The Rest Is History - 203. American Civil War: Aftermath & Legacy

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

In the final episode of this 'American Civil War' series, Tom, Dominic and historian Adam Smith look at the end of the conflict, the subsequent assassination of Abraham Lincoln and how the war is viewed in modern day America. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *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. Welcome to The Rest Is History. The American Civil War was an extraordinary narrative of twists and turns, death-defying escapes and thrilling cliffhangers. But no cliffhanger was more exciting than that on which we ended the last episode with Professor Adam Smith of Oxford University poised to answer my question, cruelly cut off actually, very rudely cut off some might say, from answering my question about whether the surrender at Appomattox when Robert E. Lee threw in the towel to the Union General Ulysses Escort, whether in that moment were the seeds of some of the later problems that the United States had with reconstruction, with the legacy of the war, and particularly with the idea of the lost cause and the South having fought for this noble cause.

And they're all friends again and hurrah, hurrah, and all of that stuff. So, Adam, what's the story? Do you think Appomattox was a problem? You are entirely correct, in my view, Dominic. So that's why Dominic wanted it answered so urgently. I see now. When Robert E. Lee surrendered, he issued a message to his troops in which he said, after four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude,

the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. In that sentence, you have the lost cause myth encapsulated. That is the essence of it. Lee, as you said at the end of the last episode, and his officers were allowed to keep their sidearms. They were allowed to keep their horses if they had them, and they were allowed to ride back into private life. Lee went on to become a college president, and there was no hint or serious threat of prosecution or any kind of treatment that you might expect a traitor to a country to suffer having led a failed rebellion

he he didn't get his u.s citizenship back though did he because i i know this because i um i read yesterday that actually the person who did grant him his citizenship back was um dominic's old friend president gerald ford apparently very great man Very great man. But not infallible. But I hadn't realized that. So do they remain kind of non-citizens? So the leaders of the Confederacy were prescribed and had to petition. Only the leaders. Only the leaders. And they had to petition for to be allowed to vote,

essentially to be allowed back into full citizenship. And many of them, most of them probably were in the years after the war. But Lee was a bit too prominent. And in any case, he died before. I mean, he died in 1870. So, you know, he might have had some success a few years later. To tie up one of the loose end, Jefferson Davis,

the president of the Confederacy, we'll come to the president of the Union and what happens to him in a second, but the president of the Confederacy, what happens to Jefferson Davis? Well, he is in prison for a couple of years. It's quite a luxurious imprisonment and he uses his time to write a book in which he makes the case that this great rebellion that he's led was all about constitutional principle and nothing at all to do with slavery. So already they're starting to rewrite the history. White Southerners are rewriting history from even before Appomattox actually, but certainly from after Appomattox, that the war was not about slavery. But Adam, here's an interesting thing though. So in 1861, when they broke away, a moment we haven't talked about,

the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stevens, gives this incredibly famous speech. It's an inflammatory speech, really. I think it's called a cornerstone speech, isn't it? Where he basically says, let's make no bones about it. Our state is founded on white supremacy, on the idea that white people are better than black people. They always will be.

There's an end to it. So white supremacy and slavery are right there in the Confederacy from the very beginning. So why is it, I mean, if they really believe in this, why is Jefferson Davis and why are other Southerners at the end of the war saying, oh, well, actually, no, it was just about states' rights and the Constitution?

I mean, does that suggest that they had always secretly felt guilty about slavery? Or why have they ditched the principle for which they had fought so quickly at the end of the war? I know slavery has been abolished, but why aren't they still saying it was a disgrace that you abolished slavery? Slavery was brilliant. I mean, why are they not making that case? some of them some of them do make the case not that it was a disgrace that you abolished slavery so much as wasn't it a sad thing really you know much in the way that in chekhov plays there's a kind of nostalgia for the days of serfdom this notion that you know actually things were a lot more stable and

