The Real History of the Civil War
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 9 minutes
Harmful content
Misogyny
2
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Toxicity
23
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Hate speech
39
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Summary
The current understanding of the Civil War, as it s taught in Hollywood and schools, is a cartoon caricature. It was one of the most complicated events in American history. Its heroes, who existed on both sides, were complex, multidimensional people.
Transcript
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On the night of January 2nd, 1864, Confederate General Patrick Claiborne was worried.
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He warned his fellow Southerners that surrender to the North, quote,
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means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy,
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that our youth will be trained by northern school teachers,
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will learn from northern school books, their version of the war,
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will be impressed by all the influences of history and education
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to regard our gallant dead as traitors, our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.
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Claiborne was only partly right. For most of the following century, non-Southerners were
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pretty fair about the war and openly respected the South's leaders, including Lee.
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Four top Americans of the past. They are Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, and Lee.
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The South erected statues and monuments to its heroes. Several were erected inside the United
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States Capitol. Even abroad, people respected the dignity, bravery, and brilliance of Robert E. Lee.
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Winston Churchill described Lee as one of the noblest Americans who ever lived
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and one of the greatest captains known to the annals of war.
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It was almost exactly one century after the war, in the 1960s, when things took a turn.
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In 1977, the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd performed in Oakland, California,
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with the Confederate battle flag as their backdrop.
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In 1988, Hank Williams Jr. released a top-ten hit called If the South Would Have Won.
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But during the woke upheavals of the last decade, the story really changed and the
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statues and flags started coming down. Even conservatives in the South had
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turned on southern heritage. It's time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds.
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150 years after the end of the Civil War, the time has come. The retreat opened the
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floodgates for anti-American radicals who literally desecrated the grave of
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as it's taught in Hollywood and schools and everywhere else,
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The last 10 years have been a master class
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in historical malpractice, so jaw-droppingly stupid
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that, honestly, most sane people would just change the channel
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Over the course of this video, we're going to prove it.
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where your enemy outnumbers your side two to one.
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And not only that, your enemy is better trained.
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caught your regiment and your entire army in a picture.
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They have a massive number of soldiers behind you and in front of you, perfectly positioned.
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As an infantryman in this scenario, all you can do is follow orders, march where you're
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told to march, and shoot when you see the enemy.
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Then imagine that after a week of the most intense fighting of your life, you realize
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thought it was impossible. Well, that was the experience of a Confederate soldier named
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Dorastus Myers during the Battle of Chancellorsville, which lasted from April 30th to May 6th,
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1863. On May 11th, Myers, who served as a sergeant with the 33rd Virginia Infantry Regiment,
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wrote a letter to his brother and sister, quote, the Lord hath crowned our arms with
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another glorious victory. I think it was one of the hottest contests of the war. The enemy
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were strongly entrenched. We fought them on the left at Chancellorsville with 40,000 men
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against 110,000. I never was under such a fire of grape shell canister and musketry in my life,
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though the Lord spared my life. Although the Confederacy lost more than 13,000 soldiers at
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Chancellorsville, as well as several key officers, including Stonewall Jackson, the battle is widely
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considered to be the greatest Confederate victory of the Civil War and one of the most impressive
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military victories of all time. The historic victory was the result of the leadership of
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Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. It's widely regarded as one
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of the most brilliant tactical victories in American military history, often called Lee's
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perfect battle. It's referenced in books like the West Point Atlas of American Wars, and it
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continues to be studied in military academies today for its demonstration of outmaneuvering
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larger forces through audacity and tactical ingenuity. In other words, Robert E. Lee was a
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genius. So who was this man who, more than 150 years after his death, is still so frequently
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talked about? Robert E. Lee was born in 1807 into a prominent Virginia family as the son of
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revolutionary war hero Henry Light Horse Harry Lee. From a young age, it was obvious that he was
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military genius. He graduated second in his class from the United States Military Academy at West
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Point with zero demerits over four years and was commissioned into the elite U.S. Army Corps of
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Engineers. For over two decades he served as an exceptional military engineer overseeing critical
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infrastructure projects for the federal government. He served in the Mexican-American War where he
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performed so well under fire that he was promoted to colonel. After the war he ran West Point and
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fighting the very army that he spent three decades serving.
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Many of the officers he commanded and fought against
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Lee's men were facing starvation in Fredericksburg
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As the Union army converged on Chancellorsville,
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Union forces began crossing the Rappahannock River
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At the same time, another Union column was marching east,
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Roughly 70,000 Union soldiers ultimately converged
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It was clear that a massive battle was brewing.
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On the evening of April 29th, Jedediah Hotchkiss,
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a topographical engineer on Stonewall Jackson's staff,
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Tomorrow, tomorrow, death will hold high carnival.
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Faced with a vastly inferior strategic position,
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that were directly in front of him at the Rappahannock River.
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This was the safest maneuver, at least in the short term.
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while leaving some small divisions at the front line,
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to attack those advancing Union forces in the woods,
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and crush the small number of troops he left behind.
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He ordered Jackson to lead the troops to the west,
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troops who in the dead of night were unsure of what exactly was going on.
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William Calder, a soldier in the 2nd North Carolina Infantry,
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A soldier never knows where he's going, nor what he's going to do,
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stumbling about in the dark to the great danger of our heads and our shins.
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All the while, Union generals were congratulating one another.
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But by the morning of May 1st, the mood changed.
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ran into Union brigades from the 5th Corps and 12th Corps,
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Although the Union maintained a numerical advantage,
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Union generals couldn't believe Hooker's orders.
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In fact, Major General Henry Slocum, who was in charge of the 12th Corps,
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called the orders crazy and threatened to shoot the messenger who delivered the news.
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Hooker was still convinced that he was in the superior strategic position,
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Jackson proposed yet another secret flanking maneuver,
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taking his entire corps and leaving behind only 14,000 men.
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Around 5 a.m. on May 2nd, Lee authorized Jackson to take the entire 2nd Corps,
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15 infantry brigades consisting of 30,000 soldiers and more than 100 cannon
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In the fog of war, Jackson was able to snake around the Union forces undetected
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with the help of scouts and locals who mapped out a route in the wooded terrain.
