The Daily Signal - The Truth About America's Founding and Slavery

Episode Date: October 31, 2019

The New York Times' 1619 Project is the latest attempt from the left to re-tell history. But Dr. Allen Guelzo thinks the Times made some key errors. " The hope of many members of the Constitutional Convention, that slavery could be abolished, was linked to their conviction that the abolition of slavery was simply one more step that needed to be taken to free us from the inheritance of British colonialism and British imperialism," Guelzo, a research scholar at Princeton University says. "The 1619 Project tends to invert that." Guelzo also talks about reparations, capitalism and its role in our history, and more. We also cover the following stories: A nominee for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cried when asked about a liberal group suggesting he would not be fair to LGBT people. Rep. Matt Gaetz calls on the House Ethics Committee to investigate Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff. Former President Barack Obama had some harsh words on Tuesday for those who consider themselves “politically woke." The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet,iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, October 31st. I'm Rachel Dahl Judas. And I'm Kate Trinko. This year, the New York Times launched a controversial series of articles in a podcast called the 1619 project. Today, we feature an interview, Daniel Davis, did with Alan Gelzo, a research scholar at Princeton University, about that project and what the facts are regarding our nation's history and beginnings. And by the way, if you're enjoying this podcast, please. Please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encourage your friends to subscribe. Now on to our top news.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says Democrats' impeachment resolution falls short and lacks substance and proper procedure. Here's what he had to say on Wednesday, surrounded by several Republican colleagues. Yesterday, House Democrats released their much-hyped resolution, which was advertised as bringing fairness and due process into Speaker Pelosi and Chairman's shifts closed. closed-door partisan inquiry. Unfortunately, the draft resolution that has been released does nothing of the sort. It falls way short, way short. The House is set to vote Thursday on an impeachment resolution that lays out parameters for the process. Representative Matt Gates, Republican of Florida, has formally filed with the House Ethics Committee

a request for an investigation into House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Democrat of California. Via C-SPAN, here's what Gates said about Schiff. Nancy Pelosi's impeachment resolution gives unprecedented power to the Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. That's deeply troubling to me for a few reasons. First, Adam Schiff has proven in this process that he cannot adhere to the fundamental principles of fairness. And second, and I would say most important for my work today, is that Adam Schiff has violated the ethical rules of the House of Representatives. Rule 23, Clause 1 and 2 of the Code of Conduct from members of the House of Representatives, requires that we engage in conduct that brings credibility on the House and that we don't impair the credibility of the House. when Adam Schiff engaged in a theatrical retelling of President Trump's conversation with President Zelensky

to deceive and disorient the American people, he acted in a way that was not consistent with House rules and was not consistent with House ethics. And so now on the eve of a vote that will give unprecedented power to someone who does not deserve it, today I'm going to go file an ethics complaint against Adam Schiff for violating Rule 23 of the House. Adam Schiff has also violated Rule 11 of the House. Rule 11 requires that you are going to expel a member of Congress from a hearing who does not intend to participate by asking questions that you are required to hold a vote on that measure.

Adam Schiff held no such vote when he expelled me multiple times from simply being able to observe what the heck was going on. And so right now, I'm going to go to the Ethics Committee and I'm going to file an ethics complaint against Adam Schiff because if House Democrats tomorrow are going to give this man an unprecedented amount of power in this process, they're going to know exactly how he has departed from the rules of the House and how he's fallen short of the ethical standards that should apply to this institution. Representative Steve Scalise, House GOP WIP,

and Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, were also critical of how Democrats were handling the impeachment push and investigation. Here's what they had to say late Tuesday via Fox News. just don't want to miss this, hang on here. Let's drop in the Republican from Louisiana. ...to run a one-sided Soviet-style process that we've never seen before. This isn't like Benghazi, this isn't like anything else. This is an impeachment inquiry.

And in fact, Speaker Pelosi's resolution confirms that it's an impeachment inquiry, yet every other impeachment inquiry we've had in the history of our country. All three have allowed both sides to call witnesses, have allowed the White House to participate. That's not happening right now. And in fact, not only is it happening, but I think it's important for Jim Jordan to note what just started happening today in this committee, where they're trying to impeach a president behind closed doors without any due process. Thank you, Steve. Thank you for your leadership.

