In Memoriam: Distinguished Historian Peter S. Carmichael
We are saddened by the passing of Professor Peter S. Carmichael, a remarkable historian who made significant contributions in the field of Civil War studies. UNC Press is honored to have worked with him on many projects over the years, including most recently The War That Made America: Essays Inspired by the Scholarship of Gary W. Gallagher.
The new fall issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era features the transcript of the annual Fortenbaugh Lecture which Peter moderated and has been made available to read without a paywall for the next 90 days. This roundtable went to press just after his tragic passing on July 20th, 2024.
Thank you Muster for allowing us to re-blog the following post written by Aaron Sheehan-Dean and Caroline Janney in memory of Peter.
We grieve the sudden death of our dear friend and distinguished historian, Peter S. Carmichael. As nearly everyone in the SCWH [Society for Civil War Historians] knows, Pete brought a rare invigorating spark to everything he touched. Those lucky enough to interact with him encountered historical insights, probing questions, and his profane and hilarious sense of humor. In preparing this piece, we kept hearing variations on this story, shared by Joe Beilein: “When I was in graduate school, I walked up to him at the Southern to introduce myself (as graduate students awkwardly do). He was wearing his trademark scarf and drinking wine. He was gregarious and more polite than he needed to be. He asked me what I was working on and who I was working with. It was very kind of him and I felt really good afterwards.”
Pete’s passion for the Civil War and telling its stories began at the age of six or seven, when he made his first trip to Gettysburg. That summer his family had driven from their home in Indianapolis to the battlefield where they hired a guide who told the most brilliant stories, sparking his imagination. “I came back from that trip,” he recalled recently, “and from that moment forward I was utterly obsessed with the Civil War.” Three years later, his grandfather helped fuel the obsession, giving him a jar in which to collect pennies that would fund a Civil War-odyssey. In a span of two weeks, they had visited Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Appomattox, Petersburg, Richmond, Manassas, Antietam, and once more Gettysburg. As he often recounted in what might have been some myth making on his own part, “while other kids were going off to the malls, I’d go to the Indiana Historical Society and read letters of soldiers.”
At the age of nineteen he began his first job with the National Park Service (NPS) at Appomattox where he performed living history as a self-described “Yankee.” After several summers working at Appomattox, Richmond, and Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania honing his craft as a public historian, Pete studied under Gary Gallagher’s direction at Penn State. His MA thesis on Willie Pegram, which began as a childhood fascination with the Confederacy’s “boy” general, developed into an insightful book that anticipated many of the important themes of 1990s scholarship –the resilience and commitment of white Southerners to the Confederacy, the role of the army in Confederate nationalism, and the wartime genesis of the Lost Cause in the martyr-like treatment of killed officers. His dissertation, which became his second book, The Last Generation, brought a social historian’s eye to the shift in antebellum Southern political culture that brought white Southerners to secession and ruin. The book has only gained relevance as commentators today struggle to explain our own confrontation with the sudden and unpredictable radicalization of national politics.
Pete developed friendships with colleagues at Western Carolina University, UNC-Greensboro, and West Virginia University before finding his intellectual home (in 2010) as the Robert C. Fluhrer Chair in Civil War History at Gettysburg College, where he also directed the Civil War Institute. Over the next decade and a half, he gave hundreds of battlefield tours to students, teachers, and fellow historians. His skills as a historian were never more present than leading people around the battlefield, where he could quickly set a scene in time and place to help listeners grasp a broader interpretive point about the war. Pete combined infectious enthusiasm, a sharp sense of humor, a tremendous grasp of detail, and a storyteller’s pacing to convey the lessons of this most important place. In the process, he endeared himself to thousands of visitors to the battlefield who carried away Pete’s respect for and engagement with the past. Throughout his career, he continued to forge close ties with a wide range of NPS historians. He hosted conferences to bring public and academic historians together, he placed dozens of Gettysburg undergraduates in internships at NPS sites, and he worked assiduously to bridge the too-often separate spheres of popular and archival history.
In 2018, Pete published The War for the Common Soldier, a book that demonstrated his ability to work as a cultural historian. Having spent years reading in the history of emotions and growing increasingly skeptical about a straight reading of soldiers’ letters, Pete combined decades of reading those letters with a close analysis of a handful of semi-literate men. Charged with synthesizing the writing on soldiers for the Littlefield History of the Civil War, he instead fashioned a new interpretation that emphasized the ambivalence of many volunteers and the coercive powers of the armies. In the process, he offered a signal contribution to histories of sectional difference by showing how Northerners’ posture of skepticism and irony gave Federal soldiers a resilience that allowed them to persevere in the face of all the frustrations and challenges soldiers encounter. White Southerners, reared in a slave society in which only the enslaved possessed the power of double-talk, had no comparable flexibility. The ordinary and extra-ordinary setbacks of military life weighed more heavily on them and contributed to Confederate defeat. Like all his writing, the insights derived from a reading of wartime evidence can be read both backwards and forwards in time to help us better understand the antebellum and Reconstruction eras. At the time of his death, Pete was working on a ground-level history of the battle of Gettysburg, one that combined the soldier and civilian experiences.
Even while directing the Civil War Institute, teaching, and writing, Pete found time to contribute to the scholarly community in innumerable ways. As members of the SCWH will remember, he was a favorite attendee at conferences (often adorned with a scarf of some brilliant color). Always flashing his signature smile, he was quick to offer witty advice to anyone and everyone he saw. We are particularly grateful for his service alongside us as editors of the University of North Carolina Press’s Civil War America series. He was a master at searching out new and promising scholarship, always keen to open doors for younger scholars and encouraging innovative approaches. He could always be counted on to write judicious and supportive readers’ reports, offering clear paths forward and reassuring advice to authors.
While we will miss Pete the scholar, teacher, battlefield guide, and colleague, we will miss our friend most. A fountain of sage wisdom (at least he thought it was sage) was always forthcoming. He was a Renaissance man—a lover of Indiana basketball, art, music, CrossFit, and an expensive haircut. He was compassionate, always asking after our families and friends, and regaling us with tender stories about Beth and their girls. He made us laugh (even when we shouldn’t have) and he loved without fail. He was generous to a fault.
We will miss you, dear Friend. And we will try our best to contribute to the field and to humanity as you did so well.
Carrie Janney
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Aaron Shehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of History at Louisiana State University
Caroline Janney is the John L. Nau, III, Professor of American Civil War at the University of Virginia