American History Hit - What Caused the Civil War? | Politics

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

How did the politicians in Washington D.C. push America towards the one thing they wanted to avoid: all out Civil War? We look at how the violent and frat house culture that existed within D.C. played its part, and at the chronic failure of leadership from those sitting atop of this steaming mess - the Presidents.We're joined by returning guest (from our Franklin Pierce episode) Brian C Neumann, author of 'Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis' and managing director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia.Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte LongSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Charles Sumner from the state of Massachusetts sits at his desk in the Senate. His head bowed over papers.

Sumner is no angel. His arrogance and condescension are well known to friends and foes alike, but no one deserves what's about to happen to him. With the chamber emptying, Representative Preston Brooks from South Carolina strides in towards Sumner. In his hand, Brooks holds a heavy, gold-topped gutta-percha cane. He brings it down on Sumner's head, drawing blood, stunning the man. Brooks strikes him again, over and over, dozens of blows,

while Sumner tries to rise from his desk, blood streaming down his face. Brooks's cane even breaks in his hand, but he keeps at it, beating the near senseless summer with the splintered ends. The year is 1856, within what is supposed to be, the greatest government on the face of the earth. What happened in Washington, D.C. for things to have spiraled so drastically out of control? How did the very politics of the federal government drive the nation apart, even as so many politicians struggled to hold it together? Good day, all. Happy you're here. I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for punching us up. At a summer party a few nights ago, I landed in a troubled conversation about American politics. Both of us had much to say. Everyone does these days. For better or worse, this

podcast series affords me the impulse to offer a perspective. Well, in so many ways, I said, we've been here before. Now, that may not be entirely accurate. For one thing, digital technology has profoundly altered American life. But a politically divided America, nothing new. And prime evidence of this can be found in the raucous and radical brand of Washington politics in the years leading up to civil war. Some crazy events, which will explore to today with Brian Newman, managing director of the John L. Now the Third Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia, author of Bloody Flag of Anarchy, Unionism in South Carolina. Brian, hello, you've been with us before. Nice to see you again. It's great to be here. Thank you so much

for having me back on. Now, we're going to be talking about congressional and presidential politics, but let's first describe the seat of power. First half of the 19th century, What's it like to be living and working in Washington, D.C. as we move into, say, the 1830s. Are we in Pierre L'Enfant's dream of an American capital? Yeah, great question. Well, someone in the antebellum era called Washington, D.C., the city of magnificent intentions. You know, the plan for the city is this beautiful, grave pattern, you know, broad avenues, public parks, monuments. But all of that was going to take a really long time to build. And so for much of the antebellum era, the streets are dirt, and depending on the season, they either choke you with dust or turn into mud quagmires that make it hard to walk. They're broad open spaces, geese and cows and pigs

wander the streets. So in some ways, the day-to-day experience is unpleasant. But the thing that's really striking is the government buildings, especially the capital building, the sort of anchor. It was this immense domed structure that was open to the public, full of statues and patriotic artwork and people went there and they viewed the capital and D.C. itself as a symbol of the American Union. It's a phenomenon, isn't it? These people, America had a view of the capital that wasn't really reflected in the actuality of the capital. I mean, this is supposed to be L'Enfons' picture of democracy that legislators are going to walk around this mall and discuss the great issues before them. We are entering into time when it's going to be anything but

civil to discuss anything in Washington, D.C., much less with pigs running around between your legs. It is a brutal swamp, isn't it? I mean, that's the swamp we refer to today. Absolutely, yeah. And when visitors from Europe would come to see the capital of the United States, they wrote back, what is this place? This is the capital of this grand new nation. So it definitely is a magnificent intentions really sums it up nicely. Exactly. It's a very symbolic place for Americans, especially northerners who choose to see their government as more perfect than any other on earth. I mean, this is the promised land, isn't it? Absolutely. So during the antebellum era, North and South, people really saw D.C. as the place that belonged to all Americans, people from all

over the country gathered together to debate. And jumping ahead a little bit, one of the things that really strikes me when you read letters from Civil War soldiers, Union soldiers coming to the Capitol, they were in awe of being able to see the White House, the Capitol building. And Washington Monument, you can really, reading the letters, you can really see how much the city meant to them. Yes. It's interesting. We don't really talk about it. We've never done a show on Washington, D.C. itself, but that's the idea of it, was that this nation creates its own special capital that's apart from all the states and therefore can be managed, basically. But that's what happens in Brazil later on. A lot of countries follow suit based on the Washington, D.C. ideal. It was George Washington, who stated in his farewell address, September. 1796, that political parties would lead to division and factionalism. In 1830, that's where we are, aren't we? Absolutely. D.C., and the country as a whole, is a really violent place. So first of all, to set the stage, we've got to remember just how violent this country was.

