Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

In April 2011, the editors of Disunion, The New York Times’s series on the Civil War, convened a panel of historians to mark the 150th anniversary of the Confederate assault on Fort Sumter and the onset of the four-year conflict. Before a sold-out audience at the Times Center in New York City, the panelists – David Blight, Ken Burns, Adam Goodheart and Jamie Malanowski – discussed the origins of the conflict, the role of slavery and the immense challenges facing a still-new president.

Four years later, with the anniversary of Appomattox behind us, The Times has reconvened the same panelists – virtually, this time – to bring the series to a close. Using questions posed by readers and Facebook fans, Disunion asked them to consider the meaning of the war, its consequences and its legacy.

1. What were the two or three biggest mistakes made by Jefferson Davis?

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David Blight, professor of history, Yale University: There is a case that Davis made big mistakes in not developing a better tax policy for the Confederacy, although he surely did work to great ends to develop a centralized federal government, ironically thwarting or ignoring so much of the states’ rights doctrine on which his government was founded. The cotton embargo may also have been in the long run a big mistake, although that was not all Davis’s doing.

But as a long-term historical mistake – or perhaps more of an embarrassment – I would rank Davis’s publication of his memoir in 1881 as a genuine low point in the development of his legacy.

The two-volume, 1,279-page “Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government” is perhaps the longest, most turgid and most self-righteous defense of a failed political movement ever written by an American. The book is hundreds of pages of vindication for the Confederacy, for the slaveholders’ republic he led, and for the right of secession.

The book also stands as one of the most open and aggressive defenses of slavery written by a former Confederate. Although Davis went to great length to argue that slavery “was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident,” he nevertheless provided a thorough version of the alleged mental and historical inferiority of black people. American slaves’ African ancestors, argued Davis, “were born the slaves of barbarian masters, untaught in all the useful arts and occupations, reared in heathen darkness.” In America they had been “enlightened by the rays of Christianity,” taught the “arts of peace, order and civilization” by their new masters. This world of “contented … faithful service,” a “happier dependence of labor and capital” than realized anywhere else in the world, had all been crushed by Yankee armies and industry.

Davis thus gave the Lost Cause its fundamental lifeblood – faithful black slaves and heroic, victimized white Southerners who in their noble exercise of “sovereign” rights had tried to hold back the ravages of the Yankee Leviathan. It would be ahistorical to simply wish Davis had not written such a defense of the Confederate cause; but it is always fascinating to witness a colossal tragedy and failure all but unwittingly defended.

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Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker: I think the biggest mistake that Jefferson Davis made was being on the wrong side. But it wasn’t so much the mistake that Jefferson Davis made but the very configuration of the Confederacy that was central to its defeat – a defeat blamed on Davis the politician rather than on the celebrated generals. Davis had to manage the loose confederation of states when he needed a strong federal government as Lincoln had. The prosecution of the war was impossible for Davis under those circumstances.

Adam Goodheart, director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College: Jefferson Davis’s first mistake of the war was also his biggest: the decision to open fire on Fort Sumter in April 1861, thus taking upon the new Confederacy the responsibility for the Civil War’s first shot. By doing so, he created for the Union a moment much like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, when the nation rallied together in the face of a shocking attack, setting aside previous political differences to avenge the awful sight of the American flag going down amid smoke and flames. He badly underestimated the impact this would have on Northern public opinion, especially at a moment when new technologies like the telegraph and steam-powered printing spread descriptions and images of the attack throughout the Union almost immediately.

Davis might easily have waited. The new Confederacy faced no real threat from the tiny Union garrison – just five dozen soldiers and a brass band on a two-acre island, hemmed in on all sides by thousands of rebel troops – and Abraham Lincoln was clearly loath to open hostilities himself. The worst thing Davis could say about the Sumter garrison, in a private letter just a few days before the attack, was that its existence “irritate[s] the people of these [Confederate] states.”

Had Davis instructed rebel commanders to hold their fire, he not only would have avoided the blame for starting the war, but could also have embraced the opportunity to make his government appear moderate and reasonable to the Northern public and foreign powers. He could have taken additional time to establish the authority of Confederate rule and the apparatus of government – currency, a postal system, custom houses, courts – throughout the South. A smarter strategist might have maneuvered U.S. authorities into effectively treating the Confederacy as a foreign power in negotiating Sumter’s fate. All of this would have advanced the rebels’ true strategic interest, which was not to kill Yankees but rather to establish the Confederate States of America as a legitimate national power.