everybody knew where they were and And fundamentally, everybody was happier. So there is that part of it. And I think that, you know, that continues long into the 20th, probably into the 21st century, this lingering sense that actually maybe slavery really, you know, we would have been better if we'd kept it. But it was alongside this kind of tacit acceptance that, well, you know, look, it's gone everywhere else in the world. And that this is not a hill anymore on which it's possible to die, even if they wanted to. And of course, what they definitely don't do is to move away from their commitment to maintaining white home rule or white supremacy in the southern states. In fact, they remain as committed to that as ever. So the line in the South in the immediate aftermath of the war is, okay, well, we will grudgingly, reluctantly accept that our bid for independence

is over. And we will even if we absolutely have to accept that slavery in the form that had existed up until now, looks like that's gone as well. It has been a devastating experience for all of us. We've all lost thousands of dollars of property, including our property and human beings. But what we absolutely will not do is to knuckle under the yoke of the Yankee radical Jacobins who have now taken power in Washington. And so we will not cede our right to control racial affairs in the South. And on that, they do not yield and they win for generations. Okay. So we'll come to the implications of that in a minute, but you

mentioned the radical Yankee Jacobins in Washington. And of course, there is one particular radical Jacobin Yankee in Washington, who dies almost immediately. And that, of course, is Abraham Lincoln. And what is the impact of that? And he is shot in a theatre, unfortunately, for clergymen. It's unfortunate unfortunate it's in a theater but it's on good friday 1865 he actually dies early the next morning so the sermons write themselves right that sunday as the news spreads around the union that abraham lincoln has sacrificed his life that the union might live and he's literally been shot by an actor by somebody john wilkes booth an actor because he had said talked about giving black men the right to vote

that's right isn't it yes that's almost certainly the case um i mean booth was in the crowd when lincoln gave his last public address as it's called in which he speculated about giving black people the vote and booth um who lincoln had seen perform was a well-known shakespearean actor part of a well-known acting family um booth felt himself to be um the instrument of god in doing god's work in in killing the the tyrant lincoln so it's an extraordinary end to the war i mean it's as though you know churchill was shot within moments of um of hitler's suicide in his bunker or something because it it means at the end of the war has this kind of very bittersweet yeah elegiac quality But it also raises this question. Well, what's good?

I mean, you mentioned, you said already the South win. Yeah, they win their bid for racial control. They win that bit of it. Yeah, they win in that sense. So had Lincoln, I mean, does Lincoln's death make any difference? Or are we overemphasizing the importance of Warren as, in a vertical, as great man? I'm sure it does make a difference. But, you know but I really don't know in the end what difference it would have made. I mean, I can't help but feel that it does. It did matter because Lincoln had a political dexterity, an understanding of how to work with Congress, and a vastly greater ability to channel public opinion, to lead public opinion than his

successor, Andrew Johnson, ever had in spades. I mean, there's just no comparison. But that said, exactly what would Lincoln have done differently? That is, of course, where it becomes very difficult to say, because in the end, he would have been dealing with the same set of challenges as Andrew Johnson was facing, with the same set of incompatible demands of on the one hand, white southerners saying, well, look, if you want to maintain stability, if you want to maintain national security and prevent the recurrence of this rebellion, then you have to do business with us. Sorry, just to turn Dominic's question on the head. I mean, is there not another way of framing it, which is to say the fact that Lincoln dies immediately after the war, and before he can kind

of dirty his hands with muddy compromises, means that in the long run, he can serve as a symbol of everything that is best about America, everything that is noblest about America, kind of uncorrupted by the grubby compromises he might otherwise have had to make. Oh, unquestionably. If the question is about Lincoln's image, that's undoubtedly true. Can I read a bit of Whitman? Do, go for it. Because I was going to use this and then Dominic insisted in crowbarring his... I don't think crowbarring is the word. No, I think you absolutely did. You complained about being cut off at the end of the previous episode meaning that we couldn't have some walt whitman so this is uh will be familiar to to uh all fans of dead pert society oh captain

my captain our fearful trip is done the ship has weathered every rack the prize we sought is won the port is near the bells i hear the people all exulting. While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring. But oh heart, heart, heart, oh the bleeding drops of red. Where on the deck my captain lies, fallen, cold and dead. It's like listening to Robin Williams. Similarly inspirational. I mean, just one of the kind of amazing sequence of poems that whitman wrote over that year of 1865 um kind of halloween i mean you know and the fact that he dies on good

