Editor’s Note: Pat Cuadros originally published the following interview with IRD President Mark Tooley for ‘Blogcritics Magazine’ in anticipation of his panel discussion at the Virginia Festival of the Book. The entirety of interview is a available here. Tooley talked about his new book, ‘The Peace That Almost Was’ on the 1861 Washington Peace Conference. C-SPAN’s broadcast of the panel discussion can be viewed here.
Mark Tooley is the president of the Institute of Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. This year marks his first visit to the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, VA. His latest book is The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War.
I don’t remember learning about the Washington Peace Conference in high school.
Even history and civil war buffs don’t know about it or, if they do, they know very little about it! Most history books devote only a few paragraphs. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, one of the best overall histories about the Civil War, [has] only two and half pages. It’s a neglected and forgotten topic. There hasn’t been a book about it specifically since the 1950s.
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