Dan Snow's History Hit - The Confederate States of America

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

The Confederacy was more than an army. It was a national project. A whole state, albeit an internationally unrecognised one, formed between 1861-1865 complete with its own capital city, constitution and even a postmaster general.In this episode, Dan is joined by Stephanie McCurry to dig into what was happening behind the front line. They get into how the secession crisis, the national building project, and its key weakness and oversights.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about the Confederate States of America now. On February 8th, 1861, seven slave states, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee, or the Deep South states, formed the Confederacy. They managed to convince four more states, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Carolina to join and waged war against the US federal government between 1861 and 1865. I watched Ken Burns's documentary when I was a kid. I did. And it got me going. Like many Brits, I became obsessed with the US Civil War. In fact, American friends listen to this. What happens in Britain is you go around, you meet friends, there's the cool subculture of little turns of phrase that you realise someone else is a big history fan. You delve a bit, you push a bit harder, and then you discover the true history fans are the ones who have a secret yearning to know more about the US Civil War. And we are starved of that in mainstream broadcasting here in the UK. The great thing about having a podcast is I can call up brilliant US academics, academics all over the world, and talk about my guilty pleasure, the US Civil War.

And today I'm lucky to have Stephanie McCurry. She's the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in honour of Dwight D. Eisenhower at Columbia University in New York. She's written many books about slavery, about the Deep South, the Antebellum South, and she's been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History as well. She is the perfect person to come on. We're going to talk about secession. How did it actually happen? And we'll talk about the Confederate States of America. What was it? It was an unrecognized state that conscripted its people, conducted international diplomacy, and engaged in massive warfare. But what was it?

What constitution governed it and how was it created? Fascinating stuff. So it's a great opportunity to talk about the Confederacy. We covered a lot of ground here. I hope you enjoy it. If you want to listen to more podcasts about US history or watch documentaries, we've got a history channel. We've got our very own history channel over here.

We're not messing about. History Hit TV. It's like Netflix, but for history. In many ways, it's better than Netflix because in return for your small, very modest subscription every month, you don't just get hundreds of hours of TV documentaries. Wonderful TV documentaries, proper history for proper history fans. You also get over a thousand podcasts only available there, exclusively available there. My podcast, other podcasts on our network, all without the ads. And you get that for a tiny subscription. If you tap on the

link in the description of this podcast, just scroll down now with your thumb, tap on it. It'll take you through. You get two weeks free. You can check the whole thing out. If you like it, you can subscribe. If not, don't worry about it. Go in peace. But in the meantime, everyone, here is the brilliant Stephanie McCurry. Enjoy. Stephanie, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation. Following the establishment of the US with the US Constitution, what is the status of secession? Were states allowed to secede? Is it in any way addressed to what happens when status of secession were states allowed to succeed is it in any way addressed

what happens when one of these states wishes to leave this new union no that is not addressed in the constitution and that is one of the things that poses so much difficulty in 1860 is that southerners white southerners who want to secede claim a constitutional right to secede. But even in claiming it, there is no article that they can point to. And they know that it's a fighting position. They know it will be opposed and denied as a right. So that argument went on from the founding of the union. It escalated over the course of the antebellum period. But there is no right of secession in the U.S. Constitution.

And I would also point out that there is no right of secession in the Confederate Constitution, even though they claim that this is a right that states must reserve to themselves. And so what is the process, like the political process by which secession could take place at that point? Or did they just kind of make it up on the hoof? They made it up on the hoof for sure. Now, to this day, defenders of the Confederacy will say that they had a constitutional right to secede. It is not in the US Constitution that a state can secede. In fact, it is not even in the Confederate Constitution that a state can secede, which I think is a game changing fact. So what they did was basically they had to run a set of elections, two secession conventions, where white men in the South voted, not all of them for secessionist

candidates. It was a tremendously difficult thing to pull off. In other words, they tried to give it the veneer of white men's democracy that the people were consulted. But there was a lot of shenanigans and fraud and coercion. And in the first instance, between December of 1860 and February of 1861, seven of 15 slaveholding states pulled this off through a series of secession convention votes. So the deep South states pulled this off, some by very dubious margins. The Georgia governor would not even release the results of the vote, but the eight upper South states either didn't vote at all or voted against it. So there was then this standoff between February and April when the war began. The Confederacy could have been seven deep South states, much, much weaker than the one they actually ended up fighting with, which was 11 of the 15 slaveholding states, including Virginia, which was crucial.

