The Glenn Beck Program - August 22, 2026


Reconstruction’s Reckoning： Grant vs. the Klan in the Fight for Equal Rights ｜ The American Story ｜ Ep 19


Episode Stats


Length

46 minutes

Words per minute

143.45

Word count

6,691

Sentence count

477

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

24

sentences flagged

Hate speech

29

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 .
00:00:01.000 It's July 30th, 1866, in the sweltering streets of New Orleans.
00:00:08.280 The Civil War is over. Slavery? Dead.
00:00:11.800 But for 4 million black men and women throughout the South, 0.99
00:00:15.420 true freedom is still elusive thanks to constant terrorist attacks by white supremacists.
00:00:21.860 A determined procession of around 200 black men, many of them Union Army veterans, 0.94
00:00:26.660 marches proudly towards the Mechanics Institute building,
00:00:30.920 carrying the stars and stripes.
00:00:33.420 Inside, a group of white and black Republicans
00:00:36.380 have gathered for a constitutional convention. 0.99
00:00:39.760 Their goal is bold and dangerous.
00:00:43.200 Rewrite Louisiana's state constitution 1.00
00:00:45.620 to protect civil rights and secure voting rights for black men,
00:00:50.240 rights being violently suppressed by white authorities all across the state.
00:00:54.380 But this meeting has already been marked for destruction.
00:00:59.180 The mayor of New Orleans is John Monroe.
00:01:01.100 He's a former Confederate sympathizer pardoned by President Andrew Johnson and restored to power.
00:01:07.500 Monroe declares the convention an unlawful assembly,
00:01:10.940 and he pushes the idea that this meeting is dangerous and revolutionary.
00:01:15.800 Well, the local press amplifies the panic with provocative stories whipping up white rage.
00:01:21.180 And then there's the sheriff of New Orleans.
00:01:24.380 Harry Hayes. He's a former Confederate general. He deputizes a posse of white officers,
00:01:30.880 many of them also ex-Confederates, to confront the convention and arrest the delegates.
00:01:36.900 The city's police force, along with a white mob, confront the peaceful procession outside the
00:01:42.680 Mechanics Institute building, and the taunts begin, then the blows. Black marchers are kicked, 0.97
00:01:48.740 and then beaten with clubs. 0.99
00:01:51.980 Suddenly, the police and armed white attackers open fire. 0.96
00:01:56.820 Black men fall by the dozens, blood pooling out on the streets. 0.91
00:02:01.360 The marchers scatter. 0.97
00:02:02.560 Many rush into the Mechanics Institute and barricade the doors,
00:02:05.920 but the attackers follow.
00:02:08.160 Policemen smash the building's windows and pour gunfire inside,
00:02:12.140 where delegates huddle for cover.
00:02:14.220 Some men leap from a second-story window
00:02:16.560 only to be shot the moment they hit the ground.
00:02:19.340 Police break inside the building.
00:02:21.420 Some delegates wave white handkerchiefs and surrender
00:02:23.820 only to be shot, trampled, beaten with clubs
00:02:26.840 and stabbed repeatedly as they lie wounded. 0.63
00:02:31.020 Some on their knees, begging for mercy,
00:02:34.280 are killed on the spot.
00:02:37.180 Even the well-known white leader of the convention 0.74
00:02:39.320 is shot five times and slashed with swords. 0.99
00:02:43.500 The white mob sadistically crushes the skulls 0.99
00:02:46.240 and mutilates the bodies of their victims. 0.94
00:02:48.940 By the time the federal troops arrive on the scene,
00:02:51.000 it's far too late.
00:02:52.540 It's already a massacre. 0.96
00:02:54.180 34 black men, three white Republicans, dead. 0.55
00:02:58.200 160 wounded, 200 more arrested.
00:03:03.440 Cyrus Hamlin, he's the son of Lincoln's first vice president,
00:03:07.560 witnesses the horror firsthand and later says,
00:03:11.620 I have seen death on the battlefield,
00:03:13.240 but time will erase the effects of that.
00:03:15.960 The wholesale slaughter and the little regard paid to human life I witnessed here on the 30th of July, I shall never forget.
00:03:23.160 General Philip Sheridan, one of Grant's most trusted commanders, investigates in the days following the slaughter.
00:03:30.120 His assessment was blunt.
00:03:32.620 It was no riot. It was an absolute massacre by the police.
00:03:36.640 America is forced to confront the truth that the Civil War may be over,
00:03:41.480 but the fight over who gets to be an American has only just begun.
00:03:48.000 This is the American story, The Beginnings,
00:03:52.240 adapted from the book of the same title by David Barton and Tim Barton.
00:03:58.340 Episode 19, Grant versus the Klan in the fight for equal rights.
00:04:06.020 One month after the massacre in New Orleans,
00:04:13.600 President Andrew Johnson stood before a crowd in St. Louis
00:04:16.680 and blamed the U.S. Congress for the atrocity, saying,
00:04:19.920 Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skirts,
00:04:24.340 and they are responsible for it.
00:04:27.320 That line told you almost everything you needed to know about his presidency.
00:04:33.300 Andrew Johnson was a self-taught tailor from a poor Tennessee family.
00:04:37.900 He had climbed the political ladder as a Democrat.
00:04:40.740 And during the Civil War, when Tennessee seceded, Johnson did something extraordinary.
00:04:46.480 He refused to go along.
00:04:48.540 The only Southern senator who stayed loyal to the Union.
00:04:52.780 He became Lincoln's military governor of the state.
00:04:56.100 It was brave. It was a defiant stand that earned Johnson widespread respect in the North.
