Dan Snow's History Hit - Abraham Lincoln

Episode Date: February 25, 2024

Abraham Lincoln began his life in a log cabin in Kentucky, the son of poor pioneers. He would end it as President of the United States, having steered the Union through the turbulent years of civil war.Dan is joined by Adam Smith, Professor of US Politics & Political History at the University of Oxford and host of the podcast The Last Best Hope. Adam takes us through Lincoln's life, one of the most remarkable statesmen of the last 200 years.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. John Wilkes Booth was described as the handsomest man in America. A reporter called him a muscular, perfect man with curling hair like a Corinthian capital. He became a huge celebrity, acting on American stages through the 1850s and 60s, earning tens of thousands of dollars. In 1864, he played his part in a performance of Julius Caesar in New York. He was Mark Antony, not the assassin Brutus. But at 10 past 10pm on the 14th of April 1865, John Wilkes Booth would enter a theatre for the last time in his career, where he would play the role of an assassin. Seemingly, he used his celebrity to gain access to the grandest box, the presidential box at Ford's Theatre in Washington DC. In that presidential box, President Abraham Lincoln and his wife were watching a play, Our American Cousin. Lincoln

was laughing. There were a couple of jokes that had been tweaked by the actors to reflect the fact the president, the commander-in-chief, was watching the play. The Civil War had ended, effectively, with General Robert E. Lee's surrender of Confederate forces just a week before. As soon as Booth entered the box, he barricaded the door by wedging a stick between it and the wall. Then he turned around and waited for a few seconds. He knew the play by heart and he waited until 10.15 when there was an upsurge of laughter, a particularly hilarious line in the play. It was 10.15pm. Lincoln himself, the president, was laughing. Booth stepped forward. He raised a pistol and he shot Lincoln in the skull behind the left ear. The bullet passed through the brain and came to rest near the front of the skull. Booth shouted what witnesses think was freedom

before leaping down onto the stage and making his escape. Lincoln died a few hours later, and it was the end of one of the most remarkable careers of any politician of the last 200 years. A life that had begun in a one-roomed log cabin on the American frontier, born to the poorest of parents, and a life that ended with him having steered the United States of America through its most turbulent, through its most treacherous years, ones in which the very idea of these United States, of the Republic itself, had been challenged and come close to shattering. Joining me to talk about that extraordinary man, that extraordinary life, is Professor Adam Smith. He is a professor of US politics and political history at the University of Oxford. He specialises in the history of the American Civil War. He's a wonderful historian, a fantastic

communicator. He's going to talk us through the events of Lincoln's life. And I'm sure, like me, you'll keep thinking as you're listening to him, how many echoes there are today. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black, white unity. Enjoy. Adam, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. You're welcome, Dan. It's good to be here. Tell me, there's such a legend wrapped around the young Abraham Lincoln growing up in his log cabin. What's the reality of his circumstances at birth and his upbringing? Well, the myth is based on reality, as sometimes myths are. I mean, he really did grow up in a log cabin.

He grew up on the very edge of white European settlement at that time in 1809 on the frontier in Kentucky. He moved with his family into Indiana, a settlement was opening up there. And then as a teenager, leaving his family behind, he kind of set out to make his fortune, as it were, in the young state of Illinois. So he really was a president who grew up in about as impoverished a circumstances as white Americans could at that time. And through his own hard work and good luck and charisma, and later his connections and an effective marriage, ended up in a position where he wielded huge political influence at a critical moment in American history. Can I say that again? So he taught himself? Were his family, was there a premium in education within the community, or did it just sort of come from his own drive?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, he did have a little bit of formal schooling, but not very much. He really was an autodidact. There were very few books available. There was the Bible, of course, and there were newspapers, actually. We think about people who have written whole books themselves about what books Lincoln read, and it's an interesting subject. But really, it seems to me it's actually newspapers that were the really critical thing. This was a newspaper reading society, much more so than any other country in the world at that time. There weren't taxes on newspapers in the United States like there were in Britain at this period. And so the young Lincoln devoured political news. Newspapers were all very political with very clear editorial

