Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Secrets of the Civil War: The Rocky Road of Reconstruction

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

After four years of fighting, the Union had persevered in bringing the seceded states back into the fold. But the newly reunited country had a great deal of healing to do. Reconstruction took over a decade, and the passage of several constitutional amendments, to create new scaffolding. And even as a new century dawned, the United States was as segregated as ever. 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

Hello, friends. Welcome. So glad you're here and joining me for the final episode in our series, Secrets of the Civil War. Wilmer McLean stood in the front parlor of his home in the village of Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, and watched as the Union soldiers around him took his tables, chairs, and dozens of other household items to keep as souvenirs. They wanted to remember the historic event that they had just experienced. But for Wilmer, it was a moment of deja vu. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Four years earlier, the first Battle of Manassas, technically the first major battle of the Civil War, had been fought on Wilmer McLean's farm in Prince William County, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C.

Wilmer was not especially keen about being so close to the action. A cannonball had literally dropped through his kitchen fireplace during mealtime. Nope, he must have thought, I am too old for this. He was nearing 50, so he moved his family about 130 miles south to Appomattox County, Virginia. It was a small community and safer, he guessed, way too out of the way from where the war action would be happening. Four years. He got four years of peace. And then on April 9th in 1865, the Civil War officially concluded in his parlor when General Robert Ely finalized the surrender papers to General Ulysses S. Grant. The Virginian wholesale grocer put it best when he said,

the war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor. And in case you're wondering, the McLean family moved again without their pilfered table and chairs into Alexandria, Virginia, where Wilmer spent a few years before his retirement working for the IRS. That April 9th surrender in the McLean house signaled the end of the nation's largest war, which of course had been costly and bloody. Around 700,000 people, 2% of the then population, had died. And what's more, one in 13 of the veterans who had survived the war went home as amputees. Losing a limb was a very high price to pay, especially for farmers who worked the land for a living. The South, where most of the fighting

occurred, was already devastated. Towns and fields burned, and the economy was in shambles. Two years earlier, at a memorial for the dead at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln intentionally called on the Union to persevere for a single national ideal, saying, We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth. After four years of fighting, through which the Union had persevered through terrible conditions, victory was finally theirs.

But the newly reunited country had a great deal of healing to do. Reconstructing the country would take over a decade and several constitutional amendments. And even as a new century dawned, the United States was as segregated as ever. In 1869, the Texas v. White Supreme Court case ruled that secession was unconstitutional, ruled that secession was unconstitutional. And the 11 states that made up the Confederate States of America did not have the right to secede from the United States. So let me say that again, for everybody in the back, you know who you are. The United States is an indestructible union from which no state can secede. Final answer, I don't need to photo front.

The ruling meant that the union was deemed permanent, and it ended the debate about whether or not states could voluntarily leave, or even if the Confederacy had in fact left. Now, individual states can have their own laws and regulations, but they are ultimately beholden to the supreme laws of the federal government, which is to say, federal laws trump states' rights. Article 6, Clause 2 of the Constitution, which was ratified 80 years prior to the Texas v. White case, is the Supremacy Clause. It says that the federal constitution takes precedence over state laws and state constitutions.

But it's one thing to make a ruling in a federal courtroom and a very different thing to put it into action. We still struggle with acting out this balance today, right? States' rights versus federal power is probably one of the most enduring debates in this country. What constitutes overreach and infringement? Where does state sovereignty begin and end? Just because the Confederate states lost the war didn't mean their opinions on personal liberty and enslavement changed overnight. They weren't exactly rolling up their sleeves to get to work, and most people in both the North and the South still held very specific ideas about the enslaved who had been emancipated

and where they belonged in the hierarchy of society. General Sherman's march to the sea in early 1865 had left a large portion of Georgia burned to the ground. Many people in that torched path had fled, leaving their land abandoned. As part of his master ambition, Sherman instituted Field Order Number 15, which was a plan to redistribute this land to the formerly enslaved. You may recognize the saying, 40 acres and a mule, and that was what the wartime order aimed to issue to the people who had been freed from enslavement. Sherman believed that redistribution of this land in Georgia was important because it both punished Confederate landowners for their role in the war, and it also provided the Black population with the land and resources they needed to begin a new life out from under the confines of enslavement.