00:05:01.900 and it made him look like living proof that the union was bigger than party.
00:05:07.900 In 1864, Lincoln needed a running mate who could pull in war Democrats and border state voters,
00:05:13.540 so he picked Johnson for the role.
00:05:15.920 It seemed like a great unifying idea.
00:05:19.420 Until Lincoln's assassination,
00:05:22.180 suddenly the Tennessee Democrats sat in the White House,
00:05:25.620 and almost immediately, Johnson's sympathy flowed towards the defeated White South
00:05:31.240 at the expense of former slaves.
00:05:34.600 He issued over 13,000 pardons to ex-Confederates,
00:05:38.720 restoring their property and political power.
00:05:41.300 The man who had stared down secession
00:05:43.360 now stared down Southern blacks.
00:05:46.940 Andrew Johnson was arguably the most openly racist president
00:05:50.420 in U.S. history, at least at the time.
00:05:53.420 He boiled down his personal creed when he said this. 0.75
00:05:56.940 This is a country for white men, 0.85
00:05:59.220 And by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men. 0.98
00:06:04.980 In stark contrast, the Republican-controlled Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau 0.92
00:06:10.200 to help formerly enslaved people and white refugees survive the wreckage of war.
00:06:16.600 Its agents distributed food and clothing, operated hospitals and camps,
00:06:20.920 supervised labor contracts, and helped legalize marriages,
00:06:24.820 assisted people searching for family members, and built schools. 0.80
00:06:29.040 The Freedmen's Bureau did all the messy, unglamorous work of turning emancipation into reality.
00:06:36.300 And the whites in the South hated it.
00:06:40.280 By the end of 1865, southern states passed new rules to rebuild their control.
00:06:44.720 These so-called Black Codes restricted the movement, labor, voting, property rights, and daily life of black people all across the South.
00:06:53.040 The laws were designed to replace slavery's old chains with new legal traps to force black
00:07:01.980 labor back onto plantations and keep white supremacy intact. It laid the cruel foundation 0.80
00:07:08.580 for the Jim Crow caste system that would poison the South for the next century. 0.98
00:07:13.920 This was the central fight of Reconstruction. Was freedom going to mean citizenship? Or was 0.74
00:07:19.700 going to mean congratulations you're no longer enslaved but every courthouse sheriff employer
00:07:25.140 and mob still owns your future enter the radical republicans led by fiery idealists like thaddeus
00:07:35.060 stevens in the house and charles sumner in the senate they saw the black codes for what they
00:07:40.420 were a counter revolution so in early 1866 they passed the civil rights act this was the first
00:07:47.540 major federal civil rights law in U.S. history. It declared black American citizens and guaranteed
00:07:54.160 them equal protection under the law. To radical Republicans, this was not optional. If the former
00:08:00.820 Confederate states could recreate slavery by another name, then the Union victory had just
00:08:05.760 been a costume change, not a transformation. President Johnson vetoed the act, arguing,
00:08:11.400 among other things, that the federal government had never done so much for white people. But
00:08:17.020 Congress overrode the president's veto.
00:08:22.200 Meanwhile, Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, founded a secret society.
00:08:27.940 They called it the Ku Klux Klan.
00:08:31.240 It was from the Greek word, kiklos, meaning band or circle.
00:08:36.900 It started as a social club, and it quickly became a terrorist organization
00:08:40.760 led by former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
00:08:44.620 Forrest, who had been at the helm of one of the most notorious incidents of the Civil War.
00:08:52.180 In 1864, his men had surrounded Fort Pillow.
00:08:55.660 It was a Union fort north of Memphis, Tennessee.
00:08:58.660 After the Union force refused to surrender, Confederate troops under Forrest quickly took the fort.
00:09:05.520 His men were outraged to find a unit of around 300 black Union troops defending the fort,
00:09:11.120 many of whom had been runaway slaves.
00:09:14.620 Well, Forrest's men had never seen black troops in combat before, and according to multiple eyewitness accounts,
00:09:21.760 the Confederates brutally executed 200 of the black troops after they had surrendered.
00:09:30.680 Members of the Ku Klux Klan wore white robes and hoods.
00:09:34.740 It masked their identity, but also to symbolize the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers out for revenge. 0.82
00:09:42.020 These night-riding gangs burned crosses and schools and flogged, tortured, and murdered black citizens and their white Republican allies. 0.66
00:09:51.160 The violence spread like wildfire.
00:09:53.400 In many areas of the South, the Klan operated as an undercover military arm of the Democrat Party to undercut Reconstruction efforts.
00:10:02.820 Reconstruction wasn't just about Washington policy debates.
00:10:06.260 for four million Blacks in the South,
00:10:08.940 it was a daily struggle just to survive.
00:10:12.940 By March 1867, Republicans in Congress had had enough. 0.86
00:10:17.120 Southern states had passed Black codes. 0.98
00:10:19.400 Ex-Confederates were returning to power. 1.00
00:10:21.800 White mobs were killing Black citizens. 0.99
00:10:23.860 And the president seemed far more offended 0.99
00:10:26.360 by congressional intervention than racial terror.
00:10:30.860 So Congress passed the first Reconstruction Act,
