April 18, 2020 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
Well, folks, our Confederate History Month series, every April, we've been doing it for 16 years.
It has become a fan favorite long since and got all over the country, by the way, if not the world.
Little message here from Philip in Granite City, Illinois.
Times are tough, but here's a small donation for the best show on the radio.
Well, thank you, Philip.
And so many of you have written in about our Confederate History Month series, either in anticipation of it or in response to it since we've started a couple of weeks ago, and it has been good.
Tonight's show has been fantastic.
The opening hour with the British barrister Adrian Davis, a longtime friend of mine, dissident mama, Rebecca, former mainstream media journalist turned domesticated Southern Belle.
She was with us to kick off our Confederate coverage tonight.
What a fantastic guest she was.
And now, one of our all-time favorites, one of the most interviewed guests in the history of TPC, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review.
Of course, as you know, you don't need to be reminded, but I'll remind you anyway, Mark is an accomplished historian, a lecturer, a current affairs analyst, and author.
He was educated in both the United States and Europe.
He holds a master's degree in modern European history.
And, of course, as the director of the Institute of Historical Review, we're bringing him home tonight in his capacity to speak to us about southern history as this is, after all, Confederate History Month.
Mark, welcome back.
Great to have you.
Thank you very much, James.
I'm always touched and even humbled by the generosity of your introduction.
So I always feel I've got to live up to it.
But thank you very much again.
It's always a pleasure being on with you.
Well, Mark, look, we don't blow smoke at anyone here.
You know that.
You are my friend.
But I tell you what, your accolades that you earn as a commentator and as a guest are, in fact, well-deserved.
And it's interesting, Keith.
You know, we had Mark on last month during our World Tour series.
So Mark, I mean, that is rare air indeed.
He appears during our March Around the World and our Confederate History Month series.
Only Mark Weber could do that.
As my southern grandmother would say, Mark is from the top dresser drawer.
Well, thank you very much.
Well, you know, I'm not a southerner.
I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon.
I do have ancestry on my mother's father's side from Louisiana, a little town called Thibodeau.
Every year has a reunion of that side of the family in Louisiana.
But I can't say I'm really very southern in my outlook.
But like millions of people, I've always been impressed by the, well, the grandeur, the romance, the heritage of the South.
I'm always still very moved every time I watch Gone with the Wind.
I don't think anybody can watch it who has any kind of heart and not be moved by so much about that movie.
And I've read Gone with the Wind several times, and I think it's one of the great American novels.
But what I try to do with the Institute for Historical Review is relate the past to the present.
That is, to deal with the past as it is relevant for our times and to talk about events that are going on today from a historical perspective.
And when you told me or invited me on the show, I wanted to really stress an aspect, I think, about all this that I think should be just emphasized over and over.
You know, over the years, I and others like me have done a lot or tried to do a lot to encourage a greater awareness of history that we believe is more objective, more truthful, less bigoted, less prejudiced than what we get in our mainstream media and in much of our educational establishment.
And for doing that, we're very often criticized as, or dismissed even, as historical revisionists because they say we're rewriting history.
Well, however true that may be, there's nothing more that illustrates what's happening in America, in our cultural life, in our political life, than the radical, drastic rewriting of history that's going on in America today.
And this is nowhere more true than how, over the past several years, particularly, there's been this huge, systematic, across-the-country campaign to denigrate and smear Robert E. Lee.
Now, Robert E. Lee, I think, was an exemplary man, and there's a good reason why.
For more than a century, he was held in high regard by Americans and not just Southerners, not just Southerners, but by Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
And the way he is now smeared, his statues are being taken down and so forth, just, I think, underscores the sickness, the evil of our society in a drastic rewriting of history.
And it's a shameful thing, I think, that this is not only happening, but that so many people are permitting it to happen.
Here in California, when this campaign started up and running a couple of years ago, the state legislature here passed a law, which was signed by the governor, to make it illegal to have any state school named after Robert E. Lee.
And this is just shameful.
And I want to say more about that, but that's just something I want to get into and emphasize because it's really relevant of our past, our history, relevant in times we live in today.
Well, Mark, if you want to get a real handle on how public opinion and the establishment viewpoint towards the Confederacy has changed, I can't think of anything better for you to watch than the movie Santa Fe Trail with Ronald Reagan as George Custer, Errol Flynn as Jeb Stewart, and Maron I. Olson as Robert E. Lee.
