00:00:00.000Today on a special Saturday episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, my continued conversation with Dr. McClay from the wonderful Hillsdale College.
00:00:24.000The genius of compromise, the wound of slavery, and so much more.
00:00:29.000And if you want to teach your children proper history, and if you want to take the classes for yourself, go to charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:00:37.000I go to my hillsdale.edu portal every single day.
00:00:41.000When I'm working out for about an hour, hour and a half, I take a couple of these classes.
00:00:44.000You can download them as podcasts, and then you have short little quizzes after.
00:00:47.000And when you're done, you get a certificate and a long test to make sure that you are able to internalize all of the content that you go through.
00:03:58.000Will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:04:30.000So we got some wonderful response and lots of questions.
00:04:34.000And people have been really looking forward to this particular topic about the Constitution and what you call the genius of the Constitution.
00:04:44.000You don't really hear that language as much anymore.
00:04:48.000Instead, we kind of hear about the flaws of the Constitution or the bigotry of the Constitution, as some academics would say.
00:04:55.000Talk to us about why the Constitution was truly a stroke of genius.
00:05:00.000Well, it was very much conceived in a particular historical moment.
00:05:07.000And that part of it's really interesting, but it had a kind of larger vision that was part of that.
00:05:17.000You know, it's very rare that when people are involved in politics that they're both thinking about addressing the moment and thinking about something that's going to last permanently.
00:05:28.000Although, you know, some of the framers, even George Washington, didn't really expect it to last that long or needing to be radically revised.
00:05:37.000I think all of them would be surprised that 234 years later, bing, still there it is with some amendments and alterations, but fundamentally the structure that they envision and the longest lasting Constitution in the world.
00:05:54.000So obviously there's something, you're doing something right if you last that long in a turbulent world.
00:06:02.000And I think that the genius of it is one of the ways that compromise sometimes produces a better result than what either side wanted.
00:06:12.000I think that's the case with the Constitution because it expanded the scope of the national government, but not too much, just the right amount, while enshrining protections against the abuse of power, some of which, you know, we've lost or we're in danger of losing.
00:06:38.000I mean, three and a half trillion dollars budget voted on yesterday or today.
00:07:15.000I think what the Constitution does is it starts with a very realistic view of human nature.
00:07:23.000I mean, your view of human nature really is at the bottom of everything.
00:07:27.000And if you have the wrong kind of conception of human nature, the government that comes out of it is going to be ineffective and likely to be prone to tyranny simply because those who make it up will say, you know, we just need to turn the screws a little harder to get things the way we want it when you're going against the grain of human nature.
00:07:51.000They understood that we are motivated by interests, sometimes by even by greed or cupidity, but by our self-interest, the pursuit of our self-interest.
00:08:05.000And instead of trying to outlaw that or badger us into an idea of virtue that would cause us to renounce our interest, it sets up a system in which interest is given its place, but is held in check by the other people pursuing their interests.
00:08:27.000And so the system is like an equilibrium when it's working properly.
00:08:38.000We were just talking about the slowness of government.
00:08:42.000But if you're interested in protecting liberty, you don't want to be hasty.
00:08:48.000You don't want to declare every bump in the road to be an emergency that requires you to suspend the laws and spend another trillion dollars.
00:08:58.000And so the Constitution, I think, is made for a people who have that kind of patience, have that kind of realism.
00:09:09.000That's, again, a current events question.
00:09:11.000But it was the product of this extraordinary group of people, even people who don't especially like the Constitution.
00:09:22.000When they study the framers, they have to say, wow, these guys, an average of 45 years old, I believe, very young for the most part, who came up with such a profound document.
00:09:39.000But I don't know whether you want me to talk about this, I'll show you a little bit about the circumstances, because it really was a product of very special circumstances.
00:09:51.000You know, we had a revolution and we talked, you and I talked about that last time, that that was in large measure a revolution, I call it a revolution of self-rule.
00:10:01.000It was a revolution to, on the colonists' part, to retain their rights as Englishmen, which oddly enough meant they had rebel against England, which was they saw as taking those rights away.
00:10:17.000And during the revolution, we fought the revolution under the Articles of Confederation.
00:10:24.000That was the charter of the national government.
00:10:27.000And just the name Confederation suggests this is a loose alliance.
00:10:35.000Going back to the Declaration of Independence, it concludes by declaring that the British colonies are free and independent states, which is great, you know.
