The Aftermath of War Symposium (February 19–21)
February 20, 2027 @ 8:45 am – 5:30 pm
The American Civil War Museum’s 22nd Annual Symposium will take place February 19–21, 2027, at ACWM–Tredegar in Richmond, Virginia.
The Aftermath of War
Join us to explore the complex legacies of the American Civil War.
With the end of the American Civil War, the immense task of rebuilding the nation lay ahead as individuals grappled with the impact of war on their own lives. Widows and veterans struggled to deal with the loss and devastation wrought by war, African Americans embraced new-found freedom, and political leaders sought to implement political change through Reconstruction. Many defeated white southerners resisted change, sometimes through violence, and worked to craft a Lost Cause narrative that would shape their defeat into a noble endeavor.
Symposium daylong event occurs on Saturday, February 20, 2027 from 9:30am-5:30pm. Doors Open: 8:45am
LECTURES WILL BE PRESENTED BY:
•James Marten, Ph.D., Professor of History Emeritus at Marquette University
•Angela Esco Elder, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, Department of History & Philosophy, Converse University
•Fergus M. Bordewich, Historian, Author, and Journalist
•Robert Bland, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee
Panel discussion led by Caroline Janney, Ph.D., John L Nau, III, Professor in History of American Civil War, Director, John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History
ticket options:
TICKET TYPES
•General – $100
•Member – $75
•Student – $35
ADD-ONS
•Friday: “The Aftermath of War” Themed Collections Tours – $25 per person
•Saturday: Lunch – $12.50
•Friday & Sunday: Battlefield Tour – $35 PER PERSON
Collections TOURS:
“The Aftermath of War” Themed Collections Tours
Join us Friday at ACWM-Tredegar for a collections tour! Enjoy an intimate 8-person tour of our artifact collection led by Director of Collections, Robert Hancock.
- Friday, February 19th, 2027
- Slot Times: 2pm, 3pm, 4pm
Battlefield Tours:
This is a caravan tour, meaning participants will drive their own vehicles to meet an ACWM historic site interpreter at the stops for an overview of troop movements and battles. The ACWM historic site interpreter will lead the tour, sharing insights and stories at each battlefield along the way.
Petersburg Campaign
- Friday, February 19th, 2027
- 9:00am – 3:00pm
Details to follow!
Appomattox Campaign
- Sunday, February 21st, 2027
- 9:00am – 3:00pm
Details to follow!
For questions or additional information, please contact Historic Engagement Manager Chuck Young at 804-649-1861, ext. 101.
SATURDAY’S Daylong SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE:
- 8:45–9:30 AM – Check-in
- 9:30 AM – Opening Remarks
- 9:40–10:40 AM – James Marten, Ph.D., Professor of History Emeritus at Marquette University
- “Families, Communities, and Veterans’ Long Civil War”: The men who served in the Union and Confederate armies were veterans far longer than they had been soldiers. Many came home maimed in body or mind; others simply needed to find ways to integrate what they endured into peace-time lives. The “old soldiers” of the Civil War did this by forming organizations to commemorate their shared experiences and by developing ways of explaining “their” war to people who had not fought. But even as they sought to distinguish themselves from non-veterans, they relied on families and communities not only for public recognition of their valor and sacrifice, but also for emotional and material support. Drawing on the post-war lives of several Union and Confederate veterans, this talk will explore how the “long Civil War” played out in Gilded Age America.
- Q&A
- 11:00 AM–12:00 PM – Angela Esco Elder, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, Department of History & Philosophy, Converse University
- “House of Mourning: Love and Loss in the American Civil War”: For Civil War widows, reconstructing a life began not with the loss of a war, but with the loss of a husband, immediate and inescapable. Between 1861 and 1865, approximately 200,000 women were widowed. This presentation shares some of their mourning stories and potential political influence. Death forced all Confederate widows to reconstruct their lives, but only some would choose to play a role in reconstructing the nation.
- Q&A
- 12:00PM – Lunch
- 1:00–2:00 PM – Fergus M. Bordewich, Historian, Author, and Journalist
- “The War After the War: Grant’s War Against the Ku Klux Klan and the Battle to Save Reconstruction”: At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted tens of thousands of members with a mission to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable. To repel the virulent tidal wave of violence, President Ulysses S. Grant waged a battle against both armed Southern enemies of Reconstruction and Northern politicians seduced by visions of postwar conciliation. Fergus Boredwich will delve into how Grant wielded the power of the federal government to dismantle the KKK.
- Q&A
- 2:20–3:20 PM – Robert Bland, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee
- “The Roots of Black Reconstruction: The Gilded Age Black Press, and the Production of Robert Smalls’s Rival Hagiography”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 magnum opus Black Reconstruction is rightfully understood as both a critical challenge to the Dunning School interpretation of the Civil War era and a critical milestone in the social history of enslaved and freedpeople in the United States. However, his challenge to the longstanding attacks on Reconstruction broadly—and Black politicians particularly—had earlier roots in the Gilded Age Black press. Part of a larger cultural struggle over the meaning of race and Reconstruction in the late nineteenth century public sphere, journalists began producing new histories of the postbellum South that sought to capture both the promise and peril of the previous political generation. This presentation examines the specific struggles in the Black press around narrating the history of Robert Smalls that could capture his wartime heroics, controversial postbellum political machine, and his larger meaning in the nascent field of African American history.
- Q&A
- 3:40–4:25 PM – Panel discussion led by Caroline Janney, Ph.D., John L Nau, III, Professor in History of American Civil War, Director, John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History
- “Creating and Living the Lost Cause”: This panel will explore the ways in which veterans, widows, African Americans, and white southerners created, leveraged, and resisted the Lost Cause between 1865 and 1900.
- 4:25–4:40 PM – Q&A
- 4:40 PM – Closing Remarks
- 5:00–5:30 PM – Book Signing
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Robert Bland is a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. His first book, Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) traces the story of the cohort of teachers, missionaries, and political leaders who built South Carolina’s postbellum political world and reshaped the story of the nation’s second founding in the Black public sphere at the turn of the century. His academic writing has appeared in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Journal of the Civil War Era, American Nineteenth Century History, and the American Historical Review.
Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of ten non-fiction books, including Centennial : The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future; Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction; The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government. He is a native of New York City and has been an independent writer and historian since the early 1970s. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, American Heritage, and elsewhere. As a journalist, he reported extensively on politics, economic issues, and culture from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Greensboro, NC with his wife Jean Parvin Bordewich, a playwright.
Angela Elder is an Associate Professor of History at Converse University (South Carolina). She earned her doctorate from the University of Georgia and her research explores emotion in the American Civil War. She most recently published Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss (2022, UNC Press). She is now at work on a project studying the Dry Tortugas, which held a remote Civil War prison off the coast of Florida.
Caroline Janney is the John L. Nau III Professor of the American Civil War and Director of the John L. Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia (UVA). A graduate of UVA, she worked as a historian for the National Park Service and taught at Purdue University before returning to UVA in 2018. An active public lecturer, she has given presentations at locations across the globe. She is the past president of the Society of Civil War Historians and a series editor for the University of North Carolina Press’s Civil War America series. She has published seven books, including “Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation” (2013) and “Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America” (2021).
James Marten is professor of history emeritus at Marquette University, where he taught for thirty-six years. He is author, editor, or co-editor, of two dozen books, including The Children’s Civil War, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America, and his latest, The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment. He is a former president of the Society of Civil War Historians.
In partnership with The John L. Nau Center for Civil War Studies at the University of Virginia.
