American History Hit - What Made America? Victory in the Civil War

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

Was the Civil War a 'Second American Revolution', or was it a continued evolution of the nation set out by the Founding Fathers? How did Lincoln see it?We've asked some of our favourite historians for their most important moment in these 250 years of the United States' History.In this episode, Aaron Sheehan-Dean returns to discuss how winning the Civil War fits into the growth of American identity.Aaron is the Fred C. Freyer Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University. He is author of several books, including ‘Reckoning With Rebellion: War and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century’.Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign 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.  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. In 1861, as mortar rounds explode over Fort Sumter, walls dent and crumble. The very future of the United States seems to crumble too.

This country, a land of independence and equality, is set down by the founding fathers, is at risk. And the direction that this war, the civil war, would take is integral to who we are today. Greetings, one and all. Well, you've heard it by now unless you live under Iraq. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration. of independence, and by extension, of course, the birth of the United States itself. As July 4th looms here at American History Hit, were marking the occasion by circling back to some of our favorite and most trusted guests, celebrated voices in the study of American history,

and asking them a simple question, what inspires the most about America at 250? What compelling event, person, movement, idea, best captures the American story, the spirit of 250 for them and why. With me today, we have Professor Aaron Sheean Dean. He is a leading scholar and author on Civil War History from Louisiana State University. Hello, Aaron. Welcome back. Looking forward to July 4th this year.

Thanks, Don. It's a pleasure to be here. And yes, this should be a very colorful and fun year. Yeah, for sure. Thank you. For all the episodes you've done this past year and for indulging our question today. So let's get right to it. When facing a momentous celebration of America, what do you find yourself most celebrating?

Well, for those of your listeners who've suffered me in the past, this will sound like special pleading for me to single out the Civil War. And as a Civil War historian, it's probably obvious. But it is, I think, bears repeating that Union victory in the Civil War is what, in the fact, makes this anniversary possible in a very fundamental way. And, you know, we have talked about contingency and certainly readers, people who have read carefully about the military history of the Civil War now know all of the vulnerable moments during which the Civil War could have ended quite differently. And then we wind up with North America with eight or 15 or 45 republics. And instead we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of one that dates back from 80 years before the Civil War. But I would still view and argue that Northern Victory is a kind of remarkable confirmation. That's certainly how Lincoln understood it of the ability of this republic to persevere. And I think that's where,

where thinking about the Civil War in relation to the nation's founding opens up some interesting questions about continuities and discontinuities. Gettysburg is one focal point for those, of course, the end of the war itself, the kind of Lincoln's last moments offer another opportunity to kind of dig in on this. Exactly. It's Lincoln's framing of this thing that's so interesting to talk about logistically, but also almost philosophically and politically for sure. And you're saying all this sitting in Louisiana, which is how far we've come as a lot of. a nation today. So, Aaron, bringing this up is a good chance to review the history, how and when the North did achieve victory. You know, we have never done an episode on the Appomattock Surrender,

which is a murky event for many. When does that take place and how, you know, the basics of it? So Appomatics, which I would, I think we could probably now call the first surrender because there are then, there's another surrender in North Carolina, and depending on how you date it, there are later ones. But that happens informally on April 9th. 1865 and formally on April 12th, 1865. So exactly four years to the day. And it creates an almost eerie kind of marking of the duration of that war, that that's the official surrender on April 12th. Lincoln is assassinated on April 14th. And there is certainly widespread expectation among people in the north that leaves surrender as the head of the army of Northern Virginia and the most powerful

force and the one closest to Washington that Lee's surrender on the 9th and then again formally on the 12th marked the end of the war. There is still actually a major army under the control of Joseph Johnston in North Carolina that Sherman is maneuvering into position against that surrender happens on April 22nd. And there's some controversy because Sherman extended more generous terms and those were pulled back. But typically we date this around Lee's surrender and then Lincoln's assassination two days later on Good Friday of April 1865. What were the circumstances that Lee was reacting to that prompted this moment? I mean, his army is worn out. And so here I would say, you know, what we have to credit is

really the logistical, the strategy of logistical devastation that Grant and Sherman have put into operation. And Grant had managed to maneuver Lee into the trenches of Petersburg. And at that point, it's really, and that happens in 1864, sort of late summer into the September. And at that point, in fact, it's a kind of waiting game. And the first, the question is whether Lincoln will be reelected. And he is, and then Sherman captures Atlanta. And then Phil Sheridan defeats Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley and Mobile Bay. The last deepwater port and the Confederacy is captured in late August.

