Feb. 23, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It's Presidents Week here on the Rubin Report, working with Learn Liberty to bring you five shows | ||
| in five days on five different presidents of the United States. | ||
| And joining me today is professor of history and economics at San Jose State University and author of the book, Emancipating the Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, A History of the American Civil War, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| It's a pleasure to be on The Rubin Report. | ||
| We have already, just in the few minutes we've been sitting here, we talked about almost every other president. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now I guess we're going to have to get to this Lincoln guy. | ||
| Yes, definitely. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| So first off, the obvious question, was he actually a vampire hunter? | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| It's not a show that I watched. | ||
| Or was it a movie? | ||
| I forget. | ||
| It was a movie. | ||
| I thought it was a documentary. | ||
| Apparently not. | ||
| All right, there's a lot I wanna talk to you. | ||
| Now, it was obvious when we were selecting our five presidents to do this week, we wanted to do some of the big ones and some smaller ones, and hopefully we'll do this for many years to come and can get to everybody, but Lincoln was the one I was like, all right, we gotta do it because I think if you poll most Americans, they always say that Lincoln is their favorite. | ||
| I think probably George Washington comes in second, but I think Lincoln is the big one. | ||
| So I want to do a little bit on his bio, then I want to do, obviously, on the political stuff and civil war and freeing the slaves, and I want to talk about some of the interesting criticisms that you have of him in this book. | ||
| But first, let's just start a little bit about childhood. | ||
| Where should we start? | ||
| Well, Lincoln was born in Kentucky, 1809, and grew up in a very poor frontier household. | ||
| His mother died when he was very young, was partly raised by his stepmother, they moved to Indiana, And basically, he educated himself. | ||
| And it was a humble background, as he described it himself. | ||
| How is that possible, to educate himself back then? | ||
| I mean, was he just grabbing books? | ||
| He was just grabbing books and reading them at every opportunity he could get. | ||
| he could get. | ||
| And yeah, that's basically the story. | ||
| Do we know anything about his further education as he got a little bit older? | ||
| I don't know anything about his further education. | ||
| I don't think he was university educated. | ||
| He obviously went on to get a law degree, but in those days getting a law degree was you clerked under a lawyer and then you hung out your shingle. | ||
| As far as formal education is concerned, he didn't have very much of that. | ||
| Was his real ambition at first to be a lawyer? | ||
| I don't know whether he had a real ambition at first. | ||
| I mean, you know, he had a lot of other kinds of more frontier-oriented jobs, right? | ||
| That's how he got the nickname, the Rail Splitter, working on the rivers, and those sorts of things. | ||
| And so, I think he just sort of fell into law. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, so he's a lawyer. | |
| But eventually, I mean eventually, politics became his passion. | ||
| Yeah, so he's a lawyer and then politics became his passion. | ||
| Yeah, I would say those two are interrelated because remember at that time, many of your politicians, if not most of your politicians, either came through the military or through a profession of law. | ||
| Yeah, was there a seminal moment for him that he realized this is, No, I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| You know, it's like life happens and opportunities open and you take advantage of them. | ||
| And, you know, he had a legal profession in Illinois, and then he was elected to the Illinois legislature, eventually elected to the House of Representatives for a short time. | ||
| And became very prominent in the Illinois Whig Party. | ||
| Yeah, what were his politics like in time? | ||
| And what was the Whig Party like? | ||
| This is one of the places people don't really know. | ||
| If you look at the two parties ideologically, at that time it was the Whigs versus the Democrats. | ||
| The Whigs were the interventionist party. | ||
| The Whigs were in favor of high protective tariffs. | ||
| They were in favor of spending a lot of money, government money, on internal improvements, what we call infrastructure today. | ||
| And they were in favor of a nationally chartered bank. | ||
| And a lot of these policies were the outgrowth of one of the most prominent Whig leaders, Henry Clay, and what he termed his American system. | ||
| Whereas by this time the Democratic Party had become the party of laissez-faire, low tariffs, getting rid of the National Bank and in fact actually trying to divorce government from any relationship with banks. | ||
| And at least trying to keep the federal government out of funding internal improvements. | ||
| Yeah, that's very interesting to me, because in a modern sense, that seems to be a bit of a reversal on where we're at right now. | ||
| Was Lincoln really in line with the policies on all this? | ||
| I mean, he really admired Henry Clay. | ||
| Henry Clay was his hero. | ||
| And he supported all of those policies down the line. | ||
| When he was in, the state legislature in Illinois, | ||
| he was crucial in passing a very expensive internal improvements program in Illinois | ||
| that subsequently almost drove the state into bankruptcy, financing of canals and railroads. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So fiscally, at the time, he was spending a lot, and did the infrastructure deal actually make sense? | ||
| Uh... | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| In other words, what happened is that the states went through sort of two phases in terms of infrastructure. | ||
| The first phase was canal building. | ||
| And the second phase was railroads. | ||
| These are often referred to as phases of the transportation revolution during that period. | ||
| The canal building orgy was actually set off by New York building the Erie Canal, which is one of the few examples of a socialist enterprise that actually made a profit. | ||
| And so this inspired a lot of other states to build canals, almost all of which Yeah. | ||
| lost money and created financial problems for the states that built them, | ||
| which suggests that they were not economically justified. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then as a result of the states losing so much money on the canals, | ||
| initially they were heavily involved in railroads and they continued to | ||
