Louder with Crowder - July 10, 2024


The Civil War: American Masterclass with Historian David Barton | Louder With Crowder


Episode Stats


Length

24 minutes

Words per minute

209.17583

Word count

5,076

Sentence count

431

Harmful content

Misogyny

11

sentences flagged

Toxicity

19

sentences flagged

Hate speech

20

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

If you thought that the idea of another Civil War was dominating the political conversation five years ago when I first brought you this video, try taking a look at social media now. It seems like every week, a new headline or pundit asks, is the United States headed for another civil war? Is Civil War imminent? What comes next? The Civil War? Spoiler alert: it s the Civil War.

Transcript

Transcripts from "Louder with Crowder" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The Civil War.
00:00:03.000 If you thought that the idea of another Civil War was dominating the political conversation five years ago when I first brought you this video, try taking a look at social media now.
00:00:15.000 Seems like every week there's a new headline or some new pundit asking, is the United States headed for another Civil War?
00:00:21.000 Is Civil War imminent?
00:00:23.000 What comes next?
00:00:25.000 It's the Civil War.
00:00:25.000 The Civil War?
00:00:27.000 Spoiler alert.
00:00:28.000 Heck, Alex Garland even took a creative risk and wrote a whole film about the idea, titled Civil War.
00:00:38.000 So if repeating history is to be avoided, then as it relates to the Civil War in the United States, it's important to know how, but more important to know why.
00:00:50.000 Only the person who can answer the why of history Can't even hope to avoid the doom of repeating it.
00:00:57.000 it. Hopefully this helps.
00:01:04.000 Hello viewer.
00:01:07.000 Happy 4th.
00:01:08.000 You may say Independence Day.
00:01:09.000 I say 4th.
00:01:10.000 I don't know why.
00:01:10.000 I was raised in Canada, so this next installment, I didn't learn a whole lot about, and by not a whole lot, I mean none at all.
00:01:17.000 We spent an entire semester on how we burned down the White House before actually Canada was really a country.
00:01:21.000 It was technically still a colony.
00:01:22.000 The point is, the Civil War is more interesting.
00:01:24.000 We have David Barton of Wall Builders here, and we'll be doing an installment today on the Civil War and maybe some of the most common misconceptions.
00:01:33.000 Thank you for having us.
00:01:34.000 Sure, man.
00:01:35.000 This is a Civil War drum, correct?
00:01:35.000 Good to have you here.
00:01:36.000 It is a Civil War drum.
00:01:37.000 It is.
00:01:38.000 Is this a Civil War camera?
00:01:40.000 That goes back to that time.
00:01:41.000 This is the kind of camera they used from Civil War days going into the 1920s and 30s.
00:01:46.000 Wow.
00:01:46.000 So it would have been the kind of stuff that Brady would have used later to take pictures, famous pictures of Civil War.
00:01:52.000 You should put that on Etsy.
00:01:54.000 I wonder what we'd get for that.
00:01:56.000 Someone would probably just think, oh, that's quaint.
00:01:58.000 That's almost original.
00:02:00.000 And you have a lot of artifacts here from the Civil War.
00:02:04.000 I guess let's sort of kind of walk people through the Civil War.
00:02:06.000 A lot of folks say, and you hear this argued a lot, the Civil War really didn't have anything to do with slavery.
00:02:12.000 It was about economics, it was about states' rights, and we look back on it more fondly thinking it was about freeing the slaves.
00:02:20.000 Is that accurate?
00:02:21.000 Well, I kind of like to let the documents speak for themselves.
00:02:25.000 And so when you look at the Civil War, you had 11 states that seceded to become the Confederate States of America.
00:02:31.000 And so these 11 states, when they left the United States, they all wrote a document of secession on why they left.
00:02:38.000 And by the way, all of their congressmen from those states gave farewell addresses on the floor of the House and Senate that are public record.
00:02:45.000 Anybody can get them.
00:02:46.000 The Constitution requires us to keep records of every speech made.
00:02:50.000 So, that's public record out there.
