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00:00:06On the night of January 2nd, 1864, Confederate General Patrick Claiborne was worried.
00:00:11He warned his fellow Southerners that surrender to the North, quote,
00:00:14means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy,
00:00:18that our youth will be trained by northern school teachers,
00:00:21will learn from northern school books, their version of the war,
00:00:25will be impressed by all the influences of history and education
00:00:28to regard our gallant dead as traitors, our maimed veterans, as fit subjects for derision.
00:00:35Claiborne was only partly right.
00:00:37For most of the following century, non-Southerners were pretty fair about the war
00:00:41and openly respected the South's leaders, including Lee.
00:00:44Four top Americans of the past.
00:00:47They are Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, and Lee.
00:00:51The South erected statues and monuments to its heroes.
00:00:55Several were erected inside the United States Capitol.
00:00:59Even abroad, people respected the dignity, bravery, and brilliance of Robert E. Lee.
00:01:04Winston Churchill described Lee as one of the noblest Americans who ever lived
00:01:08and one of the greatest captains known to the annals of war.
00:01:12It was almost exactly one century after the war, in the 1960s, when things took a turn.
00:01:17But even then, it wasn't immediate.
00:01:19In 1977, the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd performed in Oakland, California
00:01:24with the Confederate battle flag as their backdrop.
00:01:27In 1988, Hank Williams Jr. released a top ten hit called If the South Would Have Won.
00:01:33But during the woke upheavals of the last decade, the story really changed.
00:01:37And the statues and flags started coming down.
00:01:41Even conservatives in the South had turned on Southern heritage.
00:01:44It's time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds.
00:01:51150 years after the end of the Civil War, the time has come.
00:01:55The retreat opened the floodgates for anti-American radicals
00:01:58who literally desecrated the grave of Robert E. Lee's horse,
00:02:02melted his statues, and slandered his reputation.
00:02:05The Confederacy, the American Civil War, it was an act of rebellion.
00:02:09It was an act of treason at the time.
00:02:11The current understanding of the Civil War, as it's taught in Hollywood and schools
00:02:15and everywhere else, is a cartoon caricature.
00:02:18I can't breathe.
00:02:21Robert E. Lee represented me.
00:02:23The last ten years have been a master class in historical malpractice,
00:02:27so jaw-droppingly stupid that, honestly, most sane people would just change the channel
00:02:34and call it a day.
00:02:35But here we are, obligated to tell the truth, so here it goes.
00:02:40The Civil War is not nearly as black and white as the school marms wish it were.
00:02:46It was one of the most complicated events in American history.
00:02:49Its heroes, who existed on both sides, were complex, multidimensional people.
00:02:55Over the course of this video, we're going to prove it.
00:02:59This is the real history of the Civil War.
00:03:11The Civil War
00:03:12Imagine serving as an infantryman in a battle where your enemy outnumbers your side two to one.
00:03:17And not only that, your enemy is better trained.
00:03:21They're well-rested.
00:03:22And to make matters worse, they've caught your regiment and your entire army in a picture.
00:03:28They have a massive number of soldiers behind you and in front of you, perfectly positioned.
00:03:34As an infantryman in this scenario, all you can do is follow orders, march where you're told to march, and
00:03:40shoot when you see the enemy.
00:03:42So, that's what you do.
00:03:45Then imagine that, after a week of the most intense fighting of your life, you realize that your side has
00:03:51somehow emerged victorious.
00:03:52In fact, you've won decisively.
00:03:55You don't remotely understand how it happened.
00:03:58You thought it was impossible.
00:03:59Well, that was the experience of a Confederate soldier named Dorostas Myers during the Battle of Chancellorsville, which lasted from
00:04:07April 30th to May 6th, 1863.
00:04:11On May 11th, Myers, who served as a sergeant with the 33rd Virginia Infantry Regiment, wrote a letter to his
00:04:17brother and sister.
00:04:18Quote,
00:04:40Although the Confederacy lost more than 13,000 soldiers at Chancellorsville, as well as several key officers, including Stonewall Jackson,
00:04:48the battle is widely considered to be the greatest Confederate victory of the Civil War, and one of the most
00:04:53impressive military victories of all time.
00:04:56The historic victory was the result of the leadership of Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Army of Northern
00:05:02Virginia.
00:05:02It's widely regarded as one of the most brilliant tactical victories in American military history, often called Lee's Perfect Battle.
00:05:09It's referenced in books like the West Point Atlas of American Wars, and it continues to be studied in military
00:05:15academies today for its demonstration of outmaneuvering larger forces through audacity and tactical ingenuity.
00:05:22In other words, Robert E. Lee was a genius.
00:05:27So, who was this man who, more than 150 years after his death, is still so frequently talked about?
00:05:35Robert E. Lee was born in 1807 into a prominent Virginia family as the son of revolutionary war hero Henry
00:05:41Light Horse Harry Lee.
00:05:43From a young age, it was obvious that he was a military genius.
00:05:46He graduated second in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point, with zero demerits over four
00:05:53years, and was commissioned into the elite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
00:05:57For over two decades, he served as an exceptional military engineer, overseeing critical infrastructure projects for the federal government.
00:06:04He served in the Mexican-American War, where he performed so well under fire that he was promoted to colonel.
00:06:11After the war, he ran West Point and later commanded cavalry units in Texas.
00:06:15A decade later, in 1863, he found himself fighting the very army that he spent three decades serving.
00:06:22Many of the officers he commanded and fought against were students at West Point when he ran it.
00:06:28He needed a victory at Chancellorsville because he needed European support to break the naval blockade.
00:06:33His enemies sought to destroy Lee's army and reunite the country.
00:06:38The odds were in favor of the Union.
00:06:41Lee's men were facing starvation in Fredericksburg, and he had just split his forces up, sending General James Longstreet and
00:06:47roughly 20,000 soldiers away to Suffolk to defend Richmond and secure more supplies.
00:06:53As the Union army converged on Chancellorsville, they had a substantial numerical advantage.
00:06:59Union forces began crossing the Rappahannock River in late April, laying pontoon bridges just south of Fredericksburg.
00:07:06At the same time, another Union column was marching east, crossing the Rapidan River.
00:07:11Roughly 70,000 Union soldiers ultimately converged at the Chancellorsville crossroads, moving towards Fredericksburg and the rear of the Confederate
00:07:18Army.
00:07:19Meanwhile, Hooker left a force in front of Lee at Fredericksburg under General John Sedgwick.
00:07:24It was clear that a massive battle was brewing.
00:07:27On the evening of April 29th, Jedediah Hotchkiss, a topographical engineer on Stonewall Jackson's staff, remarked,
00:07:34Tomorrow, tomorrow, death will hold high carnival.
00:07:37Faced with a vastly inferior strategic position, Lee had three options.
00:07:41Option one, he could attack Sedgwick's forces, roughly 40,000 men along with artillery, that were directly in front of
00:07:48him at the Rappahannock River.
00:07:50But if the fighting lasted too long, the Union could move from the west and destroy the rear of the
00:07:55Confederate Army.
00:07:56Option two, he could retreat and head south to consolidate his forces.
00:08:01This was the safest maneuver, at least in the short term.
00:08:05Option three, he could split his forces and send Jackson's corps to the west,
00:08:09while leaving some small divisions at the front line, holding Sedgwick at bay.
00:08:16At the time, there were 70,000 Union soldiers over four corps who had moved into the Virginia wilderness facing
00:08:23east.
00:08:25If Lee divided his army to attack those advancing Union forces in the woods,
00:08:29the main risk was that Sedgwick would advance and crush the small number of troops he left behind.
00:08:36Lee decided to take that risk.
00:08:38He ordered Jackson to lead the troops to the west, troops who in the dead of night were unsure of
00:08:43what exactly was going on.
00:08:45William Calder, a soldier in the 2nd North Carolina Infantry, recorded the movement this way,
00:08:51We had no idea where we were going.
00:08:52A soldier never knows where he's going, nor what he's going to do, until the moment for action comes.
00:08:57They have only to trust in their commanders.
00:09:00On we went, through mud and over stumps, stumbling about in the dark,
00:09:04to the great danger of our heads and our shins.
00:09:07All the while, Union generals were congratulating one another.
00:09:10Bands played upbeat songs as soldiers cheered.
00:09:14But by the morning of May 1st, the mood changed.