So there's a whole constellation of military victories that limit the capacity of the Confederates to continue fighting. And so, you know, Grant and Sherman had been very clear that the purpose of this is not to simply bleed the Confederacy out. That is at odds with Lincoln's goal of reunifying the country. He wants white Southerners to come back into the United States and just killing them is pointless. But if you reduce their ability to fight and by trapping Lee there and Sherman is coming up along through the Carolinas, and he reaches the middle of North Carolina by late March, early April at Goldsboro and First Fayetteville and then Goldsboro and then Durham. He's very close to the Virginia border.

Lee really has nowhere to go. And the Union Army breaks through the Confederate lines on April 1st, 1865, outside the Richmond-Petersburg line. And famously, there's this moment at the church where on a Sunday morning, you know, where Jefferson Davis is at the service and one of his aides comes running into the church to say Grant's troops have breached the line. And Davis gets up and leaves the church in the middle of service and everyone knows this is it. We've been sort of waiting for this. And then an evacuation begins. And Lee is hoping that somehow he'll be able to move west and maybe connect with Johnston's army in western sort of central North Carolina. But Grant's cavalry is to the south of him.

and cuts off that escape. And so then it's really, it sort of forestalls any option of escape. And rations aren't reaching his army either because they have to get through that Union Cavalry line. And Appomattox just happens to be the surrender point. And there's just no forging left in Virginia at this point, I suppose, you know, this is. No, certainly not in the direction. I mean, you know, if they could have continued into the south side, perhaps, but again, the line of Union Cavalry, Rance is really sort of to the north of Lee's army on a march going to the West, and he has a huge cavalry force under Sheridan's command that is on the southern side of Lee's army, and it cuts off the railroad lines that are bringing supplies up from North Carolina,

and his soldiers haven't eaten in days. And so Lee really recognizes basically my army is trapped, and there is no other solution except to surrender. It's been so interesting for me, just hosting this podcast and talking to the likes of you about the structure of the Civil War and the pivot point that is Gettysburg and Vicksburg and how different the war is from 63, mid-63, onward to now. It's been a long and slow decline and not so slow at some points. But here we are. It's true of any surrender you think of the generals, you know, at first, but not really the leader, you know, in this case, Lincoln. Had Lincoln met Lee, this came up in my thinking as I was preparing this, had he ever met Lee? Did he have any personal

connection with the man? He did not have any personal connection. It's an interesting question. I don't see how I certainly would have been alerted, I hope, in saying this, that they hadn't ever met. Lee and Grant had met. Most of the West Point generals knew each other, and there are huge classes in the 1840s. Sherman and Braxton Bragg are very close compatriots. So there's all kinds of personal connections, but not Lincoln. And Lincoln is quite clear in his instructions to Grant and Sherman, you negotiate the surrender of an army.

I end the war. These are different things, that what we need to do, because the end of a war involves questions of whether there's going to be a prosecution of treason for the leaders of this, you know, whether there'll be imprisonment that's awaiting people, that the question of whether a war is happening is fundamentally a political one, an army can surrender. And this is really where Sherman gets hung up as he takes and tries to negotiate sort of broader terms that would in fact end the war. And very quickly, the northern cabinet says, you don't, as a general, have the authority to do that. All you can do is

receive his surrender. And then Sherman returns to Durham Station and Johnson says, I surrender my army as exhausted and this is fruitless as well. This is where we then get into the question of what did the war mean? What are the core accomplishments? And for Lincoln, it was very clear that reunion was from the beginning, the centerpiece of the Northern War effort and also that emancipation had been added as a accomplishment that could never be undone. And so Confederates are surrendering knowing slavery is over forever. Right. And this is the relevance as a 250 conversation is really that Lincoln's whole framework of the war is to preserve what had been begun with the Declaration of Independence.