Between 1830 and 1860, one historian estimated that there were about 1,200 riots or acts of group violence all over the country. Violence directed at abolitionists or African Americans against Catholics, against Mormons, against immigrants. So it's a really violent country, and that violence is really reflected in Washington, D.C. Throughout the Antebellum era, there are dozens of incidents of violence in the halls of Congress or immediately outside of Congress. And rioting, of course, in the cities. Absolutely, yeah, especially around Election Day and cities like Baltimore, Election Day riots

were a common occurrence as people from both parties attacked their political opponents to keep them from voting. Yeah. It's kind of hard for people to understand this these days because there's not a large population in this country. And it's limited in its geography even for a period of there. And yet so much is happening that is really gnarly. You know, out west you have the Mormons who are getting all kinds of pushback from wherever they are and downright massacre is happening. And the government opposed to them.

A big factor these days is the establishment of urban America, you know, these factories and so forth that are becoming lands of immigration, you know, and all these places are happening. And there's tremendous racism and prejudice that's fueling these riots and these pushbacks. This is what the political culture is reflecting in Washington, D.C., right? Absolutely. Yeah. So you've got all these people gathering together in cities, which, you know, even then, it's like very anonymous places where you might not know a lot of your neighbors. You mix all these people from all over the country and all of the world together, and it's sort of ripe for tension. Yeah. I guess we're checking. trying to establish here the contradiction that is so important to understand as we're leading

up to the Civil War, that this Antibald and Peron is nothing easy going. Like, this isn't, you know, green fields and everybody doing their little agricultural things. No, there's tremendous social change happening in the country, tremendous cultural havoc as new people are coming from other countries. Never mind slavery. Never mind all the controversies around that. We're heading towards Kansas and all the rest of it. But I want to really understand what I've already raised, which is this, notion of the political parties. And it deserves a little backup here. We had what was called the era of good feelings, which was basically the dominance of one party, the Democratic Republicans that were started by Jefferson. This was called the first party system. Then the Democratic

Republicans evolve into what's called the Democrats under Andrew Jackson, the Jacksonian Democrats, and they are opposed by the Whig Party, which is John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster. this all gives rise to my point in bringing this up to the second party system Democrats versus Whigs which lasts into the 1850s so in the 1830s this beginning of this antebellum period or at least the middle of it this is when we're talking about these political parties really figuring themselves out basically to the point that we're at now which is there's two dominant parties all of this was happening against this backdrop of violence and cultural you know confusion you know that's going on and real problems in the city and so.

forth. It's an amazing time to understand what we're about to talk about. These partisan lines that we've created here, which becomes Democrat and Republican, but we're at this point, Whig versus Democrats, are expressed in the 1838 duel between Jonathan Silly, who was a Democrat from Maine and William Graves, a wig from Kentucky. Can you take me through this event? Absolutely. So it's a fascinating incident. So first of all, the sort of major political issues of the day were largely economic, so federal funding for infrastructure, banking policies, tariffs. And that's what this dual sort of had at its heart. They were debating the Bank of the United States in 1838, and Jonathan Silly, a Democrat from Maine, in the process of debate, insulted a prominent

wig editor and accused him of corruption. In response, Congressman William Graves, a wig of Kentucky, sort of rose to the editor's defense. And tensions escalated, things got personal, and graves challenged silly to a duel. And dueling was illegal in Washington, D.C. So they traveled right outside the city into Maryland. The weapon of choice was rifles. And it's absolutely crazy. So they, you know, they walk their paces. They face each other. They fire. The first shot misses. And so they decide they're going to take a couple of steps closer, fire again, both shots miss. Finally, on the third attempt, Jonathan Silly is hit and bleeds out on the dueling ground and dies.