I think most of you know that Chairman Schiff has prevented the witness from answering certain questions we have during the deposition. You know, one of the things you're doing these depositions is you ask the basics. Who, what, when, where, why? He asked those questions. When we asked the whistleblower who he spoke to after important events in July, Adam Schiff says, no, no, no, we're not going to let him answer that question. Even though at the start of every one of these depositions, and you all know this already, every one of the start of every single one, he says, this is not classified.

He tells us that the witness has their counsel there, their lawyer there. They don't need Adam Schiff being chairman and lawyer. A nominee for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals got an emotional Wednesday when addressing remarks, that he might not be unbiased when working with those who identify as LGBTQ. Lawrence Van Dyke told Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri through tears that his commitment to fairness as a judge should not be called into question. The letter also says that you would not commit to being fair to litigants before you, notably members of the LGBTQ community. Can you speak to that?

Did you say that you wouldn't be fair to members of the LGBT community? Senator, that was the part of the letter. I did not say that. I apologize. It's all right. I'm sorry. No, I did not say that. I did not believe that.

It is a fundamental belief from mine that all people are created in the image of God. They should all be treated with dignity and respect. Senator. Can you commit today to this committee that, you will treat, if confirmed, that you would treat every litigant who came before you with respect and with dignity? Absolutely, Senator. I would not have on myself to be nominated for this position if I did not think I could do that. Including members of the LGBT community and any other community that has been historically disadvantaged in this country. Absolutely, Senator.

Appearing on Fox and Friends, Dr. Michael Baden, formerly a New York City medical examiner, who says he was present at the autopsy of Jeffrey Epstein suggested there was a reason to believe it wasn't a suicide. Well, I was asked by the brother, the next of kin, to be at the autopsy. And at the autopsy on day one, there were findings that were unusual for suicidal hanging and more consistent with ligature,

homicidal strangulation, which included... And it was suggested at the time that he committed suicide by doing what? By hanging, at the time he was found allegedly hanging by a homemade ligature of sheets. Are you saying you don't think it was suicide? I think that the evidence points toward homicide rather than suicide. Why? Dr. Barbara Sampson, chief medical examiner for New York City and the doctor involved

in the original ruling that Epstein's death was a suicide, maintained it was a suicide. Samson told the New York Times, I stand firmly. behind our determination of the cause and manner of death in this case. Former President Barack Obama had some harsh words on Tuesday for those who consider themselves politically woke during his summit at the Obama Foundation in Chicago. Here's what he had to say. And you're never going to, you know, this idea of purity

and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. there are ambiguities, people who do really good stuff, have flaws, people who you are fighting may love their kids, and, you know, share certain things with you. Next up, we'll feature Daniel's interview with a research scholar at Princeton about the 1619 project from the New York Times. Tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger government, become a part of the Heritage Foundation. We're fighting the rising tide of homegrown socialism while developing conservative solutions that make families more free and more prosperous.

Find out more at heritage.org. Well, I'm joined now by Dr. Alan Gelzo, who serves as Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, where he also serves as director of the James Madison Program's Initiative in Politics and Statesmanship. Dr. Gelsso, thanks for your time today. It's wonderful to be here. So this year, the New York Times launched a project that marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves in America. It's called the 1619 project. And for our listeners who aren't familiar, it's basically a set of collection of essays and poems and other writing that is aimed

at giving a certain version of America's early history. Now, this is something that you, Dr. Gilesa, have been very vocal about. You've commented on it. When something like this comes up, I think we would all like to say, okay, this is a genuine attempt to get at the truth and to educate all of us. Is that what this is, or is there something different going on? I want to say yes and no on that. To a certain degree, yes, the 1619 project, is a healthy contribution in the sense that it redirects our attention to the fact that running through American history, there has been a very ugly current and an ugly current linked to race and linked to slavery. And there are many ways in which the American experience has been more

dependent on that ugly current than we've often wanted to admit. And if the 1619 project does have a positive outcome, it'll be this. It will compel them. Americans to come to grips with one of the more, if not the most unpleasant and difficult aspects of our history. Now, having said that, the question is, does the 1619 project and everything that lies behind it also commit its own follies, and I think it does? largely follies of overreach and sometimes follies of naivete. It's also not exactly an immediate discovery in the sense that the 1619 project is itself

the reflection of a number of years of historical work that is done previously on its behalf by a number of historians, sometimes called the new historians of capitalism. And among these new historians is a determined effort to link the rise of capitalism with the rise of slavery, as if to say that capitalism itself is a form of slavery, slavery is a form of capitalism. The ultimate goal there is fundamentally to tarnish capitalism. Right. That is not all that discreet. And it has to be said that it's asking us to believe something that no.

