Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Secrets of the Civil War: A Fractured America

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Welcome to the first episode in our series, Secrets of the Civil War. This won’t be a history of the Civil War like you’re expecting. The Union and the Confederacy, divided though they were, experienced incredible changes in medicine, technology, food science, and transportation during four years of conflict. It may surprise you to learn that it wasn’t solely an era of suffering and hardship; it was also an era of innovation and advancement, spies and social evolution. We’re going to explore it all. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reid Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month at Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hello, friends. I am so glad you're joining us today. This is the first episode in our new series about the Civil War. But this will not be a history of the Civil War like you're expecting. No. We will not be taking episode-long deep dives into battle strategy and troop conflicts. This is not a series about how one set of men moved into battlefield positions and pushed their enemy back into different hillside territory, or how another battalion retaliated with more cannon power the following week. No. While the battles fought during the

Civil War absolutely impacted the landscape of our country, they aren't the full story. The Union and the Confederacy, divided though they were, experienced incredible changes in medicine, technology, food, and transportation. It may surprise you to learn that it wasn't solely an era of suffering and hardship. It was also an era of innovation and advancement, spies and social evolution. And in this series, we're going to explore it all. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. where it gets interesting. Almost 175 years ago,

in a tavern in the middle of rural Illinois, a tall, gangly man entertained fellow patrons with the following story. He said, I'm reminded of the day back in Indiana when I was out chopping wood in the forest and a woman came by on a horse. She stopped and she looked at me and said, my, you're the ugliest man I ever saw. And I said to her, well, ma'am, there isn't a lot I can do about it. And she said, there isn't a lot I can do about it. And she said, well, you could have stayed at home.

And the man telling that story was a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. And the story he told is one of his favorite tales to tell people when he met them. It's the perfect example of his signature self-deprecating humor and jovial humility that endeared many to him during his life. In fact, people that knew Abraham Lincoln personally spoke frequently about his sense of humor, his storytelling ability, and also he was known to have kind of a unique, slightly high-pitched voice. I would love to be able to hear a recording of his voice, but alas, none exists. It's absolutely impossible to separate Abraham Lincoln from the Civil War, right? And not just because he was the president through its tumultuous years. His story is intricately entwined with the changes of the country as it barreled toward the war. So let's take just a few

minutes to brush up on our Civil War history with a quick review session. Chances are pretty high that you have some key facts down pat, right? You know that the war began in 1861 and ended in 1865, but the road to those four long years of battle began well before the 1860s and involved a political rivalry of epic proportions. Throughout the early 1800s, the conversation around enslavement began to evolve. Thanks to the vocal, often religious women who gained ground with the temperance movement, some of the country's leaders, mostly Northern and Western, were promoting moralization in an effort to persuade people to change their behavior by making moral choices and not because they were going to get in trouble with the law. This shift in thinking began to grow in popularity in other movements too, notably abolition. abolition. And thanks to Manifest Destiny, the belief that it was America's God-given responsibility to control what eventually became the boundaries of the United States from coast

to coast, there was also an uptick in newly acquired lands that were quickly parceled up into new states and territories. And the million-dollar question became whether or not these new acquisitions would allow enslavement or be designated as free states. Everyone had an opinion about enslavement and expansion. A short 5'4 Democrat named Stephen Douglas was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1843. His nickname was Little Giant because even though his frame was small, he was an outspoken powerhouse in politics. He was a judge and a huge supporter of policies that gave free homesteads to European settlers in order to populate new territories, and he advocated for the construction of the transcontinental railroad system. By 1848, Stephen Douglas was elected to the U.S. Senate, representing the state of Illinois.