friday i mean as you say i mean it enshrines lincoln as this great emblem of liberty i agree with you tom that absolutely his death absolutely enshrines him as this uncorrupted figure because it's i mean okay so adam you may completely disagree with me but my view would be the north is in an impossible position at the end of the the war because to to force the white south to to completely redraw their their arrangements but also their kind of their assumptions, their intellectual and cultural assumptions about their new black neighbors would require presumably keeping an army in the South for 10 years, 20 years? Because, I mean, they quite quickly are facing clan paramilitary violence to try and retake control for the old Southern elite. So do you think, I mean, the North's heart was never in that, was it?

No, I don't disagree. On the contrary, I strongly agree with you. I think probably most other historians writing about this at the moment would disagree with us both. So what would they think, though? What's their case, right? Well, the way in which Reconstruction, this period after the Civil War, is usually written about is as a kind of disgraceful, head-shaking series of missed opportunities. And if it only went for the supine nature of the individual people and of the northern public at certain moments, then maybe, maybe, maybe something greater could have been achieved and a biracial democracy could have been properly established.

But I completely agree with you, Dominic. I don't think that was ever going to happen. And I think the thing was in 1865, northerners, they'd done the job. There wasn't anything else to do really for most of them because they'd secured the union. The only thing they were really, really concerned about were any future dangers to the union. And so reconstruction for most northerners, not for the, there were always, there were radical Republicans who were completely and genuinely and sincerely committed to equal

citizenship for African American people. And they won some stunning political successes. Most of all, the passage of the 14th Amendment, which states exactly what I've just said, which grants citizenship to black people or everybody born in the United States, and therefore including black people, and then gives them equal rights under the law on paper, on parchment. But that was an amazing radical success. In my view, the great majority of white northerners were never that bothered about any of that. What they didn't want to have to do was to fight another war. They didn't want white enslavers, the slave power, lording it over them over again. They were quite

happy to see the South impoverished and marginalized. But they, in the end, were not that bothered about the idea of the South controlling their own racial order, because after all, that's what they wanted to do back home in the North as well. And, you know, it's one thing to be enfranchising, you could genuinely think in Massachusetts as a Republican, yes, let's enfranchise black people in South Carolina, if that helps to prop up the Republican Party in South Carolina and keeps those rebels out of power for a bit longer. But hang on, don't tell me that I've got to enfranchise Irish immigrants as soon as they walk off the boat. I want the right to regulate the franchise here in Massachusetts of people I don't like. So they wanted to control who took part in the polity, just as Southerners did. And is there also the case that history starts, you know, the conveyor belt starts moving again and American expansion happens?

And suddenly what's happened in this narrow strip of land between Richmond and Washington suddenly seems rather peripheral compared to the vast expanses of the West and manifest destiny and things like that. And that people, you know, their focus. They want to make money. Opportunities to make money opportunities to make money the gilded age everything's turning and suddenly this is yesterday's history let's leave them in their kind of backwards i think i wouldn't i i agree with the with the with the gist of what you're saying i i don't think it it made what happened between richmond and and washington peripheral i think it made it to quote a mid-20th century scholar,

a kind of treasury of virtue, something that they could return to. Right. Wonderful stories that made them feel good about themselves as a nation because, after all, they just, you know, just as the British had been self-congratulating themselves since the 1830s for having abolished slavery, now the Americans could do it, but they had died in order to end slavery and to remove the sin of slavery from the nationalist scutcheon there we are have you ever heard the

word escutcheon in this program before you probably have uh i think this is quite an escutcheon heavy podcast yeah this is um i think when we come back we should look at how the civil war is is understood now but just just to pick up on that idea of it providing mythology, would there be a case for saying that in a way the mythology is perhaps the most important legacy? And there are two myths. There's the myth of the lost cause, romantic cavaliers, all that kind of stuff. And there's the myth that is kind of sanctified by Lincoln's assassination of a virtuous, freedom-loving people who have sacrificed, you know, not just their president, but the lives of their sons

