Factually! with Adam Conover - Skewed Civil War Stories with Christy Coleman

Episode Date: July 31, 2019

Public historian and CEO of the American Civil War Museum, Christy Coleman, joins Adam this week to discuss skewed stories from the Civil War and their influence in history, the real success story of reconstruction and what else we’re missing in history. This episode is sponsored by KiwiCo (www.kiwico.com/FACTUALLY), Blinkist (www.blinkist.com/FACTUALLY), and The Great Courses Plus (www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/FACTUALLY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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You know, the period after the Civil War? If you're anything like me, not much. All I really got out of the brief unit we spent on it in history class was the idea that Reconstruction was a time when northern carpetbaggers ruled over the South and that it, quote, failed. You know, I can also remember like a political cartoon with like an evil looking guy carrying a literal carpet full of his stuff from New York to Georgia. I mean, what can you say? It's an evocative word.

And that's it. That's all I can remember. It was a pivotal period in American history, but my textbook spent two pages on it, less time than I spent learning how to diagram a sentence, which I still don't remember how to do, by the way. The truth about history is that it's not a fixed recording we just play back. It's a story we have to actively tell

ourselves to keep alive in our memory. So what happens when we do a poor job of telling that story accurately or when we fail to tell it at all? Well, the answer is that we forget the truth and our culture rushes in to fill the gaps. History changes from something that we learn from historians to something we just receive from pop culture, movies, and fiction. And that means that our cultural memory can become dangerously skewed. And that's the case with reconstruction. Our entire image of it is completely off base. The most enduring image of reconstruction that people have, the one you might have started picturing as soon as I said the word,

is from the 1940 movie Gone with the Wind. It started as a hyper-successful Pulitzer Prize winning novel and then a blockbuster movie which won 10 Oscars in 1940. And it wasn't just any blockbuster. Adjusting for inflation, it's still the highest grossing movie of all time,, slave-owning Southern protagonists. And it represents Reconstruction as a disaster for those heroes, a tragedy in which something beautiful and pure was lost. That image, put so vividly on screen, stuck, and it influences how we think about Reconstruction to this day. And Gone with the Wind was in turn

influenced by an even earlier film that literally changed the course of cinema in America forever. Imagine sitting down to watch the first Star Wars in the theater. You know you're about to witness a spectacle unlike anything before it, a bold new chapter in the history of movies, the state of the art in cinematography and editing, not to mention a pop cultural event the likes of which had never been seen before. Now, also imagine that this massive Star Wars type movie was being presented as a true and real history, and also that that history is made up of over three hours of vile racist propaganda. That would approximate the experience of seeing D.W.

Griffith's Birth of a Nation in 1915. The movie depicted freed black Americans as evil, lascivious, and obsessed with finding ways to prey on white women, and it portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as the triumphant heroes of the South. And again, it was a smash. Woodrow Wilson played it at the goddamn White House, and the Klan used the film to recruit for decades. The movie presented itself as a faithful history of Reconstruction, and Americans took it as that. Many white viewers came away convinced that Reconstruction was a disastrous failure. And the ideas embedded in these films didn't appear out of thin air.

Dig deeper and you'll find that Birth of a Nation's racist and disgusting idea of Reconstruction was influenced in part by the ideas of a group of scholars known as the Dunning School, named after their wide-whiskered, avowedly racist leader, William Dunning. The Dunning School viewed black people as childlike and incapable of governing themselves, and it saw the North's attempt to govern the South and expand rights to recently freed African Americans as the low point of American history. According to Dunning and his ilk, order in the South was restored only when the Ku Klux Klan began a campaign of violent terror that caused the North to retreat and instituted a

regime of white supremacy known as Home Rule. Now, the idea of Reconstruction as a calamity that befell white Southerners didn't just take hold because of one historian with bad facial hair in a couple movies. This story lasted because if you were a white person living in Jim Crow America, this story made sense to tell. You know, if your goal is to uphold a racist system, it's helpful to have a false and racist history to tell. But sadly, this is the version of the story of Reconstruction that dominated for over half a century. But we now know it wasn't true. Contemporary historians have spent decades doing the hard scholarly work of putting together a more accurate history of what happened at that time.

And what they've learned is that Reconstruction was actually an unprecedented effort by the federal government to affirm and expand the rights of African Americans in a way that had never been done before. And it worked. For the first time, African Americans were able to participate in American democracy. They actually went from being slaves to being voters, and they were soon elected to state houses and even Congress. For the first time, schools were built

for white and black students, and citizenship was guaranteed for anyone born in America as a result of these reforms. If you wanna talk about failure, the true failure of Reconstruction is that when the Ku Klux Klan and its allies began their campaign of white supremacist terror, the North retreated and all those gains were lost.