And the response, you know, Graves defends himself. You know, he was saying, well, you know, he had to fight this duel to defend his honor as a man in this sort of violent political culture. And there was an attempt in, you know, this Congress launched an investigation into the incident, but ultimately Graves faced no punishment. Congress did the following year, however, pass a law that would make it illegal to issue or accept a challenge in D.C. So some progress came out of this, but this incident just really shows you, one, how violent all of this was. But it also shows you that the fault lines early on in the 1830s, 1840s were along partisan lines, along the lines of Whigs versus Democrats, rather than along north, south, sort of sectional lines. Exactly. The continuum we're on at this point is when does it shift? into a North versus South thing. And it's kind of fascinating to follow that line and figure it out.

But as you say, early on, earlier on, it's really about issues such as federal versus state issues, which is what so much of the Jacksonian period was about. It still is. It's important to note that for a while, partisanship actually serves to hold the country together in a kind of paradoxical way. So the Democrats and the Whigs both have supporters in the North and the South. And so as long as the country is sort of divided along those lines, along the lines of banks and tariffs and infrastructure, then it's not divided along North South lines. So in a weird way, the really passionate tensions between the Whigs and the Democrats serve as a buffer against some of those tensions over slavery. Because if you're a, if you're the Whig Party, you can't adopt a national platform condemning slavery because you've got a lot of supporters in the South that are going to leave the party en masse. Yes, right.

By the mid-1850s, the second party system, and to remind you, it's the Whigs versus Democrats, we're not at the Republicans yet. It is collapsing because of the issue of slavery. Essentially, 1850s is when really things get focused on slavery as the divisive issue. Of course, it's been going on, you know, as an abolitionist cause for a long time, but this is when it really hits Washington. It's quite complicated as we approach the election of 1856. This is when James Buchanan is elected.

And part of it is. it is the new American reality that lands acquired after the Mexican-American War are now opening up this Western expansion. And tremendous opportunity is there for everyone, never mind the cotton farmers who would like new soil. So Kansas is bleeding, slavery at state, politics start getting brutal. And again, there is a famous, violent episode in Congress when violence comes to the floor of the Congress itself. Painting of Charles Sumner. It's kind of unbelievable that this has ever happened and hasn't happened since in some way. Amazing. Let's take the listeners through this whole chronology. Absolutely. So first of all, Charles Sumner

was a Republican and he was very, you know, very strongly anti-slavery. He was known as one of the the radical Republicans, kind of the most progressive end of the party. And as Republicans start to, you know, get elected to Congress, tensions ratchet up because many Southerners see the Republican Party as an existential threat. Even though many Republicans emphasized that their goals were to stop the spread of slavery, Southerners feared outright abolition and racial warfare. And so tensions were already really high around Republicans being in Congress. And the sort of inspiring incident for the caning of Charles Sumner was tensions out in Kansas. So settlers are streaming into Kansas, debating whether the territory would become a free state or a slave state. It seemed

pretty clear that most of the legitimate residents of Kansas supported a sort of free soil constitution, but there was a lot of voter fraud where pro-slavery residents would stream in to try to shape the destiny of the territory. And Charles Sumner delivers a speech called the crime against Kansas in 1856 calling out Southerners for their violence for their voter fraud. And this was already sort of incendiary enough for Southerners. But in the course of the speech, Sumner mocks a South Carolina senator who had suffered a stroke recently and therefore had a bit of a speech impediment. And one of this senator's cousins, Congressman Preston Brooks, heard the speech and was enraged. He sort of viewed this as an insult to not only the South, but to his own family honor.

And what I find really interesting is how deliberate what happens next is. Preston Brooks reads the speech. He waits two days. he goes into the Senate chamber, he waits for the galleries to clear, and he, in particular, waits for all the women to leave the galleries. So this is not a heat of the moment thing.

