American History Hit - Darkest Hours: Brother Against Brother

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

There is no question that the Civil War is one of the darkest chapters in American history. With roughly 2.5 percent of the population lost, a higher number of Americans than in both World Wars combined.In portraying the war in history, however, we often focus on the tragic division of loyalties in the the United States - the predicament of brother fighting brother.To discuss this idea - where it came from, how true it is and how it has been used by various parties - Don is joined once more by Aaron Sheehan-Dean. Aaron is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University, and author of ‘Reckoning With Rebellion: War and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century’.This is the first in a series on America's Darkest Hours. In the coming weeks we will explore the Great Depression, the Kent State Shootings and the origins of slavery.Edited by Aidan Lonergan, produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The battle is over. It is won. Now the field is quiet and still, save for the groans of the wounded and the slow work of collecting the dead. A Union soldier in dark blue slowly walks a line of captured men in Confederate gray. Many injured, slumping against each other.

All are caked in mud and blood, wearing expressions of defeat and defiance. The soldier moves along, counting each of these captured troops, readying them for transport. But for a brief moment he hesitates, pausing, losing his count. In that line of unfamiliar faces, faces that until hours ago were deadly threats, he sees a pair of eyes that look different. Eyes he thinks he knows, that remind him of home, of cherished childhood, of someone long absent. Could it be no?

During the Civil War and in the decades after, stories of families of. family separation would come to define how Americans talked about the war. Brother against brother, family against family, a nation tragically torn in two. But how often did this really happen? And do such stories illuminate the agony of the war itself, or just as much the way Americans have chosen to remember it? Greetings and welcome, I'm Don Wildman. This is American History Hit.

The idea of the American Civil War as a family feud, a conflict of broad, Brother against brother, house divided, has endured to the present. It's a powerful image. But like so much else in history, it tells us as much about how the war has been remembered and reshaped over time as it does about the events themselves. The story of the Civil War has been influenced not just by what happened, but how it has been told. So to help us unpack where this brother versus brother idea came from and why it's proven so durable, we turn to an expert of those trouble. Times. Aaron Shian Dean is a historian of the American Civil War and professor of history at Louisiana

State University. His work focuses on the lived experience of the war, how Americans North and South understood and remembered the conflict. He is the author and editor of several major works of the Civil War era, including the calculus of violence, Harvard University Press, why Confederates fought, University of North Carolina, and most recently, fighting with the past, how 17th century history shaped the American Civil War. Dean has joined us for several episodes in the past. I'll be sure to talk about it at our conclusion. Honored you're back.

I gave you the long bio. Dr. She and Dean. Pleasure to be back and I appreciate all of the celebration there. Yeah. Brother against brother is a phrase that comes straight from the Old Testament, a book of Genesis, Cain and Abel story. Chapter 4.8, verse 8.

Kane rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. How fitting is this, this first murder, the first fratricide in characterizing the civil war. It was certainly language that people on both sides used, especially northerners. And so, you know, there were ministers in those early Sundays in April of 1861, where northern ministers turned to that text, almost as a way of saying, can you believe what's happening? Yes.

That by merely reciting it, you would be able to basically call Southerners back to their senses that you are reenacting the cardinal trauma, one of the cardinal sins in the Bible, this original murder, fratricide, but now on a national scale. And Southerners make less recourse to it, though, is the brother versus brother rhetoric is laced throughout,

often in a more kind of wistful or almost allegiant tone in the South. But northerners throughout, particularly northern ministers, but, you know, as in the 21st century, not everybody reads the whole Bible, but a lot of people have read those first couple of chapters. Right. And so you don't have to get very far, as you noted, to reach this as a story.