no one at the time believed, that no one at the time saw, and yet which is given credibility today because if people can say, well, slavery is a terrible thing, and yet capitalism was somehow connected to it. If we can say that, then somehow we can, apparently, apply that tarnish to capitalism. As I say, there's an element, though, of naivete which enters into that scholarship and also enters into the 1619 project, which depends on it. And I think the naivete lies largely in how capitalism is defined, because these are people who define capitalism in a way that no one has really defined capitalism before, certainly not any way that even Karl Marx defined capitalism.

It also depends on a naivete that says if capitalism had any kind of use, any kind of employment, any kind of connection whatsoever with slavery. It's therefore somehow tainted with slavery and is slavery. And a moment's reflection will show the naivete of that. The Soviet Union, for instance, no one would accuse that of being a capitalist enterprise, anything but. And yet, the Soviet Union traded on world markets for goods and services. It sold resources.

It sold manufactured goods. It bought resources. It bought manufactured goods. all of them very capitalistic sorts of behaviors. And yet no one would accuse the Soviet Union of having somehow sold out to capitalism. I mean, there might be a few, a very perishing few,

who would insist that somehow the Soviet Union did sell out the store, but I don't think anyone seriously believes that. Why did that take place? Because the Soviet Union lived in a world surrounded by capitalists. It was in the capitalist world, but not of it. Well, the same thing really is true of slavery. Slavery was in the capitalist world, but slavery was not of it. And people who observed the operation of slavery in those times saw that very clearly.

Nobody, even if we limit ourselves to talking about America between 1776 and 1861, nobody, north or south, ever made any kind of connection that said, well, slavery is a function of capitalism, and capitalism just couldn't do without slavery. To the contrary, both North and South continually insisted that slavery and capitalism were mortal enemies, that the two were radically opposed to each other. Southerners, for instance, always talked about their society as something being apart from capitalism, as being, well, especially if you were a white slave owner, something nobler and more chivalrous and more like the Middle Ages than northern money-grubbing, bank-loving capitalism.

So what you find with Southerners is this constant insistence that what they are doing with slavery is not, in fact, part of a capitalist network, even though it's true. They were selling, they were growing, and then they were selling a commodity, largely cotton, which was one of the hottest commodities in the international capitalist world of the 19th century. They were in it, but they were not of it. They resisted entirely the idea that they had any connection with resemblance to capitalism. You see that particularly in the most prominent pro-slavery apologist for the South before the Civil War, and that was the Virginian George Fitzhue. And Fitzhue in his book's Sociology for the South and Cannibals All.

over and over again insisted that the slave system of the South not only was superior to the capitalist system of the North, but in fact the slave system of the South was really, frankly, kin to what was being proposed in his day as socialism in Europe. And he was actually rather proud of the fact that Southern slavery was on the intellectual cutting edge of the world by having such a resemblance to socialism. If you turn your attention to northerners,

Northerners see no continuity between capitalism and slavery. To the contrary, they're constantly pointing out the differences between the two. If you look at the economic system of the North, the economic system of the North is very largely a small farm system. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that the North, before the Civil War, was turning into some kind of industrial powerhouse. It really wasn't. The industrial powerhouse that the United States does eventually become

is much more a product of the post-Civil War decades, the 1880s, the 1890s. The United States, and especially the northern states before the Civil War, are still overwhelmingly an agricultural nation. Something like 75 out of 118 northern congressional districts are really rural districts. So what governs the North, before the Civil War, is not some kind of industrial juggernaut, but rather it is the free labor family farm of, say, 110 to 150 acres, as opposed to the southern slave population plantation of 1,000 acres,

or in some cases in Louisiana, 2,000 acres, which is organized according to a slave labor system. That's the real antagonism. It's an antagonism between a northern family farm capitalism and southern plantation slavery. And the 1619 project misses that entirely. It imagines the north, and therefore by extrapolation, the United States as a whole, to be a kind of economic world that it was not yet, which is to say an industrial world. And what's more, it misses entirely the distinctions drawn by northerners and southerners alike

between their economic systems in which there was no sense of any kind of comity between the southern slave system and northern free labor capitalism. No one saw this clearer, by the way, than the anti-slavery president, in this case Abraham Lincoln, because Lincoln always advertised himself as an apostle of free labor, free labor in this case being a phrase that is almost coterminous with capitalism. The word capitalism, by the way, is not yet an invention of the 1850s. When people talked about capitalism in the 1850s, what they really used was the term free labor. Lincoln is an apostle of free labor.