| subsidize the railroads, but at least by the 1840s and 1850s they weren't | ||
| owning outright the railroads the way they had owned outright the canals. | ||
| And therefore, there was a little bit too much railroad expansion subsidized by the government, but it wasn't as significant as the problems created by the canal building. | ||
| Interesting, because this is a part of Lincoln that I don't, you know, we mostly think about the Civil War and freeing the slaves, but the economic part is sort of interesting. | ||
| What do you think his sort of overriding economic policy was? | ||
| Because it sounds like it was a lot of spending. | ||
| Well, he carried this policy into the presidency. | ||
| The first subsidized transcontinental railroads. | ||
| We're during Lincoln's administration, during the Civil War. | ||
| And that resulted in many other transcontinentals being subsidized by the national government, and a whole bunch of pork barrel legislation in the post-Civil War period, and a lot of scandals, corruption involved as well. | ||
| So his economic views continued throughout his entire career. | ||
| And this was the main dividing line between the two policies, between the two political parties, because up until the Civil War, Both political parties tried to straddle the issue of slavery so they would both be national parties. | ||
| So they tried to keep it out as best they could out of the political arena. | ||
| Yeah, when did he start talking about slavery really? | ||
| I mean when he was in the Illinois legislature. | ||
| No, he doesn't really start talking about slavery. | ||
| He had a visceral dislike of slavery from his youth, but he didn't really start talking about slavery until after the Kansas-Nebraska Act and slavery becomes a prominent issue and it causes the death of the Whig Party. | ||
| and the collapse of the Whig Party. | ||
| Can you explain that a little bit more? | ||
| Why that actually caused the collapse? | ||
| Both parties initially tried to straddle the slavery issue, but as it evolves over time, | ||
| the Whig Party, being more interventionist, tends to be stronger in New England, | ||
| whereas the Democratic Party, tending to be non-interventionist, | ||
| tends to be stronger in the South and the West. | ||
| And so, uh, both parties feel the strain between Northern and Southern Democrats, Northern and Southern Whigs, but the Whig Party is actually blown apart. | ||
| by that strain after the Kansas-Nebraska Act. | ||
| And one issue that causes the demise of the Whig Party is slavery. | ||
| So you have the split between Northern Whigs and Southern Whigs. | ||
| And then also another issue that comes to the fore during that period is immigration. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| There is a nativist movement that some Whigs end up embracing and that also plays a role in the demise of the Whig Party. | ||
| Yeah, what was his policy on immigration? | ||
| Well, actually, Lincoln was fairly good on that. | ||
| I mean, in other words, there was a debate within the councils of the Republican Party about, you know, between those who were more nativist and those who were less nativist, and Lincoln was definitely on the side of the one he didn't want. | ||
| He didn't want the Republican Party to take a platform stand on nativism opposing immigration. | ||
| Actually, they weren't proposing restrictions on immigration so much as restrictions on acquiring citizenship. | ||
| So when the Whig Party fell apart and then basically the remnants became the Republican Party, what was that like? | ||
| Did they literally just fold out the people? | ||
| Well, initially the Republican Party is a coalition of anti-slavery Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats. | ||
| So it's exclusively a sectional party, or almost exclusively. | ||
| So just to be really clear on that though, so the Republican Party actually was the original anti-slavery party. | ||
| It was taking from both sides. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Now we need to be clear about this term anti-slavery because being anti-slavery was a broad tent. | ||
| At one extreme were the abolitionists. | ||
| And at least in America, the term abolitionist refers to anti-slavery advocates who favor immediate emancipation of all slaves and full political rights. | ||
| For all African Americans. | ||
| So there's a whole range of anti-slavery positions. | ||
| And so the Republican Party, the abolitionists are always a minority. | ||
| And the Republican Party succeeds where the abolitionists don't succeed. | ||
| By reducing anti-slavery to its lowest common denominator, essentially one issue, which is opposing the spread of slavery into the territories. | ||
| And so you have, and again, the Kansas-Nebraska Act In which Kansas and Nebraska were opened to slavery in violation of the Missouri Compromise is what sort of inspires this concern among anti-slavery northerners. | ||
| So, just to be clear, at the beginning of the Civil War, there are a lot of former Democrats involved in the Republican Party. | ||
| Lincoln's Secretary of State, Solomon Chase, is a former Democrat. | ||
| Several Republican senators and governors are former Republicans. | ||
| pardon me, yeah, Republican senators and governors are former Republicans. | ||
| So in Lincoln's election, the Republican Party has to sort of straddle these economic | ||
| issues to keep both sides of the coalition together. | ||
| Where did he fall when he was running for president? | ||
| Where did he fall on that scale of abolitionist to... What would you call that other group? | ||
| They were sort of more... They're just anti-slavery. | ||
| But that approach that they had, what would you refer to? | ||
| Was that pragmatic or what did they base it in? | ||
| Well, gradualist, pragmatic. | ||
| Basically, again, this is where Lincoln follows Henry Clay. | ||
| Henry Clay was in favor of colonization. | ||
| In other words, not just having a plan of perhaps compensated emancipation in which freed slaves are moved back to Africa. | ||
| And Lincoln was a big advocate of colonization and in fact he continues to pursue colonization even after the outbreak of the Civil War. | ||
| By the end of the Civil War, he's probably given up on that, but during the Civil War he sponsored one disastrous attempt at colonization in Haiti that I'm a little bit hazy on the details, but some land was acquired in Haiti, and they got some African Americans who agreed to move there, and then it was not just economically unviable, but had problems with disease, and so the whole colony collapsed. | ||
| In other words, he wanted to push in Latin America something similar to Liberia in Africa, which was also a colonization scheme set up by the American Colonization Society, of which Henry Clay was a participant. | ||
| Right, so there's a couple interesting things there. | ||