This is a very deliberate action. Now, Preston Brooks had he been deciding how he was going to retaliate. He considered a duel, but the thing about duels is, you duel someone who has honor and someone who is your social equal. In Preston Brooks' eyes,

Sumner was not his equal and had no honor. And so Brooks's response was, he was going to cane Sumner. And caning was this what you would do to an inferior. It was a sort of assertion of your dominance and the other person's humiliation. And so Brooks goes into the Senate chamber, goes up to Sumner who was writing at his desk and gets Sumner's attention and proceeds to beat him brutally over the head again and again. While this is going on, another South Carolina congressman pulled out pistol to sort of hold the rest of the senators at bay to make sure that nobody else intervened. Sumner finally manages to stagger away and ends up spending the next

three years recovering from this assault. Brooks decides not to kill him. He says out loud, right? Yes. So he sort of decides that while he's punished him enough, Brooks's pain has literally shattered in this attack. And the aftermath is fascinating as well. So Congress launches an investigation, debates expelling him, but ultimately the vote to expel him fails. Brooks, as a sort of matter of principle, resigns his seats, and his constituents overwhelmingly reelect him, sort of statement of how much they support his actions.

And this really shows you how the fault lines are now breaking down along North-South lines. Northerners overwhelmingly condemn the assault. This is, you know, this is what Southern, quote-unquote, honor looks like, they insist, you know, this sort of mockery of honor. Whereas Southerners, a lot of Southerners cheer Preston Brooks, And in fact, meetings across the South raise money to buy him new canes.

At the University of Virginia, where I am now, the UVA students buy him a new cane, and the head of the cane was shaped like a cracked skull. Wow. So, Brian, we've covered these two, I mean, very notorious events between Scyllian Graves and Sumner and Brooks. Do they mark a progression towards war? I mean, are they stepping things up here, or is violence sort of happening as it always has? I really think they do. So in 1838, this duel between Graves and Silly, a lot of the outcry around it is focused on the method.

So the dueling itself. In northern states in particular, there are meetings about the barbaric practice of dueling and how we've got to ban it. And that's part of why Congress votes to make it illegal to issue or accept a challenge in D.C. The debate really is not about north-south sectional tensions in 1838, whereas in 1856, it absolutely is. So some of the outcry in the north is about the brutality of what Preston Brooks has done, but it's much more sort of focused on, well, this is what the South is like, that Preston Brooks did this because all Southerners are violent, that, you know, that they view Charles Sumner as someone who was engaged in a rational debate on the floor of Congress and

the southern response is to brutally attack him. And for Northerners, this was symbolizing. of them being censored. They can no longer speak their minds on the halls of Congress because of sort of southern violence. And so I really do think that showed the different responses to those two incidents show how this sort of reorientation of violence and show how the country has marched so much closer to civil war and by the mid-1850s. That caning really does trigger everything, doesn't it?

I mean, or at least in the media, I suppose. And then it joins up with all of the momentum of abolition and so forth. It's an extraordinarily important event. Absolutely. All right. Brian, let's cool down for a short break. When we return, we'll be looking at how the frat house backroom socializing in Washington was in part responsible for the Civil War. We're back with Brian Newman.

Now, Brian, if violence was one problem, it goes hand in hand with a chumminess and overly close friendships, which were not always in the best interest of the country at large. Give us a sense of how members of Congress were living, I mean, literally physically living, and the social aspect of Washington politics which affected events. Sure. So these guys all lived in very close proximity. One important thing to note is many congressmen and senators' wives and children stayed home. And so elite political DC was overwhelmingly male. And a lot of these men lived together in hotels or boarding houses called messes. And so they're all living in close proximity. And interestingly, in many cases, they're living in boarding houses with members from the other part of the country. So northerners are living with southerners. They're all living in close proximity. They're interacting a lot on sort of day-to-day, they're attending church together. They are part of the same clubs and organizations, you know, the board of the Smithsonian Institute, the Bible Society, the Agricultural Society. So these are all guys who are living together and attending all these social functions together. And drinking a lot. Yes. On top of it. I mean, everybody was drinking a lot

in those days because the water was bad, but this was for different reasons. It was really like a frat house, wasn't it? Absolutely. So the amount of alcohol people drank back then is truly staggering. And there were restaurants inside of the Capitol building that sold alcohol to congressmen. And so we sometimes imagine these austere, serious debates. And there were some of those. But in many cases, congressmen were drunk and these debates that stretched on into the evenings would get rowdier and rowdier as time went on. It's a little counterintuitive because you think that if people were, you know, hanging out so much and living with each other, sometimes from the other side, they would work things out. But in some strange way, that did not happen at all.