partisan editorial lines. But they had letters from Europe. They had information about the whole of the rest of the country, which Lincoln himself had never experienced by and large. So he was very driven. And you can see the influence of his early reading throughout his remarkable speeches. And the Bible is especially important. But he also got hold of law books and Blackstone's commentaries and effectively taught himself the law, albeit reading with a professional lawyer at a critical moment in Springfield, Illinois. But there wasn't a formal bar exam in Illinois at that time. He wouldn't have been able to become a professional middle-class

lawyer, even if he'd grown up back East in New York or New England. So there was something very particular about that frontier experience at that time, which enabled him to rise through his own efforts. You mentioned Blackstone's commentaries. That's an 18th century treatise written by, I think he was a judge, wasn't he? As well as a thinker. Whenever you read about 19th century American history, you're always coming across Blackstone. I always love the fact that there are these canonical books in American history that are kind of British, that no one in Britain cares about at all. No, that's right. And that tells you something much more broadly about 19th century America at this time,

which was that it was a projection of an idea of English history. I mean, of course, it wasn't the case that all white Americans had their roots and their ancestry in England or in the British Isles, although Lincoln's family did. But there was this very deep, important connection to an idea of English liberty, to the idea, the myth of the Magna Carta and of the Glorious Revolution and of the revolutions generally of the 17th century. And so the idea of the common law, and that's where Blackstone comes in, was a very important sort of structuring idea. The United States was imagined, this was very much Lincoln's view as he was growing up, he imbibed it. The United States was the place that had, as it were, taken on the mantle of English liberty as the old world had become corrupted and

decayed. And that's what the American Revolution was about. It was about inheriting something pure from the old world and expanding it in the new. The other one that Americans keep going about is Bolingbroke, isn't he? The early 18th century, Sir Tory. They were just absolutely reading him hand over fist in America long after he's been- And Edmund Burke. Of course, of course. Burke, who conveniently gave some speeches on the eve of the revolution, supporting the claims of the American colonists, but supporting those claims as Englishmen, their rights as Englishmen. So Burke was also a big figure, and a big figure for Lincoln in particular as well. What I'm fascinated by, you've got this man born in a one-room cabin.

He's on this frontier. And yet he feels part of a political nation, does he? He feels he could have a life, being important, playing a role, because of literacy, because of newspapers, of the creation of this common culture. Did his boundaries extend right across the USA? And was that because of these newspapers? Yeah.

As I said, he hadn't travelled to the East. He didn't travel to the East until he was elected to Congress. He did travel to the South. The Mississippi River connected, of course, still connects, the Mississippi River Network connects Illinois down to New Orleans. And with a friend of his as a young man, he built a barge and transported goods all the way down the river to New Orleans, at which point, of course, they sold their goods. They encountered a slave market. It was one of Lincoln's first encounters with enslaved people. They then broke up their barge and had to walk back. There was no way of getting back. So he had walked the West. He'd walked the Mississippi as a young man, but he'd never been East. But one of the things he read, one of his early books, was Parson Weems' biography of George

Washington. So he grew up as was typical of white Americans of his generation, with this veneration of the revolutionary generation of the founding fathers who had sacrificed, it was imagined, so much in order to create this new union. And Lincoln was all through his life, I think, extremely conscious of that revolutionary inheritance and the responsibility on his generation and on him in particular, because he was a man with huge vaulting ambition, to carry forward the promise of the Declaration of Independence, which was the key thing that Lincoln began more and more and more to understand as being the centre of the meaning of America, to carry forward the Declaration of Independence into the next generation and into