And your opening, I would amend your opening. You talked about the way in which how we have spoken about the war influences what we think of it. This happened in real time, too, I guess I would remind listeners. That is, the stories that people told themselves during the war were in. some ways as powerful as the events of the war in determining how people understood what it was. Yeah. So this is sort of key metaphor here is the Canaan Abel story. Yeah, I just want to root this conversation in that biblical reference stuff, you know, because we're going to get into a

factual conversation about, in fact, brothers did fight brothers. But it's so big time, the epic themes that are discussed at right at the outset of this war that it's so interesting and how they frame it is so fascinating in the American story. Geography plays a big role in this, obviously, because the nation itself was divided and long before the Civil War by the Mason-Dixon line, which is a surveyed border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, only a couple hundred miles long, which then extends as the nation does with the Ohio River. And that creates the legal boundary between, not the legal boundary, but in effect, the boundary between North and South. slavery back in those days didn't have anything to do with it. That was everywhere in the 18th century.

But it then becomes this kind of, in effect, moral and political division as abolition rises and then secession. But geography is central as well. It is. We tend to imagine, certainly when we talk in sweeping terms about a north and a south, I think a lot of people imagine a very clean and bright line between those two regions. And there's several important things to remember. One, and I think we're going to talk a lot about the sort of very messy middle, blurry middle. of what becomes the border. That is, as you said, the Ohio River Valley states like parts of Southern Illinois and Indiana and Ohio and then the northern tier of Kentucky and all of Missouri, that these are states where people are sort of hopelessly mixed in ideological and familial terms, but also remembering that throughout the 1840s and 1850s, there had been a lot more mobility among Americans, many of them moving west to pursue sort of settlement opportunities, white Americans,

moving west to pursue settlement, but also north and south. So Southerners, elite Southerners, when they're being educated, are going to Yale and Princeton. Northerners, particularly northern women, who might work as tutors when they're young, are coming into southern households. So there is also a big flow of people born and raised in one section who move to the other, and then all of a sudden, as the war sort of crystallizes in 1861, those people find themselves, in essence kind of stranded, or maybe they have actually embedded and married people and built lives there. And it brings those value conflicts into much sharper relief.

So both regions are much more sort of densely settled with people not born in those regions. And there are books on, you know, Yankees in the South and Southerners in the North. So migration and mobility is indeed sort of the backdrop to understand how this becomes such a fratricidal conflict. Yes. And it's, I mean, let's name the border states, which is what this border creates, the Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, later West Virginia. Those slavery states that choose not to secede from the union become those border states and they have a tremendous mixed population in terms of allegiance to one side or the other. And that becomes the story really of how the most interesting surprise to me was how these troops were,

who fought for one side of the other within these states? I mean, you start going through the facts. In Kentucky, 100,000 people fought for the Union. 35,000 fought for the Confederacy. The Battle of Culp's Hill, which is July 2nd and 3rd of 1863 at Gettysburg, the Union's First Maryland Battalion fought against the Confederate's First Maryland Battalion. Oh, my gosh. I mean, you can only imagine many of those soldiers on both sides weren't.

weren't so far from home, and many of them might have known each other. Bill, to be sure. No, this was one of my chief confusions when I started studying Civil War soldiers before I really understood the scale of things was clocking that many of those border states had first infantry designations on both sides, and it was very important to know, in fact, which first Maryland or which first Kentucky or even which first Tennessee you're talking about. Regiments are organized locally, and in a way you can see. let's say the first Maryland's at Culp's Hill as kind of mirrors of each other, but certainly

drawn from the same place. Certainly men who knew one another, and at the very least would have been probably cousins, if not literal siblings. And that problem of literal siblings turns up on a number of battlefields in different places. Sure. It also talks about the split allegiance within even southern states. I mean, Tennessee, very much a split state, east and west, are two different kind of places even today. Virginia, of course, then becomes West Virginia, such a split there over slavery. North Carolina has a lot of people that are going for the North as well. And some of these things actually play through to today. It's amazing. Yes. I mean, there are unionists in every capital U unionist, the designation we used to describe

people who support the North in the war and yet live in the South. There are unionists in every state. Some of them in rural areas, western North Carolina is famously, in eastern Tennessee, that sort of Appalachian mountain region is famously settled by Scott's Irish in the 18th century who have little investment in slavery and really resist the Confederate as a political experiment and also just generally want to be left alone. So they're sort of noncompliant. But even in southern cities, it's not exclusively a rural phenomenon. There are pockets of unionist resistance in Atlanta in New Orleans, in Mobile.