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In his final dispatch to General Lee, Jackson wrote,
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The enemy has made a stand at Chancellor's, which is about two miles from Chancellorsville.
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Jackson's Corps emerged suddenly from the woods.
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where the Confederate surprise attack was coming from.
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Very quickly, the Union forces were pushed back
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about three miles, but they weren't completely defeated.
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which complicated Jackson's efforts to crush them.
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In fact, Jackson himself, along with some other officers,
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to get a better sense for what the Union army was doing.
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Dr. McGuire, my wife tells me I'm going to die today.
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it is necessary that the glorious victory thus far achieved
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Endeavor, therefore, to dispossess them of Chancellorsville,
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which will permit the union of the whole army.
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I shall myself proceed to join you as soon as I can,
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but let nothing delay the completion of the plan
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of driving the enemy from his rear and from his positions.
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I shall give orders that every effort be made
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on this side at daybreak to aid in the junction."
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On May 3rd, Stewart led brutal frontal assaults
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on critical positions, including the high ground
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In order to prevent another Confederate flanking maneuver,
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Hooker made the fateful decision to abandon the high ground
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was a pivotal blunter and yet another cautious decision
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while Lee was pursuing a much more aggressive strategy.
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It's important to emphasize how important Hazel Grove was
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As Chris Michalski writes in That Furious Struggle, quote,
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making the wilderness a terrible place to deploy artillery.
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The Confederates immediately rushed dozens of guns
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onto Hazel Grove and unloaded on the Union lines,
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The cover fire allowed the Confederate Army to reunite,
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Hooker was injured when a Confederate cannonball
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at his command center, splintering a piece of wood
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nor did his subordinates attempt to replace him,
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but he was clearly dazed at the worst possible moment,
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the Confederate battle lines at Fredericksburg,
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after bringing word of the advancing Union army,
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Lee said simply, thank you very much, but both you and your horse are overheated.
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Take him to that shady tree yonder and rest a little.
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Lee ultimately decided to split his army for a third time.
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He sent the Second Corps under Brigadier General Raleigh Colston to strike Hooker,
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and he ordered McLaw's division to march east to fight Sedgwick.
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Fighting had broken down in three key areas, Salem Church, Fredericksburg, and the Chancellorsville Crossroads.
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Eventually, Lee rode out to Salem Church to lead the counterattack on Sedgwick directly.
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He successfully prevented the Union pincer movement once again by dividing his forces.
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Outmaneuvered, stunned, and physically injured, Hooker ordered a full retreat on the night of May 4th.
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Lee, by repeatedly dividing his forces when conventional wisdom called for retreating each time,
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had managed to defeat a much larger army at a time when both the Union and the Confederacy were eager for a major victory.
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Lee's tactics are still studied today in military academies.
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He recognized his opponent's strategic weakness and his opponent's fear, and he exploited them both.
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When the war broke out, no one thought it would last long.
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One person who knew it wouldn't be short was Robert E. Lee.
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In early 1861, while still in the U.S. Army at Fort Mason, Texas,
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he correctly predicted that if it came to armed conflict, quote,
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Lee's foresight in recognizing the Civil War's potential for protracted devastation,
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unlike the naive optimism of many on both sides, underscored his wisdom and his realism.
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His perfect battle at Chancellorsville showcased Lee's military prowess.
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The South didn't have the North's industrial capacity, railroads, wealth, or population,
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but it had some of the greatest military leadership in human history.
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In other words, Lee and the South, they were no losers.
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When the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, an immediate question arose,
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what should the conflict be called? Now, the answer wasn't obvious. On April 15th,
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President Lincoln issued Proclamation 80, which referred to the attack on Sumter and
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various state secessions as, quote, combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary
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course of judicial proceedings. In a July 4th message to Congress, Lincoln referred to the
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war as, quote, a case of rebellion. He continued to use the term rebellion throughout the war,
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including in the Emancipation Proclamation, where he mentioned the rebellion against the United
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States. The words were political in nature. The Constitution conferred Lincoln emergency powers
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if he called it a rebellion. It also denied legitimacy to the South, implying that they
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were still part of the country. In 1880, when the War Department released the official records of
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the war. They titled it the War of the Rebellion, a compilation of the official records of the Union
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and Confederate armies. During the War of the South had its own preferred terms, like the War
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for Southern Independence and the War Between the States. After the First Battle of Manassas,
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Confederate General Stonewall Jackson told his troops, I hope by your future deeds and bearing
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you'll be handed down to posterity as the First Brigade in this, our Second War of Independence.
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Harris von Bork, Chief of Staff to Confederate General Jeb Stewart,
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titled his book, Memoirs of the Confederate War for Independence.
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Now, whether it was a rebellion or a war for independence depends on who you ask,
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Civil wars are between two sides that want to control the country.
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The Russian Civil War was between whites and reds over who would control the Russian Empire.
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The Chinese Civil War was between communists and nationalists over who would control China.
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The English Civil War was between parliamentary forces and the king over who would have supreme power over England.
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There's no evidence whatsoever the South had any interest in occupying or controlling Boston or New York or the entire country.
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They wanted to leave the Union for various reasons, which they believed they had the legal right to do.
