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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, means that the history
00:00:16of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy, that our youth will be trained
00:00:20by Northern school teachers, will learn from Northern school books, their version of the
00:00:25war, will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant
00:00:30dead 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 and openly respected
00:00:43the South's leaders, including Lee.
00:00:44Four top Americans of the past, they 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 and one of
00:01:08the 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.
00:01:20In 1977, the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd performed in Oakland, California with the
00:01:25Confederate 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 and the statues and
00:01:39flags 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 who literally desecrated the grave of
00:02:00Robert E. Lee's horse, melted 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 and
00:02:15everywhere else, is a cartoon caricature.
00:02:18I can't breathe.
00:02:21Robert E. Lee represents me.
00:02:23The last ten years have been a master class in historical malpractice, so jaw-droppingly
00:02:29stupid that, honestly, most sane people would just change the channel and call it a day.
00:02:36But here we are, obligated to tell the truth, so here it goes.
00:02:41The Civil War is not nearly as black and white as the school marms wish it were.
00:02:45It was one of the most complicated events in American history.
00:02:49Its heroes, who existed on both sides, were complex, multi-dimensional people.
00:02:56Over the course of this video, we're going to prove it.
00:02:59This is the real history of the Civil War.
00:03:11Civil War
00:03:12Imagine serving as an infantryman in a battle where your enemy outnumbers your side two
00:03:17to one.
00:03:17And not only that, your enemy is better trained, they're well rested, and to make matters worse,
00:03:24they'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
00:03:39told to march, and shoot when you see the enemy.
00:03:43So, that's what you do.
00:03:45Then imagine that, after a week of the most intense fighting of your life, you realize
00:03:49that your side has somehow emerged victorious.
00:03:53In 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 Dorastus Myers during the Battle
00:04:05of Chancellorsville, which lasted from April 30th to May 6th, 1863.
00:04:11On May 11th, Myers, who served as a sergeant with the 33rd Virginia Infantry Regiment, wrote
00:04:16a letter to his brother and sister.
00:04:19Quote,
00:04:19The Lord hath crowned our arms with another glorious victory.
00:04:23I think it was one of the hottest contests of the war.
00:04:26The enemy were strongly entrenched.
00:04:28We fought them on the left at Chancellorsville with 40,000 men against 110,000.
00:04:33I never was under such a fire of grape shell canister and musketry in my life, though the
00:04:39Lord spared my life.
00:04:40Although the Confederacy lost more than 13,000 soldiers at Chancellorsville, as well as several
00:04:46key officers, including Stonewall Jackson, the battle is widely considered to be the greatest
00:04:50Confederate victory of the Civil War and one of the most impressive military victories
00:04:54of all time.
00:04:56The historic victory was the result of the leadership of Robert E. Lee, the commander of
00:05:01the Army of Northern Virginia.
00:05:03It's widely regarded as one of the most brilliant tactical victories in American military history,
00:05:07often called Lee's Perfect Battle.
00:05:10It's referenced in books like the West Point Atlas of American Wars, and it continues to
00:05:14be studied in military academies today for its demonstration of outmaneuvering larger forces
00:05:20through 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
00:05:41hero Henry Light Horse Harry Lee.
00:05:43From a young age, it was obvious that he was a military genius.
00:05:47He graduated second in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point,
00:05:51with zero demerits over four years, 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
00:06:02projects for the federal government.
00:06:05He served in the Mexican-American War, where he performed so well under fire that he was
00:06:09promoted to colonel.
00:06:11After the war, he ran West Point and later commanded cavalry units in Texas.
00:06:16A 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.
00:06:39The odds were in favor of the Union. Lee's men were facing starvation in Fredericksburg, and he had just split
00:06:44his forces up,
00:06:46sending General James Longstreet and roughly 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,
00:07:16moving towards Fredericksburg and the rear of the Confederate Army.
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,
00:07:47that were directly in front of him 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,
00:08:30the 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.
00:08:58They have only to trust in their commanders.
00:08:59On we went, through mud and over stumps, stumbling about in the dark, to the great danger of our heads
00:09:06and 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, catching Hooker off
00:09:24guard.
00:09:24Although the Union maintained a numerical advantage, Hooker ordered his soldiers to pull back.
00:09:30Union generals couldn't believe Hooker's orders.
00:09:33In fact, Major General Henry Slocum, who was in charge of the 12th Corps, called the orders crazy and threatened
00:09:39to 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, taking 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, 15 infantry brigades, consisting
00:10:04of 30,000 soldiers and more than 100 cannon, around the Union's right flank.
00:10:08In the fog of war, Jackson was able to snake around the Union forces undetected, with the help of scouts
00:10:15and locals who mapped out a route in the wooded terrain.
00:10:19In his final dispatch to General Lee, Jackson wrote,
00:10:21The 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, fired off two signal shots, which were followed by
00:10:42bugle 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, where 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, which complicated Jackson's efforts to crush them.
