American History Tellers - Encore: The Age of Jackson | A Nation Divided | 7

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

The Age of Jackson was a time of intense change and tremendous growth in the United States. But it was not without controversy. In the years leading up to the Civil War, slavery and the rising abolitionist movement divided the country. On this episode, Lindsay speaks with Dr. Kate Masur, a history professor at Northwestern University and the author of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction. They’ll discuss the decades leading up to the Civil War: the Black codes, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Compromise of 1850 and states’ rights.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersPlease support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. This summer, American History Tellers will present a special seven-part series on one of the most pivotal and violent events in our nation's history, the Civil War. But first, we're bringing you an encore presentation of a series about that war's origins. This is The Age of Jackson. Imagine it's September 30th, 1850, in the Quinn Chapel AME Church in Chicago, Illinois. You're a tailor and an anti-slavery activist,

and you've gathered 300 fellow black Chicagoans for a rally. You're determined to put a plan in action to resist the new Fugitive Slave Act recently passed by Congress. All eyes turn to you as you step up to the pulpit. Good evening. Now, I've asked you all here to discuss this outrageous new law Fugitive Slave Act commands all citizens to cooperate with the capture of runaway slaves And this law is unconstitutional It's unchristian, and it's a direct assault on our community You smile and take a deep breath, feeling strengthened by the applause Now, although we ourselves are free, we must commit to helping those still in bondage.

So I propose we form a vigilance committee, something to patrol the streets at night, watching out for slave catchers. We'll find them, and we'll stop them. As you sweep your gaze across the room, you lock eyes with a wealthy client of yours named David. He's one of a handful of white men in the audience, and looking around nervously, he rises to speak. Well, excuse me. Thank you. I agree this law is abhorrent, but you're talking about creating your own vigilante police force. Is that really the best way to go about things?

Well, I ask you, what other way is there? Our government won't protect us. We have to protect each other. It's time we defend ourselves against this assault on our rights. And we need white allies like you in the fight. Well, of course I want to help. But the Fugitive Slave Act imposes penalties on anyone caught aiding a runaway. It's a federal offense to resist. Well, please think of the words of

George Washington when mulling over the federal offense. Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. We must fight for our liberty, even at the expense of our lives. We won't consent to be captured and taken into slavery or to let our brethren be taken. It's not only those who have recently fled the South who are under threat. You have to know that. There are men and women among us who escaped long ago and who have lived here in Chicago for years, for decades. They could be kidnapped and sent back to their former owners. Even those who legally attained their freedom might falsely be captured and returned. Are you prepared to stand by as federal agents forcibly grab your neighbors and banish them back into slavery? Your client David looks down at the floor and shakes his head. No, no, of course not. Good, because this law tramples over all of our rights, not just black men and women, but whites too.

Will you let these slave owners force you to cooperate with this madness? No, I want no part of it. Then make a stand. All of you, sign your names. We'll form divisions. We'll keep our neighborhoods safe. A few dozen men stand and walk up to the pulpit, and you smile as you see David rise to join them. A few other white men follow. You'll need many more volunteers, black

and white, before you can have any hope of protecting the former slaves of Chicago. But you're proud that tonight you've begun a movement to resist this unjust law. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims,

and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In the 1840s and 50s, black tailor John Jones was one of the leading activists challenging racially discriminatory laws in Illinois known as Black Coats. In 1850, Northern abolitionists like Jones were outraged by the draconian new Fugitive Slave Act. Backed by pro-slavery forces in Congress, the law forced Northerners to help seize and return runaway slaves to their owners. In response, on September 30, 1850, Jones formed a vigilante committee to patrol the streets of Chicago looking for slave catchers. It was just one act of Black resistance against racist laws in the

turbulent years before the Civil War, a time of growing national polarization and tension. Here with me to discuss the Black Codes, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the run-up to the Civil War is Dr. Kate Masur. She's a professor of history at Northwestern University and author of the book Until Justice Be Done, America's First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction. Dr. Masur specializes in the history of race, politics, and law in 19th century America, especially as it pertains to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Here's our conversation. Dr. Kate Masur, welcome to American History Tellers.