And it's all about, and Raymond Massey's John Brown.
It's about the John Brown history.
I told you I didn't bring that name up again on this show, Keith.
No, but that's it.
Watch that.
It's free.
Mark got that one.
It's on YouTube, and it's free.
And that was Hollywood's viewpoint on the whole issue back in 1939.
And I was reading the comments from current listeners, and I mean, viewers, and they said, this is Ku Klux Klan propaganda.
But that was Hollywood's viewpoint on it in 1939.
Well, it was the viewpoint of virtually everyone during those years.
I mean, things have been so turned upside down in our country that the views that not only ordinary Americans, but American leaders, military commanders, presidents held for up until the last 40, 50, 60 years are now considered not merely wrong and out of date, but evil.
That's just fantastic and really shows such an arrogance, an assumption, a self-absorbed, arrogant assumption. that this generation has got it right and nobody else in the past got it right.
It's an insult against our ants, not only our ancestors, but the wisdom of all healthy societies throughout history.
And that movie you're talking about.
Mark Sander Petro, it's a great movie.
I've seen it several times.
I saw first as a kid when it was being shown one night.
Well worth seeing.
Mark, when we come back, my goodness, you and Keith could have a night of movies.
Keith has a VHS collection that would, man, it would make anybody.
I'm proudly stating I've never paid over a quarter for any of my VHS agents.
Crystals.
Back with Mark forever.
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I'd advise Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.
The press has created a rigged system.
They even want to try and rig the election.
Well, I tell you what, it helps in Ohio that we got Democrats in charge of the machines.
And poisoned the mind of so many of our voters.
At the polling booth, where so many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common.
And then they say, oh, there's no voter fraud in our country.
I come from Chicago.
So I want to be honest.
It's not as if it's just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past.
Sometimes Democrats have to.
You know, whenever people are in power, they have this tendency to try to tilt things in their direction.
There's no voter fraud.
You start whining before the game's even over.
Whenever things are going badly for you and you lose, you start blaming somebody else, then you don't have what it takes to be in this job.
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All right, so
now, as overmodulated or as undermodulated or as static as that may have sounded, Keith, why were you so persistent to get that played?
Because that's part of my life.
I remember as a child back in the early 60s, going to Ole Miss football games and hearing the Ole Miss band dressed in Confederate uniforms playing Dixie, and they had a huge Confederate flag that they would unfurl behind the band.
And Colonel Rebel back then was not some cartoonist character.
It was a guy in a cap of SIG, a Kappa SIG that was riding a white horse into the stadium brandishing a sword.
Now, you are a member of the, what, alumni of the University of Mississippi?
I'm an alum of the Ole Miss Law School.
And of the Ole Miss Law School.
And that was what you just heard.
Now, it wasn't the best audio, but it's the best audio that we had.
That was the last time the Ole Miss Band played Dixie at the University of Mississippi.
And that's that.
Tommy Tuberville, by the way, was the coach at the time who was anti-Everything Confederate.
And that's why Tommy Tuberville needs to lose to Jeff Sessions in the special election that's coming up in, I think, June or July.
Well, you need to move to Alabama and vote.
Hey, listen, we got Mark Weber, of course, for IHR Institute for Historical Review.
Longtime friend, one of our all-time favorite guests.
And Mark, I got this letter in from a listener.
And of all places in Utah, which is actually where our network is based, obviously we're a local show here in Tennessee.
But a listener in Utah wrote this, Dear James and Keith, I stumbled on some interesting Civil War history that took place in Utah.
Sam Bushman may be interested in this.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, soldiers from the South that were stationed at Camp Floyd in Utah were released from the U.S. Army.
General Albert Sidney Johnston of Shiloh fame marched eastward in April.
In July, a second group of 40 men led by General Philip Cook marched east to join the Confederate Army.
When marching through the rugged Spanish Fork Canyon, they were caught in a freak July snowstorm.
Six men and a 14-year-old boy froze to death.
The gravestones mention, here lies seven unknown soldiers buried.
These great men paid the ultimate price.
I'm not sure if this is worth if this is worthy of Confederate History Month, but I found it interesting.