00:02:52.000 So, if you take the secession documents of the 11 states telling the world why we did what we did, every one of them says it's because of slavery.
00:03:02.000 Every one of them.
00:03:03.000 Really.
00:03:04.000 Now, that's the Southern documents.
00:03:05.000 That's not a Northerner or anybody else.
00:03:07.000 And, you know, I'm from the South, but that's not anybody else saying, oh, you guys made it about slavery.
00:03:11.000 They're the ones who said that, without exception.
00:03:13.000 All 11 said slavery's the issue.
00:03:15.000 Now, you could say, well, it was economics.
00:03:17.000 That's true, but the backbone of your economy was slavery. 0.98
00:03:20.000 Right.
00:03:20.000 And so that was economics.
00:03:22.000 But you, yourself, in your secession document, you're the one who said that we left because he's trying to end slavery.
00:03:29.000 It's interesting.
00:03:30.000 We often hear the civil wars about states' rights, and the federal government is trying to tell the southern states what to do.
00:03:35.000 And as federalists, as conservatives, that's an argument that would appeal to us to a degree.
00:03:35.000 Right.
00:03:39.000 And so we think that it was all about states' rights, which is interesting that in the Confederate Constitution, to be a member of the Confederate States of America, you are not allowed to end slavery.
00:03:48.000 You had to maintain slavery as part of the Constitution. 0.52
00:03:51.000 So if it's all about states' rights, what are you doing joining a group that won't let you have the right to decide what to do with that issue?
00:03:56.000 So, it really was about slavery, and that's maybe their constitution, their vice president.
00:04:01.000 Also legalizing pot.
00:04:02.000 They were ahead of their time.
00:04:04.000 That was a big issue back then.
00:04:06.000 Missouri, really big on legalizing weed.
00:04:08.000 Well, you know, that's a border state.
00:04:10.000 There's really deep southern states like Alabama and all those states.
00:04:13.000 Yeah, right.
00:04:14.000 So, they really had this thing of slavery was the issue, according to them.
00:04:22.000 I feel comfortable because it's very laminated.
00:04:24.000 forms, according to their own constitutions and according to their secession documents.
00:04:28.000 What about according to, I can touch this, correct?
00:04:31.000 I feel comfortable because it's very laminated.
00:04:34.000 According to this man, Abraham Lincoln, if he could have kept the union without ending
00:04:39.000 slavery and a lot of people say that that's what he would have done.
00:04:42.000 He felt that it was necessary.
00:04:44.000 Would he have kept slavery?
00:04:45.000 Well, see, the whole argument all the way up to that point... By the way, he looks a lot more ethnic than you usually think of Abraham Lincoln when you look at that.
00:04:51.000 I mean, he could be Native American, he could be, I don't know, he could be Ukrainian?
00:04:56.000 Uzbekistanian?
00:04:57.000 Yeah.
00:04:58.000 The point is, it's not Daniel Day-Lewis from The Crucible.
00:05:01.000 No, it's not.
00:05:02.000 So, with Lincoln, leading up to all those years before the Civil War, with the abolition debates, there was no clear consensus that the Constitution prohibited slavery.
00:05:16.000 And why did they want to do that?
00:05:17.000 to each state.
00:05:18.000 Now, the founding fathers, they thought when they were doing the Constitutional Convention,
00:05:23.000 they all agreed, if you give us 20 years, we're going to end slavery, which is why they 0.98
00:05:27.000 put the date at 1808.
00:05:29.000 So 20 years after the Constitution was written, they thought they could get rid of slavery,
00:05:32.000 they could ban the slave trade and be done with it. 0.86
00:05:35.000 Even the pro-slavery states...
00:05:36.000 And why did they want to do that?
00:05:38.000 Who would be included in those founding fathers who wanted to end slavery?
00:05:41.000 Well, it's interesting that when we did the Declaration of Independence, the longest single
00:05:45.000 grievance in the Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson, and it said, we have been
00:05:50.000 trying to end slavery in America and the king won't let us.
00:05:53.000 Because in 1773, you had Rhode Island, and you had Massachusetts, and Connecticut, you had Pennsylvania all do anti-slavery laws.