And those pockets are sometimes drawing husbands and wives against each other. sometimes siblings against each other. And, you know, so it's not, it is in fact a family conflict, fractricidal as a way to describe it, in fact, limits the scope of the degree to which it is a family war. And part of what we're talking about here is the challenge of loyalty. Right. And to whom you owe loyalty and the ways that this war then complicates all sorts of political and social arrangements. The only kind of pure culture in this regard is South Carolina.

there's no record of people going and serving the union from there. And it's amazingly unique in that regard. But there you go. I usually fall back on William Gilmore Sims, the South Carolina writer in the Antebellum era, who describes South Carolina as too small to be a nation and too large to be an insane asylum. Okay. He said that, not me. Interestingly, it's where many northerners are moving these days because they like what they see down there.

And it's changing the culture of South Carolina a lot. from what I understand in certain pockets. So let's go down to actual brothers or family connections who were known to fight against each other on the field of battle or in military leadership. These are some of the most famous names. And we can actually start with Lincoln himself, not in either of those. Well, I guess military leadership, sure. He married a southerner, Mary Todd Lincoln, whose siblings were sided with the Confederacy, whose family was enslaving and so forth. And I mean, Lincoln was, he's a great example.

No wonder, endless books are written about the man of how so much of the American story courses through his own life. And the fact that Mary Todd's family is from Kentucky, and Lincoln's family had been in Kentucky sort of briefly as they're moving across originally Virginia. And Lincoln is born in Kentucky. He and Jefferson Davis are actually born the same year, not that far from one another. Right. And you're right.

Mary Todd has three brothers, all of whom fight in the Confederate Army, one of whom actually dies in battle. This is Alexander Todd, her sort of favorite brother. He dies in battle in the Battle of Baton Rouge, which is where I'm calling from. He dies not a half a mile from where I currently live and where I'm recording right now. He was killed here in Baton Rouge in that battle August 5th of 1862, and then his body returned to their family home, and he's buried in Kentucky. but Lincoln has to, today we would say that Lincoln has to compartmentalize.

Yes. That, you know, he is managing this conflict. And yet his wife and his familial attachments are drawing him towards the tragedy of this and the immense personal cost. You know, Mary Todd is uncharitably often characterized as being hysterical. But she has some serious sort of challenges, emotional challenges during the war, most famously the loss of her son. but the loss of this favorite brother is devastating to her. And in a way, her husband is responsible. Yes, indeed.

And she was always so pitted against Robert fighting in the union. And she desperately did not want him to join for obvious motherhood reasons, but also all these torn, this feeling of fighting against her own family. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Ulysses S. Grant, father-in-law, Frederick Dent, prominent Southern Democrat. same problem. Yes, slaveholder and someone who is sort of publicly and politically aligned against his son-in-law. Grant and his wife, Julia, had this wonderful, loving marriage, and a lot has been written about the affection that they showed one another,

but sort of just outside of that relationship stands these much more fraught tensions. And particularly, I mean, this, it is a theme, and listeners should know that this is a problem, the problem of these families, broken families, that the Civil War media announced frequently. This is not something that sort of historians figure out later. Confederates often refer to Lincoln's relatives. They refer to grants. Northern newspapers do the same. So newspapers are always full of stories.

Yeah. And it's a very curious form of rhetoric because it doesn't necessarily, there are forms of rhetoric that easily bring you to demonize your enemy and to kind of emboldened your fighting spirit. And I'm always struck by the degree to which this is just sort of horrible. And it does not necessarily make you want to kill your enemy more. It reinforces the sense of the war as a tragedy and an unproductive tragedy. But as I say, those stories are told in the newspapers and retold and copied, you know, anytime you can find two brothers on the same battlefield, you know that that story is going to.

