Civil War Expert and Retiring Professor Urges Students to See the "Long View"

Matthew Hersh

When the attacks of September 11 occurred, members of the class of 2004, who were mostly sophomores at the time, experienced a cataclysm that significantly changed the global climate from the time they entered university as freshmen. Now faced with graduation, those students are being asked to re-enter a world that is notably different than the one they left behind.

"These are perhaps not the best of times to graduate, but neither are they the worst of times," said Civil War historian and Princeton University Prof. James McPherson in his Baccalaureate address at the Princeton University Chapel on Sunday.

"Most of your student days have been lived in the shadow of 9-11, but from that experience, you gained the perspective to endure both the good and the bad times that will come in the future," he said.

Prof. McPherson urged students to "take heart" and look to the "long view," and not dwell on the short term, with its tumultuous current events. He quoted the words spoken by Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr in the 1880s to convey the burden placed on a generation during wartime. Holmes, a Civil War soldier who was wounded three times in battle and an influential U.S. Supreme Court justice, said that generations who carry on during war are set apart from others.

"[9-11] touched your hearts with fire," Prof. McPherson said, "and [it taught] you that life is a profound and passionate thing."

Widely known for his 1989 Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War account, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, Prof. McPherson said in a separate interview that history has usually dictated that looking at events in the long term will paint a more complete, often more positive picture.

"The students may be living in tough times right now, but living through this might actually make them better prepared to deal with difficulties in the future," he said.

Prof. McPherson said that while the actual conflicts are different, citizens may have felt similar emotions during the Civil War as they have with 9-11 as both events occurred on American soil, leaving many feeling vulnerable and helpless.

"The Civil War was a great disaster. Six hundred twenty thousand Americans lost their lives and there was a huge destruction of property," he said. "Yet the outcome of the war changed the country for the better. That's not to say it was worth all that was lost, but at least it was a war with positive results for the future."

However, in his Baccalaureate sermon, he said that the country will "meet and surmount difficulties," despite its involvement in an "ugly and perhaps unwinnable war of its own making."

He recognized the bleak landscape presented to college graduates and dryly quipped that if he stopped speaking before presenting the positives, the students "would want to join the cicada larvae and spend the next 17 years underground."

He used his own experience to illustrate determined optimism. He remembered his childhood growing up in North Dakota during the Depression.

"My very existence standing before you today is testimony to the optimism of the long view taken by my parents three score, and eight years ago," he said, echoing the words of Lincoln.

Born in 1936 in hard economic times when the nation was just a few years away from entering the Second World War, Prof. McPherson's father had taken a teaching job in an "state that was so broke, it could only pay it's teachers in warrants," he said. His father was essentially paid in IOUs promising money "when, and if, the state ever had any real money."

"It took a special kind of faith in the future to get married and start a family at such a time, and if my parent had not had that faith, I would not be here," he said.

The Baccalaureate, one of the University's oldest traditions, acts as an interfaith service honoring those about to receive their bachelor's degrees. The service includes readings from the Qur'an and the Old Testament and concludes with the sermon. The speaker is chosen by the University president and other class leaders.

Having delivered his last lecture as University faculty in April, Prof. McPherson said he, too, will look to the future in continuing on the same track that brought him to Princeton. The historian is currently writing a book that illustrates President Lincoln as a commander-in-chief.

"I wanted to step down when I'm at the top of my game," he said. "All along I thought after I had taught for 40, or 42 years, I would step down."

It turns out that Prof. McPherson has taken the "long view" from the very start.