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the matter at hand was whether the united states was a collection of sovereign states
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or a centralized union of subordinate states that wasn't really a question in the early years
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of the republic according to katherine drinker bowen's book miracle at philadelphia when the
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constitutional convention's committee of style and arrangement originally drafted the preamble
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it had no reference to we the people of the united states in fact what the articles drafted by the
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convention had said was, quote, we the undersigned delegates of the states of New Hampshire,
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Massachusetts Bay, etc. And so on down the list of the 13. But they scrapped that idea because it
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was unlikely that they would get all 13 states to ratify the new constitution. So the real history
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of how the term we the people was born is that it was a technicality. Back then, you wouldn't have
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said the United States is a place, you would have said these United States are a place. And that is
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a very important distinction. In that context, it's not surprising that by 1794, just six years
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after the Constitution's ratification, two U.S. senators, Rufus King of New York and Oliver
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Ellsworth of Connecticut, approached Senator John Taylor of Virginia and informed him they wanted
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to break up the union already. They recognized a huge divide between the northern and southern
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states, and it wasn't just cultural differences between the agrarian south and the urbanized
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north. They noticed major political and economic differences too. In 1883, more than two decades
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after the outbreak of the war, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts acknowledged that everybody
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involved in the ratification of the Constitution would have assumed states could leave, writing
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quote, when the Constitution was adopted by the votes of states at Philadelphia and accepted by
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votes of states and popular conventions it is safe to say that there was not a man in the country
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from washington and hamilton on the one side to george clinton and george mason on the other
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who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment entered upon by the states and from
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which each and every state had the right peaceably to withdraw a right which was very likely to be
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exercised their historical record proves this point between the founding of the country in 1861
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northern states threatened to secede at least five times. In 1803 a group of
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Massachusetts-based Federalists known as the Essex Junto threatened to secede
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because they feared the Louisiana Purchase would dilute their political
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power. Aaron Burr, who was Thomas Jefferson's vice president, was their
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leader. In 1807 they threatened to leave again after Jefferson put an embargo on
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Great Britain in France. During the War of 1812 New England once again threatened
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secede because of the British blockade of their ports. Some states considered independently
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making peace with the British. Massachusetts and Connecticut refused to place their militias
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under federal command. They claimed the federal government didn't have the power to do it.
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In the 1840s, northern politicians published a solemn appeal to the peoples of free states,
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arguing that the annexation of Texas will be, quote, so injurious to the interests and abhorrent
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to the feelings of the people of the free states as, in our opinion, not only inevitably to result
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in a dissolution of the Union, but fully to justify it. Former President John Quincy Adams
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of Massachusetts signed that document. After the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act,
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New England threatened to nullify the law, and some leaders called for secession again.
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Before the Civil War, the North issued credible threats to secede at least five separate times.
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As the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote put it,
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If the states had known that they couldn't get out, they never would have gotten in.
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We're not the only ones fixing the historical record.
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It includes speeches from Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington,
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two of the greatest orators America has ever produced,
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and are almost never taught in schools anymore.
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Robert E. Lee witnessed the 1860 election results from a U.S. Army post in San Antonio, Texas.
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As the fervor over secession began to boil over, Lee wrote his father-in-law, quote,
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If the union is dissolved, which God in his mercy forbid, I shall return to you.
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According to historian Alan Guelzo, as the states of the Deep South left the Union, Lee complained that the behavior of the cotton states was wholly beyond any justification, and he was worried that their selfish and dictatorial bearing would make life for Virginia miserable should she determine to coalesce with them.
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According to Guelzo, Lee wished to live under no other government
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and to have no other flag than the Star-Spangled Banner.
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But if that government was now going to disappear,
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and the only alternative was to go back in sorrow to my people and share the misery of my native
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land. Like so many Americans from this period, Lee was a patriotic American and a war hero,
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but he saw himself first and foremost as a Virginia. On February 6th, 1861, David Twiggs,
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the commander of the U.S. Army's Department of Texas, surrendered his entire command to
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the Confederates and ordered all federal troops to abandon their posts. Lee refused to leave
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Fort Mason and pledged to defend his post at all hazards.
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This is because the legality of secession mattered to him
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and because his native Virginia hadn't seceded yet.
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As he left Texas, Lee declared he was returning to Virginia
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And though he would never bear arms against the US,
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one single Confederate leader was ever convicted of treason because it was commonly understood at
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the time that it was not treason. The legal case for secession goes back to before the Constitution
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when 13 U.S. colonies decided to secede from the British crown. After winning their war for
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independence, those colonies then formed the Articles of Confederation, which required that
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any changes to the Union be adopted by the Congress in all the states. But that never happened,
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The background led historian Charles Francis Adams Jr., who served as a colonel in the Union Army, to say, quote,
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If Robert E. Lee was a traitor, so also indisputably were George Washington, Oliver Cromwell, John Hamden, and William of Orange.
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Adams goes on, George Washington furnishes a precedent at every point.
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A Virginian like Lee, he was also a British subject.
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He had fought under the British flag, as Lee had fought under that of the United States.
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When, in 1776, Virginia seceded from the British Empire, he went with his state, just as Lee went with it 85 years later.
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Subsequently, Washington commanded armies in the field designated by those opposed to them as rebels and whose descendants now glorify them as the rebels of 76.
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Much as Lee later commanded and at last surrendered, much larger armies also designated rebels by those they confronted.
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Except in their outcome, the cases were therefore precisely alike.
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So the only difference is that Washington won his war and Lee lost his.
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The courts basically agreed with that analysis.
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After the Civil War, many northern newspapers, including the Boston Daily Advertiser and the New York Times,
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published materials encouraging the government to put Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, on trial for treason.
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And for their part, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that a trial would, quote,
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render traitors infamous and have it judicially settled that secession is illegal.
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We would have learned a lot about the country if they would have done it.
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According to University of Virginia law professor Cynthia Nicoletti,
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no one knew for sure whether secession was legal
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and that any treason prosecution would rise and fall on that question.
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Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court,
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who wrote in a letter to a lawyer representing a Confederate senator, quote,
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The doctrine of state rights will have a severe test and may find a strange vindication in that trial.
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Secession has yet to be defined. Hitherto, it has been a toy of politicians,
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and they have dodged everything like a definition.
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But is secession treason? That's a grand question.
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If the right to withdraw existed, it must have included the right of defense,
00:29:01.240
so that levying war to defend a confederacy founded in secession
00:29:05.020
could not be levying war against the government of the U.S.
00:29:08.600
But this is on the assumption that secession is something less than treason,
00:29:14.760
Many northern politicians were certain the government would lose.
00:29:20.460
who was most famous for getting caned on the Senate floor,
00:29:23.220
said to try Jefferson Davis would be the nay plus ultra of folly.
00:29:29.060
If you bring these Confederate leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not rebellion.
00:29:36.380
Nicoletti writes that even Lincoln himself was concerned about the possibility that a trial might backfire.
00:29:41.980
Before his untimely death, President Lincoln had remarked that Davis' flight from Richmond in April was a good thing
00:29:47.740
because it forestalled the political and legal difficulties that might attend a high-profile treason prosecution.