Southern whites quickly imposed the Jim Crow system of apartheid and it would take over half a century for those rights to return with the civil rights movement. So the truth is that Reconstruction made America just as much as the Civil War or even the Revolutionary War before it. So if all we can devote to it

is two pages in a political cartoon, we have to wonder, what else are we missing? Again, history isn't a recording or a fossil record that we can just read and observe. It's a story that we as a culture have to tell ourselves. And when that story is wrong or missing chapters, it distorts our understanding of the present. And no one understands that better than my guest today. Her name is Christy Coleman. She is historian and CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. And previously, she led Detroit's Charles H. Wright Museum of

African American History and was the director of the African American Programs at Colonial Williamsburg. I think you're really going to enjoy this interview. Let's get right to it. Well, Christy, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. So I want to start by asking, as a entertainer who attempts to teach history through comedy, I want to know from an actual educator, how did you come to history as a subject? And what about your approach is different from the way it's commonly taught in America? Well, I came to the American Civil War as a topic of study through the job, frankly. I am what people refer to as a public

historian in that I work in museums. And my job is to, for lack of a better term, interpret what academic historians do and make it something that a general public can digest and hopefully do that in a way that's exciting and engaging and challenging and all of those things that people can make immediate connections to. So the American Civil War, though, is a really fraught topic. Really fraught. And so I think, I will say this, coming into the role, having worked in other museums, I found that this is a history that is very much alive in a lot of iterations. And regrettably, it's something that people have managed to cherry pick how they want to remember it. So there are people who, for example, they only want to talk about what happened on the battlefield. They only want to do that.

Then there are people who want to venerate. And then there are people who just want to deal with the political realities of the day and the constitutional questions and the this and the that. And then there are people who really love people stories. one of the challenges there is you can very quickly lose context. And so my job ultimately is about bringing all of this context to bear, bringing it all together, frankly, the way that people lived it. it. That sounds like such an enormous job, because what you're describing is, you know, the blind men and the elephant, and everyone having their own little piece of it that they're examining. And, you know, that makes sense, because this, I mean, the Civil War, just as one historical event, is so massive that, I mean, any of the things that you just laid out, the military history, the personal history, the personal history, the political history, that's something someone could spend a lifetime studying just that aspect of it.

That's exactly right. And there are people who do that. So how do you synthesize those things together to get that context? Well, the first thing we have to do is, you know, we really have to just look at the historical record because the reality is people didn't live their lives that way, right? Just as we don't today. What happens politically will have an impact in our communities and our families. Things that we do as communities and families can impact our politics and ultimately impact military action and vice versa. And so people of the Civil War era also are living their lives that way. They

are inundated with newspapers that all of them have a particular bias and are very unapologetic about that. There are various social movements that are taking place at the time. And so the easiest way, again, for us to do what we've done in our new museum and galleries is that we just went back to the record. Okay, so what's happening? Who are the people that help us best illustrate this fluidity? What battles help us illuminate a particular theme, and so forth. So when you break it down that way, then it's much easier to figure out what's the best way to deliver that information. So in some cases, it might be through a really dynamic video visual presentation, right? You can convey so much more in a picture than you

can with words. In another instance, it may just be the artifact itself can speak power to an idea. And then you use words and other types of images, you know, more two-dimensional imagery. So that's the advantage I think that we have to be able to, again, weave the story back together the way people lived it. And, you know, there's no question, it's one of those things, since you used the elephant analogy, it's absolutely one of those things that if somebody who has spent their lifetime or their interest, you know, pulling on the elephant's tail, well, they've got to at least see the tail before they even consider feeling around and learning that they got an elephant there. That was their entry point.

Yeah, that's their entry point, right? So we acknowledge where the entry points are, and our goal is to get them to finally see the elephant. And I think we do a really remarkable job with that. I mean, this is part of the reason why museums are the second most trusted institutions for learning. What you're talking about reminds me of, I know you got your start in Colonial Williamsburg, which is also, I have to say in my mind, sort of the archetype of plain old mainstream history is that sort of, oh, let's go see the blacksmith kind of. And then here's going to a guy with a musket. Oh, there was the battle over there on yonder hill.

But I know that you also had a different perspective towards how that kind of history could be done. How what sort of approach did you take in that work? Well, see, there is the beauty of Colonial Williamsburg and institutions that define themselves as sort of living history spaces is that they are recreating the life in many ways. But clearly there are holes there because of staffing, right? What the staffing often looks like at these institutions. So, example, the challenge at Williamsburg,

they'd always known that 52% of the population of this colonial capital were black people. Yeah. Majority of whom were enslaved, but there were free blacks there as well. They'd always known that, but they weren't able to visualize it because the staffing didn't represent that, still doesn't represent that. So there were other types olde colonial town, they had to deploy their

archaeologists, their historians, their architectural historians, et cetera, to their material cultural folks to really recreate the stuff of that 52 percent and then start deploying those items and artifacts into the spaces throughout the historic area. So even if you didn't see a person, you may have seen a thing, and that thing may lead to a question. And that question leads to discovery. So that's one of the ways that they did it. Obviously, one of the other ways, in addition to just learning those particular traits and crafts of the period and the specialization that's required with it and the history that's required to share that, they also were smart enough to recognize that theater has a place in this. the use of theater is amazing in building empathy and helping people understand sort of common humanity yeah even in the most difficult of imagery or situations um and so you know that's one of the things that they do now i think um there are occasions certainly when that can be done extremely well.

