The Rest Is History - 200: American Civil War: The Causes

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

Welcome to The Rest Is History 'American Civil War' series. The release schedule of the four episodes is as follows: The Causes (Monday 27th June) Outbreak (Tuesday 28th June) Gettysburg (Thursday 30th June) Aftermath & Legacy (Monday 4th July) However, members of The Rest Is History Club get all four episodes RIGHT NOW, so head to restishistorypod.com to sign up. In the first of a four part series, Tom and Dominic are joined by historian Adam Smith for an in-depth look at the origins of the war. They ask whether the moral, political and economic problems of slavery made conflict inevitable and discuss the character of Abraham Lincoln. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. From whatever standpoint one regards it, the American Civil War presents a spectacle without parallel in the annals of military history. The vast extent of the disputed territory, the far-flung front of the lines of operation, the numerical

strength of the hostile armies, the creation of which hardly drew any support from a prior organizational basis, the fabulous cost of these armies, the manner of commanding them, and the general tactical and strategic principles

in accordance with which the war is being waged. All these are new in the eyes of European undercutters. That, Dominic, was Karl Marx and, confusingly, Friedrich Engels. So I should actually have done that in stereo. You should have done. In a Manchester mill owner's accent surely in um in 1862 which of course second year of the american civil war uh it was like a kind of bloody stalemate at that point

um and the american civil war one of the great possibly the greatest theme in in american history but also in modern history more generally the sense that this is the beginning of something it's a kind of portent of so much that will happen in the late 19th and particularly in the 20th centuries so an amazing theme for but for this podcast it is it's an epic story tom um because a lot of people would probably say it's the first truly modern war because of course it has the telegraph and the railroad and it has a kind of sense of total mobilization um but also i think what makes the american civil war and i'm sure we'll come on to this so fascinating is that it has so many contemporary political and cultural kind of resonances so in some ways you could argue and we will definitely

come to this later in this series that the american civil war is is as yet unresolved or the aftershocks of it are still rippling through american society and and from the point of view of how historians understand it obviously that is of seismic influence because it means that you know a settled opinion about it is pretty much impossible particularly perhaps at the moment anyway yeah but to get confirmation on that i think we need an absolutely top historian of the subject and i know dominique that this is i mean this is a subject very close to your heart this is something that you've studied that you know a lot about but it's very gracious of you that you have seeded the field to an even greater an even greater an

even greater specialist so when we first started doing this podcast however many hundred episodes ago i'm we've mentioned doing guests and this was one of the very first people i thought of um because i have known this guest for more than 20 years he is professor adam smith the edward osborne professor of political history and director of the rothermere american institute at oxford i knew him when he was little more than a boy Tom and I think Adam Smith is the only historian uh with whom I pretended to be part of a couple to get into a bar in New York City do you remember that Adam I do remember that yes it was a piano bar I think it was I think I was more enthusiastic about this coupling than you were Dominic actually at the time I was you accused me at the time you

said I was very unconvincing yeah um yeah couple that's very love island very very of the moment so it is fantastic what a wonderful so we were a very unconvincing couple but adam went on to great things at oxford and is a historian of lincoln the republican party the political scene during the american civil war so nobody better and tom best of all, Adam knows an enormous amount about American cricket. Well, which is a key part of the story, if not perhaps the key story. At some point, perhaps we can come on to that. But I wanted to kick off with a question really that's been posed by a gentleman currently resident in Florida, in Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump, who – when was this, Dominic?

It was a few years back, wasn't it? It was 2017, I think. 2017. If you think about it, why? People don't ask that question. But why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out? That's Karl Marx's voice again, isn't it? it no that was donald trump i was clearly donald trump everyone would recognize that as donald

trump um so so so adam um there you have it the president of the united states yeah it's saying that people don't ask the question of why did the civil war happen yeah um so as a professor at Oxford, why aren't you asking this question? Yeah, no, it never occurred to me why it happened. I mean, in fairness, I mean, there were there is a lot. There have been a lot of people throughout throughout American history over the last 150 years who said, surely we could have avoided that one. I mean, there is a tradition underlying. Do you think they're right? Do you think they're right? No, I think they're completely wrong.

I think this is an interesting example in modern history of a war that it's, I mean, we can play some interesting alternative history games and try and imagine scenarios in which a war could have been avoided. You can imagine how a different war could have been fought, but it's pretty hard to imagine how the fundamental moral and political and economic problem of slavery could have been resolved in the United States in any way short of some kind of big breakdown. And so in that sense, is it the case that the American Civil War is baked into the original founding of the United States? Yeah, I think it's as close to being that as anything you'll find. I mean, this is not like the First World War in Europe, where you can imagine all kinds of different scenarios, all kinds of things had to be in place for that war to happen in the way that it did in North America in 1861 was one that had been predicted and foreordained and speculated about and people had had nightmares about it. And some people had looked forward to it, right, because it was imagined correctly, as it turned out, by abolitionists, by anti-slavery activists of all stripes to be the most likely way, given the institutional structure of the United States, that you could ever bring about the end of slavery. So it would have been much anticipated. And then it came.