00:29:53.640
I'm bound to oppose the escape of Jeff Davis, Lincoln had reportedly told General William T. Sherman.
00:29:59.060
But if you could manage to have him slip out unbeknownst, like, I guess it wouldn't hurt me much.
00:30:05.520
At a cabinet meeting at the White House on July 18th, there was no consensus at the White House as to how to proceed.
00:30:11.900
President Andrew Johnson, who assumed office after Lincoln's assassination, pressed for a clear answer, but he didn't get one.
00:30:18.100
The Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, stated that there was, quote,
00:30:21.940
a great diversity of opinion in the matter as to whether Davis should be tried first for the crime of high treason.
00:30:27.520
Ultimately Andrew Johnson opted to proceed tentatively with a treason
00:30:31.480
prosecution. For his part Davis was eager for trial because he believed
00:30:34.840
secession was legal and he wanted vindication in court. Davis in fact
00:30:39.040
hoped that he would be arrested in 1861 after his home state of Mississippi
00:30:42.880
seceded so he could demonstrate the legality of secession. But no one
00:30:47.000
arrested him and he instead was chosen to be president of the new Confederate
00:30:50.620
States of America. That's why Davis unlike Robert E. Lee never requested a
00:30:54.820
presidential pardon. He genuinely thought that he'd be vindicated in court. Jefferson Davis was
00:30:59.700
charged with treason and held for two years at Fort Monroe in Virginia, but never got his day
00:31:04.320
in court. Over time, popular support for prosecution waned, and the Johnson administration
00:31:08.800
was far from certain that a Virginia jury would convict Davis, or even that the Supreme Court
00:31:13.240
would definitively rule that secession was illegal. Davis took the surrender as an unequivocal win.
00:31:18.540
A sovereign state cannot commit treason, he wrote. The government early discovered that if this issue
00:31:24.320
came before the Supreme Court, it would lose its case, and I should be acquitted. So none of the
00:31:29.580
indictments were ever tried. Shortly after Davis's case was dropped in April of 1869, the Supreme
00:31:35.060
Court ruled in a separate, unrelated case, Texas v. White, that secession is indeed unconstitutional.
00:31:41.340
As the court put it, the Constitution in all its provisions looks to an indestructible union
00:31:46.060
composed of indestructible states. But it was a throwaway line in a case about bonds. There wasn't
00:31:56.460
And the ruling attracted virtually no media attention
00:31:59.120
because by that point, it seemed like a dead issue.
00:32:10.900
there was no consensus on that point in the country.
00:32:17.880
was very different from the United States we know today.
0.79
00:32:24.360
the constitutionality of secession was a close call,
00:32:27.620
and that it would be a gross oversimplification,
00:32:30.360
if not an outright falsehood, to call these men traitors.
00:32:45.080
Indeed, at the time, abolitionists aggressively
00:32:50.060
As Thomas Fleming writes in A Disease in the Public Mind,
00:32:53.360
A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, quote,
00:32:59.960
that smearing the South's reputation in every possible way
00:33:03.320
would create the anxiety that would lead to a mass conversion
00:33:08.240
The South was portrayed as a province ruled by Satan
00:33:13.160
if her citizens did not vow to expunge the sin of slavery.
00:33:17.900
Meanwhile, in the South, there was an intense fear
00:33:28.200
is best understood as a product of a psychological disease
00:33:32.320
in different ways, which made rational dialogue impossible.
00:33:38.200
That mutual disease, he argues, is why only the US,
00:33:46.880
some of these over-the-top descriptions of the South
00:33:52.360
The cartoon version of history holds that Abraham Lincoln
00:34:12.480
more than 42% of New York City households owned slaves.
00:34:15.840
a ratio only surpassed by Charleston, South Carolina.
00:34:23.920
By 1783, one quarter of Connecticut families owned slaves
00:34:27.220
and one out of every 14 people in Rhode Island was a slave.
00:34:37.360
and future Massachusetts governor, John Hancock,
00:34:44.620
include Cotton Mather, who learned about inoculation
00:34:51.180
Massachusetts and Connecticut set curfews for black people.
00:34:54.360
According to the book Black Bondage in the North,
00:35:02.120
and to remain within the towns to which they belonged.
00:35:05.200
Slaves who broke curfew in Connecticut, Massachusetts,
0.67
00:35:14.140
gather in groups larger than four. And in Long Island, they could not travel more than a mile
00:35:18.700
from home without a pass. Similar laws existed in Pennsylvania and in New Jersey. By the time
00:35:24.380
Abraham Lincoln was elected, slavery had been banned in most but not all Union states. It's
0.52
00:35:29.660
important to point out that while radical abolitionists in the 1850s were calling for
00:35:33.340
the South to immediately free all of their slaves, the Northern states didn't end slavery that way.
00:35:38.700
for the most part the manumission of slaves in the north was a gradual process the laws
00:35:44.780
emancipated people born in the future and were designed so northern slaveholders didn't lose
00:35:49.500
money in many cases northern slaveholders just sold their slaves to the south one overlooked
00:35:55.900
fact is that early attempts to curb the slave trade had southern support in his 1806 state of
00:36:01.500
the union president thomas jefferson a virginian and a slave owner called on congress to withdraw
00:36:06.140
the citizens of the united states from all further participation in those violations of human rights
0.62
00:36:11.020
which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of africa the next year the united
00:36:16.140
states congress voted to abolish the slave trade the bill passed the house with 96 percent of
00:36:20.620
representatives yes including massive support from southern members of congress there are two
00:36:26.220
reasons why southern members of congress voted this way first at the time many people in the
00:36:30.460
south wanted to end slavery by 1827 more than 100 anti-slavery groups existed in the south
00:36:35.660
mostly under the banner of colonization societies which advocated for sending freed slaves back to
00:36:41.020
africa second and more importantly profits from the slave trade weren't going to the south the
00:36:46.860
slave trade was a northern business and jefferson's bill was ineffective at stopping it according to
00:36:52.620
the book black cargos by daniel manix an english captain reported that the port of lamu in the
00:36:58.460
slave market of zanzibar was packed with quote enterprising americans whose star-spangled banner
00:37:06.080
where other nations would not deign to traffic.