00:10:49.000But what does that mean in terms of the kind of government that will are they independent?
00:10:53.000Does it mean the Rhode Island is going to be its own country?
00:10:57.000Or was there some sort of national structure envisioned?
00:11:32.000You had to have a unanimous vote to get through Congress.
00:11:37.000And obviously, that was very difficult to do.
00:11:41.000You didn't have a real regulatory power to regulate interstate commerce or To conduct diplomacy, even to conduct warfare.
00:11:52.000So, you know, once the revolution was over and it was driven by a momentum of its own, it became clear that the articles were not going to be adequate for the future.
00:12:05.000And there were several things, you know, that the British refused to leave some of the Western lands where they were encamped in forts.
00:12:15.000We didn't really have the power to do anything about it.
00:12:19.000And there were debt rebellions all over, especially in Massachusetts.
00:12:25.000There was one famous one called Shays' Rebellion, which debtors who were, many of them were soldiers of the Revolution, who'd been paid in IOUs that had never been redeemed.
00:12:42.000And meanwhile, guys who had sat out the revolution, running the banks in Boston and so on, started to proceed to foreclose on them.
00:12:51.000And this produced a rebellion, shutting down the courthouse.
00:12:55.000And people like Washington, who were very concerned about the whole enterprise holding together, began to feel we've got to do something.
00:13:07.000And Hamilton and others, Alexander Hamilton, star of Broadway Musicals, and also, you know, Washington State de Camp, decided that they needed to convene a convention, which happened in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation.
00:13:27.000And of course, what they ended up doing was much more extensive than that.
00:13:32.000They really drafted in secret a whole different arrangement.
00:13:38.000And I think a lot of you know that there was an element of compromise, a profound element of compromise in that the large states wanted for population to be dominant in representation and figuring out representation.
00:14:02.000And the small states wanted statehood.
00:14:07.000Rhode Island was so a tiny little place, still is, hasn't gotten any bigger.
00:14:13.000And if voting was done by population, they'd be reduced to being nothing compared to Virginia, New York.
00:14:24.000On the other hand, if you had representation by states, it would be very unfair with regard to population.
00:14:31.000And there were other things disputed, but they came up with the compromise of the House and the Senate, in which the principles of representation, each of the principles of representation is there.
00:14:42.000And this was a pretty brilliant solution.
00:14:46.000It borrowed some from the British parliamentary model, but it was in many ways uniquely American.
00:14:56.000Our whole idea of federalism is federalism, the concept that the national power should be divided between the national government, the states, and within the national government between the three branches.
00:15:49.000You can't reduce everybody to the same common denominator.
00:15:53.000Instead, you build the system, a kind of mechanism for political action to fight things out and determine what is the best set of policies for the general good.
00:16:10.000It often looks very messy because it involves conflict.
00:16:17.000I remember I was in Turkey giving speeches in the country around the time when things got really messy with the Iraq war and George W. Bush's presidency.
00:16:32.000And, you know, he was fighting with the Congress, which was dominated by Democrats.
00:16:39.000And the Turkish journalists were all saying, well, is this the end?
00:17:28.000I don't because I think the state constitutions at that time were considered to be the real sort of seed beds of training citizens for virtue.
00:17:39.000So, you know, they were very, you know, people talk about how God isn't mentioned in the Constitution.
00:17:46.000Well, that is, it's not a sign that the founders were all atheists, hardly.
00:17:53.000It was a sign that they thought religion and things like the establishment of religion.
00:18:00.000That was the responsibility of the state.
00:18:25.000So, oh, getting away from me, getting too excited here.
00:18:30.000So, that notion that the Constitution ought to inculcate virtue, I think, is maybe a little overblown, but there's something to it.
00:18:40.000It's not just the collision of forces, just the same as in a courtroom.
00:18:45.000You know, you expect the defense attorney to amount of vigorous, you expect the prosecutor to be vigorous, but that doesn't mean they get a right to lie or cheat or withhold evidence.
00:18:57.000They are officers of the court, which means they have a loyalty to the process.
00:19:44.000It is, you have this assemblage of great, great people.
00:19:49.000You have all of the conflicting, or many of the conflicting interests in the country represented, including the southern planters who were not yet as addicted to slave labor as they would become.
00:20:11.000But even so, very resistant to the idea of abolishing slavery at the time of the founding of the adoption of the Constitution.