the future. And that was a huge responsibility that he felt as a result of his reading of history. Maybe we'll come back to that when we talk about the old Gettysburg Address, his most enduring rhetorical legacy, which is a bit of a history lesson in there. I didn't know he went down the Mississippi on a boat. That's extraordinary. When does he get involved in politics and why does he do that? He got involved in politics. This is a very unsexy answer. He got involved in politics because he was really interested in banking. But wait, but is there a sexy answer to that question? Well, when I say he was interested in banking, you may think that this sounds slightly glib, but I tell you what, he wasn't driven into politics to do initially. He wasn't driven

into politics in order to abolish slavery. And that is quite important. Now, he did always think slavery was a bad thing. He said in later life, in 1864, I think, he said, if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel. And there's nothing in the record that dis, which was the opposition party. He lived in an area in a state that was dominated by the Democratic Party, which at that time, the central figure, the charismatic figure of President Andrew Jackson was dominant. And the Whigs were the opponents of the Democrats. And the Democrats basically were the libertarian party. They were the party of the ordinary white men. They were the party that were effectively supportive of slavery in the South. The Whigs were the entrepreneurs. This is how they imagined themselves, the entrepreneurs, the people who wanted to be interested in investment in what we would now call infrastructure

or what was then called internal improvements. And it's really notable that although Lincoln grew up in a... His family were farmers, of course, and had been farmers for generations. Lincoln never wanted to work with his hands. He never wanted to work on the land. He wanted to be a lawyer. He became a lawyer. He became a wealthy, well-paid railroad lawyer by the 1850s. And so the direction that Lincoln's own life was taking him in was a direction that was made possible because of industrialization and the beginnings of urbanisation and the development of the economy that happened in the 19th century. And he thought that the Whig Party, the opposition party in effect, were the party that would best enable that kind of society,

giving loans to people. Now, that's why banking mattered, creating credit, enabling people to borrow, and so the economy could grow and develop in new ways. It wouldn't just have to remain this kind of flat Jeffersonian vision of small farmers everywhere expanding territorially and geographically. Lincoln imagined the United States developing in a different way, spiritually as well, spiritually and economically. Speaking of expanding territorially, as someone at the forefront of that drive to take more land, something that's becoming increasingly talked about and contested today, what did Lincoln

write and think about the settlement of America, its ever westward push, its dispossessing of its original inhabitants? He was obviously a beneficiary of that process. As I've described, he grew up in the West, but he was much more ambivalent about the further territorial expansion of the United States than certainly Democrats were and the mainstream political culture were. There was a big crisis point when Lincoln was first elected to Congress over the United States invasion of Mexico. United States invasion of Mexico. This was one of the most successful wars of territorial expansion in modern history, where the US invaded Mexico and took all of what is now present day, most of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and so forth. And Lincoln was deeply sceptical. In fact, he opposed the war, partly on the grounds, correctly, that he understood it to be driven by slaveholders,

by American slaveholders, who wanted to increase the territory available to them, which would increase their power within the United States. So it wasn't opposition to territory per se, but his much greater interest was in economic development within the existing United States, rather than endless territorial expansion. Okay, so he's into local politics. I guess as a lawyer, that's a natural pathway into local politics. Is he a state representative? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He became a state representative for several years

and was re-elected several times. And then he makes the big jump to the federal, going out to Washington. How does that come about? He serves a term in Congress in the late 40s, and then he essentially retires from politics. He retreats back into his law practice. He's in this minority party, right? There isn't really a path forward for him. He's never going to become a governor, he doesn't think. He's never going to become a senator, because at that time,

senators were elected by the state legislatures, and the Democrats always ran the state legislature in Illinois. So it's really his path forward politically seemed blocked until 1854, when Congress passed a bill called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which organized the territories of Kansas and Nebraska in such a way that opened them up to the possibility of slavery. And this is part of North America that people thought, Lincoln thought, and most other normalists thought, from which slavery had been barred back in 1820. And that was such an outrage for Lincoln and for hundreds of thousands, millions of other people. It was such a betrayal of what he called a sacred compact that this drove Lincoln, the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, drove Lincoln back into politics. He effectively ran for the Senate in 1858 against the dominant sitting Senator Stephen Douglas.