and fathers and brothers on the cause of liberty and racial equality. And that both of those two myths feeding into the 20th century are still kind of reverberating into the 21st century. Absolutely. Brilliantly put. Okay. Well, fabulous. On that note, let's go to a commercial break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz 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 therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, everybody. Now, regular listeners will know that from time to time, we like to talk about an article from UnHerdheard the online magazine for which both of us have written and which kindly sponsors the rest is

history and this week it's a very striking piece by their staff writer will lloyd very good writer and it's called how to fly a spitfire and will describes the final gathering of project propeller which is the annual get-together of Royal Air Force veterans from the Second World War. There's only a few of them left, and it's meeting this year for the very last time, or probably the very last time anyway. People are exquisitely careful with them, Will writes, utterly decorous and graceful. They're so valuable, and there are so few of them left. It's as if we're in a room with Henry's longbowmen or Nelson's sailors. Our scope for reverence, usually so limited, is much larger here. And Will goes on to describe the extraordinary moment when Bill Williams, a 101-year-old veteran, is handed the controls of a Cessna mid-flight and allowed to fly once again. It feels heavier

than a spitfire, he mutters to himself in the headset. He's attentive, composed, professional. Bill flew a thousand hours in the war. Suddenly a man who cannot walk has his wings back. I watch him closely, everyone in the plane does. Bill looks younger, visibly freshened. He's twenty again, avoiding purple-black monsoon clouds above a Burmese delta. He's not flying. He's travelling back in time. There's only one thing it makes sense to ask him. How does it feel to be back? Oh. He pauses, searching for the right word. It's wonderful. Now, Unheard publishes lots of original long reads like this, and it tackles politics and all kinds of world issues through the lens of history and philosophy every day. It's normally

a pound a week, but you guessed it, there is a special offer for Rest Is History subscribers to try it out. So that means you will get the first three months free. And if you don't like it you can always cancel so go to unheard.com slash rest to check it out that's unheard.com slash rest welcome back to the rest is history now before we get more deeply into the way the the war itself is remembered um adam uh the war was followed by a period of reconstruction which you know certainly when i studied it at university the story of reconstruction was that it was a failure that black americans a generation or so later okay they weren't enslaved anymore but they were very much second-class citizens they were segregated all of these kinds

of things is that basically how how most American historians think about Reconstruction now, as this sort of utter disaster and sort of tragedy? Or do they see some good in it, or do they think it was inevitable, or what? Because obviously now, in the 21st century, these things have incendiary kind of political meanings, don't they? I think it's not so much that it was a tragedy, but that there were missed opportunities, that it was an unfinished revolution. And some of the things that happened in Reconstruction were crucial to advances that were later made towards racial justice. So the 14th Amendment, which puts into

the Constitution for the first time, defined citizenship for the first time, and in such a way as to include African Americans, even though the 14th Amendment was disregarded or violated in practice for decades and decades after it was passed, was nevertheless there in the Constitution as something that could be invoked and was invoked by Martin Luther King. If we are wrong, then the Constitution of the United States is wrong, King said in the 1950s, referring not really to the original Constitution of 1787, but to the 14th Amendment, which was passed in the wake of the American Civil War and as a direct result of it. So in that sense, what happened after the

Civil War is of huge consequence, even though the condition of African American people by the end of the 19th century was dire by any measure. They were completely marginalized within Southern society. They were subjected to systematic violence in the form of lynching and other forms of intimidation and violent action. They were in practice denied the right to vote, even though they theoretically had it. They were excluded from jury service and in practice from much property ownership and lived on the margins of white society and, of course, continued to do so for long into the 20th century and beyond. And in the 21st century, because when you began your career looking at this period,

specialising in this period, did you have a sense of it becoming kind of ever more politically combustible as an issue within contemporary United States? So 20 years ago, or so, more than that, when I first started studying this period, it seemed it was possible for me, especially perhaps as a British person, to study the American Civil War in much the way that I might have studied the English Civil War. There were a set of fascinating interlocking intellectual problems that I wanted to understand. It didn't really feel back then in the 90s, in that kind of Clinton era, as if what I was dealing with was live American politics,

even though it obviously was. And on some level, I must have known that. And I did know that, you know, you walk around the South, you drive around the South back then in the 90s, the number of Confederate monuments. And I remember being struck and kind of appalled and fascinated by the centrality of them all. But they weren't really a big political issue then, were they? And they've become so now, those monuments and everything else that's gone along with it. So have you been surprised by what's happened? Or did you have a sense that this was something that was going to happen? I can't really say that I had some amazing, prescient understanding that this was an issue that was going to explode exactly when it did.