Thanks for having me. So when you first started working on your book, Until Justice Be Done, I'm curious why you went back to this period leading up to the Civil War, having written some books about the Civil War and afterwards. There were a number of questions that I felt needed to be kind of answered or looked at again that were associated especially with the Reconstruction period. So I had written a book about the Civil War and Reconstruction in Washington, D.C., and I ended up at the end of that book thinking, well, how did we even get to a point where there was a Republican party in the United States, the party that, you know, swept into office nationally with the 1860 election

that actually stood up for not just ending slavery, but also certain forms of racial equality before the law. And, you know, some interpretations of American history would have you think that it simply would have been impossible for the largely white North to have produced a party that could get a lot of people in office that would hold those beliefs. People might not be surprised to find that, but I didn't feel like we had a good enough explanation of how debates and discussions about the rights of free African Americans had unfolded in the free states before the Civil War and how those debates would have informed the people who eventually took national

office in the 1860s and ended up writing, for example, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments or the nation's first civil rights laws. So I thought there was more to say and more to kind of uncover on those issues. And that's what I tried to do with my book, Until Justice Be Done. Yeah, I think many people might have a very simplified version of events that the North was free and the South was not, but it's a little more nuanced than that. So in your investigation of the politics of race in the free states, what did the North and South have in common? What were their differences? Well, it's interesting. And I mean, I think for one thing,

the idea that there was a North and a South that serves some purposes for us now, but certainly at the time of, let's say the American Revolution and in the decades after it, it was not at all clear cut that there was such a thing as a North and South. So for example, at the time of the American Revolution,

slavery was legal in all of the British North American colonies. And it was a process that occurred during the period of the revolution and afterwards that allowed for slavery to be abolished in some states while other states doubled down on it. So first of all, you have in the early decades of the Republic, the beginnings of a distinction where some states are going to get rid of slavery, either by state constitution or through the state legislature. A few states actually talk about abolishing slavery, but then double down on it

and don't abolish it. And some are kind of completely committed to slavery from the get-go. And when I say states, what I mean really is state legislatures, because it was up to state legislatures or state bodies to decide at that time whether to have slavery or not. But then you also have a patchwork of different kinds of policies in what became the free states, both around emancipation itself, how is the abolition of slavery actually going to happen, and then also what are going to be the rights and status of free African Americans. Not to get too much in the weeds, but there are some conversations about that in the states that retain slavery too. So for example, in Virginia and Maryland, there come to be a lot of free African-Americans in those states as well. And those state legislatures are also going to end up having debates about, you know, well, if you're a free

Black person, what rights do you have? Do you have all the same rights as white people expect to have and so on? So it's not that the slave states didn't have those conversations, but I was especially interested in how those debates played out in the states where people in power had actually explicitly made the decision to get rid of slavery. Well, I'm not afraid of getting into the weeds. In fact, I want to ask you about this caste system that did develop. Can you go into the history of the black laws and Black codes? What were they and where were they enforced? You know, one thing that's interesting is you might expect, let's say in a state like Virginia or Maryland that keeps slavery,

you might not be surprised to hear that when it came to free African-Americans, after a period of thinking they might do otherwise, they eventually have a set of laws, what are called sometimes black codes, that apply to free black people, not to mention the many, many, many laws that they have that make slavery itself legal, that make it possible to buy and sell human beings and so forth. But what's kind of maybe a little more surprising is in particularly the newer states. So Ohio is the first state to be admitted to the Union out of the Northwest Territory. And it comes in as a state in 1803. And beginning with Ohio, these Midwestern states, so following on Ohio, there's Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin

to a lesser extent, have anti-Black policies. So these are places where slavery has basically been outlawed by the Northwest Ordinance. Slavery existed in these places, but it was kind of being pushed aside and generally on its way out, while at the same time, the state legislatures, particularly in that southern tier of Midwestern states, so Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, passed laws designed to keep free African Americans as a subordinated class, basically. And they're trying to discourage Black migration into the states. These legislatures are worried that African-Americans are going to migrate in from places like Kentucky or Virginia or Missouri,

just on the other side of the border of these Midwestern states on the northern side of the Ohio River. And so they pass laws that require African Americans to register with local officials. If they move into the county, they have to pay a fee to do this registration. Black people are not allowed to testify in court cases involving whites. Black children are excluded from public education as public school systems develop. And also black men are denied the right to vote. And all of these policies are really designed to send a message that free African Americans are not welcome in these states, and also that if they are here, they're not going to have the same kinds of rights and privileges as white people expect to have. Ohio turned out to

be a hotbed of abolitionism, though. Quite a few famous ones came from there. And it repealed its black codes in 1849. So that's a, what, a 46-year period in which it was a state that had them. How did this turnabout come? What was the effect of the repeal on day-to-day life for black Ohioans. It's a really important kind of success story about how political mobilizations can work over a period of many years to get rid of racist policies and put something better in their place.