| So you referenced that the Whig Party itself had a sort of internal conflict between their northern representatives, that would be someone like Abraham Lincoln, and their southern. | ||
| If you were a local representative in the legislature in Illinois, Did it ever come up to talk about it? | ||
| I mean, why would slavery even really... It was only within the national discussion, right? | ||
| Like, was it something that people were actually voting on in any way in Illinois? | ||
| Not at the state level, no. | ||
| It's hard to think of party politics in a 2018 lens without everything being national and everybody affected by every little thing, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the only sense in which you got involved at the state level was with respect to the Fugitive Slave Law. | ||
| So if you look at the history of slavery, there's always this tension between free states and slave states, even at the Constitutional Convention. | ||
| But it is usually kept below the surface, except during these instances where it erupts and then it's resolved. | ||
| So you first have Missouri coming in as a slave state, which leads to the Missouri Compromise, and then things calm down. | ||
| And then you have the tariff issue, which is partially driven by South Carolina's slave. | ||
| And then you have things calming down. | ||
| With the annexation of Texas and California coming in as a state, slavery becomes a big | ||
| issue again. | ||
| And it's partially calmed down by the Compromise of 1850. | ||
| And then after that, you have the Kansas-Nebraska Act. | ||
| then there's no calming it down anymore. | ||
| And the Compromise of 1850 is responsible, part of what Southerners got out of the Compromise of 1850, or more precisely slaveholders, was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. | ||
| Now, one of the constitutional deals, I mean, right in the Constitution there's a fugitive slave provision in which it's the obligation of free states to return runaway slaves. | ||
| And the Washington administration actually passed the first Fugitive Slave Act, but the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 Was one of the most draconian laws that Congress ever enacted. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in other words, it set up a bureaucracy of commissioners who would hear cases of fugitive slaves. | ||
| They got five dollars if they decided that that the person wasn't a slave and ten dollars if they decided It was a slave. | ||
| The slave had no right to representation, a jury trial, no right to testify, the alleged slave, and the commissioners could require the cooperation of individuals to apprehend runaways. | ||
| And if you violated that, you could face a jail sentence, $1,000 fine, $1,000 civil penalties for each escaped slave. | ||
| So it was pretty, so many of your northern states began before this, but began after this, passing what were called personal liberty laws, trying to make sure that state officials did not participate in the apprehension and return of runaways. | ||
| And so that's the big slavery issue in northern states. | ||
| Yeah, it sounds like such a crazy thing because they were incentivizing the northern states that may not have wanted to send the slaves back. | ||
| They were literally financially incentivizing and then, as you're saying, there were other people, they were just citizens that were going out there. | ||
| Right, and it also made it easier to engage in kidnapping free blacks. | ||
| Bringing them South. | ||
| Who was fighting this the most? | ||
| I mean, I would imagine there must have been some states' rights people in the North that maybe didn't even care about slavery per se, but must have said, you can't tell us what to do. | ||
| Yeah, well, this is one of the things, after the Compromise of 1850, that brings slavery, starts pushing it to the forefront. | ||
| And of course, this is when Elliot, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Henry B, what's her first name? | ||
| I'm drawing a blank. | ||
| It'll pop in a second. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
|
unidentified
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You'll get it. | |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe writes Uncle Tom's Cabin, which becomes a bestseller, and it's about the fugitive slave issues. | ||
| So it sensitizes a lot of Northerners. | ||
| To the fugitive slave question. | ||
| And so, Illinois doesn't pass a personal liberty law because southern Illinois is actually settled by, from the southern, the eastern, southern states. | ||
| But some of your other states like Pennsylvania and states further north do pass personal liberty laws. | ||
| As a result of either before the Fugitive Slave Act or after the Fugitive Slave Act. | ||
| So before we get directly into the presidency and the war, is there anything else we need to know about Lincoln's politics at the time or what else was influencing him? | ||
| Besides, obviously, there were states' rights issues, there was obviously the slavery issue. | ||
| Was there anything else that we think of as really the moments that kind of shaped him before the presidency? | ||
| I think we've covered the important issues. | ||
| Those are the big ones. | ||
| Okay, so he runs for president. | ||
| What do we need to know about that platform? | ||
| Well, as I say, it tries to paper over the difference between former Democrats and former Whigs. | ||
| It has a plank about the tariff that can be interpreted differently, but the primary plank is opposition to the spread of slavery into any more territories. | ||
| And what's interesting about that plank is that it's essentially, that plank has essentially been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision. | ||
| In the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court says that The territories are the common property of both Northerners and Southerners and therefore the national government cannot restrict the property rights of Southerners when they move into the territories by preventing them from bringing their slaves. | ||
| So you have a platform plank. | ||
| That was literally unconstitutional. | ||
| Declared unconstitutional. | ||
| I mean, most Supreme Court, most legal scholars today think it was a very bad decision, but yes, it had been declared unconstitutional. | ||
| What do we need to know about the tenor of the political infighting at that time? | ||
| You know, these days everyone always says, Everything's never been worse. | ||
| Everyone's meaner than ever before. | ||
| And, you know, Trump's tweeting this and all that. | ||
| But there was some pretty serious fighting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those kinds of claims are exaggerated. | ||
| I mean, you can find Campaign rhetoric and campaign literature that, if not vicious, verges on being vicious throughout the period leading up to the Civil War. | ||