But I suppose on some level, yes. And I suppose everybody else studying the American Civil War realized that it was unfinished business. There was never a sense, even at the end of the 20th century, when I got into this world, that this was entirely settled history. It's just that it was sleeping history then. So there's a great question here from Lindsay Hopkins, who asks, how can contemporary historians approach the subject and analyze the evidence without bias or preconceptions, while the issues surrounding the conflict remain so viscerally alive in American culture? I mean, I guess that's a question that all historians, you know, we're all influenced by the context in which we work and by our assumptions and biases and so on. But it does seem, I mean, writing about the Civil War at the moment must be like sitting in the library while there's a kind of blazing fire all around it. Yeah, it does feel like that. And actually, I mean, you probably don't want to get into this,

but actually not being in an American university, I think, is quite helpful. I can't say it's actually studying this from Oxford in some ways insulates me from that fire. I can see it happening across the Atlantic, but it's not actually really happening all around me. But no, I mean, yes, it is really hard and it's very difficult. There's large sections of the American population right now who are, you know, who feel real pain and a deep burning sense of injustice, which is directly and correctly connected to the experience of the 19th century. And it's kind of facile and irresponsible to kind of pretend that that isn't the reality.

That the battles that we've been talking about in these podcasts are still being fought out. And that the question of who controls, who rules at home, who are the members of this polity who get to decide what are the rules of the game, those are the battles of American history from before the Civil War, and they're still the battles of America today. And so those of us who work in the Civil War era are writing about issues which are of direct and immediate relevance. How do you do that without being, which you can't do it. I mean, as you say, Tom, I mean, you can't, when you write about anything as a? Which you can't do it. I mean, as you say, Tom, I mean, you can't when you write about anything as a historian, you can't but be influenced by the present.

At least what I try to do in my work is to always try to understand how political ideas and concepts and terms are used, were used at the time by the people using them. And that can be a very difficult thing to do when you know that there are issues being discussed in the past that seem on the surface and often are in reality so similar to those being discussed today and yet often the assumptions that go into the judgments being made by people at the time are different from the ones that people made today and so it's a question of historical reconstruction to try to get ourselves into the minds of the people and to understand the pastness of the past, even though we're also understanding its connectedness to the present. But Adam, that thing about understanding the

pastness of the past, I mean, obviously, all historians try to do that, as you say, but you raised an interesting comparison with the English Civil War, or the British Civil Wars, as they're now called. So that period has always had a lot of political baggage. You know, Marxists were very interested in the civil wars of the 17th century and still are. And, you know, the sort of Christopher Hill, all the arguments about the Levellers and Oliver Cromwell and stuff, that was all great fun.

It was all great historiographical fun in kind of post-war Britain. It didn't remotely have the charge that the American Civil War. I mean, maybe the closest that it comes is what Cromwell did in Ireland. Maybe, but I don't think that's... I mean, I know not remotely, but that is a vivid and alive issue, perhaps. Maybe that's as close as you get. But do you think in our lifetime, historians will ever be able to write about this? Will they ever get to a point

where they're writing about this period, about abolition, about slavery and reconstruction, with the same degree of distance, almost emotional distance, I suppose, the psychological distance that we in Britain have with our own civil war? Or do you think the... I mean

I suppose you'd only get to that point when those issues are settled wouldn't you and they're not going to be settled now yeah now the answer to the question is no I don't because I don't think in our lifetimes in my lifetime anyway um I I don't imagine that these issues of racial justice in the United States are going to be resolved in a way that will enable that people to write in that with that kind of tone no and so so long as race is still a central issue in america and it will always be the civil war will still be a live question and can i ask um the way i mean not just the weight the totality of liberal opinion is obviously very strongly of the opinion that the union was in the right and that the right side won in the civil war within america what's the balance of sympathy with the confederacy with

the kind of the myths that it has the the ideals that it has articulated and so on um because i i find it hard to get a sense a handle on. I think that the kind of brilliance of the neo-Confederate operation over 150 years has been that it has meant that it is possible, and it is still possible, to literally hold a Confederate flag in one hand and a United States flag in the other. You can embrace the values of the Confederacy. It's our heritage. It's our history. They're our ancestors. They were fighting for real American ideals and yet somehow conveniently ignore the fact that they were traitors, that they were rebels. Yeah.