And there are other times when it's just really kitschy and I can't stand it. Well, it reminds me of what I do a little bit on on Adam Ruins, everything that we try to bring these stories or these ideas to life simply by showing you, OK, here's a person. And in our case, the sketch comedy version of a person. But in our case, it's a sketch comedy version of a person. But, you know, we try to get the wardrobe right and everything. We do period costumes and, you know, but they'll say, you know, we'll have someone who, you know, we'll have a slave or someone in Jim Crow time or someone like that say, oh, my God, this really sucks, you know, to give you that sort of modern comedy feeling.

sucks, you know, to give you that sort of modern comedy feeling. But still, just seeing the person reminds you, oh, this is something that really happened to real people. This is not abstract. Just seeing that actor in that dress. Absolutely. I mean, you know, that's one of the things that I love about how we are starting to engage with history again. I mean, I love your show. There are a few others that I'm not sure I can particularly name on your podcast. But, you know, you share space with Comedy Central, for example, right? And so I love Drunk History. I love that show.

A lot of historians love Drunk History. I love Drunk History. I love that show. A lot of historians love Drunk History. Only, you know, because you guys have found the medium to reach an audience who probably says, oh, I'm not much of a history fan. But in fact, when they, again, you have a way of humanizing and providing humor and then dig deep. And when you dig deep, that's when the discovery takes place. And so, you know, we appreciate that. It's when we see things that, you know, nothing makes a historian more nuts to see, for example,

a dramatic movie. For example, Hollywood would spend, you know, millions of dollars producing a film, and it's historically crap. You know? Yeah. That can make you crazy. As a matter of fact, there's a group of historians that every Sunday evening they tweet about a movie that they're watching together. And it's really pretty funny to follow along as they break it apart in some pretty humorous ways, too. I get so frustrated by that. I, you know, just by an example, I watched the Alan Turing movie a couple years ago.

I'm forgetting the name of it, but, you know, won an Academy Award or two. But I knew enough about the story of Alan Turing, which is a very important, you know, tragic story, to know that this is not what happened. These events did not occur. You wrote that this is this is fictionalized. And there's a level to which, you know, I I'm in the business of making history and the truth entertaining. And of course, you take some liberties. But the core of the story needs to needs to remain true. Otherwise, you end up perpetuating the same myths that we've always had. Exactly. I was giving a presentation in New York for a group of museum educators, and one of the things that I talked about is the role that popular culture plays in historical understanding. So popular culture will often either reinforce a stereotype or a historical inaccuracy, or in those remarkably rare situations, they will not only hit on sort of emotional truths, but they'll actually get the history 90% right. And that's a small group that can

actually pull that off. But they're out there. They're out there. So I want to ask you about one thing in particular. At Colonial Williamsburg, I know that you staged a reenactment of a slave auction. And that strikes me as such a profound thing that you don't normally see. And that's not something that I picture when I imagine going to Colonial Williamsburg. Yet as soon as I heard of it, I thought, well, of course, this would be something that would have occurred at the time. What led to your choice to put that on? And how do you feel folks reacted to it?

Well, you know, it's funny. It was 25 years ago that we did that. Oh, wow. And we had been doing, yeah, Colonial Williamsburg, in fact, is commemorating this year the 40th anniversary of doing African American focused interpretation. But 25 years ago is when we did that estate slave auction. And what it was, frankly, the program for all intent and purpose had been going on for years prior to where they were auctioning off varying goods, you know, and the public was there and all this.

But whenever they were talking about the auctioning of slaves, they would say a lot of slaves from the estate of so-and-so passed on so-and-so includes this. You never saw the people. And so we decided, having been doing programs at the organization for 15 years, what happens if you do see the people? Yeah. So we very carefully crafted it, very carefully redid that program so that the visitor was very clear that they had no role, but they were observers to how this process worked. And we had character actors to portray everyone from the constable and the sheriff and the auctioneer and the enslaved people who were going to be sold away, the people who were the ones who were doing the buying and the selling. It was really quite something.

And I will be honest with you, I don't think – I just wanted to do good history. It did not occur to me fully the impact that that program would have in the field. impact that that program would have in the field. The response leading up to it was one of, I mean, it just was a lot of concern, especially outside of our immediate community, because the people who were closest to us knew the excellence of the work and the real discipline and scholarship behind the work. This was not something we weren't going to be playing around with this history, right? And so they were there in large numbers in support, you know, community church groups and folks that just, again, really loved and cared for the programming that we'd been offering. And, you know, we had obviously institutional support to the point where even some key donors at the time

who were saying, if you allow this program to go on, we're going to cut, we're not writing you another check. And to have the CEO of the organization say, that's fine. Thank you for your past support. Wow. Was an extraordinary moment that I won't ever forget, frankly. And so as it happened, even the critics who came out that day to protest the action, I simply asked them to watch the program, set their fears aside and watch the program, let us do it and then criticize since they really didn't know what we were doing.

They agreed to do that. And we got them on tape, full tape, talking about how they, you know, one gentleman said I was wrong. Pain had a face. The story was real. I felt it to my core. Yeah. And that's a powerful statement. I felt it to my core. And that's a powerful statement.