And what's equally interesting, Mark, is that he closed.
Now, this is a listener in Utah, Jeff, who didn't know you were going to be on when he sent this letter in.
He closes his letter by writing, thanks for your great work.
I especially enjoy when you have Mark Weber as a guest.
Mark, man of great taste.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
That's very kind.
Very kind.
Well, I wanted to get back again about Robert E. Lee and the way that he is denigrated and torn down in our society and what it says about America today.
This should really be of concern to everybody.
I wanted to get back to that because that's not the way it was 20, 30, 40, and 50 years ago.
During the 1950s, in the White House of President Eisenhower, there was a picture, a portrait of Robert E. Lee on the wall.
And Eisenhower got some criticism for that.
By the way, the criticism he got was not the criticism of today.
It was mainly the fact that Robert E. Lee had been fighting against the government, not because he was a defender of evil, slavery, or anything like that, which we hear all the time.
But he was criticized for this because Robert E. Lee did take up, of course, with Virginia and the Confederacy in battle against the federal forces, and he was criticized.
And President Eisenhower wrote a letter to a critic of him for putting that picture on the White House office wall.
And he replied, and he said he wrote why he put up this picture, why he said, I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.
And here's what President Eisenhower wrote, and it's worth remembering.
He wrote, General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our nation.
He was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens.
He was thoughtful, yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies, but ingenious, unrelenting, and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or an obstacle.
Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God.
Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man and unsullied.
As I read the pages of our history, a nation of men of Lee's caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul.
And when I, considering that, think for a moment, can anyone name a single prominent American public figure today, especially in political life, who we could say justly is, to use Eisenhower's words, poised, thoughtful, selfless almost to a fault, unfailing in his faith in God, noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied.
I don't think we have such characters in public life in America today.
And that's important.
This goes far beyond even the Confederacy.
Over the centuries, the character traits that Lee personified have been regarded and held up as important virtues by all healthy and enduring nations.
And that's not the case in today's America.
Anyone who watches American television and movies knows that, well, on popular TV shows like Friends or Two and a Half Men, the leading characters, they're sarcastic, they're confused, they're self-important, and they lead self-absorbed and meaningless lives.
And that is much more a token of America today and the way that Robert E. Lee and men of his character are run down.
Eisenhower believed that a nation of men of Lee's caliber could be unconquerable in spirit and soul.
But I think it's just as true to say that any nation, even one of material comfort or has freedoms that lacks men like that, is unviable.
It's sickly, and nothing better illustrates, as I said earlier, the evil or the sickliness of our age and our society than the way that Robert E. Lee is smeared and denigrated and the character, along with the character of outstanding men who founded the country in the 18th century.
Well, you don't mean to say that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is inferior to Robert E. Lee, heaven forbid.
I'm not going to go into words like inferior or superior, but these are virtues.
Every healthy society throughout the ages, in ancient Greece, in all healthy societies, the virtues that Robert E. Lee personified have been and are considered important character traits essential to the especially the leadership of any good country, any good nation.
Well, he was a true paragon.
He's the only person that ever went through West Point without earning a single demerit, and he was number two in his class.
You know, show me someone else that can say that.
Robert E. Lee had a very strong temper, and he worked very hard to control it.
He was a man of tremendous self-control.
That's, in all of human history, that's considered a good trait.
In our society, it's somehow considered a virtue to be impulsive, to not control one's own emotions or let it all hang out, as I said in the 60s.
Mark, what you just stated to this audience was beautiful.
It was poignant.
It was heartfelt.
I thank you so much for sharing your perspective with this audience as we continue to celebrate here in the South Confederate History Month.
We'll be back with Mark Weber for two more segments, and we'll get into more of this, more of the same, more fantastic content next.
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President Trump is again going after some governors he thinks are making unreasonable demands in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
You don't hear anymore about ventilators.
What happened to the ventilators?
And now they're giving you the other.
It's called testing, testing.
But they don't want to use all of the capacity that we've created.
We have tremendous capacity.
He says several states are going ahead with plans to start reopening for business, despite warnings from health experts that doing it too soon could give the pandemic a second wind.
He also says China should face consequences if it knew about the virus and didn't immediately alert the rest of the world.
If they were knowingly responsible, certainly.
If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake.