But it is because they were the continuity USA. I mean, that was what the Confederates themselves were doing. They were trying to create a separate Confederacy, but they were trying to do it in the name of the original revolution of 1776. Well, Adam, I came across this amazing detail, which I didn't know, but it turned out that loads of experts in submarines knew, that in the 50s, when the US Navy launched a fleet of ballistic missile submarines, the USS Robert E. Lee was the third commissioned. And the first was the George Washington, the second was the Patrick Henry,

and the fourth was the Abraham Lincoln. So Lee gave his name to a US Navy submarine before Lincoln. That presumably would not happen now. Well, it wouldn't happen right now. Right now, I mean, of course, there's been a commission, which is, I think, as we're recording, just about to report on renaming Confederate bases, of which, you know, there are hundreds of not just bases, but other kinds of military installations and ships and so on that are named after Confederates, mostly military figures. There's a huge portrait of Robert E. Lee in West Point. And so what's the balance of opinion on that, though? Well, I think things have tipped, but very recently. And I think it's been the reaction

to the Trump presidency. So Trump is the president who has most overtly championed Confederate causes, well ever certainly since the civil war but he might win the next election he might so so presumably there's still a substantial support for this perspective yeah clearly clearly because i was i was i was struck listen i i thought i should get myself in the mood by um you know play before this podcast by playing some suitable music. So I played the famous Joan Baez song, what was it, The Day They Drove Old Dixie Down, which I hadn't listened to for years. And it never particularly struck me as problematic, as one might say.

But Tom, I mean, you merely have to, I mean, even growing up in Britain in the 1970s, I've mentioned before about history books showing Confederates as cavaliers. I mean, you think you would have grown up seeing the Dukes of Hazzard, seeing the Confederate flag on the car, you know, the General Lee car. You would have grown up, you know, with, I don't know, is it Lynyrd Skynyrd? With kind of music that, pop music, rock music that um exalts the south and the idea of the south is special um that it has a distinct history a history of sort of courtesy and gentility and tradition and all of these kinds of things and of course that often is not explicitly linked to the lost cause or to the civil war but it's always there isn't it adam hanging in the background do you think yeah and so that that's why it's always there, isn't it, Adam, hanging in the background,

do you think? Yeah. And so that's why it's so difficult to answer Tom's question about the balance here. Because I think probably for most people, for most Americans, the two things are so hard to unpick. You know, at least until quite recently, even people who would regard themselves as, you know, extremely liberal and racially egalitarian would have, let's just say, a sneaking admiration for Stonewall Jackson, right? Or for Robert E. Lee, you would have a portrait, have a little postcard of him on their bookshelf, you know, and why not? What harm can it possibly do? And so what's happened really in the just the last few years has been this new kind of militant neo-abolitionism, where they they are saying just as people in the 1860s said

as radical republicans as frederick douglas said no let us not give them any quarter these people were racist and enslavers and they were traitors okay but adam so a question so so robert e lee was a slave owner and he seems to have fought he taken the side he did because he wanted to keep possession of the plantations and the slaves that they brought stable jackson slightly more ambivalent figure as far as i know didn't keep slaves uh didn't support slavery uh taught sunday school to black children but fought on the side of the confederacy so how is how is he that's a very fine distinction that i well i know i mean it's an important distinction historically but i think in terms of this point about the the

lingering sense that the myth of the confederacy and the old south has become imbricated in the idea of america and what it is to be american then then I think that kind of Confederate chic, the admiration of these glamorous, fascinating Confederate, brave, talented Confederate leaders of whom Jackson is a prominent example, you know, it's all part and parcel of the same thing. Yeah. And it's also tied, I mean, because of course, in a way, the archetype of the dashing Confederate cavalier is someone who fought on the Union side, which is General Custer. Yes. Who likewise was kind of eulogized as a hero and now is similarly seen in kind of far more ambivalent terms.