00:09:17Jackson's army, advancing to the west, ran into Union brigades from the 5th Corps and 12th Corps,
00:09:23catching Hooker off guard.
00:09:25Although the Union maintained a numerical advantage, Hooker ordered his soldiers to pull back.
00:09:30Union generals couldn't believe Hooker's orders.
00:09:32In fact, Major General Henry Slocum, who was in charge of the 12th Corps,
00:09:37called the orders crazy and threatened to shoot the messenger who delivered the news.
00:09:41But ultimately, the generals obeyed.
00:09:44Hooker was still convinced that he was in the superior strategic position, but Lee was not done yet.
00:09:49Jackson proposed yet another secret flanking maneuver,
00:09:52taking his entire corps and leaving behind only 14,000 men.
00:09:56Around 5 a.m. on May 2nd, Lee authorized Jackson to take the entire 2nd Corps,
00:10:0115 infantry brigades consisting of 30,000 soldiers and more than 100 cannon,
00:10:07around the Union's right flank.
00:10:09In the fog of war, Jackson was able to snake around the Union forces undetected
00:10:14with the help of scouts and locals who mapped out a route in the wooded terrain.
00:10:18In his final dispatch to General Lee, Jackson wrote,
00:10:22The enemy has made a stand at Chancellor's, which is about two miles from Chancellorsville.
00:10:26I hope as soon as practicable to attack.
00:10:29I trust that an ever-kind providence will bless us with great success.
00:10:33Respectfully, T.J. Jackson.
00:10:36At 5.30 p.m., Horse Artillery, positioned near the turnpike,
00:10:39fired off two signal shots, which were followed by bugle calls.
00:10:43Jackson's corps emerged suddenly from the woods.
00:10:4612,000 soldiers from the Union's 11th Corps were taken completely by surprise.
00:10:51Many of their trenches were facing the south, not the west,
00:10:53where the Confederate surprise attack was coming from.
00:10:56Very quickly, the Union forces were pushed back about three miles.
00:11:00But they weren't completely defeated.
00:11:01It was dark, and they were in the woods,
00:11:03which complicated Jackson's efforts to crush them.
00:11:06Jackson decided to push forward anyway and headed north to cut off Union retreat.
00:11:11In fact, Jackson himself, along with some other officers,
00:11:14rode out ahead of the Confederate line to get a better sense for what the Union Army was doing.
00:11:20Jackson was wounded by friendly fire and died eight days later.
00:11:25Jackson's profound final words were documented by the historian Shelby Foote.
00:11:30And he called the doctor over and says,
00:11:33Dr. McGuire, my wife tells me I'm going to die today.
00:11:35Is that true?
00:11:36And the doctor said, yes, it is.
00:11:39And he said, good, very good.
00:11:45I always wanted to die on a Sunday.
00:11:48Lee appointed Jeb Stewart to replace Jackson, ordering him to press the attack.
00:11:53And as Lee put it, quote,
00:11:54It is necessary that the glorious victory thus far achieved be prosecuted with the utmost vigor,
00:12:00and the enemy given no time to rally.
00:12:03As soon, therefore, as it is possible,
00:12:05they must be pressed so that we may unite the two wings of the army.
00:12:09Endeavor, therefore, to dispossess them of Chancellorsville,
00:12:11which will permit the union of the whole army.
00:12:14I shall myself proceed to join you as soon as I can make arrangements on this side,
00:12:18but let nothing delay the completion of the plan of driving the enemy from his rear and from his positions.
00:12:24I shall give orders that every effort be made on this side at daybreak to aid in the junction.
00:12:29On May 3rd, Stewart led brutal frontal assaults on critical positions,
00:12:33including the high ground of Hazel Grove, with the goal of reuniting the Confederate Army.
00:12:38The attack was immediately effected in order to prevent another Confederate flanking maneuver
00:12:43where Hooker made the fateful decision to abandon the high ground on Hazel Grove,
00:12:48ordering Sickles to fall back with the rest of the Union forces.
00:12:51It was a pivotal blunter, and yet another cautious decision,
00:12:55while Lee was pursuing a much more aggressive strategy.
00:12:58It's important to emphasize how important Hazel Grove was as an artillery platform.
00:13:04As Chris Michalski writes in That Furious Struggle, quote,
00:13:07In the 70-square-mile sea of trees that made up the wilderness,
00:13:10there were few open plots of ground,
00:13:12making the wilderness a terrible place to deploy artillery.
00:13:15Open ground like Hazel Grove was invaluable.
00:13:18Being on higher ground increases a gun's range,
00:13:21while also making the gun harder to hit with counter-battery fire.
00:13:25The Confederates immediately rushed dozens of guns onto Hazel Grove
00:13:30and unloaded on the Union lines, forcing them to pull back.
00:13:33The cover fire allowed the Confederate Army to reunite, as Lee had ordered.
00:13:37It also had a direct impact on the leadership of the Union Army.
00:13:41Hooker was injured when a Confederate cannonball struck the porch
00:13:44where he was standing at his command center,
00:13:47splintering a piece of wood that fell and hit him.
00:13:49Hooker was never removed from command, nor did his subordinates attempt to replace him.
00:13:52But he was clearly dazed at the worst possible moment,
00:13:56right when his forces were divided and the fighting was fiercest.
00:13:59But at the same time, Sedgwick broke through the Confederate battle lines at Fredericksburg,
00:14:04specifically Mary's Heights, posing a direct and unopposed threat to the rear of Lee's lines.
00:14:09When Lee heard the news, he was stoic.
00:14:11In response to a chaplain who was panicking after bringing word of the advancing Union Army,
00:14:17Lee said simply,
00:14:17Lee, thank you very much.
00:14:19But both you and your horse are overheated.
00:14:22Take him to that shady tree yonder and rest a little.
00:14:26Lee ultimately decided to split his army for a third time.
00:14:29He sent the Second Corps under Brigadier General Raleigh Colston to strike Hooker,
00:14:34and he ordered McLaw's division to march east to fight Sedgwick.
00:14:38Fighting had broken down in three key areas,
00:14:41Salem Church, Fredericksburg, and the Chancellorsville Crossroads.
00:14:45Eventually, Lee rode out to Salem Church to lead the counterattack on Sedgwick directly.
00:14:50He successfully prevented the Union pincer movement once again by dividing his forces.
00:14:55Outmaneuvered, stunned, and physically injured,
00:14:59Hooker ordered a full retreat on the night of May 4th.
00:15:01Lee, by repeatedly dividing his forces when conventional wisdom called for retreating each time,
00:15:07had managed to defeat a much larger army at a time when both the Union and the Confederacy
00:15:11were eager for a major victory.
00:15:14Lee's tactics are still studied today in military academies.
00:15:17He recognized his opponent's strategic weakness and his opponent's fear,
00:15:21and he exploited them both.
00:15:23When the war broke out, no one thought it would last long.
00:15:26One person who knew it wouldn't be short was Robert E. Lee.
00:15:29In early 1861, while still in the U.S. Army at Fort Mason, Texas,
00:15:34he correctly predicted that if it came to armed conflict,
00:15:36quote,
00:15:37the war will last at least four years.
00:15:40He was right.
00:15:41Lee's foresight in recognizing the Civil War's potential for protracted devastation,
00:15:45unlike the naive optimism of many on both sides,
00:15:48underscored his wisdom and his realism.
00:15:51His perfect battle at Chancellorsville showcased Lee's military prowess.
00:15:54The South didn't have the North's industrial capacity, railroads, wealth, or population,
00:16:00but it had some of the greatest military leadership in human history.
00:16:05In other words, Lee and the South, well, they were no losers.
00:16:13When the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861,
00:16:17an immediate question arose.
00:16:18What should the conflict be called?
00:16:21Now, the answer wasn't obvious.
00:16:22On April 15th, President Lincoln issued Proclamation 80,
00:16:25which referred to the attack on Sumter and various state secessions as,
00:16:30quote,
00:16:30combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.
00:16:34In a July 4th message to Congress, Lincoln referred to the war as, quote,
00:16:39a case of rebellion.
00:16:40He continued to use the term rebellion throughout the war,
00:16:43including in the Emancipation Proclamation,
00:16:45where he mentioned the rebellion against the United States.
00:16:48The words were political in nature.
00:16:50The Constitution conferred Lincoln emergency powers if he called it a rebellion.
00:16:55It also denied legitimacy to the South,
00:16:57implying that they were still part of the country.