I mean, William Seward is a pillar of the Republican Party. He has a lot of friends in the Southern bloc, doesn't he? He really does. And even Jefferson Davis, who becomes the president of the Confederacy, considers Seward a close friend. Seward has this reputation for radicalism, but on the ground, he was a very social guy who liked a lot of Southerners and a lot of Southerners liked him. And I think he's really indicative of these relationships. And, you know, so it does seem a bit paradoxical. So first of all, not every congressman is violent. You know, there are certain members that were sort of doing the majority of the violent acts, but also in some ways the proximity breeds tension. Anyone who has siblings knows, you know, you sort of argue

endlessly with your siblings. And you can imagine that added to the tensions of political crisis. And I suppose it works out that those friendships kind of delay. taking firm positions on things because you don't want to offend your friend. You're having drinks with them tomorrow night or whatever, you know, or you live with them. You're sleeping in the same room with a guy in this case. They were alliances that were not necessarily conducive to political process necessarily, I suppose. And ultimately hardening very on an emotional level when we finally get sectional about this. It's an antebellum version of siloing, isn't it?

It's kind of like everybody moving to their little camps, but in, In this case, it's their little frat houses and they're hanging out places, working things out in not the best way. There's something called the F Street mess. It was a total surprise to me. I never read about it, never heard about it before researching for this conversation. It is a perfect example of how D.C. political culture drove divisive political decision-making. The F-street mess. Define that for me.

Sure. So the F-street mess, mess sort of meaning boarding house. So a boarding house on F. Street and several prominent congressmen lived here. And what made the F Street mess sort of unique was that all the members were from the South. And they were all really prominent guys. You've got the president pro tem of the Senate. You've got the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Finance Committee. So the people in this boarding house have a lot of power in Congress.

And where this sort of intersects with the sort of road to civil war is with the creation of the Kansas Nebraska Act. So to set the stage a little bit there, that the country is sort of starting to move west, and Senator Stephen Douglas in particular wants to organize the territory west of Missouri. This was a territory that had been set aside to be free soil by the terms of the Missouri compromise of 1820. But this is a problem because southerners have a vested interest in not organizing the territory, because if you organize it, you're going to lead to the creation of more free states. And so you can imagine this powerful block of congressmen at F Street, they don't want to organize this territory unless they get considerable concessions.

And so at first, Stephen Douglas tries to finesse the issue. He sort of introduces a bill that would let the settlers on the ground decide the future of slavery when the territory applies for statehood. You know, his idea of popular sovereignty, let the settlers decide. But a lot of southern politicians, especially these guys at the F Street mess, think that this does not go far enough. They want an explicit repeal of the Missouri compromise. In other words, Southerners have the explicit right to bring their enslaved people into the territory. They meet with Douglas. They pressure him. Douglas ultimately recognizes that, you know, this is the price to pay to get this done.

And so he agrees to it. And they convince President Franklin Pierce to go along with it as well. So here we can see how these boarding houses and these living arrangements shaped the course of legislation. It leads directly to Bleeding Kansas, doesn't it? I mean, this is a preview of the Civil War. Bleeding Kansas, for anyone who doesn't know, 1854 to 1859, is this long series of struggles that basically set the stage for the Civil War within the borders of Kansas. There's two governments, the whole thing happens. They sort of secede from each other. And then the violence occurs. Even John Brown comes out and is part of a massacre there. I mean, real blood is spilled. it would be the indirect consequence of exactly what you're saying. This frat house mentality, this culture, it sounds like it's a lack of accountability because they're just taking care of this problem themselves and aren't answering to any kind of

meaty, I suppose, is there. But it's such a closed system, I suppose, is what we're talking about. So let's take another break. When we come back, we'll look at how much the Civil War is the fateful consequence of a series of worst ever presidents. They're unbelievable. And we're back. You can't pave the road to the Civil War without addressing presidents and power and how poor leadership at the top helped drag the nation straight to the bottom. We're mainly talking about Miller-Filmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan.