Meanwhile, a fellow Illinoisan and rising politician named Abraham Lincoln had recently been elected to the House of Representatives, but Abe Lincoln and Stephen Douglas didn't only know each other through politics. First, the two faced off for the attention of a certain Southern belle. During the late 1830s, they both courted the very wealthy and accomplished Mary Todd. Where Stephen Douglas was short and round, Abraham Lincoln was tall and scrawny. Douglas was boisterous and fond of cigars and whiskey. And Lincoln was soft-spoken and abstained from both alcohol and tobacco. Opposites, they were, in virtually every way. Mary entertained both suitors, but in the end, she chose Lincoln, calling him her tall Kentuckian. The two men's rivalry grew from there, and before

long, the entire country would know about it. Lincoln served only one term in the House of Representatives and then returned to Illinois. Three political events saw Douglas and Lincoln come head to head. First, the Fugitive Slave Act, which was a law that required that enslaved people had to be returned to their enslavers, even if they were found in a free state. The act also made the federal government responsible for finding and returning the enslaved who had escaped and putting the enslaved people on trial for breaking the law if their owner decided to prosecute. You may be surprised to learn that both Douglas and Lincoln supported the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, though Lincoln was more reserved than his rival. His wife Mary was a staunch abolitionist,

and Lincoln's own opinions were beginning to shift. Second, Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act as an attempt to provide an answer to the question of whether or not new states admitted to the Union would permit enslavement. The act stated that settlers of new territories themselves could vote and decide whether enslavement would be allowable within their borders through popular sovereignty or the idea that the people of the state create and maintain their own political power. Many Southern politicians opposed Douglas's proposed act, claiming that new settlers shouldn't be allowed to decide such an important economic question on their own. They continued to push for the total legality of enslavement in new states. Douglas's act was

too much of a compromise for them. They felt that enslavement was crucial to their economic growth, and enslaved labor was the key to building and cultivating industry in the new states. to building and cultivating industry in the new states. But the North was also unhappy with Douglass's proposal because they wanted zero expansion of slavery in the new territories, period. And the Kansas-Nebraska Act meant that the practice of enslaving human beings would truly be in danger of spreading through more of the United States. The act narrowly passed in May of 1854, and that October, Lincoln criticized it harshly, saying it was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence. During this time, Lincoln tried to get elected to the United States Senate, but ultimately lost. In 1854, remember, U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures

and were not popularly elected by citizens. The third event that squared off Lincoln and Douglas was the ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court case in which the enslaved Dred Scott sued for his freedom in the state of Missouri. The Supreme Court ultimately decided that all people of African ancestry, whether enslaved or free, could not become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also ruled that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit the expansion of enslavement in its territories. Lincoln publicly condemned the ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford, and it became a huge sparring point between himself and Douglass. But while Lincoln openly opposed enslavement by the late 1850s, he took a pretty centrist position on the issue. He was not an abolitionist. He felt that if enslavement was ended, full stop, across all the states in the

Union, it could create chaos. He began working on his second run for the Senate in the 1858 midterm elections, and his opponent? Stephen Douglas. The Lincoln-Douglas Senate race carried a spotlight far beyond the state of Illinois. In the same way that the whole country recently watched the Senate race between Dr. Oz and John Fetterman, people all over had their attention firmly planted on the Illinois Senate race because at the heart of Lincoln and Douglaslass's rivalry was the clash about states' rights and enslavement. Lincoln gave an impassioned address, later dubbed his House Divided Speech, and he delivered it with incredible feeling and went completely without a script. In part, he said, a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.

I do not expect the union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall. But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Douglass took the stance that if enslavement was what the people of a territory or state wanted, then under the Constitution, they should have it. He didn't want the federal government to make laws that superseded the rights of individual states to govern as they saw fit. Lincoln took a different approach, arguing that there is always a higher calling that eclipses a democratic majority rule. Enslavement was morally wrong and should not continue to grow into new states and territories. But his stance was still nowhere near what we'd consider to be based in the embracement of equality. At this point in his personal evolution, Lincoln didn't believe that the races were equal in their humanity, and therefore he didn't see how giving them equality under the law would be beneficial.