00:17:00In 1880, when the War Department released the official records of the war,
00:17:04they titled it the War of the Rebellion,
00:17:07a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies.
00:17:10During the war, the South had its own preferred terms,
00:17:13like the War for Southern Independence and the War Between the States.
00:17:17After the first battle of Manassas,
00:17:19Confederate General Stonewall Jackson told his troops,
00:17:22I hope by your future deeds and bearing,
00:17:24you'll be handed down to posterity as the First Brigade in this,
00:17:28our Second War of Independence.
00:17:30Farewell.
00:17:31Harris von Bork, Chief of Staff to Confederate General Jeb Stewart,
00:17:35titled his book,
00:17:37Memoirs of the Confederate War for Independence.
00:17:39Now, whether it was a rebellion or a war for independence depends on who you ask,
00:17:43but it certainly was not a civil war.
00:17:47Civil wars are between two sides that want to control the country.
00:17:50The Russian Civil War was between whites and reds over who would control the Russian Empire.
00:17:56The Chinese Civil War was between communists and nationalists over who would control China.
00:18:01The English Civil War was between parliamentary forces and the king over who would have supreme power over England.
00:18:07There's no evidence whatsoever the South had any interest in occupying or controlling Boston or New York or the entire
00:18:14country.
00:18:15They wanted to leave the Union for various reasons, which they believed they had the legal right to do.
00:18:22The matter at hand was whether the United States was a collection of sovereign states or a centralized union of
00:18:29subordinate states.
00:18:30That wasn't really a question in the early years of the Republic.
00:18:33According to Catherine Drinker Bowen's book, Miracle at Philadelphia,
00:18:37when the Constitutional Convention's Committee of Style and Arrangement originally drafted the preamble,
00:18:42it had no reference to we the people of the United States.
00:18:45In fact, what the articles drafted by the convention had said was,
00:18:49we the undersigned delegates of the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, etc.
00:18:54And so on down the list of the 13.
00:18:57But they scrapped that idea because it was unlikely that they would get all 13 states to ratify the new
00:19:02constitution.
00:19:02So, the real history of how the term we the people was born is that it was a technicality.
00:19:09Back then, you wouldn't have said the United States is a place.
00:19:13You would have said these United States are a place.
00:19:17And that is a very important distinction.
00:19:20In that context, it's not surprising that by 1794, just six years after the Constitution's ratification,
00:19:26two U.S. Senators, Rufus King of New York and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut,
00:19:30approached Senator John Taylor of Virginia and informed him they wanted to break up the Union.
00:19:36Already.
00:19:37They recognized a huge divide between the northern and southern states,
00:19:40and it wasn't just cultural differences between the agrarian South and the urbanized North.
00:19:46They noticed major political and economic differences, too.
00:19:50In 1883, more than two decades after the outbreak of the war,
00:19:54Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts acknowledged that everybody involved in the ratification of the Constitution
00:19:58would have assumed states could leave, writing, quote,
00:20:27The historical record proves this point.
00:20:31Between the founding of the country and 1861, northern states threatened to secede at least five times.
00:20:37In 1803, a group of Massachusetts-based Federalists known as the Essex Junto threatened to secede
00:20:43because they feared the Louisiana Purchase would dilute their political power.
00:20:47Aaron Burr, who was Thomas Jefferson's vice president, was their leader.
00:20:51In 1807, they threatened to leave again after Jefferson put an embargo on Great Britain in France.
00:20:57During the War of 1812, New England once again threatened to secede.
00:21:00Because of the British blockade of their ports.
00:21:03Some states considered independently making peace with the British.
00:21:07Massachusetts and Connecticut refused to place their militias under federal command.
00:21:11They claimed the federal government didn't have the power to do it.
00:21:14In the 1840s, northern politicians published a solemn appeal to the peoples of free states,
00:21:20arguing that the annexation of Texas will be, quote,
00:21:23So injurious to the interests and abhorrent to the feelings of the people of the free states,
00:21:27as, in our opinion, not only inevitably to result in a dissolution of the Union,
00:21:32but fully to justify it.
00:21:34Former President John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts signed that document.
00:21:38After the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act,
00:21:41New England threatened to nullify the law,
00:21:44and some leaders called for secession again.
00:21:47Before the Civil War, the North issued credible threats to secede at least five separate times.
00:21:52As the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote put it,
00:22:01Robert E. Lee witnessed the 1860 election results from a U.S. Army post in San Antonio, Texas.
00:22:12As the fervor over secession began to boil over,
00:22:15Lee wrote his father-in-law, quote,
00:22:21According to historian Alan Gwelzo,
00:22:25As the states of the Deep South left the Union,
00:22:27Lee complained that the behavior of the cotton states was wholly beyond any justification,
00:22:32and he was worried that their selfish and dictatorial bearing would make life for Virginia miserable
00:22:38should she determine to coalesce with them.
00:22:41In a letter to one of his cousins, he wrote,
00:22:43Secession is revolution.
00:22:45He wrote that, quote,
00:22:46Our people will destroy a government inaugurated by the blood and wisdom of our patriot fathers
00:22:51that has given us peace and prosperity at home,
00:22:53power and security abroad,
00:22:55and under which we have acquired a colossal strength unequaled in the history of mankind.
00:23:00According to Gwelzo, Lee wished to live under no other government
00:23:04and to have no other flag than the Star-Spangled Banner.
00:23:07But if that government was now going to disappear,
00:23:09then the only alternative was to
00:23:15Like so many Americans from this period, Lee was a patriotic American and a war hero,
00:23:21but he saw himself, first and foremost, as a Virginia.
00:23:25On February 6th, 1861, David Twiggs, the commander of the U.S. Army's Department of Texas,
00:23:30surrendered his entire command to the Confederates and ordered all federal troops to abandon their posts.
00:23:36Lee refused to leave Fort Mason and pledged to defend his post at all hazards.
00:23:40This is because the legality of secession mattered to him and because his native Virginia hadn't seceded yet.
00:23:48As he left Texas, Lee declared he was returning to Virginia to resign and go to planting corn.
00:23:54And though he would never bear arms against the U.S., he might carry a musket in defense of my
00:23:59native state, Virginia.
00:24:01Lee's attitude tells us a lot about why not one single Confederate leader was ever convicted of treason,
00:24:07because it was commonly understood at the time that it was not treason.
00:24:11The legal case for secession goes back to before the Constitution,
00:24:14when 13 U.S. colonies decided to secede from the British crown.
00:24:19After winning their war for independence, those colonies then formed the Articles of Confederation,
00:24:24which required that any changes to the Union be adopted by the Congress in all the states.
00:24:29But that never happened, and most states just seceded.
00:24:33The background-led historian Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who served as a colonel in the Union Army,
00:24:40will say, quote,
00:24:40If Robert E. Lee was a traitor, so also indisputably were George Washington, Oliver Cromwell, John Hamden, and William of
00:24:47Orange.
00:24:48Adams goes on,
00:24:49George Washington furnishes a precedent at every point.
00:24:52A Virginian like Lee, he was also a British subject.
00:24:54He had fought under the British flag, as Lee had fought under that of the United States.
00:24:59When, in 1776, Virginia seceded from the British Empire, he went with his state, just as Lee went with it
00:25:0585 years later.
00:25:07Subsequently, Washington commanded armies in the field designated by those opposed to them as rebels,
00:25:12and whose descendants now glorified them as the rebels of 76,
00:25:17which as Lee later commanded and at last surrendered.
00:25:19Much larger armies also designated rebels by those they confronted.
00:25:24Except in their outcome, the cases were therefore precisely alike.
00:25:28And logic is logic.
00:25:30So the only difference is that Washington won his war and Lee lost his.
00:25:36The courts basically agreed with that analysis.
00:25:39After the Civil War, many northern newspapers, including the Boston Daily Advertiser and the New York Times,
00:25:44published materials encouraging the government to put Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, on trial for treason.
00:25:51And for their part, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that a trial would, quote,
00:25:54render traitors infamous and have it judicially settled that secession is illegal.
00:25:59We would have learned a lot about the country if they would have done it.
00:26:03According to University of Virginia law professor Cynthia Nicoletti,
00:26:07no one knew for sure whether secession was legal and that any treason prosecution would rise and fall on that
00:26:14question.