00:11:07Jackson decided to push forward anyway, and headed north to cut off Union retreat.
00:11:11In fact, Jackson himself, along with some other officers, rode out ahead of the Confederate line to get a better
00:11:17sense 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 and says, Dr. McGuire, my wife tells me I'm going to die today. Is that
00:11:36true?
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, it is necessary that the glorious victory thus far achieved be prosecuted with the
00:11:59utmost vigor and the enemy given no time to rally.
00:12:03As soon, therefore, as it is possible, they must be pressed so that we may unite the two wings of
00:12:08the army.
00:12:09Endeavor, therefore, to dispossess them of Chancellorsville, which 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, but let nothing
00:12:19delay 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.
00:12:30On May 3rd, Stewart led brutal frontal assaults on critical positions, including the high ground of Hazel Grove, with the
00:12:36goal of reuniting the Confederate Army.
00:12:38The attack was immediately effective. In order to prevent another Confederate flanking maneuver, Hooker made the fateful decision to abandon
00:12:46the high ground on Hazel Grove, ordering Sickles to fall back with the rest of the Union forces.
00:12:51It was a pivotal blunter and yet another cautious decision while Lee was pursuing a much more aggressive strategy.
00:12:58It's important to emphasize how important Hazel Grove was as an artillery platform.
00:13:03As Chris Michalski writes in That Furious Struggle, quote,
00:13:07In the 70 square mile sea of trees that made up the wilderness, there 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 while also making the gun harder to hit with counter battery fire.
00:13:25The Confederates immediately rushed dozens of guns onto Hazel Grove and unloaded on the Union lines, forcing them to pull
00:13:32back.
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 where he was standing at his command center, splintering a
00:13:47piece of wood that fell and hit him.
00:13:49Hooker was never removed from command, nor did his subordinates attempt to replace him, but he was clearly dazed at
00:13:54the worst possible moment, right when his forces were divided and the fighting was fiercest.
00:14:00But at the same time, Sedgwick broke through the Confederate battle lines at Fredericksburg, specifically Mary's Heights, posing a direct
00:14:06and unopposed threat to the rear of Lee's lines.
00:14:09When Lee heard the news, he was stoic. In response to a chaplain who was panicking after bringing word of
00:14:15the advancing Union Army, Lee said simply,
00:14:18Thank you very much. But both you and your horse are overheated. Take him to that shady tree yonder and
00:14:24rest a little.
00:14:26Lee ultimately decided to split his army for a third time. He sent the Second Corps under Brigadier General Raleigh
00:14:32Colston to strike Hooker,
00:14:34and he ordered McLaw's division to march east to fight Sedgwick. Fighting had broken out in three key areas, Salem
00:14:41Church, Fredericksburg, and the Chancellorsville Crossroads.
00:14:45Eventually, Lee rode out to Salem Church to lead the counterattack on Sedgwick directly. He successfully prevented the Union pincer
00:14:52movement once again by dividing his forces.
00:14:56Outmaneuvered, stunned, and physically injured, Hooker ordered a full retreat on the night of May 4th. Lee, by repeatedly dividing
00:15:03his 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 were eager
00:15:12for a major victory. Lee's tactics are still studied today in military academies.
00:15:17He recognized his opponents' strategic weakness and his opponents' fear, and he exploited them both.
00:15:23When the war broke out, no one thought it would last long. One person who knew it wouldn't be short
00:15:28was Robert E. Lee.
00:15:30In early 1861, while still in the U.S. Army at Fort Mason, Texas, he correctly predicted that if it
00:15:35came to armed conflict, quote,
00:15:37the war will last at least four years. He was right. Lee's foresight in recognizing the Civil War's potential for
00:15:44protracted devastation,
00:15:46unlike the naive optimism of many on both sides, underscored his wisdom and his realism.
00:15:50His perfect battle at Chancellorsville showcased Lee's military prowess. The South didn't have the North's industrial capacity,
00:15:58railroads, wealth, or population, but 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, an immediate question arose.
00:16:18What should the conflict be called?
00:16:21Now, the answer wasn't obvious. On April 15th, President Lincoln issued Proclamation 80,
00:16:25which referred to the attack on Sumter and various state secessions as, quote,
00:16:30combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.
00:16:35In a July 4th message to Congress, Lincoln referred to the war as, quote,
00:16:39a case of rebellion. He continued to use the term rebellion throughout the war,
00:16:43including in the Emancipation Proclamation, where he mentioned the rebellion against the United States.
00:16:48The words were political in nature. The Constitution conferred Lincoln emergency powers if he called it a rebellion.
00:16:55It also denied legitimacy to the South, implying that they were still part of the country.
00:17:00In 1880, when the War Department released the official records of the war, they titled it the War of the
00:17:06Rebellion,
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, like the War for Southern Independence and the War Between
00:17:16the States.
00:17:17After the first battle of Manassas, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson told his troops,
00:17:22I hope by your future deeds and bearing you'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, titled 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, but it certainly was
00:17:45not a civil war.