And there's a gotcha aspect to it, you know, as they're calling out, you know. So you're all high and mighty. up there in the north, but you're actually married, you know, your family connections are all mixed up with this very life were leading. Thomas Stonewell Jackson, famous Southern General. His sister, Laura, was an outspoken unionist. Jackson was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army. His sister cared for sick and injured Union soldiers. General George Thomas, who was a Virginian, stayed with the U.S. in the war. Tell me about General George Thomas. I'm not familiar with his story. Thomas is like many men who come of age in the 1840s and 50s. He's somebody who goes

to West Point. And as part of this huge officer cadre, there's a great book written about, I want to say the class of 47 of whom there are, you know, a dozen Civil War generals later, and sort of mature in the U.S. Army. And in doing so, like Robert E. Lee and Thomas and Lee are both Native Virginians, unlike Lee, Thomas sort of commits himself to the protection of the United States, even through secession and beyond. And so at the crisis of secession, Thomas commits himself to staying in the U.S. Army. He will most famously be, his nickname is the Rock of Chickamauga. So he was one of the army commanders at the Battle of Chickamauga provides an essential, that's a kind of disastrous battle for the union. But Thomas's role in building a defensive line

about halfway through that conflict allows the main Union Army to escape back to Chattanooga and then to fortify itself in Chattanooga, from which they will reemerge under Grant's leadership at the Battle of Missionary Ridge and push back south. So Thomas has really celebrated as a hero among northerners, and especially because he was a southern-born hero. But as you noted, his family is profoundly Confederate. And the war, as in Jackson's case,

that is Stonewall Jackson's case, the war creates a profound rupture between brothers and sisters. And this emerges most famously. Thomas dies early into Reconstruction, 1870 maybe, I don't remember exactly, but famously when federal agents go to his sister's home in Virginia to inform them that their brother has died, what they say in response is, our brother died in 1861. They sort of close the door. None of them go to his funeral services. Oh, my Lord. Right. So it's a permanent and lasting alienation from your natal family. Yeah. And, you know, this is the sort of, this is the sort of rupture that people worried about with the Civil War.

Right. And the family separations and the family collapse make it real and personal and emotional. I have other lists, other names on this list, but before I forget, I'm going to ask you this question that really belongs at the end of this interview. As a, as an academic scholar who studies this era and the divisions that are implicit in it, do you ever wonder why Americans don't more, readily accept the fact that we've been divided forever. Like, this is a normal part of life from the loyalists to the, you know, all the way back to the revolution. It's always there, isn't it? It is. I mean, I, the political divisions are always there. And I think the challenge for us, particularly today in a time when we are divided quite sharply politically, is to sort of stay in politics. That is to believe that politics is a sphere within which we can reconcile these problems and that

we don't resort to violence. I mean, the civil war, I would argue, is really the collapse of that idea. It's the collapse of the Democratic order, which is why some historians talk about a sort of first American Republic and a second, one that emerges from the war. But we sort of overlook that interval, what Roy Nichols, a famous civil war story, called the disruption of American democracy. When the civil order fails, you turn to violence. And as you noted, that was certainly the case in the American Revolution, which existed as a civil war. within an imperial conflict. And it is important for us to be very careful about understanding what are those features of the civil war that brought Americans to violence so that we can

stop ourselves today. We can kind of check ourselves short of that while still recognizing profound political disagreements. I'm not encouraging people to necessarily give up on their ideologies or somehow agree, but to recognize that we use politics to solve those disagreements. Yes, exactly. Senator John J. Crittenden, famously had two sons who became major generals, one for the Confederacy and one for the Union. George Crittenden was the Confederacy, Thomas Crittenden, for the union. When you look at these conflicts within families, are there stories that you know of where they actually did fight each other? There is sort of verifiable evidence of brothers, fighting brothers. Some of these are famous,