00:20:21.000That's one of the things we look back at and we just sort of say, why could they have done that then?
00:20:27.000But, you know, one of the things that the framers had to take into account was if you didn't bring the whole wagon train with you, if some states dropped out and said, we're not going to do this, the national enterprise would very likely have failed.
00:21:39.000And there are a couple of, there's some good books about it.
00:21:46.000Much of what we know about what actually happened, because it was in secret.
00:21:51.000You know, in a hot Philadelphia summer, it can get pretty hot in Philadelphia, and especially when you have the windows closed so that nobody can overhear you.
00:22:02.000But Madison, James Madison, who is often thought of as the architect of the Constitution, took copious notes.
00:22:36.000But now, the Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln is very good.
00:22:40.000I think the adoption of the 13th Amendment, that Lincoln, and this is something that I think, you know, we turn Lincoln into this sort of plaster of Paris saint.
00:22:53.000He was a shrewd, shrewd politician and a deal maker.
00:22:59.000And you could see all of that in that movie.
00:23:34.000In a representative democracy, it's especially true.
00:23:38.000So, yeah, just The process, it's such an intricate story, but the process by which these different proposals coalesce and the proponents of the respective plans,
00:23:55.000the New Jersey plan, and the Virginia Plan come to champion their view of how representation should occur.
00:24:09.000And hovering above it all is this feeling, we don't want to make the same mistake that England made.
00:24:30.000And I'll tell you one thing that has to be part of the story is what would have happened if this shows history is about more than just ideas.
00:24:40.000What would have happened if George Washington hadn't been there?
00:24:43.000Well, that was going to be my question.
00:24:46.000I was actually, so you can answer my question.
00:24:49.000Would this have actually been approved if George Washington didn't preside over this?
00:24:55.000Well, it's more, yeah, I think that's a great question.
00:24:58.000And I would put it slightly, I would expand it even.
00:25:02.000Would the office of the presidency have been conceived in the way that it was much more powerful than the people who ended up opposing the Constitution, people like Patrick Henry, who was a great patriot, but feared the concentration of power in the national government that he saw.
00:25:24.000If they hadn't had George Washington to look to as an example, George Washington, who had steered the country through, I mean, it's not often appreciated just how impossible a job he did successfully in running the Continental Army in the American Revolution.
00:25:46.000And, you know, we all know sort of vaguely about Valley Forge and the difficult winters and the smallpox and other sort of obstacles that he dealt with.
00:25:57.000What people don't realize is that every step of the way, his army was in, he was in danger of seeing his army melt away and of people who had served their time or mostly served their time just sort of disappearing.
00:26:12.000And it was not like a well organized, well oiled machine that you think of a great military.
00:26:22.000It was so the kind of leadership he had to exercise was just extraordinary.
00:26:30.000And he came to be universally trusted.
00:26:34.000Very, very few people in those years that speak negatively about it.
00:26:39.000Well, and the anti-federalists, when they're critiquing the kind of idea of Federalists, they never attack Washington, right?
00:26:49.000They're like, well, they almost admit in some of their own journals, like, yeah, this is going to be hard for us to win because they have Washington, right?
00:26:56.000Now, can you talk about, though, how Washington is sometimes portrayed by modern historians as being an egotistical person because he didn't want to preside over the Constitutional Convention.
00:27:07.000He was kind of waffling on that, right?
00:27:09.000Some people would say, oh, it's because of his ego.
00:27:12.000I think it's because he didn't want to put his name behind something that could have been destructive.
00:27:18.000Can you talk about that, how Washington almost didn't actually agree to it?
00:27:21.000Yeah, well, no, look, he came out of retirement several times.
00:27:30.000He wanted nothing more at the conclusion of the revolution than to go back to his beautiful estate in Mount Vernon and Hang out there, you know, and having earned that peace and quiet.
00:27:44.000But he felt strongly that the country, you know, he owed, he had a duty to his country.
00:27:54.000He was very formed by sort of ideals of classical notions of virtue, Roman Cincinnatus, yeah, you know, the farmer who returned, who does his duty and then returns to the plow, or Cato, the younger and the elder.
00:28:13.000So, yeah, there was a wonderful play by Joseph Addison about Cato.
00:28:19.000I think it's actually called Cato, and that Washington apparently saw numerous times and had shown to his performances put on for his troops numerous times at these critical points when morale was going through the floor.