And then I got letters, you know, quite frankly, 9.5 out of 10 letters that I got in the weeks and months after that from all over the world, frankly, were in support and talking about how brave we were and how important it was. But honestly, in addition to the public response, I think the thing that meant the most to me was having my colleagues at other institutions say, you know what, if you guys could do that, we at least need to be talking about the enslaved populations at our historic sites. Because many of these institutions 25 years ago were not doing that. So that's when we started to see the boom and the change and the investment into understanding and researching the lives of those of African descent who had been enslaved at places like Monticello and Mount Vernon and Mount Pillier and Poplar Forest and, you know, museum sites around the country. There were small pockets in some areas that wanted to continue to do sort of the moonlight

and magnolia tours as if, you know, product and wealth only occurred out of some kind of void. You know, the sort of the Scarlet O'Hara thing, which makes me nuts. But, you know, there are still a few places that do that. But they also only attract a certain kind of guest. And so people who really do consider themselves cultural tourists or history buffs or, you know, just really want to have good family experiences, learning family experiences, they don't tend to go to those places. And if they do, they ask, which is such a great thing. They're like, well, wait a minute. Weren't there slaves here? What'd they do? Who were they? You know, so that puts that, you know, additional pressure. And some of them will back away. Like

I read about this one site down in Mississippi. Well, you know, the slaves here, they all were just treated so great. They just loved and, you know, so we don't have to delve into what was going on. You know, and I'm like, you're just fooling yourself. Let's go back and actually look at what the historical record was there. But, again, that was a game changing moment. And it made me probably a lot more, it certainly made me more intentional in my work. Because it was just yet another example of just how powerful good storytelling could be and how evocative and game-changing it could be. And so I've kind of brought that with me with each subsequent role that I've had at other institutions. how much we lose when we don't treat those stories, when we don't, you know, use those

stories for all folks who were present at those times in history, that it's so clear that Colonial Williamsburg, without that, that's doing an auction without showing the slave auction is impoverishing our notion of history. And it strikes me that when we talk about the civil war and when we talk about reconstruction on those eras, most of the history that I've seen, most of the films that, you know, I've seen that are made are so often centered around the, the white characters in those, in those stories that, you know, the, um, oh, the, you know, brother against brother, uh, you know know off to war and and johnny comes back missing a leg and and those sorts of stories i've seen so many of those

and um i remember when i saw the film 12 years a slave for the first time and i was struck so hard so strongly by uh i have so rarely seen this story on on film and uh and been confronted with the immensity of this truth that this is you know that this is something that happened and not it wasn't even a uh it was a daily fact of life right i think one of the most chilling scenes is that in that is when patsy is getting whipped and people are just kind of going on as if nothing else is happening. Yeah. In the background. I mean, it's an extraordinary, extraordinary scene because of how real it was. Yeah. And, you know, certainly that film, you know, isn't perfect from a historical standpoint, even though Solomon Northrup left us his entire, I mean, he wrote the story for us, right? He told us what happened.

But dramatically, it's 90% there. And it is powerful. It is an absolutely powerful piece. But you're right, we don't see that. You know, somebody was asking me, he said, well, you know, why don't you think we see those kinds of films? I mean, we see, you know, we've seen all had all different types of Holocaust films and about the Holocaust and people that helped people escape and what the Nazis did're still trying to reconcile racism and white supremacy in the American psyche. Yeah. And so, you know, and I remind people, I said, you know, really the first Holocaust museums were not in Germany. They were in the United States. And so subsequently, I think it has taken a bit of time for us to even begin to scratch the surface of the impact of this institution on American ideals and ideology and practice. You know, so that's, you know, that's part of it. I mean, it is ever present from the colonial period through the revolutionary era, through, you know, expansion of the nation through the Civil War. I mean, it is present in most history of the nation, correct? That's exactly right. That's exactly right. You know, we were a slave nation, colonies and nation, far longer than we have been a free one.

And we don't want to, I mean, I'm not a historian, but if your friend had asked me that, I mean, I would have simply said we, at a gut level, don't want to confront it because it's so painful to truly confront it. Well, it is. And the fact is we're still living with a lot of the systems and the institutions that were put in place off the back of it. And people aren't willing to give some of that up or at least to break it down and build something new that is truly equitable. And that's the part that, you know, brings out sort of this bizarre behavior that we see. And so it's far more, I guess, comforting to, you know, keep kind of pressing this idea of American exceptionalism versus really recognizing the things that make us exceptional in some cases are not really good stuff. Yeah, that's the thing. You know, so many of the movies about these topics that I was

brought up with and TV shows and things like that, they either neglect issues like slavery, racism, and just sort of, you sort of look around them a little bit. Maybe there's one character off to the side who is representative of this part of American history, but they either avoid it or they solve it within the movie. A white character goes, oh my God, I just realized racism is bad

and slavery is bad. Hey guys, we got to stop doing this. And then, oh, problem solved. I am so – we are so sorry that this happened. And then that's it. What do they call that? They call that sort of the white savior movies. That's exactly what they call them.

Even taking out black agency, which we've done with the Civil War, right? I mean, you know, freedom was something that was given by all the brave men that fought for the United States against the evil empire of the Confederacy, as if black folk didn't, you know, was just sitting on a rock waiting for it to happen. No real agency themselves, not even recognizing and acknowledging the fact that they're the ones who are pushing the agenda. They're the ones who are forcing it. And so that's always funny to me, too. But, you know, it's how we've had to navigate history. I mean, so part of how we teach history, and I'm glad to say that this is changing.

And, you know, this is one of the things that I will give boomers credit for, that they really pushed and challenged the sort of indoctrinating narratives of American past. And that was done as they were experiencing injustice growing up, that generation, and seeing it for what it was. Some cases, you know, participating in it. But they did sort of force a new lens on how we think about research, American history. And so we've seen sort of this slow march towards that. And I think, you know, younger generations, frankly, you know, they just kind of demand and expect that their history is going to give them a variety of voices and that there is no singular narrow narrative. But there are people who are fighting hard against that. I mean, really hard because, you know, again, it is served as sort of an indoctrination function as well versus a critical thinking function. Yeah. There are folks who you can see when they push back against the new historical story when, you know, there's a new history. We've done plenty of history stories on our show where, you know, we did a story about how Columbus wasn't that great of a guy.