But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, then there should be consequences.
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President Trump tweeted, Michigan should liberate from stay-at-home orders.
Governor Gretchen Whitmere responded.
I hope that it's not encouraging more protests.
There's no one more eager to start re-engaging sectors of our economy than I am.
But the last thing I want to do is to have a second wave here, and so we've got to be really smart.
Nebraska's Governor Pete Ricketts wants residents to wait until May, then start reopening.
That phase approach aligns with what we've been saying all along, right?
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With many farms and food companies on lockdown, too, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue is vowing to keep food supplies coming.
America agriculture has been hard hit like most of America with the coronavirus.
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Welcome back.
To get on the show, call us on James's Dime at 1-866-986-6397.
Well, we're back with Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, IHR.org.
Make that one of your daily reads as well, and one of the organizations that you are supporting financially, folks.
There are very few organizations and individuals that have stood the test of time.
Mark Weber and IHR are one of them.
Please give them your consideration.
Mark, we were talking in the last segment about the character of the men of the South during the Confederate era.
Now, when we come back in the next segment, our final segment, I'd like to talk with you about the two presidents of the war era, of course, Davis and Lincoln, and we'll get to that momentarily, but the character of the Southern man and woman in the 1860s, obviously 1861 to 1865.
You write this, Mark.
At the beginning of the terrible conflict, thousands of young men across the South volunteered to fight for a cause for which they were willing to make great sacrifices, if need be, to give their lives.
At the front, Confederate soldiers typically endured great privation week after week, month after month, in hot, humid summers, days, and in cold winters.
Far from home and loved ones, they often trampled long distances and slept on the ground, sometimes in rain and snow, putting up with vermin, mosquitoes, illnesses, and wretched food.
Soldiers were not the only ones who sacrificed, as you are very good to remember, Mark.
Across the Confederacy, wives back at home accepted their husbands' decisions to fight.
While their men were away, those many tens of thousands of women took up the hard work of running farms and stores without their husbands, adding to the traditional tasks of raising children and keeping a home.
Mark, how do the people of our modern era compare to those ancestors that you write about in your very stirring commentary?
It's well worth remembering because self-sacrifice, willingness to endure privation for a noble and good cause, for our fellow, for those we care about, for those who are our own people.
Those are virtues throughout the ages, in all centuries, in all healthy societies.
And that is in short supply today.
You know, to go back to Robert E. Lee, at the beginning of the war, Robert E. Lee was offered the command of the Union armies, of the Federal Army, at the beginning of the war.
Now, imagine how many people would not jump at the chance to do that.
But he said, I cannot raise my arms, my sword, against my native state.
His native state was Virginia, and his home was just across the river, the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., in Arlington, Virginia, where I lived for five years.
He turned that down for an unknown future.
It was unclear what was going to happen.
As it turned out, he lost everything.
He lost his home, Arlington, which then was taken over by the federal government.
It's now Arlington National Cemetery, and turned down this.
Now, today, in today's America, he'd be considered a fool and an idiot for turning that down because he could have sat out the war as a commander, had been the commander on the winning side in a surefire thing, because even if the South had not been defeated and the North didn't prevail, the Northern commanders were still thinking.
Anyway, that's a very different thing than today.
And now in our time, we live in an era of great comforts, of gadgets, conveniences, and nobody, unless they're just stupid, is going to be short of things to eat or drink.
In fact, the problem is there's too much.
And so particularly in our age, it's worth remembering the courage, the devotion to principle, the readiness to sacrifice of the Americans of the 1860s of that period on both sides, but particularly in the South, which, of course, suffered far more than the North.
And who can doubt that the Americans of that age were a tougher breed than Americans today?
Now, I think that's especially worthwhile because there are so many people that are unwilling even to express unpopular views to their friends because they might be called names or people might think they're bad.
But in reality, that's a very tiny, tiny price to pay for being true to one's own self.
And in our age, it's incredible how little even those who are dissidents have to really sacrifice compared to the tremendous privation, the great suffering that people endured and were willing to endure, particularly in the South, but even many in the North for a cause that they thought was right.
That kind of courage.
Courage is a virtue.
And that should be held up, particularly when exemplified by men of the caliber, as Eisenhower said, of Robert E. Lee.
