Looking Forward at Two Hundred Fifty

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This year marks the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and by extension, of course, the birth of the United States itself As july fourth looms here at American History Hit, we're marking the occasion by circling back to some of our favorite and most trusted guests, celebrated voices in the study of American history and asking them a simple question What inspires the most about America at two hundred fifty? What compelling event, person, movement ideea Best captures the American story, the spirit of two hundred fifty for them and why? With me today, we have Professor Aaron Shehandine. He is a leading scholar and author on Civil War history from Louisiana State University. Hello Earon. welcome back. L forward to july fourth this year. Thanks Don. It's pleasure to be here. And yes, this should be a very colorful and fun year Yeah, for sure Thank you for all the episodes you've done this past year and for indulging our question today. So let's get right to it. When facing a momentous celebration of America What do you find yourself most celebrating? Well, for those of your listeners who've suffered me in the past, this will sound like special pleading for me to single out the Civil War. And as a Civil War historian, it's probably obvious, but it is I think Bear is repeating that Union victory in the Civil War is what in fact makes this anniversary possible in a very fundamental way And you know, we have talked about contingency and certainly readers, people who have read carefully about the military history of the Civil War now know all of the vulnerable moments during which the Civil War could have ended quite differently, and then we wind up with a North America with eight or fifteen or forty five repepublics and instead, we're celebrating the two hundred fiftieth. anniversary of one that dates. from eighty years before the Civil War, but I would still view and argue that Northern victory is a kind of remarkable confirmation. That's certainly how Lincoln understood it of the ability of this republic to persevere And I think that's where thinking about the Civil War in relation to the nation's founding opens up some interesting questions about continuities and discontinuities Gettysburg is one focal point for those of course the end of the war itself kind of Lincoln's last moments offer another opportunity to kind of dig in on this. Exactly. It's Lincoln's framing of this thing that's so interesting to talk about logistically, but also almost philosophically and politically for sure. And you're saying all this sitting in Louisiana, which is how far we've come as a nation today. Bringing this up is a good chance to review the history, how and when the North did achieve victory. You know, we have never done an episode on the Aomatic surrender. which is a murky event for many. When does that take place and how? you know, the basics of it? So Appomatox, which I would I think we could probably now call the first surrender because there are then there's there's another surrender in North Carolina and depending on how you date it, there are later ones, but that happens Informally on april ninth, eighteen sixty five and formally on april twelfth eighteen sixty five. So exactly four years to the day and it creates an almost eerie marking the duration of that war, that that's the official surrender on april twelfth. Lincoln is assassinated on april fourteenth, and there is certainly widespread expectation among people in the North that Lee's surrender as the head of the arrmy of Northern Virginia and the most powerful force and the one closest to Washington that Lee's surrender on the ninth And then again, formmerally on the twelfth marked the end of the war. There is still actually a major army under the control of Joseph Johnston in North Carolina that Sherman is maneuvering into position against that surrender happens on april twenty second. And there's some controversy because Sherman extended more generous terms and those were pulled back tyypically we date this around Lee's surrender and then Lincoln's assassination. two days later on goodood Friday of april eighteen sixty five. What were the circumstances that Lee was reacting to that prompted this moment? I mean, his army is worn out. And so here I would say, you know, what we have to credit is really the logistical the strategy of logistical devastation Grant and Sherman have put into operation, and Grant had managed to maneuver Lee into the trenches of Petersburg And at that point, it's really and that happens in eighteen sixty four. sort of late summer into the September And at that point, in fact, it's a kind of waiting game and the first the question is whether Lincoln will be reelected. And he is and then Sherman captures Atlanta And then Phil Sheridan defeats Dual early in the Senadoah Valley and Mobile Bay, the last deepwater port in the Confederacy is captured in lateugust So there's a whole constellation of military victories limit the capacity of the Confederates to continue fighting. And so You know, Grant and Sherman have been very clear that the purpose of this is not to simply bleed the Confederacy out. That is at odds with Lincoln's goal of reunifying the country. He wants white Southerners to come back into the United States and just killing them is pointless But if you reduce their ability to fight, And by trapping Lee there and Sherman is coming up along through the Carolinas and he reaches the middle of North Carolina by late March, early April at Goldsboro and first Fayetteville and then Goldsboro and then Durham. He's very close to the Virginia border. Lee really has nowhere to go And the Union Amy breaks through the Confederate lines on april first. eighteen sixty five outside the Richmond Petersburg line. and famously there's this moment at the church where on a Sunday morning where Jefferson Davis is at the service and one of his aides comes running into the church to say Grant's troops have breached the