In short, Davis made a mistake that Lincoln would never have: He let a purely symbolic irritant determine the course of national policy. The rebel forces’ 34-hour artillery barrage at Fort Sumter killed not a single Yankee. But it may have cost the newborn Confederacy its life.

Jamie Malanowski, author of “Commander Will Cushing: Daredevil Hero of the Civil War”: Many people believe that Davis’s biggest mistake was to start the war. True enough, by reacting to Lincoln’s plan to resupply the garrison at Fort Sumter by opening fire, Davis lost any claim to reasonableness, alienated Northerners who didn’t care if the South stayed or left, and fired up the union cause.

But the bigger mistake, the tragic mistake, was in thinking, like the rest of the secessionists, that the Confederacy could ever win the war. At the time the war began, the Confederacy was composed of only seven states; by opening fire, Davis won his bet that he would draw Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas to his side, but he was wrong about Maryland and Kentucky. The confederacy was ill equipped for war; it had a much smaller population than the North, and lacked foundries and railroads. Davis might have sensed that he was being delusional when he appointed a secretary of the navy, even though the South had no ships. Moreover, the South was hardly unified; tens of thousands of former slaves eventually fought for the Union, but 100,000 white Southerners did as well. Southern armies consistently lacked ammunition, equipment and, most seriously, food, primarily because plantation owners kept producing cotton instead of corn.

Most seriously, Davis, like most secessionists, simply underestimated the resolve of the North to preserve the Union. Davis and his fellow secessionists invited the war, and reaped the whirlwind.

2. Who was the most effective military leader of the Civil War?

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Burns: We celebrate the daring and genius of many Southern generals, including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest. But they were in essence the last vestige of an old order. The new order was best represented by very middle-class (rather than aristocratic) military men, particularly Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Though Sherman is hated in the South, and a good deal of that hatred has migrated north, he was by far the most effective leader of the Civil War, bringing the war to the “industrial” centers of the South, i.e., the plantations.

Malanowski: Let’s raise a glass to Gen. Winfield Scott. Though seemingly something of a comical figure, the aged, infirm Scott devised the strategy of strangulating the Southern economy with a total blockade of the Southern coast, while using a joint Army-Navy force to capture the Mississippi and sever the Confederacy in two. At first it was derided for its passivity; it wasn’t called the Anaconda as a compliment. But it worked. Although many blockade runners successfully eluded Navy vessels, Southern commerce was reduced to a tenth of prewar levels. The Southern economy could not supply the food it needed to feed its people, let alone the weapons and supplies needed to sustain a war.

3. Notwithstanding the much-celebrated Emancipation Proclamation, was the end of slavery not accomplished by the slaves themselves, by refusing to remain slaves whenever the presence of Union forces made this possible?

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Blight: We have almost worn this question out. The answer should be and always has been that emancipation was both the result of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (the policy) and the brave volition and actions of the slaves themselves (the process). History can never be as simple as sometimes we would like it to be. “Either-or history” simply does not work in this instance. The crooked path to the Proclamation during 1861-62, its roots in Republican Party ideology, in congressional measures such as the Second Confiscation Act and in hugely important military events such as the battle of Antietam – all this is crucial to understanding how Lincoln ends up delivering the executive order to the armed forces to free all slaves in the states in rebellion by January 1863. But the thousands of individual decisions by slaves themselves, who were at least in proximity to the Union forces, to strike out for their own liberation are equally important.

The very term “self-emancipation” has sometimes been forced to carry too much weight and significance. It is simply too operatic. This dual story needs to be seen through real evidence, real stories on the ground during the war. There are thousands of such cases well documented in the documentary history of emancipation volumes published over the years at the University of Maryland.

But as a streamlined way into understanding how emancipation came about, see my book “A Slave No More,” which reprints the postwar memoirs of two former slaves, John Washington and Wallace Turnage. In each case, these former slaves would never have achieved their freedom without their own cunning and extraordinary courage. But they also would never have become free without the presence of the Union Army along the Rappahannock River in April 1862 (Washington’s case) and the Union Navy in Mobile Bay in August 1864 (Turnage’s case). Willing or unwilling, Union soldiers and sailors helped to “free” thousands of slaves who were already risking everything to free themselves.

Goodheart: In early 1861, Lincoln and nearly all other white Northern leaders – and most of the general public – wanted to avoid the slavery issue as much as possible. It seemed much safer to frame the struggle in terms of Southern treason and the Union’s survival. It was enslaved African-Americans themselves who forced ending slavery onto the Union’s wartime agenda.

