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July 10, 2024 - Louder with Crowder
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The Civil War: American Masterclass with Historian David Barton | Louder With Crowder
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The Civil War.
If you thought that the idea of another Civil War was dominating the political conversation five years ago when I first brought you this video, try taking a look at social media now.
Seems like every week there's a new headline or some new pundit asking, is the United States headed for another Civil War?
Is Civil War imminent?
What comes next?
The Civil War?
It's the Civil War.
Spoiler alert.
Heck, Alex Garland even took a creative risk and wrote a whole film about the idea, titled Civil War.
So if repeating history is to be avoided, then as it relates to the Civil War in the United States, it's important to know how, but more important to know why.
Only the person who can answer the why of history Can't even hope to avoid the doom of repeating it.
it. Hopefully this helps.
Hello viewer.
Happy 4th.
You may say Independence Day.
I say 4th.
I don't know why.
I was raised in Canada, so this next installment, I didn't learn a whole lot about, and by not a whole lot, I mean none at all.
We spent an entire semester on how we burned down the White House before actually Canada was really a country.
It was technically still a colony.
The point is, the Civil War is more interesting.
We have David Barton of Wall Builders here, and we'll be doing an installment today on the Civil War and maybe some of the most common misconceptions.
Thank you for having us.
Sure, man.
Good to have you here.
This is a Civil War drum, correct?
It is a Civil War drum.
It is.
Is this a Civil War camera?
That goes back to that time.
This is the kind of camera they used from Civil War days going into the 1920s and 30s.
Wow.
So it would have been the kind of stuff that Brady would have used later to take pictures, famous pictures of Civil War.
You should put that on Etsy.
I wonder what we'd get for that.
Someone would probably just think, oh, that's quaint.
That's almost original.
And you have a lot of artifacts here from the Civil War.
I guess let's sort of kind of walk people through the Civil War.
A lot of folks say, and you hear this argued a lot, the Civil War really didn't have anything to do with slavery.
It was about economics, it was about states' rights, and we look back on it more fondly thinking it was about freeing the slaves.
Is that accurate?
Well, I kind of like to let the documents speak for themselves.
And so when you look at the Civil War, you had 11 states that seceded to become the Confederate States of America.
And so these 11 states, when they left the United States, they all wrote a document of secession on why they left.
And by the way, all of their congressmen from those states gave farewell addresses on the floor of the House and Senate that are public record.
Anybody can get them.
The Constitution requires us to keep records of every speech made.
So, that's public record out there.
So, if you take the secession documents of the 11 states telling the world why we did what we did, every one of them says it's because of slavery.
Every one of them.
Really.
Now, that's the Southern documents.
That's not a Northerner or anybody else.
And, you know, I'm from the South, but that's not anybody else saying, oh, you guys made it about slavery.
They're the ones who said that, without exception.
All 11 said slavery's the issue.
Now, you could say, well, it was economics.
That's true, but the backbone of your economy was slavery.
Right.
And so that was economics.
But you, yourself, in your secession document, you're the one who said that we left because he's trying to end slavery.
It's interesting.
We often hear the civil wars about states' rights, and the federal government is trying to tell the southern states what to do.
Right.
And as federalists, as conservatives, that's an argument that would appeal to us to a degree.
And so we think that it was all about states' rights, which is interesting that in the Confederate Constitution, to be a member of the Confederate States of America, you are not allowed to end slavery.
You had to maintain slavery as part of the Constitution.
So if it's all about states' rights, what are you doing joining a group that won't let you have the right to decide what to do with that issue?
So, it really was about slavery, and that's maybe their constitution, their vice president.
Also legalizing pot.
They were ahead of their time.
That was a big issue back then.
Missouri, really big on legalizing weed.
Well, you know, that's a border state.
There's really deep southern states like Alabama and all those states.
Yeah, right.
So, they really had this thing of slavery was the issue, according to them.