00:17:47Civil wars are between two sides that want to control the country.
00:17:51The 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.
00:18:34According 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, quote,
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.
00:19:03So 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,
00:19:31approached Senator John Taylor of Virginia and informed him they wanted to break up the union already.
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,
00:20:02When the Constitution was adopted by the votes of states at Philadelphia
00:20:06and accepted by the votes of states at popular conventions,
00:20:09it is safe to say that there was not a man in the country from Washington and Hamilton on the
00:20:13one side
00:20:14to George Clinton and George Mason on the other,
00:20:16who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment entered upon by the states,
00:20:21and from which each and every state had the right peaceably to withdraw,
00:20:26a right which was very likely to be exercised.
00:20:28Their historical record proves this point.
00:20:31Between the founding of the country in 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 because 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,
00:21:23"...so injurious to the interests and abhorrent to the feelings of the people of the free states as, in our
00:21:28opinion,
00:21:29not only inevitably to result in a dissolution of the Union, but 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, New 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.
00:21:53As the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote put it, quote,
00:21:56"...if the states had known that they couldn't get out, they never would have gotten in."
00:22:05Robert 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, Lee wrote his father-in-law, quote,
00:22:17"...if the Union is dissolved, which God in his mercy forbid, I shall return to you."
00:22:22According to historian Alan Guelzo, as the states of the Deep South left the Union, Lee complained that
00:22:28the 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 determined to coalesce with them.
00:22:41In a letter to one of his cousins, he wrote,
00:22:43"...secession is revolution."
00:22:45He wrote that, quote,
00:22:46"...our 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, power and security abroad,
00:22:55and under which we have acquired a colossal strength unequaled in the history of mankind."
00:23:00According to Guelzo, 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, then the only alternative was to
00:23:10"...go back in sorrow to my people and share the misery of my native land."
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 6, 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.
00:23:41This is because the legality of secession mattered to him,
00:23:44and because his native Virginia hadn't seceded yet.
00:23:48As he left Texas, Lee declared he was
00:23:50"...returning to Virginia to resign and go to planting corn,
00:23:53and though he would never bear arms against the U.S.,
00:23:56he might carry a musket in defense of my native state, Virginia."
00:24:01Lee's attitude tells us a lot about why
00:24:04not 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,
00:24:15when 13 U.S. colonies decided to secede from the British Crown.
00:24:19After winning their war for independence,
00:24:21those colonies then formed the Articles of Confederation,
00:24:24which required that any changes to the Union
00:24:26be 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.,
00:24:37who served as a colonel in the Union Army,
00:24:40will say, quote,
00:24:41"...if Robert E. Lee was a traitor, so also indisputably
00:24:44were George Washington, Oliver Cromwell,
00:24:46John Hamden, and William of Orange."
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.
00:24:55He 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,
00:25:04just as Lee went with it 85 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,
00:25:20much 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
00:25:43and the New York Times, published materials encouraging the government
00:25:46to 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.
00:26:00We 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
00:26:09and that any treason prosecution would rise and fall on that question.
00:26:15Indeed, she quotes George Washington Woodward,
00:26:17Chief 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
00:26:25and may find a strange vindication in that trial.
00:26:29Secession has yet to be defined.
00:26:30Hitherto, it has been a toy of politicians.
00:26:32And 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.
00:26:46So that levying war to defend a Confederacy founded in secession
00:26:49could not be levying war against the government of the 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.
00:27:03Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who was most famous for getting caned on the Senate floor,
00:27:08said the tried Jefferson Davis would be the nay plus ultra of folly.
00:27:12The 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.
00:27:26Before his untimely death, President Lincoln had remarked that Davis's flight from Richmond in April was a good thing,
00:27:32because it forestalled the political and legal difficulties that 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, I guess it wouldn't hurt me much.
00:27:50At a cabinet meeting at the White House on July 18th, there was no consensus at the White House as
00:27:55to how to proceed.
00:27:56President Andrew Johnson, who assumed office after Lincoln's assassination, pressed for a clear answer, but he didn't get one.
00:28:02The Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, stated that there was, quote,
00:28:07a great diversity of opinion in the matter as to whether Davis should be tried first for the crime of
00:28:11high 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 and he wanted vindication in court.
00:28:23Davis, in fact, hoped that he would be arrested in 1861 after his home state of Mississippi seceded so that
00:28:28he could demonstrate the legality of secession.
00:28:30But no one arrested him and he instead was chosen to be president of 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 in Virginia, but never got his
00:28:49day in court.
00:28:50Over time, popular support for prosecution waned and the Johnson administration was far from certain that a Virginia jury would
00:28:56convict 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. Quote,
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, it would lose its case and I
00:29:12should be acquitted.
00:29:13So none of the indictments were ever tried.
00:29:15Shortly after Davis's case was dropped in April of 1869, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate unrelated case, Texas
00:29:22v. White, that secession is indeed unconstitutional.