From the beginning of Ohio statehood, there were white people in Ohio who thought that these explicitly racist laws were unfair, that we shouldn't be discriminating based on race. There were also Black Ohioans who were raising their voices against these laws. And Black Ohioans were never, in this period, never more than about 1% of the Ohio population, and also Black men couldn't vote. So there was a dilemma, right? And if you think about it, I think this is an interesting kind of dilemma to think about more broadly in American history. If you think a policy

should change and you don't have a lot of people on your side, what do you do, right? And how do you try to run candidates that are going to be able to get elected, who will do the things that you want them to do? So in the case of Ohio, you have a lot of Black mobilization to draw white people's attention to the unfairness of these laws. So African Americans, they're mobilizing statewide and issuing statements that are basically saying to white citizens of Ohio, look at how unfair these laws are. This is how we are treated in Virginia, but surely the free state of Ohio doesn't want to discriminate in this way. They often invoke the Declaration of Independence, for example, to say, you know, this is violating this

principle that all men are created equal, that our nation is supposed to be about, not to mention the Ohio Constitution also had similar declaration of kind of universal rights. And over time, a growing number of white Ohioans come to see it this way. And at first, they're just a tiny minority of people. They run third party candidates. But the third party candidates actually have the capacity to shake up politics in the state because the two major parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, are very closely divided. When you run third party candidates and kind of siphon off some of the votes from one of

the two major parties, you can get people elected to the state legislature. They can start negotiating to make political deals with either the Whigs or the Democrats. And so finally, in the winter of 1849, they repeal most of them. And it's a really big victory. And you can kind of see if you look at the history of this gradual mobilization and the very savvy ways that they're able to accomplish this. What repeal of the laws did in addition to, yes, they allowed people to begin testifying in court. They nullified those registration laws. They allowed black children to start going to school. But they also sent a message that African-Americans were citizens of the state, that you couldn't do these things to them and expect to have, you know, no repercussions.

So I think it was a really important move, both in a practical sense, but also in a kind of broader, like, symbolic sense. Lots of people wanted to keep the black laws around, but after they were repealed, the change really stuck, even though it was a very tough battle. The state's white voters were very closely divided, but they didn't go back after they repealed those laws. Well, let's move from Ohio to Washington, D.C., because that's a unique place. Nestled right between Maryland and Virginia, it nonetheless has no local representation. People from Missouri and Ohio are the legislators who are writing D.C.'s laws. So just a year after Ohio repeals the Black Codes in 1949, D.C. bars the slave trade. But that's surely not exactly what the local populace might have been clamoring for. D.C. is particularly strange. Go into that.

Sure. I mean, I think people are maybe familiar with the gag rule, the idea that for a while in response to the abolitionist movement, Congress basically had an agreement to never look at abolitionist petitions. Congress was basically saying, we refuse to even entertain the idea that we're going to talk about slavery, we're going to talk about the abolition of slavery. But one thing that people often don't realize is that a lot of those abolitionist petitions that were flowing into the House and the Senate were about abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. Now, why was that the case? Because abolitionists understood the Constitution, and they understood that it would actually be a more kind of conventional

exercise of Congress's power to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia because the Constitution gives Congress power kind of in every aspect over the District of Columbia. So it's a much easier lift in some ways from the perspective of the Constitution to say, we want you to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia where you have full power than to say, we want you to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, where you have full power, than to say, abolish slavery in Virginia or South Carolina, because those are states and they have a kind of sovereignty or autonomy that the District of Columbia simply didn't have. Now, the white population of Washington, D.C. had a variety of different kinds of feelings about whether you know, whether they should continue to have slavery there or not. The African-American population of D.C. was mostly consisted of

enslaved people at the beginning. But then over time, the free Black population of the District of Columbia grew as the enslaved population proportionally shrank. And so what this meant was that D.C. also developed these black codes that applied to free African-Americans, just like any slaveholding jurisdiction had. And some of those black codes were implemented by Congress, and then some were implemented by the local government of what was called Washington City. And even after slavery is abolished in D.C., the city is no real welcoming place for free Black men.