And of course, the reason the South was fighting was not over slavery.
I like Shelby Foote's comment when he was asked that question.
He replied with a quote from a Southern foot soldier that was captured at Shiloh.
And one of his Northern interrogators was asking him, why would a poor man like you fight to preserve slaves and whatnot?
And the soldier said, because you're down here.
In other words, we've been invaded by you.
That's why most Southerners fought.
And they did not want to be tyrannically dominated and ruled over by people from outside their own area.
Wanted representative government just like the American revolutionaries did.
I want to go back to something that James was starting to talk about, and that's comparing Jefferson and Lincoln.
I mean, however bad either one was or their cause, each of them were far more just willing to understand the other person's point of view than just about any political leader, than so many political leaders in today's America.
They didn't just assume that the motives and the character of those people they disagreed with were bad and evil.
I mean, Lincoln himself was born in Kentucky.
His wife's family was far even more southern than Lincoln's ties to the South.
And she had brothers who fought on the Confederacy.
And Lincoln even said in one speech, he said, here we are in a war in which we're essentially the same people.
We pray to the same God.
And we're fighting this terrible, terrible conflict here.
I mean, but today, there's an assumption that people who we disagree with, or may disagree with, and the arrogance of people who in our society assume that those people who lived and acted in our own ancestors 50, 60, 100 years ago were not only wrong but evil is unbelievable arrogance.
It's a self-righteousness that's just sickening, really.
The only people that thought like that in the North were the abolitionists, and they were a tiny minority of the people in the North.
Of course, in the North, they were a very small minority.
And I mean, because they were also infused with this self-righteousness.
And yet, in our time, that fanatic minority is now considered the only people that got it right out of all the people in the American Civil War.
By today's standards, Abraham Lincoln was no good.
His views are considered now not only unacceptable, but also evil.
This is crazy because a country like that has no coherence.
It has no identity.
It has no heritage.
It's just a...
It's not a nation.
It's not a true nation.
It's not even a collection of individuals.
It's just a sort of ideology.
It's like a version of neo-Bolshevism or communism in which the egalitarian or prevailing ideology trumps everything else.
It's demonic cacophony.
Well, I'll tell you what we're going to do in the next segment.
Now, how can you possibly do this in one segment of commercial radio?
It's about 10 minutes time.
We are going to try to tackle Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln in one segment with Mark Weber of IHR.
Impossible, I know, but we'll do the best we can.
That's all we can do.
But Mark, we have anybody can.
But Mark, we have seconds remaining this segment.
Give us your website, your website, that contact information, and how people can support you.
Yeah, the website's very easy to find.
It's ihr.org.
Very, very easy.
Simple.
If you have any trouble, just type Institute for Historical Review.
It's very easy to find.
We keep it updated.
In spite of all the lockdown and restrictions that are in place because of this coronavirus, we are still able to maintain a lot of what we do.
And thanks to you, James, I'm still able to do this and other interviews.
We also put out still our free email bulletin of news and comment items and so forth, not the website.
We are restricted right now in fulfilling orders and shipping them out like so many other people because the person who handles that isn't able to come into the office right now.
But please check that out.
IHR.org for the Institute for Historical Review.
It's been a fantastic show tonight, as it always is when Mark's on.
But in addition to Mark, we've had Adrian Davis in the first hour talking about the situation in London and the UK checking in and our kinsman across the pond.
Dissident Mama, a former mainstream media journalist who has been transformed into a domesticated southern bell.
DissidentMama.net.
Rebecca was on with us to talk about her story in the second hour.
And now Mark Weber the third.
Now, what a hell of a show tonight.
Hell of a show.
We'll be right back to wrap it up next.
Yeah, this is David in engineering.
This is your wife in Suburbia.
Oh, hi, Ann.
What's up?
How's the robot coming?
Well, he doesn't exactly respond to requests yet, but I know how frustrating that can be.
You do.
I'm still waiting for my romantic lunch day.
Oh, yeah.
David.
I must not have enough memory, allocated.
Uh-huh.
Sorry.
You know, your son said mama today.
Really?
Uh-huh.
Well, we'll have to have that sound chip changed to dada.
Well, you could reprogram it yourself, you know.
I know.
Hey, why don't we do it over lunch today?
Oh, you really are previewing things.