I mean, the thing is, though, Tom, surely, I mean, you know, even as a Briton, it would be very hard, even insisting stubbornly on one's outsider status, it would be hard, at the very least, to go into a bar in America full of black people and to say, oh, I've got a great admiration for Robert E. Lee, what a tremendous commander and all this don't you think i mean i think it would seem a monstrous thing to do to i mean a lot of people in america would say that's like going into a pub full of jews and saying actually rommel was a tremendous fellow well so that is the other that is the other great shadow that hangs over the whole story now that didn't say in the 1860s, is the experience of the Second World War and what the Nazis did. And that is another parallel that is often drawn. But a parallel would actually then turn that around, Tom.

I mean, I would agree with you, you made that parallel. But again, you wouldn't walk into a bar in Atlanta full of white people and say, your ancestors were a pack of Nazis. No. I mean, maybe bars aren't the place to have the newest discussions of the American Civil War, full stop. Just stop going to bars. Adam, is there a way through this?

Do you think that in – I mean, you said basically in our lifetime, no. Well, I don't think in our lifetime the Civil War is going to be something that can be written about with the same sense of distance that we can write about the Wars of the Roses. I think that was the sort of implication of your question. What we're already seeing, though, is the visibility of Confederate memorialization becoming more and more marginalized. We're pretty close to a situation now where you're not going to go around seeing Confederate monuments anywhere in the United States. There aren't going to be

nuclear submarines or anything else named after Confederate generals. So there's a stigma now, which there wasn't even 10 years ago, there's a stigma now attached to the Confederacy, which for the first time, really for the first time since the 1860s. And so how that will play out in coming generations, no one's going to write like William Faulkner anymore. No white Southern boy, unless they are self-consciously kind of radicalized and a white supremacist, are going to write with the innocent romanticism that Faulkner was able to imagine a white Southern boy writing in 1948. Is that also going to be true of, say, Lincoln and the Union? Is the idea of the Union cause as simplistically about abolishing slavery?

Well, that's an interesting myth that's going to be sustainable. I think the point that you made about there being two myths of the American Civil War, the one being the the lost cause the other being the myth of the virtue of the union um that myth is a lot harder to shift not least because it has it probably has strong elements of truth it has more truth to it and um i don't think Lincoln's going to be properly cancelled anytime soon. In fact, I think I see a kind of revival of an important element of the Lincoln myth, which is the labelling of Confederates as traitors. You know, I did an interview for my podcast with Ty Sidhu, who is a white, West Point, southern-born, West Point-educated guy who's written a book called Robert E. Lee and Me, in which he talks about his... It's almost like a kind of Christian awakening story of his

recognition of the evil of this man who he had venerated in his childhood. But one of the key maneuvers that Ty makes in that book is not just his recognition that Lee was a supporter of slavery, which is shocking to him, to Ty, but also that he's a traitor. And that's something that is maybe hard for us, harder for us as non-Americans to really get on board with. Because we're like, well, you know, I mean, Lee was only a traitor because he lost the war. He was no more a traitor. And then he's only, I mean, George Washington was a traitor in the same sense. It's just he was on the winning side, right? But for someone like Ty, the fact that Lee is a traitor is like he's winning card for why lee's portrait

needs to be taken down from west point and why his name needs to be removed from military bases but i mean the comparison with washington isn't just a flip one i mean washington was a slave owning secessionist and so if you are pulling down statues of of lee i mean yeah pull them all down and put up george iii so you can you can definitely see how and and people on the right in american talk in this kind of way warning of the thin end of the wedge so you can definitely see how you can get from taking down statues of lee to taking down statues of jefferson and of washington i think it's harder to see how you get to taking down statues of Lincoln though, because, which is your question, because Lincoln is the re-founder of the nation and he's washed the Republican robe white to use his own language.