Irregular electoral behavior by the governor of Georgia. I mean, I wouldn't, you know, it's just a different world. You wouldn't believe it. Oh, no, no, you would never believe it. And in fact, one historian tried to redo the count to see what the story was. And it was so close that to this day, we don't know if Georgia voters voted to secede. So there was a lot of the production of the vote. Yeah, you're right. I mean, it all resonates very badly today. Well, maybe, yeah, maybe we'll come on to that at the end, because that's where all these conversations tend to lead at the moment. No doubt Stacey Abrams is listening very close to this podcast with great fascination. Okay,

so once they secede, secessionists, it reminds me of these early Protestants breaking away from the Church of Rome and deciding how disciplined they need to be with these new churches. What shape did the Confederacy take? This is very revealing because initially, of course, it was the seven deep south states and the capital was in Montgomery, Alabama. It was way, way down south on the Gulf of Mexico. They had a constitutional convention. They had a provisional constitution and then they pushed it through. And that constitution tells you a lot about the nation

that they wanted to build. The secessionists, of course, denied that there was going to be war, but they were already preparing for war, buying arms in Europe, buying arms all over the US, seizing forts and arsenals, all kinds of preparation, writing budgets, state budgets that had huge military buildup lines. But in February, they wrote this constitution, elected Jefferson Davis, who was relatively moderate, president of the Confederacy. So the constitution was the way they attempted to assert the legitimacy of this breakaway set of states as a legitimate nation. And of course, that question got agitated internationally all through the war and within the United States. I mean, Lincoln and his government

never recognized it as a separate nation. They always called it the states in insurrection or the states in rebellion. But they did write this constitution, established themselves as a nation and cast themselves as a, like many other countries in the 19th century, not as little states unifying like Germany or Italy, but a secessionist state. Like they claimed that they were an independence movement like Hungary or something. So that was what they said. And then the constitution was the sort of set of principles that they laid out about what this nation was going to be. And how did they differ from the language in legal and also in linguistic terms from the founding documents of the 1770s and 80s and 90s in the US? Well, this is a really interesting question,

because the idea that the Confederate Constitution is just a copy of the US Constitution is a myth that took hold after the Civil War by the 1870s, and it's maintained to this day, and it's just not true. I mean, it follows the form of the U.S. Constitution. They definitely consulted, they copied its structure, but from the first line, they start making crucial changes. There aren't tons of them, but they're decisive. So for example, it's called the Confederate States of America, not the United States of America, right? Confederate States. And Confederate implies the reserved sovereignty of the individual states.

So the first line of the U.S. Constitution are we the people of the United States. The Confederate Constitution says we the people of the Confederate States, in our sovereign capacity, so reserving that sovereign capacity, even as they build a federal government, which would come back to bite them in the biggest way possible. is very explicitly secular. So they make themselves a Christian nation. They make themselves a set of sovereign confederated states like the original union was in the 1770s before the constitution. And so in other words, they imagine a kind of weak federal government with the states holding all the power. They claimed that they were returning to the principles of the founders. But what they were really doing was making a constitution that had never existed, because if they liked the one they had, they certainly wouldn't have seceded. So they took this chance to perfect it.

And all the things that they've been fighting about up to 1860, they resolved. So, for example, the U.S. Constitution never uses the word slaves or enslaved people. Nothing. It uses euphemisms like persons held to labor, other persons, because I think they were ambivalent enough about slavery to want to reserve the possibility. They didn't want the stain of slavery on the original constitution. Confederate constitution removes all those euphemisms and uses the term slavery and slaves repeatedly. But the really important things it does

is it explicitly protects property and slaves as the legitimate property of citizens of the Confederacy and specifies that they can carry it into any other state or territory, sort of implying that they intend to expand and that when they do, slavery will expand with them and the rights of slaveholders, which had been the precipitating conflict in the antebellum period before the war