you know, officer level. I mean, others are common soldiers. I mean, I was just reading earlier this week about an episode of brothers fighting on the battlefield and one, in awareness that they were fighting each other and one basically delivering a fatal blow and then abandoning the field only to then return later in the evening to kind of hold his brother as he actually died. Wow. Very few civil war, a lot of Civil War battlefield injuries are not fatal at the moment. It's sort of you, you know, you bleed out and other problems. And, you know, there is this moment of him delivering that blow and leaving and reinforcing

for Confederates. This is a union soldier, the cruelty of the Yankee that would murder his own brother. And then the fact that he returns the recognition for Northerners that, you know, family will out and he tendered his brother in his last moments and heard his final words. So there are occasions where people come to awareness that they are literally fighting each other. And they often persist. That is, they have committed themselves to an army and to brothers in arms as against the blood brothers that, you know, they might be in actual life.

Battle of Front Royal 1862, Captain William Brotherton of the Union First Maryland Infantry captures his own brother, a Confederate soldier in the first Maryland division. The same kind of story as before we were talking about, but the Conley brothers, Cornelius, a unionist, Perry, a Confederate guerrilla fighter, met in conflict. Aaron, how do we know these stories? Where do we learn about these brothers' stories? So we learn about them mostly from the newspapers, which have, you know, reporters from both North and South have dozens in the Northern case and hundreds of reporters following them, but people also chronicle them themselves.

And as I say, newspapers reprint these stories. Some of the conflicts within families grow quite public. We've been talking mostly about brother versus brother. There are famous episodes of conflicts between husbands and wives that spill out into the public. There's a Maryland case where a wife actually sues for divorce because her husband is a Confederate or a pronounced secessionist. This happens in 1861. She's a unionist.

And, you know, those papers go to court. And, I mean, divorce in the 19th centuries of a complicated affair. But it becomes a very well-known story publicly, partly because it's a legal process in which you have to actually sue for divorce or get a private act from the state legislature. And the husband alleges that his wife is basically under the influence of her unionist father and that these aren't her real beliefs. She's quite insistent that they are her actual beliefs. And I would note, you know, part of what is so brought in the context of husbands versus wives, and we have a lot of cases of husbands and wives disagreeing not many to the point of suing for divorce is that it reveals the degree to which women had very pronounced political beliefs, which in the 19th century they were not supposed to hold.

This is before women have the right to vote. The idea is that the man is the political head of the household. He's certainly the voting head of every household because women can't. And yet all of a sudden, the war exposes the degree to which everybody has political views and they hold them quite strongly, and it threatens masculine authority over the household, right? It sort of reveals the fragility of the sort of social order in a way that the war on its own doesn't. Yeah. And so I think that's part of why Americans sort of caught into these stories. And as I say, replay them over and over again. You can imagine the kind of YouTube view clicker running up and up and up on these stories. People are satisfied in what strikes me. It's almost a kind of perverse way

because it is really sort of telling them how horrible this conflict is. How corrosive of the social order, not just in political terms, but in literal familial terms, that wives are now free to disobey their husbands. Did the mail keep working throughout the Civil War were people just sending letters back and forth

between the north and south? It does. And, I mean, it's harder to get mail across the border. Certainly, if you're a soldier, you have a, there's a military mail system on both sides. But there is also a fairly heavy traffic, certainly along the border states. And, you know, mail was one of the few things that didn't really count as contraband. There are famously Confederate women in places like Memphis who cross the border and are given

surprisingly way to do that, some of whom get captured carrying things in their skirts. But mail would have been something that they could legitimately carry back and forth. And so this is part of the way that families actually know who's remained a unionist and who's, in fact converted to the Confederacy, if it's a, you know, Northern woman who's come down as a as a tutor to Alabama or something. And has been the record past that we now have today. I mean, a lot of these letters are between these people and we understand. Yeah. And then you have the political argument, which is going on, you know, while they're on opposite sides of the war. There's an example after Secessionville outside Charleston 1862 Confederate, James Campbell,