line. And Davis gets up and leaves the church in the middle of service and everyone knows This is it This is we've been sort of waiting for this. and then an evacuation begins. And Lee is hoping that somehow he'll be able to move west and maybe connect with Johnston's army in western sort of central North Carolina. Grant's cavalry is to the south of him and cuts off that escape. And so then it's really it sort of forestalls any option of escape and rations aren't reaching his army either because they have to get through that Union cavalry line and Appomattox just happens to be the surrender point. And there's just no forging left in Virginia at this point, I suppose, you know, this is no, certainly not in the direction. I mean, you know, if they could have continued into the south side perhaps, but again, the line of Union cavalry Rrant is really sort of to the north of Lee's army on a march going to the west, and he has a huge cavalry force under Sheridan's command that is on the southern side of Lee's army and it cuts off the railroad lines that are bringing supplies up from North Carolina. and his soldiers haven't eaten in days. And so Lee really recognizes basically my army is trapped And there was no there's no other solution except to surrender. It's been so interesting for me just hosting this podcast and talking to the likes of you about the structure of the Civil War and the pivot point that is Gettysburg and Vicksburg and how different the war is from sixty three mid sixty three onward to now ' been a long and slow decline and not so slow at some points But here we are. It's true of any surrender, you think of the generals, you know at first not really the leader, you know, in this case, Lincoln Had Lincoln met Lee? This came up in my thinking as I was preparing this. had he ever met Lee? Did he have any personal connection with the man? He did not have any personal connection. It's an interesting question. I don't see how I certainly would have would have been alerted. I hope in saying this that they hadn't ever met. Lee and Grant had met. Most of the West Point generals knew each other and there are huge classes in the eighteen forties Sherman and Braxton Bragg are very close patriots. So there's all kinds of personal connections, but not Lincoln. And Lincoln is quite clear in his instructions to Grant and Sherman You negotiate the surrender of an army. I end the war These are different things that what we need to do because the end of a war involves questions of whether there's going to be prosecution of treason for the leaders of this, you know, whether there'll be imprisonment that's awaiting people. that the question of whether a war is happening is fundamentally a political one army can surrender and this is really where Sherman gets hung up is he takes and tries to negotiate sort of broader terms that would in fact end the war. And very quickly, the Northern Cabinet says You don't as a general, have the authority to do that. All you can do is receive his surrender. And then Sherman returns to Durham Station and Johnston says, I surrender, my army is exhausted and this is fruitless as well. This is where we then get into the question of what did the war mean? What are the core accomplishments? And for Lincoln, it was very clear that reunion was from the beginning, the centerpiece of the Northern war effort And also that emancipation had been added as a accomplishment that could never be undone. And so Confederates are surrendering knowing slavery is over forever And this is the relevance as a two hundred fifty conversation is really that Lincoln's whole framework of the war is to preserve what had had been begun with the Declaration of Independence. That was the fundamental, of course, fundamental document. But even in his fighting of the Civil War, that was the fundamental document. frraming it as an ultimate test of whether a nation dedicated to human liberty and self government could survive. It's right there in in the Gettysburg address We are now facing a time of the survival of our nation as many of us know are seeing at least, you know, this is the first generation this time now that is celebrating this two hundred fifty. Since the Civil War, that has been grappling with some sense of division that they are having back then, notothing close, of course But for Lincoln, that was the deal was was to heal that division to bring together those those opposing sides and put the nation back together. That is most captured, of course, by the Gettysburg address So let's talk about that address. I can never talk about it enough, quite honestly. It's just a remarkable speech. Between that and his second inaugural, it's Yeah, exactly. November eighteen sixty three, dedication of Gettysburg National Cemetery. We've done several episodes on this It's two hundred and fifty words that are just, you know, earth shaking as far as I'm concerned. And thinking about Lincoln, we tend, I think, to underestimate the degree to which he really anchored himself on the Delaration and on the creation of a perpetual union. And this is where thinking about what things change and what things remain the same as a result of the Civil War comes into sharp focus because you know the beginning of that speech, as you started to quote it there, a nation dedicated that Lincoln is speaking very explicitly the fact that he sees a line of continuity that the Civil War is in effect and I'm going to use a kind of modern vernacular, a kind of stress test on this republic. There were plenty of people in seventeen seventy six that said, you can't create a republic of this size, of this heterogeneity. You have people from Africa and you have people from Europe and you have indigenous people. you have people from different religious backgrounds. almost immediately you have competing ideological positions that it's simply, you know, that the experiments in republics, places like San Marino and Italy, had been tiny and tremendously homogeneous and you know, could claim old lineages But this was so much bigger