He holds up free labor as the model of growth. It is what the United States is supposed to be. And it has nothing. It shares no ground whatsoever with slavery. If you consult the people who were living then, the ways they lived, the ways they produced, then a great chasm opens up beneath the 1619 project because the real world that existed then simply does not look like the world described by the 1619 project. Well, it sounds like by what you're saying that slavery was really a relic of the old world that was brought over to the new world, but really wasn't part of the DNA of America and what it was growing into.

Well, in the most literal terms, slavery is an inheritance that the American Republic has from British colonial days. Slavery takes its roots in America under British colonial rule and with British colonial conniving. And many were the voices at the time of independence and the Constitutional Convention, which complained of how the presence of slavery in America was really one more evidence of British imposition on Americans. The hope of many members of the Constitutional Convention that slavery could be abolished was linked to their conviction that the abolition of slavery was simply one more step that needed to be taken to free us from the inheritance of British colonialism and British imperialism. Again, the 1619 project tends to invert that.

The 1619 project and those others who stand in its overall circle in seeing slavery and capitalism as being integral to the American experience, these are people who are looking away from what was said at the time. and at the time Americans really believed that slavery was an ancient practice that had been unfortunately fastened onto Americans by the British colonial regime and which now was an opportunity for Americans to deal with either deal with directly by getting rid of it. This is what Gouverner Morris at the Constitutional Convention was urging upon people. He said the system of slavery is nefarious.

It has the curse of heaven in any of the states where it is operating. But there were other voices which then opposed that from South Carolina and Georgia in particular. And they objected that this was going to disrupt their economic systems. At which point voices from the north, not the South, the voices from the North, especially from Connecticut, interposed and said, well, look, slavery is a dying institution. Roger Sherman says slavery is on. on its way out. Oliver Ellsworth says slavery is on its way out. Let's not kick the sleeping dog. There's soon going to be a time in America when slavery will be simply a memory, and we can

let things go and let slavery die out on its own. And so the Constitution does not, in fact, take direct action against slavery. What it'll do is it will decline to mention slavery. The word slavery doesn't occur anywhere in the Constitution, and those points at which the Constitution might have pointed towards it, the authors of the Constitution want to employ euphemisms. Well, that's not a mistake. They wanted to employ the euphemisms, so that years later, when people read the Constitution and slavery was gone, no one would know that there ever had been slavery in the United States, and that's what they wanted. This, of course, is the argument that Lincoln makes when Lincoln in 1860 delivers his famous Cooper Institute speech.

The reason slavery isn't mentioned there is because there was going to come a time when there would be no slavery and the whole memory of it could be effectively erased. Now, the difficulty for the 1619 project is that it prefers not to see any of this. It prefers instead to see slavery as central. And I have to grant this one thing, and I think anyone who is canned enough will also grant this. despite the expectation of the founders that slavery was a disappearing institution, two major events brought it back to life. One was the Industrial Revolution in Britain. The Industrial Revolution in Britain is largely built around the production of cotton textiles.

Well, Britain doesn't grow cotton naturally. Where are you going to get cotton? Oh, dear. The single spot on the face of the earth, most congenial in its soil and its climate growing cotton was the American South. Up until 1800, cotton growing in the American South had been pretty much a secondary kind of agricultural pursuit. After 1800, it takes off as the hunger of Britain's textile mills demands more and more and more and more cotton. To the point that by 1860, cotton accounts for more than a quarter of all.