I feel comfortable because it's very laminated.
forms, according to their own constitutions and according to their secession documents.
What about according to, I can touch this, correct?
I feel comfortable because it's very laminated.
According to this man, Abraham Lincoln, if he could have kept the union without ending
slavery and a lot of people say that that's what he would have done.
He felt that it was necessary.
Would he have kept slavery?
Well, see, the whole argument all the way up to that point... By the way, he looks a lot more ethnic than you usually think of Abraham Lincoln when you look at that.
I mean, he could be Native American, he could be, I don't know, he could be Ukrainian?
Uzbekistanian?
Yeah.
The point is, it's not Daniel Day-Lewis from The Crucible.
No, it's not.
So, with Lincoln, leading up to all those years before the Civil War, with the abolition debates, there was no clear consensus that the Constitution prohibited slavery.
And why did they want to do that?
to each state.
Now, the founding fathers, they thought when they were doing the Constitutional Convention,
they all agreed, if you give us 20 years, we're going to end slavery, which is why they
put the date at 1808.
So 20 years after the Constitution was written, they thought they could get rid of slavery,
they could ban the slave trade and be done with it.
Even the pro-slavery states...
And why did they want to do that?
Who would be included in those founding fathers who wanted to end slavery?
Well, it's interesting that when we did the Declaration of Independence, the longest single
grievance in the Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson, and it said, we have been
trying to end slavery in America and the king won't let us.
Because in 1773, you had Rhode Island, and you had Massachusetts, and Connecticut, you had Pennsylvania all do anti-slavery laws.
And in 1774, the king said, no, no, no.
You're part of the British Empire.
We have slavery.
You're going to have slavery.
So at that point, founding fathers like Ben Franklin and Benjamin Rush and others said, this is not right.
We've been trying to free our own slaves.
We don't like slavery.
We don't want it.
And so you'll find that 41 of the signers of the Declaration owned slaves.
It's not a question of how many own slaves.
What did they do once they had the right to end slavery?
So when we separate in 1776, you'll find that so many of those guys freed slaves, said,
this is what we've been waiting for.
This is why we want to separate from Great Britain.
And so the largest grievance in the Declaration is Thomas Jefferson saying, we've been trying
to end slavery and they won't let us.
Jefferson had been introducing anti-slavery laws in his own state.
His state would not allow him to free his own slaves.
Right.
Not just the British, but his state.
So what happened was... Was it Jefferson who, or was it Washington who freed them at the time of his death?
Washington freed them at the time of his death.
There was a loophole in the law that was added in 1782 to Virginia law that said, okay, We want people to be free, so when you die, you can free.
But even with that, even when you die, you can free your slaves.
They never allowed you to free what were called dowry slaves.
And dowry slaves were the slaves that came through the wife.
So Martha's slaves, George Washington, you can't free Martha's slaves.
You can never free a dowry slave.
So Jefferson, by the time he came to Jefferson, the legislature said, what were we thinking about?
That was a bad loophole.
So they closed the loophole.
He didn't even have that loophole at the time of his death.
So, what happened was Jefferson wrote this anti-slavery piece in the Declaration, and he wrote, because the Declaration says, the unanimous Declaration, they all agreed that the only thing we'll put in the Declaration is what all 13 states agree on.
Jefferson said South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia would not agree that slavery was a big issue, and so we had to take that clause out.
So the Civil War was a long time brewing.
It didn't just come out of nowhere like a lot of people think.
But those three states thought that if you give us 20 years we can be away from slavery, and they probably would have been, because slavery is economically unprofitable.
What kept it alive was 1803.
The cotton gin comes in, and now a slave can do what 10 slaves used to do, so now I can make money.
So it changed the whole economy.
The slave economy changed, but there was the belief that by 1808 we can get this done in America.
So, and before we move on, what are these here?
I see some... These are all Civil War... Oh, and by the way, sorry, I should have said, this is actually the picture that was used, right?