00:29:25As the court put it, the 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.
00:29:41And the ruling attracted virtually no media attention because 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 years after the lengthy public debate
00:29:53over Davis's trial made clear that, in fact, there 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, at the minimum, the constitutionality of secession was a close
00:30:11call.
00:30:12And that it would be a gross oversimplification, if not an outright falsehood, to call these men traitors.
00:30:23One 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, A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil
00:30:39War.
00:30:40The abolitionists convinced themselves, based on their evangelical experiences, that smearing the South's reputation in every possible way would create
00:30:48the 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 that would consume the North's soul if her citizens did
00:30:58not vow to expunge the sin of slavery.
00:31:02Meanwhile, in the South, there was an intense fear of slave insurrections and race wars, following the brutal uprising and
00:31:08revolution in present-day Haiti.
00:31:10Therefore, the Civil War, Fleming argues, is best understood as a product of a psychological disease that afflicted both the
00:31:16North and the South in different ways, which made rational dialogue impossible.
00:31:19Sound familiar?
00:31:22That mutual disease, he argues, is why only the U.S., unlike Great Britain and Brazil, fought a brutal war
00:31:28over slavery.
00:31:30And yet, long after the war, some of these over-the-top descriptions of the South, as simply evil, survive
00:31:35today.
00:31:36The cartoon version of history holds that Abraham Lincoln invaded the South because 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., in 1703, more than 42% of New
00:31:58York City households owned slaves, a ratio only surpassed by Charleston, South Carolina.
00:32:03In Connecticut, Mitchum says one-half of all ministers, lawyers, and public officials owned slaves.
00:32:08By 1783, one-quarter of Connecticut families owned slaves, and one out of every 14 people in Rhode Island was
00:32:15a slave.
00:32:15Many prominent Northerners, including Founding Fathers, owned slaves.
00:32:19This includes the first signer of the Declaration of Independence and future Massachusetts Governor John Hancock, who had two or
00:32:25three household slaves.
00:32:26Other notable slaveholders from Massachusetts include Cotton Mather, who learned about inoculation from one of his slaves.
00:32:34Slavery in the North was awful.
00:32:36Massachusetts and Connecticut set curfews for black people.
00:32:39According to the book, Black Bondage in the North, in the 1700s, Connecticut required blacks to be off the streets
00:32:45by nine at night and 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.
00:32:57In New York, it was a misdemeanor for slaves to gather in groups larger than four.
00:33:01And 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, slavery 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 were calling for the South to immediately free
00:33:19all 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 and were designed so northern slaveholders didn't lose money.
00:33:35In 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 from all further participation in those violations of human
00:33:55rights
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, including 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 which 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, and Jefferson's bill was ineffective at stopping it.
00:34:37According to the book Black Cargoes by Daniel Mannix,
00:34:39an English captain reported that the port of Lemieux in the slave market of Zanzibar
00:34:44was packed with, quote, enterprising Americans whose star-spangled banner may 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,
00:34:58there were 24 American ships in the Zanzibar Harbor as against three British.
00:35:03There are two reasons the British Navy, which 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.
00:35:13And second, President John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts forbade the British from boarding any American flagged ships.
00:35:18The 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 that the Zanzibarians thought all white men came from this one
00:35:31New England town.
00:35:32English officers discovered to their indignation that Great Britain was considered to be a suburb of Salem.
00:35:38The Americans traded for slaves in ivory with a cheap caligo turned out in vast quantities by the New England
00:35:44cotton mills.
00:35:45Even today, cotton is called Americani in Zanzibar.
00:35:49Moving slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and Brazil was big money for northerners.
00:35:54This part of the slave trade was its own version of the famous triangle trade.
00:35:59Cheap southern cotton was shipped north to textile mills, which northerners turned into manufactured textile goods.
00:36:06Northern slave traders traded those textiles for slaves in Zanzibar who were then trafficked to the Caribbean for huge profits.
00:36:13The North was profiting from slavery on all three corners of the triangle.
00:36:17This continued for decades.
00:36:18W.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 and centered at New York City.
00:36:28In 1862, literally during the Civil War, the New York Journal of Commerce reported that New York was, quote,
00:36:34The principal port of the world for this infamous commerce.
00:36:38Although the cities of Portland, Maine, and Boston are 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, black people couldn't attend public schools,
00:36:53couldn't testify against white people in court, or bear arms.
00:36:56If three or more of them gathered to dance, they were fined and lashed.
00:37:00The purpose of these laws, which were known as the Illinois Black Codes, was to discourage black people from moving
00:37:05to the state.
00:37:06In 1853, Illinois made things more explicit with a black exclusion law that, quote,
00:37:12Prohibited blacks from coming into the state with the intention of living there.
00:37:16Punishment proved especially harsh in that violators were subject to penalties that amounted to forced labor, essentially slavery.