So let's go back to the very beginning then, Adam. I mean, whether that very beginning of 1619 or 1776 is now a subject of intemperate debate, isn't it? But let's go back to 1776 anyway. So the United States of America are founded. They declare independence from the colonists, break away from Great Britain. Some of them have slavery, and some of them don't. And they sort of muddle along into the beginning of the 19th century, don't they? But even point so with you know when the when the republic is celebrating its 10th 20th 30th birthdays are people conscious then that slavery is this sort of ticking time bomb um that's going to engulf them all yeah they are now in fairness there are other potential ticking time bombs that people imagine are there that don't go off so people

imagine there's might be a ticking time bomb a division between western states and eastern states there are other potential lines of division but um but everybody knew uh that that slavery was probably the the critical factor i would say it's not 1776 so much as 1787 or 1789 that really matters. 1787 was when the Constitutional Convention met and 1789 was when the Constitution came into effect. And that new constitution, which created a stronger federal government, created a national government really for the for the first time, could not have been put together, would not have been agreed by all of the 13 states as they then were, the previously 13 colonies that had broken away from the British Empire, could not have been agreed by them had it not been for the fact that there was a conscious compromise over the question of slavery. So as you say, Dominic, by then, by the late 1780s, slavery was kind of on the way out in New England. There were moves already being made in the middle,

in the mid-Atlantic states, in Pennsylvania, in New York, in New Jersey, to put slavery on the course of ultimate extinction, to use a phrase that Abraham Lincoln would later reiterate again and again and again. And in the more southernmost states, Virginia being by far the most populous, slavery seemed so central to the economy that it was much harder to imagine how slavery would end. Yet even there, there was a sense that, well, maybe it's a legacy of a previous era. Maybe something will happen in the next few decades that will make it less important to us to have to hold on to it. So for the time being, it was necessary to reassure southern slaveholders that this new national government was not going to have the power to end slavery in their southern states. But at the same time, northerners and anti-slavery mid-Atlantic people were able to join this national government in the optimistic hope that maybe by about 1810, maybe by 1850, who knew, slavery would probably have disappeared in the

south anyway, just as it was already disappearing in the northeast and the mid-Atlantic. So Adam, why is slavery seen as a problem? I mean, that sounds an insane question from our perspective. But for people in the late 18th century, it's not at all a given that slavery as an institution is morally wrong. So in the context of the nascent United States, is it Christian principles that are causing this tension? Or is it the sense that there is a measure of hypocrisy in the kind of Jeffersonian preaching of liberty, while at the same time holding human beings in bondage? Or is it a kind of fusion of both or something more? It's definitely both of those things, Tom. I mean,

it's the famous line from Dr. Johnson, isn't there? Why do we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes? I mean, the answer to that question that some historians have put forward is that we hear the loudest yelps for freedom precisely because they're the drivers of Negroes, to quote Johnson. In other words, the presence of actual chattel slavery sharpened colonial american sense of the distinction between freedom and slavery um but but yes it was by the late 18th century of course there was a growing anti-slavery movement in in britain as well as in north america um and of course the the language the enlightenment, which informed the Declaration of Independence, these ringing declarations of the equality of man,

you don't need to look back on that retrospectively to see the obvious disjuncture between those claims and the reality of the claim to property and man. But, Adam, you were saying that people thought slavery might wither away. But as the 19th century progresses, I mean, it would seem to me that two things happen. One is that the world demand for cotton

increases massively. You have the development of the cotton gin. The South is producing about a quarter of the world's cotton, I think, by 1860. So the institution, the economic institution is making a lot of people a lot of the world's cotton, I think, by 1860. So the institution, the economic institution, is making a lot of people a lot of money. It's obviously deeply embedded in the cultural world as well, isn't it? It's like cotton to the 19th century industrial economy

is like oil is to the mid-20th century. And by 1860, raw cotton from the American South, it's about 90% of the imports of raw cotton into Britain, in fact, are coming from the American South. So they're like the kind of the Middle East on this kind of oil analogy. And the price of cotton keeps on rising, as you say, through the 1830s and 40s and 50s, and the capacity to produce cotton in large quantities increases and then the critical factor here that we'll talk about which is the territorial expansion of the united states means that there's just hundreds of thousands of acres uh under cultivation growing cotton more than there was uh at the at the beginning of the of the period so so yeah a lot of people are making a lot of money from it and

well that's what i wanted to ask about the territorial expansion because actually when you look at american i mean the build the build- up to all civil wars is fascinating in Spain and Yugoslavia, in America, as much as anywhere. There's an awful lot of violence in the build up to the American Civil War. There's paramilitary violence, there's assassinations and so on. But in particular, I mean, there's this violence that the Americans themselves are sort of dealing out to others. So most famously, I suppose, Mexico. So the Mexican-American War, they take Texas or they absorb Texas and then they defeat Mexico 1846 to 48. And is that, to me, I would say, and now maybe I'm completely wrong because it's years since I really thought about this. But to me, that feels like one of the absolute triggers for what comes because the acquisition of so much territory from Mexico. Totally.

