RESEARCH & PUBLISHING

Taking Aim at the 'Ken Burns' View of the Civil War

By CHRISTOPHER SHEA

Since the dawn of the civil-rights movement, he says, historians have oversimplified the war, giving it an overarching moral purpose it lacked at the time.

As he sees it, the established narrative -- on display in Ken Burns's epic television series The Civil War and in the best-selling Battle Cry of Freedom (Oxford University Press), by Princeton University's James M. McPherson -- goes something like this: Because of slavery, the United States began as a tragically flawed democracy. The contradiction of slavery in an society driven by egalitarian ideals pointed toward inevitable conflict. When the clash finally came, Lincoln guided the nation toward the recognition that slavery was at the heart of the split between North and South, and turned the war into a referendum on industrial society and the place of blacks in America.

"It's a convenient argument," says Mr. Ayers, his voice tinged with a North Carolina accent. "But it ignores that we backed into emancipation, did everything possible to avoid it, and then reneged on it after the war."

His last big book, The Promise of the New South (Oxford University Press, 1992), dug beneath the usual political sources to explore the blues, religion, and the views of poor blacks and whites left out of earlier versions of the story. Reviewers hailed the work as a worthy successor to C. Vann Woodward's landmark Origins of the New South (Louisiana State University Press, 1951).

The emphasis on social history in Promise signaled a generational shift. For his revisionist Civil War project, however, the University of Virginia professor has made an even bigger shift -- into Generation Next, uncharted terrain for this 45-year-old sometime techno-skeptic. Working with a cadre of graduate students and techies, he is placing on the World-Wide Web every available piece of information about two opposing communities from 1859 through the war: Confederate Augusta County, in Virginia (right next-door to Charlottesville); and Unionist Franklin County, in Pennsylvania.

When he envisioned the project, in 1991, his goal was to shift from the broad-brush look at the South in Promise to a fine-grained portrait of two communities. He imagined doing that the old-fashioned way -- shuttling, alone, to and from archives in Washington and the two county seats, Staunton, Va., and Chambersburg, Pa. Instead, he jokes, he's created a "cyborg," a Frankenstein mating of high technology and history. If others take their cue from him, the "Valley of the Shadow" project could change the way history is done.

Augusta and Franklin Counties are 200 miles apart in the Shenandoah Valley, the corridor of rich farmland in which some of the fiercest battles of the Civil War were fought. Although the legality of slavery was the defining difference between the two places, the Virginia county contained its share of anti-secessionists, and few in the Pennsylvania community were die-hard abolitionists. Property values, demographics, and farm sizes were comparable in the two counties. Yet when war broke out, the counties fell in line with the states'-rights and Unionist causes. Why?

Mr. Ayers will eventually write a book about his take on the complicated, overlapping imperatives that drove those neighbors into combat. Rather than await the tome, however, anyone with a modem can now see the messy ingredients that will go into it.

"The note cards for Promise are sitting in boxes in the corner of my office," Mr. Ayers says. "I used only about 10 per cent of them, and no one will ever look at them again." Now, he says, "not only do I have more control over the information, because it's digitized, but it will also be useful long after my book is finished."

Sociologically speaking, the Valley project also takes some of the loneliness out of book writing. "I'm a bit more like a science professor now," Mr. Ayers continues. "I have a research center, and it creates jobs for graduate students." Anne Rubin, a Virginia Ph.D. candidate in history, and Will Thomas, a 1995 Ph.D., have guided the day-to-day operations of the effort. Unlike research assistants on more traditional projects, they get co-billing on the Web site. Depending on how fund raising is going -- the project got seed money from I.B.M. in 1992 and now receives help from the university, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and private donors -- eight to 25 people work on it. In a tight job market, it's not a bad gig.

In advance of the scholarly book, W.W. Norton will release Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, a book/CD-ROM package. The book introduces readers to the project and to social and political issues in antebellum America, while the disk provides a user-friendly compendium of data from the Web site.

Newspapers from the era lend the project a fragmented narrative. Mr. Ayers's "post-docs" have scanned into the computer thousands of pages of stories from broadsheets like the Staunton Spectator and the Valley Spirit. Transcriptions of those stories -- images of the pages are also accessible -- offer both grand tales (firsthand accounts of Gettysburg) and not-so-grand nuggets of human interest (a news brief about a poor soul who committed a sexual "atrocity" with a horse).

Drawing on the collection of military records in the National Archives, the site includes data on every soldier from the two counties. Census information rounds out the demographics for both civilians and soldiers, while insurance claims -- the Confederates burned down Chambersburg, Franklin's biggest town, in 1864 -- open cabinets and closets for inspection. Topographic maps, overlaid with the routes of roads and rail lines, make clear the landmarks that the armies fought over.

Digital history couldn't hope to have a more convincing pitchman. Energetic, with a thin frame, boyish face, and a shock of dark, unruly hair, Mr. Ayers is an astoundingly popular professor. As he walks across the university grounds, undergraduates buttonhole him to talk about how their weekends went, how they're feeling, how late they stayed up working on a paper. He responds with banter and an easy laugh.