That they used... That's what they used to build the Lincoln Memorial.
That is the picture that was used for that, and this is the negative that was used for that picture.
Photo negative of Abraham Lincoln.
Now you're looking at what looked at Lincoln, essentially.
So all that to say that at the time of Lincoln, slavery was not a settled constitutional issue, because the Constitution didn't matter.
So his job was to take an oath to uphold the Constitution, which he would have done that if slavery had to be required.
He hated it.
He was against it.
He spoke against it.
But when it became clear, after the split, that I can't save the Union without ending slavery, then that's where he went.
Okay.
And he did that with this, I assume.
Well, this... Hit?
Yeah.
Actually, by the way, is that maybe a little short for you as a crutch?
It's a little, yeah.
It almost is belt height.
This came from a black soldier in the Civil War.
This is a crutch?
This is a crutch.
That was a black soldier in the Civil War.
It actually seemed like he was pretty tall.
Oh, no way, it's a crutch.
I was thinking a cane.
Never mind.
Oh, wow.
That was tiny, tiny Tim.
That was midget Tim.
While we're there... That's a far cry from Will Chamberlain.
He would not have been the guy on the basketball team.
No, he wouldn't.
It was a Canadian guy who invented basketball.
While we're there...
I want to introduce you to a guy, a very famous guy in Civil War.
His name is John Clem.
John Clem, for bravery at the Battle of Chickamauga, a newspaper reported that for what he did in that battle, his bravery was so great, that Lieutenant Rosecrans saw his bravery on the
battlefield and promoted him on the spot from being a private to being a sergeant.
And then General Thomas came in and said, no, no, no, I need you on my staff and made
him a lieutenant and put him on his staff, on the general staff.
He's 12 years old.
That is the soldier.
So that's his... That's not... No, no.
This is a black guy, but I want you to see how small they were.
Well, it's hard to tell what the photo negatives and the 9 is black and white.
I couldn't really see.
Okay, no, that's clearly a white 12.
It's a white 12-year-old.
I don't see color.
Here he is in his... You don't see color.
I'm colorblind.
There's my dad.
We're all the human race.
Oh, there you go.
Nice job.
So this is him, too.
So you see how small?
That is his sergeant's uniform.
Wow.
He's about this tall.
And so, I mean, they were small, really small back then.
And he was smaller than usual, but they were all pretty small.
So this is from the Mass 54th, the movie Glory.
This is one of the soldiers that was featured and would have been featured in that movie Glory.
Matthew Broderick probably could have actually used that He probably could.
He's about the right height for that.
So that is from the Civil War.
This is a hand grenade from the Civil War.
What you do, load it up with powder, and this is your firing pin right there, and it looks like a Nerf football.
I was going to say, we used to have Velcro pads, and we would throw them over the game.
Well, you would throw this to the other side, and when it hit, it would blow up.
So that was your early hand grenade.
Ages 7 and up with that one.
Yeah, well, ages 12 and up.
And these are swim goggles?
Yes, they look exactly like it.
They fit you so well.
Actually, the guys who were using the cannons, this would protect their eyes.
From all the powder?
Cannon fire, yeah.
So that's all the guys in artillery.
These are all things related to Civil War.
And actually, one of the famous generals in the Civil War was James A. Garfield.
Okay.
And he was so good at what he did that Lincoln said, I've got to help you in Congress.
I need help bad.
So Garfield came back.
He was a major general.
He gets in Congress.
He helps pass the first 23 civil rights laws that are passed for equality in Congress.
He becomes the 20th president.
And this happens to be a letter from him.
It's kind of... I don't want to say this.
It's not what you expect of a president.
But in this letter, he says here, he's a preacher.
I can't believe he would call someone's wife that.
Well, yeah.
I can't read this at all.
I don't know how you can read this.
He says he preached 19 times in a revival meeting.
There were 34 editions, and he baptized 31 by immersion.