And that war was probably the most successful war of territorial expansion in modern history. Very, very small number of Americans were killed, and yet they had this huge expansion of territory, all of Southern California, New Mexico, Arizona, all of that big southwest portion of the United States came into the United States after the defeat of Mexico. And the problem then was,

should slavery be legal or illegal in those territories? It had been illegal in Mexico. So the question is whether you push slavery into this new area. And the people really pushing this territorial war of expansion were slaveholders, and they wanted that southwestern territory in order to grow more cotton, take more enslaved people there. So essentially, just to be clear, because this is a really dumb question, but slavery is geographically determined because cotton is geographically determined. It's determined by the climate.

Is that essentially why it's so much more fundamental to the Southern economy than it ever was to the Northern? Yes, it becomes very tied with cotton. In the 18th century it wasn't so and that's what you know there were enslaved people in boston townhouses and uh but in the end the reason why slavery became a southern institution was because was overwhelmingly because of cotton also also tobacco and and rice and sugar but overwhelmed but overwhelmingly overwhelmingly cotton and so the but though, Tom, also meant that there

were some people in the United States in the decades running after the Civil War who said, well, because that's true, because there is that association between cotton and slavery, we don't need to worry about this too much because slavery can never become a national institution. It's unlikely ever to take hold critically in Kansas, for example. Right, right. Because Kansas doesn't appear to have the appropriate climate for cotton cultivation. So why worry then about whether we ban slavery from the new state of kansas when it was opened up but it's it's that that determines why it's north and south and not say east and west or yes any other configuration and that is why the acquisition of states along

that kind of border zone become particular flashpoints yes yes but but adam so so for people who who are new to this i i suppose the question is okay they disagree about slavery you know i mean very very simplistically north and south disagree about slavery but there's more to the issue than that isn't there because it's so incendiary because in the north they have this idea of a conspiracy a slave power that is the very existence of slavery is undermining the united states itself in the south um you know there is this sort of that the institution of keeping you know so many people enslaved has bred a kind of a weird kind of paranoia hasn't it and a sort of there's a there's a violence to the debate

which to people outside it might seem a bit odd because you might say well why don't they just let if they want to have slaves let them have slaves why do you think it becomes so embittered now is that i mean to pick one of that well i was about to say one of tom's favorite themes undoubtedly tom's favorite theme is that because this is ultimately a religious debate to some degree, or it's infused with religiosity? It is infused with, I mean, everything in the 19th century is infused with religiosity. But it's also infused with the question of what America is and who Americans are and what kind of republic this is going to be. And in the end, the question is whether for northerners, for people who live in states where slavery is illegal, the question is

whether the institution of slavery in the South is corrupting the republic as a whole, and in the end, therefore, infringing their freedom as white American citizens. And it's when it gets to that moment, when Northerners in Massachusetts or Illinois think that the demands being made by Southern slaveholders are such that their own freedoms are being abridged. That's the point where it becomes really, really dangerous. And when war,

I think becomes unavoidable. I mean, the thing about slavery is you can say slavery was the cause of the American Civil War, right? And that is to say, you know, everything and nothing. I mean, the question is, how was slavery? How did slavery come to create the war? And when you talk to Americans who deny that slavery was the cause of the war, you know, that war is not about slavery. And you ask people, I mean, I vividly remember one of the times when I was in the States back in the 90s and I took a tour around one of those plantation houses in South Carolina. And the crinoline lady showing us around and after she'd shown us, she had shown us the slave quarters and so on.

And she was telling us the dates of all the pictures and the furniture in the room. And I was there with a group of Americans in baseball caps. And at one point, you know, the crinoline lady said, no, that war is not about slavery. And the question then is, you know, what was the war about if it wasn't about slavery? What she would have said was that war was about states' rights. But, of course, the states' rights that mattered to Southerners were their right to protect slavery. And when it became necessary for Southern slaveholders

in the run-up to the Civil War to use the national government in order to enforce the principle of property and man, then they had no hesitation in using the national government. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was a big expansion of federal power. And it was in the aftermath of that, it was northern states who were talking about states' rights in order to resist the encroachment of the federal government who were reaching in to northern free state communities and arresting and dragging away in chains fugitive slaves or people who slaveholders claimed had been fugitives from slavery without recourse to local juries or local

police forces or local courts. That was a massive expansion of federal power and it was supported, it was necessary for slaveholders to demand it. So it all comes back to slavery one way or another. But as you say, Dominic, it's completely interlaced with all these basic questions about Republican freedom, as Northerners and Southerners understood those things. And in the North, they're not surrounded by slaves. So how are they kind of being radicalized so lincoln lincoln is supposed to have met um uh harriet beecher stowe isn't he and said you're the little lady who made such a big war or something made such a big war with um uncle tom's cabin yeah was our our novels like uncle tom's cabin frederick douglas's kind of, all this kind of thing, is this having an effect?