They are all driven by a noble desire, which is to keep this union together, but they do it in ways that are not effective. In what way, Brian? So I'm so glad you started there because that is crucial to remember is that all of these guys are trying to save the union. That really is their highest priority. We can't lose sight of that. So what they're all trying to do in their own ways is to remove this issue of slavery. Everyone recognizes how divisive the issue of slavery is if anything is going to tear the country apart, it is slavery. And so for Philmore, for Pierce, for Buchanan, if they can just get this issue of slavery out of politics, you can really create harmony.

And a great example to sort of think about is other political issues. So imagine the issue of information. This was, again, a major issue that it divided the Whig Party and the Democratic Party in the 1830s and 1840s. By the 1850s, the issue was pretty much disappeared from really tense debates. I mean, Democrats like Stephen Douglas support infrastructure. And so I think Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan are trying to do the same thing with the slavery issue, is to find some common ground that everyone can agree to and then just sort of agree to disagree about the sort of messy edges. The problem is that only works if you don't see slavery as a moral issue, and if you don't care

with the fate of African Americans. Yeah. The problem is it's slavery. Yeah. I mean, it's different than infrastructure. Absolutely. Who's the worst of these three, in your opinion? Well, they're all bad, and I'm certainly not here to defend their reputations, but for me, I would say James Buchanan. And the reason for that. So one thing that Fillmore has going for him is he helps get the compromise of 1850 past, which sort of buys the country an extra 10 years, which is a major accomplishment. And Franklin Pierce also has some important political wins. You know, the Gadsden Purchase, a piece of territory in the Southwest, comes in under his administration. He gets trade deals with Japan and England done.

So there are some really positive accomplishments you can point to. But boy, with Buchanan, it's really hard to find some positive accomplishments. I mean, Buchanan, it seems pretty clear that he influences the Dred Scott decision and sort of pushes Supreme Court justices to make a sort of broader decision that will say that African-Americans do not have citizenship in this country. He also totally bungles the Kansas issue. He supports Kansas coming in as a slave state, even though it's clear that the majority of actual settlers oppose it. And then, most importantly of all, when the southern states start to secede after Ibrahim Lincoln's election, Buchanan sort of sits back and does very little. I mean, he says that secession is illegal,

but he also says that he has no power to stop it. And on the one hand, it's hard to know for sure what would have happened if he had taken a decisive stand. But certainly doing nothing has to make him one of the very worst presidents who've ever had. Yeah. Well, I agree with you. And so does C-SPAN. There's frequent polls that put Buchanan at the bottom. Pierce is bad to. I mean, Pierce comes in with this extraordinarily tragic beginning to his presidency, this train accident where he loses his son. Oh, my God. But what's so interesting to me about Pierce's he's so northern.

He's a New Hampshire guy. You know, he's got no skin in this game as far as being a border kind of state. I mean, Buchanan, in his defense, perhaps, I don't know. Pennsylvania is down there. It's sort of down closer to the south. So maybe he had more of vested interest. But Pierce's way up there. It's really weird.

No, absolutely. I mean, Pierce is a classic example of what people have called dough faces. So that's northern politicians with southern principles. And again, a small piece of this, again, you've got to remember he's trying to save the union. And so he sort of sees, you know, making concessions to the South as the price to pay to save the union. But it also just shows you that, yeah, he's willing to compromise on these really important moral issues like slavery in order to get this done. The Kansas Nebraska Act, which happens, you know, he supports the Kansas Nebraska Act and he makes it a test of party loyalty. You know, in other words, if you are a Democrat, you have to support the Kansas Nebraska Act.

that's a major step in the road to civil war. So, Brian, as civil war breaks out, how do the politicians account for themselves? I mean, do they take that responsibility? So first of all, during the secession crisis, congressmen and other prominent politicians are scrambling to try to come up with another compromise. And there's a lot of hope that they will. There are several efforts both within Congress and without there's a sort of peace conference that forms in D.C.

They're really trying to figure this out. And in fact, they propose what would have been the original 13th Amendment, which said that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the states where it already existed. So they're trying to work this out. Ultimately, compromise fails. And I think what's interesting is a lot of those 1850s presidents like James Buchanan, for the rest of his life, he fiercely defends his reputation. He said, I was in the right.