So here you've got a guy who is a guy we know as a president who was a revival preacher?
I mean, we don't think about faith with these guys, and that was a really big part of their life.
Let me see, how do you juxtapose when people talk about Abraham Lincoln and the belief that a black man was worth three-fifths that of a white man?
Oh, I love you brought that up.
The best answer to that is to go to black commentators on the Constitution.
Go to Frederick Douglass.
Because Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery, he made it to Boston, he started speaking first in New York for the New York Abolitionist Society, then Boston wanted to hire him full-time.
And he was trained at the feet of what are called radical abolitionists, Garrett and Smith and some of those guys.
And they said, you know, we have a real problem in America.
We have a pro-slavery Constitution.
It's been flawed from the beginning.
We need a new Constitution.
So these hardcore abolitionists thought the Constitution's a flawed document.
He said, I believe that.
They were taught.
He said, but when I was hired full-time by the Massachusetts Abolitionist Society to speak full-time, he said, I decided I better read it for myself.
He said, when I read the Constitution, he said, I saw that in it there was not a single pro-slavery clause.
It was anti-slavery.
Well, then what do you do with three-fifths?
Three-fifths, if you go back to the debates in 1787, three-fifths, the Southern states said, we want to count every black And the northern states said, count them, but free them first.
They need to be free, because you're not representing them, you're using them.
And so what happened was, they arrived at this compromise and said, okay, every black you count, you get more pro-slavery representation in Congress.
So they went back and forth and said, okay, here's the deal, we'll let you count three-fifths of your blacks.
And so that cut pro-slavery representation by 40% in Congress.
It was nothing about the worth of the individuals.
It was about the representation from them.
And so when people hear the Constitution says blacks are only worth three-fifths, Frederick Douglass said, I checked it, that's not true.
That was an anti-slavery provision to limit that.
And how long did that last?
It's still in the Constitution.
Well, it was done away with the Civil Rights Amendment, 13th, 14th, 15th Amendment in 1865 through 1870.
That's no longer an issue.
In 1865 through 1870, that's no longer an issue.
They got to it pretty quickly.
Yeah.
And it was interesting that when they did that, I mean, back in the founding era, it was the anti-slavery founding fathers who came up with the Three-Fifths Clause to put less pro-slavery people in Congress.
And does that come with being so close to taxation without representation?
as well there because basically you weren't representing them.
You were counting them but not representing them.
And that's what the North said, and by the way this was a fun debate, they said, you
know you guys in the South, you say that blacks are your property and you're counting your
property to get more pro-slavery reps.
So we're going to count our horses and our cows and our chairs and our brooms and everything.
And right now someone's going to get mad and say, you're comparing black slaves to horses
and cows.
They remove the historical context.
You know, for example, you see this sometimes where when you are fighting really bad enemies abroad with foreign policy, sometimes you have to partner or form coalitions with the lesser of evils.
Sometimes the historical context is, well, why do we have a relationship with Saudi Arabia?
We're not really happy.
Yeah, exactly.
We weren't big fans necessarily of Stalin.
The three-fifths was a means to an end to just make sure that they weren't being misrepresented.
Well, I appreciate it.
I tried to lay that one up and you handled it superbly.
So I got another one for you here.
I'm distracted by the hand grenades.
What was this?
Was this in case you needed to get rid of your leg and turn it into this?
Well, that's right.
If you get shot right there, I will promptly take your leg off for you.
Careful.
Seems like hepatitis central.
Oh yeah, I would say so right now.
I wonder what DNA would show if we tested that for blood.
But at that point in time... Probably not a white guy.
Yeah, may not have been.
If I could not take your leg off and stop the bleeding within a minute, I could not be a surgeon.
And you're going to get no... That's a horrible incentive!
I want a surgeon to take as much care as possible.
Take your time, Doc.
No, because you get no painkillers and if I don't do it in under a minute, you will bleed out and bleed to death.