Or is it more just a kind of sense of what they're reading in the newspapers, what people are saying? How is this process of radicalization happening? So it clearly does have an effect. I mean, Uncle Tom's Cabin was a publishing sensation. sensation and what uncle tom's cabin does is to put into the homes of middle-class mid-victorian northeastern americans confront them with the reality of a system of enslavement that breaks up families that violates women in every sense so violates christian principles in the victorian sense exactly and that gets people and it's one of the reasons why women are so important in the anti-slavery movement um frederick douglas this incredibly articulate amazing baritone voice

incredibly effective speaker good writer born into slavery escaped from slavery in maryland he becomes this very visible spokesman for the possibility that well you know what black people are not clearly not born somehow born innately into slavery and so confronts white northerners with that reality. But in the end, I don't think, I mean, those kinds of anti-slavery arguments would not have driven the United States to war, I don't think, were it not for what people could see and experience in their own streets and their own communities in the north. I think the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which I just mentioned, is probably the single most important piece of legislation in helping to trigger the American Civil War.

I mean, there's a lot of competition there. There's also the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. And there are other things we could talk about. But for the sake of argument, I put my money on the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. And that's because you can see free black men and women being physically dragged away in front of your eyes. Yeah. And there's the famous, perhaps the most notorious case was that of Anthony Burns in Boston in 1854, where this guy who was in fact a fugitive slave who'd been living in,

working in Brattle Street for a few months, was arrested by federal forces and taken, marched in chains to the port of Boston. And the bells of Boston tolled as he was forced onto a federal ship and taken back down south. And this, of course, in the cradle of the revolution, this very visible violation of liberty. so what happened to him it was a good news story for anthony burns he he was he was sold back to northerners to anti-slavery people who who effectively rescued him and he he died in in 1862 oh well that's that's that ended better than it could have done so there were many others for whom

the story did not end so yeah of course well i wanted to talk a little bit about the south so the north is becoming radicalized i suppose by by the fugitive slave act and by pamphlets and books and speeches and so on but am i right in thinking the south is also becoming radicalized in a way i i sort of get a sense and maybe I'm completely misremembering this, that the southerners' attitude to slavery a generation or two earlier had been that it was a kind of regrettable but necessary evil.

Whereas there's a sense, isn't there, that they're absolutely obsessed with slavery in the 1850s, and they see it as a positive good, as a sign of their own nobility and their tradition and their these all these wonderful things that have been lost in the cruel mechanistic capitalistic north yeah yeah that's absolutely right and i think that that transition happens around the late 1820s or early 1830s and so it happens in line with the rise of radical abolitionist movements in the North. It's

the classic way in which polarization happens and that each is reacting to the other. And whereas in the late 1820s, it's still possible in the Virginia state legislature, for example, to debate a gradual emancipation bill, by the end of the 1830s, that is completely inconceivable. There's no space in the South by the end of the 1830s for any white person or anybody questioning the moral rectitude of slavery. But Adam, presumably, I mean, what proportion of people in the South actually are profiting from slavery? slavery in in the direct sense of owning uh enslaved people it's only about a quarter um so there is a is a big and interesting question here about why the majority of white southerners who don't themselves directly benefit from the ownership of slaves nevertheless support the

slave system which so far as we can tell, most of them did. And are willing to die for it in due course. And in the end, are willing to die for it, or at least willing to die for a society which has slavery rather than submit to the Yankee yoke, as they would see it. And an obvious answer is that the existence of slavery creates a racial caste system and so if you're a poor propertyless white man you at least know that you can never be formally enslaved and so that gives you a kind of status on the basis of your skin color which you wouldn't have in a non-slave based society um that there are i mean there are plenty of places in the south where that doesn't really

seem to hold true and in parts of the south where there aren't very many enslaved people because there aren't many black people up country north carolina and so on um those are not coincidentally the parts of the south which are least enthusiastic about fighting for the confederacy and where desertion during the american civil war is at its highest rates. And there were a couple of quite high-profile white Southerners in the late 1850s, the most prominent being Hinton Rowan Helper, who wrote a book saying the real problem with slavery is what it does to poor white people. And this was taken up, and he was then hounded out of the South, of course,

but this book was taken up by Northern anti-slavery people with great glee because it made their case for them exactly. The problem with slavery is what it does, not just, if at all, in some cases, to enslave people, but what it does to everybody else. The way it corrupts the owners of slaves and the way it impoverishes those who don't own slaves. So you can be an abolitionist in the north and still be massively racist? Definitely. You know said a um a few minutes ago tom that you northerners were growing up without slavery around them many of them were also growing up without black people around them they were living their their actual experience was that they were living in a kind of lily white whites white man's republic and that, you know, the gender and the race bit of that is important.