00:29:00.000I didn't addressing this to the people you're talking about.
00:29:03.000I mean, it's he was, and he actually, I don't think he gets enough credit for being eloquent.
00:29:12.000I think sometimes he's marvelously eloquent.
00:29:16.000And his speeches, which, you know, he largely wrote himself.
00:29:23.000I mean, that's pretty much what was done.
00:29:26.000And his letters, he has a wonderful letter to the Hebrew congregation in Newport that is a crucial document in the history of religious liberty in America.
00:29:40.000He saw the importance of religion, but he saw, if you look at his first inaugural address, he sees the revolution as having been about self-rule, about Republican, self-governing society in which the people rule themselves.
00:30:25.000And then all of a sudden, you start to see these anonymous, really well-written publications in New York newspapers, who we now know is written by probably Madison Hamilton and John Jay, almost certainly.
00:30:38.000I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
00:30:39.000But then these kind of debates are happening, anti-federalists and federalists.
00:30:49.000And then talk about the process of convincing state by state, because that was also a real, that was an endeavor in and of itself.
00:30:59.000Yeah, no, that's an interesting point.
00:31:01.000They published under the name Publius.
00:31:04.000And most of the, on both sides, this was a sort of convention of the time that you elevated your argument by separating it from your personal identity and instead associating it with some universally revered figure from generally the Roman, sometimes Greek, but usually Roman past.
00:31:27.000And so, you know, there's something to be said for it.
00:31:32.000It takes attention away from the personality of the author.
00:31:37.000You think of today, I mean, you read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and you probably know some of the people who write for that editorial page.
00:31:47.000I know a couple, but it's sort of pointless to try to figure out who actually wrote this.
00:31:53.000It's a statement, it's a corporate statement of the entire editorial board.
00:31:57.000So it's a way of giving what you're saying, what you're arguing for, more of a weight.
00:32:07.000Now, about the debates and the ratification process, that was by no means a sure thing.
00:32:15.000There's a lot of these things in early American history.
00:32:18.000We sort of forget how close run they were.
00:32:23.000And I hope I pointed out last time, I think I did, how crucial the intervention of the French was to us winning, and that was not a sure thing.
00:32:38.000New York ended up being not a crucial state, as it turned out, because it was built into the Constitution that after nine states had ratified, the Constitution would become effective.
00:32:54.000But New York, you know, love it or hate it, New York is a pretty big enchilada in the American makeup.
00:33:02.000So yeah, what you were referring to is that Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, and I think we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was those three, and we know which numbers they wrote.
00:34:08.000Battlest number 10 is maybe the most famous for being innovative because there had been an argument going back to Aristotle and as recently as Montesquieu in that time that a republic had to be small.
00:34:24.000That if you got larger than a certain amount, you couldn't have a sort of self-governing entity.
00:34:29.000It would inevitably become some kind of an empire or take on the lineaments of or have to be governed by a monarch.
00:34:37.000And Madison said, no, you know, there's a way this can work that precisely by, as he called it, extending the sphere, making it larger rather than smaller, you can mitigate the effects of faction, of conflict, of interests clashing with interests,
00:35:01.000because there's so many more interests encompassed that no one can get the upper hand and dominate over all the others.
00:35:15.000Federalist 51, also by Madison, one of the best expositions of the logic behind the separation of powers and federalism that anyone's ever written.
00:35:30.000And if men were angels, government would not be necessary.
00:35:47.000That's again that notion that you're not going to stop ambitious people from being ambitious.
00:35:54.000What you have to do is make sure they don't have a clean path by everyone else who's not ambitious just rolling over and say, oh, well, take it.
00:36:06.000No, you have to have other ambitious people standing in the way.
00:36:08.000And that clash of the ambitious, which is sort of what life is in Washington, D.C., the clash of the ambitious on a good day, is more productive of the general good than if one group, one faction, one person triumphs.
00:36:32.000It's more consonant with human nature to recognize this.
00:36:36.000And all through the Federalist Papers, they're really arguing: you know, these are very learned guys, and they haven't just learned things in a kind of book-learning way.
00:36:49.000They scour the past looking for examples that can have some relevance for their situation, for our situation, at the birth of the nation.
00:37:13.000First of all, they didn't have a good name.
00:37:18.000But there's a very good book that I recommend to anyone who wants to read about this.