But just five days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, whatever plans that existed for Reconstruction that were on the table were thrown into uncertainty. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee and a former enslaver, became the new head of the crumbled nation. His agenda would take the rebuilding promises in an entirely different direction. Andrew Johnson was not on board with Sherman's Field Order No. 15 plan. Instead, he used the executive power of clemency to pardon ex-Confederates. Now, in full transparency, before his assassination, Lincoln himself was not stingy with the pardons either. During the Civil War, he granted 64

pardons for Confederates for things like treason, conspiracy, and rebellion. But Johnson proved to be even more lenient. And even though he had been a Southerner who stayed loyal to the Union, he backtracked on some of his wartime pronouncements that treason needed to be punished. Instead, he gave amnesty to any former Confederate who owned less than $20,000 in property and who swore an oath to the Union. By the way, the story of Andrew Johnson at his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln had a different vice president during his first term. And then when he gets sworn in in March of 1865, Andrew Johnson becomes the vice president. He was literally only vice president for a few weeks before he becomes the president. Andrew Johnson was rip-roaring intoxicated at his own inauguration.

It was the stuff of legends. It was embarrassing. Lincoln was like holding his head in his hands. Members of Congress listened to his speech that went on and on and on. And they wrote letters home to their wives of like, you're never going to believe what just happened. It was not an auspicious beginning. And then just a few weeks later, Abraham Lincoln was dead. Wealthy Southerners had to appeal directly to Andrew Johnson in order to receive their pardon. And he enjoyed seeing them grovel and flatter him so much so that writer and abolitionist Ralph Waldo Emerson called him out on it and was like,

you couldn't resist their condescensions and flatteries. you couldn't resist their condescensions and flatteries. What's more is that Johnson feared giving power to a newly emancipated Black population. He granted over 13,000 individual pardons of ex-Confederates, voting men, who would check the political power of the Radical Republicans who wanted Black civil rights. The radical Republicans were a faction in Congress, by the way. He did not welcome Frederick Douglass or other well-known Black abolitionists to meet with him. He publicly stated that the United States was a country for white men. Where Lincoln had proved himself to be open to compromise and evolution of thought,

Johnson was not. So when Johnson started pardoning highly influential Southerners who had been a major part of the Confederacy, it took away any real leverage the U.S. government may have had to make sure that the South was rebuilt with Black civil rights as one of its building blocks. Andrew Johnson was in a hurry. And it was just the beginning of his Reconstruction plans. I want to take a moment to make a side note about one very particular Confederate general whose post-war pardon was soured by what we'd call a bit of poetic justice. At the start of the war, General Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary left their 1,100-acre estate in Virginia on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. By 1863, the U.S. government confiscated the property, and Lincoln gave permission for a cemetery to be built on its acreage, including a burial vault in the estate's former rose garden. The idea was that should Lee ever return,

he would always have a reminder of the Union lives that had been lost in battle. When the war ended, the Lees quietly looked into reclaiming the estate called Arlington, but ultimately never returned to the home. In 1877, their oldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, sued the federal government for confiscating Arlington illegally. The Supreme Court agreed and gave it back to him. But what could the remaining Lee family do with an estate full of graves? George Lee sold it back to the government for $150,000. sold it back to the government for $150,000. And over time, 250,000 soldiers would find their final resting place in what is now Arlington National Cemetery. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery passed in January of 1865 before Lincoln's death. But Johnson spent most of his time in office butting heads with