that slaveholders could not take their slaves into federal territory. Slavery was not recognized in federal territory. New states that were added to the union would not have slavery in them. So they fixed all that. And then the real kicker was, and this one really, really amuses me because they end up really regretting this one. They write a clause that says the Confederate Congress can never write any law impairing or reducing the property in slaves. So when the war gets bad and they want to infringe on slaveholders' rights and seize their slaves, for example, for labor, they can't do it. The federal government does not have the power to do anything. Slaveholders and their individual private property rights

in slave human beings is written into and rendered permanent in the confederate constitution and this is the key difference and isn't it amazing that because they didn't acknowledge that enslaved people of color were not were citizens you can't conscript them you can only conscript citizens right so rarely in history has the military service fallen so hardly on the shoulders of a slice of a population as in the confederacy because you can only conscript the white guys, the free citizens. No, that's amazing. I mean, that was one of the main things I was trying to develop in the book I wrote on this, and also just kind of explain what this meant, because you're absolutely right. And it's not only that they didn't see them as citizens. In writing the Constitution, for the most part, they didn't even

really see them as people who would have any human agency in the struggle that was underway. They were just nullities. Like, now there were a few people who said, are you nuts? Like, once this starts, we're going to have to deal with an internal enemy, which is exactly what happened. But it wasn't how they thought about it. And you're absolutely right. I mean, the population of the Confederacy is way smaller than the population of the Union to start with. And 40% of it is of the males are enslaved and unavailable for military service. So you're 100 percent correct. And the result was that 75 to 85 percent of white men had to serve. And that is why the Confederacy, as it actually was, was extremely unpopular.

Nobody was putting statues up to Jefferson Davis in 1865. It was reviled. This Confederate government, the central government, had to violate all its own principles in order to be able to wage the war because it didn't have either the manpower or the military capacity to do it. Well, that's the interesting question now is, given what we know about all the wars of the kind of modern era from the 18th century onwards, the kind of fiscal military states, the way that waging war and building these recognizably modern states and bureaucracies and gigantic data collection of people in the society, war goes hand in hand with that gallop towards

modernity. So how did the Confederacy, which actually was kind of effective at waging war for a while, how did it marry its principles with the modern exigencies of waging war? It didn't. It had to violate its principles, especially its state's rights principles, because slaveholders controlled those state governments. They also controlled the Confederate government. So they were not about to do anything that allowed the government to impede on their property rights. So for example, at the beginning of the war, the fiction was that slaves are an element of strength in war because you, okay, we don't have as many white men. They have 22 million population. We have nine, three and a half million of them are black and enslaved, but no problem. Our white men can all

go to war. We can dedicate the whole white male population to war. And these enslaved people will be home growing the food, making the things we need. So they start trying to impress them to do that. And the slaveholders themselves, there's massive civil disobedience. They will not send their valuable property, most of it mortgage, they're up to their eyeballs in debt. They are not sending them to army camps to be three feet away from the Union Army building entrenchments and so forth. So basically, as the war went on, the Confederate Congress had to impose conscription. A few months later, they imposed an exemption for white men who owned more than 20 Negroes, as they called it.

So they imposed conscription, and then they exempted the rich. So that was when you immediately got rich man's war, poor man's fight. They conscripted all these white people, which is one of the most statist things you can possibly do. So the kind of idea that the Confederate government was resisting the tyranny, right, of the federal government, which is still one of the myths of the Confederacy. This was the most tyrannical Confederate government you could even imagine. They reached right down to agrarian households, to farm households, and pulled off 15-year-old boys and all the way up to 55-year-old men. By the end of the war, 75 to 85 percent of white men

had served. But as you suggested, Dan, they also couldn't build ships, make guns. They couldn't produce the Confederate seal. They had to send it out across the blockade to England, have it made and bring it back. They didn't have the capacity to produce the symbol of their own independence. So the truly amazing thing is that Davis and Robert E. Lee and a few other people who were kind of charged with making this work did all the things that had to be done, including building a huge military infrastructure, including shipbuilding works, ironworks, mines, everything else. It was like the Prussian road to modernization, like the private sector couldn't do it. In the north, they just put out contracts. They paid through the nose, but put out contracts, and they sold war bonds to pay for it. In the Confederacy, they just built it themselves. So by the end of the war, 90% of the Confederate budget was in the War Department,