That that was the fundamental, of course, fundamental document, but even in his fighting of the Civil War, that was the fundamental document, framing it as an ultimate test of whether a nation dedicated to human liberty and self-government could survive. It's right there in the Edersburg address. We are now facing a time of the survival of our nation, as many of us, you know, seeing at least, you know, this is the first generation this time now that is celebrating this 250. Since the Civil War, that has been grappling with some sense of division that they are having back then, nothing close, of course. But for Lincoln, that was the deal, was to heal that division to bring together those opposing sides and put the nation back together.

that is most captured, of course, by the Gettysburg Address. So let's talk about that address. I can never talk about it enough, quite honestly. It's just a remarkable speech. Between that and his second inaugural, it's really, he. Yeah, exactly. November 1863, dedication of Gettysburg National Cemetery. We've done several episodes on this.

It's 250 words that are just, you know, earth-shaking as far as I'm concerned. In thinking about Lincoln, we tend, I think, to underestimate the degree to which he really anchored himself on the declaration and on the creation of a perpetual union. And this is where thinking about what things change and what things remain the same as a result of the Civil War comes into sharp focus. Because, you know, the beginning of that speech, as you started to quote it there, a nation dedicated, that Lincoln is speaking very explicitly to the fact that he sees a line of continuity, that the Civil War is in effect, and I'm going to use a kind of modern vernacular kind of stress test on this republic, that there were plenty of people in 1776

that said, you can't create a republic of this size, of this heterogeneity. You have people from Africa and you have people from Europe and you have indigenous people. You have people from different religious backgrounds. Almost immediately you have competing ideological positions. That it's simply, you know, that the experiments in republics, places like San Marino in Italy, had been tiny and tremendously homogenous and, you know, could claim old lineages. But this was so much bigger on scale and ambition. And many of them said that it just frankly will not work.

And we also, I think, need that listeners should remember the degree to which in the early 19th century, this is the era of the creation of nation states, that it's not unusual. People anticipate a kind of flux and dynamism. There's a great line from Sandy Pendleton, one of Stonewall Jackson's officers, who's a young Virginian, whose parents had been alive at the sort of tail end of the revolution, and he's writing to his sister has written to him saying, I would like to go to Richmond to see the inauguration, the official one of Jefferson Davis. This happens in early 1862 when he's officially inaugurated. And his parents won't let me take the train. Can you convince mom and dad into letting me go?

And he says, he writes a letter to them. He says, remember, you know, as you experienced, we will only see a nation born once in our lifetime. And I think for a moment. And I think for Americans today, you would think, why should never see a nation born in my lifetime? That is, America dates to 250 years. I hope that I don't see its destruction and then something follow. But in the early 19th century, it's a moment of tremendous uncertainty. And so from Pendleton's perspective, we can create a new nation. Italy has just been created in 1860. The German city states are starting to kind of cohere. And at the end of, you know, within a few years, at the end of the Civil War, there'll be a Germany. But for Lincoln, it is anchored in that declaration. And so what he

is positioning, certainly, in the Gettysburg Address is we are fighting here to keep that, not to reinvent it, not to remake it. There is a kind of slight of hand going on there, and certainly over the course, because the inclusion of emancipation changes the character, the ending of slavery changes the character of America in pretty fundamental ways. Certainly the 13th and 14th. and 15th amendments change the nature of American constitutionalism of American citizenship in fundamental ways. But at Gettysburg, Lincoln is really anchoring what's happening in an old foundation. Abolitionists want, you know, Garrison and other abolitionists want to sort of remake it,

right? They're done with the constitution. Garrison famously burns the constitution in the 1850s and calls it a covenant with hell because it's sanctioned slavery. But Lincoln does not see it that way. Lincoln sees a kind of continuity of lowercase de-democratic republicanism that will persevere. And he's saying that in November of 1863, maybe it seems more likely than less likely at that moment, though there's still a huge amount of hard fighting left in the Civil War.