00:26:15Indeed, she quotes George Washington Woodward, chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court,
00:26:19who wrote in a letter to a lawyer representing a Confederate senator, quote,
00:26:22The doctrine of state rights will have a severe test and may find a strange vindication in that trial.
00:26:28Secession has yet to be defined.
00:26:30Hitherto, it has been a toy of politicians, and they have dodged everything like a definition.
00:26:35But is secession treason?
00:26:37That's a grand question.
00:26:38If it is not, war in support of it cannot be.
00:26:41If the right to withdraw existed, it must have included the right of defense,
00:26:45so that levying war to defend a Confederacy founded in secession could not be levying war against the government of
00:26:52the U.S.
00:26:53But this is on the assumption that secession is something less than treason,
00:26:56which I neither aver nor deny.
00:26:59Many Northern politicians were certain the government would lose.
00:27:02Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who was most famous for getting caned on the Senate floor,
00:27:08said to try Jefferson Davis would be the nay plus ultra of folly.
00:27:11The Supreme Court's Chief Justice said,
00:27:14If you bring these Confederate leaders to trial, it will condemn the North,
00:27:17for by the Constitution, secession is not rebellion.
00:27:21Nicoletti writes that even Lincoln himself was concerned about the possibility that a trial might backfire, quote,
00:27:26Before his untimely death, President Lincoln had remarked that Davis' flight from Richmond in April
00:27:31was a good thing because it forestalled the political and legal difficulties
00:27:34that might attend a high-profile treason prosecution.
00:27:38I'm bound to oppose the escape of Jeff Davis, Lincoln had reportedly told General William T. Sherman.
00:27:44But if you could manage to have him slip out unbeknownst, like,
00:27:47I guess it wouldn't hurt me much.
00:27:50At a cabinet meeting at the White House on July 18th,
00:27:53there was no consensus at the White House as to how to proceed.
00:27:56President Andrew Johnson, who assumed office after Lincoln's assassination,
00:28:00pressed for a clear answer, but he didn't get one.
00:28:02The Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton,
00:28:05stated that there was, quote,
00:28:07a great diversity of opinion in the matter as to whether Davis should be tried
00:28:10first for the crime of high treason.
00:28:12Ultimately, Andrew Johnson opted to proceed, tentatively, with a treason prosecution.
00:28:17For his part, Davis was eager for trial because he believed secession was legal
00:28:20and he wanted vindication in court.
00:28:23Davis, in fact, hoped that he would be arrested in 1861
00:28:26after his home state of Mississippi seceded
00:28:28so that he could demonstrate the legality of secession.
00:28:30But no one arrested him, and he instead was chosen to be president
00:28:34of the new Confederate States of America.
00:28:36That's why Davis, unlike Robert E. Lee, never requested a presidential pardon.
00:28:40He genuinely thought that he'd be vindicated in court.
00:28:43Jefferson Davis was charged with treason and held for two years at Fort Monroe
00:28:47in Virginia, but never got his day in court.
00:28:49Over time, popular support for prosecution waned,
00:28:52and the Johnson administration was far from certain that a Virginia jury would convict Davis,
00:28:56or even that the Supreme Court would definitively rule that secession was illegal.
00:29:00Davis took the surrender as an unequivocal win.
00:29:03Quote,
00:29:04A sovereign state cannot commit treason, he wrote.
00:29:06The government early discovered that if this issue came before the Supreme Court,
00:29:10it would lose its case, and I should be acquitted.
00:29:13So none of the indictments were ever tried.
00:29:16Shortly after Davis' case was dropped in April of 1869,
00:29:19the Supreme Court ruled in a separate, unrelated case, Texas v. White,
00:29:23that secession is indeed unconstitutional.
00:29:25As the court put it,
00:29:27the Constitution in all its provisions looks to an indestructible union composed of indestructible states.
00:29:33But it was a throwaway line in a case about bonds.
00:29:36There wasn't any significant discussion of secession during oral arguments or briefing.
00:29:40And the ruling attracted virtually no media attention,
00:29:43because by that point it seemed like a dead issue.
00:29:46In short, the Supreme Court snuck in a ruling about the unconstitutionality of secession
00:29:51years after the lengthy public debate over Davis' trial made clear that, in fact,
00:29:55there was no consensus on that point in the country.
00:29:58And there still isn't, by the way.
00:30:00The America of the 17th and 18th centuries was very different from the United States we know today.
00:30:04At the time, even many Northerners would have conceded that,
00:30:08at the minimum, the constitutionality of secession was a close call,
00:30:11and that it would be a gross oversimplification, if not an outright falsehood,
00:30:16to call these men traitors.
00:30:22One of the great myths of the Civil War is that the South was somehow uniquely evil.
00:30:29Indeed, at the time, abolitionists aggressively pushed propaganda with exactly that message.
00:30:34As Thomas Fleming writes in A Disease in the Public Mind,
00:30:38A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War,
00:30:40The abolitionists convinced themselves, based on their evangelical experiences,
00:30:44that smearing the South's reputation in every possible way
00:30:47would create the anxiety that would lead to a mass conversion of the North to their crusade.
00:30:52The South was portrayed as a province ruled by Satan
00:30:55that would consume the North's soul if her citizens did not vow to expunge the sin of slavery.
00:31:02Meanwhile, in the South, there was an intense fear of slave insurrections and race wars,
00:31:06following the brutal uprising and revolution in present-day Haiti.
00:31:10Therefore, the Civil War, Fleming argues,
00:31:12is best understood as a product of a psychological disease
00:31:15that afflicted both the North and the South in different ways,
00:31:17which made rational dialogue impossible.
00:31:20Sound familiar?
00:31:22That mutual disease, he argues, is why only the U.S.,
00:31:26unlike Great Britain and Brazil, fought a brutal war over slavery.
00:31:30And yet, long after the war, some of these over-the-top descriptions of the South,
00:31:33as simply evil, survive today.
00:31:36The cartoon version of history holds that Abraham Lincoln invaded the South
00:31:40because it had slaves.
00:31:42But just how peculiar was the South's peculiar institution, as it was called?
00:31:47Well, not very, as it turns out.
00:31:49The North had slaves, too.
00:31:51According to the book, It Wasn't About Slavery by Samuel Mitchum Jr.,
00:31:55in 1703, more than 42% of New York City households owned slaves,
00:32:00a ratio only surpassed by Charleston, South Carolina.
00:32:03In Connecticut, Mitchum says,
00:32:05one-half of all ministers, lawyers, and public officials owned slaves.
00:32:08By 1783, one-quarter of Connecticut families owned slaves,
00:32:11and one out of every 14 people in Rhode Island was a slave.
00:32:15Many prominent Northerners, including founding fathers, owned slaves.
00:32:19This includes the first signer of the Declaration of Independence
00:32:21and future Massachusetts governor, John Hancock, who had two or three household slaves.
00:32:27Other notable slaveholders from Massachusetts include Cotton Mather,
00:32:30who learned about inoculation from one of his slaves.
00:32:34Slavery in the North was awful.
00:32:35Massachusetts and Connecticut set curfews for black people.
00:32:39According to the book, Black Bondage in the North, in the 1700s,
00:32:43Connecticut required blacks to be off the streets by nine at night
00:32:46and to remain within the towns to which they belonged.
00:32:49Slaves who broke curfew in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were flogged.
00:32:54In New Hampshire, the penalty was ten lashes.
00:32:56In New York, it was a misdemeanor for slaves to gather in groups larger than four.
00:33:00And in Long Island, they could not travel more than a mile from home without a pass.
00:33:05Similar laws existed in Pennsylvania and in New Jersey.
00:33:08By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected,
00:33:10slavery had been banned in most but not all Union states.
00:33:14It's important to point out that while radical abolitionists in the 1850s
00:33:17were calling for the South to immediately free all of their slaves,
00:33:20the Northern states didn't end slavery that way.
00:33:23For the most part, the manumission of slaves in the North was a gradual process.
00:33:28The laws emancipated people born in the future
00:33:31and were designed so Northern slaveholders didn't lose money.
00:33:34In many cases, Northern slaveholders just sold their slaves to the South.
00:33:39One overlooked fact is that early attempts to curb the slave trade had Southern support.
00:33:44In his 1806 State of the Union, President Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian and a slave owner,
00:33:49called on Congress to withdraw the citizens of the United States
00:33:52from all further participation in those violations of human rights
00:33:55which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa.