00:37:23Illinois law was so extreme that it was a crime for blacks to settle in that state without a certificate
00:37:27of freedom,
00:37:28which cost $1,000, the equivalent of about $40,000 today.
00:37:32The Black Codes were so harsh that even some southern newspapers objected.
00:37:36The New Orleans Bee called the Illinois Black Codes an act of special and savage ruthlessness.
00:37:42One of the key figures in passing the Black Codes was a state representative named John A. Logan.
00:37:46Logan was an enthusiastic enforcer of the Fugitive Slave Act and an open racist.
00:37:51Abraham Lincoln later made him a union general.
00:37:53After 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.
00:38:10Indiana and Oregon banned black settlement in their state constitutions.
00:38:14According to Eugene Berwanger's book, The 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 and is even less likely to do
00:38:30so on such thorny problems as race relations.
00:38:33Yet, if 79.5% of the people in Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, and Kansas voted to exclude the free Negroes
00:38:40simply 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, quote,
00:38:51The motive of those who protested against the extension of slavery had always been concern for the welfare of the
00:38:56white man and not an unnatural sympathy for the Negro.
00:38:59In other words, many northern and western voters opposed the expansion of slavery into their states and territories,
00:39:05not primarily out of moral opposition to slavery itself, but because they didn't want black neighbors.
00:39:12Generally speaking, in the first half of the 1800s, many 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, thousands of Virginians petitioned their government to end slavery.
00:39:31Charles County Quakers issued a petition calling for a new law declaring that all persons born in the state after
00:39:37some period to be fixed by law shall be free.
00:39:41Virginia's governor at the time wrote in his diary that before I leave this government,
00:39:45I will have contrived to have a law passed gradually abolishing slavery in this state.
00:39:50The Richmond Enquirer at the time called slavery the greatest evil which can scourge our land.
00:39:56The Virginia House of Delegates failed to end slavery then, but it wasn't by an overwhelming vote.
00:40:01Many people didn't realize that the windowed end slavery through the legal process likely peaked right at the beginning of
00:40:07the 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, dramatically increased the demand for slave labor in the South because it made cotton
00:40:21cultivation vastly more profitable.
00:40:23As the Civil War approached, the hundreds of anti-slavery groups that had formed in the mid-1820s had mostly
00:40:30gone away,
00:40:31and so had any possibility that Southern 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, though many Virginians knew it was wrong.
00:40:46One of them was Robert E. Lee himself.
00:40:48According to historian Alan Guelzo, Lee, quote, regarded slavery as a moral and political evil,
00:40:54which, however, he was content to leave in the hands of God to resolve.
00:40:58Lee's slaves were inherited, one slave family from his mother and 197 others from his father-in-law, GWP Custis.
00:41:07In 1862, during the war, Lee, quote, completed the emancipation of the Custis slaves,
00:41:11which he was obligated to do by his father-in-law's will, and then freed his own, which he was
00:41:16not.
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, the 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, then what was it about?
00:41:39Well, the answer depends on who you ask.
00:41:41Though interestingly, Presidents Lincoln and Davis seemed to agree.
00:41:44Confederate President Jefferson Davis said, quote,
00:41:46We 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, quote,
00:42:08In other words, according to both presidents, the war was fundamentally about the question of keeping or ending the Union.
00:42:16The key argument against the idea that Civil War was solely about slavery is that at the time of secession
00:42:22in late 1860 and early 1861,
00:42:24neither the incoming Republican administration nor mainstream Northern opinion advocated for the immediate abolition of slavery where it already existed
00:42:32in southern states.
00:42:33The Republican Party platform of 1860 opposed the extension of slavery to the territories, but didn't call for abolition of
00:42:40slavery in the South.
00:42:41But even if it had and stood a reasonable chance of happening, which it didn't, at least in the short
00:42:46run, most 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 for the sake of rescuing black
00:42:59people in the South is just absurd and ahistorical.
00:43:03In the words of the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote, quote,
00:43:06No soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves.
00:43:10The soldiers' diaries support this.
00:43:13Heros von Bork, chief of staff to Confederate General Jim Stewart, wrote a 558 page history of his experiences in
00:43:20the war.
00:43:21His memoirs contained no references to slavery at all and only one to a slave in which he passed a
00:43:26large plantation which, I was told, belonged to a free Negro,
00:43:30one of the richest men of the county who was himself the owner of numerous slaves.
00:43:34The historian James McPherson went through the diaries of more than a thousand soldiers from both sides for his book,
00:43:41For Cause and Comrades.
00:43:43He found that, quote,
00:43:44For Union and Confederate volunteers alike, abstract symbols or concepts such as country, flag, constitution, liberty, and legacy of the
00:43:52revolution figured prominently in their explanations of why they enlisted.
00:43:57For Confederate soldiers, a more concrete, visceral, and perhaps more powerful motive also came into play.
00:44:03Defense of home and hearth against an invading enemy.
00:44:06They signed up to fight out of duty, a concept that was a lot stronger 150 years ago than it
00:44:14is 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 because 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 and 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 and native born Americans who said, quote,
00:45:00Our 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.