and it had an incredibly successful quartermaster and infrastructure of producing what it needed. But like at the beginning of the war, something like 98% of firearms were made in the North. They only had the weapons they had seized from the federal government. So the ones they had managed to buy before the war. And of course, as you might know, or your listeners might know, they built Confederate warships in British ports and created a tremendous international firestorm over that. I mean, it's amazing that they held on for four years. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the political leadership of the Confederate government

basically recognized that they had to produce this stuff themselves and they created the capacity to do it. But in terms of a measure of statist intrusion, it was massive. Like, as I said, the union government did all this by paying people to do it. The federal government did it by conscripting people, impressing resources, impressing food, and basically lifting off all the money of the economy and putting it into this military infrastructure. And then the other thing is like in a modern society, you can tax people. But this is not a society of wage labor or salaried labor. This is a farm, this is an agrarian society. Two thirds of the capital of the

Confederacy is in enslaved human beings. They don't have any capital and they can't tax. So they taxed food. They taxed stuff because it's not a money economy. It wasn't a wage economy. So they literally went into people's barns and took out a tenth of what they produced and usually more than a tenth to feed the army. So the backlash was just phenomenal. the army. So the backlash was just phenomenal.

If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the Confederate States of America. More coming up. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon without the bra? You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from history hit, patented History of Inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians,

and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to Patented History of Inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. 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.

You mentioned foreign ships. I'm reminded of the Confederate ship Shenandoah, which is the last Confederate battle unit to surrender. And it surrendered in the Mersey in Liverpool here in the UK. That's the last Confederate flag to come down. Speaking of, therefore, the international aspect, another function of the state is kind of foreign and diplomatic relations. Was the Confederate able to speak with one voice?

Because the stance of France and Britain were almost decisive, presumably, in the Civil War. This is one of the areas in which they were well prepared because of the power southern slaveholders had had in the US government up to that point, tons of secretaries of state and foreign affairs and so forth. So they had these very skilled diplomats that they sent to England and France, among other places, and they did wage an extremely powerful and in some ways effective campaign for Confederate recognition. And they never got outright recognition. You probably know this as a British person. They never got outright recognition, but they did manage to get a recognition of neutrality, which recognized them as a legitimate combatant, not as rebellious states or a rebellious region.

They did get this recognition of neutrality from the British early in the war, I think in 62. And it really wasn't until after the Emancipation Proclamation that the threat of British recognition of the Confederacy was dispatched with. So this was a tremendous worry for the Union government, for Lincoln's government all through the war. And it really, a lot of the hopes of the Confederacy rested on that, that Britain would recognize them. And in fact, Britain was doing all kinds of things to help the Confederacy.

But in the middle of the war, they pulled back from official recognition. And that was a real turning point for the Confederacy. I think it was because as soon as the Union became an explicitly anti-slavery mission, you know, that the war was no longer a war just for the Union, but a war for slave emancipation. You know, Britain's cultural capital was so tied up in that reputation of itself as the first and most altruistic emancipator that, and also they had been the guardian of the seas or the enforcer on the seas of closing down the slave trade, that I think that was a step too far. And that possibility faded by the middle of the war. As the reunited USA overtook Britain in the late 19th century, Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, regretted the decision,

said we should have broken them up when we had the chance. What about the enslaved people? Because what's so bizarre about the Confederacy is right at the end, they do try and mobilize African-Americans to fight for the slaveholders' republic. It's crazy. It's the craziest thing ever. Just want to say one thing about that Lord Salisbury thing is I think that is really misunderstood or at least not recognized enough is that, you know, Britain for its own reasons wanted the breakup of the United States. Like they weren't stupid. It was a geostrategic calculation and they were angling on the edges, right, in