I loved that episode. Thank you. Right, right, right. Thank you. Thank you. And, you know, it's short. It's just sort of like, hey, here's what you didn't learn in school about Columbus. But we have, you know, there's so many people, you know, YouTube videos and stuff like that

push back and say, no, no, no, the original narrative of Columbus is true. And let me tell you why. and said, no, no, no, the original narrative of Columbus is true, and let me tell you why. And the reason they did that is because that history really, there's a direct connection between the way that they've been telling that history to themselves and the values that they have and how they think the world is today. And that makes it clear, if nothing else does, that the way that we tell these historical stories have a ideological purpose often, because that's the reason people are pushing back. And I have a question off of that. But first, we have to take a really quick break.

We'll be right back with more Christy Coleman. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. Okay, and we're back with Christy Coleman. So what that led me to, talking about Columbus in that moment, is the idea that the history that we hear, our cultural memory of the events of the past is not static. It's not something, you know, it's not written on a tablet. It's not something that we remember directly. It's so often a story that we started telling ourselves only recently. You know, our modern conception of Columbus or the version of Columbus I learned in school was an idea that was created in the early part of the 20th century, hundreds

of years after his death. And you spoke earlier about how the, you know, we only started looking into the lives of enslaved Americans in the, you know, in the last few decades that hundreds of years after these people, after these folks lived, we still weren't creating that history and thus we didn't have any. Well, let me be clear. We weren't creating it on a national scale. There were scholars already doing this work. Of course. Of course. Yes. So we had it, and people were having those conversations, and they were digging into it, but it wasn't widespread interest in them.

So, I mean, therein lies the difference. And you're right. The questions that we ask of the past is going to vary with each generation for what it needs. And I tell people all the time, history has never been for the dead. It is about our lived experience and trying to find some connection to the past or some lesson from the past or a way forward that we have to look at the past to help us glean that, to find our place and our space. And so that's how history has traditionally functioned. And so unfortunately, we're also living in a period where, you know, this idea of historical literacy, as well as the critical skills and the critical thinking that goes into that are really missing. And on top of that, we're living in an era where the information is out

there in vast quantities. But because people don't have the discipline of learning how to actually, you know, kind of call that material, we're in an age of self-curated content. Anybody that wants to set up a web page or a website can do it. They'll find a few little artifacts to support their contemporary need of the history and then push it. And so, you know, that's the other thing that, again, it comes down to, you know, the trusted institutions. Why are they trusted? And they're not perfect as they have done.

They are reflections of their societies as well. But they are also sometimes at least the discipline of the work is there to go beyond that. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, it does. But do you feel that we're all, do you feel that necessarily, because what I'm curious about is how this affects our understanding of the discipline of history overall. So do you feel this perspective implies that all of us are always trying to fulfill our immediate needs through history? Or is there such a thing as simply knowing what the heck happened? I think it's both.

I think it's both. I think it's both. I think we have to have a clear understanding of what the heck happened, right? Everybody has to know. But when you decide to go deeper into that, that's when the discipline is required. You either get into that work yourself or go find reputable sources to help you, not sources that are going to help reinforce your ignorance. And too often that's the case. I, you know, I have to remain hopeful or I wouldn't be in this business now for 30 years. I got to be hopeful that people are going to get it and that they're going to, you know, participate in being open and willing to hear voices they hadn't heard before or stories that they hadn't heard before that builds out the richness. Because at the end of the day, when we're talking about American history or any history for that matter, you may think you're looking sort of at a circle that's laid out in front of you.

But the deeper you dig, you realize you're actually holding a globe in your hands. You know what I mean? And it's just being, it's just a matter of wanting to pivot it enough to see just how remarkable that thing is. But if you're one of those people who I just want, this is all I want right here. I don't want to look at anything else. Don't mess with me on what I think about X, Y, and Z. We have a lot of those out there. And it just makes me crazy. And since I'm a bubble buster, I love to challenge that. Let's bust some bubbles.

We've been talking about how we go about the process of examining and teaching history so much. Let's talk about some actual history. the process of examining and teaching history so much, let's talk about some actual history. What are the primary bubbles that you feel need to be busted or that you try to bust about our understanding of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period, which gets so much less attention compared to the war itself? Right. So the first thing that I try to do is break down this idea of a unified North and a unified South. That's the first thing that has to go because it absolutely is not the case. Second thing is that I try to break down is that slavery and racism was purely a Southern phenomena. It was not. It was not.

Third thing that I break down is this idea of that freedom was given versus hard fought for. So that's kind of where I start. And then we can get into actions and moments. Basically from April until September of 1863 was a very tumultuous period. And there are people who love to say, well, Gettysburg was a turning point. No, it wasn't. It was a series of many things that happened in 1863 and subsequent to that, that really are pivoting and changing how the nation was trying to define itself, right? So one of the things, examples I give is everybody likes to talk about Gettysburg and people love to go to Gettysburg and, you know, oh, to walk on those hallowed grounds where, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,

that's right. All of that happened out there. But here's another thing you may or may not know about Gettysburg. On May 1st of 1863, the Confederate government passes a resolution because they are trying to deal with the reality that they are going to encounter black troops in uniform fighting for the United States. So they pass a resolution on May 1st saying that any black troop that they fight that is captured, they are either to be enslaved or to be killed. Wow. Period. Wow. No POWs. No POWs.