He did believe that every person should have the same basic right to make a living and provide for themselves and their families, and that the union as a whole should be united in that effort. as a whole, should be united in that effort. So even just the mainstream concept that the enslaved should be given the freedom to choose what to do with their own lives was a 19th century progression, and it was a radical one. Lincoln ended up losing his Senate race against Stephen Douglas, but along the way, he had solidified a name for himself as sort of this middle ground guy who sat in between full abolition and the advancement of enslavement into the West. He took advantage of his national recognition and continued to give presentations on the issue throughout many of the states in the North and the West, and his law partner remarked that his ambition was a little

engine that knew no rest. And then, in February of 1860, Lincoln gave a truly game-changing speech in New York, the Cooper Union speech. Some state leaders and politicians were already threatening to secede from the union if a Republican was elected as the next president. So Lincoln conducted painstaking research into the views of all of the constitutional framers. Lincoln revealed that his research showed that a majority of them held the belief that Congress should control enslavement in territories and states, not the states and territories themselves. This speech helped him earn the nomination as the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States in the 1860 election.

It was a four-way race between a constitutional union candidate, It was a four-way race between a Constitutional Union candidate, Lincoln on the Republican ticket, and a split Democratic party with a candidate representing the Southern Democrats, and Lincoln's rival, Stephen Douglas, who ran as the Northern Democrat candidate. This time, Lincoln was victorious. But with four candidates running, he eked out his win with just under 40% of the popular vote. A huge portion of the country was not a fan of the lanky, awkward man from Illinois. He did not win a single Southern state. The Atlanta Southern Confederacy newspaper printed the sentiments of their region loud and clear as news of Lincoln's win spread. A scathing article read, let the consequences be what they may, whether the Potomac is crimsoned in gore and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved 10 fathoms deep in mangled bodies,

the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. I mean, those are some words, y'all. If Pennsylvania is paved 10 fathoms deep in mangled body, I mean, they were not tiptoeing around their opinion. True to their word, to secede if a Republican won the presidency, within a few weeks of Lincoln's inauguration, seven states left the Union. It was a bittersweet moment when Lincoln stepped into the presidential limelight in March of 1861. The mood was tense, and for the first time, military sharpshooters lined the path that his carriage traveled to the Capitol building as a precaution to keep the Lincoln family safe.

Not everyone who was there was cheering on the first family. But Lincoln had an unexpected ally with him, providing support. As he delivered his inaugural speech, Lincoln's longtime opponent, Stephen Douglas, stood next to him, graciously holding his hat for him as Lincoln spoke. While Douglas and Lincoln disagreed on many, many political fronts, they had both agreed on one significant point. Secession was not the answer. The union of the country must be maintained. The union of the country must be maintained. Just under three months later, in June of 1861, Stephen Douglas contracted typhoid and died. When he heard the news of his rival's death, Lincoln wept.

I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office. With insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! It's my girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests.

And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. The first seven states to leave the Union were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. More states began leaving the Union, and the federal government of the United States, needed to consider that a military force may be necessary to rein in the states who claimed to have seceded and to

preserve the Union. Charleston, South Carolina was a major hub of Southern life in the mid-19th century, and Fort Sumter was just off its shores. Federal forts throughout the South were being passively turned over to the Southern states, but Sumter was still under Union control. As the South sought to fortify what it believed was its fledgling country, their Confederate military attacked the fort on April 12, 1861, and forced the surrender of Union forces over to the Confederacy, the war had begun. Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia left the Union shortly after. The Union had a solid footing on which to wage a war. They had a larger population than the Confederacy, existing infrastructure that could produce weaponry and a more extensive transportation