As he makes a quick stop at his office, a bushy-haired fraternity member stops by to ask what he's teaching next semester. Mr. Ayers says that, alas, because he's been named chairman of the Faculty Senate, he won't be teaching undergraduates. "But, as chairman, I look forward to having meaningful dialogue with you -- about destroying the Greek system!"

He pokes at the student's plaid shirt as he shouts, "This place is about learning! Not fun!" The student grins.

An interest in forgotten voices drives the Valley project. It's said that more books have been written about Lincoln than about any other man besides Jesus, but the lives of most of the citizens of Civil War-era Augusta and Franklin Counties remain unchronicled.

"The point is not that all this information is here because we are type A -- 'Oh, God, we have to include everybody!'" Mr. Ayers says. "It's for the intellectual purpose of being able to include every member of society. The idea is to have freedom of movement in as many directions as possible, so you can ask the most-sophisticated questions. We don't know what the story is, so we put all the stories there. The idea, of course, is to democratize history."

In explaining how to use the Web site, Mr. Ayers likes to give the example of his 11-year-old daughter typing her name, Hannah, into the computer. Five matches came up: four white girls, one black. Did they have brothers and sisters? Were their families rich or poor, slaveholding or not? One piece of information and you're off.

On a more academic level, take the question that Mr. Ayers posed to a class of history majors at Virginia: People say the Civil War was a fight between two fundamentally different economies. True or false? They had 15 minutes to search the Web site. An advanced economy might include more professions than a rural one. Is that idea borne out in searches for various professional titles? How many more rail lines did the North have? Call up a map. What about family income? Hit the census. With the primary documents at hand, third-years have to think more like graduate students.

The project may make some people think that history is as easy as point-and-click. (Some high-school students e-mailed a request to the Valley project: Please fax us all the information you have on the Civil War.) But other visitors may realize that it's more complicated than they thought, the sort of thing you might even have to spend six years in graduate school to get a handle on.

In the February issue of Perspectives, the newsletter of the American Historical Association, historians debated the pros and cons of on-line history. Almost everyone hails the Valley site as a success, though some demur that simply providing massive amounts of information isn't what history is all about. Mr. Ayers agrees that it's only part of what historians do; hence the academic book that will follow.

Even Mr. McPherson, whose Civil War narrative Mr. Ayers wants to dynamite, calls the accessibility of all this information a "boon to the profession." He expresses doubts, however, about whether the two counties are truly representative of the North and South.

"The massive amount of material for these two counties creates a certain kind of coerciveness," he says. "There is the potential that they will be regarded as typical, and that the material will dominate our understanding of certain issues."

"Neither the Republican Party in the North, or its polar opposite, the Southern-rights Democratic Party, was powerful in these two counties. They were full of people who would have favored compromise."

Mr. Ayers's response is that the decisions of Virginians and Pennsylvanians were crucial in the move toward war. And while it's easy to understand how Massachusetts and South Carolina might view each other as alien cultures, the decisions made by people who shared the Shenandoah Valley to start killing each other may be more telling.

He initially envisioned the project as an "archive in a box" -- nearly unfiltered information -- but early users found that overwhelming. Now you can peruse mini-archives on, say, African-American life, or women. Valley staff members got some design help from Thomas Jefferson; the Web site is organized around floor plans for Poplar Forest, his summer home.

There are some bells and whistles. Computer-generated graphics, still in the works, will bring life to those confusing maps from military books -- "Gettysburg, July 2, 4 p.m."; "Gettysburg, July 3, 10 a.m."; which line is the Union again? The movies also serve in a bait-and-switch: Lure the military junkies, then get them thinking about daily life in the 1860s.

Students who take the digital-history class that Mr. Ayers teaches with Mr. Thomas, a former high-school teacher, are handed a sheaf of letters, diary entries, or military records, along with a topic like "the Augusta home front." From there, they have to enter the information into a computer, travel to archives to get more of it, and synthesize it all into an attractive Web site.

"In most history classes, you read a book and write a paper," says Molly Campbell, a second-year student majoring in history and English. "We were, like, building the book."

"In most classes, theories of history are never discussed," she adds. "In this class, we had to think about how to do history. It asks students to be more aware of what goes into it."

The project isn't about history as nostalgia or self-empowerment, as one potential donor, a Virginia alumnus, discovered to his chagrin. On a visit to the project's offices, he mentioned that one of his ancestors had lived in Staunton, and he asked staff members to do a search.

"We made some laughing noises, saying, 'You never know what you'll find when you do this.'" Mr. Ayers recalls. "We entered the name -- and he turned up only as a delinquent taxpayer.

"I could just see the money flying away.

"Then the man said, 'Well, I think I had a relative who fought for the Confederacy.' We typed in the name. Sure enough, the guy deserted in something like July 1861."

"History hurts," chimes in Mr. Thomas.

Manfully, the alumnus still forked over $20,000.