| I wouldn't say that the Civil War or the 1860 election is particularly unique in that respect. | ||
| But what happens is that you end up having four candidates. | ||
| Lincoln is the candidate of the Republican Party. | ||
| And then the Democratic Party splits. | ||
| So you have Stephen Douglas as the candidate of the Northern Democrats. | ||
| John Breckinridge is the candidate of the Southern Democrats. | ||
| And then some of your upper tiers, former Southern Whigs, form a constitutional union party. | ||
| So, to oversimplify only a little, it becomes really two elections. | ||
| An election between Lincoln and Douglas in the North, and an election between Breckinridge and John Bell in the Constitutional Union Party in the South. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, the next obvious segue is the Lincoln-Douglas debate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, that's before the 1860 election. | ||
| It was for that election, though. | ||
| No, no. | ||
|
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No? | |
| Remember, this is a time when senators are still chosen by the state legislature. | ||
| So that's one of the things that makes the debate unique, because it's the 1858 Senate election in Illinois. | ||
| The legislature is going to choose who is going to be the senator, but the Republican candidate is Lincoln, the Democratic candidate is Douglas. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know that! | ||
| And then they go around and have these debates at various locations, Throughout Illinois. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| I mean, I like to think that I know a lot about this stuff. | ||
| I had no idea that that wasn't on the national scale, because they did run against each other just two years later. | ||
| Two years later, right. | ||
| So what was that? | ||
| This actually propels Lincoln into the forefront of potential candidates for the Republican nomination in 1860, even though the legislature chooses Douglas As Illinois Senator. | ||
| So I want you to explain what the Lincoln-Douglas debates are and why there's such a richness there, but was nothing like this even done before that? | ||
| Everyone talks about it like it was so revolutionary or we so desperately could use it these days. | ||
| I wouldn't go so far as to say nothing like it, but in terms of how extensive it was and Can you explain the basic tenets of sort of how it would work? | ||
| Well, basically, they picked out various locations in Illinois, I forget the number of debates, and they would travel there, and then they would face off each other, and the big issue was slavery. | ||
| And Lincoln, his position was prohibiting slavery, the extension of slavery into the territories. | ||
| Douglas' position, he was trying, he was, the Democratic Party hadn't split. | ||
| So he was trying to maintain the unity of the Democratic Party. | ||
| So his position is known as popular sovereignty. | ||
| And his view was that we leave the territories open and then let people in the territories decide whether it's going to be a slave territory or a free territory. | ||
| But that creates a certain amount of ambiguity, because when do they get to decide? | ||
| Do they only get to decide at the time of statehood? | ||
| Also, if they decide before statehood, aren't they violating the Dred Scott decision? | ||
| But there was also a racial element to the debates. | ||
| Because you brought up the issue of viciousness in the campaigns. | ||
| The attempt is to paint Lincoln as an advocate of racial amalgamation. | ||
| Because even in the North, Despite the northern states being free states, in most of the northern states African-Americans face legal disabilities and significant social discrimination. | ||
| So at this time Lincoln would make the distinction between Between civil equality, political equality, and social equality. | ||
| Civil equality means being equal before the law. | ||
| Political equality would involve giving African Americans the right to vote, and then we know what social equality is about. | ||
| So his position, at this time, he did not advocate political equality. | ||
| was not in favor of giving African-Americans the right to vote, | ||
| but he was firmly in favor of civil equality. | ||
| And that's where he and Douglas differed. | ||
| Was that part totally pragmatic in that he felt if he said, | ||
| "Well, I am for having African-Americans to vote." | ||
| It might've been pragmatic, but remember, as I said, he was in favor of colonization. | ||
| Hmm. Uh... | ||
| Even if he, even when he began to entertain views of political equality, for pragmatic reasons, not Politically, but for pragmatic reasons, he wasn't sure the country was ready. | ||
| In other words, he would use arguments which I think are sincere that the two races are | ||
| not going to be comfortable living together and that it would be better off for African | ||
| Americans, once free, to move elsewhere. | ||
| Now, he eventually drops that and eventually by the end of his life was favoring a limited | ||
| franchise for freed African Americans in Louisiana. | ||
| His ideas are changing, they're progressing. | ||
| Yeah, that's what's interesting is that there is an evolution here, which really we find out really in the presidency. | ||
| Did the abolitionists basically hate him at that point? | ||
| I mean, did they think he was sort of a sellout or that he just, because he was doing the pragmatic thing? | ||
| Yeah, some abolitionists did. | ||
| Some abolitionists did. | ||
| So, there was still, there had been, before the creation of the Republican Party, there had been the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party, which were slightly broader anti-slavery coalitions, but minor parties. | ||
| And there still was a radical abolitionist party that ran in 1860, but it garnered very, very few votes. | ||
| Okay, so we started touching on the beginnings of the election, so basically four candidates running because of the split in the Democratic Party. | ||
| What else do we have to know before he gets elected? | ||
| That's pretty much it. | ||
| I mean, he didn't win the popular vote, but even if you combined the vote of all the other candidates, he still would have won the Electoral College. | ||
| Right, interesting. | ||
| So what was the beginning of his presidency like? | ||
| Well, the beginning of his presidency is dominated by the secession of the Deep South. | ||
| How soon after he was inaugurated? | ||
| Well, after he's elected, the Deep South secedes, with South Carolina being the first state. | ||
| And then you have the cotton states seceding. | ||
| Was he even inaugurated at that point? | ||
| No, no, this was right after the election. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| By the way, one interesting detail that a lot of people are unaware of, in South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession, And they're the first state. | ||