And Abraham Lincoln is a good example. I mean, in the state of Illinois, where he moves as a kind of teenager and builds his career and his political career in the end, Illinois has anti-black laws on the on on the book so it's actually illegal for black people to move to illinois slavery is illegal in illinois but as it were so are black people i mean there is nevertheless a black community in illinois but it's very small so that raises the issue about colonization adam which is absolutely fascinating probably a lot of people don't know about which is that i mean lincoln is a good example we'll come to lincoln more properly after the break but lincoln is a good example isn't he of somebody who hates slavery wants to see it extirpated but also basically in an ideal world would like to see huge numbers of african-americans perhaps almost all or indeed all african-americans

physically moved to africa yeah yes and the American Colonization Society which Abraham Lincoln is a supporter of that that is their stated aim to end slavery by removing black people from America and at various points that the American Colonization Society has the support of the political establishment as it were the multiple layers different types of the political establishment, as it were, the multiple layers, different types of the political establishment, pretty much everywhere outside of the Deep South through the 1810s and 20s and 30s. I mean, you talk about, I mean, Thomas Jefferson is interesting in this respect as well.

I mean, Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal, also himself a slaveholder, deeply conflicted, aware of the horrible bind that slavery puts people like him in. And of course, having a relationship with at least one of his enslaved women, Sally Hemings, and having children by her. And so has this deeply complex and ambivalent attitude to slavery, with the result that Jefferson himself, by the time of the American Civil War, white Southerners are quite ambivalent about Jefferson. He's a really problematic figure for them. The glittering generalities, as they call it, of the Declaration of Independence, which create these problems for

people who by the 1860s need to rely on the idea that there is a cast iron difference between black people and white people because jeff jefferson there with that kind of famous um phrase about how he trembled for his country um reflecting that that god is just and that you know justice will be visited on it, which of course is essentially what happens. I think we should take a break at this point. When we come back, let's look at Abraham Lincoln and then let's look at the build up to war. host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of show biz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early

access to live tickets head to the rest of entertainment.com that's the rest is history we're looking at the american civil war and more specifically in this first episode the causes of the american civil war um and in the first half adam we were talking about lincoln he's kind of popped up every so often as you might expect but we haven't really focused in on on who he is and why he becomes a significant player in the run-up to the civil war so just a bit of background on Lincoln I know this is absolutely your mastermind subject so if you could bear to just kind of compress it who is Lincoln what where's he coming from what motivates him why is he important well he grew up on the frontier he's born in 1809 in kentucky moved with his family to indiana moved on again eventually to illinois um he his family were poor about pretty much about as poor as you could get as a white family on the frontier had very little

formal education he learned to read and write he was estranged from his father at some point as a teenager and moved into a small community in Illinois, kind of pretty much on his own, and had to kind of build his own life, a war against Native Americans, didn't really fight, just fought mosquitoes by his own account. But that kind of elevated him in his own community because he was elected as an officer by his men and then found his way into the Illinois state legislature. He was, I mean, everybody who met Lincoln in those early years through the 1820s and 30s and 40s regarded him as fascinating and odd. I mean, in a hard-drinking world, he was a teetotaler. In a highly religious world, his own faith was ambivalent and shifting.

And we can talk more about that. But definitely Christian-ish. Oh, certainly Christian-ish. I mean, he grew up in a kind of Baptist community, an anti-slavery Baptist community. And he mostly, although not always, attended church. I mean, this was a religious world, but he also wrote tracts questioning the existence of God at various moments when he was accused of infidelity, which was a political liability for him. I think he had a kind of Old Testament providentialism. I mean, he believed in an all controlling fate. And certainly

by the time of the Civil War, he was deeply conscious of his own humility in the face of an all controlling providence, but he rarely talked about Christ. And a fate like the one that Jefferson was talking about just before the break, one that judges sin definitely definitely i mean you know i think his his his religious views were quite different from jefferson who was a product of the kind of deism of the 1770s and 1780s but but he he had a deep consciousness of sin and that came out that comes out most obviously in his extraordinary second inaugural address at the very end of his life in 1865, in which he talks about the sin of slavery and the

punishment being inflicted on both North and South by God for the 200 years of bondage in America. But Adam, when you get to the 1850s, I mean, even in the early 1850s, let's say, Lincoln is surely at that point an exceedingly implausible person to become president of the United States, isn't he? I mean, he's a weak... Yeah, nobody would have heard of him. I mean, he was a one-term congressman.