And then eventually in 1860, he got the nomination of this brand new Republican party for president and was elected president in 1860 in the most consequential presidential election in American history so far. That's a pretty astonishing rise to power. I mean, how did he win? How did he get the nod to be presidential candidate? And then how on earth did he win? A degree of luck. It's only true that he was one of the least qualified in the traditional sense, one of the least qualified presidents up to that point. Others had been nominated without much more elected experience, but they'd had a military background, which Lincoln didn't have other than a few months fighting effectively in the National

Guard, mostly as he later accounted it against mosquitoes. So he had no real military experience. But it was partly precisely because he didn't have a long track record that made him, in the 19th century parlance, the available man. He didn't have the political skeletons in his closet that most of the other leading contenders for the Republican nomination in 1860, well, all of them had to a greater or lesser extent. The only thing he was really known for by 1860 were these debates he'd had in 1858 with Stephen Douglas in Illinois when Lincoln had been trying to influence the elections to slavery and the relationship between slavery and the idea of the American nation and the legacy of the American Revolution, were reprinted in newspapers across the whole country and brought Lincoln to the attention of the important people and the

bankrollers of the Republican Party back East, who saw him as a man who could win over, who wasn't tainted with being too radical. He wasn't imagined to be an abolitionist. He disavows abolition in those debates. He certainly isn't an abolitionist as that was understood at the time. And he's very clear about the constitutional situation, which is that a president can't abolish slavery. Congress can't abolish slavery. The Supreme Court can't abolish slavery. Slavery was a state institution. But what Lincoln and the Young Republican Party are worried about, and genuinely so, and Lincoln is a very effective warning about this, is that what had happened in the 1850s was that the slave power, as they came to be known, the very wealthy southerners whose wealth

was based on the ownership of people, the principle of property and man, the slave power had gone from a defensive posture, defending slavery as a regrettable necessity. They had gone into making the case that slavery in effect should be a nationally recognized institution. And the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision in 1857 was the primary piece of evidence that Lincoln and the Republicans had that this was so, because the implications of the Dred Scott decision were that you could never really properly ban slavery anywhere, because the underlying legal idea of the Dred Scott decision was that it accepted, the Supreme Court accepted the claim

that you could own property in man. And therefore, if you were the owner, in quotes, of an enslaved person, and the state, a state government or a territorial government or the federal government tried to take your slave away, that would be denying you your property without due process of law, which is contrary to the constitution. So that was a very big claim, because the implications were not only that you couldn't ban slavery from the federal territories in the West, but potentially that states like Massachusetts or Illinois or Vermont or New York couldn't legally, completely and utterly ban slavery. And that was a terrifying idea. And combined with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave the federal government immense

powers to interfere in the judicial and police processes of free states in order to forcibly return fugitive slaves, or people who weren't necessarily fugitive slaves, but who were claimed to be fugitive slaves by slave owners. This all amounted to the idea that the national government, the federal government, had been taken over by the slave power in a way that was to the detriment of the liberties of ordinary white northerners, of white people. White people's liberties were at stake. And Lincoln articulated that case extremely well in 1858. So in other words, his anti-slavery wasn't primarily premised on sympathy for enslaved black people. Lincoln did think that slavery was wrong, but he rarely talked about the plight of enslaved people in the South.

His main claim was that slavery is corrupting Republican institutions nationwide. So we white people who may never have met an enslaved person are suffering because of the presence of slavery in the nation as a whole and that's why Lincoln said we cannot remain in the end half slave and half free a house divided against itself cannot stand we will become one thing or the other if we the supporters of freedom don't destroy slavery in the end they will destroy us you listen to Dan Snow's history here. Talk about Abraham Lincoln. All coming up.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. And he wins the election,