Mexico and other places to meddle and get things. The U.S. had all these Fenians, which Britain wanted control over. So they really didn't want a powerful U.S. And I think that really is not very well understood that, you know, the U.S. was nowhere near the power that Britain was in 1861. But by 1865, after they pulled this off, I mean, Spanish and German military advisors are coming to the United States and writing home saying, oh my God, you have to see this, like, do not mess with these people. And then American military advisors are like spanning out across Europe for the rest of the 19th century. So I think you're right about that. The Europeans will have been well advised to listen to those US military advisors. The lessons of Shiloh and Tietam and Gettysburg fell on deaf

ears, I think, on this continent. But yeah, let's go on to the slaves. Tell me about the enslaved people in the Confederacy. I think this is the most interesting part of the story, certainly for people like me who are, you know, sort of social historians of politics. We used to have this whole category of history, like war and society, and that has kind of died out. But it shouldn't because these are moments of transformation because everything gets shook loose. And then, you know, the contingency is at its maximum. I mean, secession is a moment of maximum contingency, but the war is. And the situation with slaves is, it's not just the Confederacy that thinks that they can wage this war with slaves as a sort of non-entity or non-factor. But the Union initially is trying to save the Union, but without alienating these four slave

holding states that are still inside the Union, like Kentucky. And that's a big issue. So the classic way, at least now in the United States, of teaching or talking about the American Civil War is about how a war for union became a war for slave emancipation. And it doesn't really have much to do with the Confederacy at all, which I think is a mistake because that was the key terrain. But the key element of how a war for union became a war for slave emancipation is not the Lincoln government initially, it's the enslaved people themselves. And the key original place is on Confederate southern plantations and farms, where they recognize enslaved people, there's about three and a half

million of them, recognize immediately that their longstanding war against the slaveholders has entered a new phase, that they might now have allies, and that the white men who have constituted the police power over them, like literally daily, they're gone. They're, you know, they're taken off to war, and they're left behind on these plantations and farms. And so it's the enslaved people themselves who start acting in ways that push military decision making and policy making. So instead of being just a runaway or a slave refugee, you now become one who's carrying military intelligence to the enemy. And this happens in a lot of small-scale ways. And Confederate planters say this right from the start, my people are an insurrection against the state. And the state is me, les tassez-moi.

So there's these mini-rebellions, and then they spill out. And from the very beginning of the war, as the Union penetrates the southern coast, Virginia, South Carolina, enslaved people start presenting themselves in significant numbers to these Union commanders at these posts, stealing ships and moving them across the Charleston Harbor and presenting them to the naval officers across the bay, things like this. And it sort of goes from there. So enslaved people are themselves, they're constituting themselves as a military and political force, largely because of the intelligence they carry about troop numbers, positions, etc. Men and women, by the way,

when the military history gets written, the women are left out, but that's because that's what army historians focus on. But it's indiscriminate. People are leaving in huge numbers, and the Confederacy planters first, and then the Confederate states and Confederate government start to recognize the enslaved as the enemy within. And there's an Irish-born officer of the Confederacy, Patrick Claiborne, who writes a position paper at the end of 1863, basically saying, we thought slaves were an element of strength. Now we realize they're the weakest link. They're a fifth column. We have the enemy in the front and the slaves in the rear, and we have to win them to our cause. So that goes to your point about the irony that in the end, they need to conscript slave men into the Confederate army.

They have nobody left to conscript or enlist. And they know, as Claiborne boldly and his military career ended there, so this was not wise on his part. But he basically said what you're not supposed to say is we have to win them to our cause. And the only way to do that is to offer them their freedom. And he says, not just the individuals who fight for us, but all their families too. So he's talking about something close to universal emancipation.

And when Davis hears about this, he deep sixes this paper. It doesn't surface again until like the 1880s or something, but that's it in a nutshell. Like over the course of three years, they realized these slaves aren't nullities. They're actually really consequential military factors. And by 1864, the actual effort to conscript them or enlist them into the Confederate Army really takes place in the last six months of the war. And it's deeply impeded by the fact that Congress has denied itself the right to do that. So it has to go begging to the states to come full circle to where we started. begging to the states to come full circle to where we started. Now, speaking of coming full circle, secession, where are we with secession? As an Anglo-Canadian, two states that have been riven with secessionist battles, albeit far less bloody ones in my lifetime.