00:33:59The next year, the United States Congress voted to abolish the slave trade.
00:34:03The bill passed the House with 96% of representatives' yes,
00:34:06including massive support from Southern members of Congress.
00:34:10There are two reasons why Southern members of Congress voted this way.
00:34:13First, at the time, many people in the South wanted to end slavery.
00:34:16By 1827, more than 100 anti-slavery groups existed in the South,
00:34:20mostly under the banner of colonization societies
00:34:23which advocated for sending freed slaves back to Africa.
00:34:27Second, and more importantly, profits from the slave trade weren't going to the South.
00:34:31The slave trade was a Northern business
00:34:33and Jefferson's bill was ineffective at stopping it.
00:34:36According to the book Black Cargos by Daniel Mannix,
00:34:39an English captain reported that the port of Lemieux
00:34:42in the slave market of Zanzibar
00:34:44was packed with, quote,
00:34:46enterprising Americans whose star-spangled banner
00:34:49may be seen streaming in the wind
00:34:50where other nations would not deign to traffic.
00:34:54By 1858, as Abraham Lincoln was running for Senate in Illinois,
00:34:57there were 24 American ships in the Zanzibar Harbor
00:35:00as against three British.
00:35:02There are two reasons the British Navy,
00:35:05which at the time was trying to end the slave trade,
00:35:08couldn't stop American slavers.
00:35:09First, American ships were extremely fast and maneuverable.
00:35:12And second, President John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts
00:35:15forbade the British from boarding any American flagged ships.
00:35:19The result was huge profits for Massachusetts-based slave traders.
00:35:23Mannix writes that, quote,
00:35:24So many of the ships hailed from Salem, Massachusetts,
00:35:27that the Zanzibarians thought all white men
00:35:30came from this one New England town.
00:35:32English officers discovered to their indignation
00:35:35that Great Britain was considered to be a suburb of Salem.
00:35:38The Americans traded for slaves in ivory with a cheap caligo
00:35:42turned out in vast quantities by the New England cotton mills.
00:35:45And even today, cotton is called Americani in Zanzibar.
00:35:49Moving slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and Brazil
00:35:52was big money for northerners.
00:35:54This part of the slave trade was its own version
00:35:57of the famous triangle trade.
00:35:59Cheap southern cotton was shipped north to textile mills,
00:36:02which northerners turned into manufactured textile goods.
00:36:06Northern slave traders traded those textiles for slaves in Zanzibar,
00:36:09who were then trafficked to the Caribbean for huge profits.
00:36:12The north was profiting from slavery on all three corners of the triangle.
00:36:16This continued for decades.
00:36:19W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that by the 1850s, quote,
00:36:22The fitting out of slavers became a flourishing business in the United States
00:36:25and centered at New York City.
00:36:28In 1862, literally during the Civil War,
00:36:31the New York Journal of Commerce reported that New York was, quote,
00:36:34The principal port of the world for this infamous commerce.
00:36:37Although the cities of Portland, Maine, and Boston
00:36:40are second to her in that distinction.
00:36:43As New England was making money off the global slave trade,
00:36:46other northern states were passing racist legislation.
00:36:49In Lincoln's home state of Illinois,
00:36:51black people couldn't attend public schools,
00:36:52couldn't testify against white people in court,
00:36:55or bear arms.
00:36:56If three or more of them gathered to dance,
00:36:58they were fined and lashed.
00:37:00The purpose of these laws, which were known as the Illinois Black Codes,
00:37:03was to discourage black people from moving to the state.
00:37:06In 1853, Illinois made things more explicit with a black exclusion law
00:37:11that, quote,
00:37:12Prohibited blacks from coming into the state with the intention of living there.
00:37:15Punishment proved especially harsh in that violators were subject to penalties
00:37:19that amounted to forced labor, essentially slavery.
00:37:22Illinois law was so extreme that it was a crime for blacks to settle in that state
00:37:26without a certificate of freedom, which cost $1,000,
00:37:29the equivalent of about $40,000 today.
00:37:31The Black Codes were so harsh that even some southern newspapers objected.
00:37:36The New Orleans Bee called the Illinois Black Codes
00:37:38an act of special and savage ruthlessness.
00:37:41One of the key figures in passing the Black Codes
00:37:44was a state representative named John A. Logan.
00:37:46Logan was an enthusiastic enforcer of the Fugitive Slave Act
00:37:49and an open racist.
00:37:51Abraham Lincoln later made him a union general.
00:37:54After the war, Logan reinvented himself as a radical Republican senator,
00:37:58but it's hard to imagine that Johnny Logan held contemporary woke views on black people.
00:38:03Many northern or free states enacted black laws or exclusionary codes similar to Illinois.
00:38:09Indiana and Oregon banned black settlement in their state constitutions.
00:38:13According to Eugene Berwanger's book,
00:38:16The Frontier Against Slavery, quote,
00:38:18The exact extent of racial prejudice as a factor encouraging limitation of slavery is indeterminable.
00:38:24The average man in all ages does not record his thoughts for posterity
00:38:28and is even less likely to do so on such thorny problems as race relations.
00:38:33Yet, if 79.5% of the people in Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, and Kansas
00:38:37voted to exclude the free Negroes simply because of their prejudice,
00:38:42surely this antipathy influenced their decision to support the non-extension of slavery.
00:38:47As Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward, put it,
00:38:50The motive of those who protested against the extension of slavery
00:38:54had always been concern for the welfare of the white man
00:38:56and not an unnatural sympathy for the Negro.
00:38:59In other words, many northern and western voters
00:39:02opposed the expansion of slavery into their states and territories
00:39:05not primarily out of moral opposition to slavery itself,
00:39:09but because they didn't want black neighbors.
00:39:12Generally speaking, in the first half of the 1800s,
00:39:14many southerners supported emancipation and the relocation of slaves.
00:39:18In many cases, it's because they thought the black populations of their states were getting too big.
00:39:23After Nat Turner's violent slave revolt in Virginia in 1831,
00:39:27thousands of Virginians petitioned their government to end slavery.
00:39:31Charles County Quakers issued a petition calling for a new law
00:39:34declaring that all persons born in the state after some period to be fixed by law shall be free.
00:39:40Virginia's governor at the time wrote in his diary that
00:39:43before I leave this government,
00:39:45I will have contrived to have a law pass gradually abolishing slavery in this state.
00:39:50The Richmond Enquirer at the time called slavery
00:39:52the greatest evil which can scourge our land.
00:39:56The Virginia House of Delegates failed to end slavery then,
00:39:59but it wasn't by an overwhelming vote.
00:40:01Many people didn't realize that the windowed end slavery through the legal process
00:40:05likely peaked right at the beginning of the country and into the early 1800s.
00:40:10In 1794, the incentives radically changed after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.
00:40:15That invention, more than anything else,
00:40:17dramatically increased the demand for slave labor in the South
00:40:20because it made cotton cultivation vastly more profitable.
00:40:23As the Civil War approached,
00:40:25the hundreds of anti-slavery groups that had formed in the mid-1820s
00:40:30had mostly gone away and so had any possibility that
00:40:32Southern legislatures would end slavery on their own.
00:40:36The debate after Nat Turner's rebellion was the last major attempt to do so.
00:40:41And so slavery persisted for decades,
00:40:43though many Virginians knew it was wrong.
00:40:46One of them was Robert E. Lee himself.
00:40:48According to historian Alan Guelzo,
00:40:50Lee, quote,
00:40:51regarded slavery as a moral and political evil,
00:40:53which, however, he was content to leave in the hands of God to resolve.
00:40:58Lee's slaves were inherited,
00:40:59one slave family from his mother
00:41:01and 197 others from his father-in-law,
00:41:05G.W.P. Custis.
00:41:07In 1862, during the war, Lee, quote,
00:41:09completed the emancipation of the Custis slaves,
00:41:11which he was obligated to do by his father-in-law's will,
00:41:14and then freed his own, which he was not.
00:41:22The war was not exclusively about slavery.
00:41:25That is just a fact.
00:41:26It could not have been.
00:41:28Right up through the shelling of Fort Sumter,
00:41:30the North was profiting massively from the slave trade.
00:41:33Four Union states had legal slavery.
00:41:35But if the war was not about slavery,
00:41:37then what was it about?
00:41:39Well, the answer depends on who you ask.
00:41:41Though, interestingly,
00:41:42Presidents Lincoln and Davis seemed to agree.