00:06:01.000 And in 1774, the king said, no, no, no.
00:06:04.000 You're part of the British Empire.
00:06:05.000 We have slavery.
00:06:06.000 You're going to have slavery. 0.92
00:06:07.000 So at that point, founding fathers like Ben Franklin and Benjamin Rush and others said, this is not right.
00:06:12.000 We've been trying to free our own slaves.
00:06:14.000 We don't like slavery.
00:06:16.000 We don't want it.
00:06:17.000 And so you'll find that 41 of the signers of the Declaration owned slaves.
00:06:21.000 It's not a question of how many own slaves.
00:06:23.000 What did they do once they had the right to end slavery?
00:06:26.000 So when we separate in 1776, you'll find that so many of those guys freed slaves, said,
00:06:30.000 this is what we've been waiting for.
00:06:32.000 This is why we want to separate from Great Britain.
00:06:34.000 And so the largest grievance in the Declaration is Thomas Jefferson saying, we've been trying
00:06:40.000 to end slavery and they won't let us. 0.99
00:06:42.000 Jefferson had been introducing anti-slavery laws in his own state.
00:06:46.000 His state would not allow him to free his own slaves.
00:06:48.000 Right.
00:06:48.000 Not just the British, but his state.
00:06:49.000 So what happened was... Was it Jefferson who, or was it Washington who freed them at the time of his death?
00:06:54.000 Washington freed them at the time of his death.
00:06:56.000 There was a loophole in the law that was added in 1782 to Virginia law that said, okay, We want people to be free, so when you die, you can free.
00:07:04.000 But even with that, even when you die, you can free your slaves.
00:07:07.000 They never allowed you to free what were called dowry slaves. 1.00
00:07:10.000 And dowry slaves were the slaves that came through the wife. 1.00
00:07:13.000 So Martha's slaves, George Washington, you can't free Martha's slaves.
00:07:16.000 You can never free a dowry slave.
00:07:18.000 So Jefferson, by the time he came to Jefferson, the legislature said, what were we thinking about?
00:07:23.000 That was a bad loophole.
00:07:24.000 So they closed the loophole.
00:07:26.000 He didn't even have that loophole at the time of his death.
00:07:29.000 So, what happened was Jefferson wrote this anti-slavery piece in the Declaration, and he wrote, because the Declaration says, the unanimous Declaration, they all agreed that the only thing we'll put in the Declaration is what all 13 states agree on.
00:07:43.000 Jefferson said South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia would not agree that slavery was a big issue, and so we had to take that clause out.
00:07:51.000 So the Civil War was a long time brewing.
00:07:52.000 It didn't just come out of nowhere like a lot of people think.
00:07:54.000 But those three states thought that if you give us 20 years we can be away from slavery, and they probably would have been, because slavery is economically unprofitable.
00:08:01.000 What kept it alive was 1803.
00:08:03.000 The cotton gin comes in, and now a slave can do what 10 slaves used to do, so now I can make money.
00:08:09.000 So it changed the whole economy.
00:08:10.000 The slave economy changed, but there was the belief that by 1808 we can get this done in America.
00:08:15.000 So, and before we move on, what are these here?
00:08:17.000 I see some... These are all Civil War... Oh, and by the way, sorry, I should have said, this is actually the picture that was used, right?
00:08:23.000 That they used... That's what they used to build the Lincoln Memorial.
00:08:26.000 That is the picture that was used for that, and this is the negative that was used for that picture.
00:08:31.000 Photo negative of Abraham Lincoln.
00:08:33.000 Now you're looking at what looked at Lincoln, essentially.
00:08:36.000 So all that to say that at the time of Lincoln, slavery was not a settled constitutional issue, because the Constitution didn't matter.
00:08:46.000 So his job was to take an oath to uphold the Constitution, which he would have done that if slavery had to be required.
00:08:52.000 He hated it.
00:08:53.000 He was against it.
00:08:54.000 He spoke against it.
00:08:56.000 But when it became clear, after the split, that I can't save the Union without ending slavery, then that's where he went. 0.77
00:09:03.000 Okay.
00:09:04.000 And he did that with this, I assume.