system. It seemed as if they could easily conquer the South and bring a swift end to the conflict. Believing in this, Abraham Lincoln asked soldiers to sign up for only 90 days of duty, thinking that a summer of service would be sufficient. But during that first battle, which took place in Bull Run, just south of Washington, D.C., the Union was embarrassingly defeated. And Lincoln and the Union government realized that the war was perhaps going to take longer than they anticipated. Each side began to recruit large numbers of men into their militaries, around half a million each. The Union made use of the Navy in order to swiftly block almost all the southern ports and cut off the region from imports and exports that were crucial to their economy. In return, the Confederacy pushed its way into the north and devastated the Union

troops in their path. They hoped to make the north back down due to the sting of their monumental losses. Lincoln couldn't seem to get an effective general in place, and the revolving door of their military leadership directly affected their number of defeats. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. As he signed the document, he said, I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right. Contrary to what most of us were taught, the Emancipation Proclamation, which was an executive order, by the way, did not end enslavement. It was limited in a number of ways. It only applied to the enslaved population inside of the rebelling

states, not the union-loyal border states or the southern states that were already back under union control, which also meant that to be effective, the North would have to actually be victorious in order to ensure the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation. You can imagine that if the states who believed they were seceding did not feel that they were part of the Union any longer, they were not going to enforce Lincoln's executive order. They viewed him as not the president. So in order to enforce the executive order, the Union actually had to win. executive order, the Union actually had to win. What it did do, however, was solidify the North's stance in the Civil War. They were officially fighting to create a new Union without enslavement. While the pronouncement had a moral backbone to it, it also had a logistical purpose. It opened the door to enlisting free Black soldiers into the Union and bringing greater fortification to the military.

And the Union needed all the help it could get. Despite having the upper hand in terms of troops and supplies and resources, the North could not seem to find an easy path to victory. Finally, the Union was able to land two generals who built an offensive strategy that turned the tide of the war. General Ulysses S. Grant, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, was a hard-working and skilled leader who brought a much-needed Union victory in the Mississippi region at the Siege of Vicksburg. In 1864, Grant became the Supreme Commander of the Union armies, and with the help of General Sherman, the Union defended their way through the South and performed offenses that gave the Northern forces a commanding lead in the war

between the states. Sherman took his forces on the famous March to the Sea, capturing the key region of Atlanta on his way to the Georgia coast. Grant took important areas throughout Virginia, including Richmond, which had become the capital of the Confederacy. Despite continued and extensive Union casualties, Grant's resolve did not break, and in early 1865, the Confederate Army began to accept their defeat. The war ended on April 9, 1865, when the Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse in central Virginia. Over the following few months, Confederate generals throughout the South surrendered. And let's, for the historic record, be abundantly clear. This was not a war of northern aggression.

This was not a war about states' rights or a war caused by economic pressures. The economy and states' rights were certainly tied up in the war, to be sure, but we must ask ourselves the question, what exactly did the states who tried to secede want the right to do? What were the economic pressures? The answer's clear. The war was about the Confederacy's desire to continue to enslave people. Lincoln didn't live to see the Union fully restored. While he had one re-election at the end of 1864, he was shot and killed by actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth while attending the theater with his wife in April of 1865, just five days after Lee's surrender and a few weeks after his second inauguration.

The Civil War was the deadliest battle conflict in U.S. history and left around 750,000 people dead. Much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed, especially its railroads. In the months after the war, the Confederate government collapsed. Enslavement was abolished throughout the entire country. And four million enslaved people were freed. The concepts contained in the Emancipation Proclamation were eventually written into the Constitution in 1865 as the Thirteenth Amendment, which put into law the freedom of all people in the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment read,