Tell us about Gilbert Horton. So Gilbert Horton was a free African-American man from New York State who, like many Black Northerners from the Atlantic coast ship he was working on in Virginia and made his way to Georgetown, which was part of the District of Columbia, where he was arrested on the suspicion that he was a fugitive slave. So the law in the District of Columbia at that time, like in just about every slaveholding jurisdiction, was any Black person who was out and about could be asked by any person, whether that person was a law enforcement authority or not, could be asked to show their papers. And if they couldn't demonstrate to the satisfaction of the person who stopped them on the street that they were a free person, they could be arrested on the suspicion that they were a fugitive slave. And that's what happened to Gilbert Horton. So Gilbert Horton told people who were arresting him, look, I'm a free man from New York. I don't have my papers with me, but I can get people from New York to attest that I'm a free person. I'm not a runaway slave. You can't put me in jail like this. And the authorities don't care and they don't believe him.

And so they then go ahead and advertise in the papers, which was, again, by law, they had to do this, saying basically, this man, Gilbert Horton, they give a description of his physical appearance. And they say, you know, he was picked up on suspicion of being a runaway slave. He claims he's free. Would his owner please come forward and pick him up? And this was just typical, happened day in and day out in the slave states. So fortunately for Gilbert Horton, one of the newspapers in which Horton was advertised for made its way to New York. And he was from Westchester County, right outside of New York City. And people who knew him spotted this advertisement for him in the paper and said, you know, wait a second, we've got to get Gilbert

out of jail. And one of those people was his father, who was a free black man. He had been enslaved, but now it was 1826. He was free because almost all people had been freed in New York State. And the people in Westchester County bring this issue all the way to the governor of the state of New York, DeWitt Clinton, who writes to the president of the United States, John Quincy Adams, and says, you know, you've got a free citizen of the state of New York in your jail. You need to let him out. And at around that time, Horton gets freed from jail. He'd spent about a month in jail. And in the meantime, interestingly to me, all of these proceedings became kind of a northern cause. And so even as these people are trying to mobilize

to get him free, newspapers are picking up the story all across the free states and talking about it as an example of the injustice of the slave-holding regime, and also talking about the fact that Gilbert Horton, as a citizen of the state of New York, should be entitled to go free in different places. He should not be subject to arbitrary arrest in a place like the District of Columbia. Are you in trouble with the law? Need a lawyer who will fight like hell to keep you out of jail? We defend and we fight just like you'd want your own children defended.

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Nintendo never fires anyone, ever. Follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. So let's talk about the Compromise of 1850 a bit, the period of time in which the country sets a course for what will become the Civil War. California was admitted to the Union as a free state, and the slave trade was outlawed in Washington, D.C. But it brought about a more strictly enforced Fugitive Slave Act, and then other changes in Texas, New Mexico, and Utah. But I'm wondering, as an attempt to settle these tensions, did the Compromise of 1850 accomplish its goal, or did it really amplify the threat of disunion?

Inadvertently, I think it amplified the threat of disunion. So the goal was not to do that. But let's just say on the eve of what became the Compromise of 1850, there were a huge number of simmering issues associated with slavery that people in power knew they needed to try to tamp down or try to resolve. And the Compromise of 1850 represents an attempt to resolve those issues. But the underlying issues were so difficult and so profound that it would have been very, very hard to arrive at something that actually the people who are trying to create a compromise were trying to accomplish. And let's just take the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which, if anything, just amplified the conflict in the aftermath of the passage of that act. So the escape of enslaved people into free jurisdictions and the fact that many, many people in the free states were unwilling to help enslavers and their agents go into free states and grab people and drag them back to slavery,

that really bothered a lot of slave owners by the late 1840s, right? So it was already an issue. The Supreme Court had weighed in on it once in 1842 in a case called Prigg v. Pennsylvania. And in some ways, that decision had sent a message that, yes, slave owners have a right to get people back who make their way into free jurisdictions. But it also left some ambiguity about the extent to which local authorities, let's say in a place like Illinois or Pennsylvania, needed to cooperate with slave owners when they were trying to get enslaved people back who had run into the free states. And so one of the responses back after the Prigg decision in 1842 was northern states and

local people began to say, well, we're not cooperating. If this is a federal issue, let federal officials do it. And we're not going along with this. And so the issue was kind of only amplified in some ways or not at all resolved by the Prigg decision. So this is where we are when we get to 1850. And what the Fugitive Slave Act did was first it created a set of federal marshals and other federal authorities to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act against the will of local populations. So it's an example of slave owners and their allies being very interested in using the power of the federal government in an unprecedented way to override the authority and the wishes of the states in the interest of

slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act set up really unfair kind of legal proceedings in which the alleged person who had run away from slavery was not allowed to testify on their own behalf, and also that the person who's doing the adjudication would get paid more if they sent the person back to slavery than if they declared that they were free. So there were all kinds of ways in which the law itself empowered federal officials to kind of squelch what local people wanted and also seemed to really not at all be attentive to the rights of alleged fugitive slaves. And this really radicalized some white northerners who hadn't been paying much attention to the issue beforehand. They did not want to see people being dragged off

to slavery who hadn't had any kind of rights in the course of these proceedings. And they didn't think that that's what their state stood for. They didn't think that that's what it meant to live in a free state. Not to mention the ways that this struck fear in Black communities in the North, because it essentially meant that anyone who was an African-American person living in a free state, no matter how long they had been living there, was now vulnerable to being picked up and through these unfair proceedings dragged into a slave state, even if they had no relationship to being a fugitive from slavery. So it was a really dramatic law that actually sort of exacerbated or radicalized a

lot of people in the North at the same time as it created the conditions in which white Southerners could never be satisfied by its enforcement. So it was going to be difficult to enforce. It was going to be something that white Northerners and Black Northerners were against. And then it set up a kind of dynamic where slave owners and their allies in the South turned it into a thing of, if you don't enforce this, we are going to secede. So yes, it turned out to be not something that tamped down the conflict, but actually exacerbated the conflict. Secession is clearly a drastic measure. It's an abandonment of the entire country. And I presume any citizen of a seceding state would no longer be a citizen of the United States.

But that brings up a question about what citizenship actually means to any one individual person in the United States in this time. Clearly, we have slaves who are not citizens or have very few rights. We have Black Americans who are subjugated under Black codes. We have women who cannot vote. What does being a United States citizen mean in 1850, for instance? Well, that is a question that could take all day to answer. So let me try to say a few key points. I mean, first of all, the Constitution, as it was originally written, really doesn't say who is a United States citizen

or what citizenship gets you or entails. The original Constitution mentions citizenship a few times. It mentions, for example, that you have to be a native-born citizen to be president of the United States. But it really doesn't say what it means to be a U.S. citizen or who can be one. The Constitution also has this kind of interesting clause in Article IV, Section 2, that mentions state citizenship. So it says something like the citizens of each state are entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states. So the Constitution actually recognizes that there's such a thing as state citizenship. And that came into play, you know, as we were talking about Gilbert Horton, for example, the people who were advocating for Horton were saying, he's a citizen of New York, you have to let him go. But they were also

implying that as a New York citizen, he should have certain rights no matter where he goes. But the sense of what those rights were, the sense of who was entitled to them, the question of whether slaveholding jurisdictions had to recognize anything about the citizenship status of a citizen of New York or Massachusetts who was African-American, these were all very unresolved questions. I mean, Americans were debating whether citizenship also entailed the right to vote because, as you said, white women were widely considered to be citizens, but most people agreed that they should not have the right to vote, which implies that citizenship and the right to vote are two separate things. There is a lot of ambiguity around what citizenship means, and that continues really until the 14th Amendment, which was passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868. When finally in the Constitution, there's something about who is a citizen and what the nature of citizenship is. Well, when thinking about citizenship, especially in this period and for Black Americans, the Dred Scott case immediately comes to mind. Can you remind us what that case entailed? Sure. Well, Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet Scott, and their two daughters who were involved

in early litigation, they were enslaved people who had lived in Missouri and then had been taken separately and together. They had also lived in Illinois, which was a free state for these purposes. They had lived in Minnesota territory where slavery was not allowed. And they had ended up back in Missouri and St. Louis and then sued for their freedom. Basically, they are saying nobody should be able to claim us as slaves anymore because we've spent time in these free jurisdictions. In Missouri law in particular, the Missouri courts had long held that if enslaved people were taken into free jurisdictions, even if they ended up back in Missouri, they could claim their freedom in court. And so

if things had gone for the Scots the way that they had gone for many African Americans who made similar claims before that, they would have been freed by the courts. But in this case, the Missouri courts were going in a very reactionary direction and said, you know, we don't really care if you spent time in Illinois or Minnesota territory, you're still enslaved. Dred Scott appealed this case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that's where we get the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which did a bunch of different things. The opinion of Chief Justice Roger Taney was an attempt to solve a lot of different kind of political problems in that moment. And one of them was the question of whether the U.S. government can ban slavery from federal territories. But when it came to the