| They're the most firebrand of all the secessionists. | ||
| In their ordinance of secession, the issue they give the largest play to, in terms of justifying secession, is not Lincoln's election. | ||
| But northern failure to comply with the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution. | ||
| Now partially that's a rhetorical ploy because it allows them to argue that the northerners had violated the constitutional contract first. | ||
| But it also reflects a deep concern about fugitive slaves. | ||
| And one of the One of the points that I make in my book is that I think most historians have underestimated the economic significance of the fugitive slave issue in terms of bringing on secession. | ||
| Maybe we can get to that. | ||
| I do want to get to that. | ||
| So you have the Deep South seceding and they're seizing all of the U.S. | ||
| military bases. | ||
| Except for a few that are holding out, and the prominent one that's holding out is Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. | ||
| So James Buchanan has to deal with this. | ||
| He's the lamed up president. | ||
| He tries to reinforce Sumter and South Carolina fires on the ship and so, but the garrison is still there when Lincoln becomes president. | ||
| So that's the big issue that's dominating Lincoln's presidency. | ||
| What do you do about Fort Sumter? | ||
| And Lincoln, you know, he's getting all kinds of advice. | ||
| Some people want him to try to Back down on the Republican position about slavery in the territories. | ||
| But he absolutely refuses to do so. | ||
| I mean, he's he has agreed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act as president. | ||
| So this is the only anti-slavery issue. | ||
| And he decides to hang on to it. | ||
| And some want a more aggressive policy, some want a more passive policy. | ||
| Basically, Lincoln essentially follows Buchanan's policy, although Buchanan gets a lot of criticism. | ||
| Yeah, I was just going to ask you that. | ||
| Well Buchanan's policy being what? | ||
| Trying to reinforce the fort but not using military force to hold on to the fort. | ||
| So Lincoln sends reinforcements and supplies to the fort. | ||
| Telling South Carolina that he's doing so. | ||
| By this time, the Confederacy is formed. | ||
| The Confederacy fires on Fort Sumter, right? | ||
| And that's the 9-11 of the Civil War. | ||
| It polarizes both sides. | ||
| It polarizes Northerners, because up until this time, there are a lot of Northerners who say, well, we should let the South go in peace. | ||
| Many of them think, well, if we let them go in peace, they'll come back. | ||
| And at the time of Lincoln's inauguration, there's still more slave states in the Union than out of the Union. | ||
| But Lincoln responds to the firing on Fort Sumter by calling out troops and immediately Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas all joined the Confederacy. | ||
| So it's the great divide. | ||
| So with a stroke of the pen he's doubled the size and the material resources of the Confederacy. | ||
| Yeah, what do we know about his thought process at the time? | ||
| Was he really ready for the fallout that was going to happen? | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| And then the escalation. | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| Let me back up a little and explain why he had to do this. | ||
| Why it was politically necessary to do this. | ||
| Many of your abolitionists, particularly William Lord Garrison, who's one of my heroes, who has advocated immediate emancipation, full political rights for all African Americans. | ||
| He was also a pacifist. | ||
| An anarchist, a classical liberal, in favor of free trade, free labor. | ||
| I've got to do more on this guy. | ||
| His opposition to slavery, a lot of the radical abolitionists framed it as man stealing in | ||
| terms of property rights. | ||
| And he was also in favor of northern secession from the Union because he saw the Constitution | ||
| as a pro-slavery document. | ||
| He denounced the Constitution, publicly burned a copy, and on the masthead of his paper, the liberator, no union with slaveholders. | ||
| graced it throughout from 1831 on up to the Civil War. | ||
| And this was true of many of your most radical abolitionists. | ||
| So basically what your abolitionists, and one of the reasons they were so unpopular | ||
| is because they were saying you can't have antislavery in union. | ||
| And people are committed to the union, right? | ||
| So they're not happy about the abolition. | ||
| The Republican Party, by reducing the anti-slavery issue to its lowest common denominator in the territories, is telling the public you can have anti-slavery in Union. | ||
| All right, well, once the Union's threatened, the Republican Party is going to have to suppress secession or face political oblivion. | ||
| And in fact, Even if Stephen Douglas had been elected president, he's an old hardline Jacksonian. | ||
| If he had been elected president and the South had still seceded, now that's not very likely, but if he had been elected president and the South had seceded, he probably would have moved military force against the South even faster than Lincoln. | ||
| It's so interesting because I think one of the themes as we do this whole week is looking at these people through a 2018 lens and when you hear that somebody didn't want full rights for people but wanted to free them or they couldn't vote or some of the other issues you're talking about and yet at the same time you're saying but the abolitionists actually weren't that popular. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like To view these people through our lens today is really, it's a very slippery slope, because Lincoln had to do some things that perhaps, in our lens now, would have been viewed as very unfair to the African Americans. | ||
| And there he was. | ||
| So okay, so the war begins, and he's a new president at war. | ||
| Who is he getting advice from? | ||
| Did he really understand how to? | ||
| The other part of the answer to your question is that Lincoln and many of the Republicans, and many Northerners in general, underestimated the enthusiasm for secession on the part of Southerners. | ||
| They initially believed that it was a Southern elite of slaveholders, almost a conspiracy that had brought about secession. | ||
| And that's why they weren't prepared for the extent of the resistance of Southerners once Lincoln calls out troops. | ||
| Once he calls out troops, then you have the problem of managing the war. | ||
| So there was really nothing he could have done at that point, even if there were voices, even if he internally felt, well, maybe we could just let them go, or if he had voices around him that were saying, ah, you know, it's all right, let them secede. | ||