Yes, to get back to Lincoln in his life, Dominic, he was a one-term congressman from Illinois. He was actually there in Congress, able to oppose the Mexican war, but he introduced resolutions demanding that the spot on American soil in which the Mexicans had allegedly invaded be revealed by the president, knowing that there was no such spot so if somehow lincoln had kind of disappeared from the historical record in 1850 he might be remembered if at all as kind of spotty lincoln the man who who raised that question in congress in the face of an overwhelming pro-war majority um he did a few things in in illinois in the illinois state. He was always in a minority opposing. I mean, there was a

resolution opposing the formation of abolitionist societies in Illinois, which passed overwhelmingly. And Lincoln was one of a minority of people who opposed that resolution. So where there was, in the odd occasion, the opportunity to stand up against slavery, Lincoln generally did so. But it wasn't at the center of his political project. At the center of his political project up through the early 1850s was probably banking. I mean, that was the thing that really mattered to him because he wanted to bring credit. He was a Whig. He was a Whig in a state that was the other thing. I mean, he was a teetotaler in a hard drinking state. He was a Whig in a democratic state. And so he wanted

economic development. He wanted to increase the availability of credit so that people could start small businesses. And he wanted to imagine an economically diverse Illinois. That was the thing that really got him out of bed in the morning. For people not familiar with the intricacies of American party politics in the 90s. Are there any people like that? Well, including me. The system such as we recognize it now with Democrats and Republicans at this point does not exist. So it's Democrats and Whigs.

And is that essentially what the state of play is? Yeah. The Whig Party, the Democratic Party was really the world's first mass political party. It emerged really in support of Andrew Jackson, this great populist president who ran for office first in 1824 and was elected in 1828 and re-elected in 1832. And the Whigs were the opponents to the Jacksonian Democrats. They were never really very successful, to be honest, as a national political party. But insofar as there was a functioning two party system in the 1830s election, trying to repeat the trick of nominating a famous general from the Mexican war and hoping that he got elected despite the fact

that he was a Whig. They failed in 1852 and were never able again to run a presidential candidate. And the collapse of the Whig Party, like the Democrats, a national political party which had the support of slaveholders in the South and non-slaveholders in the North, the collapse of the Whig Party created the political space for the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s. The Republican Party being a northern anti-slavery party. We can talk about exactly how anti-slavery it was and what form its anti-slavery party we can talk about exactly how anti-slavery it was and what form its anti-slavery politics took but it was a northern anti-slavery party and that was the

party that lincoln as many other wigs did as well lincoln joined in the mid 1850s and which eventually carried him into national power as the first republican president elected in 1860 so that's another turn of the ratchet if that's the right metaphor isn't it towards towards conflict because the republican party is an avowedly anti-slavery party and i guess to some extent maybe this is too simplistic is perceived as an anti-southern party i mean there are no southern republicans right no i mean the lincoln gets a handful of votes in kent a handful in Virginia, but essentially that's absolutely right. But basically a brave man if you come out as a Republican. You're a very brave

man if you come out as a Republican in those places, definitely, yes. And this is why, you know, we've got to talk about electoral systems. I mean, you know, we know that elections matter, but the rules of the game matter, electoral systems matter. So the Republican Party is a plausible party, despite only even attempting to get votes in the North, because the electoral college system for electing the president means that they know as early as 1856, when they try for the first time, they fail to elect their candidate in 1856, but they can elect Lincoln in 1860, even though nationally Lincoln gets less than 40% of the popular vote. But because he wins a majority, or at least a plurality, in most cases, the majority of the vote in the non-slaveholding northern states, that gives him, and if you win a state, you get all of the Electoral College votes, with the interesting exception of New Jersey at that time, but leaving that aside, you get all of the Electoral College votes, with the interesting exception of New Jersey at that time, but leaving that aside, you get all of the Electoral College votes from those states. And so he won a big majority in the Electoral College in 1860, despite winning only a small

minority of the national popular vote. Everybody knew that. Without that, with a different electoral system for president, the Republican Party would not have been a viable organization, but it was. So before we get to that point adam i mean obviously lincoln's election is is that is the trigger if i mean i've got my metaphors were over the shop i've had a ratchet i've got a trigger i've got i've got basically a toolbox it's not going well um no no i've got i've got a whole panoply of of metaphors tom i think is the is the truth of it a rising fever um, I've got a horrendous cold. So this is basically like a fever dream talking to Adam and Tom.