wrote to his federal brother Alexander, I was astonished to hear from the prisoners that you were the color bearer of the regiment that assaulted the battery at this point the other day. I'm obviously quoting from the letter. I was in the breastwork during the whole engagement doing my best to beat you, but I hope you and I will never meet face-to-face as bitter enemies on the battlefield. But if such should be the case you have but to discharge your duty for your cause, for I can assure you, I will strive to discharge my duty for my country and my cause. All right, those are fighting words. Yeah, I mean, that's fair notice that we are military enemies here. Exactly. And I think it helps reinforce the importance of oaths, the degree to which as people

who committed themselves to this cause, you know, for Americans, certainly, or other people in the Western world in the 21st century, making a promise or taking an oath, we take very few oaths. And I think it's hard to appreciate the significance of those. But he is quite clearly committed and has committed and also expects that his brother has committed in a way that might lead them to kill one another. Yeah. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Important to realize, you know, we've talked about some of the number, the massive amounts of troops involved in the Civil War. This is a small sliver of this, the military effort.

It wasn't a lot of these stories, but it was made a lot more. more of is the point of this episode, I suppose, of by the media and by the records that we've read down the, and the intimacy of it, the themes that resonate to us today, that's what's going to live, rather than necessarily the standard fighting forces that go out there and do their jobs. That's what's so poignant about it, I suppose. Yeah, and I think that's what was useful for Civil War Americans. I mean, so one of the key fault lines here is actually father's son. So, particularly along those border states in places like Kentucky. and Maryland, there are fathers who are more politically conservative, and they tend to be unionists

and sons who have been reared in the 1840s and 50s in the kind of hot house of anti-slavery critiques of their region, who will actually leave their households and move into Tennessee and enlist in regiments there. And this happens in Virginia as well. And those are stories that are publicized quite widely, you know, as examples of a kind of fracture in the social order. sons are supposed to obey their fathers. The late historian, my friend Peter Carmichael, wrote a book called The Last Generation about the young men who came of age in Virginia in the 1840s and 50s, and they referred to their father's generation as the old fogies. These were men who had lost, who had basically given up Virginia's mantle of leading the United States. This is the generation

after Jefferson and Madison and Monroe, and the sons wanted to reclaim it. They were firmly committed to slavery in its defense. And their fathers move far too cautiously. They're wedded down by a kind of just older conservatism. That is, as you age and your own property, you become less willing to do things like engage in a war. And these are men that sort of abandon their fathers and commit themselves to the Confederate cause. And as I say, this happens all the way from the East and Virginia across Kentucky into the West. And Civil War Americans read these stories as another version of a house divided. Not just divided brother versus brother, but from the natural allegiance that you owe Father Abraham, right, in the language that was sometimes used to describe Lincoln,

that a father as a king had been is the head of a nation. And there's a kind of natural loyalty owed there. And the war proves that a lie, or at least disrupts it profoundly. Were there memoirs written about the return, you know, after the war is over, how these unionists or Confederates returned to these families that they had either turned against or, you know, these ruptures had to be healed? There are occasions where people are able to reconcile, where families sort of welcome people back and move basically through the process of reconstruction into a kind of genuine emotional reconciliation.

And then there are others. I mean, George Thomas, we've already discussed, is one where even at his death, his family is unwilling to acknowledge him anymore as. a part of their family, and they've made that, they make that sort of publicly clear. Right. One way in which this manifests is intersectional romances. And Nina Silber, the historian of Boston University, has a brilliant book on this. The Romance of Reunion is her book.