| It was too late, really, right? | ||
| Yeah, politically, all right, politically. | ||
| I mean, by that time, in the North at least, not in the deep South, but in the North, Liberty and union have become mystically identified as inseparable. | ||
| And so that's, and in fact, right, this leads to the question of, a more basic question of what caused the Civil War, right? | ||
| And there's now a current trend to argue that slavery caused the Civil War, and not only did it cause the Civil War, but it was all about slavery, and that in fact slavery, the entire history of the Union up until that point, is all about slavery. | ||
| You disagree with this premise, I know that, so take it away. | ||
| I think that asking what caused the Civil War is the wrong question. | ||
| And even some of your neo-abolitionist historians like Ken Stamp and Eric Foner have pointed out that they're really two separate questions. | ||
| Why does the South secede? | ||
| And why does the North refuse to let the South go? | ||
| And the answer to the first question is definitely slavery. | ||
| I mean the evidence is overwhelming for that. | ||
| There's probably hardly any historical causal explanation at that level of abstraction for which the evidence is more overwhelming. | ||
| So the South secedes in order to protect slavery. | ||
| Okay, so that's the easy one. | ||
| But ending slavery is not what motivates the North. | ||
| What motivates the North is preserving the Union. | ||
| And in fact Lincoln Before the firing on Fort Sumter, endorses an original 13th Amendment, which has not passed, in which he's still holding to the position of opposing the extension of slavery in the territories, but this new amendment would protect slavery in the existing slave states and be unamendable. | ||
| In the early days of the war, some of your Union commanders were returning runaway slaves. | ||
| So the war, from the Union perspective, the suppression of secession, is designed to preserve the Union. | ||
| And Lincoln even later says if he could preserve the Union by freeing all the slaves, he'll do that. | ||
| If he could preserve the Union by freeing none of the slaves, he'll do that. | ||
| If he can preserve the Union by freeing some and leaving others enslaved, he would do that. | ||
| What was his real belief in the Union based in? | ||
| Did he just truly believe that we had to remain one country, otherwise we would be in perpetual war? | ||
| Yeah, he thought that the disillusion of the Union would lead to anarchy. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because... Now, one of the things that's interesting about historians is, even historians who don't seem to be explicitly nationalist, their nationalist bias with which they approach that issue. | ||
| So, for instance, The U.S. | ||
| has made several attempts to annex Canada in the early history. | ||
| First during the American Revolution, then during the War of 1812, and then between and after those events by sponsoring the kinds of revolutionary movements that brought Texas into the Union. | ||
| If any of those had succeeded, Historians would be writing the history of North America as if this was inevitable and any other result would have been catastrophic. | ||
| My view is that the North American continent has gotten along fine with two Anglo-American republics. | ||
| If it had been three or more, history would have been different, but wouldn't have been catastrophically different. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And speaking of the example of Canada, when Canada was looking at the peaceful secession of Quebec, its population was about the same size as the Union at the time. | ||
| And the population of Quebec was greater than the Gulf Coast Confederacy that initially seceded and slightly less than the Confederacy once Lincoln had called out troops. | ||
| Did Lincoln have any advisors or anyone close to him at the time that was just saying, forget this, you know, just let them go? | ||
| No. | ||
| We're going to do it, live by our laws here. | ||
| So he really. | ||
| Yeah, well, there were some. | ||
| There were some newspaper editors prior to Fort Sumter who were in favor of a peaceful secession, letting the South at least temporarily go in peace. | ||
| There was even a secessionist movement in New York City. | ||
| Meaning they wanted New York City to secede? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Lincoln's Secretary of State toyed with the idea of provoking a war with Great Britain in order to bring Really? | ||
| To get everybody? | ||
| Yeah, everybody sewered back together, but... | ||
| But nobody really, at least within Republican councils, accepted, especially after Fort Sumter, the preservation of the Union becomes uppermost. | ||
| So most of his presidency, which obviously was cut short, and we'll get to that shortly, it was about the Civil War. | ||
| What else do we have to know? | ||
| Towards the end of the war, what other decisions did he make that were sort of pivotal? | ||
| Well, he starts a reconstruction program, which is relatively lenient compared to the congressional reconstruction that is eventually implemented after Lincoln's assassination. | ||
| Lenient in what regard? | ||
| Lenient in terms of allowing white Southerners a free hand in terms of, as long as they had abolished slavery, of re-entering the Union. | ||
| And how was that different than what happened? | ||
| Well, this is a complicated story. | ||
| I'm going to try and make it really simple. | ||
| Okay, you have this first phase presidential reconstruction, which Lincoln initiates and then becomes really lenient under his successor, Andrew Johnson, who was from Tennessee, a very racist but anti-slavery Southerner. | ||
| And what happens is that the Southern states essentially set up under a lot of the former Confederate leadership an apartheid regime with black codes that are very restrictive on the activities of the freed african-americans and this outrages uh... uh... northern republicans and so you have a period of congressional reconstruction where none of these governments are they're all disbanded you have military occupation and then you have the creation of new republican governments in which a lot of southerners are disfranchised | ||
| And African Americans are given voting rights and so you have a period of Republican regimes in the South and then that creates the resistance of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and other violent organizations and By 1876, Northerners have gotten tired of trying to maintain these regimes with military occupation, and so you have what's euphemistically referred to as redemption, where you have the restoration of white rule throughout the former slave states. | ||
| Yeah, so it's just hard to imagine what a messy time it would have been during those years, just healing all those wounds, literally family members having killed each other. | ||