Congress over what came next. Former Confederate states had not yet been readmitted to having a place in Congress. And so as a result, Congress was made up of mostly Northern Republicans. was made up of mostly northern Republicans. Johnson wanted the South to recover quickly, so all of his pardons served a logistical purpose. The southern state governments were given free reign, essentially, to rebuild themselves as they saw fit. Additionally, all the land that had been confiscated by the Union army and distributed to the formerly enslaved reverted to its pre-war owners, the white enslavers. As a result of Johnson's leniency, nine southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully enacted a series of laws known as Black Codes that were designed to limit freed black people's activities and ensure their

availability to serve whites as a cheap labor force. These repressive codes, which restricted the rights of black people to own property or land, told them what kind of jobs they could have and find them if they didn't fulfill the labor contract that they signed, frustrated the radical Republicans in Congress that had been working toward a reconstruction goal that included Black civil rights. In an attempt to rein Johnson in and regain some control, Congress passed the Equal Rights Act and extended the laws surrounding the Freedmen's Bureau. And they sent the bills to Johnson for his signature. The Freedmen's Bureau was originally

established at the end of the war as a temporary organization charged with assisting the formerly enslaved people with logistics like provisions and shelter. Congress renewed the charter for the Bureau in 1866 so they could expand their efforts and organize for more lasting aid, like reuniting Black families and teaching them literacy skills. Johnson vetoed the extension. He also vetoed the Civil Rights Bill, which defined all people born in the United States as national citizens without distinction given to their race or color, stating that it interfered with the municipal legislation of the states. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the first major bill that still became a law, even though the president vetoed it. That was how much Congress wanted to pass it. It was not even close. They overrode his

veto. Because even though Johnson enjoyed strong support in the South, his support in Congress was at an all-time low. And look, it's not like the war ended and the U.S. government turned into a heroic group of politicians who championed equality and inclusion. No. But even moderates in Congress were over Johnson's refusal to see the forest for the trees. The vast majority of them knew that if Reconstruction was going to work, if the country was going to have the strength to recover, then there was no room for arguing the same old pre-war states' rights arguments. The nation needed structural change, and that's where the 14th Amendment came in. The amendment, passed by the Senate in 1866, forbade states to deprive any citizen of equal protection of the laws. It made a pretty big change in federal and state relations. In fact, it might surprise you

to know that up until the conclusion of the United States Civil War, the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. It only applied to the federal government. Of course, we now think that the Bill of Rights applies to the state government as well. You know, like if you think about the First Amendment that says that Congress shall not restrict your ability to practice your religion, free speech, restrict your ability to practice your religion, free speech, assemble, etc. Right? We interpret now Congress to mean the government as a whole, and that includes your state government. Prior to this time period, that was not the interpretation. Congress meant Congress. Congress did not mean your states. So let's talk about this Congress. Who were they? Back in the 1860s, the relatively new Republican Party contained a small faction of politicians I mentioned before. They called themselves Radical Republicans.

Today, we would consider them to be highly progressive, highly progressive by United States standards. They were abolitionists. And in the Reconstruction era, they were led by Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens. Thaddeus constantly clashed with President Johnson and insisted that the federal government remember the crimes of the Confederacy and punish them accordingly. Under Lincoln, he pushed hard for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved. And under Johnson, he believed that all Blacks should have a say in the South's future and that land should be redistributed to them. The Radical Republicans supported federal civil rights for Black men, although it's important to reiterate that these rights were not extended to Black women,

and the radical Republicans were gaining in numbers and power. 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! 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 Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. 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. In 1866, Johnson was ready to get rid of the Republican majority in Congress. He was not amused. He held a convention to try to gain more support for his agenda, and he embarked on a speaking tour around the country. But it did very little for him.