question of African-American citizenship, Taney's decision held that Dred Scott was not a citizen of the United States and that it didn't matter whether he was free or enslaved because Taney said no person of African descent could be a citizen of the United States. And the reason he said this was to say that Taney had no standing to sue in federal court because there's a part of the Constitution that says that, you know, essentially you have to be a citizen to sue in federal court. Although, as I said, it doesn't say what a citizen is or who a citizen is. So Taney says, you know, people of African descent cannot be citizens of the United States. And this was a really radical decision. I mean, among other things, you know, many states did recognize African Americans as citizens of their states, and there had not been a clear-cut point of view on the part of the framers of the original Constitution on whether African Americans were citizens of the nation or not. In fact,

that hadn't come up because they didn't even define what national citizenship was or who was a citizen. So Taney's decision in that case was very kind of radical and was sort of an earthquake in politics. It's interesting, I think people sometimes don't realize that the entire or most of the Republican Party, which by then had kind of launched and they had run their first presidential candidate in 1856, disagreed with the Dred Scott decision. I mean, Abraham Lincoln starting to talk and campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1857 in Illinois says, this is a terrible decision. Taney is wrong on the facts of history and he's wrong on the law today. And that is not uncommon among Republicans. And then states, a number of individual states, passed resolutions denouncing the Dred Scott decision.

So when we think about that, and we think about, you know, controversial Supreme Court decisions in the present, you know, there was not at all a sense that among many Americans that they had to accept or believe that this was a correct decision or that it was necessarily the law of the land. This was one opinion in which the court was weighing in on a variety of different controversial issues. But events continue to unfold. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses,

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Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neurolinguistic programming. Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict and murder suspect, and you can't help but wonder what his true intentions were. I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee.

And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. We recently dove into the story of the godfather of modern mental manipulation,

Richard Bandler, whose methods inspired some of the most toxic and criminal self-help movements of the last two decades. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. In our series, we focused almost exclusively on Andrew Jackson and his power and influence in this era. It is titled The Age of Jackson, aptly.

He is a polarizing figure, a hero, a populist, a founder of the Democratic Party, but certainly also a man who pushed some unbearable cruelties on many people. What do you think his legacy really is? It is an interesting question. I mean, when I was thinking about Andrew Jackson and listening to the series, one thing I was thinking about was how when I was in school, when I was in high school, I think, and I took AP U.S. history growing up in right outside Chicago, I learned about the age of Jackson. And when I

learned about it, the age of Jackson was the era of the flowering of American democracy. The idea, you know, that regular everyday people had a voice in government, the dropping of property and wealth qualifications for the right to vote so that the idea is like all men have the right to vote now, not just the wealthy, right? And kind of the defense of everyday people against wealthy interests. I mean, I really think that that is a version of the age of Jackson that I learned in high school. And I think it's a really important indication of actually just how much richer our accounts of history have become, that the increase in white men's right to vote actually was accompanied by the disenfranchisement of Northern Black men at the

same time period. Not to mention, of course, that almost none of these people favored women's right to vote. And so the age of Jackson and Jackson himself becomes a much more complicated and, you know, really morally compromised figure when you take into consideration the whole history, as I think we are obligated to do. So people might have felt more comfortable with the older version of the age of Jackson, but it was really only part of the story. And I think telling the whole story, we see the complexity and the violence and the tragedy of some aspects of U.S. history. Andrew Jackson also changed the presidency in the minds of many Americans.

As a populist, he came up into an elite political sphere with disdain for it and changed the character. How do you think he shifted what we see as the president's role even today? Jackson was one of a few presidents, and I would certainly count Abraham Lincoln in this too, who distinguished himself for the use of presidential power. And so Jackson defied the Supreme Court. Jackson was a military hero who didn't hesitate to use the military in wars against Native Americans once he was in the presidency. And so I think one of Jackson's legacies is contributing to the idea of a very strong, empowered American president. And of course, Lincoln carried on that tradition in very different conditions and the conditions of the Civil War. And it's interesting in relation to contemporary conversations because the original Constitution puts Congress first, right, above the