00:10:34.040 once again over Johnson's veto.
00:10:36.880 It was bold, it was uncompromising.
00:10:39.740 Southern states were divided into five military districts.
00:10:43.240 Federal troops would now enforce order.
00:10:46.600 Those states had to write new constitutions
00:10:48.940 guaranteeing black male suffrage
00:10:51.220 and to ratify the 14th Amendment
00:10:53.560 before they could rejoin the Union.
00:10:56.300 Well, President Johnson called it tyranny.
00:10:58.520 The Republican Congress called it justice.
00:11:01.640 The act wasn't subtle or gentle at all.
00:11:04.820 It was Congress saying, if Southern governments refuse to protect basic rights,
00:11:09.420 then the federal government will supervise the rebuilding.
00:11:13.080 At the same time, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act.
00:11:17.960 It said the president could not remove cabinet members without Senate approval.
00:11:22.420 Well, Johnson vetoed that one, too.
00:11:24.660 Congress overrode him yet again, which was no easy feat.
00:11:28.620 overriding a presidential veto requires two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate.
00:11:34.720 The stage was set for a constitutional showdown, the likes of which America had never experienced before.
00:11:45.260 One man stood at the center of the fight between Johnson and Congress, Edwin Stanton.
00:11:51.740 He was still Secretary of War, he was a holdover from Lincoln's cabinet,
00:11:55.880 and he was closely aligned with congressional Republicans.
00:12:00.120 Just as important, the War Department controlled the military presence in the South,
00:12:04.400 which meant Stanton mattered enormously to enforcing Reconstruction.
00:12:09.940 The Tenure of Office Act was a political tripwire stretched right in front of Johnson.
00:12:15.960 And, of course, he stepped on it.
00:12:18.520 February 1868, Johnson fired Stanton and tried to replace him with a Loyalist.
00:12:24.360 Well, Republicans claimed it was a direct violation of the act.
00:12:27.560 The House voted 126 to 47 to impeach Johnson.
00:12:32.340 It was the first presidential impeachment in U.S. history.
00:12:35.940 In fact, the only one up until Bill Clinton.
00:12:41.420 The ensuing Senate trial became a political thriller of the age.
00:12:46.260 Johnson's enemy saw a president sabotaging Reconstruction
00:12:49.480 and protecting the defeated slave-holding order.
00:12:53.520 Johnson's defenders saw Congress trying to reduce the president to a clerk.
00:12:58.700 On May 16, 1868, the Senate voted 35 to 19 to convict Johnson,
00:13:04.400 one vote short of the two-thirds needed to remove him from office.
00:13:09.040 So he remained president for the nine months left in what would have been Lincoln's second term.
00:13:14.120 Yet Johnson never changed course.
00:13:17.660 Even as the Ku Klux Klan reign of terror intensified, Johnson refused to act.
00:13:22.160 General Ulysses S. Grant forwarded him a desperate letter from a Tennessee representative
00:13:26.940 pleading for federal troops to stop the night-riding murders.
00:13:32.340 Johnson ignored it.
00:13:34.040 His reason?
00:13:35.200 The Tennessee legislature itself had not made a direct request,
00:13:38.520 so the federal government just didn't have any jurisdiction.
00:13:42.000 Now, in spite of Johnson's hostility towards Reconstruction,
00:13:45.800 the 14th Amendment moved forward.
00:13:48.560 Proposed by Congress in 1866 and finally ratified two years later,
00:13:52.900 it wrote into the Constitution what Johnson had spent his presidency resisting.
00:13:58.540 Birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection of the laws for all Americans.
00:14:06.460 It was the legal hammer that would eventually crush Jim Crow,
00:14:10.660 though it would take another hundred years and much more tragic bloodshed to do it.
00:14:15.900 Andrew Johnson, he had entered national power as a symbol of union loyalty.
00:14:21.860 And he left as the president who fought against the people trying to defend freedom after slavery.
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00:15:56.480 The Civil War cast a very long shadow over America, and Reconstruction was complicated.
00:16:02.480 It was a bloody mess that compounded the misery.
00:16:05.780 War and recovering from war were so all-encompassing
00:16:08.880 that it's easy to overlook other major developments in the nation that happened at the same time.
00:16:15.340 One of these was spearheaded by another holdover from President Lincoln's cabinet,
00:16:19.420 a man who had maintained an expansive vision for America even through the darkest days of war.
00:16:26.340 A man, based on what happened to him in 1865, should have been dead already,
00:16:31.660 William Henry Seward.
00:16:33.000 Seward had spent his life climbing the greased ladder of the 19th century politics.
00:16:39.120 He had served in the New York State Senate, he became governor of New York,
00:16:43.080 served as a U.S. senator, and built a reputation as one of the nation's most prominent anti-slavery politicians.
00:16:50.200 By 1860, Seward was the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.
00:16:54.940 He was the obvious choice, the experienced insider.
00:16:58.960 But then the relatively unknown Prairie lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, snatched it away at the convention.
00:17:06.060 Rivals? Absolutely.
00:17:08.460 Seward was stunned, even bitter.
00:17:11.520 Yet Lincoln did something very Lincoln.
00:17:14.480 He invited his defeated rival into his cabinet as Secretary of State.
