 1860, R.S. Finley, a slaveholder wrote, “The designs of the abolitionists are no longer matters of doubt. They are lettered in poison, fire, and blood invisible from Maine to Mexico. It is no longer safe to tolerate anyone in Southern society who affiliates with the abolitionists. Nor should anyone properly make the charge of lynch law against Southerners. A people who would lie upon their backs until their enemies burned down their towers and houses, murdered by poison or abolition pipes and spears, their wives and children and force their fair daughters into the embrace of buck negros for wives and plead absence of a protective law deserves to be enslaved.” Nonetheless, reservations about the wiz of succession were expressed even by planters who might be supposed to gain most if succession were to succeed. And this is important because Armstead’s point was that even from the inception, there were cracks in what appeared to be Southern solidarity and this is representative of that.

Both Jefferson Davis, who became the Confederacy’s President, and Alexander Stephens, the Georgia planter who became its Vice-President were among those planters who warned against succeeding in the 1860 Presidential campaign. “I consider slavery much more secure in the Union than out of it,” Stevens wrote in a letter of July 10, 1860. “We have nothing to fear from anything as much as unnecessary changes and revolutions in government. The institution is based on conservatism. Everything that weakens this has a tendency to weaken the institution. Indeed, a number of slaveholders fear that any move towards succession would lead to liberation of the slaves - towards succession would lead to liberation of the slaves.

A campaign pamphlet, "The destruction of the Union is emancipation", written by an Alabama planter under the name Nathaniel Maken calls the support of the fire-eaters in the cause of Southern nationalism an “act of political suicide, which I cannot reconcile with the instincts of self-preservation. The success of slavery, the successful management of the black race, Maken insisted, is impossible outside of the Union. It is the Union that gives slaves perfect security. To slaves, they are of present high value and to slave labor, it’s a large measure of success.” So here are planters who are not so sure that this idea of succession was a very good one. Clearly, painful choices were in the offing. To sort of sum up, the attempt to achieve unity among whites ultimately failed. They failed in part because there were divergent interests right from the beginning. The slaveholders were of one frame of mind. The yeomen and non-slaveholders had far less at stake, but wound up of course carrying the brunt of the burden, especially when the Southern Congress enacted exemptions from service and that allowed slaveholders as well as those who were responsible for oversight on plantations to avoid the draft and so the burden came to fall more and more on yeomen and non-slaveholders. This was all complicated by differences between slaveholders and non-slaveholders. Many slaveholders brought their servants with them and they lived at quite a different level than did non-slaveholders. This caused a great deal of jealously and lead to such things as non-slaveholders occasionally kidnapping slaves. The slaves of course reacted to this. They knew what was going on and they sought to exploit the situation to the extent possible and did as often as possible.

Let me tell you a little bit about Armstead’s view of the response to his work. During the last two decades of his life, he presented his findings before audiences ranging from MIT in Boston to the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. Although he sought to explain the whys of the Civil War in a non-partisan fashion, because he was fiercely intellectually honest, each group, each group became uncomfortable with the story that he was telling. He found that his unbiased storytelling threatened the myths cherished by each. The following excerpt is taken from his introduction to the book, “I have been accused in the South of being anti-Southern for the same paper than in the North prompted accusations of an anti-Northern bias. I realize that many Southerners maximize their claim to principle heroism by minimizing the role of slavery in their decision to succeed. While many Northerners castigate the South for its stance while ignoring their own racialist power grab in driving Southerners to the wall. Memories of the Civil War are alive in the imaginative realm of each region fed by partisans North and South. Fortunately, my father had warned me more than once that attracting fire from both sides of a heated conflict is generally the surest sign that one is closing in on the truth. He turned to Robert Penn Warren in an effort to understand that and basically Robert Penn Warren in another quotation, which you can read in your own copy of the book, characterizes the Civil War as the greatest single event in America history and one, which necessarily generates very strong feelings on both sides.

Let me tell you a little about the scholarly response to the publication of this book so far. I of course have an interest in this and so like others who seek instant reactions, most of us do I suppose at this point, I turned initially to the internet for whatever small morsels I could gleam. I found early responses during the winter of 2005 on Amazon.com. A few of these reader assessments were arrogantly dismissive. From someone who called himself or herself Fruitloop from down South, “extremely disappointing Civil War work.” One star out of a possible five. And from William B. Townsend, also from the South, who asserted that the book is based upon opinions rather than research. He contended that Southerners of every color went eagerly off to war and fought to the bitter end as slaves supported the troops in the field by working back home. One star out of a possible five. I thought I may have stumbled onto fiction at that point, but not to worry. Perhaps these reactions explain why the History Book Club that includes a very large number of publications on Civil War listings declined to include Bitter Fruits, characterizing it as too scholarly. However, UVa’s own Ed Ayers in a dustjacket comment said that it is wonderful at last to have this fabled work. "A masterpiece of scholarly ingenuity and research, Robinson’s book challenges us today no less than it did when this bold pioneer burst on scene thirty years ago". From the Library Journal, "this book offers a powerful counter-way to those who would separate social dynamics from military history". From several professors, and I am just going to read the little excerpts, "there is much here that is expressed today as the day as it was written". From another, "Bitter Fruits is a gem, highly readable". And finally, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage remains cutting edge".

As an academic, I know that ultimately time alone determines the durability of ideas. I am confident the Armstead’s ideas will prove both durable and persuasive. Finally, as a wife, because wives must always have the last word, I have to make a comment on what I see as the modernity of this work. I think that even though it is based on events that occurred one hundred and fifty years ago, it still presents a powerful lesson for the present. The experience of the Confederacy during its brief existence as a co-ed state suggests that a social contract that is under-inclusive or that subjugates identifiable subgroups is inherently flawed. The Confederacy’s experience is an extreme example of the consequences that could ensue in the worse case. As we struggle with the fault lines that presently exist in American society at large, the experience of the Confederacy I submit serves as a compelling reminder of the cost of failure to engage in truly inclusive nation-building.