And so Lincoln, in a way, is still using that to kind of inspire optimism and faith, I think. I have a friend, a smart guy who pointed out to me at some point. that Lincoln would be embarrassed at the amount of attention we spend on the Gettysburg Address when he was there to celebrate and memorialize the sacrifices of the soldiers. And we now talk very little about the soldiers and everything about Lincoln's 250 words. It's very ironic. It's true. I mean, he famously says in that address, the world will little note nor long remember what we say here.

But they should remember forever the sacrifice made by those people. And of course, it's wound up being the opposite, as you point out. Yeah. I mean, some people, and I've said it on this show a lot, that this is the beginning of a second American revolution. Maybe that's a glib thing to say, considering, you know, how hard it was to do the first one. But the idea of that to defend my own position is that there were a whole bunch of values that were baked in. This was an America that wanted to become. And the civil war allows that to happen.

Again, totally subjective view of that. But do you agree with that idea, that notion? Yeah, I do. I mean, I think, you know, James McPherson has a collection of essays called The Second American Revolution, the famous Civil War historian, and Greg Downs, a great Civil War story, and just recently had a book of the same title, sort of thinking about this as not a kind of smooth continuity, but as a moment of rupture in which something new is created. And I think Lincoln is, in fact, performing, as I say, a kind of slight of hand. The term that Downs uses is whitewash, that Lincoln is concealing the radical of what the Civil War is creating by talking about this continuity. And for Lincoln, the preservation of a Democratic, a Democratic Republic of a government of the people, by the people, for the people, is what's most important. At the same time, the United States that exits the Civil War, particularly with the post-war amendments that transform us from a constitutionalism of negative liberty. Those first 10 amendments are restrictions on the capacity of the state. And,

to do things interfering with the civil liberties that we enjoy as citizens. And now we have a vision of positive liberty, a grant of power to the federal government to do things like end slavery, to ensure that all citizens are treated equal before the law. This is a tremendously powerful idea and really a fundamental reshaping of how the American law at its core works. And Lincoln, of course, is not alive for the 14th Amendment, but in his final speech, the one at which John Wilkes Booth is present. Lincoln famously says, this is a kind of ad hoc speech off the back of the White House

on the night that he's going to die. He's giving a kind of speech to well-wishers before he goes to the theater. And he says, we should begin thinking about enfranchising black men. Says, for instance, the very intelligent among them and those who have fought valiantly in the ranks that they merit the franchise, which, of course, doesn't come officially until the 15th Amendment. And that's the thing Wilkes Booth supposedly turns to a colleague and says, you know, now I'm going to kill him. This is the thing that has tipped the scales now into murder and assassination. But so Lincoln does see and knows that the United States is going to change in a very fundamental way.

And that the war is propelling that. He's not necessarily sugar-coating it, but he is not sort of leading with that. And there's lots of debate. And I think we've talked about, you know, what would have happened had Lincoln lived, reconstruction is a thorny and complicated question. But Lincoln is too smart a lawyer not to understand that ending slavery through the violence of war, that the repudiation of secession in a way for him, that is by beating the South and by preserving the Union, you are really ensuring that the Republic lives on. And that for Lincoln is really the most important continuity is that that is preserved.

The fundamental idea was that secession was completely incompatible with the founder's vision, and that if we were a whole this thing together, it was to follow that vision first and foremost with all its vagaries. He articulated that as much. I want to go over just the bullet points of what you've just said. The difference in this nation from Civil War onward, destruction of enslavement, of course, emancipation, increased power of federal governance, very important factor. I don't know that it was a declared accomplishment. You know, that was kind of the evolution of the whole thing. It evolves over time for obvious reasons.