00:37:09.660
By 1858, as Abraham Lincoln was running for Senate in Illinois,
00:37:13.280
there were 24 American ships in the Zanzibar Harbor
00:37:20.620
which at the time was trying to end the slave trade,
00:37:24.820
First, American ships were extremely fast and maneuverable.
00:37:28.160
And second, President John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts
00:37:30.640
forbade the British from boarding any American flagged ships.
00:37:34.460
The result was huge profits for Massachusetts-based slave traders.
00:37:39.740
So many of the ships hailed from Salem, Massachusetts, that the Zanzibarians thought all white men came from this one New England town.
00:37:48.340
English officers discovered to their indignation that Great Britain was considered to be a suburb of Salem.
00:37:54.340
The Americans traded for slaves in ivory with a cheap caligo turned out in vast quantities by the New England cotton mills.
00:38:01.240
Even today, cotton is called Americani in Zanzibar.
00:38:05.020
Moving slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and Brazil was big money for northerners. This part
0.90
00:38:10.460
of the slave trade was its own version of the famous triangle trade. Cheap southern cotton was
0.77
00:38:15.660
shipped north to textile mills, which northerners turned into manufactured textile goods. Northern
00:38:21.420
slave traders traded those textiles for slaves in Zanzibar who were then trafficked to the Caribbean
00:38:26.940
for huge profits. The north was profiting from slavery on all three corners of the triangle.
0.62
00:38:32.300
This continued for decades. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that by the 1850s, quote,
00:38:37.560
the fitting out of slavers became a flourishing business in the United States and centered at New York City.
00:38:43.600
In 1862, literally during the Civil War, the New York Journal of Commerce reported that New York was, quote,
00:38:49.620
the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce,
00:38:53.540
although the cities of Portland, Maine, and Boston are second to her in that distinction.
00:38:58.720
As New England was making money off the global slave trade, other northern states were passing
0.99
00:39:03.120
racist legislation. In Lincoln's home state of Illinois, black people couldn't attend public
00:39:07.520
schools, couldn't testify against white people in court, or bear arms. If three or more of them
00:39:12.560
gathered to dance, they were fined and lashed. The purpose of these laws, which were known as
00:39:17.680
the Illinois Black Codes, was to discourage black people from moving to the state. In 1853, Illinois
00:39:23.600
made things more explicit with a black exclusion law that, quote, prohibited blacks from coming
00:39:28.720
into the state with the intention of living there. Punishment proved especially harsh in that
00:39:33.420
violators were subject to penalties that amounted to forced labor, essentially slavery. Illinois law
00:39:38.760
was so extreme that it was a crime for blacks to settle in that state without a certificate of
00:39:43.260
freedom, which cost $1,000, the equivalent of about $40,000 today. The black codes were so
0.99
00:39:48.460
harsh that even some Southern newspapers objected.
00:39:51.660
The New Orleans Bee called the Illinois Black Codes
00:39:54.420
an act of special and savage ruthlessness.
1.00
00:39:57.660
One of the key figures in passing the Black Codes
0.78
00:39:59.440
was a state representative named John A. Logan.
0.99
00:40:06.780
Abraham Lincoln later made him a union general.
00:40:15.900
contemporary woke views on black people many northern or free states enacted black laws or
00:40:22.780
exclusionary codes similar to illinois indiana and oregon banned black settlement in their
00:40:27.740
state constitutions according to eugene berwanger's book the frontier against slavery quote
00:40:34.060
the exact extent of racial prejudice as a factor encouraging limitation of slavery is indeterminable
00:40:39.900
the average man in all ages does not record his thoughts for posterity and is even less likely to
00:40:45.100
to do so on such thorny problems as race relations.
00:40:48.520
Yet, if 79.5% of the people in Illinois, Indiana,
00:40:52.280
Oregon, and Kansas voted to exclude the free Negro
00:40:57.260
surely this antipathy influenced their decision
00:41:09.660
had always been concern for the welfare of the white man
00:41:15.060
In other words, many Northern and Western voters
00:41:20.980
not primarily out of moral opposition to slavery itself,
1.00
00:41:28.040
Generally speaking, in the first half of the 1800s,
00:41:35.760
the black populations of their states were getting too big.
00:41:38.840
After Nat Turner's violent slave revolt in Virginia in 1831,
0.99
00:41:42.580
thousands of Virginians petitioned their government
00:41:51.980
after some period to be fixed by law shall be free.
00:41:56.280
Virginia's governor at the time wrote in his diary that,
00:42:02.860
pass gradually abolishing slavery in this state.
00:42:06.240
The Richmond Enquirer at the time called slavery,
00:42:11.940
The Virginia House of Delegates failed to end slavery
00:42:14.540
then, but it wasn't by an overwhelming vote. Many people didn't realize that the windowed end
00:42:19.000
slavery through the legal process likely peaked right at the beginning of the country and into
00:42:23.860
the early 1800s. In 1794, the incentives radically changed after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.
00:42:31.000
That invention, more than anything else, dramatically increased the demand for slave
00:42:34.480
labor in the South because it made cotton cultivation vastly more profitable. As the
00:42:39.820
Civil War approached, the hundreds of anti-slavery groups that had formed in the mid-1820s had mostly
00:42:45.800
gone away, and so had any possibility that Southern legislatures would end slavery on their own.
00:42:51.520
The debate, after Nat Turner's rebellion, was the last major attempt to do so. And so slavery
00:42:57.880
persisted for decades, though many Virginians knew it was wrong. One of them was Robert E. Lee
00:43:02.740
himself. According to historian Alan Guelzo, Lee, quote, regarded slavery as a moral and political
00:43:08.580
evil, which, however, he was content to leave in the hands of God to resolve. Lee's slaves were
00:43:14.160
inherited, one slave family from his mother, and 197 others from his father-in-law, G.W.P. Custis.
00:43:22.180
In 1862, during the war, Lee, quote, completed the emancipation of the Custis slaves, which he
00:43:27.180
was obligated to do by his father-in-law's will, and then freed his own, which he was not.