| Right, yeah, especially in your border states like Kentucky and Missouri. | ||
| Yeah, I mean it's really just hard to imagine what it was like. | ||
| So, the North obviously wins, the South does not secede, the Union is maintained. | ||
| What was happening just in the weeks leading up to his assassination? | ||
| Well, Lee surrendered. | ||
| Same month, I believe. | ||
| And so it was clear that it's clear that the Confederacy has lost the war. | ||
| And you have the passage of the 13th Amendment by Congress. | ||
| It still has to be ratified by the states. | ||
| Abolishing slavery. | ||
| And those are the two most important events leading up to the end of the war. | ||
| So to talk about the assassination for a little bit, I mean, obviously, just from everything we're talking about, and it was wartime and everything else, obviously, you know, tensions were high and all that. | ||
| Was there any reason to believe that anything like this was gonna happen? | ||
| I know that may sound like It's a very open question, but were there assassination attempts before that? | ||
| There was always concern about Lincoln being assassinated, particularly at the outset of the war. | ||
| I mean, pardon me, at the outset of his administration. | ||
| So when he initially comes into Washington, he comes in disguised Because of concern about an assassination, of rumored assassination attempts. | ||
| And then during the inauguration, you have sharpshooters stationed at the tops of buildings and other provisions made by General Winfield Scott to make sure that there is no assassination attempt. | ||
| Because remember, Washington D.C. | ||
| is south of Maryland. | ||
| Maryland is a slave state. | ||
| It's a slave state that doesn't secede, only partially because of Union military force interfering with elections and throwing secessionists in jail. | ||
| And Baltimore is, at least at the outset of the war, is a pro-Southern hotbed. | ||
| So there were always concerns. | ||
| But we don't have the Secret Service. | ||
| In fact, the Secret Service was created during the Civil War, mainly to track down counterfeiters. | ||
| It's one of the many government agencies that we've come to all love. | ||
| It emerges during the Civil War. | ||
| Wow, that's wild. | ||
| So it started to track down counterfeiters, and now it's clearly gone beyond that scope these days, but that's a whole other topic. | ||
| So I assume that The day, I mean, if we had to look at Lincoln, the morning he woke up before he went to the theater, he had to have been feeling pretty good about things. | ||
| I mean, he had accomplished the thing that was most important to him, basically. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Certainly, he was feeling relieved. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What should we talk about related to the assassination? | ||
| Well, give me the basics for people that really don't know anything about the assassination. | ||
| There's now evidence that there was more involvement of Confederate counterintelligence, whatever you want to call it, than previously. | ||
| In other words, it wasn't entirely John Wilkes Booth and his Confederates. | ||
| Is there hard evidence on that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've heard little things. | ||
| I don't really have a lot to say about the assassination of Lincoln. | ||
| One of the big debates is, if Lincoln hadn't been assassinated, would he have continued his lenient policy towards the southern states? | ||
| And I go along with the historians who say no, that he was trying leniency in order to try to reestablish the Whig Party in the South. | ||
| But it wasn't turning out that way. | ||
| And Congressional Reconstruction may not have been quite as harsh under Lincoln as it turned out to be without Lincoln. | ||
| But Lincoln's views had evolved to the extent that he would not have been, would have been willing to tolerate the black codes that the States were setting up. So you think certainly by his | ||
| second term where he would have had a freer hand he would have done a lot of the things that... That | ||
| happened during congressional reconstruction. Yeah, that's my speculation. Yeah. | ||
| What was it like after the assassination? | ||
| Well, it's like any assassination, you know, there there is a | ||
| manhunt, there is an attempt to track down the conspiracy and | ||
| you have several conspirators hung including Mary Surratt who... and there's a lot of controversy about whether she | ||
| was actually involved or not involved and | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| So it certainly hardens Northern attitudes. | ||
| But remember... Was there really a feeling that he was the one keeping it all together at that point still? | ||
| Or was the feeling that the war had been won, it was gonna be okay either way? | ||
| You know, he was such a symbol of what had happened. | ||
| I mean, he had all... | ||
| That's an interesting question. | ||
| In some circles, he had already become deified. | ||
| But not to the extent that the assassination deified him. | ||
| Remember, he'd already been elected for a second term, so he did not face significant political opposition. | ||
| Before the fall of Atlanta, because the war had dragged on so long, it wasn't always | ||
| clear that Lincoln would be re-nominated by the Republican Party. | ||
| And there were elements in the Republican Party who wanted to replace him and rivals | ||
| who wanted to replace him. | ||
| So really, I think that's what we're going to see. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| Uh, you have you have Andrew Johnson being president, you know, for most of Lincoln's second term, and he's impeached or he's impeached and almost removed. | ||
| From office because of his disagreement with the Republicans who are in tight control of Congress because the southern states have been kept out, are still not in, except for Tennessee and the slave states that didn't secede, they're still not in the Union, are permitted to have representatives in Congress. | ||
| So the Republicans have a free hand irrespective of whether Lincoln's in office or Andrew Johnson's in office or Grant is in office. | ||
| Right, interesting. | ||
| So one of the reasons that I wanted to do this YouTube week was to help frame things around how politics are right now. | ||
| So to sort of wrap all this up first, what do you think Lincoln's politics would be today if you were to try to take the things that you think he believed in the most within a sort of modern context. | ||
| Is there a way that you can make sense of that? | ||
| Because I see he gets used by everyone all the time. | ||
| Lincoln would have been a Republican for this. | ||
| He would have been a Democrat for this. | ||