But the temperature has been rising year on year, hasn't it? And let's, I mean, there's Kansas, there's the Dred Scott case, and there's John Brown. So let's do Kansas first. So basically, this is sort of paramilitary. It's kind of a civil war before the civil war isn't it within the state of kansas so there was a civil war in kansas before there was a civil war everywhere else because kansas was the latest place in which congress had to make a decision

about whether slavery should exist or not so a bill came Congress at the very end of 1853 to organize Kansas as the United States territory. And everybody had thought up until then that the status of slavery in this part of North America would never be an issue because Congress had previously decided in what was called the Missouri Compromise that all future land north of the 36 degrees 30 parallel would be free territory and slavery would be allowed south of it. Now, this new proposed United States territory, which would later become a state, was north of that line, so slavery shouldn't exist. And yet, when the bill was brought forward, introduced into the Senate, it was introduced with a brand new provision that after all, the territorial

legislature of this new territory would determine for itself whether or not slavery existed. For anti-slavery Northerners, this was an extraordinary betrayal. This was upending what they had thought was for a generation, for more than 30 years, had been the settled policy. And it looked like an incredible act of aggression by the slave power, as they called it. The guy who introduced the bill, Stephen Douglas, Democratic senator from Illinois, long-term sparring partner of Abraham Lincoln, he himself is from a northern state, from a non-slaveholding state in Illinois. He said, look, this is no big deal. Slavery probably isn't going to go into Kansas anyway. Who's going to want to take slaves into Kansas? You're never going to be able to really grow cotton there successfully. This is just a pragmatic way of making sure this bill passes.

My Southern colleagues really want this. Let's give it to them. Slavery isn't going to exist in Kansas anyway, so let's all just calm down about it. And insofar as this is a positive resolution of the question of slavery, what can be more more american it's popular sovereignty in action just let people decide who could possibly object they choose that people of kansas choose freely for themselves yeah slavery or not slavery but then what happened dominic was that people piled in with guns to fight it out on the ground so this is bleeding kansas bleeding kansas yeah right and it was horrible and and one of the people who went there to fight for the free state cause was this guy, John Brown, an abolitionist who'd been radicalized 15 years earlier and who committed one of the many atrocities that were committed in 1850s Kansas and went on from there to lead in 1859

an attempted insurrection of enslaved people in Virginia. So John Brown, I mean, he's stereotypically, you see him, he's this incredibly forbidding looking bloke with a colossal beard, isn't he? Yeah, Old Testament prophet type. Who lies among his grave. Yeah, exactly. Old Testament prophet with gun. yeah yeah old pro old testament prophet type who lies in his grave yeah exactly old testament prophet with gun um but i mean how should is he is he a terrorist or is he a freedom fighter

because he's fighting on behalf of the slaves but as you say he's he's carried out atrocities in kansas he's launched he launches this rebellion doesn't it harper's ferry virginia yeah 1859 which gets suppressed by um a very distinguished u.s uh military man called robert e lee yes he's a colonel at the time yes who that's right the well is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter i mean that's that's you could ask that about most um about most people in history try to use violence uh to achieve ends right i mean he believes that he is being appointed by god to rid the united states of the sin of slavery and that any means will justify that end yeah but isn't also the key thing about brown and why he has such an impact is that he doesn't die when lee and his men come and recapture the whatever it is the um the arsenal

the arsenal that he's captured he he gets taken prisoner and so he has his time in the dock yeah and because he's an old testament kind of guy you put an old testament kind of guy in the dock and he really lets rip yeah the biblical language yeah and. Yeah. And then he is sentenced to death and he's hung. And on the day of his hanging, the bells toll once again in Boston and in the the unitarian congregations and the congregationalist congregations meet together to mourn the death of someone who they certainly regard as a freedom fighter and that his soul is marching on yeah but that absolutely inflames the south doesn't it because as far as they see it the northerners are in bed with this as they would say terrorist yeah and do

you think at that point so in 18 so there's been a couple of other things haven't there because there's been there's been violence in the senate um a representative preston brooks has attacked yeah with a cane a bloke called charles charles sumner isn't it, Adam? Yeah, yeah. Charles Sumner, who was a Massachusetts senator, anti-slavery senator. Yeah, he gets attacked with a cane and almost killed. I mean, he's unconscious and lying on the floor with blood seeping out of his skull, and this guy Preston Brooks keeps on smashing his stick into the back of his head.

So a real sense that the centre is not holding, that violence is kind of lapping at the feet of the Republic. And then you have Lincoln's election. And does a combination of all this mean that essentially by this point, there is no stopping it? The war is inevitable. It's just a matter of time. When Lincoln is elected.

I think that's probably true, that by by this point some kind of confrontation is inevitable whether it's the war that actually happened is it is a different question of course they're all different kinds of uh scenarios even once secession has happened and once the the military has been engaged but that some kind of breakdown is going to happen i think i think that's right. And I think all of this is important to remembering that, I mean, I see, I mean, there are many historians who disagree with me on this, but I see Lincoln as in some ways fundamentally quite a conservative figure of the small C.