And we've got Spain, Italy, to a certain extent. We've got active secessionist movements throughout the world. Where are we at the moment in the US? What is the legacy of the Civil War and secession? what I think of as ancestral Confederates to conservatives who have bought the idea or find it convenient to embrace the idea that secession and the Confederacy was a very principled fight against federal tyranny and for individual rights and states' rights, which is why people wave the Confederate flag in California in invading the U.S. Capitol on January 6th last year, carrying Confederate flags. It's a free-floating symbol now of resistance to federal tyranny with no knowledge of what the Confederacy was and with a very determined denial

that it had anything to do with slavery at all, that it was ever about slavery, it was only ever about states' rights and sovereignty. So that's the cause that travels and is resuscitated constantly, and is stripped of its real meaning and its real history. I mean, most secessions fail, right? Let me put it this way. The story in Spain is extremely interesting because the Spanish government cannot concede the right of the Catalans to secede. But it also doesn't want to end up in a war about it. And the EU is in a difficult position. Right. I mean, is it supposed to recognize? I think that's a really interesting wrinkle in all of it. the fact is that Confederates seceded. And when they wrote their own constitution, they debated and voted down a secession clause in their own constitution. So no government likes to oversee its own dissolution, right? And I'm not sure that has changed. I mean, can you, the only secessionist movements that I can think of that really succeeded were ones that were negotiated, like the breakup of

the former Yugoslavia or something, where they get separated after war through a negotiation. On 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. from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. What strikes me is you've got Ted Cruz the other day was joking about on Twitter, I mean, maybe he's joking, I don't know, about Texas seceding from the union. It strikes me that it's oddly the states that one associates with being comfortable with federal power, like New York or California or

the more blue-leaning states, who in the event of obviously flagrant irregularities in the election, a Supreme Court throwing a victory to a minority candidate at next election, for example, it was talked about this time around as well. Are you going to see secessionist pressure from the other direction, the progressive direction in the US over the next four, but possibly 30, 50 years? You periodically hear this. I distinctly remember a conversation about 10 years ago with very progressive people saying, just disgusted at what Texas and so forth were doing, saying, we should have let them secede. That's the way that radical conversation normally goes. And as a historian of slavery, I'm appalled by this. Okay,

right. Put all those people behind, you know, an apartheid wall and to hell with them. It would have been South Africa until the 1970s. I mean, Texas, by the way, seceded three times. It likes to secede and it's part of its political DNA to talk about secession. I think the scenario that you're pointing to is a very reasonable one, unfortunately, but that has not arisen yet in American political discourse that we might have to think about seceding ourselves. You hear that as a quip and you hear that as a sort of, you know, bomb thrown into a conversation, but as a political, real political position, no. But if everything else fails, then I think you might hear that. I mean, it was really jarring for me during four years of the Trump administration, after being a historian of the South and slavery for so long and thinking of states' rights as an

ultra-conservative position, to recognize that in that case, states' rights as an ultra-conservative position to recognize that in that case, states' rights was the protection against the abuse of the federal government by a sitting president. So what California was able to do on its own, for example, about the border or protecting illegal immigrants or aliens, et cetera, et cetera, it was able to use its power as a separate state. I mean, I'm Irish, so I still find this mind-boggling, like it's a federalist system. It really is. Even after the Civil War, even after all that state building that you talked about, and the very common view that Reconstruction was a refounding of the United States with a much more powerful central government,

which is true. A series of Supreme Court decisions and other court decisions gutted the 14th Amendment for a long time, and states' rights never went away, including even in international affairs, if you can believe that. So it's really hard for Europeans to understand. It's part of the reason we're in such a COVID mess. We have no national health system. We don't have a set of rules for the country as a whole. States hold on and protect their powers with passion. What that means going forward, if in fact states are now using it to retrofit voting rights, like the gerrymandering process that's underway right now is really worrisome

to a lot of people. So I don't think your question is preposterous. I think it's possible that that scenario, what have we seceded, might start to come into more serious consideration. But up to this point, it's been a little bit of a sort of bomb thrown in a shocking statement rather than a serious one. Let's hope it stays like that. Thank you very much indeed. What's the name of your wonderful book? Confederate Reckoning, Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Go and get it, everybody. Thank you so much, Dan.

our school history, our songs, this part of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account so please don't ever do that can seem like a small thing but actually it's kind of a big deal for us i really appreciate it see you next time you