00:17:18.500 At first, Seward thought Lincoln needed supervision.
00:17:22.060 He even tried to steer policy himself, and Lincoln quietly outmaneuvered him.
00:17:25.800 And then, something unexpected happened.
00:17:29.760 Respect.
00:17:31.220 Partnership.
00:17:32.680 Even trust.
00:17:34.800 Seward became Lincoln's closest confidant,
00:17:37.460 the one who could speak bluntly,
00:17:39.040 the one whose counsel Lincoln valued most during the Civil War.
00:17:44.160 Then came April of 1865.
00:17:47.060 With that carriage wreck that almost killed him,
00:17:49.740 followed by Lewis Powell's brutal knife attack just nine days later,
00:17:53.460 Seward barely clung to life.
00:17:55.800 But somehow he survived, he recovered, and even returned to work as Secretary of State,
00:18:00.860 but now under President Johnson.
00:18:04.880 20 years earlier, long before he even reached the U.S. Senate,
00:18:09.480 William Seward had looked north and west and imagined the United States stretching into the Pacific world.
00:18:18.040 He believed America's future would reach across the continent and the ocean,
00:18:22.860 Trade with Asia, Pacific ports, commercial and naval power.
00:18:27.140 Seward even predicted America would one day claim the vast frozen territory
00:18:31.560 hanging off the northwest corner of the continent,
00:18:34.840 which was then known as Russian America.
00:18:38.160 It was enormous.
00:18:40.380 The territory covered around 600,000 square miles,
00:18:44.840 more than double the size of Texas.
00:18:47.700 In 1846, Seward declared,
00:18:49.860 I see the Russian as he busily occupies himself in establishing seaports and towns and fortifications on the verge of this continent as the outposts of St. Petersburg.
00:19:00.180 And I can say, go on and build up your outposts all along the coast, up even to the Arctic Ocean.
00:19:05.940 They will yet become the outposts of my own country, monuments of the civilization of the United States in the Northwest.
00:19:12.800 To Seward, Alaska was not an icebox. It was a doorway.
00:19:17.100 It sat right on the doorstep of Asia. 0.90
00:19:19.800 It bordered British territory.
00:19:22.020 It could become a base for trade, whaling, timber, furs.
00:19:26.780 In his view, it had enormous potential.
00:19:30.260 But Seward feared that British-backed Canada might swoop in and claim the territory for itself.
00:19:36.360 If America didn't move quickly, someone else might.
00:19:40.100 Russia, meanwhile, was desperate to unload it.
00:19:44.300 Its Alaskan territory had never become a thriving colony.
00:19:47.840 It had very few permanent Russian settlers.
00:19:50.560 The Russian government lacked the financial resources to support major settlements or a strong military presence there.
00:19:56.980 Losing the Crimean War had drained Russia's treasuries.
00:20:00.680 So Tsar Alexander II saw selling it to friendly America as the smartest way to cash out before Britain simply took it in the next war.
00:20:10.560 Russia had even offered to sell Alaska to the U.S. in 1859,
00:20:14.560 but the Civil War took over and kicked any potential deal way down the road.
00:20:20.120 Enter Baron Edward Stoeckle.
00:20:24.140 This was Russia's long-serving minister to Washington.
00:20:27.580 He was polished. He was a cosmopolitan diplomat who had lived in the U.S. since the 1850s.
00:20:33.960 Stoeckle had cultivated a warm personal friendship with Seward through the years of dinner parties
00:20:38.140 and quiet back-channel talks in the Capitol's smoky drawing rooms.
00:20:42.420 And they trusted one another.
00:20:46.560 Once Stokel received authority from Russia to negotiate, Seward moved fast.
00:20:52.620 President Johnson was distracted by his reconstruction battles with the Republican Congress,
00:20:56.800 and that distraction handed Seward a rare opening to chase a dream he had nursed for decades.
00:21:04.000 Working in secret at first, late-night meetings and Seward's study,
00:21:07.680 maps unrolled across the table, Seward and Stokel hammered out a deal.
00:21:12.240 On March 30, 1867, they signed a treaty at 4 a.m. after an all-night bargaining session.
00:21:19.380 The price was $7.2 million.
00:21:21.920 That's roughly $162 million in today's money.
00:21:25.680 That's 600,000 square miles at two cents an acre.
00:21:30.740 But in America, remember, treaties don't become a reality by the wave of a scepter.
00:21:36.140 Congress has to approve it.
00:21:42.480 To get Alaska, Seward needed help from a man who usually stood on the opposite side of President Johnson,
00:21:49.680 Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.
00:21:52.460 He chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
00:21:55.580 Sumner was initially skeptical of the deal, but he did a deep dive on the subject.
00:21:59.500 he buried himself in maps and journals and pamphlets and more than a hundred books about
00:22:04.440 Alaska. He joked to a friend that he was, quote, living with the seals and the walruses and the
00:22:10.960 black foxes. Sumner emerged from his research a true believer. On the Senate floor, he delivered
00:22:17.020 a three-hour speech, three hours of Sumner unloading an encyclopedia of Alaska. Population,
00:22:24.020 climate, fisheries, forest, minerals, strategic value. And then he insisted this place should no
00:22:30.260 longer use the old label Russian-American. Instead, he proposed calling it Alaska,
00:22:36.340 the native Aleutian Islanders' word for the great land. The next day, the Senate approved the treaty