Nope. Nope. And so Gettysburg, that's exactly what happens. Even the free black population that had been living around the small town of Gettysburg were terrified and were trying to get out. Yeah. Because people were being kidnapped. The Confederate Army was – Lee's Army was kidnapping these people and having them sent back. They were rounded up and sent back and sold into slavery.

I mean that puts a whole different look on what happened on those fields. The fact that blacks are present because the Confederate Army, and here's the other thing, because they knew they were going to be, you know, Lee knew he was going to be going into Northern Territory, had a number of the camp slaves

that would make up a huge percentage of the army because they're hauling the mules and they're hauling the weaponry and they're digging the trench works and all that manual labor that the Confederate Army needed. It's being done by an impressed slave population where slaveholders were sending their slaves to be a part of the military effort, not as soldiers, but as labor. You know, right? So you got these folks, but they don't want to bring them into the North. They don't want to bring them into Pennsylvania because that's a free state.

So they march forward because they don't want to have their slaves say, hey, we're out. Dash off, right? We crossed the line. We're free now. We crossed the line. We're free now. Yeah, we crossed the line. We're free now. You think these folks didn't know it? They knew it. So it puts a whole different piece on Gettysburg. Yes, it was brutal and three days of fighting, you know, in July of 1863 and all of a sudden, but you've also got this other thing happening that most people don't know a thing about when looking at Gettysburg.

So we kind of, not kind of, we tried, again, to dig a little bit deeper into this. We look at the whole question of, well, you know, it was really about states' rights. We've all heard that one, right? I mean, let me just say, the story you just told me directly indicates it was not just about states' rights. If you're fighting an army, if you have two armies fighting,

and one of the army has a large slave population supporting the army, it seems like at least part of the war is about slavery, especially if you're, again, having to make decisions about where you're moving the folks based on which states are slave states.

Like slavery is clearly threaded through the entire conflict. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And the other piece that I talk about a lot is this concept of states' rights. That's sort of a post-war definition that evolves. You know, yes, people are talking about it to a certain extent, but where states' rights actually was born was in Northerners and Unionists' lexicon, and it was in direct response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Northern Free Territory said, listen, the federal government just passed a law that basically usurps our state laws where we have abolished slavery.

And the government is telling us that if a slave, a former slave runs away, comes to us for freedom, that we have to now use our resources to return those people. We're not doing it. We're going to advocate our state's rights. Well, the South was furious about that. How dare they invoke state's rights? How dare they do that? You know, so that's one that I love as well, is the conversation around state states' rights because the northern states had made clear what their intent was. They were not going to participate in this. Wall Street bankers, insurers, shipbuilders in Connecticut and Rhode Island that very much made a fortune off of the slave trade. Right. And so for them, they were just trying to find – at a minimum, find a compromise or some kind of peace initiative that would preserve the institution enough to preserve the wealth that was being made off of it, North and South. And in fact, post-war, immediate post-war, you have a number of, especially the white

elite Southerners, who actually relocate to places like New York, right? I mean, quite frankly, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, his wife and children will relocate to New York and she actually, Verena Davis, I'm sorry,

Verena Davis actually becomes a reporter for a magazine newspaper in New York based out of New York. Yeah. I've never heard that before.

That's amazing. I mean, see, there you go. New stuff you learn. Reconstruction, though, the thing that's maddening about Reconstruction is one of the most progressive periods in American history in terms of the expansion of rights of citizenry in the United States. It's not just impactful on black communities. It's impactful on immigrant communities that have been here for generations and newly arrived and their children. It's when we get free public education for every person who wants it. It is expansion of libraries and roads and railroads. And all of this is being done by

eligible male voters, right? It is a new day. It is a new dawn of freedom, the way that people, this moment in the sun. But the way that we have been taught it around the country is that Reconstruction was a failure. Reconstruction wasn't a failure at all.

Reconstruction was abandoned. And the narrative that it was a failure at all. Reconstruction was abandoned. And the narrative that it was a failure is a direct result of former Confederates and former Southern white elites who had been stripped of their political power. They still had their money. New research has shown us that they didn't lose a lot of money at all during the course of the war. They had investments in other nations. They had investments in New York banks. They came out just fine post-war. Those families that had wealth before the war had wealth after. What they resented was having their political rights taken away from them. What they resented is having formerly enslaved now able to vote, What they resented is having formerly enslaved now able to vote, being able to help make – and these folks were not just randomly going.