American commodity exports. Cotton is one of the chief items of consumption internationally. It is the white gold of the transatlantic economy by the middle of the 19th century, and that's larger because of British demand for it. And this suddenly puts profitability back behind cotton growing and the slave labor that was used for it. And when you have profit ability, sometimes what you get is excuse-mongering, and that is exactly what Southerners did. They made excuses for what they were doing. It was wrong. It was an evil. And it was an evil that was part of this being in the capitalist system, although not of it, because what makes cotton profitable is the ability to sell cotton on foreign markets in Birmingham, in Manchester, in Liverpool.

that piece of things the 1619 project has right, but only that piece. From that, you cannot extrapolate the idea that slavery is a capitalistic system. Slavery took advantage of capitalism. And then, once it pocketed the profits, like the old Soviet Union, it turned around and went its merry uncapitalistic way. So if the 1619 project is successful in what it's trying to do in the, the narrative it's giving, what effect do you think that would have on our country as a republic? If I were to take the 1619 project purely at its word with no qualifications, then I would have to assume that the American experiment from the very start

was a hideously flawed mistake that the American Republic was guilty of a crime or crimes so infamous that the only thing worse than that would have been outright genocide. Well, if that is the case, that taints everything that was done by the American Republic. It taints the Constitution. It taints the laws. It taints the history. It even taints the history of what we did to get rid of slavery in the Civil War, because it means that in the Civil War, we would have to say that the purpose of the Civil War somehow was something other than dealing with slavery.

There are some people who would say that, too. We have to work our way around all of these things and somehow come up with the idea that because everything that is now successful in America is somehow built upon the bones of slavery, we must therefore see that everything that we have done is an act of guilt, an act worthy of guilt, for which we should utter apologies rather than take any kind of pride or satisfaction. action, much less hold up as some kind of example, democratic example, to other nations. That completely inverts the purpose of what we're doing. By that logic, we would have had no right to complain of imperial Germany in World War I. We would have had no right to complain of Nazi Germany in World War II. Because by the logic of the 1619 project, what was the United States built upon except the very same things that Nazi Germany was doing, except they were doing it based on. upon a different definition of race than we were doing it, but still doing very much the same

thing. It converts the entire history of the United States into an exercise in hypocrisy. Some people may be confident and very happy with that. I think that it marches directly opposite to the realities of that history and certainly suggests that today we are in a position internationally, where we should have nothing to say to anyone about anything, but perhaps fold up on our own and just go very quietly into a corner and make no testimony whatsoever about right or justice or democracy. I'm not sure that we should do that. And what's more, I think the 1619 project is asking us to assume a burden of guilt, which is not only unjustified, but which, in fact, would be toxic, both for those on whom it sits as a burden, but also for those who have

put it forward, because at the end of the day, there is really no end to the manufacturer of guilt. You can create historical guilt out of some very feeble materials, provided you have enough energy and enough assertion to make the case. The 1619 project abounds in energy and assertion. I give them all the credit they deserve on that score. But whether what they are promoting reflects historical realities on the ground, that it seems to me is another point entirely. What they begin to resemble is not so much a theory of American history as a conspiracy theory. And like conspiracy theories, the 1619 project, which does resemble, ironically, the structure of conspiracy theories.

The 1619 project would have us to believe that the explanation to American history really only lies in one thing. Well, that's a typical mark of a conspiracy theory. One thing explains everything. Well, as soon as you say that, you begin to feel the ridicule rising in your throat because you know very well

that theories which use one thing to explain everything usually wind up explaining nothing. But the 1619 project has one thing which it wants to use to explain everything. That's a conspiracy theory. Like conspiracy theories, the grassy knoll, the blood libel, these are the kinds of things which attract a great deal of attention at first because they make an aggrieved audience feel satisfied

that now, at last, they have the real key to understanding everything that they're suffering. Well, yes, but it's still a conspiracy theory. Yeah. And the problem about conspiracy theories is that while they immediately meet that need of the aggrieved for an explanation of everything, the problem is they also are very short-lived, and they usually collapse in ridicule. And if the 1619 project wants to reflect seriously on what its future impact is liable to be, it needs to reflect seriously on what the future of conspiracy theories has usually turned out to be.