00:22:43.700 37 to 2. The press, however, was savage. Cartoons and editorials mocked the deal as Seward's Icebox
00:22:52.440 in Seward's Polar Bear Garden.
00:22:55.440 One critic asked what America wanted with, quote,
00:22:58.060 glaciers, icebergs, bears, and walruses.
00:23:01.420 Newspaper editor Horace Greeley wondered
00:23:03.620 why taxpayers should pay for all of this, quote,
00:23:06.420 territory of ice, snow, and rock.
00:23:09.880 Congressman Benjamin Lone of Missouri said
00:23:12.540 what a lot of Americans were thinking.
00:23:15.060 The acquisition of this inhospitable and barren waste
00:23:18.940 will never add a dollar to the wealth of our country. 0.73
00:23:22.000 Alaska is utterly worthless.
00:23:25.080 The House of Representatives now had to approve the funding for the deal.
00:23:29.620 And that's when Baron Edward Stokel stepped in with his Russian magic.
00:23:35.220 That $7.2 million price tag quietly included $200,000 earmarked for Stokel's unlisted expenses in closing the deal.
00:23:44.660 Stokel hired skilled lobbyists who in turn paid journalists for favorable stories about Alaska
00:23:49.920 and even funneled money to sway some of the representatives.
00:23:53.640 In other words, bribes.
00:23:56.040 The House approved the funding, 113 to 43.
00:24:00.360 Stoeckle, for his part, walked away handsomely rewarded by a bonus payment from Russia,
00:24:05.560 plus whatever he stashed for himself of that $200,000 expense account.
00:24:11.000 He soon retired to Paris, where he lived lavishly off of those commissions.
00:24:16.340 Had William Seward died in that 1865 carriage accident or been killed by Powell's knife
00:24:23.540 attack just days later, it's very likely that Alaska would still be in Russian hands
00:24:28.260 today, especially after the later discoveries of gold and vast oil reserves.
00:24:34.760 Imagine how different the Cold War might have unfolded if Alaska had been part of the old
00:24:39.840 Soviet Union.
00:24:40.740 No other American leader at the time possessed William Seward's unique mix of vision, personal friendship with Skokul, and sheer stubborn drive.
00:24:51.680 One man's miraculous survival, one midnight bargain, and an entire subcontinent changed hands for pocket change.
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00:26:09.220 Imagine you're an ambitious 20-something. It's 1849.
00:26:13.140 Gold fever has just hit California like lightning.
00:26:15.940 You're on the East Coast, but you dream of striking it rich, and it's calling your name.
00:26:20.940 How do you get there?
00:26:22.700 Well, you could pack a wagon and crawl over land for four to six brutal months.
00:26:27.860 dust-choked plains, swollen rivers, treacherous mountains that stretch on forever.
00:26:34.420 Or you could pay a lot more to ride a ship around the storm-lashed tip of South America,
00:26:40.440 still three to five months of seasickness, scurvy, and endless waves.
00:26:45.860 Either way, you're gambling your life.
00:26:47.840 But what if someone had promised you you could make that same one-way trip in one week?
00:26:54.680 No more months of misery.
00:26:56.180 You just hop on a train and go.
00:27:00.060 That dreamy possibility of a transcontinental railroad had been debated since the 1840s.
00:27:07.420 In 1853, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis sent four survey teams out west to scout the routes.
00:27:13.360 But like everything else at the time, it became about slavery.
00:27:16.720 Davis and other southern leaders wanted a southern route to San Diego that would help spread slavery through the southwestern states.
00:27:23.740 abolitionists fought for a central route across the Great Plains 0.62
00:27:26.780 that would bypass the South and reach Sacramento.
00:27:30.280 When the southern states seceded in 1861,
00:27:33.340 the main opposition to a central northern route walked out of Congress.
00:27:38.180 And into that opening stepped a man with a great vision.
00:27:42.760 Theodore Judah.
00:27:44.780 He was a sharp-eyed civil engineer from Connecticut
00:27:48.180 who had already built railroads back east.
00:27:50.300 In 1854, a group of Sacramento merchants hired him to lay tracks from their city to the gold fields in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
00:28:00.280 They wanted faster ways to sell picks and shovels and supplies to the miners that were all flooding in.
00:28:06.160 What Judah delivered became the Sacramento Valley Railroad, the first ever train service in the entire western U.S.
00:28:14.000 But Judah had bigger ideas,
00:28:16.400 and he became obsessed with stitching the entire continent together with a railroad.
00:28:22.200 People in Sacramento started calling him Crazy Judah
00:28:25.080 because he would corner anyone who would listen,
00:28:27.640 shopkeepers, politicians, strangers in saloons,
00:28:30.260 and he would rant about a railroad that would cross the Sierra Nevada
00:28:33.680 and link the Atlantic to the Pacific.
00:28:36.560 His wife Anna later said the Pacific railroad bug had bitten him hard,
00:28:41.140 and he would just not shut up about it.
00:28:47.760 Theodore Judah took matters into his own hands.
00:28:51.020 At his own expense, he wrote and printed a small book
00:28:54.000 titled A Practical Plan for Building the Pacific Railroad.
00:28:58.320 He shipped copies to every single member of Congress.
00:29:01.740 It was part engineering proposal, part sales pitch, part prophecy.
00:29:05.880 And in it, he poured out his vision.
00:29:08.600 It connects these two great oceans.
00:29:10.420 It is an indissoluble bond of union between the populous states of the east