You want me to bring the robot?
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He can order pasta in 11 languages.
Only if he pays for his own lunch.
Okay.
Oh, don't forget to bring Chip.
I still wish we hadn't named him that.
Why?
It beats general defaults.
Oh.
Family, isn't it about time?
Do you know that a baby processes information three times faster than an adult?
An adult what?
Engineer.
Finally, funny.
I'll see you in this.
I can't wait.
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Okay, we're going to try to split a 10-minute segment of commercial radio with a great guest, Mark Weber, dealing with the two presidents of the War Between the States era, Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln.
And Mark, I'm going to read two excerpts and then have you respond first on Jefferson Davis.
When Jefferson Davis died in December of 1889, it was the largest funeral the South had ever seen.
And an astonished North looked on in amazement.
According to a Library of Congress photo, it was late November 1889 when Jefferson Davis boarded a train bound for New Orleans.
In New Orleans, he purchased a ticket on a steamer for travel to his plantation in Briarfield, south of Vicksburg, to settle accounts with his overseer.
The weather turned cold and rainy, and he became ill and feverish, and he developed bronchitis.
The Confederate president was unable to leave Briarfield to return home to Beauvoir in Biloxi, Mississippi, for several days.
But on that last day, kind hands helped him as he made his way through the broad middle hall of Briarfield to the porch that descended the steps to the carriage, which was waiting to take him to the landing.
As he looked out, he saw the remnants of white cotton which were still on the fields.
The overseer's 10-year-old daughter timidly approached him to ask if he would please write in her memory book, Unable to Disappoint a Child, he wrote, quote, may all your paths be peaceful and pleasant, charged with the best fruit, the doing good to others, end quote.
In New Orleans, the boat was met by prominent doctors and by four Tulane medical students waiting to take him to the home of a friend.
After he lingered for several days, he died on December 6th, 1889.
Newspapers in New York wrote the following, quote, he was a man of commanding ability, spotless integrity, and controlling conscience.
He was proud and sensitive and honorable in all of his dealings and in every relation of life.
A great soul has passed, end quote.
And another New York newspaper at the time wrote, the South loves his memory as it should, and as people of every patriotic country should and ever will respect it.
Were the people of the South to ever forget him or fail to honor the man who endured so patiently for their sake, they in turn should deserve none of the respect or place in the minds of men.
Mark Weber.
Jefferson Davis hasn't changed since his death.
So what has?
Because now everything is looked at through this very bigoted, narrow lens of political correctness or ideology that distorts everything.
It distorts how we look at not only men like Jefferson Davis and our own history, but all of the world's history.
It's really a cancer.
It's terrible to have this kind of self-centered, self-important view of the past.
Jefferson Davis was, as that newspaper points out, was a man of great dignity, bearing.
He was intelligent.
You know, he didn't want to be the Confederate president.
He had been Secretary of War of the federal government earlier on, and he wanted to be a military commander.
He was chosen.
He was widely admired in the South at the provisional government in Montgomery, Alabama, as president because of his character, and that's understandable.
But I think that, as also was pointed out, he was probably overly sensitive.
He could be brittle.
He was sometimes overly officious or he lacked a kind of common touch.
And those traits that he had, which were exemplary, especially strong, were very good in a military role, which was what he was trained in.
That was his career.
They were not as suitable as probably could have been for the office of president of the Confederate States of America.
There were some big defects in the Confederate government, most notably that the president and the vice president couldn't even talk to each other.
They were so at odds with each other.
Alexander Stevens spent most of the Confederacy back at home in Georgia.
Yeah, I think there's a joke about Alexander Stevens that he became a Confederate after the war.
Well, I think you're absolutely right, Mark.
The thing about Jefferson Davis, if he has an Achilles heel, I would hate to put it this bruntly, but he was something of a snob.
Unlike Lincoln, who would take somebody that could win like Grant, who might be unprepossessing and not look like he's really of the proper timber to lead.
Jefferson Davis, for example, never promoted Nathan Bedford Forrest as high as he ought to have done.
And if he had, we probably would have won in the West.
But that's, you know, Abraham Lincoln was told when he was proposing to make Grant the head of the Army of the Potomac by people, he said, you can't put that man in charge.
He's a drunkard.
He's a scapegrace.
