"You can't really learn about history by sitting in a room and reading about it," Goodheart says. "You need to get out and see where things happened and people really lived."
So, with that theory in mind, Goodheart annually borrows the college's mini-bus and drives his freshman students out to "a land that time forgot," the old Emory plantation, a piece of Maryland shore history that has been owned by the same family since 1669.
On his trips, Goodheart lets his students, as part of their tour, visit the now-abandoned mansion house's attic, where they would encounter family records stuffed in old lard cans, peach baskets, and steam trunks.
Goodheart was aware of the family story of the drama that supposedly revolved around a relative's difficult decision whether to side with the Union or the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War and passed that tale along to his students. One year, one of his particularly inquisitive students, Jim, decided to write his term paper on that dilemma, planning to use the uncatalogued, yellowed, rodent-chewed documents as primary sources.
Goodheart tried to discourage Jim, but finally relented and said he would take him out to the plantation again on a Saturday where they could look for evidence. "I told him if we didn't find anything in 2 or 3 hours, he would have to write on another topic," Goodheart says. "I really didn't expect to find anything useful."
However, among the first bundle of papers they perused, they discovered Maj. William Emory's resignation from the U.S. army and a host of letters describing in detail his agonizing decision to side with the Confederacy.
Using these primary sources, Jim was able to write his paper. But, more importantly, Goodheart found his way into his latest book 1861: The Civil War Awakening. The author appeared at the National Archives today to discuss his work, which is focused on "the struggle within the hearts and minds" of the people forced to wage what historians often call the 1st modern war.
Take Emory, for example. At 14, he entered West Point as a cadet, and spent the next decades of his life fighting for the United States. As 1861 dawned, he was stationed in Indian territory (now Oklahoma), torn between his allegiance to his military career and his raising in the south, including his deep friendship with Jefferson Davis, who was to become the Confederacy's president. Realizing that his decision would leave him either patriot or traitor, he decided that his Southern roots were too strong to allow him to remain with the Union.
As Goodheart was reading Emory's letters, he encountered a particularly riveting passage. "Every so often (as a historian/writer) you encounter something that leaps off the page, grabs you by the neck, and pulls you into the past," he said. For Goodheart, that line was Emory's claim that his agonizing decision and all that would follow "is like a great game of chance."
"This kind of took away that Homeric cadence of battles with almost Biblical names ... Bull Run ... Shiloh ... Antietam ... Gettysburg and showed that it really was a struggle in the hearts and minds of the people," Goodheart said.
Tales, Tidbits, and Tips
Even though the War Between the States occurred 150 years ago, it still resonates in the American psyche. Goodheart, who is writing a periodic column about the Civil War for the New York Times, says he is still somewhat surprised by the reaction his book talks and the column elicit. For example, there was the southern gentleman who contacted the Storm Thurmond Center at the University of South Carolina to find out if that talk about that book about the War of Northern Aggression was open to the public. "People still have such big feelings about it," Goodheart said. "I don't think if I had written a book about the War of the Roses I would have somebody in the back shouting 'Yeah. The House of Lancaster,.'''
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