00:45:10The same is true for Southern soldiers.
00:45:12McPherson estimates that just 20% of Confederate soldiers even considered slavery a cause worth fighting for in the first
00:45:18place.
00:45:18Most were focused on repelling an invasion.
00:45:20Quote, Defense of the homeland was one of the strongest of combat motivations.
00:45:25Even among soldiers from slaveholding families, only one third explicitly voiced pro-slavery convictions.
00:45:32McPherson writes that many Virginians shared Robert E. Lee's view that they wouldn't fight unless it be in defense of
00:45:37Virginia.
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 that marches
00:45:44against 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, he 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, which included Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and 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 from forming an alliance with the Confederacy,
00:46:19which seemed likely at the time and would have dramatically changed the South's fortunes.
00:46:24So the Proclamation was a brilliant political maneuver that undercut the Confederacy's diplomatic efforts to court Europe
00:46:31because it made intervention politically untenable for European leaders who almost all opposed slavery.
00:46:36Now, wait a second here. We are not saying the war had nothing to do with slavery because that would
00:46:43also be ridiculous.
00:46:44It's just as much a cartoon caricature as what your idiot teachers taught you in school.
00:46:49No, slavery was a factor that led to war, and it was a major factor.
00:46:54South Carolina's Declaration of Causes for Secession references slavery six times.
00:46:58After seceding, South Carolina immediately made an appeal to other slaveholding states to secede,
00:47:04and in its appeal referenced slavery no less than 32 times.
00:47:08The South Carolina legislatures literally wrote, quote,
00:47:11Slaveholding states cannot be safe in subjection to non-slaveholding states.
00:47:16When General Claiborne suggested freeing the slaves to fight for the Confederacy,
00:47:20his fellow officers were shocked and appalled.
00:47:22Slavery was a factor in the war, and probably a significant one, but it was not the only factor.
00:47:29The South left for three other reasons, too.
00:47:32First, there was the balance of political power.
00:47:35In the Republic's first 72 years,
00:47:37slaveholding Southerners occupied the White House approximately two-thirds of the time,
00:47:41or 49 years out of 72.
00:47:43Some of the biggest figures in American politics were from the South,
00:47:46including Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and John C. Calhoun.
00:47:50To the extent that there were Northern presidents, many were sympathetic to the South,
00:47:54like Pennsylvania's James Buchanan.
00:47:55But demographics is destiny.
00:47:58As the Northern states surged in population,
00:48:00driven by higher birth rates and massive waves of European immigration,
00:48:04the South's longstanding political dominance collapsed.
00:48:07The South's share of the House of Representatives dropped from roughly 48% at the founding to 38% by
00:48:131860.
00:48:14For decades, Congress maintained balance in the Senate by adding slave and free states at the same time,
00:48:19but after the country's massive territorial expansion as a result of the Mexican-American War,
00:48:24that balance was doomed.
00:48:26There was no need for slave labor in places like Arizona or New Mexico,
00:48:29and so the South's relative power declined quickly.
00:48:33California was admitted as a free state in 1850.
00:48:35Free Oregon entered in 1859.
00:48:38Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860, coupled with the rapid rise of the Republican Party,
00:48:43which was a purely sectional Northern organization at the time,
00:48:47signaled the end of Southern dominance in national politics.
00:48:51Second, the South had a financial motive.
00:48:53At the outbreak of the war, the American South produced roughly three-quarters of the world's cotton.
00:48:59From 1830 to 1860, cotton 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.
00:49:10And by the 1830s, more than 80% of the cotton grown in the South was being exported.
00:49:16At the time, the biggest source of revenue for the U.S. government was the tariff.
00:49:20This was great policy for Northern states, since their tariffs protected their manufacturers from foreign competition.
00:49:26But it was terrible for the export-dependent South because retaliatory tariffs restricted their access to the foreign markets.
00:49:32And because their economy was built around agricultural exports, they had higher demand for foreign manufactured goods.
00:49:39So how much of a factor was money in the decision to secede?
00:49:43On Christmas Day 1860, the South Carolina legislature issued an address to the other slave-holding states calling on them
00:49:50to leave the Union.
00:49:51One of their major grievances was, quote,
00:49:54The taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests
00:49:58of the North.
00:50:00The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent
00:50:07with revenue,
00:50:08to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufacturers.
00:50:14The role that economics played in secession was obvious to outsiders.
00:50:19Karl Marx complained at the time that London's biggest newspapers, including The Times, The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review,
00:50:27were arguing that, quote,
00:50:28The war between the North and South is a tariff war.
00:50:31The war is further not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact, turns on
00:50:37Northern lust for sovereignty.
00:50:38A third reason was the massive cultural divide between the regions.
00:50:43The South was rural and agricultural. The North was urban, industrial, and had huge numbers of European immigrants.
00:50:51Increasingly, they hated each other, something that became obvious on one cool Virginia morning in October 1859.