It was probably being drunk at the inauguration. That was it, right? It wasn't a good start, I'm telling you. it, right? It wasn't a good start, I'm telling you. In between talking about his policies, he would diverge into complaints about the lies of the press and the radical Republicans, likening himself, no lie, to Jesus and the Republicans to Judas. Of course, meaning that he was being betrayed by members of Congress. And if you're cringing, you probably should be. That is the correct response. His speeches regularly led to brawls between his supporters and his detractors. He gained no ground, and the Republicans swept the midterms. And they wasted no time in crafting the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which gave

Black people a voice in government for the first time in American history. It said that each state was required to pass a new constitution, and that in order for the constitution to pass, it needed to be supported by the majority of its state voters, including Black voters. The act weakened Black codes, and we'll get into this shortly. Jim Crow laws would erupt in full force soon enough. The law also required Southern states to officially ratify the 13th and 14th Amendments. Guess who vetoed the Reconstruction Act of 1867? I'll give you one guess. Yes, you're correct. It was President Andrew Johnson. With the huge majorities the Republicans had in Congress, though, they just overrode his veto again, and the act became law. Around the same time,

Andrew Johnson did something else that made Congress decide to take drastic measures. He fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who, like Thaddeus Stevens, spoke loudly about the failures of the president. Edwin Stanton, by the way, was at Lincoln's bedside when he died and was the calm head that prevailed. He famously said of Lincoln, now he belongs to the ages. And then he ordered a full lockdown of the city and commanded the war department's detectives to search tirelessly for John Wilkes Booth and any of his accomplices. Prior to his death, Lincoln had spent a lot of time discussing his plans for reconstruction with Edwin Stinton, and the Secretary of War did not appreciate that Johnson,

And the Secretary of War did not appreciate that Johnson, who had promised to uphold those plans, completely disregarded them at every opportunity. So President Johnson fired his critic, or at least he tried to. Fearing that something like this would happen, and also because Johnson had a pattern of things like this happening, Congress passed a law called the Tenure of Office Act, which restricted the ability of the president to remove an official that Congress had already approved. When Andrew Johnson tried to fire Stanton, it was the domino Congress needed. And when we talk about the Tenure of Office Act, it would be like Congress saying to current President Joe Biden, you are not allowed to fire your Secretary of Defense, your Secretary of Education, your Secretary of Labor. If we have already approved them, we also need to give approval for their dismissal. And the reason they wanted to do that

is because he kept trying to get rid of people. So when he tried to get rid of another person, when he tried to violate the Tenure of Office Act, it was grounds to impeach him. Secretary of War Stanton refused to leave office. like, literally. He locked himself in the War Department until the Senate finished the impeachment vote several months later. If you've been at all wrinkled over the childish spatting happening in this episode, I'd like to now state that Stanton's sensible wife, Ellen, rode to his office to ask him, are you out of your ever loving mind? She did not want him making a stand by sitting around in his office 24 seven. She knew this impeachment process would take months. They fought with each other publicly enough for it to be recorded,

and when she left, she refused to send him any provisions of clean linens from their home. On February 24, 1868, the House of Representatives voted along party lines to impeach. Impeach, by the way, means to charge with a crime. It is a common misconception that impeach means to remove from office. It means to charge with a crime. And the House of Representatives has to decide, do we charge this person with a crime against the United States? Then it's the Senate that has a little trial and determines whether or not the federal official is guilty of said crime, whether they will be convicted or acquitted. And if they're convicted, then they can be removed from office. If they're acquitted, they cannot be removed from

office. Andrew Johnson was the first American president to be impeached. As Ellen Stanton predicted, the process did indeed drag on. And in mid-May, the Senate acquitted Johnson by just one vote. And Johnson kept his job. The same day, Stanton resigned and left office for good. He made up with Ellen and went back to his law practice. He probably also got some clean sheets. In 1869, Congress passed the 15th Amendment, which established voting rights for Black men. established voting rights for Black men. It stated that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It did not mention gender. Black Americans were capitalizing on any glimmer of equality they were given.

Black men voted in elections. They ran for elections, too, winning political offices in local and state governments and in Congress. In the years following the Civil War, 22 black men were elected to Congress, and 15% of all state officeholders were black. percent of all state office holders were Black. The hard work of Black communities ushered in advancements like the South's first state-funded public school system, a more equitable taxation legislation, and laws against racial discrimination in public transportation. But of course, as Black education and political power gained momentum, white supremacist opposition rose.