but with a quirk of the good old British and American political systems, with less than 50% of the votes and carrying no southern states. The southerners thought, well, that causes Bella, right? Because this guy is going to try and take slavery from us. He was quite careful to say that he wouldn't do that though, right? So, I mean, on one hand, he's saying a house divided cannot stand. On the other hand, he's saying, what is he saying? If elected, what will he do? It's a great question, Dan. And it gets to the heart of why the South seceded and why the North then responded to

secession in the way that they did. So I think for Southerners, it was enough that you had a president in control of the executive branch in Washington who thought that property in man was illegitimate. Because they'd never really had that before. They'd had four years of John Quincy Adams back in the 20s, and they'd had four years of John Adams back in the 1790s. Otherwise, the slaveholders had one way or other controlled the federal government completely between the Revolution and 1860. They'd almost always had the White House, they'd almost always had majorities in Congress, and they certainly controlled the Supreme Court. Not always with actual Southerners,

but for most of the way with Northerners who were sympathetic. So to have a president who was making the bold claim that slavery was wrong was in itself terrifying. What Lincoln kept on saying was not that he wanted to abolish slavery immediately, because as we've already said, he actually couldn't do that. Nobody argued that was constitutionally possible, barring war, in which case it might be, which of course was to become relevant. But nobody argued that in peacetime, anybody in Washington had any power to abolish slavery in South Carolina or Georgia or Alabama or wherever. But Lincoln kept on saying that he wanted to put slavery on the course of ultimate extinction. That was the phrase he kept on using,

on the path of ultimate extinction. So we acknowledge, in other words, that slavery will exist in this generation and maybe in the next generation, maybe even the generation after that, but we have to tar it as being fundamentally un-American. He wanted slavery to be generally understood as the exception to the general rule of American freedom. And his election was the representation of the fact that that was definitely the majority view of northerners, of people in the free states as well by that point. Southerners claimed the opposite in effect. White southerners claimed that slavery was sanctified by the constitution. If northern states wanted to be eccentric enough to abolish slavery and to try and carve out exceptions then maybe they could try to as long as they didn't dispossess Southerners of their property when they took their enslaved people to New York or whatever.

But basically, there was nothing wrong with slavery. And furthermore, slavery was ordained by the Constitution. And that's why when the Constitution of the Confederate States, the seceded states, the Confederate States was written, they made that very clear. Slavery was the centerpiece of the new Confederate constitution. It was entirely aligned with the American Revolution and the principles of 1776. And then the South secedes, state after state secedes. I mean, we could do a whole other podcast series on, obviously, Lincoln as a war leader, but I would just like to touch on one or two bits, parking the issue of abolition to one side for a second, this random lawyer from his log cabin on the frontier turns out to be one of the most perfect political leaders of a vast military

endeavour of all time. He's held up still in staff colleges and universities as someone who seemed to get that military political balance right. What was that about? Where did this come from? Yeah. I mean, where it came from is a great question. I'm not sure I can really answer that, but I think you're right in what you say. I mean, Lincoln, I think the essence of it is this. So Lincoln understood once the war begun, Lincoln understood that his target, the target of the federal military effort, of the Union military effort, had to be the rebels in arms. It had to be the Confederate armies and not territory. And that was because he always understood his conceptualization of the Civil War was that it was a grand riot. It was a big insurrection. It was not like a conventional war in Europe. The North

was not attempting to occupy and control the South. This wasn't like Napoleon's invasions outside France 60 years earlier. This was about dealing with insurrectionists. So it was the people in arms who were the target. And most of his generals never really got that, even down to the very end of the war. Some of them did, and the ones that ended up being most successful, obviously General Grant and General Sherman are the two that immediately spring to mind. They got it. They understood that their targets were the insurrectionists. But Lincoln grasped that very early. And I think that's probably the key to explaining why he kept on really being much better than most of his early generals at understanding what the strategic imperative ought to be. We get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. history hit, wherever you get your podcasts. He takes him a while to find his chosen military instrument, but he does eventually do so. And then he emancipates slaves, having said he's not going to, he does emancipate slaves, obviously, in 1862, doesn't he? After he needs to wait for a battle, is it Antietam, when he finally wins battle? It doesn't look like a desperate move. Why did he choose that moment to free, effectively free, slaves? And also talk to me about the various distinctions, because there's a lot hidden in the Emancipation Proclamation, isn't there? Yeah, so one question that's sometimes been asked over the last 150 years or so is what