00:37:22.000It's a small book, too, extremely clearly written by a man named Herbert Storing called What the Anti-Federalists Were For, because they were for a lot of things.
00:37:33.000They were worried that there was no way that the Constitution could hold within bounds this power that was being unleashed in it.
00:37:45.000Patrick Henry saw it as a document that he said squints toward monarchy.
00:37:52.000You start out with a republic, but you're going to end up with an empire and thus defeat the American hope, which is to establish a polity based on liberty and virtue and the entwining of those two things.
00:38:12.000They were not interested in America becoming a great power in the world.
00:38:17.000They were interested in America being a virtuous, agrarian nation of people who minded their own business and had the joy of living in peace and harmony governing themselves.
00:38:38.000Hamilton was very interested in growth, in prosperity, in cutting a fine figure in the world, being an important industrial power, commercial power, highly diversified economy.
00:38:56.000His arch opponent, Thomas Jefferson, was more, and he wasn't around for the Constitution, by the way.
00:39:04.000So he didn't take part in any of this.
00:39:06.000And he didn't really think much of it, even though Madison was a good friend of his, political ally.
00:39:14.000And Jefferson thought there ought to be a revolution every so often to kind of cleanse the air a bit.
00:39:24.000And I do some appeal at the present moment.
00:39:28.000And Madison calmed them down on that, though.
00:39:31.000If there was a dialogue and he was like, well, maybe that wouldn't be a great idea because what's going to happen is Jefferson wrote back, yeah, you're probably right.
00:39:39.000No, I mean, Jefferson's an interesting character that way.
00:39:42.000But he and Hamilton did represent kind of opposing visions of the country that first become evident, I think, plainly evident in the anti-Federalist Federalist debates over ratification.
00:39:56.000One thing that the guys, I mean, the guys who pushed the Constitution, they were a shrewd bunch.
00:40:05.000They were better at PR and more sophisticated at it.
00:40:11.000And they understood that something really important that in each of the states, if you put this before the state legislature, question of whether to ratify, as we all know, legislative bodies are generally not keen on giving up any of their power and voting themselves, voting themselves a cut in a salary or anything like that.
00:40:36.000So what they did was they specified there were to be constitutional conventions that would be completely independently chosen.
00:40:44.000I mean, legislators could serve, of course, but it wouldn't be the identical body.
00:40:49.000So those people would be operating in different conclaves with different people.
00:41:48.000But he was not happy with the outcome of the constitutional, you know, installation.
00:41:56.000So look, let me say this: for the anti-federalists, one of the big things they did for us, for the Constitution, is insist on the Bill of Rights.
00:42:21.000Madison himself thought that it might be a mistake to have a Bill of Rights, because I think I mentioned this last time that if you, his fear was if you start enumerating rights, what about the ones you don't bother enumerating, like the right to breathe or the right to, you know, all sorts of things, the right to marry.
00:42:44.000These are things that he feared might be endangered if you went down the road of enumerating certain rights and not mentioning others.
00:42:56.000Well, I think that worry proved to be ill-founded.
00:43:02.000The worry that those rights might be violated if they weren't by the national government, if they weren't incorporated in the Constitution, was, I think, much more of a present danger.
00:43:19.000And I think we're all grateful for the existence of Especially the first couple of amendments.
00:43:30.000And those would not have come about without the anti-and Virginia Declaration of Rights was the precursor to a lot of that in 76.
00:43:42.000So, Dr. McClay, my last question, and we only have a couple minutes, but this is a big one.
00:44:09.000Well, you know, no less a figure than Frederick Douglass, the great, great black abolitionist who was born into slavery and became one of the great orators of the times.
00:44:25.000And in a speech, the famous speech he gave called What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.
00:44:31.000But he ends up, he goes back and forth in a dialectical way in the speech, but he ends up praising the Constitution as a glorious document that enshrines liberty,
00:44:45.000enshrines freedom as principles, and that it's that underlying character of the Constitution rather than the particular things that were inserted to mollify the slaveholders that make up its real character.
00:45:03.000So I think, I don't think there's any doubt that the country was founded on principles other than the principle of slavery.
00:45:16.000It was never part of a sort of organized plan.
00:45:20.000It was something that sort of came in for economic reasons in areas where labor-intensive agriculture, tobacco first, and then cotton and indigo sugar, so on, where it was profitable to use forced labor, including indentured servants.