You need a stronger government to manage these new challenges. A nation committed to equality and independence. Eventually, a hundred years later, it becomes one man, one woman, one vote. That's an ongoing process that has happened from the beginning until modern times. All of that is the civil war, right, in essence. Well, it certainly made possible. And I think for Lincoln, it isn't just a question of these things being stacked chronologically. That is, if you don't preserve self-government in 1861, then you're never going to get a position where

you can self-govern your way to expanding the franchise to include women or to include people of African descent. Those expansions of democracy are contingent on a majoritarian democracy. And this is what the civil war had threatened. And Lincoln had said this. I mean, even Robert E. Lee famously in a letter to his son in January of 1861, Lee says, secession is the essence of anarchy. And Lincoln said, you know, what secession will do because it is in response to his election as president? And no one disputed that election. They didn't like the outcome. But there was no sense that it had happened irregularly. Lincoln was lawfully elected. And they simply, the Southerners, white Southerners, didn't like the outcome of the election.

So they decide to blow up the system. And what Lincoln said at the time was if that is allowed to stand, as he said in his first inaugural, if we can make the appeal from the ballot to the bullet, then self-government is gone. And democracy, which is really in its modern phase only exists in the United States, the last best hope of earth, he called it, it will be gone forever. Because all of the conservatives in Europe, and it's important for listeners to remember where the fate of democracy as a practice is in 1860. And the most recent major test had come in the 1848 revolutions, the democratic efforts in

England, in Germany, in Italy, in France, all of which are repudiated. And conservatives win that moment. And they reestablish empire in a much stronger way. So over the 1850s, it's really just in America. And so for Lincoln, by preserving democracy, you can then do all sorts of other things. That's why for him, that's always the most important accomplishment. Once you preserve democracy, you can then end slavery. Once you preserve democracy, that democracy can decide we want to expand the franchise, first

to include black men, then to include all women, then to include the direct election of U.S. senators, then to lower the voting age. That is, the kind of circle of democracy expands. But it only expands if democracy itself has been proven to be the form. and that's what the Civil War itself accomplishes. Do you find your students putting this in the perspective of today's challenges? I mean, he is basically preserving the democratic principles of the Declaration and Constitution, all of which has been in place for about 50 years or more and suddenly is threatened by people

who would like to throw that entire system out. And that has always been the challenge in this country, hasn't it? It's basically boiled down to who gets a chance to vote. It is. I mean, I think, I think, unfortunately, for our... are students, and I understand a sense of cynicism. What I try to encourage in my students is skepticism and not cynicism. And the cynicism is, I think, generated by a sense that the vote is a blunt tool. It takes a long time. And you can see this in the civil rights movement that African-Americans

are, you know, they're agitating, obviously from the 1830s and 40s. They're agitating in slavery from the beginning of slavery, but for access to the vote and for legal tools. And there are civil rights movements all through the 19th century and then into the 20th century, it takes, in other words, decades and decades of labor and then actively, of course, and the famous, the kind of classic civil rights era over the late 40s, the 1950s, and then up to the kind of crescendo of the 64 Civil Rights Act and 65 Voting Rights Act. And I think for many young people today, the vote just looks like something that takes a long time to generate change. And it does. That's the point of democracy. Is it supposed to be slow?

It's supposed to be processual. It is not even, I mean, a parliamentary system works faster than our system. So, you know, it demands a level of patience that I understand for people that are looking at the climate disaster that's looming and other things than thinking, we have to act with immediate speed. We can't wait another four years. We can't wait another two years. But underneath that impatience, what I tried at least to instill and, you know, how well. it takes root in today's generation of students, I think we'll sort of see in the coming generations is an acknowledgement that we make these decisions together. And this even, I think, transcends the vote

itself, that it is Americans or people in other countries that are living in democracies who are responsible from making the changes they want to see in their world. And the Civil War has plenty of that. The U.S. Sanitary Commission, obviously the fact that there is a volunteer army of 2.1 million men. The pre-war army have been 13,000 soldiers. And so those 2.1 million men under arms that win the Civil War are volunteers. That is, they are doing this not out of a, I mean, there is a draft, but the vast majority of them volunteer. And, you know, beyond the vote, democracies work by self-action, by people organizing themselves. And that's one of those, that's lessons, is, that's a lesson, I think, as well here. It also creates a different

kind of society. When you have those democratic pressures, you know, those voting pressures and the need to include people versus exclude them, there are ripple effects throughout society. And that happens, of course, because of the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendment. All of those reconstruction amendments, which we should visit briefly, because as you say, it's very complicated. 1865, 13th Amendment abolishes slavery, involuntary servitude in the United States, accepted for crimes, which is important. 14th Amendment, 1868, granted citizenship to, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and guaranteed equal protection of the laws and due process under the laws. We're hearing about all of this stuff in the news these days.