00:29:14.980 and the undeveloped regions of the fruitful west.
00:29:18.500 It is a highway which leads to peace and future prosperity,
00:29:21.960 an iron bond for the perpetuation of the union and independence which we now enjoy.
00:29:27.380 It is the most magnificent project ever conceived.
00:29:32.760 Judah made countless scouting trips to the west,
00:29:35.900 He even drew a stunning 90-foot-long map detailing a workable route over the mountains.
00:29:42.480 It was eventually displayed in a room at the U.S. Capitol along with landscape paintings done by Judah's wife
00:29:47.680 to help convince lawmakers to take on this massive project.
00:29:52.200 Judah found his first backers in a group of Sacramento businessmen who became famous as the Big Four.
00:29:58.740 Leland Stanford, a grocer and future California governor,
00:30:02.580 Collis Huntington, a hardware store owner,
00:30:05.140 Mark Hopkins, Huntington's business partner,
00:30:08.020 and Charles Crocker.
00:30:09.660 He was a dry goods merchant.
00:30:11.780 This group formed the Central Pacific Railroad Company in 1861,
00:30:16.520 and Judah became the chief engineer.
00:30:19.300 Meanwhile, even as the Civil War raged,
00:30:21.280 President Lincoln saw the railroad as a lifeline for unity.
00:30:25.360 In 1862, he signed the Pacific Railway Act into law.
00:30:30.220 The act chartered the Central Pacific to build eastward from Sacramento
00:30:34.880 and the new Union Pacific Railroad Company to build westward from Omaha, Nebraska.
00:30:41.420 The two lines would meet somewhere in the Utah Territory.
00:30:46.060 Well, to speed things up, Congress dangled massive incentives,
00:30:48.960 government bonds, and enormous land grants for every mile of track laid.
00:30:53.600 The companies raced each other because the faster they built, the more land and money they pocketed.
00:30:59.380 In the end, those incentives handed the two railroad companies control of real estate,
00:31:04.820 totaling almost 200,000 square miles, bigger than the entire state of California.
00:31:10.280 On January 8, 1863, a simple ceremony kicked off construction in Sacramento.
00:31:16.180 Congress had hoped the railroad might be done by 1876 in time for America's centennial.
00:31:21.700 That would have meant 14 years from the passage of the Pacific Railway Act.
00:31:26.960 Instead, the two companies finished the job in six years and four months.
00:31:33.720 The Central Pacific relied heavily on over 13,000 Chinese immigrant laborers who blasted tunnels through granite,
00:31:41.200 hauled debris, laid the rails, survived avalanches, freezing winters, and harsh discrimination.
00:31:47.320 The Union Pacific depended largely on 8,000 Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans from both sides of the conflict to push west across the plains.
00:31:56.960 And in the last phase through Utah, over 5,000 Mormon workers were essential in blasting, tunneling, and grading the rail bed all the way to the finish line. 0.74
00:32:08.020 And the race got personal. 0.86
00:32:09.400 I mean, bigwigs on both sides started betting on who could lay the track fastest.
00:32:13.120 Union Pacific crews had once laid eight and a half miles of track in a single day.
00:32:18.260 They insisted that number just can't be beat.
00:32:21.260 Well, Charles Crocker of the Central Pacific Railway disagreed.
00:32:26.960 So as the project neared its final stretch, the Central Pacific men got ready to redeem their bosses' faith in their ability.
00:32:34.640 On April 28, 1869, they began their sprint at dawn.
00:32:39.840 Twelve hours later, they had laid 10 miles and 56 feet of track.
00:32:46.340 The Central Pacific won the bragging rights contest and set a world record that still stands today.
00:32:56.960 On May 10, 1869, after laying out over 1,700 miles of track, the race was over.
00:33:05.920 At Promontory Summit in Utah, a crowd of dignitaries, workers, and reporters gathered around a small gap in the tracks.
00:33:15.040 One of the two golden spikes prepared for the ceremony carried this inscription,
00:33:20.460 May God continue the unity of our country
00:33:23.660 as this railroad unites the two great oceans of this world.
00:33:28.520 Reverend John Todd of Massachusetts stepped forward and offered a heartfelt prayer.
00:33:33.000 Then Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific,
00:33:35.980 was given the honor of driving in the final spike.
00:33:39.360 He swung and missed the spike completely.
00:33:42.980 Union Pacific's vice president, Thomas Durant, also swung and also missed.
00:33:48.480 The crowd erupted in cheers anyway.
00:33:51.780 The on-site telegraph operator tapped out the news across the wires.
00:33:56.620 This one word, done.
00:33:59.540 In cities all across the nation, church bells rang, cannons boomed, and people poured into the streets to celebrate.
00:34:06.760 America was finally stitched together with iron.
00:34:11.980 But the man who dreamt of that moment, the hardest, wasn't there.
00:34:17.260 During the first year of construction on a trip back east,
00:34:20.160 Theodore Judah took the shortcut through Panama and contracted yellow fever.
00:34:25.220 He made it to New York, but the disease took his life.
00:34:28.580 He was only 37.
00:34:29.780 Tragically, nobody remembered to invite his widow, Anna, to the ceremony. 0.98
00:34:34.360 Kind of a sad oversight given that crazy Judah had basically willed the entire project into existence. 0.94
00:34:42.180 The Transcontinental Railroad did not solve America. 0.94
