Daniel Feller to present program on Civil War crises of Union

The TriCities Civil War Round Table will host a presentation relating to the American Civil War and Reconstruction on Monday, Feb. 9. The speaker, Dr. Daniel Feller, will present a program titled "1860: The Second American Revolution?" His talk will be held at 7 p.m. in Room 219 of the Toy F. Reid Eastman Employee Center, 400 S. Wilcox Drive, Kingsport. As always, this presentation is free and open to the public. In March 1861, in Savannah, Georgia, Alexander Stephens delivered a major speech hailing the birth of a new nation, the Confederate States of America. Stephens, a longtime Whig party congressman and once a friend of Abraham Lincoln, had himself just been elected as the new country's provisional vice president. His address celebrated what he called "one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of the world." As Stephens explained, the new Confederate government "preserved and perpetuated . . . all the essentials of the old Constitution" while introducing certain "great improvements." In his telling, the new nation did not repudiate or depart from the legacy of the original American Revolution. Rather, it perfected it. Thirty-two months later, in November 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a famous address at Gettysburg. Like Stephens, he harked back to the American Revolution and to the Declaration of Independence, but in an opposite way. Where Stephens hailed the fulfillment of America's promise, Lincoln warned of its destruction: the threat that with Confederate victory, "government of the people, by the people, for the people" would "perish from the earth." So which was it? Did the "Second American Revolution" of 1860 build upon the First of 1776, or did it betray it? Did the new Confederate government perfect the principles of the old, or reject them? Who was right — Stephens or Lincoln? The answer depended on how one understood the Revolution itself. For the Revolution had bequeathed a dual legacy, both institutional and ideological: on the one hand, a governmental Union built on overlapping state and federal sovereignties; on the other, a principled dedication to the "self-evident truths" set forth in the Declaration of Independence, among them that "all men are created equal." These two legacies steered the American republic's history through its first fourscore years. Sometimes they worked in tandem; but friction between them produced a series of crises of Union, the last of which, in 1860, ended in armed conflict. University of Tennessee historian Daniel Feller will unpack these dual legacies, the ways they played out over time and how the Civil War brought them finally into direct confrontation and eventual resolution. Feller is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and also editor/director emeritus of "The Papers of Andrew Jackson." He received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and before coming to UT in 2003 he taught history at Northland College in Wisconsin and at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He is the author of "The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics" and "The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815–1840," and the editor of six volumes of "The Papers of Andrew Jackson" covering the presidential years from 1829 through 1834. His professional recognitions include the Society for History in the Federal Government's Thomas Jefferson Prize and the J. G. M. Ramsey Award for Lifetime Achievement, awarded by the East Tennessee Historical Society in 2024. His fascination with the Civil War dates from his youth in the Washington suburbs, where he collected Airfix toy soldiers, played Avalon Hill war games, devoured Bruce Catton and roamed Cemetery Ridge on family visits to Gettysburg. He honed his interest, and varied his grad school academic training, with a job doing roving interpretation at the Chancellorsville unit of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in 1978. Individuals wishing to dine with Dr. Feller at 5 p.m. at The Chop House, 1704 N. Eastman Road, Kingsport, prior to the meeting should request reservations by contacting Dr. Michael Smith at michaellanesmith@charter.net.