So I have to be able to do it, take it off, and stop the bleeding.
Cut off a leg?
This was used to cut off a leg.
Oh my God, I was joking.
No, no, this is for real.
This is your amputation saw in the Civil War.
Children could see that!
And you see this coming at you and you've got no, no kind of deadening.
No, I mean, there's nothing, no anesthesia.
So, I'm watching, there are actually... Is that because Abraham Lincoln's wife was taking it all?
She had the opium going on, right?
That is true.
That's true.
She did have the... There was... Yeah, she had a lot of depression problems.
A lot of depression problems.
Okay, so let me ask... That is absolutely terrifying.
I thought it was a little... No, you're actually cutting off your leg.
Imagine that.
Do you just think of how much more intimate battle was back then?
One of the... In Vicksburg, Mississippi, there's battlefield memorabilia kind of stuff that's there.
And one of them is, is they would cut off your leg.
They would give you one of the bullets to bite.
And it's where they get biting the bullet.
And they have bullets there.
They're bitten by guys.
The bullet's about that big, and when it's over, it's about that big, and it is as thin as paper, because they just keep biting on it.
Were they stupid people?
They were shaving.
They had leather stropes.
Why don't they just bite on leather?
Give them lead?
I don't know.
They bite the bullet, and there are actually photographs.
It's a number two pencil.
Go to town.
There are actually pictures of where a surgeon was in the middle of sawing off a guy's leg.
It's halfway through, and they all look up and smile for the camera, and then he goes back to sawing again.
And the guy who's getting his leg sawed off is actually looking at the camera, smiling for the camera.
With a bullet?
Do you think maybe it started with one guy bit the bullet to show how tough he was, and then no one else thought, I can bite the leather belt.
They're like, well, Dennis bit the bullet, so now I gotta do it.
Otherwise, I'm never gonna hear the end of it from the guys that are gonna do a movie about them with glory.
Yeah, yeah.
Morgan Freeman's never gonna let me live this down.
No telling where it came from.
Gosh!
I see that stuff and I just, I cringe to think what it was like to live back then.
And 620,000 guys gave their lives one side or the other.
A lot sacrificed their lives to end slavery.
A lot sacrificed their lives to defend a system they didn't really understand.
Right.
A lot of Southern guys, they weren't fighting for slavery.
They're fighting because the North invaded.
That's an important delineation because I think a lot of people where they say well we see the confederate flag as a symbol of heritage and we don't see it the way you see it.
I think a lot of people from the south don't see it that way but like you said the leadership when they had the opportunity to clarify their position they made it very clear that they wanted to leave because of slavery.
Let me ask you this.
This is something we hear a lot about.
Young Turks, MSNBC, CNN.
It's sort of accepted as a truism, the Southern strategy.
They say, well, yeah, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
And if you look back then, Republicans, obviously, they're the ones about freeing the slaves.
And if you look at even the Civil Rights Act.
But there was a Southern strategy where it swapped.
What do you say to that?
Well, it certainly was not that way for the first more than a century.
Right.
I mean, if I take a piece like this, this is a hit card for the Klan.
This shows, you know, lynching's a big deal for the Klan.
Wow.
So, they have given you now the names.
It's kind of their maison d'être, when you really think of it.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Sixty-three names here that need to be taken care of.
Sixty-three names.
These are all Republican members of the legislature.
There are 50 blacks, there are 13 whites.
Now, people say, wait a minute, they didn't lynch whites.
Yeah, there were 4,800 lynchings.
And the 4,800 lynchings that happened with those 4,800 lynchings, 1,300 were white, 3,500 were black.
The lynchings were Republicans.
Now, the deal was just about any... White Republicans?
Why Republicans?
You couldn't lynch any white because some might be Democrats.
But blacks, that's a different thing.
Right.
So you could go at it that way.
And so what you find is when you look after once the 13th and 14th Amendment were passed, you could elect blacks to office in the South.