The most dramatic single event occurred on the night of May 23, 1861, when three Virginia slaves – Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend – escaped across the James River and sought asylum with U.S. forces. By declaring them “contraband of war” and offering his protection, Gen. Benjamin F. Butler placed the federal government in the role of liberator. This was a revolutionary change, since throughout its previous existence U.S. authority had protected slaveholding as a constitutional right. Soon, thousands more escapees were pouring into the Union lines and becoming the Yankees’ only reliable allies in the otherwise hostile South. This eventually made Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation appear not just politically acceptable to millions of Northern whites, but even historically inevitable.

To give the Confederates their due, they also did their part to hasten the day of jubilee – albeit inadvertently. When leaders like Vice President Alexander Stephens declared slavery the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy’s existence, they more or less acknowledged that Union forces could undermine the rebellion by freeing the slaves. Increasingly as the war went on, Northern leaders, ordinary soldiers and the general public found that a pretty tough invitation to resist.

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4. How different was Andrew Johnson’s reconstruction strategy from the one Lincoln would have likely employed had he lived to complete his second term?

Blight: To answer and understand this question would take pages. But a quick way to grasp how different Johnson’s policy was is to concentrate on the period from midsummer to December 1865. During this period, with Congress out of session, Johnson engineered a process by which the ex-Confederate states were allowed to take back control, practically overnight, of their state governments and of their societies generally. They passed the infamous “black codes,” restricting movement, economic activity and any civil or political rights for the freedmen. They also restored ex-Confederates to power and office.

Johnson’s approach to Reconstruction was rooted in a few fundamental ideas: states’ rights, white supremacy and rapid presidential control over the readmission of Southern states to the Union. His philosophy about Reconstruction was often summed up in a slogan he adopted: “The Constitution as it is and the Union as it was.”

We cannot know precisely, of course, how Lincoln would have done all of this differently. What we do know is that he had at least signaled some support for black suffrage, and he was a far more adroit politician than Johnson, a great deal more skilled in dealing with friends or enemies in Congress. It is worth remembering that Johnson was not a Republican; he was an old Jacksonian Democrat, placed on the presidential ticket in 1864 because of his loyal unionism from a seceded state during the war. And it is worth concentrating on why, for very good reasons, the congressional Republicans wrested control of Reconstruction away from Johnson in 1866.

Burns: President Johnson was a reluctant Reconstructionist, a pale diet version of the one Lincoln would have likely employed. He was tentatively carrying out his dead predecessor’s wishes and into the vacuum of his ambivalence was driven the wedge that would ultimately help cause Reconstruction to collapse.

Malanowski: I don’t know about policies, but it would have been interesting to see if Lincoln’s personal qualities – his magnanimity, intelligence, empathy, personal warmth – and his gifts of language and politics would have allowed him to make a connection with ordinary Southerners and bring about genuine reconstruction. Sadly, it’s possible that the task would have overwhelmed anyone, and left Lincoln with a diminished reputation.

5. Since the end of the Civil War, the United States went on steadily to become a global power, while Europe went in the opposite direction. Can you comment on the effect of the post Civil War United States in the geopolitical configuration of the world?

Burns: In very simple geopolitical terms, the paradox of the Civil War is clear: It made a diverse collection of states one thing, a Nation. Before the war, when speaking about our country Americans said, “the United States are,” plural. After the war, we began to say, as we do today, “United States is,” which is actually ungrammatical. That “one thing” would within 50 to 75 years be the most powerful country on earth, freed seemingly forever from the sectarian divisions that had driven it to civil war. Europe, with its long history of separate nationalities, its cultural and linguistic differences, couldn’t keep up. Even its modern-day attempt at union is beset by problems and divisions from all corners.

Malanowski: I think you would have a hard time convincing Queen Victoria or Winston Churchill or Otto von Bismarck or Vladimir Lenin or almost any European that Europe declined vis a vis the United States at any point prior to the catastrophe of World War II.

It’s much more interesting to consider how the post-Civil War United States would have declined if the South had won the war. Had secession succeeded, it’s easy to imagine other states and sections breaking away, leaving North America like 18th century Europe, a continent of smallish nations of competing interests and ideologies, vying for and going to war over land and resources. Powerful European nations like France and Spain would have tried to retrieve old possessions, inviting Britain and other powers to tamper as well.

And even with the federal armies defeated, it is hard to imagine that millions of Southern slaves would have docilely accepted their crushed hopes. North America would have been a constant war zone, and the wealth and prosperity and power enjoyed by a stable United States during the last 150 years would have been squandered in war and competition.