00:41:44Confederate President Jefferson Davis said,
00:41:45We are not fighting for slavery.
00:41:47We are fighting for independence.
00:41:48And that, or extermination, we will have.
00:41:51Lincoln himself told newspaper editor Horace Greeley,
00:41:53My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,
00:41:56and is not to either save or destroy slavery.
00:41:59If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.
00:42:03And if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it.
00:42:06And if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone,
00:42:09I would also do that.
00:42:10In other words, according to both Presidents,
00:42:13the war was fundamentally about the question of keeping or ending the Union.
00:42:17The key argument against the idea that the Civil War was solely about slavery is that,
00:42:21at the time of secession in late 1860 and early 1861,
00:42:24neither the incoming Republican administration nor mainstream Northern opinion
00:42:28advocated for the immediate abolition of slavery where it already existed in Southern states.
00:42:33The Republican Party platform of 1860 opposed the extension of slavery to the territories,
00:42:38but didn't call for abolition of slavery in the South.
00:42:41But even if it had and stood a reasonable chance of happening,
00:42:44which it didn't, at least in the short run,
00:42:46most Southerners would not have been affected anyway.
00:42:49Only about one-third of Southerners were from households that had slaves.
00:42:52The idea that 360,000 white men were going to line up and die
00:42:56for the sake of rescuing black people in the South is just absurd and ahistorical.
00:43:03In the words of the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote,
00:43:06quote, no soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves.
00:43:10The soldiers' diaries support this.
00:43:12Heros von Bork, chief of staff to Confederate General Jim Stewart,
00:43:17wrote a 558-page history of his experiences in the war.
00:43:21His memoirs contained no references to slavery at all,
00:43:24and only one to a slave, in which he passed a large plantation,
00:43:27which, I was told, belonged to a free Negro,
00:43:30one of the richest men of the county,
00:43:31who was himself the owner of numerous slaves.
00:43:34The historian James McPherson went through the diaries of more than a thousand soldiers
00:43:39from both sides for his book, For Cause and Comrades.
00:43:43He found that, quote,
00:43:44For Union and Confederate volunteers alike, abstract symbols or concepts such as
00:43:49country, flag, constitution, liberty, and legacy of the revolution
00:43:53figured prominently in their explanations of why they enlisted.
00:43:56For Confederate soldiers, a more concrete, visceral, and perhaps more powerful motive
00:44:01also came into play.
00:44:03Defense of home and hearth against an invading enemy.
00:44:06They signed up to fight out of duty,
00:44:09a concept that was a lot stronger 150 years ago than it is today.
00:44:15Many Union soldiers echoed Lincoln's calls for preserving the Union.
00:44:19McPherson found a Union soldier from Philadelphia who wrote that,
00:44:23This contest is not the North against the South.
00:44:25It is government against anarchy, law against disorder.
00:44:29Another from Michigan joined against the wishes of his family
00:44:32because he wanted to join, quote,
00:44:34All true patriots to sustain her government.
00:44:36Another from Michigan wrote that,
00:44:38If the Union is split up, the government is destroyed,
00:44:41and we will be a ruined nation.
00:44:43Do not borrow any trouble about me.
00:44:45If I die in the battlefield, I do so with pleasure.
00:44:48And he did die in battle the next year.
00:44:51McPherson found immigrants lamenting that secession would make the country, quote,
00:44:55As bad as the deeply divided German states.
00:44:57And native-born Americans who said, quote,
00:44:59Our fathers made this country. We their children are to save it.
00:45:04McPherson notes that relatively few Union volunteers mentioned the slavery issue when they enlisted.
00:45:09The same is true for Southern soldiers.
00:45:12McPherson estimates that just 20% of Confederate soldiers
00:45:15even considered slavery a cause worth fighting for in the first place.
00:45:18Most were focused on repelling an invasion.
00:45:21Quote,
00:45:21Defense of the homeland was one of the strongest of combat motivations.
00:45:25Even among soldiers from slave-holding families,
00:45:28who's only one-third explicitly voiced pro-slavery convictions.
00:45:31McPherson writes that,
00:45:32Many Virginians shared Robert E. Lee's view that
00:45:35they wouldn't fight unless it be in defense of Virginia.
00:45:38Another Virginian wrote,
00:45:39I would give all I have got just to be in the front rank of the first brigade
00:45:43that marches against the invading foe
00:45:45who now pollute the sacred soil of my native state with their unholy tread.
00:45:50When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
00:45:52he did it as a wartime measure to suppress the rebellion.
00:45:57It's just as notable for what it did not do as what it did do.
00:46:01It did not free the slaves.
00:46:02No, slavery continued in areas under federal control,
00:46:05which included Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
00:46:09and parts of Virginia, Louisiana, Tennessee.
00:46:11In practice, it only freed about 100,000 people out of a pool of millions.
00:46:15Lincoln did it because he wanted to prevent European powers
00:46:17from forming an alliance with the Confederacy,
00:46:19which seemed likely at the time
00:46:21and would have dramatically changed the South's fortunes.
00:46:24So the Proclamation was a brilliant political maneuver
00:46:27that undercut the Confederacy's diplomatic efforts to court Europe
00:46:31because it made intervention politically untenable
00:46:33for European leaders who almost all opposed slavery.
00:46:36Now, wait a second here.
00:46:38We are not saying the war had nothing to do with slavery
00:46:42because that would also be ridiculous.
00:46:44It's just as much a cartoon caricature
00:46:46as what your idiot teachers taught you in school.
00:46:49No, slavery was a factor that led to war,
00:46:52and it was a major factor.
00:46:54South Carolina's Declaration of Causes for Secession
00:46:57references slavery six times.
00:46:59After seceding, South Carolina immediately made an appeal
00:47:02to other slave-holding states to secede,
00:47:04and in its appeal referenced slavery no less than 32 times.
00:47:08The South Carolina legislatures literally wrote,
00:47:11quote,
00:47:11slave-holding states cannot be safe in subjection
00:47:14to non-slave-holding states.
00:47:16When General Claiborne suggested freeing the slaves
00:47:18to fight for the Confederacy,
00:47:20his fellow officers were shocked and appalled.
00:47:22Slavery was a factor in the war,
00:47:25and probably a significant one,
00:47:27but it was not the only factor.
00:47:28The South left for three other reasons, too.
00:47:32First, there was the balance of political power.
00:47:34In the Republic's first 72 years,
00:47:37slave-holding Southerners occupied the White House
00:47:39approximately two-thirds of the time,
00:47:41or 49 years out of 72.
00:47:43Some of the biggest figures in American politics
00:47:45were from the South,
00:47:46including Andrew Jackson,
00:47:48James K. Polk,
00:47:49and John C. Calhoun.
00:47:50To the extent that there were Northern presidents,
00:47:52many were sympathetic to the South,
00:47:54like Pennsylvania's James Buchanan.
00:47:55But demographics is destiny.
00:47:57As the Northern states surged in population,
00:48:00driven by higher birth rates
00:48:01and massive waves of European immigration,
00:48:04the South's longstanding political dominance collapsed.
00:48:06The South's share of the House of Representatives
00:48:09dropped from roughly 48% at the founding
00:48:12to 38% by 1860.
00:48:14For decades, Congress maintained balance in the Senate
00:48:16by adding slave and free states at the same time,
00:48:19but after the country's massive territorial expansion
00:48:22as a result of the Mexican-American War,
00:48:25that balance was doomed.
00:48:26There was no need for slave labor
00:48:27in places like Arizona or New Mexico,
00:48:29and so the South's relative power declined quickly.
00:48:32California was admitted as a free state in 1850,
00:48:35Free Oregon entered in 1859.
00:48:38Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860,
00:48:40coupled with the rapid rise of the Republican Party,
00:48:44which was a purely sectional Northern organization
00:48:46at the time,
00:48:47signaled the end of Southern dominance
00:48:49in national politics.
00:48:51Second, the South had a financial motive.
00:48:53At the outbreak of the war,
00:48:55the American South produced roughly
00:48:57three quarters of the world's cotton.
00:48:59From 1830 to 1860,
00:49:01cotton was by far the country's top export.
00:49:03It comprised literally half or more of all U.S. exports.
00:49:0790% of exports to Great Britain came only from the South,
00:49:11and by the 1830s,
00:49:12more than 80% of the cotton grown in the South
00:49:14was being exported.