00:43:31.500
the war was not exclusively about slavery that is just a fact it could not have been
00:43:43.080
right up through the shelling of fort sumter the north was profiting massively from the slave trade
00:43:47.760
four union states had legal slavery but if the war was not about slavery then what was it about
00:43:54.120
well the answer depends on who you ask though interestingly presidents lincoln and davis
00:43:58.520
seem to agree. Confederate President Jefferson Davis said, quote, we are not fighting for slavery.
00:44:02.620
We are fighting for independence and that or extermination we will have. Lincoln himself told
00:44:07.440
newspaper editor Horace Greeley, quote, my paramount object in the struggle is to save the union and is
00:44:12.080
not to either save or destroy slavery. If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would
00:44:17.740
do it. And if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it. And if I could save it by
00:44:22.380
freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. In other words, according to both
00:44:27.880
presidents, the war was fundamentally about the question of keeping or ending the Union.
00:44:32.800
The key argument against the idea that Civil War was solely about slavery is that at the time of
00:44:37.160
secession in late 1860 and early 1861, neither the incoming Republican administration nor
00:44:42.400
mainstream Northern opinion advocated for the immediate abolition of slavery where it already
00:44:47.360
existed in Southern states. The Republican Party platform of 1860 opposed the extension of slavery
00:44:52.680
to the territories, but didn't call for abolition of slavery in the South. But even if it had,
00:45:01.900
most Southerners would not have been affected anyway.
00:45:08.120
The idea that 360,000 white men were gonna line up
00:45:11.700
and die for the sake of rescuing black people in the South
0.98
00:45:19.300
In the words of the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote,
00:45:22.000
no soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves.
00:45:28.180
Heros von Bork, Chief of Staff to Confederate General
00:45:36.780
His memoirs contained no references to slavery at all,
00:45:44.060
belonged to a free Negro, one of the richest men
00:45:46.160
of the county, who was himself the owner of numerous slaves.
00:45:50.200
The historian James McPherson went through the diaries
00:46:01.840
abstract symbols or concepts such as country, flag,
00:46:05.680
constitution, liberty, and legacy of the revolution
00:46:12.640
For Confederate soldiers, a more concrete, visceral,
00:46:15.620
or perhaps more powerful motive also came into play,
00:46:18.940
defense of home and hearth against an invading enemy.
00:46:25.480
a concept that was a lot stronger 150 years ago than it is today.
00:46:30.860
Many Union soldiers echoed Lincoln's calls for preserving the Union.
00:46:34.880
McPherson found a Union soldier from Philadelphia who wrote that,
00:46:38.820
This contest is not the North against the South.
00:46:41.000
It is government against anarchy, law against disorder.
00:46:44.860
Another from Michigan joined against the wishes of his family
00:46:47.500
because he wanted to join, quote, all true patriots to sustain her government.
00:46:53.140
If the union is split up, the government is destroyed, and we will be a ruined nation.
00:47:00.660
If I die in the battlefield, I do so with pleasure.
00:47:06.620
McPherson found immigrants lamenting that secession would make the country, quote,
00:47:10.220
as bad as the deeply divided German states and native-born Americans who said, quote,
00:47:15.540
Our fathers made this country. We, their children, are to save it.
00:47:19.680
McPherson notes that relatively few Union volunteers mentioned the slavery issue when they enlisted.
00:47:27.960
McPherson estimates that just 20% of Confederate soldiers even considered slavery a cause worth fighting for in the first place.
00:47:37.300
Even among soldiers from slave-holding families, only one-third explicitly voiced pro-slavery convictions.
00:47:47.200
McPherson writes that many Virginians shared Robert E. Lee's view that they wouldn't fight unless it be in defense of Virginia.
00:47:55.320
I would give all I have got just to be in the front rank of the first brigade that marches against the invading foe
00:48:00.620
who now pollute the sacred soil of my native state with their unholy tread.
00:48:05.720
When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he did it as a wartime measure to suppress the rebellion.
00:48:12.280
It's just as notable for what it did not do as what it did do.
00:48:18.300
No, slavery continued in areas under federal control,
00:48:21.180
which included Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
00:48:26.940
In practice, it only freed about 100,000 people out of a pool of millions.
00:48:30.760
Lincoln did it because he wanted to prevent European powers
00:48:36.860
and would have dramatically changed the South's fortunes.
00:48:40.120
So the proclamation was a brilliant political maneuver
00:48:43.080
that undercut the Confederacy's diplomatic efforts to court Europe
00:48:46.520
because it made intervention politically untenable
00:48:48.840
for European leaders who almost all opposed slavery.
00:48:53.780
We are not saying the war had nothing to do with slavery
00:49:01.420
as what your idiot teachers taught you in school.
1.00
00:49:10.040
South Carolina's Declaration of Causes for Secession
00:49:14.800
After seceding, South Carolina immediately made an appeal to other slave-holding states to secede,
00:49:20.360
and in its appeal referenced slavery no less than 32 times.
00:49:24.000
The South Carolina legislatures literally wrote, quote,
00:49:26.540
Slave-holding states cannot be safe in subjection to non-slave-holding states.
00:49:31.620
When General Claiborne suggested freeing the slaves to fight for the Confederacy,
00:49:38.140
Slavery was a factor in the war, and probably a significant one, but it was not the only factor.
00:49:44.100
the south left for three other reasons too first there was the balance of political power
00:49:50.340
in the republic's first 72 years slave-holding southerners occupied the white house approximately
00:49:55.140
two-thirds of the time or 49 years out of 72. some of the biggest figures in american politics
00:50:01.060
were from the south including andrew jackson james k polk and john c calhoun to the extent
00:50:06.260
that there were northern presidents many were sympathetic to the south like pennsylvania's
00:50:10.100
James Buchanan. But demographics is destiny. As the northern states surged in population,
00:50:15.820
driven by higher birth rates and massive waves of European immigration, the South's long-standing
00:50:20.940
political dominance collapsed. The South's share of the House of Representatives dropped from
00:50:25.560
roughly 48% at the founding to 38% by 1860. For decades, Congress maintained balance in the Senate
00:50:32.100
by adding slave and free states at the same time. But after the country's massive territorial
00:50:37.340
expansion as a result of the Mexican-American War, that balance was doomed. There was no need
00:50:42.380
for slave labor in places like Arizona or New Mexico, and so the South's relative power declined
00:50:47.580
quickly. California was admitted as a free state in 1850. Free Oregon entered in 1859. Abraham
00:50:54.540
Lincoln's election in 1860, coupled with the rapid rise of the Republican Party, which was a purely
00:51:00.340
sectional northern organization at the time, signaled the end of Southern dominance in national
00:51:05.820
politics. Second, the South had a financial motive. At the outbreak of the war, the American
00:51:11.460
South produced roughly three quarters of the world's cotton. From 1830 to 1860, cotton was by
00:51:17.100
far the country's top export. It comprised literally half or more of all U.S. exports.