They were holding – and I'm talking about the newly freed people who were men who were voting. They were holding informational meetings, educating themselves about issues and policy and politics. And they are – I mean, and taking it really seriously, right? And there were black office holders at that time? Absolutely. Congress people? Black office holders, most of whom were – those initial groups were freemen, had been freemen prior to the war. So they were already educated and had various trades or businesses or what have you that

became those initial groups of black legislators, both at state and local levels. But so the southern white elite resented the fact that this was happening. And furthermore, they resented the fact that there's a military presence. And some of that military presence still included black soldiers who are patrolling and protecting the new freemen. This was an affront to social order in an extraordinary way. As soon as they are able to get that political power back because Northerners were growing weary of the cost of maintaining all of this, they were growing weary as more of these formerly enslaved are moving into urban centers in the North, trying to find employment and work and a new life for themselves and their families as folks were traveling all over the country. You have Native American

groups who had also participated in the Civil War. Twelve, I mean, I'm sorry, 20 different Native nations are participating in the American Civil War. Four for the Confederacy, the other 16 for the United States. They're trying to renegotiate what it means for them as sovereign nations or whether or not they will be a part of the United States now that they fought. So new treaties are being signed and exercised. Some are being broken. So there's chaos there. I mean, it is a period of – there's just so much going on, and there's been so much loss and suffering and dramatic change to American life, both political, social, militarily, and otherwise, that the Reconstruction era, again, it didn't fail. It was abandoned.

It just got to be more than the majority was willing to contend with. Yeah. And the mistake of thinking that, well, we've been doing this now for 12, 15 years. They ought to be able to handle it on their own now. We're done. Just pull up stakes. Let's get out of here. And that was all that was needed along with frustration about all of this and the scandals of the 1873 financial crisis was also another key factor that Congress would then give the right to vote back to these former Confederates.

And when that happened, the tide shifted and we would go through another hundred years of disenfranchisement. Yeah, that is so wild to contemplate because, I mean, we are brought up in this country, you know, we do hear about Jim Crow and the civil rights movement and, you know, the struggle for civic participation and political participation by people of color. But we are not taught that we had it over 100 years ago and that then we lost it, that it was a brief moment, and then things slipped back and we had to fight for them again. That's so stunning. That's exactly right. It is.

I give the example here in Virginia, the election of 1876, there were roughly 140,000 African-American men who were registered to vote in Virginia. There are roughly 140,000 African-American men who are registered to vote in Virginia. By 1900, that number is down to 10,000. Wow. And half of the white men who were not moneyed, who had been given extended the right to vote because of the 15th Amendment in 1868. the right to vote because of the 15th Amendment in 1868. Those white men who had immigrant communities who were generational and people who didn't have a lot of property who were now allowed to vote, half of them would lose their right to vote by 1900. So this wasn't just disenfranchisement of black people. This was disenfranchisement of the vast majority of Americans in favor of this

elite white supremacist perspective. And then to control that narrative coming into the 20th century, it was, again, trying to get the poor white to align with that elite versus the black folk with whom they probably had the most in common and it was successful and that is another story that we that's another story in another conversation right well i mean i mean this story is not one that we tell ourselves it's it's a you know it comes back to why we don't make you know movies, movies about slavery as often as we should, that this is, I mean, what you're describing is so contrary to America's story about itself, because, you know, the story we normally have, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice every

day is a little bit more just and equal than the one that came before American democracy. You know, well, it started as just the white landowners, but then slowly and steadily we improved and we expanded it to folks again and again. And, hey, the Civil War was a big inflection period where, you know, a big inflection point where that happened. But we, you know, we were on the side of justice and we won. And gosh, darn it, we did it. And what you're describing is that, no, right right after that we had a brief period of democracy and then we slipped back into being an apartheid state i mean what you're describing is is a country that is not democratic for a huge portion of its history and that had the opportunity and we're not even talking we haven't even talked

about what happened to the women yet right yeah yeah i mean yeah that's uh you know you're right i mean it's it isn't the story that we tell ourselves but if we told ourselves it correctly if we told ourselves it um fully then we can see where those demons are and we know when we're under threat when we see those behaviors repeating themselves yeah when they these you know because frankly some of the things that we see in current political climates in terms of you know various state legislatures that are you know shifting or trying to make voting more restrictive or you know the various things. I mean, the 15th Amendment is pretty doggone clear. Right. You know, the right of the citizen to vote shall not be abridged by the state. Period. Well, it goes on.

Okay. Sorry, they were long winded. No, it goes on to say, you know, regardless of previous condition of servitude. Ah. on to say, you know, regardless of previous condition of servitude. Right. So there's other ways, you know, then they come up with poll taxes and they come up with, you know, well, if you committed a crime, then no, we're going to strip you of your right to vote. And if you did this, we're going to, I mean, you start, you know, if you live within this particular jurisdiction, and we don't have any, we don't have to have voting, you know, easily accessible to you, or no, you can't.

One I read in the paper recently, well, if you're elderly and you can't get yourself to the polls, you can't get a ride. I mean, there's actually a legislature looking at that that are preventing people who may not have transportation from getting rides to the polls. Can you imagine? I mean, it's just stunning. But these are the kinds of things. And if you don't understand how people have used these varying techniques to disenfranchise, then you can't be on the lookout for them. You can't fight against them. It's nice to stay in the nice little bubble and think, well, of course, anybody who wants to vote can vote.

know, it's nice to stay in the nice little bubble and think, well, of course, anybody who wants to vote can vote. Well, the impediments that are put there are very real. And so. And they're put there for a reason. And they're put there for a reason. So you have to, you know, we just have to know what the history is so that we can be more mindful about these things. So, I mean, that's why it keeps me fascinated, needless to say.