00:09:06.000 Well, this... Hit?
00:09:08.000 Actually, by the way, is that maybe a little short for you as a crutch?
00:09:08.000 Yeah.
00:09:13.000 It's a little, yeah.
00:09:14.000 It almost is belt height.
00:09:16.000 This came from a black soldier in the Civil War. 0.96
00:09:18.000 This is a crutch. 0.95
00:09:18.000 This is a crutch? 0.95
00:09:19.000 That was a black soldier in the Civil War.
00:09:21.000 It actually seemed like he was pretty tall. 0.53
00:09:23.000 Oh, no way, it's a crutch.
00:09:24.000 I was thinking a cane.
00:09:24.000 Never mind.
00:09:25.000 Oh, wow.
00:09:26.000 That was tiny, tiny Tim.
00:09:27.000 That was midget Tim. 1.00
00:09:28.000 While we're there... That's a far cry from Will Chamberlain.
00:09:31.000 He would not have been the guy on the basketball team.
00:09:34.000 No, he wouldn't.
00:09:35.000 It was a Canadian guy who invented basketball.
00:09:36.000 While we're there...
00:09:37.000 I want to introduce you to a guy, a very famous guy in Civil War.
00:09:43.000 His name is John Clem.
00:09:45.000 John Clem, for bravery at the Battle of Chickamauga, a newspaper reported that for what he did in that battle, his bravery was so great, that Lieutenant Rosecrans saw his bravery on the
00:09:56.000 battlefield and promoted him on the spot from being a private to being a sergeant.
00:10:01.000 And then General Thomas came in and said, no, no, no, I need you on my staff and made
00:10:06.000 him a lieutenant and put him on his staff, on the general staff.
00:10:09.000 He's 12 years old.
00:10:12.000 That is the soldier.
00:10:13.000 So that's his... That's not... No, no.
00:10:15.000 This is a black guy, but I want you to see how small they were. 1.00
00:10:17.000 Well, it's hard to tell what the photo negatives and the 9 is black and white.
00:10:20.000 I couldn't really see.
00:10:21.000 Okay, no, that's clearly a white 12. 0.82
00:10:22.000 It's a white 12-year-old.
00:10:24.000 I don't see color.
00:10:25.000 Here he is in his... You don't see color.
00:10:27.000 I'm colorblind.
00:10:28.000 There's my dad.
00:10:28.000 We're all the human race.
00:10:29.000 Oh, there you go.
00:10:30.000 Nice job.
00:10:31.000 So this is him, too.
00:10:32.000 So you see how small?
00:10:33.000 That is his sergeant's uniform.
00:10:36.000 Wow.
00:10:36.000 He's about this tall.
00:10:38.000 And so, I mean, they were small, really small back then.
00:10:42.000 And he was smaller than usual, but they were all pretty small.
00:10:44.000 So this is from the Mass 54th, the movie Glory.
00:10:48.000 This is one of the soldiers that was featured and would have been featured in that movie Glory.
00:10:52.000 Matthew Broderick probably could have actually used that He probably could.
00:10:55.000 He's about the right height for that.
00:10:57.000 So that is from the Civil War.
00:10:58.000 This is a hand grenade from the Civil War.
00:11:02.000 What you do, load it up with powder, and this is your firing pin right there, and it looks like a Nerf football.
00:11:07.000 I was going to say, we used to have Velcro pads, and we would throw them over the game.
00:11:11.000 Well, you would throw this to the other side, and when it hit, it would blow up.
00:11:14.000 So that was your early hand grenade.
00:11:15.000 Ages 7 and up with that one.
00:11:17.000 Yeah, well, ages 12 and up.
00:11:20.000 And these are swim goggles?
00:11:23.000 Yes, they look exactly like it.
00:11:25.000 They fit you so well.
00:11:27.000 Actually, the guys who were using the cannons, this would protect their eyes.
00:11:32.000 From all the powder?
00:11:33.000 Cannon fire, yeah.
00:11:34.000 So that's all the guys in artillery.
00:11:38.000 These are all things related to Civil War.
00:11:40.000 And actually, one of the famous generals in the Civil War was James A. Garfield.
00:11:46.000 Okay.
00:11:46.000 And he was so good at what he did that Lincoln said, I've got to help you in Congress.
00:11:50.000 I need help bad.
00:11:51.000 So Garfield came back.
00:11:52.000 He was a major general.
00:11:54.000 He gets in Congress.
00:11:55.000 He helps pass the first 23 civil rights laws that are passed for equality in Congress.
00:12:00.000 He becomes the 20th president.
00:12:01.000 And this happens to be a letter from him.
00:12:03.000 It's kind of... I don't want to say this.