He dresses like a slob.
And Abraham Lincoln said, I don't know what he's drinking, but we need to get a barrel of it to every one of our generals.
He said, I can't spare him.
The man fights.
All right.
So with that entry, let's go straight to Lincoln because time is fleeting.
And Mark, I believe you or the Institute for Historical Review published a paper, a booklet, written by our mutual friend Sam Dixon entitled Shattering the Icon of Abraham Lincoln.
As Sam puts it, even in the Christian school or as Sam laments, even in the Christian schools these days, it's amazing to see the amount of worshipful Lincoln Douglas Tubman propaganda.
Well, this is what you wrote, Mark, in response to Dixon's Shattering the Icon of Abraham Lincoln.
The real Lincoln, says Georgia Attorney Dixon, in this punchy sourced, referenced booklet, was quite different than the one portrayed in television, school books, and motion pictures.
The author marshals evidence from throughout his career to show that Abraham Lincoln was a hypocrite, an opportunist, an instigator, and wager of ruthless war, and the nation's first political tyrant, particularly critical of the 16th president's savage war against the Southern Confederacy.
The author contends that Lincoln should be regarded as a dangerous forerunner of such liberal collectivists as Franklin Roosevelt.
How did we get from Lincoln to where we are now?
Was it a logical progression?
And is where we are now a direct relation to what Lincoln did?
Or was it an outlier?
Well, the description is really telling what Dixon said.
I was trying to introduce and summarize what Dixon had to say.
I'm more generous in my assessment of Lincoln than Dixon is.
We've talked many hours about Lincoln and his character.
I think it's fair to say, and this is really my strong view, is that however right or wrong Lincoln was or Jefferson Davis was, the cost in life, in death, and destruction of forcing the South back into the Union was so high and so terrible that it doesn't justify, it's not justifiable.
Lincoln thought he was upholding the Constitution, the constitutional order.
But when the cost of, when the price of doing so is the death of hundreds of thousands of fine young men, such huge destruction, then it's simply, in my mind, simply not worth it.
As you know, many American presidents have bent or violated the Constitution for far, far less reasons.
And no one, it's important to realize, no one in 1860 or 61, when the Confederacy was established and when the war began, ever anticipated that the war would go on the way it did and would lead to such tremendous bloodletting and destruction as turned out.
And I dare say that if anyone had foreseen, could have foreseen what was going to come out, they would have stood back and never embarked on that terrible, terrible path.
But, you know, hindsight is 2020.
It's very hard to have foresight.
And very often, that's why leadership who is able to have a strong understanding of the past, which is the best guide to the future, is all the more really, really necessary.
But no, Lincoln had a flexibility that Jefferson Davis didn't have.
And he was able to keep control of his own cabinet and to get increasing amount of popular support in a way that Jefferson Davis eluded him throughout the Confederacy.
There was tremendous criticism in the Confederate press of Lincoln.
He was just bashed all the time, even by his own vice president.
One of the last speeches that Alexander Stevens, his own vice president, gave, was to the Georgia State Legislature in 1864, which was a fierce denunciation of the very man he was supposed to be the vice president of.
I mean, Mark Davis had tremendous problems.
Yeah, Mark, I was going to say this.
I think that the revision that ought to be done regarding Lincoln's reputation is that he was not the great emancipator, but he was the great maven of an imperial United States.
He wanted America, the United States of America, to cast a large shadow and a big footprint in international affairs.
And he knew they couldn't do that if it was half the size with half the wealth, which is what would have been the result of the South seceding.
Also, the South was paying most of the taxes that was running the federal government.
And when the Virginia delegation asked for an audience with Lincoln, this was before they got out of the union, Lincoln's first word to him wasn't about slavery.
He said, what about my tariffs?
Well, listen, folks, we're out of time.
IHR.org, Mark, we could have gone three hours with you tonight.
We're ready to have you back next week.
As soon as you're able, let me know.
And the red carpet will be yours.
Mark Weber, IHR.org.
Check him out.
Thank you, Mark, for being with us for Confederate History Month tonight.
Back with you again next week, and Mark, with you as soon as you're ready.
For Keith Alexander, I'm James Edwards.
Good night, everybody.
God bless you.
We'll see you next week when we wrap up Confederate History Month 2020.