These reactionary forces gained a following, often with working-class white men who feared that Black men were taking their jobs. And they worked to reverse the changes enacted by the Radical Republican Reconstruction. Their path to restore white dominance and supremacy in the South was a violent one. Much of the violence was connected to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, led by former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who served as the KKK's first grand wizard. The Jim Crow South had begun. The KKK got its start in 1865 in Tennessee. Originally, they said it was a private club for Confederate veterans to gather. But as the membership watched Black Americans gain agency, rights, and even political power. The organization fine-tuned

its intentions. They were committed to terrorizing Black communities in order to keep whites at the head of Southern culture. Former Union General Ulysses S. Grant was elected president in the election of 1868 because Because shocking, not shocking, President Johnson was so unpopular by that point that he didn't even make it on his party's ballot. One of Ulysses S. Grant's challenges was quelling the violent attacks of the KKK. These men donned disguises and wreaked havoc where they could, burning Black churches at night, harassing Black voters, raping Black women, and lynching and murdering Black people. Grant pushed hard for legislation to combat the KKK, and Congress responded by passing the three force acts. and Congress responded by passing the three force acts. The first prohibited the gathering of groups in disguises in public places with the intent to impede a citizen's constitutional rights. The second put federal elections under the supervision of federal officials, meaning that

U.S. marshals were placed at polling sites to prevent violence. And the third act, arguably the most effective, gave President Grant the power to suspend habeas corpus and use the military to enforce the first two acts. That was all the permission Grant needed. He declared martial law in nine counties in South Carolina, where the Klan violence had been absolutely atrocious and rounded up as many members as he could. Those who weren't taken into custody, scattered, and eventually disbanded. The reprieve from violence would end up being temporary for Black communities.

By 1915, the Klan rose again, and it grew rapidly to include millions of members. They had kids programming in women's auxiliaries. They held every level of office. And of course, unlawful violence was perpetuated by lawful racism. Named after a Black minstrel show character, Jim Crow laws, which began to spring up in the late 1800s, were the South's response to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The goal was to use indirect ways to skirt around the amendments and keep Black Americans disenfranchised. The state and local laws detailed when, where, and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much money, where they could live and learn, and what public places they could patron. They were a legal way to push Black

citizens into indentured servitude, to withhold voting rights by enacting the Grandfather Clause and literacy tests, and to control where they went and how they traveled via segregation. They traveled via segregation. And while we won't do a deep dive on it today, in 1896, the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the notion of separate but equal, which, as we know, kept Black Americans separate and in a position of inferiority for decades. Beyond the laws, the Jim Crow era was heavy with social policing too. Black citizens had to demur to whites in every situation. White motorists had the right of way at all intersections. Black people were called by their names but were required to

address all whites with titles of respect like sir or ma'am. Black men couldn't reach out to shake hands with the white men because it implied that they were socially equal. And forget touching a white woman or even making eye contact because you might be accused of rape. Fines and jail time were the least violent punishments, but the pervasive belief was that violence was necessary to keep Blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. By the end of the 19th century, a conservative estimate of at least 2,500 Black people were lynched in the South, which was more than 100 black men and women per year. That number continued to rise over the next 60 years. Rise. W.E.B. Du Bois famously said that the slave went free, stood for a brief moment in the sun, and then moved back again toward slavery. After emancipation, the majority of the formerly enslaved settled close to southern towns and cities that they were familiar with. But eventually, Black Americans had little choice but to leave their homes and move to the North and West.