00:12:05.000 It's not what you expect of a president.
00:12:07.000 But in this letter, he says here, he's a preacher.
00:12:12.000 I can't believe he would call someone's wife that.
00:12:14.000 Well, yeah.
00:12:16.000 I can't read this at all.
00:12:18.000 I don't know how you can read this.
00:12:21.000 He says he preached 19 times in a revival meeting.
00:12:24.000 There were 34 editions, and he baptized 31 by immersion.
00:12:28.000 So here you've got a guy who is a guy we know as a president who was a revival preacher?
00:12:34.000 I mean, we don't think about faith with these guys, and that was a really big part of their life.
00:12:38.000 Let me see, how do you juxtapose when people talk about Abraham Lincoln and the belief that a black man was worth three-fifths that of a white man?
00:12:45.000 Oh, I love you brought that up.
00:12:47.000 The best answer to that is to go to black commentators on the Constitution. 0.94
00:12:50.000 Go to Frederick Douglass.
00:12:52.000 Because Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery, he made it to Boston, he started speaking first in New York for the New York Abolitionist Society, then Boston wanted to hire him full-time.
00:13:02.000 And he was trained at the feet of what are called radical abolitionists, Garrett and Smith and some of those guys.
00:13:08.000 And they said, you know, we have a real problem in America.
00:13:10.000 We have a pro-slavery Constitution. 0.98
00:13:12.000 It's been flawed from the beginning.
00:13:13.000 We need a new Constitution.
00:13:15.000 So these hardcore abolitionists thought the Constitution's a flawed document.
00:13:18.000 He said, I believe that.
00:13:20.000 They were taught.
00:13:21.000 He said, but when I was hired full-time by the Massachusetts Abolitionist Society to speak full-time, he said, I decided I better read it for myself.
00:13:30.000 He said, when I read the Constitution, he said, I saw that in it there was not a single pro-slavery clause.
00:13:36.000 It was anti-slavery.
00:13:38.000 Well, then what do you do with three-fifths?
00:13:40.000 Three-fifths, if you go back to the debates in 1787, three-fifths, the Southern states said, we want to count every black And the northern states said, count them, but free them first. 1.00
00:13:49.000 They need to be free, because you're not representing them, you're using them.
00:13:52.000 And so what happened was, they arrived at this compromise and said, okay, every black you count, you get more pro-slavery representation in Congress.
00:14:00.000 So they went back and forth and said, okay, here's the deal, we'll let you count three-fifths of your blacks. 0.56
00:14:05.000 And so that cut pro-slavery representation by 40% in Congress.
00:14:09.000 It was nothing about the worth of the individuals.
00:14:11.000 It was about the representation from them.
00:14:13.000 And so when people hear the Constitution says blacks are only worth three-fifths, Frederick Douglass said, I checked it, that's not true.
00:14:20.000 That was an anti-slavery provision to limit that.
00:14:23.000 And how long did that last?
00:14:25.000 It's still in the Constitution.
00:14:26.000 Well, it was done away with the Civil Rights Amendment, 13th, 14th, 15th Amendment in 1865 through 1870. 0.72
00:14:29.000 That's no longer an issue.
00:14:30.000 In 1865 through 1870, that's no longer an issue.
00:14:34.000 They got to it pretty quickly.
00:14:36.000 Yeah.
00:14:38.000 And it was interesting that when they did that, I mean, back in the founding era, it was the anti-slavery founding fathers who came up with the Three-Fifths Clause to put less pro-slavery people in Congress.
00:14:49.000 And does that come with being so close to taxation without representation?
00:14:52.000 as well there because basically you weren't representing them.
00:14:54.000 You were counting them but not representing them.
00:14:57.000 And that's what the North said, and by the way this was a fun debate, they said, you
00:15:01.000 know you guys in the South, you say that blacks are your property and you're counting your 0.61
00:15:05.000 property to get more pro-slavery reps. 0.79
00:15:08.000 So we're going to count our horses and our cows and our chairs and our brooms and everything.
00:15:13.000 And right now someone's going to get mad and say, you're comparing black slaves to horses 0.58
00:15:15.000 and cows. 0.93