| Is there a way you can frame that? | ||
| I don't like playing that game. | ||
| I mean, things have changed so much. | ||
| And the context is so different. | ||
| It's really hard to say. | ||
| One of the interesting things about Lincoln And this is one of my sort of reservations or criticisms of Lincoln, actually criticisms of the people who deify Lincoln as president. | ||
| is the Whig Party had this ambivalent attitude in terms of government versus the presidency. | ||
| They were in favor of a lot of government intervention, but at the same time they had emerged in opposition to Andrew Jackson and his very uh... vigorous often high-handed presidency so they tended to favor uh... the legislature as the dominant uh... uh... uh... mover uh... force in the government rather than the presidency and i think uh... lincoln had imbibed this wig attitude uh... about uh... | ||
| administration. And as a result, I think being a wartime president, he had to ignore it to | ||
| a large extent. But I think that it created some of the administrative problems that emerged | ||
| during Lincoln's presidency. So I think Lincoln would be, would have very ambivalent feelings | ||
| about how powerful the president has become within government, irrespective of what policies | ||
| were being implemented. | ||
| I will accept that as an answer. | ||
| That really was what I was trying to get to. | ||
| Not that he would have endorsed this policy or that policy, but just his general take on what power was, the opposite of the presidency, and things of that nature. | ||
| Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| Are we done? | ||
| We're done. | ||
| We did the whole hour? | ||
| That was a pretty quick hour. | ||
| Did we miss anything major? | ||
| We missed a lot of major things. | ||
| All right, give me something major that we missed. | ||
| Well, I'll give you a couple things. | ||
| One is, I mean, my book. | ||
| You didn't mention my book. | ||
| Let's talk about your book. | ||
| Well, I think you sort of hit on it there. | ||
| You're more critical of his involvement in the war than some of the people who deify him. | ||
| Yeah, the book is a narrative history of the Civil War, but I have about half a dozen provocative theses where I disagree with prevailing views. | ||
| And one of them is that I argue that if Northerners had been interested in ending slavery rather than preserving the Union, there's a set of policies they could have adopted allowing the lower south to go in peace, | ||
| which would have brought down slavery within an independent confederacy, | ||
| certainly by the turn of the century, and possibly within four years. | ||
| And why letting them go would do that? | ||
| Well, letting them go didn't necessarily do it. | ||
| It just means that you didn't have to kill 750,000 people in order to bring about the end of slavery. | ||
| In other words, I think there is a set of policies that could have achieved the same goal at less cost. | ||
| In other words, I was actually turned on to this alternative by Garrison and the other | ||
| radical abolitionists. | ||
| In other words, you can be rabidly anti-slavery and still pro-secession. | ||
| The second important argument I make has to do with the growth of government. | ||
| I think it's a commonplace observation that government today is a lot more powerful and a lot more intrusive than it was earlier in our history. | ||
| And whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing, there's the question of what changed and what brought about the change. | ||
| The popular story is that it's the New Deal, right? | ||
| That made the big change in the growth of government, and I think that's mistaken. | ||
| It's mistaken in part because the New Deal was essentially a recreation of Woodrow Wilson's war collectivism, and the impact of the New Deal on government was dwarfed by the impact of World War II. | ||
| Now, there's some elements of truth. | ||
| The New Deal gives you Social Security, and along with Medicare, that's become government's biggest expenditure. | ||
| More sophisticated commentators would push the change back to the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, but I'm arguing that the Civil War is the crucial watershed. | ||
| In American history that prior to that, prior to the Civil War, the long-term secular trend had at all levels of government for government to become smaller, less intrusive, less involved in people's lives, and that the turning point is the Civil War. | ||
| That leaves him with a complex legacy from some small government people. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Yeah, interesting. | ||
| Yeah, because during the Civil War, I mean, national conscription, the U.S. | ||
| moves from free trade to high protective tariffs, the first Western country to do so, massive subsidies to railroads, first subsidies to higher education through land grants, And I've already gone over my time. | ||
| I could go on and on and on. | ||
| You got one more? | ||
| One more big, big point that's in the book related to Lincoln. | ||
| Yeah, one more point that's related to Lincoln. | ||
| I think that one of the reasons it takes the Union so long to defeat the Confederacy is because of Lincoln's bad administration of the military. | ||
| He tended to micromanage uh... the war uh... uh... like lyndon johnson tried to micromanage the vietnam war and historians want to place all of the blame on lincoln's generals uh... whereas i think that really the source of the problem is lincoln uh... consider the eastern theater alright so uh... you have a succession of commanders | ||
| Irvin McDowell, defeated at the first bull run, replaced by McClellan. | ||
| McClellan is almost supplanted by John Pope, who's defeated at the second bull run, only to bring back McClellan, then to replace him with Burnside, who admitted that he wasn't ready to command the army, and then Hooker, and then Meade. | ||
| Now normally, and this is within a period of two years, two and a half years, normally this doesn't earn administrators high marks. | ||
| In terms of how they're managing things, right? | ||
| And I think that, I mean, there were problems with all the generals. | ||
| The advantage that the generals in the West had, Sherman and Grant, is they weren't micromanaged by Lincoln and therefore they could make their mistakes early in the war and learn from them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I like that you gave us a complex view. | ||
| I mean, that's really why I wanted to do this, that, you know, we pick certain ones. | ||
| I think Lincoln is one that we all sort of view in this lens of this perfect being. | ||
| Yeah, the cult of Lincoln. | ||
| Of course, and of course he did a tremendous amount of good, but it's interesting hearing what the little imperfections are and all sorts of things. |
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