Well, a few years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates put forward a widely shared case for racial reparations, and that's got a lot of talk, especially on the political left, and we're starting to see Congress even have hearings now talking about this, exploring, you know, setting up a committee to explore the history here and consider this as a policy initiative. Do you think the 1619 project is setting itself up to try to present an account that underwrites that kind of policy initiative? Well, I can't be a profit on behalf of the 1619 project, but I would not be surprised if a demand for reparations does eventually unfold from the overall trajectory of the 1619

project. But on the other hand, I have seen campaigns about reparations for slavery appear fairly regularly. They tend to come in 15-year cycles. And I'm not sure. that a new cycle of this kind of demand is going to meet with more success than earlier ones have, which is not to say that reparations are not significant. We have seen in our lifetimes a number of reparations programs which meet a meaningful demand. We have seen this, for instance, in the case of Germany, dealing with reparations for the families of Jews who suffered in the hands of the Holocaust. We have seen other reparations programs that are put in place, although usually what you have in any kind of workable reparations environment is you have a body

of people who are still alive, who have suffered harms, and who can be recompensed for their harms, harms which can be calculated in some reasonable fashion. Among the problems that we face in terms of slave reparations is that we are now 155 years or so away from slavery. We are generations away from slavery. And trying to calculate what those reparations should be becomes simply an exercise in imaginative fiction. We just don't know. Another problem that is posed for reparations concerning slavery is the question of who is going to be held responsible? Who is going to pay for this? Well, should, for instance, the federal government assume the responsibility of paying slave reparations?

Well, the question then becomes why. The federal government never enslaved people. Slavery was always a matter of state law and state regulations. So the federal government didn't have a slave code. The federal government didn't have slave laws. The federal government, therefore, was not an honor of slaves. why then should the federal government be held responsible? All right, then let's shift. Maybe we should hold the states responsible. And what jumps to mind right away is a parallel, for instance, to the tobacco settlement. Let's hold some states.

Let's hold the states that were responsible for slavery. Let's hold them to account for reparations. All right, fine. The difficulty there is that you will find that the state of Pennsylvania actually, legalized slavery for a longer period of time than the state of Alabama. So we would be in the well-nigh ludicrous situation of assessing Pennsylvania, which was otherwise, as we understand it, a free state. We would end up assessing Pennsylvania more for slave reparations than we would Alabama, which attempted to destroy the union in the defense of slavery. All right. So there's a conundrum.

All right. Well, if not the federal government and the states, the individuals who own slaves or their descendants. Well, you have two problems there. One is tracking down the descendants, and assuming that those descendants who were slave owners actually have the means to pay those reparations, there's no guarantee of that. The other problem is in the DNA of the slaves themselves, because on average, an ordinary African American is actually about 20% white? And this is because of the peculiar twisted history of slavery itself, which involved rape, miscegenation, all kinds of horrors this way. The power of white male slave owners over female black slaves produced large populations of mixed-race people whose parents,

of course, one was a slave, but the other was a slave owner. Well, that means that you're ordinary, and I'm speaking on an average basis here. Your average African American is a descendant of both slaves and slave owners. If we are going to assess the descendants of slave owners for reparations, then we would end up having to assess many people who are also the descendants of slaves. And what kind of a situation is that?

So reparations for slavery resembles a plank, 10 feet long, placed over a chasm 10 feet wide. I mean, it looks good, but the moment you try to put a foot on it, down it goes. It also forgets, and this I think is the final thing. It forgets the thing that in a sense this country did pay reparations, and it paid them in the coinage of blood in the civil war. The civil war cost, when you reckon all the totalities of death, something like that, like 750,000 American lives, including the life of Abraham Lincoln.

When you ask about reparations, when you ask about payment for slavery, there's a very real sense in which the Civil War itself was such a payment in blood. Lincoln himself saw it that way in his second inaugural when he talked about how the Civil War was a visitation of God's judgment on the nation so that, as he put it, every drop of blood drawn by the lash should be paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword. One thing which I find absent from Ta-Nehisi Coates, one thing which I find absent from the 1619 project, and from many others who have been involved in these calls over the years for reparations, is a remarkable sense of blindness to the costs of the Civil War and the costs

that were paid in the Civil War to end slavery. If that is not a form of reparation, then Lincoln was wrong, then those who fought for the Union side against slavery were wrong. Then the Republicans in Congress who pushed forward the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery, they were wrong. As soon as you have begun toting up the number of people

that you are going to set down as being wrong, then the question tends to swivel back to you and maybe there is a problem with the question you are posing in terms of slave reparations. It was such an important discussion. Dr. Gelsso, thank you so much for your time today. Okay, thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation.

Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify. And please leave a review or rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. We'll see you again. tomorrow and of course have a happy Halloween. The Daily Signal podcast is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound design by Lauren Evans and Thalia Ramprasad. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.