really was the point of the Emancipation Proclamation? Because in and of itself, the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free very many people. It did free some people directly. But what it actually did was to declare free enslaved people who were still within the control of the Confederacy. There were still at this point, slave states that hadn't seceded. There were four of them, in fact. The most important one in terms of slave population was Kentucky, where slavery remained a legal institution until December 1865, when the 13th Amendment was passed. That was a while after the end of the war. So in other words, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was declaring free those slaves who he had no direct control over, while leaving alone the ones that you might think he did have control over. So that's a sort of slightly cynical view of it. But actually, the point was that he could

issue, or he argued, and it was never really tested in the courts, but he argued that he could issue an Emancipation Proclamation in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief. So he argued that slavery was, to use the 19th century phrase, the taproot of the rebellion. So if you wanted to defeat the rebellion, you had to pull out the taproot that was feeding it. And therefore, it was legitimate for him to declare free enslaved people under Confederate control, and only legitimate for him to declare those people free because the slaves that were still under Union control weren't able to help the Confederacy. And so by destroying slavery or by trying to destroy slavery within the Confederacy, he would help the cause of reunion. That was his argument. And I think it was also what he believed. So the practical effect of the

Emancipation Proclamation then was that as Union troops moved into the South, they automatically, without any debate about it, without recourse to courts or the randomness of the opinions of different Union commanders on the ground, they would automatically treat enslaved people as free people whenever they came into contact with them. And it also, of course, encouraged naturally enslaved people to move to union lines. And this had been happening since the start of the war anyway. It didn't take the Emancipation Proclamation to do this, but it was a huge mass migration, refugee crisis, to use a sort of modern terminology, when enslaved people come to union lines. And by 1863, many of those enslaved black men, formerly enslaved black men, were enlisted in the Union Army. So Lincoln was able to say, not only have we, as it were, taken this force away from our enemies, from the insurrectionists, we are now using it back against them. And so he always cast his emancipation policy in terms of what would be most effective to win the war.

Andy, I guess also, perhaps it wasn't super important, but it makes it impossible for European about William Gladstone, who even after the announcement of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, gave a speech in Newcastle, in which he said Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy, has made an army, he's making a navy, and he's done more than either of those things, he has made a nation. And Gladstone, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, was making the case for British recognition of the Confederacy. And Gladstone, of course, was a liberal. But what Gladstone saw when he looked across the Atlantic at the American crisis, at the

American war, was a war of national self-determination. So Gladstone, of course, had supported Italian unification, for example. He supported Greek. The movements for national unification elsewhere in the world, Gladstone supported. That was a liberal principle. So he didn't see anything different in the South. Of course, Gladstone was also, by this stage, deeply anti-slavery. But in 1862, it was possible for Gladstone to say, well, either. It doesn't really matter. I mean, of course, we don't like the fact that Confederacy has slaves, but the Union also has slaves. I've already mentioned, Kentucky was still in the Union. They have slaves. And the President of the United States, Lincoln, has said that his aim is reunion,

it's not emancipation. So slavery is out of the equation here. Gladstone was able to make that case in 1862. He spent the rest of his life regretting the position he took on the American War. But he wasn't the only liberal to be in that position, right? It kind of was a head exploding thing because not only was it a cause of national self-determination, but the Confederates were also supporters of free trade, right? Whereas the Northerners were all protectionists. So if you're a British liberal, you know, the Confederacy, you know, looks kind of perfect apart from this problem of slavery. So you're totally right, Dan, that not just the Emancipation Proclamations, but once it became gradually clear that the practical effects of Union victory would be the destruction of slavery, then it became harder and harder and

harder for foreign observers, and particularly in Britain, to advocate for recognition of the Confederacy. There's a great quote by a Tory, the Arch Tory, Lord Salisbury, at the end of the 19th century Prime Minister, who was very depressed about Britain's imperial decline or perception of it. But it's basically going, we had our chance, we should have intervened in the US Civil War, we could have absolutely shafted the Americans when we had the chance, and they would have been divided into two. They could not have challenged us economically or militarily. Yeah, that was a very common view, especially among Tories. But as I say, liberals held the same view, albeit for different reasons, in the 1860s. I mean,