I was trying to steer this country in a way that would save the union. And, you know, if it weren't for these Republicans raising the issue, of slavery, you know, none of this would have happened. So I think for people like Buchanan, like Pierce, they sort of don't take accountability. And I think for a lot of Southern politicians sort of after the fact, you know, again, they too, they see themselves as acting in the right. You know, some of them are, of course, remorseful for what it's done to their homes and to the institution of slavery. But again, you know, they sort of see it as, well, we were fighting for the right in their minds. Maybe these guys just weren't up to the task. Could it be that, that we

didn't have politicians that really could figure this stuff out until, you know, until the rubber really meets the road under the circumstances of the war? I mean, or was it the system that just didn't allow them to act more decisively? You know, I think it's a little of both, which I know is not the best answer, but so first of all, from the very beginning of this country, slavery was sort of the divisive issue, you know, as the delegates at the Constitutional Convention made the comment that the real issue dividing the states was slavery. And so it's there from the very beginning. all these compromises, that the Missouri compromise, the nullification crisis even, the compromise of 1850, all of these major crises sort of have slavery at their route. So this was this major

source of tension that the country had to grapple with. And personally, I think that some kind of reckoning over slavery was probably inevitable. Did it have to happen in 1860? Perhaps not. But to use Lincoln's phrase, I don't think the country could have lived forever half slave and half free. And so to a certain extent, these politicians were dealt a losing hand. You know, they're coming to power in a time when tensions are already ratcheting up. And then they make a series of decisions that go really poorly. So I don't know that there's anything they could have done to permanently solve this issue. But I will say that their actions made it more likely that Civil War would come when it did. I never knew. I never understood why they couldn't sit back

these guys. I'm glad they didn't because this needed to be dealt with, but the Missouri compromise gave them a kind of model for how they could have continued this. The difference, as we've said over and over again, and why all these deniers of why, why does the civil war happen? Because it's because of slavery. You know, if it hadn't been because of slavery, they would have found some way to compromise. They would have avoided war. It was the fact that this was a morally abhorrent situation in this country, and nobody could deny that. So that's really what triggers the whole thing in the end and leads to the split of the wigs and, you know, the whole creation of the Republican Party comes out of that fact. Absolutely. You know, Brian, there's so much

talk these days. My party chat at the top of the show about whether we're divided, you know, as a country, and we may go to war, people even say, in passing these days. It's really important to underscore that when we were a much younger nation, it took that issue of slavery to bring on that civil war, something so undeniably immoral and important, as we say. that was ultimately no way. There was no way out of that dilemma. People had to make the choice in the end, and of course, it led to war. Today, we have a different kind of thing. We have paralysis. We have a constitutional crisis, but we don't have such an absolute line in the sand. Or do we? What do you think? What do you think? Well, that's a really complicated issue. I will say one thing that the fact that the major issue of the day in 1860 was so clearly sectional. You know, there is a north-south divide. There's some nuance there. There are southern unionists, for example. But the fact there's such a clear divide. I think makes it different from today where you've got Democrats and Republicans in in every state. And so it's, it's sort of hard for me to imagine a civil war playing out anywhere close to, you know, like it did

then, because you don't have those, those clear lines. You know, a state like Texas has tons of Democrats. A state like California has tons of Republicans. So it's, you know, I think it's a very different system. And like you said, too, I think the political climate is very different as well. Yeah. I mean, in the end, the wives showed up. That's what happened. They realize, oh my God, I'm going with you this time to be in Washington, D.C., for goodness sake. And then they go and get the vote, and everything changes. Anyway, Brian Newman is the managing director of the John L. Now the Third Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia, and author of Bloody Flag of Anarchy, Unionism in South Carolina. I really want to do an episode about that issue, because South Carolina is so amazing.

I mean, obviously with Sumter and everything else is important, but the culture of South Carolina. it drives the thing in so many ways, doesn't it? Absolutely. No, I think you definitely should. I'll make a plug for myself. I mean, I would love to come on and chat about it. But it's a fascinating state. Yeah. Thanks, Brian. Talk to you again.

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