00:51:22.720
90% of exports to Great Britain came only from the South. And by the 1830s, more than 80% of the
00:51:29.000
cotton grown in the South was being exported. At the time, the biggest source of revenue for the
00:51:34.380
U.S. government was the tariff. This was great policy for northern states since their tariffs
00:51:39.440
protected their manufacturers from foreign competition, but it was terrible for the
00:51:43.080
export-dependent South because retaliatory tariffs restricted their access to the foreign markets,
00:51:48.000
and because their economy was built around agricultural exports, they had higher demand
00:51:52.840
for foreign manufactured goods. So how much of a factor was money in the decision to secede?
00:51:58.900
On Christmas Day, 1860, the South Carolina legislature issued an address to the other slave-holding states calling on them to leave the Union.
00:52:09.000
The taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North.
00:52:15.640
The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue,
00:52:20.360
but for an object inconsistent with revenue, to promote, by prohibitions, northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.
00:52:30.420
The role that economics played in secession was obvious to outsiders.
00:52:34.680
Karl Marx complained at the time that London's biggest newspapers, including The Times, The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review,
00:52:43.700
The war between the North and South is a tariff war.
00:52:46.660
The war is further not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery,
00:52:51.140
and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty.
00:52:55.100
A third reason was the massive cultural divide between the regions.
00:53:01.940
The North was urban, industrial, and had huge numbers of European immigrants.
0.99
00:53:08.000
something that became obvious on one cool Virginia morning in October 1859.
00:53:14.580
Robert E. Lee was harvesting the rye crop in his fields in Arlington when a mounted soldier showed
00:53:19.460
up and handed him a letter from the Secretary of War. The night before, around 1 30 in the morning,
00:53:24.260
the Federal Armory and Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, had been taken by a group of armed men.
00:53:30.100
A train passing through it sent telegrams on to Washington warning of 150 armed abolitionists
00:53:35.860
who have come to free the slaves and intend to do it at all hazards and to arm poor whites who
00:53:40.580
who were similarly aggrieved with the slave system.
00:53:51.260
It was Lee's job to take back Harpers Ferry
0.69
00:54:04.060
and he commandeered a Baltimore and Ohio engine car
00:54:07.280
to get there, riding with just one other officer,
00:54:21.400
John Brown and four of his men were taken alive
00:54:26.780
The South responded to the news with total heart.
00:54:31.680
the Southern people have heretofore disregarded
00:54:52.520
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that John Brown was an idealist
00:55:03.400
The abolitionist Wendell Phillips, also of Massachusetts,
00:55:09.360
comparing it to the opening shots of the Revolutionary War,
00:55:12.160
and said Brown was the brave, frank, and sublime
00:55:18.780
Northerners raised money to pay for Brown's legal defense.
00:55:26.620
The northern response shook the South to its core.
00:55:29.100
South Carolina's Declaration of Causes for Secession
00:55:31.700
specifically mentioned northern states providing safe harbor
00:55:43.160
that the cultural bond it once shared with the North
00:55:53.240
For as long as political scientists and historians
00:55:58.040
Abraham Lincoln has topped the charts in every category.
00:56:00.640
Modern presidents can't help but compare themselves to him.
00:56:19.660
In school, kids are taught that Abraham Lincoln
00:56:21.540
was the great emancipator, a champion of equality,
00:56:26.880
To his contemporaries, he was the ape baboon of the prairie,
1.00
00:56:34.480
and the craftiest and most dishonest politician
0.99
00:56:42.540
Although he may have been a coarse and vulgar joker,
00:56:48.620
what turned him from man to myth, was his assassination.
00:57:01.680
He was shot on Good Friday and by Easter Sunday,
00:57:05.700
Heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of our lost leader,
00:57:09.760
referring not to Jesus, but to Abraham Lincoln.
00:57:15.080
Illinois schoolchildren recited verses calling him a peasant prince,
00:57:21.260
His oversized statue keeps watch over the National Mall in Washington, D.C. today.
00:57:25.680
But in 1863, no one in America would have recognized the Lincoln we know today.
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Back then, it wasn't even clear if he was going to win re-election.
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He was, in the words of Michael Burlingame, the most activist president in history who transformed the presidency and the country when he, quote, expanded the Army and Navy, spent $2 million without congressional appropriation, blockaded southern ports, closed post offices to treasonable correspondences, suspended the writ of habeas corpus in several locations, ordered the arrest and military detention of suspected traitors, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year's Day, 1863.
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To do all these things, Lincoln broke an assortment of laws and ignored one constitutional provision after another.
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He was hated by Southerners, but also loathed by many Northerners.
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The abolitionist Wendell Phillips called Lincoln a huckster in politics, a first-rate, second-rate man.
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So Lincoln was, in a word at the time, controversial.
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He was also a human, and a flawed one, like us all.
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He believed blacks were inferior to whites.
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In one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he said, quote, I will say then that I am not nor ever have I been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races that I am not nor have I ever been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office or to intermarry with white people.
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And I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races,
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which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.
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And inasmuch as they cannot live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior.
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And I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
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I say upon this occasion, I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position,
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I do not understand that because I do not want a Negro woman for a slave,
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It's really hard to know what Abraham Lincoln really thought
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he did so knowing who his audience was and what their response would be.
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Historians in 100 years might look back at Barack Obama in 2008
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and, based on his words, think he did oppose gay marriage because he said he did.