00:34:45.780 It brought new violence against Native Americans, new corruption, new exploitation, and new fights over land and power.
00:34:53.680 But it was rightly celebrated for all that it symbolized invention, perseverance, hope, freedom, and unity.
00:35:02.200 This was the first great national project after the Civil War that pointed towards America's future,
00:35:08.720 beyond the scars of slavery and sectional hatred that had defined the 1800s.
00:35:13.660 this was a country moving forward this was a new beginning
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00:36:25.500 history that inspired this podcast series be sure to read the american story the beginnings
00:36:31.280 by david barton and tim barton available now at wallbuilders.com
00:36:38.280 In the summer of 1868, America stood at a crossroads.
00:36:45.640 The Republicans needed a hero to lead them into the next phase of Reconstruction,
00:36:49.960 and they turned to the man who had won the Civil War.
00:36:52.920 At the party's convention, Ulysses S. Grant became the nominee for president
00:36:57.180 without a single other candidate being considered.
00:37:00.620 In his written acceptance message, because back then nominees didn't deliver speeches at the convention,
00:37:06.640 Grant concluded simply with the words,
00:37:09.420 Let us have peace.
00:37:11.740 Republicans seized on that line and made it their campaign slogan,
00:37:15.140 a promise of healing in a still very fractured nation.
00:37:19.780 Meanwhile, President Andrew Johnson hoped Democrats would nominate him to keep the job.
00:37:25.620 They didn't.
00:37:27.000 Instead, they chose former New York governor Horatio Seymour,
00:37:30.920 and for vice president, a man named Francis Preston Blair Jr.
00:37:35.980 He was a vocal racist who thrilled the party's white supremacist base.
00:37:41.280 The Democrats' campaign motto that year left zero room for subtlety.
00:37:45.860 Quote, 0.54
00:37:46.780 This is a white man's country. Let white men rule. End quote. 0.94
00:37:57.800 As the campaign heated up, the Ku Klux Klan terror network surged across the South. 0.83
00:38:02.860 they torched homes and churches and murdered black citizens and white republicans alike.
00:38:08.620 The KKK swelled to an estimated 500,000 members. White employers threatened black workers with 0.97
00:38:15.980 losing their job if they voted for a republican. Blacks were gunned down at political meetings 0.99
00:38:20.860 and voting parades. Witnesses and victims, they all knew the score. Almost all of these crimes 0.98
00:38:27.260 went unpunished frederick douglas understood the grim reality for black americans explaining why
00:38:34.620 blacks had to stick with the republican party he put it this way if as a class we are slighted by
00:38:40.460 the republican party we are as a class murdered by the democratic party grant won in a landslide
00:38:48.460 in the electoral college 214 to 80. but the civil war hero had almost no political experience which
00:38:56.780 made for a bumpy ride in the white house years later grant reflected candidly i entered the
00:39:02.700 white house as president without any previous experience either in civil or political life
00:39:09.100 i thought i could run the government of the united states as i did the staff of my army
00:39:14.620 it was my mistake and it led me into other mistakes for a president grant remained very
00:39:21.820 down to earth. He shunned personal bodyguards, loved taking long, solitary walks around Washington,
00:39:28.360 often covering five miles or more while puffing on his ever-present cigar.
00:39:33.740 The poet Walt Whitman, who lived in D.C. at the time, frequently spotted him on these walks.
00:39:39.140 Whitman described seeing Grant often stop at a modest house in the edge of town to chat with
00:39:44.000 an elderly couple that he had befriended. I would see him leaning on their windowsills outside.
00:39:48.560 all would be talking together,
00:39:50.640 they seeming to treat him without deference for place,
00:39:54.160 with dignity, courtesy, appreciation.
00:39:58.180 Grant was the typical Western man,
00:40:00.440 the plainest, the most efficient,
00:40:02.780 the least imposed upon by appearances.
00:40:09.300 As president, Grant pushed forward on civil rights
00:40:12.380 in ways often overlooked today.
00:40:14.920 He had welcomed the first black elected officials
00:40:16.920 ever to visit the White House.
00:40:18.560 He appointed Ebenezer Bassett as the U.S. minister to Haiti,
00:40:22.600 making him the first black diplomat in American history.
00:40:25.900 He appointed hundreds of black Americans throughout the civil service,
00:40:28.920 and one of his first acts as president was signing a bill
00:40:31.880 guaranteeing equal rights for black citizens in Washington, D.C.
00:40:36.480 Then, in February 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified,
00:40:40.760 finally giving the black man the right to vote.
00:40:44.060 In a message to Congress, Grant said,
00:40:45.920 The adoption of the 15th Amendment constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came into life.
00:40:54.220 But Southern white leaders were not about to let that stand.
00:40:57.560 They worked overtime to get around the amendment.
00:41:00.660 Remember the Constitution's three-fifth clause?
00:41:04.120 It had let Southern states count three of every five enslaved people toward their population,
00:41:09.620 for congressional seats and electoral votes, even though enslaved people had no political rights.
00:41:15.700 Well, now that formula no longer applied.