00:50:59Robert E. Lee was harvesting the rye crop in his fields in Arlington when a mounted soldier showed up and
00:51:04handed him a letter from the Secretary of War.
00:51:06The night before, around 1.30 in the morning, the Federal Armory and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, had been
00:51:12taken by a group of armed men.
00:51:14A train passing through it sent telegrams on to Washington warning of 150 armed abolitionists who have come to free
00:51:21the slaves and intend to do it at all hazards and to arm poor whites who are similarly aggrieved with
00:51:27the slave system.
00:51:28They were led by a radical abolitionist and insurrectionist named John Brown, who wanted to provoke a massive slave uprising
00:51:34across the South.
00:51:35It was Lee's job to take back Harpers Ferry with a company of 90 Marines, two howitzers, and a few
00:51:42local citizen militias from Maryland and Virginia.
00:51:45He had such little time to prepare that he wore civilian clothing and a top hat, and he commandeered a
00:51:50Baltimore and Ohio engine car to get there,
00:51:52riding with just one other officer, the conductor, and the train's fireman.
00:51:57When Lee arrived, Brown's revolution had failed to materialize.
00:52:00The raiders were trapped in an engine house. The Marines waited until morning and then stormed the building.
00:52:06John Brown and four of his men were taken alive and later tried and executed.
00:52:11The South responded to the news with total heart.
00:52:14The Richmond Enquirer wrote, quote,
00:52:16The Southern people have heretofore disregarded the ravings of Northern fanatics because they believe such madness to be merely a
00:52:22pecuniary speculation.
00:52:23But the attack at Harpers Ferry shows that the Northern people mean more than words.
00:52:29Virginia's legislature awarded Lee a sword for his gallant conduct at Harpers Ferry.
00:52:35The North was euphoric.
00:52:37Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that John Brown was an idealist who put his ideas into action.
00:52:43Henry David Thoreau compared Brown's execution to the crucifixion of Christ.
00:52:47The abolitionist Wendell Phillips, also of Massachusetts, called Harpers Ferry the Lexington of today,
00:52:53comparing it to the opening shots of the Revolutionary War, and said Brown was the brave, frank and sublime
00:53:00truster in God's right and absolute justice.
00:53:03Northerners raised money to pay for Brown's legal defense.
00:53:06Many of Brown's conspirators were protected by Republican governors in Northern states.
00:53:10The Northern response shook the South to its core.
00:53:13South Carolina's Declaration of Causes for Secession specifically mentioned Northern states providing safe harbor for John Brown's accomplices.
00:53:21Other states complained of Northern aggression and hostility.
00:53:24The attack on Harpers Ferry proved to them that the cultural bond it once shared with the North no longer
00:53:31existed.
00:53:37For as long as political scientists and historians have been polled on the best presidents,
00:53:42Abraham Lincoln has topped the charts in every category.
00:53:45Modern presidents can't help but compare themselves to him.
00:53:49But the life of a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer tells us that a different future is possible.
00:53:57That is why I'm in this race. Not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform
00:54:03a nation.
00:54:04In school, kids are taught that Abraham Lincoln was the great emancipator, a champion of equality, a defender of democracy.
00:54:11To his contemporaries, he was the ape baboon of the prairie, a coarse, vulgar joker, a simple Susan,
00:54:19and the craftiest and most dishonest politician that ever disgraced the White House.
00:54:24Now, in reality, he was none of these things.
00:54:27Although he may have been a coarse and vulgar joker, it's hard to know for sure.
00:54:31The greatest event in Lincoln's life, what turned him from man to myth, was his assassination.
00:54:36In the words of historian Michael Burlingame,
00:54:40"...canonization began almost immediately. Within days of his death, his life was being compared to Jesus Christ.
00:54:46He was shot on Good Friday, and by Easter Sunday, a prominent American pastor said,
00:54:50Heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of our lost leader."
00:54:54Referring not to Jesus, but to Abraham Lincoln.
00:54:56At the 1909 Lincoln Centennial, Illinois schoolchildren recited verses calling him a peasant prince, a masterpiece of God.
00:55:05His oversized statue keeps watch over the National Mall in Washington, D.C. today.
00:55:10But in 1863, no one in America would have recognized the Lincoln we know today.
00:55:16Back then, it wasn't even clear if he was going to win re-election.
00:55:18He was, in the words of Michael Burlingame,
00:55:21"...the most activist president in history who transformed the presidency and the country."
00:55:26When he,
00:55:26"...expanded the army and navy, spent $2 million without congressional appropriation,
00:55:31blockaded southern ports, closed post offices to treasonable correspondences,
00:55:35suspended the writ of habeas corpus in several locations,
00:55:38ordered the arrest and military detention of suspected traitors,
00:55:42and issued the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year's Day, 1863."
00:55:45To do all these things, Lincoln broke an assortment of laws
00:55:49and ignored one constitutional provision after another.