00:15:17.000 They remove the historical context.
00:15:18.000 You know, for example, you see this sometimes where when you are fighting really bad enemies abroad with foreign policy, sometimes you have to partner or form coalitions with the lesser of evils.
00:15:28.000 Sometimes the historical context is, well, why do we have a relationship with Saudi Arabia?
00:15:32.000 We're not really happy.
00:15:33.000 We weren't big fans necessarily of Stalin.
00:15:33.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:15:35.000 The three-fifths was a means to an end to just make sure that they weren't being misrepresented.
00:15:40.000 Well, I appreciate it.
00:15:41.000 I tried to lay that one up and you handled it superbly.
00:15:43.000 So I got another one for you here.
00:15:45.000 I'm distracted by the hand grenades.
00:15:46.000 What was this?
00:15:47.000 Was this in case you needed to get rid of your leg and turn it into this?
00:15:50.000 Well, that's right. 0.99
00:15:51.000 If you get shot right there, I will promptly take your leg off for you. 0.99
00:15:54.000 Careful. 1.00
00:15:55.000 Seems like hepatitis central.
00:15:57.000 Oh yeah, I would say so right now.
00:15:58.000 I wonder what DNA would show if we tested that for blood.
00:16:01.000 But at that point in time... Probably not a white guy.
00:16:04.000 Yeah, may not have been.
00:16:06.000 If I could not take your leg off and stop the bleeding within a minute, I could not be a surgeon.
00:16:11.000 And you're going to get no... That's a horrible incentive!
00:16:14.000 I want a surgeon to take as much care as possible.
00:16:18.000 Take your time, Doc.
00:16:19.000 No, because you get no painkillers and if I don't do it in under a minute, you will bleed out and bleed to death.
00:16:25.000 So I have to be able to do it, take it off, and stop the bleeding.
00:16:29.000 Cut off a leg?
00:16:30.000 This was used to cut off a leg. 0.93
00:16:31.000 Oh my God, I was joking.
00:16:32.000 No, no, this is for real.
00:16:33.000 This is your amputation saw in the Civil War.
00:16:36.000 Children could see that!
00:16:37.000 And you see this coming at you and you've got no, no kind of deadening.
00:16:41.000 No, I mean, there's nothing, no anesthesia.
00:16:44.000 So, I'm watching, there are actually... Is that because Abraham Lincoln's wife was taking it all?
00:16:48.000 She had the opium going on, right?
00:16:49.000 That is true.
00:16:50.000 She did have the... There was... Yeah, she had a lot of depression problems. 0.97
00:16:50.000 That's true. 0.97
00:16:54.000 A lot of depression problems.
00:16:56.000 Okay, so let me ask... That is absolutely terrifying.
00:16:58.000 I thought it was a little... No, you're actually cutting off your leg.
00:17:01.000 Imagine that.
00:17:01.000 Do you just think of how much more intimate battle was back then?
00:17:06.000 One of the... In Vicksburg, Mississippi, there's battlefield memorabilia kind of stuff that's there.
00:17:13.000 And one of them is, is they would cut off your leg. 0.87
00:17:15.000 They would give you one of the bullets to bite. 0.95
00:17:17.000 And it's where they get biting the bullet. 0.70
00:17:19.000 And they have bullets there.
00:17:20.000 They're bitten by guys.
00:17:21.000 The bullet's about that big, and when it's over, it's about that big, and it is as thin as paper, because they just keep biting on it.
00:17:27.000 They were shaving. 1.00
00:17:27.000 Were they stupid people? 1.00
00:17:28.000 They had leather stropes. 1.00
00:17:29.000 Why don't they just bite on leather? 1.00
00:17:30.000 Give them lead?
00:17:32.000 I don't know.
00:17:32.000 They bite the bullet, and there are actually photographs.
00:17:35.000 It's a number two pencil.
00:17:36.000 Go to town.
00:17:39.000 There are actually pictures of where a surgeon was in the middle of sawing off a guy's leg.
00:17:44.000 It's halfway through, and they all look up and smile for the camera, and then he goes back to sawing again.
00:17:48.000 And the guy who's getting his leg sawed off is actually looking at the camera, smiling for the camera.
00:17:53.000 With a bullet?
00:17:55.000 Do you think maybe it started with one guy bit the bullet to show how tough he was, and then no one else thought, I can bite the leather belt.
00:18:00.000 They're like, well, Dennis bit the bullet, so now I gotta do it.