This is still, you know, incredibly modern stuff. But this set a precedent for the direction that America would go in regards to equality, right? Certainly, I think Lincoln hoped so, and he obviously isn't alive to see that happen. But as you noted, in his opening, you know, the opening part of the Gettysburg Address, he talks about a nation conceived in liberty. And importantly, in another point, you know, one of the things that Lincoln says that's always resonated with me is he says, in giving freedom to the slave, we enrich or enhance freedom for everyone. You know, that that is, the ending of slavery is not merely something that affects enslaved people, but it affects everyone because it changes in a qualitative way the nature of what liberty is and means. And the Civil War does not, of course, bring true equality, but by establishing a democratic government and certain, in the 14th Amendment by acknowledging, and that's essential because the citizenship part that you

mentioned is what basically undoes the Dred Scott decision. Dred Scott had been decided in 1857, and in it the Supreme Court said black people cannot be citizens. And it's bad law at the time. And most people say that because they had been citizens of states. They had voted. They don't property. They participate in courts. But the Supreme Court sort of wipes all of that out. So you need a 14th Amendment to undo that and to establish a uniform. set of citizenship, and then beyond that, the promise of due process that there will be equal justice under the law for everyone. I mean, there are two ways in which the United States, there is a sharp disjuncture in which

we can talk about the civil war as a second American Revolution, one of which is here with the kind of commitment to equality, to a colorblind law. And then the other, and this is what Greg Downs emphasizes in his book, is the way in which those amendments are adopted isn't really the way. way that constitutional amendments are supposed to be adopted. And this is true of the creation of West Virginia as a state. I used to live in West Virginia. That's created by Fiat. And we can just be honest about that, that it does not follow the regular course. And neither, you know, the 14th amendment is in a way sort of the southern states are kind of extorted to support that as a

condition for being readmitted. And so there is an extra legal dimension here that as Americans, we need to acknowledge that it has not been a kind of smooth and uniform, democratic process all the way through, that the war itself creates the conditions where people like Lincoln feel empowered. And Lincoln is really conservative when it comes to the law, but even Lincoln felt empowered to take that step of saying we are going to, Congress is going to pass the 13th Amendment, and then we are going to basically require southern states at the end of the war to ratify it. And, you know, so we need to acknowledge that, even as we acknowledge the continuity of democracy and the expansion of democracy, that there are moments when this happens when you have to

watch very carefully the boundaries of how that legal change is occurring. In the days of 250, I mean, these are broad strokes celebration themes. And I'm glad you mentioned the 1848 revolutions. I mean, this is a time when really the world is going in a different direction. And Americans today don't really put this in perspective that at that time, it could have been a given that we had tried. We'd done almost 75 years of very hard work. Clearly, half the country did not believe in what was happening. And it would have just collapsed. And, you know, it could have become an entirely different story, but for standing up for those principles. And a lot of people sacrificing their lives. It's a remarkable story that really does

sit in the 250 theme, in my opinion. Important also to recognize that, you know, part of this country doesn't even know about this. And there's Juneteenth, which doesn't happen until June 19th, you know, 1865. It takes a long time for these lessons to be learned. Of course, that's a short time. But, I mean, over time it's demonstrated many times how difficult that this is to absorb what has happened. It is. So Juneteenth is the end, I mean, we sort of regarded as an anniversary ending slavery the moment when the last U.S. troops reached sort of the part of Texas where the news of the Emancipation Proclamation hasn't necessarily reached. And, I mean, in fact, slavery doesn't end until the very end of the year in Kentucky, as Lincoln had always promised,

slavery would remain intact in the union and under the Constitution longer than outside of it. And so enslaved people are held in bondage even past that point. The interesting thing that I hear you raising here is how we think about this at this moment today at the 250th, because so much of the, certainly from the White House and the kind of, even the sort of official channels of thinking about this are a very narrow reading that goes backwards, as opposed to going forwards, which is, in fact, what Lincoln is trying to do at Gettysburg is to say, what is the most important and best part of what the founders were hoping to accomplish, your word at the beginning here of becoming, you know, and it's a brilliant use of the passive voice.