And in states like Louisiana, states like South Carolina, Mississippi, you had more blacks than you did whites.
So what happens is, for example, the first 137 blacks elected in Louisiana were all Republicans.
The first 41 blacks in Texas, the first 190 blacks in South Carolina, the first 99 in Alabama, 112 in Mississippi, etc.
So the switching of parties, no, blacks were strong Republicans at that point in time.
And they say, well, you know, that started changing in the 60s, the Southern strategy.
Strom Thurmond.
All right, Strom Thurmond was a Democrat, no question.
He ran against Harry Truman because Harry Truman did some really good civil rights stuff, helped desegregate the military.
He would not kowtow to the Democrats in his party that were racist, so they ran a Democrat against him, Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat Party.
So Strom Thurmond runs as a Southern Democrat against, and, you know, Harry Truman, I mean, he is from a Southern state, a border state.
He was raised in a racist atmosphere, but he did the right thing with helping civil rights.
And so Strom Thurmond is a Democrat.
Well, Strom Thurmond became a Republican.
He sure did.
He became a Republican because he changed his philosophy, because he became the first Senate Republican from the South to hire blacks onto his staff as major positions.
And so it's not Democrats that did that, it was a Republican who did that.
He left the Democrat party because of their positions.
So when they point to Strom Thurmond, you've also got to look at the fact that he also
changed his policy positions and he was no longer a Republican.
He became less racist.
And actually he tried to break through the barrier.
He had a lot of education, a lot of...
Well, you know, I think we're going to do a whole installment because you have so much
here on Black History.
So before we do that, let me...
For those who say in the South, I say, OK, let's assume you're right.
Let's assume that Democrats switch to the Republican Party.
I'm going to take any Southern state in the 70s, 80s, 90s.
You're going to have 1,000 people elected to office every election.
You're going to have your local people, your county people, your others.
And it was called the Solid Democrat South for a reason.
So I want you to find me any 10 offices in the South where the Democrats became Republicans and got elected.
You just show me 10 out of 1,000.
Nobody's shown me more than two or three.
Well, you got Strom Thurmond, and you got David Duke, and David Duke went back to the Democratic Party.
They can show me two or three.
Show me, if you're saying that the thing, you gotta show me a majority,
otherwise your premise doesn't hold up.
You can't even show me 10 out of 1,000.
So this is what people repeat without thinking about it, and there's certainly not evidence enough to prove
that it was a shift, what they call the Suddenist Strategy.
So the Republican Party is still the party of Lincoln.
Yes, I don't think they know that, because I don't think they know what Lincoln believed,
and I don't think they knew what the original platform.
This happens to be the original Republican platform.
That's the very first one.
There's only nine planks in the platform.
Seven of the nine deal with civil rights, equality, making all people equal.
Equality in pay, etc.
That's the original Republican platform, and I'll bet you most Republicans have no clue what it is.
This is the second Republican platform in 1860, 17 planks.
This is the third Republican platform, compares the Democrats and the Republicans side by side.
This is the first platform to call for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.
So I would say most Republicans today don't know what Lincoln believed, although the platforms tell us what he believed.
But, no question that Lincoln was anti-slavery.
Okay, I was going to ask you what you believe the most common misconceived notion of the Civil War was, but I think that we've addressed it in full.
It seems to be that a lot of people don't think it was actually about slavery.
And, of course, we have more segments, so you can just hit subscribe or notifications on YouTube.
Let us know.
We'll probably come back out here as well after the Fourth of July week.
To do more segments with David Barton because my god, this is I don't want to touch anything going very uncomfortable.
I'm sweating It's like a library.
I keep thinking I'm gonna get shushed by a lady who looks like an angry snail I don't know.
I'm not coming.
I just it's going to spontaneously combust We have the Civil War.
We have Second Amendment First Amendment go enjoy those videos or don't you don't have to That's the wonder of the constant.
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