00:49:16At the time, the biggest source of revenue
00:49:18for the U.S. government was the tariff.
00:49:20This was great policy for Northern states,
00:49:23since their tariffs protected their manufacturers
00:49:25from foreign competition,
00:49:26but it was terrible for the export-dependent South
00:49:28because retaliatory tariffs restricted their access
00:49:31to the foreign markets,
00:49:32and because their economy was built
00:49:34around agricultural exports,
00:49:36they had higher demand for foreign manufactured goods.
00:49:39So how much of a factor was money
00:49:41in the decision to secede?
00:49:43On Christmas Day, 1860,
00:49:45the South Carolina legislature
00:49:46issued an address to the other slave-holding states
00:49:49calling on them to leave the Union.
00:49:51One of their major grievances was,
00:49:53The taxes laid by the Congress of the United States
00:49:56have been laid with a view
00:49:57of subserving the interests of the North.
00:50:00The people of the South have been taxed
00:50:02by duties on imports, not for revenue,
00:50:05but for an object inconsistent with revenue,
00:50:08to promote, by prohibitions,
00:50:10Northern interests in the productions
00:50:12of their mines and manufacturers.
00:50:14The role that economics played in secession
00:50:17was obvious to outsiders.
00:50:19Karl Marx complained at the time
00:50:21that London's biggest newspapers,
00:50:23including The Times, The Economist,
00:50:24The Examiner, The Saturday Review,
00:50:27were arguing that,
00:50:28The war between the North and South
00:50:30is a tariff war.
00:50:31The war is further, not for any principle,
00:50:33does not touch the question of slavery,
00:50:35and in fact, turns on Northern lust for sovereignty.
00:50:39A third reason was the massive cultural divide
00:50:42between the regions.
00:50:43The South was rural and agricultural.
00:50:46The North was urban, industrial,
00:50:48and had huge numbers of European immigrants.
00:50:51Increasingly, they hated each other,
00:50:53something that became obvious
00:50:54on one cool Virginia morning in October 1859.
00:50:59Robert E. Lee was harvesting the rye crop
00:51:01in his fields in Arlington
00:51:02when a mounted soldier showed up
00:51:04and handed him a letter from the Secretary of War.
00:51:06The night before, around 1.30 in the morning,
00:51:09the Federal Armory and Arsenal
00:51:10at Harper's Ferry, Virginia,
00:51:12had been taken by a group of armed men.
00:51:14A train passing through it
00:51:16sent telegrams on to Washington,
00:51:17a warning of 150 armed abolitionists
00:51:20who have come to free the slaves
00:51:22and intend to do it at all hazards
00:51:23and to arm poor whites
00:51:25who are similarly aggrieved with the slave system.
00:51:28They were led by a radical abolitionist
00:51:30and insurrectionist named John Brown,
00:51:32who wanted to provoke a massive slave uprising
00:51:34across the South.
00:51:35It was Lee's job to take back Harper's Ferry
00:51:38with a company of 90 Marines,
00:51:40two howitzers,
00:51:41and a few local citizen militias
00:51:43from Maryland and Virginia.
00:51:45He had such little time to prepare
00:51:46that he wore civilian clothing and a top hat
00:51:48and he commandeered a Baltimore and Ohio engine car
00:51:51to get there,
00:51:52riding with just one other officer,
00:51:54the conductor and the train's fireman.
00:51:57When Lee arrived,
00:51:58Brown's revolution had failed to materialize.
00:52:00The raiders were trapped in an engine house.
00:52:02The Marines waited until morning
00:52:04and then stormed the building.
00:52:06John Brown and four of his men were taken alive
00:52:08and later tried and executed.
00:52:11The South responded to the news with total heart.
00:52:13The Richmond Inquirer wrote,
00:52:15The Southern people have heretofore
00:52:17disregarded the ravings of Northern fanatics
00:52:20because they believe such madness
00:52:21to be merely a pecuniary speculation.
00:52:24But the attack at Harper's Ferry
00:52:25shows that the Northern people
00:52:27mean more than words.
00:52:29Virginia's legislature awarded Lee a sword
00:52:32for his gallant conduct at Harper's Ferry.
00:52:35The North was euphoric.
00:52:36Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that
00:52:39John Brown was an idealist
00:52:40who put his ideas into action.
00:52:43Henry David Thoreau compared Brown's execution
00:52:45to the crucifixion of Christ.
00:52:47The abolitionist Wendell Phillips,
00:52:50also of Massachusetts,
00:52:51called Harper's Ferry
00:52:52the Lexington of today,
00:52:54comparing it to the opening shots
00:52:55of the Revolutionary War
00:52:56and said Brown was
00:52:57the brave, frank, and sublime
00:52:59truster in God's right and absolute justice.
00:53:03Northerners raised money
00:53:04to pay for Brown's legal defense.
00:53:06Many of Brown's conspirators
00:53:08were protected by Republican governors
00:53:09in Northern states.
00:53:11The Northern response
00:53:12shook the South to its core.
00:53:13South Carolina's declaration
00:53:14of causes for secession
00:53:16specifically mentioned
00:53:17Northern states providing safe harbor
00:53:19for John Brown's accomplices.
00:53:21Other states complained
00:53:22of Northern aggression and hostility.
00:53:24The attack on Harper's Ferry
00:53:26proved to them
00:53:27that the cultural bond
00:53:29it once shared with the North
00:53:30no longer existed.
00:53:37For as long as political scientists
00:53:39and historians have been polled
00:53:40on the best presidents,
00:53:42Abraham Lincoln has topped the charts
00:53:44in every category.
00:53:45Modern presidents can't help
00:53:46but compare themselves to him.
00:53:48But the life of a tall, gangly,
00:53:51self-made Springfield lawyer
00:53:53tells us that a different future
00:53:55is possible.
00:53:57That is why I'm in this race.
00:53:59Not just to hold an office
00:54:00but to gather with you
00:54:02to transform a nation.
00:54:04In school, kids are taught
00:54:05that Abraham Lincoln
00:54:06was the great emancipator,
00:54:07a champion of equality,
00:54:09a defender of democracy.
00:54:11To his contemporaries,
00:54:12he was the ape baboon
00:54:14of the prairie,
00:54:15a coarse, vulgar joker,
00:54:17a simple Susan,
00:54:18and the craftiest
00:54:20and most dishonest politician
00:54:21that ever disgraced
00:54:22the White House.
00:54:24Now, in reality,
00:54:25he was none of these things.
00:54:27Although he may have been
00:54:28a coarse and vulgar joker,
00:54:29it's hard to know for sure.
00:54:31The greatest event
00:54:32in Lincoln's life,
00:54:33what turned him
00:54:34from man to myth,
00:54:35was his assassination.
00:54:36In the words of historian
00:54:38Michael Burlingame,
00:54:39quote,
00:54:40canonization began
00:54:40almost immediately.
00:54:42Within days of his death,
00:54:43his life was being compared
00:54:44to Jesus Christ.
00:54:46He was shot on Good Friday
00:54:47and by Easter Sunday
00:54:48a prominent American pastor
00:54:49said,
00:54:50Heaven rejoices
00:54:51this Easter morning
00:54:51in the resurrection
00:54:52of our lost leader.
00:54:54Referring not to Jesus,
00:54:55but to Abraham Lincoln.
00:54:57At the 1909 Lincoln Centennial,
00:54:59Illinois schoolchildren
00:55:00recited verses
00:55:01calling him a peasant prince,
00:55:03a masterpiece of God.
00:55:05His oversized statue
00:55:07keeps watch over
00:55:07the National Mall
00:55:08in Washington, D.C. today.
00:55:10But in 1863,
00:55:12no one in America
00:55:13would have recognized
00:55:14the Lincoln we know today.
00:55:16Back then,
00:55:16it wasn't even clear
00:55:17if he was going to win
00:55:18re-election.
00:55:18He was,
00:55:19in the words of Michael Burlingame,
00:55:21the most activist president
00:55:22in history
00:55:23who transformed the presidency
00:55:24and the country
00:55:25when he,
00:55:26quote,
00:55:27expanded the army and navy,
00:55:28spent $2 million
00:55:29without congressional appropriation,
00:55:31blockaded southern ports,
00:55:32closed post offices
00:55:33to treasonable correspondences,
00:55:35suspended the writ
00:55:36of habeas corpus
00:55:37in several locations,
00:55:38ordered the arrest
00:55:39and military detention
00:55:40of suspected traitors,
00:55:42and issued the
00:55:43Emancipation Proclamation
00:55:44on New Year's Day,
00:55:451863.