And as you say, perhaps the current intensity of debate, because it is reminiscent of the kind of the violence of opinion and mood in the 1850s and 60s. Perhaps it will, you know, it'll make Lincoln stop being a kind of dead figure. It'll make him more alive, more kind of contemporary. That's what I wanted to ask Tom, because the intensity of the debate reflects an intensity of political polarization in the United States in the last 10 years or so. And, you know, when we did a podcast, one of the first podcasts in our series, and it was just, I think, before, wasn't it, Tom, the Trump-Biden election? Yeah. And it was about how civil wars start. And I don't think there's anybody who could have listened to the first episode

in this epic that you've done for us, Adam, showing, I have to say, Herculean stamina, who hasn hasn't i doubt there are many people who haven't thought at some point you know the united states torn apart by these terrible arguments about race um about the tension between the locality and the federal government but about what it is to be an american all of those kinds of things. And there can be very few people who've listened to all that and haven't thought about the 21st century. Do you think, I mean, is it completely fanciful to say that the same kind or similar cleavages and arguments could,

in frankly a heavily armed society, could lead America to a similarly dark place in the next 10 years or so. The thing that worries me is that today in the United States, for the first time since the 1850s, you have two political parties who are not only operating in their own information universes. It's not just that they don't share the same facts. It's not just that the level of polarization between them has risen to the level where, you know, whatever it is, 70% of parents don't want their child to date someone from the other party. It's that level. It's not just that. It's also that the parties are on opposite sides of all of the main cleavages in American society.

So the division over race, over the historic injustice done to black Americans in particular, but also immigration and the question of cultural diversity in all of its forms. Up until a few decades ago, the political parties shared out those schisms. So, you know, historically, you had a Republican Party, which had the support of a lot of African Americans, and that was quite tolerant, relatively speaking, on race issues. And you had a Democratic Party that catered to immigrants, broadly speaking. And now on those two issues, for example, and there are many others that we could talk about, the two parties represent the two different camps. And it's impossible for me to think of an issue, a really important issue that is a real schism, you know, whether it's abortion or gun control, in which the two parties don't polarize opinion. That was the situation just before the Civil War, when the Republican Party in the North deliberately and self-consciously, in order to win a national election, gathered together all of those who

felt threatened by slavery or by the slave power. For most of the time since, it hasn't been that case. So if things go disastrously wrong in the United States, I think that is why it will be. But it has an intensity, doesn't it, that it also had in the 1850s? Yes. So in other words, there are times in Britain where the two parties, the two main parties, have been wildly at variance on lots of issues, on almost all the key issues of the day. Labour and the Tories in the 1970s or the 1980s, let's say.

But that didn't quite have that kind of inflammatory cultural salience that made people think if we lose the next election, our entire way of life is threatened by these treacherous, dastardly, wicked people. I mean, I think there were probably moments in the 1983 general election when we came pretty close to that. But no, you're exactly right. And that is how American politics is now. It is, as you say, that sense that every election, the stakes are incredibly high because the enemies of the republic will be in control if we lose this election. So everything, everything is at stake. Our way of life, our republic, our values, everything that we hold dear are being threatened. The other side are enemies. And there's always been, I mean, this is nothing new in American history. Americans have been at each other's throats over those questions literally since the 1780s. But there are moments when it has been more intense than others. One moment was in the 1850s and another moment is right now

uh well adam i i can't thank you enough and i i mean i think the whole this whole series uh perhaps particularly the last you know the last 20 minutes or so have been absolutely kind of ringing demonstration of the reason that history is never just history um you know the past really lives on in into the present and perhaps the future um and if you want to hear more of adam talking perhaps along these very lines i don't know uh he has his podcast the last best hope question mark um about american history an excellent podcast unmissable so thank you all so much for listening. Thank you particularly to Adam for, as Dominic said, herculean effort and four incredible episodes. What the listeners don't know is he has done this all in one go. And what is more, he's done it on his daughter's birthday,

which is really... Which may or may not be coincident. And against the terrible deadline because you're off to America tomorrow. But thank you both. This has been really good fun thank you bye bye everybody thank you bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz 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 therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.