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. But did you know that John Wilkes Booth wasn't the first man who attempted to take Lincoln's life? Before Lincoln was inaugurated in March of 1861, his personal secretary grew nervous about how many threatening letters he was receiving. So when Lincoln set out on his final stretch of train travel for Washington and his inauguration, a plan was hatched. In order to foil an assassination attempt uncovered by Alan Pinkerton and his detectives, including a woman detective named Kate Warren, Lincoln slipped unnoticed onto the sleeping car

of the train disguised in a beaverskin hat as Kate's sickly brother. When he arrived in Washington, Lincoln snuck into his hotel through a lady's entrance. The coded telegraph message that was sent communicating the president-elect's safety said, plums delivered nuts safely. And two attempts were made on Lincoln's life in 1864. As he was on horseback riding to the old soldier's home, a presidential country retreat outside of D.C., a gunshot rang out and spooked the horse, knocking Lincoln's hat onto the ground. The hat was located the next day by two soldiers who immediately saw a musket ball hole through the side of it. The shot had missed the president's head by less than an inch. A few months later, while Lincoln was visiting Fort Stevens, the officer he was standing right next to was shot in the leg.

It was later discovered that a Confederate sniper was about a thousand yards away and had been aiming for Lincoln's abdomen. And barely a week before John Wilkes Booth successfully assassinated Lincoln in 1865, before John Wilkes Booth successfully assassinated Lincoln in 1865, a man from the Confederate Torpedo Bureau was headed to the White House to blow up the dining area while the president was eating. Before he was able to get there, however, he randomly ran into a military unit that discovered his plan and arrested him. And Lincoln didn't spend his entire time in Washington focused on the politics and maneuverings of war. When he entered office, the Federal Capitol Building was in desperate need of refurbishing and expansion, and Lincoln inherited the project. British troops had set fire to the Capitol building in 1814. A rainstorm put out the

fire, but enough damage had been done to require extensive repairs. Part of the new build was a small ornamental dome made of wood and then covered in shining copper. But by 1850, the Capitol building required another expansion to lengthen each of its sides. But the little dome didn't fit the new design, and omitting it seemed out of the question. The home of the United States government needed to look the part. And so the plan was to add a larger, more grandiose dome as a symbol of the country's success and prosperity. When Lincoln was elected president, the new dome was only partially finished. And during the early days of the Civil War, the Capitol construction ceased and the

building was used for the war effort. The House and Senate chambers became soldiers' quarters, and the basement was outfitted with a large-scale bakery to produce large quantities of bread for troops. But in 1863, Lincoln decided that it was time to resume work on the Capitol Building's dome. In his pitch to Congress for resuming construction, he said, if people saw work continue on the Capitol, they would accept that the Union will go on. It solidifies our war effort to finish this structure. Despite the necessity that Lincoln saw in completing the dome, it had to seem absolutely bonkers to work on what some people probably viewed as a vanity project in the middle of a

civil war. Men were losing their lives, people were going hungry, and yet financial resources were being spent on a big dome symbol? But Lincoln wanted a visual sign of progress that the Union would live on. And in a number of ways, progress and advancement was happening across the divided country. New spy tactics like the formation of the United States Balloon Corps, where a hallmark of Lincoln's time as commander-in-chief, telegraph machines sent messages in Morse code and revolutionized communications within the war. Battlefield medicine, which advanced surgery and internal care because it had to, slowly moved its way into civilian hospitals and medical schools, cementing solutions and cures

that evolved our understanding of the human body. As citizens and soldiers got creative with the foods that were available to them during wartime, new techniques in baking and flavoring and preservation established the advancement of food science that remains the building blocks of how we prepare meals today. And while photography had made its way into the United States before the war, it became a huge industry. As photographers captured soldier keepsakes and battlefield recreations, there is even evidence that some photographers were splicing photos together and perfecting the 1800s version of Photoshop. So many facets of industry got their start during the war years. As soldiers and civilians looked for ways to get goods and services back and forth to battlefields quickly, it led to expansions in the postal

service and the creation of something a little more unexpected, travel agencies. There were even more unconventional innovations along the way, too, so get ready to hear about herds of imported camels in Texas. Yes, you heard me right. Camels. Only in Texas. I'll see you again soon for episode two. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. This episode is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reed. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder.

And it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to hit the follow or subscribe button on the podcast platform of your choice. We also benefit so much from ratings, reviews, and sharing on social media. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you again soon.