I think in the end, the chances of sort of active British intervention were pretty small. They obviously had an awful lot of other global commitments. You know, there was no real possibility of them sending troops. But merely the recognition of the Confederacy would itself, of course, have dramatically altered the balance of power within the war. And certainly from the Confederate side, if you're trying to imagine hypotheticals in which the Confederacy could have won the war, then recognition by Britain and or France really has to be part of

that picture of that alternative scenario of how they could have achieved their independence. They had virtually no chance of achieving their independence after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, which was in itself decisive. But we remember it almost equally because of events a few months later when Lincoln gives possibly the finest speech in the history of the English language, inaugurating a cemetery, if that's the right word, on the site of the battle. Just quickly talk me through why that is such an important speech. Because it's only 250 something words long. That's why we all like it. It's quite handy, isn't it? It's really short and is a perfect distillation in one long paragraph of why the union is fighting the war. And he wasn't actually saying anything he hadn't said before, or that lots of other people hadn't said, or that ministers didn't say on pulpits most Sundays, or that Edward Everett, who was the main speaker at Gettysburg, he'd said much

the same in two long hours of speechifying just before Lincoln got up. But Lincoln said it well. And he said it well in a way that has resonated because he did this brilliant thing, which many American political leaders have been able to do, but Lincoln was the best of the lot of them, of being able to identify the cause of American nationality with universal ideas, with the idea that the United States is the last best hope of earth, right? So his claim was, four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. That's how he begun. So he begun by saying, we are here, we exist because of the Declaration of Independence.

That was the thing that happened four, four and seven years ago. And so the point of America is that we're dedicated to these things. In other words, we are an ideological construct. You know, he wasn't like Bismarck making the case for German consolidation 10 years later. You know, we're Germans because we're Germans. We've got this ethnic identity we need to consolidate in order to be strong. That wasn't his case. His case is we matter because we are the carriers of this idea of liberty and equality. And we are now testing, this is what he said at Gettysburg, we are testing whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. So the test here is whether any nation devoted to the ideas of liberty and equality can

ever exist on earth. And if we fail, government of form by the people will perish from the earth. I mean, this is an astonishing claim, but it's a familiar one because it's so embedded in American political rhetoric. And as I said, Lincoln wasn't the first person to say it, and this wasn't the first time Lincoln has said it, and he certainly wasn't the last. But he expresses it so well. And this is an idea that did indeed capture people's imagination around the world. I mean, the Gettysburg Address itself was read around the world, but the idea that America was this carrier of liberty was certainly something that resonated in working class radical communities in Britain,

for example. And when Lincoln was assassinated, sorry, that's a spoiler for listeners if they didn't know, but when Lincoln was assassinated at the end of the war in April 1865, the reaction in Britain was in part based on that and based on this idea that he had become this figure who embodied the idea that ordinary, and it's a gendered idea and a raced idea, but at least ordinary white working class men could achieve anything. They could be free. And America, the United States of America represented that idea in the way that nowhere else at that time in the world possibly could. And so that's what the Gettysburg Address did. It said, these are the ideals for which we're fighting and they matter not just for us here and now in this generation, but for all people forever, everywhere. That's an astonishingly big claim to make.