presidency. And one of the concerns among the original founders of the United States was a concern about an overpowering executive, a president who would take too much power for himself or eventually maybe herself. And so, you know, in some ways, Jackson is the beginning of a kind of aggregation of power to the presidency that we really haven't seen the end of. You mentioned looking at Jackson in eyes of our contemporary conversations of politics, and it is irresistible to talk about what echoes might be there. I mean, today, just this morning, Roe v. Wade was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. We are in a polarized time. What do you think are the lessons from the age of Jackson that we can apply the similarities and the differences to our modern age? Well, unfortunately, I think some of the parallels are, you know, make me feel very pessimistic about our own time. We haven't talked that much about what the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution were designed to do. But, you know, if we go back to the example of somebody like Gilbert Horton, for example,

he was a citizen in New York and he was an African-American man, right? A free black man who was considered a citizen by the state of New York. Although he didn't have the same right to vote as white male citizens of New York, but still he was considered a citizen with certain kinds of rights in New York state.

Yet when he went to the District of Columbia, or certainly if he'd gone to any other slaveholding jurisdiction, he was subjected to the presumption of guilt, right? The presumption that he was a fugitive slave. He could be jailed. He could be sold into slavery. His rights were very, very different depending on what jurisdiction he happened to be in. One of the things that the Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th and 15th Amendments, were designed to do was to create a baseline of individual rights in this country, which is to say, to make sure that in certain areas that are really considered most important, everywhere you go in this country, you will have certain kinds of rights. So take voting, for example, with the 15th Amendment bars racial discrimination and the right to vote.

So it's saying, look, states have a lot of say over who can vote and under what conditions people vote. But one thing they cannot do is discriminate on the basis of race and the right to vote. All across the United States, that is unacceptable. and Congress has the power to step in, and the courts have the power to step in if states are doing this thing that's banned now. So we didn't get that kind of intervention on behalf of individual rights until the 1860s in our Constitution, and I think it's really important to keep that in mind. What we're seeing now, particularly because of what the Supreme Court is doing, is dismantling a variety of ways in which those reconstruction amendments put in place a baseline of individual rights. So, for example, Roe v. Wade has been overturned. What that means,

and we've already been seeing it, it's just going to be intensified now, is if you live in some states, you can access abortion and other kinds of reproductive health care without too much trouble, particularly if you have enough money to pay for it. If you live in other states, you cannot. And you might have to go to another state if you really want to end a pregnancy. And of course, as people have been saying, that impinges much more dramatically on people with fewer resources, poor women, women of color, young women, teenagers, and so forth. And so what we're seeing is an increasing phenomenon where your rights are really different depending on where you live. And there's

less and less and less of a sense that this is a country in which we are committed to a certain baseline of individual rights. And I think that's a real betrayal of the vision of the people who came into office in the 1860s who wanted to see the nation change, who wanted to see the nation not be like the age of Jackson, right, where this was this patchwork of different kinds of rights on some level. So, and by the way, I want to add, those framers of the Reconstruction Amendments did not want to erase the states, right? They were leaving plenty of power and of decision-making in the hands of the states, but they were saying, on certain rights that we consider to be incredibly important, you know, we're going to set a national baseline. So we're really seeing that erode in a

lot of ways that I think is really, really unfortunate and really hurts people. Dr. Mazur, it was a pleasure speaking with you today. Thanks again for having me. I enjoyed our conversation. That was my interview with Dr. Kate Mazur. She's the author of Until Justice Be Done, America's First Civil Rights Movement, and the book An Example for All the Land, Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. From Wondery, this is the seventh and final episode of The Age of Jackson from American History Tellers. In our next season, in the pre-dawn darkness of April 12, 1861, Confederate cannons opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina.

It was the start of the greatest crisis in our nation's history, the Civil War. The bloody battles fought over the next four years would determine America's future and reshape the country in ways that still reverberate today. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. Audio editing by Molly Bach. Sound design by Derek Behrens. Additional writing by Ellie Stanton.

This episode was produced by Morgan Jaffe and Peter Arcuni. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marsha Louis for Wondery. Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now. Louis for Wondery. seconds to pitch to an audience of potential customers. This is match point, baby. If the audience liked the product, it gets them in front of our panel of experts, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Anderson, Tabitha Brown, Tony Hawk, Christian Siriano. These panelists are looking for entrepreneurs whose ideas best fit the criteria of the four Ps, pitch, product, popularity, and problem-solving ability. I'm going to give you a yes. I want to see it. If our panelists like the product,

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