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6. How do you envisage the Civil War’s bicentennial being commemorated in 50 years time? Both within the academic world of Civil War scholars and within the wider American political and public spheres? Where do you see the future of the Civil War heading in these arenas?

Blight: At various gatherings and panels this past spring commemorating the ending of the Civil War, this question would often emerge in some form. The real answer is, of course, none of us know. It would be too easy to predict that the Lost Cause and neo-Confederate memory will have eroded much more, if not even died out. But I rather doubt that. As long as we have a politics of race in America we will have a politics of Civil War memory, and therefore the Lost Cause will have salience. It certainly still does in America’s right-wing politics.

I suspect that the roiling salience of federalism, the battles over states’ rights that are so persistent in our political culture today, will still be around in some form. But events determine these matters, over and over.

The only thing we might be certain of is that if as a world community, as a species, we do not do something serious and soon to reduce greenhouse gases, and therefore stop global warming, then the commemoration of the Civil War in 2061 will likely not be held in Charleston to remember Fort Sumter, because that city may be under the sea. Perhaps, ironically, by 2061 we will have a new Lost Cause with which to contend: the long, failed effort to thwart the power and greed of climate change deniers. Why is it that only dystopian projections come to mind in relation to this counter-factual question, and very few resembling their opposites?

But to offer something uplifting: Let’s all hope that the 14th Amendment survives the next 50 years, that the right to vote for every American, rooted so deeply in the blood of the Civil War, will not be further eroded by one of our political party’s desperation to survive, that we can somehow imagine a politics that will revive faith in that federal government saved in the war of 1861-65, and that the disasters that will be necessary to force us to rebuild our national infrastructure will not be too terrible.

Burns: I believe that the Civil War’s centrality will never diminish as long as the United States survives. Fifty years from now at the bicentennial, both the academy and the wider public will marvel at how important the Civil War was and is to almost every aspect of American life.

Goodheart: I hope I’ll still be around to see the start of the bicentennial. I’ll be 90 years old then, so my own lifetime will cover nearly half the distance between the 1860s (a past that we think of as distant) and the 2060s (a future that still feels remote). The Civil War, in other words, will still be barely two lifespans away. In biological terms, that’s the merest blip. Yet our pathetic human concept of what constitutes “a long time” – unlike our idea of “a long distance” – seems only to have shrunk during the modern era.

Something tells me that this may start changing in the next 50 years, as the cycles of climates, species and technologies come to overshadow those of wars and presidencies. Centuries and millennia may (again) loom larger than years and decades as the significant units of historical and political time. So I’ll make a wild bet that in 2061, the Civil War may actually feel less distant than it does now.

Does that mean it will seem more important, or less? Hard to say. But I’m guessing it will increasingly be seen as a signal modernizing and liberalizing moment not just for the United States, but also for the world. Other major developments of the 1850s and 1860s – Darwinism, digital communications, mass media, consumerism, new ideas about gender and sexuality, the rise of European nation-states, the end of Russian serfdom, the vast upheavals in China, India, and Japan – may get smooshed together with the American Civil War into one big story, the story of how one version of human society yielded way to another. The full consequences of that painful and joyous revolution, that fiery jubilee, may be clearer to everyone in 50 years’ time than they are now.

A safer bet is to predict that the story, or stories, of 1861-65 will continue to enthrall and infuriate us, unite and divide us. Certain episodes in history are like great books: They can be endlessly read, reread, retold and reinterpreted. The ancient Greeks’ Iliad hasn’t gone stale after more than a hundred generations, and there’s no reason to expect that our “American Iliad” will do so after just another two.

Malanowski: Americans don’t have much interest in history generally, and less interest in the Civil War than they used to. This is particularly true in the South, where even those who still take pride in a defiant rebel yell find the legacy of slavery and segregation increasingly an embarrassment. Consider this: In February 1961, 100,000 people, most of them ardent segregationists, showed up in Montgomery, Ala., to mark the centennial of Jefferson Davis’s inauguration. In Charleston S.C., in December 2010, about 400 people showed up for a secession ball.

We still battle with many of the same issues that brought about the Civil War, and perhaps will continue to do so in 2061. But an increasingly diverse, multiethnic America will find itself celebrating the South that produced Elvis Presley and Martin Luther King Jr., Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams, Peyton Manning and Muhammad Ali, B.B. King and Johnny Cash, Coca-Cola and whoever invented barbecue — all pillars of modern American culture – and stuffing Nathan Bedford Forrest into the attic.

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