00:55:46To do all these things,
00:55:47Lincoln broke
00:55:48an assortment of laws
00:55:49and ignored
00:55:49one constitutional provision
00:55:50after another.
00:55:51He was hated by Southerners
00:55:53but also loathed
00:55:54by many Northerners.
00:55:55The abolitionist
00:55:56Wendell Phillips
00:55:57called Lincoln
00:55:57a huckster to politics,
00:55:59a first-rate,
00:56:00second-rate man.
00:56:02So Lincoln was,
00:56:03in a word,
00:56:04at the time,
00:56:06controversial.
00:56:07He was also a human
00:56:08and a flawed one,
00:56:09like us all.
00:56:10He held contemporary views
00:56:12on race.
00:56:13He believed blacks
00:56:14were inferior to whites.
00:56:15In one of the
00:56:16Lincoln-Douglas debates,
00:56:17he said,
00:56:18quote,
00:56:19I will say then
00:56:19that I am not,
00:56:20nor ever have I been,
00:56:22in favor of bringing about
00:56:23in any way
00:56:24the social and political
00:56:25equality of the white
00:56:26and black races.
00:56:28That I am not,
00:56:29nor have I ever been,
00:56:30in favor of making voters
00:56:31or jurors of Negroes,
00:56:32nor of qualifying them
00:56:34to hold office,
00:56:35nor to intermarry
00:56:36with white people.
00:56:37And I will say,
00:56:38in addition to this,
00:56:38that there is a physical
00:56:39difference between
00:56:40the white and black races,
00:56:41which I believe
00:56:42will forever forbid
00:56:43the two races
00:56:44living together
00:56:44on terms of social
00:56:46and political equality.
00:56:47And inasmuch as
00:56:48they cannot live
00:56:49while they do remain together,
00:56:50there must be the position
00:56:52of superior and inferior.
00:56:53And I am as much
00:56:54as any other man
00:56:55in favor of
00:56:57having the superior position
00:56:58assigned to the white race.
00:56:59I say upon this occasion,
00:57:01I do not perceive
00:57:02that because the white man
00:57:03is to have the superior position,
00:57:04the Negro should be
00:57:06denied everything.
00:57:07I do not understand
00:57:08that because I do not want
00:57:09a Negro woman for a slave,
00:57:11I must necessarily
00:57:12want her for a wife.
00:57:14The crowd laughed
00:57:15at that answer.
00:57:16It's really hard to know
00:57:18what Abraham Lincoln
00:57:18really thought
00:57:19because he was
00:57:20an incredible politician.
00:57:21Every word he said,
00:57:22every action he took,
00:57:23he did so knowing
00:57:25who his audience was
00:57:26and what their response
00:57:27would be.
00:57:28This is very important
00:57:29and often overlooked.
00:57:30Historians in 100 years
00:57:32might look back
00:57:33at Barack Obama in 2008
00:57:34and based on his words,
00:57:36I think he did oppose
00:57:38gay marriage
00:57:38because he said he did.
00:57:40But of course,
00:57:41he was pandering
00:57:42to an audience.
00:57:43He was a politician.
00:57:45Lincoln and Obama
00:57:46might have more in common
00:57:47than just being tall,
00:57:48gangly, self-made lawyers
00:57:49from Illinois.
00:57:50But we do know
00:57:51that in the end,
00:57:52Lincoln did not free the slaves.
00:57:54When Lincoln issued
00:57:55the Emancipation Proclamation,
00:57:57he still believed that,
00:57:58quote,
00:57:58the only long-term solution
00:57:59to slavery
00:58:00was voluntary colonization.
00:58:02On March 6th, 1862,
00:58:05President Abraham Lincoln
00:58:06sent a special message
00:58:07to Congress
00:58:08urging the adoption
00:58:09of a joint resolution
00:58:10that would offer
00:58:11federal financial support
00:58:12to any state
00:58:13voluntarily adopting
00:58:14the gradual abolishment
00:58:15of slavery
00:58:16with pecuniary aid
00:58:17provided to compensate owners
00:58:19for the inconvenience
00:58:20public and private
00:58:21caused by the change.
00:58:23In total,
00:58:24Abraham Lincoln believed
00:58:25that slavery
00:58:26was a moral
00:58:27and political evil.
00:58:29He believed it
00:58:29should end gradually
00:58:30rather than immediately.
00:58:32And he supported
00:58:33the idea of colonization
00:58:34or sending freed
00:58:35black people to Africa
00:58:36or elsewhere
00:58:37as part of the solution.
00:58:39In other words,
00:58:40Abraham Lincoln
00:58:41had the exact same views
00:58:42on slavery
00:58:43as Robert E. Lee.
00:58:45After the war,
00:58:46Robert E. Lee
00:58:47received a presidential pardon
00:58:48and returned to Virginia
00:58:49where he took up
00:58:50the presidency
00:58:50of what is now
00:58:51Washington and Lee University,
00:58:53a role many historians
00:58:54regard as the happiest
00:58:55period of his life,
00:58:56far removed
00:58:57from the burdens
00:58:58of command.
00:58:59At the moment
00:58:59of surrender
00:59:00at Appomattox,
00:59:01Lee could have urged
00:59:02his devoted soldiers
00:59:03to scatter into the Appalachians,
00:59:05waging a guerrilla war
00:59:06that might have dragged
00:59:07on for decades,
00:59:08sapping northern resources
00:59:09and claiming
00:59:10countless more lives.
00:59:12Instead,
00:59:12true to his character,
00:59:13he chose the path
00:59:14of honor
00:59:15and remarkably,
00:59:16reconciliation
00:59:17with the Union.
00:59:18He urged his men
00:59:19to lay down arms,
00:59:20return home,
00:59:22rebuild
00:59:22as loyal citizens.
00:59:24Today,
00:59:25efforts to erase Lee
00:59:26from history
00:59:26often stem from
00:59:27sheer historical illiteracy,
00:59:29but a deeper motive lurks.
00:59:32Resentment towards a man
00:59:33who embodies virtues
00:59:35increasingly rare
00:59:36in modern America.
00:59:38They hate him
00:59:39not for his flaws,
00:59:40but because he represents
00:59:42unattainable ideals.
00:59:44Tactical genius,
00:59:45a man of unyielding duty,
00:59:47honor and dignity,
00:59:48a Southerner
00:59:50whose leadership
00:59:51at Chancellorsville
00:59:51still echoes
00:59:53in military academies
00:59:54worldwide.
00:59:55They know they'll
00:59:56never measure up.
00:59:57No statues will rise
00:59:59for fleeting figures
01:00:01like Mark Milley
01:00:02or anyone else,
01:00:03but Lee's legacy endures,
01:00:05outlasting the vandals
01:00:07who would topple
01:00:07his monuments
01:00:08or even disturb
01:00:09his faithful horse
01:00:10traveler's grave.
01:00:12In the end,
01:00:13Robert E. Lee
01:00:13is a reflection
01:00:15of the Civil War itself,
01:00:16far more nuanced
01:00:17and multifaceted
01:00:18than the simplistic tales
01:00:20spun in high school classrooms
01:00:22or viral videos.
01:00:23A full reckoning
01:00:24with the real history,
01:00:25such as Shelby Foote's
01:00:27epic 1.2 million word trilogy
01:00:29spanning 3,000 pages,
01:00:31demands depths
01:00:32that no textbook
01:00:33or hour-long
01:00:34internet video can capture.
01:00:35The mainstream narrative
01:00:36is a cartoon.
01:00:37The war was never
01:00:39a straightforward crusade
01:00:40against Southern evil.
01:00:41Secession was not
01:00:42categorically treason.
01:00:44Abraham Lincoln
01:00:45was not a messianic figure.
01:00:47The story most Americans
01:00:49have heard
01:00:49is a fairy tale.
01:00:51But one thing is true.
01:00:52Wars have consequences.
01:00:54And victors
01:00:55shape the story.
01:00:57That is the enduring lesson
01:00:59of the Civil War.
01:01:10The Civil War
01:01:10is a fairy tale.
01:01:11is a fairy tale.
01:01:14This is the frick intro
01:01:15in an empire.
01:01:15from U.S.
01:01:15of the great
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