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But, of course, he was pandering to an audience.
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Lincoln and Obama might have more in common than just being tall, gangly, self-made lawyers from Illinois.
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But we do know that, in the end, Lincoln did not free the slaves.
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When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
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The only long-term solution to slavery was voluntary colonization.
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On March 6, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln sent a special message to Congress urging the adoption of a joint resolution that would offer federal financial support to any state voluntarily adopting the gradual abolishment of slavery with pecuniary aid provided to compensate owners for the inconvenience public and private caused by the change.
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In total, Abraham Lincoln believed that slavery was a moral and political evil.
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He believed it should end gradually rather than immediately.
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And he supported the idea of colonization or sending freed black people to Africa or elsewhere as part of the solution.
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In other words, Abraham Lincoln had the exact same views on slavery as Robert E. Lee.
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After the war, Robert E. Lee received a presidential pardon and returned to Virginia,
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where he took up the presidency of what is now Washington and Lee University.
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a role many historians regard as the happiest period of his life far removed from the burdens
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of command at the moment of surrender at appomattox lee could have urged his devoted
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soldiers to scatter into the appalachians waging a guerrilla war that might have dragged on for
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decades sapping northern resources and claiming countless more lives instead true to his character
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he chose the path of honor and remarkably reconciliation with the union he urged his
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men to lay down arms, return home, and rebuild as loyal citizens. Today, efforts to erase Lee
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from history often stem from sheer historical illiteracy, but a deeper motive lurks. Resentment
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towards a man who embodies virtues increasingly rare in modern America. They hate him not for his
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flaws, but because he represents unattainable ideals. A tactical genius, a man of unyielding
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duty honor and dignity a southerner whose leadership at chancellorsville still echoes
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in military academies worldwide they know they'll never measure up no statues will rise for fleeting
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figures like mark milley or anyone else but lee's legacy endures outlasting the vandals who would
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topple his monuments or even disturb his faithful horse travelers grave in the end robert e lee is
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a reflection of the civil war itself far more nuanced and multifaceted than the simplistic
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tales spun in high school classrooms or viral videos a full reckoning with the real history
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such as shelby foot's epic 1.2 million word trilogy spanning 3 000 pages demands depths that
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no textbook or hour-long internet video can capture the mainstream narrative is a cartoon
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the war was never a straightforward crusade against southern evil secession was not categorically
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treason. Abraham Lincoln was not a messianic figure. The story most Americans have heard
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is a fairy tale. But one thing is true. Wars have consequences. And victors shape the story.
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If you ask American teenagers basic questions about American history, you'll quickly discover
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that they don't know much about it. One Gallup poll found that most American teens are unaware
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that Columbus arrived in 1492, more than two-thirds don't know that states' rights were an issue in
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the Civil War, and three-quarters are unaware that the United States gained independence
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in 1776. More interesting is what they do know. In May 2008, two college professors gave two
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thousand American high school juniors and seniors a simple prompt. Starting from Columbus to the
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present day, jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history. The only ground rule is that
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they cannot be president. The top three answers were all black. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and
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in first place, of course, Martin Luther King Jr., who was named by two-thirds of the students.
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Benjamin Franklin, by comparison, was named by just 29 percent. Thomas Edison made the top 10
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but was outranked by Oprah Winfrey. A similar survey of college students between 1975 and 1988
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had radically different answers. Their top choices, Betsy Ross and Paul Revere,
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didn't even make the top 10 by the mid-2000s. This is because sometime between 1988 and 1995,
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things radically changed national heroes like george washington and ben franklin were replaced
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with a new class of central figures in american history as the authors of the study put it by the
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mid-1990s quote african americans and women had moved to the center of american history
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ask any american who went to public schools between 1995 and today they'll tell you the
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central feature of their social studies classes as history became known were the histories of
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slavery and the civil rights movement they likely remember watching videos like this one in school
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we wanted to show you a clip of martin luther king jr's i have a dream speech there but it
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turns out we couldn't that's because king's family owns the audio from the speech and they
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wouldn't let us use it you might think that's weird this is america surely you can use a
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short sound bite of an extremely famous speech in an educational video and in most cases you'd be
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right but according to our lawyers we can in fact we can't show quotes or read on air any portions
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of speeches owned by king's estate it turns out his family has done all sorts of things to stop
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people like us including amazingly releasing the speech as an album so they could secure special
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music rights they published his life's work as a book to secure additional rights and recently
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blocked open ai from allowing users to recreate king's likeness these gimmicks gave them total
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control over how king is portrayed in media today why would they rig our legal system like that
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well money is one reason when cbs broadcast portions of the i have a dream speech on air
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the family sued and the company settled king's family has made a lot of money suing media outlets
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but another reason is that they want to silence critics like us they need to protect his legacy
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What they're doing makes it very difficult to honestly re-evaluate Martin Luther King Jr.,
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and you're about to see why they don't want people to do that.
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It turns out the King you've heard of is a carefully curated creation.
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His estate's efforts perfectly illustrate what the civil rights movement has become,
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and as we'll show in this episode, what it always was, a gigantic lie.
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Over the course of this video, we are going to judge Martin Luther King Jr. not by the color
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of his skin, but by the content of his character. What you will see will shock you. Some of it
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isn't suitable for young children. We'll also confront the movement that he spearheaded.
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Were his true aims a colorblind society or something far more radical? Who bankrolled him?
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What did other civil rights leaders think of him? What unfolded behind the scenes in Birmingham
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Alabama in 1963? Was civil disobedience actually peaceful? And most importantly,
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is America today stronger, more unified, and racially equal than before King's rise?
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These questions demand answers, and as Americans, we are entitled to a full accounting of the civil
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rights movement and its consequences. King's movement fundamentally transformed our country
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That's why we're tackling the topic in two parts.
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First, the hidden history of the Civil Rights Movement,
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its key figures, agendas, funding, and scandals.
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And second, the profound, lasting changes to our society
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This is the real history of the Civil Rights Movement,
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That's code DAILYWIRE for $50 off, but you can also get free meat with every order on top of the $50 off if you decide to start a plan today.