00:45:43.000But I think the crucial thing, and a professor from Princeton, Sean Willins, who is no right-winger, he organized a petition of historians to impeach Donald Trump twice, both times.
00:46:04.000He's a man of the left, but he wrote a wonderful book called No Property in Man, which is a very nuanced, but ultimately resoundingly affirmative view of the Constitution on this subject.
00:46:19.000And one of the things he points out, and he's not the first to do this, is that the Constitution resolutely avoids using the word slavery.
00:46:30.000And one of the things he's ferreted out is Madison saying explicitly, I wanted to do it this way because I did not want to give any credence, any kind of crevice to be kind of crawled up through that arguing that there is such a thing, a legitimate thing as property in man, that is to own another human being.
00:46:57.000So there is everywhere place that slavery comes up, there's a kind of euphemism, conditions of servitude, you know, and not never the word slavery itself.
00:47:15.000Willins thought it was important, pretty decisive that, And as I mentioned before, there are an awful lot of them who felt that slavery was certainly not going to last.
00:47:28.000And they couldn't have envisioned the way it grew like kudzu as the southern agricultural economy developed.
00:47:39.000So, yeah, I think that now there are these things.
00:48:24.000But I think, you know, I think the way people, I'm not, I don't want to defend it, you know, but at the same time, the way people understand it, it wasn't sort of saying a slave is three-fifths of a man or something like that.
00:48:39.000Often you'll hear that said emotionally that way.
00:48:43.000So in every turn, and you mentioned the provision that the importation of slaves Thomas Jefferson signed in 1807, one of his first acts as president in March of 1807.
00:49:01.000Jefferson and Jefferson fought against slavery when he was governor of Virginia, too, earlier.
00:49:12.000Jefferson is a paradoxical figure because he owns slaves and he knew the institution was wrong.
00:49:21.000And he said, you know, I tremble when I reflect that God is just and his mercy will not last forever.
00:49:29.000I'm not quoting him exactly there, but that's the essence of it.
00:49:34.000I think in other instances, it's a more even more tragic thing that as the 19th century develops and as slavery becomes more and more entrenched and people like John C. Calhoun start arguing that it's a positive good and not necessary evil things that would throw their whole way of life and the economic means that they depend on into disarray.
00:50:01.000There are some things that they simply won't allow themselves to think.
00:50:06.000And I think that can be said in this instance.
00:50:12.000That said, it's very hard when you have an entrenched economy in a certain way to change it because you're dealing with lots and lots of people's lives.
00:51:33.000One historian, famous historian, Richard Hofstadter, said it had all the emotional power of a bill of lading, an invoice.
00:51:43.000And it really isn't an inspiring document at all.
00:51:46.000It just because what it does is it frees slaves in those areas that were in a state of rebellion.
00:51:55.000So, even in states where at that point, you know, Confederate states where Union armies occupied part of the states, like Tennessee, slaves there were not free.
00:52:10.000Slaves in Kentucky were not free because Kentucky had never joined the Confederacy and so on.
00:52:23.000I mean, it would have been great to say, I mean, a contemporary politician would say, I declare that all slaves are free.
00:52:31.000But Lincoln wasn't going to do that because it would be way beyond his constitutional powers.
00:52:37.000What he could do in his reading of the Constitution, and not everyone agrees with this, but he could do as a commander-in-chief was to free slaves as a military as a tactical measure.
00:52:52.000So, he could free those states, slaves, and those areas in a state of rebellion.
00:52:57.000And it would in no way endanger the Constitution.
00:53:01.000He was looking ahead always and saying, I want to come out of this war with the same Constitution we went into it have.
00:53:10.000I don't want to trash the Constitution in order to win the war and then turn around and have no structure of authority to appeal to.
00:53:19.000And if we're going to get rid of slavery, let's do it the right way.
00:53:22.000We passed an amendment to the Constitution.
00:53:25.000Yeah, and we're going to talk about Lincoln in our next conversation.
00:53:28.000And just to kind of tease people, great.
00:53:30.000I have some questions about Lincoln because some of his detractors say that there's two schools of thought on Lincoln today: that he didn't act decisively enough soon enough in his Cooper Union speech, or he just what he was trying too much focus on process.
00:53:45.000Um, and I think those people are full of it.
00:53:48.000Then, the other ones, you've got to get elected, yeah.