It definitely keeps me fascinated, you know, how we navigate all this. And in terms of sort of the progressiveness, it gets better over time. What we actually see, not just with American history, but in history in general, is there's always this sort of expansion and contraction in general is there's always this sort of expansion and contraction that takes place. And, you know, you have this expansion of human rights and dignity, and then it snaps back like a rubber band. And sometimes far more restrictive than it was previously. And then, you know, you creep a little bit further. So, yes, the arc towards justice is there.

It does lean towards there. But you have these expansions and contractions that happen as you are moving that direction. So none of it really should surprise us when we see that happening. The hope is that those periods of contraction become shorter. That's what you hope for. And the one that we're discussing was not short. It was a very long period of time. No, it was a very long period of time.

Yeah. Right. That's right. But, you know, when you think about it in the arc of sort of U.S. history, though, what happened was an extraordinary expansion during the Reconstruction period. From the early sort of colonial settlements to that moment, most American character and the ideal of American democratic republicanism expands significantly. But it expanded in this case where the snapback, because it hadn't had a period of expansion like that, the snapback not only snapped back, but it stayed in a particular place. So we wouldn't see that continual move, that continual arc, until we got into the 50s, 60s, and 70s and really saw— Half a century later.

Half a century later. But again, most of it had been periods of constriction. So that rubber band wasn't being pulled very hard. Yeah. And when it did, that's what we saw. So it just took some time. And I think the difference this time is that we had roughly 50 to 60 years of expansion on it in the progressive period in the modern era. And that's why we're seeing such a tremendous backlash against it now. But at the end, we'll definitely come out ahead of where we are. We

just got to acknowledge it, deal with it, figure it out, fight it to keep that expansion going. That's my two cents from a historical perspective. And as an American who looks at this and says, we'll never reach our ideal until we deal with these assaults on it. Yeah, I mean, that's a very optimistic two cents to have for someone like yourself who has such a clear-eyed view of how far short we've fallen.

I mean, this issue, and let's maybe have this be our last question. I'm really curious about your thoughts on this. As myself being an entertainer and educator, I find that one of the hardest types of arguments I make are the ones that interfere with our self-conception, either personally or nationally. And our self-conception, either personally or nationally. And our self-conception about America, I mean, even America's critics, and I count myself as a

loving critic of America, you know, often find ourselves having to go back to the uplifting version, you know, that, hey, we've had some trouble in the past, but we've always, you know, that, um, Hey, we've had some trouble in the past, but we've always, you know, bent, bent that arc of history forward. We've always, uh, uh, you know, expanded, expanded the rights to, to more people, et cetera. And, and often by doing that, we sort of let ourselves off the hook a little bit. Hey, you know, the founding fathers didn't have it all right, but you know, uh, we expanded, we expanded the right to vote over time, even though they left, you know, uh, everybody with themselves out at first, uh, you know, we expanded the right to vote over time, even though they left, you know, everybody with themselves out at first, you know, they had a great idea in mind and we were able to fulfill that history. And so, you know, America is still a wonderful place because

it took a little time, but we got there eventually. And when we tell stories that contrast with that, that contradict that, that actually, no, we backslid horrifically in a way that we don't even acknowledge today it it is hard it hurts our self-conception it it it's it's a blow to the ego it says oh i thought i was good but i'm bad is the is the feeling and so we react we react against that and i feel like that's so often, you know, part of the personal snapback that people will have is against that sort of negative change their self conception. I'm curious about how you approach that as an educator. And and what do you what would you tell folks listening about how they should conceive of America differently having heard this? about how they should conceive of America differently, having heard this?

Hmm. Okay, so— Big question. Yeah, big question. So I think if I were to simplify the thought, I think about it kind of like this. It's kind of, you know, we're all a part of this family, right? And every family's got its kooks, and every family has its idealists, and every family has its idealists and every family has its drunks. And you can still love that drunk uncle, but let's not pretend he's not an alcoholic so

we can deal with the issue. And so I think that that's kind of where we fall down. We often don't want to look critically because it does mean that we've got to put in the work. That's what people, I think, are really afraid of. They don't want to put up the work. They don't want to break down the status quo because they found their place within it. But if we really believe, if we really want to say that what the founders, even though the founders didn't intend for it to include everyone, they nonetheless gave us a blueprint that was bigger than themselves and their own shortcomings. And I think we as Americans have a responsibility to make real the ideal of a populace that is educated, a populace that is engaged, a populace that is looking for the common good, and a populace that is inviting and welcoming, and e pluribus unum, as the founders said, out of many, one. Which suggests an embracing of our differences to find ourselves.

So that's part of the reason why I can still be kind of Pollyanna, because I think the experiment that is America is an extraordinary one and a painful one, but it is still worth being on the journey. That's a beautiful sentiment, and I think that's a wonderful note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the show to talk to us about this. Thank you so much, Adam. It's always fun. I'll see you the next time. Thank you so much to Christy Coleman for coming on the show. I hope you got as much and learned as much from that interview as I did. If you enjoyed it, please consider giving us a rating or review wherever you subscribe. Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, wherever you do it.

It helps us out a lot. I would like to thank Dana Wickens and Brett Morris at Earwolf and our researcher, Sam Roudman. And of course, thanks once again to Andrew WK for our theme song. You can follow me at Adam Conover on Twitter or anywhere else on social media. That is it for Factually this week. We'll see you next time. That was a HeadGum Podcast. Heroes