A House Divided: An Expedition into the Civil War

With an audience mostly of those aged 50 and up, a handful of veterans in the crowd and the few students who had come to watch their professor lecture, the halls of the Casa Loma building of the University of Redlands opened up with echoes of “good morning.” Chairs separated and formed an aisle leading up to the podium where Frank J. Williams, the retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, opened up with a light joke and a warm presence. Thus started the first lecture of the Civil War Symposium, entitled “1863: The Turning Point,” an eye-opening account of President Lincoln and the trials, tribulations, and parallels to our current state of affairs the Civil War reflects. “History binds us as a nation,” Craig Symonds, Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Naval Academy, said against the background of the waiting crowd that morning. When asked about the new research the symposium would later come to cover on casualties, he replied that research was continuously ongoing and new facts were always being uncovered. The notion of the number of deaths was vastly underestimated, for in 1863 records stopped being kept. For some time the number of deaths was calculated to be somewhere around 600,000 Americans for both sides, but new research suggests that the death toll could actually lie over 700,000. To put that into modern perspective, that would be nearly 7 million casualties to our current population. With a roster of different scholars from places nearby to far along the east coast, each had plenty to say on the subject of turning points. Joan Waugh, a professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that though there were many different turning points of the Civil War, one of the most important would have to be Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. In the words of the Bible, quoted by Abraham Lincoln, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The symposium offered a lot of insight to a broad public audience, insight that forces a person to revisit and reexamine the nation’s past actions for the sake of its current issues. Though over 150 years have gone by since the Civil War, the continuing interest in the events of that war shows that these events continue teaching lessons on unity and conflict.