00:55:52He was hated by Southerners, but also loathed by many Northerners.
00:55:55The abolitionist Wendell Phillips called Lincoln
00:55:58a huckster to politics, a first-rate, second-rate man.
00:56:02So Lincoln was, in a word at the time, controversial.
00:56:07He was also a human, and a flawed one, like us all.
00:56:10He held contemporary views on race.
00:56:12He believed blacks were inferior to whites.
00:56:15In one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he said,
00:56:18I will say then that I am not, nor ever have I been, in favor of bringing about in any
00:56:23way
00:56:24the social and political equality of the white and black races.
00:56:28That I am not, nor have I ever been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes,
00:56:32nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.
00:56:37And I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races,
00:56:41which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.
00:56:47And inasmuch as they cannot live while they do remain together,
00:56:50there must be the position of superior and inferior.
00:56:53And I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white
00:56:59race.
00:56:59I say upon this occasion, I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position,
00:57:04the Negro should be denied everything.
00:57:07I do not understand that because I do not want a Negro woman for a slave, I must necessarily want
00:57:12her for a wife.
00:57:14The crowd laughed at that answer.
00:57:16It's really hard to know what Abraham Lincoln really thought because he was an incredible politician.
00:57:21Every word he said, every action he took, he did so knowing who his audience was and what their response
00:57:27would be.
00:57:28This is very important and often overlooked.
00:57:31Historians in 100 years might look back at Barack Obama in 2008 and based on his words,
00:57:36think he did oppose gay marriage because he said he did.
00:57:40But of course, he was pandering to an audience.
00:57:43He was a politician.
00:57:45Lincoln and Obama might have more in common than just being tall, gangly, self-made lawyers from Illinois.
00:57:50But we do know that in the end, Lincoln did not free the slaves.
00:57:54When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
00:57:56he still believed that, quote,
00:57:58the only long term solution to slavery was voluntary colonization.
00:58:02On March 6th, 1862,
00:58:05President Abraham Lincoln sent a special message to Congress urging the adoption of a joint resolution
00:58:10that would offer federal financial support to any state voluntarily adopting the gradual abolishment of slavery
00:58:16with pecuniary aid provided to compensate owners for the inconvenience public and private caused by the change.
00:58:23In total, Abraham Lincoln believed that slavery was a moral and political evil.
00:58:28He believed it should end gradually rather than immediately.
00:58:32And he supported the idea of colonization or sending freed black people to Africa or elsewhere as part of the
00:58:39solution.
00:58:39In other words, Abraham Lincoln had the exact same views on slavery as Robert E. Lee.
00:58:45After the war, Robert E. Lee received a presidential pardon and returned to Virginia,
00:58:49where he took up the presidency of what is now Washington and Lee University,
00:58:53a role many historians regard as the happiest period of his life, far removed from the burdens of command.
00:58:58At the moment of surrender at Appomattox, Lee could have urged his devoted soldiers to scatter into the Appalachians,
00:59:05waging a guerrilla war that might have dragged on for decades,
00:59:08sapping northern resources and claiming countless more lives.
00:59:12Instead, true to his character, he chose the path of honor and remarkably reconciliation with the Union.
00:59:18He urged his men to lay down arms, return home, rebuild as loyal citizens.
00:59:23Today, efforts to erase Lee from history often stem from sheer historical illiteracy.
00:59:30But a deeper motive lurks.
00:59:32Resentment towards a man who embodies virtues increasingly rare in modern America.
00:59:38They hate him not for his flaws, but because he represents unattainable ideals.
00:59:44A tactical genius, a man of unyielding duty, honor and dignity.
00:59:49A southerner whose leadership at Chancellorsville still echoes in military academies worldwide.
00:59:55They know they'll never measure up.
00:59:57No statues will rise for fleeting figures like Mark Milley or anyone else.
01:00:03But Lee's legacy endures, outlasting the vandals who would topple his monuments
01:00:08or even disturb his faithful horse traveler's grave.
01:00:11In the end, Robert E. Lee is a reflection of the Civil War itself.
01:00:16Far more nuanced and multifaceted than the simplistic tales spun in high school classrooms or viral videos.
01:00:23A full reckoning with the real history, such as Shelby Foote's epic 1.2 million word trilogy spanning 3,000
01:00:30pages,
01:00:31demands depths that no textbook or hour-long internet video can capture.
01:00:35The mainstream narrative is a cartoon.
01:00:37The war was never a straightforward crusade against Southern evil.
01:00:41Secession was not categorically treason.
01:00:44Abraham Lincoln was not a messianic figure.
01:00:47The story most Americans have heard is a fairy tale.
01:00:51But one thing is true.
01:00:52Wars have consequences.
01:00:54And victors shape the story.
01:00:57That is the enduring lesson of the Civil War.
01:01:09of the Civil War.
01:01:11Second News.
01:01:14The Civil War has beaten two wars without an NAV,
01:01:15They are mourning.
01:01:15They will ruin it.
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