I mean, he is deeply anti-slavery. He's deeply concerned about the institutions and preserving the republic. And he sees, as do millions of other northerners that slavery leads to lawlessness and violence that's how he sees it and he sees the slave power making these authoritarian grabs for national power passing the fugitive slave act and then dominic the thing you you just mentioned in passing the the dred scott decision yeah um the supreme court in 1857 um rules in this uh case of a of an enslaved person who sues for his freedom

on the grounds that his owner took him into a uh free territory and so therefore he should have been freed and the and the and the supreme court basically says um no no you you can't be freed just because you're in a free territory because that would be to violate the fifth amendment rights of your owner in other words slavery is is property and you can't take someone's property away without due process of law and that implies doesn't it that slavery can never be got rid of is that right yeah and and and what basis then can a state like massachusetts uh ban slavery if it's a constitutional right if if slavery is property then you cannot be deprived of your property as a united states citizen then you know the next as lincoln called it the next dred scott decision may well say that a slaveholder can go into Massachusetts and legally hold his slaves there and potentially buy and sell slaves there.

Who knows? I mean, thin end of the wedge. The implication of that is that, you know, and this goes back to where we began with this conversation, that the problem is basically within the Constitution itself. It's within the very foundational documents of the American Republic. Yeah. And that obviously makes it very difficult to sort out. Yeah. So could we, I think that we have, I mean,

this has been absolutely tour de force looking at the buildup to the war. Adam, could you just take us from Lincoln's election to when the first shots are fired, and then tomorrow we'll look at the opening stages of the war. Yeah, so Lincoln was elected in November 1860. And immediately, the state of South Carolina, which is always in the vanguard of Southern radicalism, immediately the state of South Carolina started making preparations to secede from the Union, to leave the United States. And they did that. By December, they'd already done done that and they sent out emissaries to other slaveholding

southern states to encourage them to do likewise by the time lincoln was inaugurated in march 1861 seven slaveholding states had left the union and that's illegal well we should come to that so we'll come to that in the next episode we can we can i mean yes they certainly they certainly thought it was a perfectly legitimate thing to do they had voluntarily entered into this union just as britain voluntarily entered into the european union and they were voluntarily getting out of it because the terms of uh of the deal had apparently changed they were taking back control adam they were taking back control, Adam. They were taking back control. And they said this very explicitly in the manifestos, as it were, their documents they issued to explain secession. So by the time Lincoln became president, he had this,

it was a kind of Cold War standoff. There were these seven states that by then had formed an independent confederacy, had put people on ships sending them over to paris and to london to demand to request diplomatic recognition from europe they had adopted a new flag uh they had written a new constitution which was unnervingly similar in every respect to the united states constitution except for the fact that it explicitly said that slavery was allowed it also gave the president six a six-year term, interestingly, and a line item veto, but that's too geeky, I think, possibly for this podcast. It was essentially the same. And they

revered Washington. And they said, we are basically the continuity USA. The United States has betrayed its founding principles. It set up this um government which is not upholding our property rights so we haven't we haven't left the united states we haven't left the united states the united states has left us exactly and new capital at richmond virginia yeah well at that not at that time not at that time they were in montgomery alabama but then there was only seven states uh seceded at that point then what happens is there's a question well what about federal property so there were you know mints and lots of military installations and dozens of them all across the south most of them were taken over by the states as they seceded but there were a couple for which that was rather harder. And one of them was Fort Sumter, which is on an island in

Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. There's a very small garrison in that island. And the South Carolinians demanded its surrender. And the question is, should the new Lincoln administration allow this surrender? Well, no, of course, they're not going to do that. What can they do instead? Maybe they send reinforce, of course they're not going to do that. What can they do instead? Maybe they send reinforcements. Maybe they just resupply it because it can't be resupplied directly from Charleston anymore. So you send a ship to keep the garrison going for a bit longer. But before you could do that, the South Carolinians opened fire. So they literally opened fire on the American flag. The Stars and Stripes was flying over Fort Sumter. They forced the surrender of Fort Sumter. And in response to that, Lincoln called for troops. He called for volunteers from all of the states. He sent to the governor of Virginia, to the governor of Kentucky, to slaveholding states. He said, there's an insurrection going on. And as commander in chief, he called up volunteers. In response to that, then the upper

South states, including the most important and the most populous, the most economically valuable one of Virginia, had to choose. Was it going to send troops to suppress this rebellion in South Carolina, or was it going to stand alongside its southern brethren? Well, it chose the latter. And so Virginia seceded as well, and the Confederate capital was then moved to Richmond, which of course is only about 90 miles due south of Washington, DC. Well, Adam, on that bombshell. That literal bombshell. Literal bombshell. Thanks so much for that. I think we will take a break here. In the next episode, we will look at the opening of the war.

So please join us then for this most extraordinary of stories. Our thanks to Adam. Thanks to you for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

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