And it takes a lot of a handful, but as you know, it's sort of a handful that are replayed in the newspapers and have profound importance of intersectional romances, almost always a former union officer marrying a Southern woman in the 1870s. or 1880s, and these stories are trumpeted by the press on both sides as a way of demonstrating that America has healed and moved on. That unlike, there's a famous folk song, a Southern girl's lament where she is writing, singing to her lover who was a union soldier, the reason she can't be with him, because you may have dashed my brother's brains out, she says, and what's a really grotesque imagery in a love ballot. And the public stories, the romance of reunion is the sort

of opposite of that, the ways in which America comes to reconciliation and it's personified in these romances and marriages between northern and southern men and northern men and southern women, less often southern men and northern women, as a way of showing the healing that's going on. Right. So it is rebuilding the family as a key part of rebuilding the nation, as it were. You were called a scallywag or a Tory in the south, right? That was the, if you had fought for the union. Yes, in the Reconstruction era, both those terms are heard.

They're horrible and ugly terms. And this is part of why, in fact, it's interesting that you raise this. I have never read of a kind of public celebration of the marriage between a Southern Unionist and a Southern Confederate. The stories are always, that is, there's still an intersectional tension there. To have been a traitor during the war, that is a white Southerner who fights for the Union, is sort of unforgivable. To have a northerner who held to his cause

and did his duty as a kind of citizen, he's somebody that you can respect. And this is part of the lost cause. I mean, the romance of reunion is sort of deeply implicated in the lost cause vision of a brother's war in which those brothers eventually heal. Yes.

And they may not literally, but their sons and daughters might, you know, over time, find their way to heal together. Yeah. I was so surprised by the themes involved this as we began, you know, looking into the biblical roots of a lot of this, but also I had assumed that this brother versus brother was more of a, of a southern lost cause theme when actually

it was kind of more of a northern aspect of it, but it was used also as a lost cause element, a plank in the platform, if you will, right? Of, hey, let's, this is a, let's get the white family back together. It becomes more about that and kind of adds to the element, another element and pushing slavery to the side. Yeah, no, it's certainly important to recognize that in the context of the post-war rhetoric and the post-war's history being written by people like Jubal Early, one of Lee's lieutenants that they're writing in the 1870s and the 1880s, when they write about a brother's war, they are trying to confine the war narrowly to a kind of constitutional

conflict between white men that was fought honorably and nobly. And although they disagreed, both sides had high-minded principles for which they fought, nothing so mercenary as defending slavery itself. And that that conflict ended and Southerners may have lost, but everybody respected everyone's bravery. And so that provides a platform for sectional reconciliation, meaning a reconciliation built around union and ignoring emancipation and the social and political implications of emancipation. So there's a way in which brothers war becomes. repurposed in the post-war period to contain the revolutionary aspects of the war. Yeah, I'm a walking laboratory of this because I was educated in the early 1970s.

That would be when I was absorbing most of this stuff. And I remember those fifth grade classes about the Civil War. And Brother versus Brother resonates to this day, you know, but it was also part of the whole thing that was happening out of the 20s with the monuments of great Southern generals and so forth that was happening as the retelling of this story. So that was obviously why I was tilted that way, only to realize that this was largely framed by northern preachers. Yeah, and I think it is important and it's useful that I think we've clarified the sort of

different registers at which a brother's war, quote, operates. Because people really don't, I think, today appreciate the success of the lost cause at embedding in American culture all the way into the 1970s and the 1980s, right? I grew up just a few years later, maybe watching Dukes of Hazard on TV. Although I think that starts in the late 70s, right, with the General Lee and the Confederate battle flag on the top of that as a way of like real mass appeal for this nostalgic, kind of sympathetic view of the Confederacy, which is only possible if you imagine the war within these tight boundaries that don't really have political and social impact, that it

was a sort of mistake that, you know, transpired and we've gotten beyond it. Leonard Skinner was really good, though. I hate to admit. Professor Aaron Shandian is a friend of our podcast, thankfully. I don't know what exactly gets you that title, but as of today, you're on five episodes that I know of. Listeners can find them wherever get your podcast. Just click the see-all in our backlisting.

Go to episodes. I will tell you right now, 109, 258, 260, and 306 for more Civil War history via this good man. Thanks a lot. See you again soon, I hope. Thank you, Don. It's pleasure. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit.

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