Yeah, it is. So every time I hear those words, I get a little shiver down the spine. So thank you for saying them so beautifully there. Let's get to that assassination, which you so unkindly previewed there. The war grinds on appalling last year of the war, trench warfare akin to the types of warfare people would come to expect from the Western Front or the First World War. It ends up with 600,000 dead. And a week later, a week later, he goes to a performance in Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC and is assassinated. What was the hope? What was the point of trying to assassinate him? Was it the act of a madman or was there a sort of political idea behind it, behind the conspirators? It wasn't the act of a madman. It was a revenge tragedy being played out. I don't think there

was any really serious idea on the part of the South that the result of the war by that stage could be reversed. General Leed already surrendered the only substantial army the Confederacy still had. Union troops occupied most of the South. Lincoln's assassination wasn't going to fundamentally change that. But it was revenge, and it was maybe the start of something. It was a pretty powerful signal that the white South may have lost their bid for independence that they launched with their secession in 1860-61, but that didn't mean they were just going to accept the terms of the victors on any grounds.

And you could say, in retrospect, that it inaugurated a long period in which the white South, through force of arms, through intimidation, through local violence, and through politics, sought to reclaim their own autonomy, especially, of course, control of racial matters. So, yes, we think of it as the end of a career, but in a way, if it's the start of that, it's actually a start of a movement that would prove reasonably successful. Yes and no. I mean, it's certainly one of those things where the American Civil War is often cited as an example of a war where the victors don't write the histories. The romanticization of the old South, the lost cause idea, the gone with the wind notion of happy enslaved peoples and plantation houses. So it was obviously had a

powerful grip on popular imagination long into the 20th century, if not even up to today. And so in that sense, the white South certainly didn't accept the terms of defeat which many Northerners would have wanted to impose on them in April 1865, and were very successful in converting Northerners and the rest of the world at various points to their idea of their own nobility. On the other hand, the main thing that Northerners and Lincoln had been fighting for was the destruction of the Confederacy and the consolidation of the United States. And that, as it were, that national security question was largely settled. People weren't completely certain about that in 1865. There were a good few years afterwards where there were continual anxiety about the possibility of another civil war,

another attempt. But really by this 1870s and 80s, that question had been largely settled. So it depends on how you look at it. If you look at it from the question of racial justice, then the civil war resolved some things by abolishing slavery, but left most things unanswered. But if you look at it from the point of view, as most white northerners at the time would have done, from the point of view of national consolidation, national security, then it was a successful resolution in 1865. Had Lincoln lived though, would things have been different, do you think? Yeah, that's such a great question, Dan. And I love counterfactual histories.

And of course, sorry, we're being naughty. No, we're not being naughty. I mean, you know this as a historian, Dan. And I love counterfactual histories. Sorry, we're being naughty here. No, we're not being naughty. I mean, you know this as a historian, Dan. I think as historians, we're always asking counterfactual questions, even if we don't always acknowledge them, right? Every judgment we make about things that happened in the past is also implicitly making a judgment about things that didn't happen. And certainly that's one of the many kind of what-ifs

of this extraordinary dramatic period in American history is what would have happened if Lincoln had not been assassinated. And I think it probably is the case that the story of reconstruction, of the way that the South was going to be dealt with after the war, would definitely have been different if it had been in Lincoln's hands. because Lincoln was a much, much, much more adept politician than the man who succeeded him, Andrew Johnson, who antagonised virtually everybody and was extremely ineffective as chief executive, drunk on important occasions, and was himself a white Southerner, albeit one who had supported the Union, and so was deeply sympathetic to white Southerners in the aftermath of the war, thus provoking a great reaction in Congress, and the whole thing was a kind of chaotic political drama. I think in Lincoln's hands, it would have been better dealt with.

Whether that would have made any material difference in the long run to the lives of African-American people in the South is more doubtful, because I think the strength of the commitment to white supremacy in the South is more doubtful, because I think the strength of the commitment to white supremacy in the South was so strong that whoever had been in the White House couldn't possibly have overcome it, in my judgment. Interesting. Well, thank you so much for that rampage through the life of one of the most consequential political leaders of the last couple hundred years. I really enjoyed that. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Thank you. you