00:18:04.000 Otherwise, I'm never gonna hear the end of it from the guys that are gonna do a movie about them with glory.
00:18:08.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:18:09.000 Morgan Freeman's never gonna let me live this down.
00:18:11.000 No telling where it came from.
00:18:12.000 Gosh!
00:18:13.000 I see that stuff and I just, I cringe to think what it was like to live back then.
00:18:19.000 And 620,000 guys gave their lives one side or the other.
00:18:23.000 A lot sacrificed their lives to end slavery.
00:18:26.000 A lot sacrificed their lives to defend a system they didn't really understand.
00:18:29.000 Right.
00:18:29.000 A lot of Southern guys, they weren't fighting for slavery.
00:18:31.000 They're fighting because the North invaded.
00:18:33.000 That's an important delineation because I think a lot of people where they say well we see the confederate flag as a symbol of heritage and we don't see it the way you see it.
00:18:40.000 I think a lot of people from the south don't see it that way but like you said the leadership when they had the opportunity to clarify their position they made it very clear that they wanted to leave because of slavery.
00:18:50.000 Let me ask you this.
00:18:51.000 This is something we hear a lot about.
00:18:54.000 Young Turks, MSNBC, CNN.
00:18:56.000 It's sort of accepted as a truism, the Southern strategy.
00:18:59.000 They say, well, yeah, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
00:19:01.000 And if you look back then, Republicans, obviously, they're the ones about freeing the slaves.
00:19:04.000 And if you look at even the Civil Rights Act.
00:19:06.000 But there was a Southern strategy where it swapped.
00:19:09.000 What do you say to that?
00:19:09.000 Well, it certainly was not that way for the first more than a century.
00:19:13.000 Right.
00:19:15.000 I mean, if I take a piece like this, this is a hit card for the Klan.
00:19:20.000 This shows, you know, lynching's a big deal for the Klan.
00:19:23.000 Wow.
00:19:23.000 So, they have given you now the names.
00:19:25.000 It's kind of their maison d'être, when you really think of it.
00:19:27.000 Yeah.
00:19:29.000 Thank you.
00:19:30.000 Sixty-three names here that need to be taken care of.
00:19:32.000 Sixty-three names.
00:19:34.000 These are all Republican members of the legislature.
00:19:36.000 There are 50 blacks, there are 13 whites.
00:19:39.000 Now, people say, wait a minute, they didn't lynch whites.
00:19:42.000 Yeah, there were 4,800 lynchings.
00:19:44.000 And the 4,800 lynchings that happened with those 4,800 lynchings, 1,300 were white, 3,500 were black.
00:19:50.000 The lynchings were Republicans.
00:19:52.000 Now, the deal was just about any... White Republicans?
00:19:55.000 Why Republicans?
00:19:56.000 You couldn't lynch any white because some might be Democrats. 0.99
00:19:59.000 But blacks, that's a different thing. 1.00
00:20:01.000 Right.
00:20:01.000 So you could go at it that way.
00:20:03.000 And so what you find is when you look after once the 13th and 14th Amendment were passed, you could elect blacks to office in the South. 0.51
00:20:12.000 And in states like Louisiana, states like South Carolina, Mississippi, you had more blacks than you did whites. 0.50
00:20:17.000 So what happens is, for example, the first 137 blacks elected in Louisiana were all Republicans.
00:20:24.000 The first 41 blacks in Texas, the first 190 blacks in South Carolina, the first 99 in Alabama, 112 in Mississippi, etc.
00:20:31.000 So the switching of parties, no, blacks were strong Republicans at that point in time.
00:20:37.000 And they say, well, you know, that started changing in the 60s, the Southern strategy.
00:20:42.000 Strom Thurmond.
00:20:42.000 All right, Strom Thurmond was a Democrat, no question.
00:20:45.000 He ran against Harry Truman because Harry Truman did some really good civil rights stuff, helped desegregate the military.
00:20:51.000 He would not kowtow to the Democrats in his party that were racist, so they ran a Democrat against him, Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat Party.
00:20:58.000 So Strom Thurmond runs as a Southern Democrat against, and, you know, Harry Truman, I mean, he is from a Southern state, a border state.
00:21:07.000 He was raised in a racist atmosphere, but he did the right thing with helping civil rights.