Lincoln did it once or twice, so I'll allow it. Thank you. You know, that we understand that America is not static and that there is a core here in our sort of best moments of Democratic. inclusivity of expanding the circle of we, and that what Lincoln did and what Northern Victory meant was that that process continued. And what I hope we take from that today is understanding that we can continue to move forward, not strictly to look back and imagine a past that was somehow peaceful or uniform or homogenous, which, of course, it never was, but to sort of begin from that democratic premise and continue working to fulfill that and to satisfy that

in a way that is inclusive as Lincoln envisioned did and not exclusive. And this, of course, gets us to debates about birthright citizenship, as you mentioned in the 14th Amendment and the things that are happening now. But as Lincoln understood, you know, this is a promise forward, not just an obligation to the past. I think of it as timely, as a matter of fact, all of what we're going through. You've got to, it's a shame in some regards. It's difficult, but it's also a reassessment. And when you're going to be a country that does something, something, on this level and tries to marry ideals with reality, you're bound for times when the argument gets raised in many different quarters.

This in general makes what was, and sometimes it's still considered to be a war of reunification, the Civil War, a struggle instead for human rights, new American commitment to independence and equality together, which in every regard, it was not, at least for anyone who wasn't a white European Christian ancestry and, of course, male. And if you think that was all just a result of modernity overtaking the ways of the world, I disagree. I just, I think that you can consider South Africa stayed apartheid into the 1980s. You know, it was not a foregone conclusion that America would go the way it was. You know, it had to be made to happen. Yeah, and I think the most dangerous part of thinking about it, as you say, in terms of modernity, is the inevitability.

that, well, obviously, we were going to move to a more democratic system and that, you know, we would not continue to have senators elected by state legislatures in these sort of secret cabals. Clearly, women were going to get the right to vote. None of that is clear in the mid-19th century. And so as a kind of lesson in history, it is that we have to attend very closely to how and when historical change happens and not to presume that it naturally produces us, but that where we are, the world that we inhabit, is produced by contingent. and effort and struggle and uncertainty.

And all of that is present, of course, in the Civil War all over. And so it's a very useful opportunity for just trying to unpack that and recognizing we're in one of those moments now. The future is uncertain as it always is. And what it requires is us being scrupulous about the kind of world we want to make and committing ourselves to that and being willing to argue and work for it. I'm going to take those as your final thoughts on 250. Is that fair enough? It is. Thank you. From an historian's perspective, very appropriately, Professor Aaron Shee and Dean has been a friend of the podcast for a few years now, and we are most grateful. He is the Fred C. Freyer Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University and one of America's leading Civil War historians, author of too many books to mention.

What do you work it on now, Iron, I'm curious. So I've actually started another project that would look at sort of the question that we're talking about today in a way, that is what is the Civil War actually accomplish? and I'm looking through the lens of the Sherman brothers. So both William Tecumseh Sherman and then his lesser known brother, John Sherman, but lesser known only in name. And if you live in the United States today, you've probably heard of the Sherman Antitrust Acts, which John Sherman authors. He's the chief, he's the kind of key figure in the debt consolidation after the Civil War

and the return to specie payments and all of the economic fights of the post-war era. John Sherman is at the center of those. William Tecumseh Sherman leads the U.S. Army and the Plains Indian Wars. So looking through them and their fascinating relationship, they're very close as brothers and they communicate all the time as a way of understanding what it is that the Civil War changes and doesn't change. John Sherman, William Tecumseh, Sherman, is much more conservative than John Sherman, who's an early Republican.

But I think the two of them will provide a useful lens into thinking about what that post-war world looks like. Somehow on this series, we've avoided the subject of Sherman entirely, which is incredible. So we'll be back around to talk to you about that. Come back around. Let's talk. Happy 250. Thanks, Don. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays,

from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements, to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are only. on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.