00:41:18.300 The South gained more congressional seats and electoral votes 0.57
00:41:20.860 because of blacks being fully counted in the population. 0.73
00:41:24.540 Yet black votes still largely didn't count because of legal tricks and white violence. 0.82
00:41:30.380 It was a cynical power grab that kept the old hierarchy alive. 0.53
00:41:34.820 Desperate pleas for help poured into the White House from Southern Republicans,
00:41:38.540 North Carolina's Governor William Holden wrote to Grant about the terror.
00:41:42.940 Bands of these armed men ride at night through various neighborhoods, whipping and maltreating peaceable citizens, hanging some, burning churches, and breaking up schools which have been established for the colored people.
00:41:56.480 This organized conspiracy is in existence in every county of the state. It is believed that its leaders now direct the movement of the present legislature.
00:42:06.380 Witnesses were too terrified to testify, juries too scared to convict.
00:42:10.340 In June 1870, Congress created the Department of Justice, and Grant quickly turned it into a weapon against the Klan.
00:42:18.960 It gave the federal government power to prosecute constitutional right violations when states refused to act.
00:42:25.780 Grant went all in. 0.78
00:42:27.380 Deploying federal troops to protect black communities, he suspended habeas corpus, pursuing prosecutions aggressively.
00:42:34.320 Hundreds of Klan members were arrested and tried in a campaign that effectively destroyed the original version of the KKK.
00:42:42.720 But Democrats in Congress and the press pounced, accusing Grant of being power-hungry and a dictator.
00:42:49.540 Frederick Douglass didn't buy it. He said,
00:42:51.660 If we stand by President Grant and his administration, it is from no spirit of hero worship or blind attachment to mere party,
00:42:59.580 but because in this hour there is no middle ground. 0.99
00:43:04.300 Grant is for stamping out this murderous Ku Klux 0.95
00:43:06.880 as he stamped out the rebellion. 0.96
00:43:11.880 Grant cruised to re-election in 1872,
00:43:15.080 yet his second term was badly clouded by scandals
00:43:17.740 that sound like they're straight out of modern-day headlines.
00:43:20.640 One revolved around the Transcontinental Railroad.
00:43:23.380 Union Pacific executives created a sham construction company
00:43:26.580 to build the railroad.
00:43:27.880 Then they essentially paid themselves inflated construction costs,
00:43:31.300 turning public subsidies and railroad money into private profit.
00:43:35.140 To keep Congress friendly, discounted stock was passed around to influential politicians,
00:43:40.560 and much of the wrongdoing happened before Grant took office.
00:43:43.720 But since the scandal broke during his presidency, he was tainted with guilt by association.
00:43:49.460 Then came the whiskey ring scandal.
00:43:52.260 Distillers and corrupt revenue officials conspired to cheat the federal government out of liquor taxes.
00:43:58.600 Money that should have gone to the Treasury got siphoned into private pockets through bribes and false records.
00:44:04.560 It was a sophisticated fraud network stretching across several states.
00:44:09.480 No evidence ever emerged that Grant personally participated in or knew anything about these schemes.
00:44:14.860 And it's often left out that his administration secured around 350 indictments in the Whiskey Ring cases alone.
00:44:22.140 Essentially, despite Grant's effectiveness as a military leader,
00:44:26.100 in politics he too often gave people the benefit of the doubt,
00:44:29.400 and that means he got burned,
00:44:31.400 even by some of those who were closest to him in his administration,
00:44:34.860 people that he had trusted.
00:44:36.400 Grant admitted,
00:44:37.460 I could never bear to think illy of anyone
00:44:40.000 whom I had selected for responsible positions,
00:44:43.380 unless proven guilty.
00:44:45.120 As Grant entered the last full year of his presidency,
00:44:47.920 the turmoil and violence of Reconstruction
00:44:50.920 still lingered unresolved.
00:44:53.400 It would be America's centennial year, 1876,
00:44:56.800 and it was a trying year for both Grant and the nation
00:45:00.420 in which Reconstruction would boil over
00:45:03.240 in one of the most controversial elections in U.S. history.
00:45:11.800 Coming up on the American Story, The Beginnings.
00:45:16.340 Now, March 10th, Bell and Watson test their latest version
00:45:19.740 in separate rooms connected by wire bell leans towards the transmitter and says mr watson come
00:45:27.580 here i want to see you watson hears every syllable he rushes in stunned bell has just completed the
00:45:36.460 first successful telephone call he records the moment in his laboratory notebook with quiet
00:45:42.060 triumph to my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what i said later that
00:45:50.060 year still glowing from the breakthrough bell writes to his father with a prophetic certainty
00:45:55.580 the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas and friends
00:46:02.140 will converse with each other without leaving home it feels almost inevitable that this world
00:46:08.220 changing moment arrives in 1876. This is America's centennial year. The nation marks 100 years since
00:46:16.220 the Declaration of Independence, a century already packed with technological change,
00:46:20.520 including the mechanical reaper, steam engine, railroad, and telegraph.
00:46:31.160 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a
00:46:36.800 friend so it can be discovered by other people.