00:21:12.000 And so Strom Thurmond is a Democrat.
00:21:14.000 Well, Strom Thurmond became a Republican.
00:21:16.000 He sure did.
00:21:17.000 He became a Republican because he changed his philosophy, because he became the first Senate Republican from the South to hire blacks onto his staff as major positions.
00:21:25.000 And so it's not Democrats that did that, it was a Republican who did that.
00:21:29.000 He left the Democrat party because of their positions.
00:21:32.000 So when they point to Strom Thurmond, you've also got to look at the fact that he also
00:21:35.000 changed his policy positions and he was no longer a Republican.
00:21:39.000 He became less racist.
00:21:40.000 And actually he tried to break through the barrier.
00:21:42.000 He had a lot of education, a lot of...
00:21:44.000 Well, you know, I think we're going to do a whole installment because you have so much
00:21:47.000 here on Black History.
00:21:48.000 So before we do that, let me...
00:21:52.000 For those who say in the South, I say, OK, let's assume you're right. 1.00
00:21:56.000 Let's assume that Democrats switch to the Republican Party.
00:21:59.000 I'm going to take any Southern state in the 70s, 80s, 90s.
00:22:03.000 You're going to have 1,000 people elected to office every election.
00:22:07.000 You're going to have your local people, your county people, your others.
00:22:10.000 And it was called the Solid Democrat South for a reason. 0.64
00:22:12.000 So I want you to find me any 10 offices in the South where the Democrats became Republicans and got elected.
00:22:21.000 You just show me 10 out of 1,000.
00:22:23.000 Nobody's shown me more than two or three.
00:22:24.000 Well, you got Strom Thurmond, and you got David Duke, and David Duke went back to the Democratic Party.
00:22:28.000 They can show me two or three.
00:22:30.000 Show me, if you're saying that the thing, you gotta show me a majority,
00:22:33.000 otherwise your premise doesn't hold up.
00:22:35.000 You can't even show me 10 out of 1,000.
00:22:37.000 So this is what people repeat without thinking about it, and there's certainly not evidence enough to prove
00:22:42.000 that it was a shift, what they call the Suddenist Strategy.
00:22:45.000 So the Republican Party is still the party of Lincoln.
00:22:49.000 Yes, I don't think they know that, because I don't think they know what Lincoln believed,
00:22:52.000 and I don't think they knew what the original platform.
00:22:54.000 This happens to be the original Republican platform.
00:22:56.000 That's the very first one.
00:22:58.000 There's only nine planks in the platform.
00:22:59.000 Seven of the nine deal with civil rights, equality, making all people equal.
00:23:04.000 Equality in pay, etc.
00:23:06.000 That's the original Republican platform, and I'll bet you most Republicans have no clue what it is.
00:23:10.000 This is the second Republican platform in 1860, 17 planks.
00:23:15.000 This is the third Republican platform, compares the Democrats and the Republicans side by side.
00:23:21.000 This is the first platform to call for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.
00:23:26.000 So I would say most Republicans today don't know what Lincoln believed, although the platforms tell us what he believed.
00:23:33.000 But, no question that Lincoln was anti-slavery.
00:23:38.000 Okay, I was going to ask you what you believe the most common misconceived notion of the Civil War was, but I think that we've addressed it in full.
00:23:44.000 It seems to be that a lot of people don't think it was actually about slavery.
00:23:48.000 And, of course, we have more segments, so you can just hit subscribe or notifications on YouTube.
00:23:52.000 Let us know.
00:23:52.000 We'll probably come back out here as well after the Fourth of July week.
00:23:56.000 To do more segments with David Barton because my god, this is I don't want to touch anything going very uncomfortable.
00:24:00.000 I'm sweating It's like a library.
00:24:02.000 I keep thinking I'm gonna get shushed by a lady who looks like an angry snail I don't know. 1.00
00:24:06.000 I'm not coming.
00:24:07.000 I just it's going to spontaneously combust We have the Civil War.
00:24:11.000 We have Second Amendment First Amendment go enjoy those videos or don't you don't have to That's the wonder of the constant.