leave their homes and move to the North and West. They needed jobs, more economic opportunity, and to escape the violence they lived with in the South. In 1910, 90% of all Black Americans lived in the South. By 1940, it had dropped to 70%. And by 1970, it had dropped to 50%. We call this the Great Migration. Cities like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York were common destinations for people migrating northward. And Los Angeles was a popular stopping point for people heading west. popular stopping point for people heading West. Black Americans also found that racism was nearly just as pervasive as it had been in the South. Black workers were still paid lower wages than whites, and housing and neighborhoods were still segregated. Black churches became the pillars of their communities, acting as resource centers to help new residents assimilate. And as the years passed, we know churches became one of the biggest building blocks of the civil rights movement,

giving organizers a place to assemble and congregations access to ideas and action plans. In a country that continuously worked to strip opportunities and identities from Black Americans, they kept finding ways to push back. In the 1860s and 70s, a number of Black families also migrated into the wide-open plains of the Wild West. Does it surprise you to learn that nearly half of the cowboys in the American Wild West were Black Americans, men who took advantage of President Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1862 and a series of other land grants? We think of cowboys as John Wayne, right? And that is why it is surprising. When old Western TV shows were being produced, they didn't feature Black Americans as lead characters, as the cowboys.

The Homestead Act, by the way, gave 160 acres of public land to those seeking to settle west of the Mississippi, and the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 attempted to give land grants to the formerly enslaved. I say attempted, because many of the claims weren't honored by Southern bureaucrats and only about 1,000 freed African Americans were given property certificates before the act was repealed 10 years later. It was the Morrill Acts, M-O-R-R-I-L-L, that arguably had the biggest impact on Black communities. The first Morrill Act, enacted in 1862, gave grants of federal land to state governments so that they could be sold,

and the funds used for the construction of agricultural and mechanical universities. The second Morrill Act, established in 1890, added to the fine print. Any state that operated segregated college systems had to offer equal educational opportunities for Blacks in order to receive the land-grant funding. It led to the creation of 19 public Black colleges, including Alabama A&M, Tennessee State, and Tuskegee University. Every state now celebrates Juneteenth, which commemorates June 19, 1865, the date on which enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally received the news that they were free. That is right. Even though President Abraham Lincoln issued

the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, it still depended on the presence of Union troops for enforcement. And Texas was the farthest place away from the center of the Union. And it took over two years before the news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the enslaved who still lived in Texas. It was not until 2,000 Union soldiers arrived in Galveston that the state's residents finally learned that enslavement had been abolished. The freed African Americans celebrated with prayer, feasting, song, and dance. And the following year, on June 19th, Jubilee Day celebrations took place across Texas, and within a few years, Black Americans in other states celebrated too, and it has since evolved

into the official celebration of the end of enslavement in the United States. Juneteenth became a state holiday in Texas in 1979, and on June 17, 2021, President Biden officially signed the law that established Juneteenth as the 12th federal holiday. On that first June 19th in 1865, a former slave later remembered, Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes. Just like that, we were free. As Reconstruction began to sputter to its end after the Compromise of 1877, which ended federal interference and policing in the South, another political change began.

It was the dawn of the Gilded Age, a time of great prosperity for Northern industrialists, many of whom had grown rich from the war. These Northern Republican men began to influence politics in new ways. They were wealthy and had every intention of protecting their wealth and assets. They didn't see the point in continuing to support or champion the rights of Black Americans. They had done enough. And for many of them, it was time to move on. In the solid South, voters continued to support white Democrats who championed segregation and other laws that kept Black Americans as second-class citizens. They consistently voted for Democratic presidential candidates for 44 years. It would take the stock market crash of 1929 and its fallout,

the Great Depression, to start the reversal of the parties and their platforms into the ones we know today. Herbert Hoover and the Republicans favored little federal government intervention, while FDR and the Democrats leaned into a more robust government intervention. But that, my friends, is a story for a future episode or perhaps a future series. Thank you for being here with me over the past few weeks. We loved sharing just a few of the secrets of the Civil War with you. It's an incredibly fascinating period in our history, so much so that there have been 65,000 books written on it. 65,000.

Even so, I hope you learn something new, even if it's just to confirm that hot air balloon spying and a diet of beef milk will not be on your bucket list. I'll see you again soon. 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 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.