on scale and ambition And many of them said that it just frankly will not work. And we also, I think need that listeners should remember the degree to which In the early nineteenth century, this is the era of the creation of nation states that it's not unusual if people anticipate a kind of flux and dynamism There's a great line from Sandy Pendleton, one of Stonewell Jackson's officers, who's a young Virginian, whose parents had been alive at the sort of tail end of the revolution. and he's writing to his sister has written to him saying, I would like to go to Richmond to see the inauguration, the official one of Jefferson Davis. This happens in early eighteen sixty two when he's officially inaugurated parents won't let me take the train, Can you convince mom and dad into letting me go And he says, he writes a letter to them. He says, remember You know, as you experienced, we will only see a nation born once in our lifetime And I think for Americans today, you would think, I should never see a nation born in my lifetime? That is America dates to two hundred and fifty years. I hope that I don't see its destruction and then something follow But in the early nineteenth century, it's a moment of tremendous uncertainty. And so from Pendleton's perspective, we can create a new nation Italy has just been created in eighteen sixty. The German city states are starting to kind of cohere and at the end of, you know, within a few years, the end of the Civil War, there'll be a Germany. But for Lincoln It is anchored in that declaration And so what he is positioning certainly in the Gettysburg address is We are fighting here to keep that not to reinvent it, not to remake it. There is a kind of sleight of hand going on there and certainly over the course because the inclusion of emmancipation changes the character. The ending of slavery changes the character of America in pretty fundamental ways. Certainly the thirteenth and fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments change the nature of American constitutionalism of American citizenship in fundamental ways But at Gettysburg Lincoln is really anchoring what's happening in Old Foundation. abolitionists want, you know Garrison and other abolitionists want to sort of remake it, right? They're done with the Constitution. Garrison family famously burns the Constitution in the eighteen fifties and calls it a covenant with hell because it sanctioned slavery. But Lincoln does not see it that way. Lincoln sees a kind of continuity of lower case de deemocratic Republicanism will persevere. And he's saying that in November of eighteen sixty three, Maybe it seems more likely than less likely at that moment though there's still a huge amount of hard fighting left in the Civil War. And so Lincoln in a way is still using that to kind of inspire optimism and faith, I think I have a friend, a smart guy who pointed out to me at some point that Lincoln would be embarrassed at the amount of attention we spend on the Gettysburg adddress when he was there to celebrate and memorialize the sacrifices of the soldiers And we now talk very little about the soldiers and everything about Lincoln's two hundred and fifty words. is very ironic. It's true. I mean, he famously says in that address, The world will little note nor long remember what we say here But they should remember forever the sacrifice made by those people. And of course, it's wound up being the opposite as you point out I mean, some people and I've said it on this show a lot that this is the beginning of a secondecond American Revolution. Maybe that's a glib thing to say considering, you know how hard it was to do the first one. The idea of that to defend my own position is that there were a whole bunch of values that were baked in. This was an America that wanted to become. and the civil War allows that to happen Again, totally subjective view of that, but do you agree with that idea, that notion? Yeah, I do. I mean, I think, you know, James McPherson has a collection of essays called The Second American Revolution of the famous Civil War historian. and Greg Downs, a great Civil War historian just recently had a book of the same title sort of thinking about this as not a kind of smooth continuity, but as a moment of rupture in which something new is created. And I think Lincoln is in fact performing, as I say, a kind of sleight of hand, the term that Downs uses is whitewash that Lincoln is concealing the radicalism of what the Civil War is creating by talking about this continuity. And for Lincoln preservation of democratic a democratic repepublic of a government of the people, by the people, for the people is what's most important. At the same time, the United States that exits the Civil War, particularly with the post war amendments that transform us from a constitutionalism of negative liberty. Those first Ten ammendments are restrictions on the capacity of the state to do things interfering with the civil liberties that we enjoy as citizens And now we have a vision of positive liberty, a grant of power to the federal government to do things like end slavery to ensure that all citizens are treated equal before the law This is a tremendously powerful idea and really a fundamental reshaping of how American law at its core works. And Lincoln, of course is not alive for the fourteenth Amendment, but in his final speech, the one at which John Wilkes Booth is present, Lincoln famously says, this is a kind of ad hoc speech off the back of the White House on the night that he's going to die. He's giving a kind of speech to Well wishers before he goes to the the theater and he says, we should begin thinking about en frranchising black men says for instance, the very intelligent among them and those who have fought valiantly in the ranks that they merit the franchise, which of course doesn't come officially until the fifteenth Amendment. And that's the thing Wilkes Booth supposedly turns to a colleague and says, you know, now I'm going to kill him. This is the thing. that has tipped the scales now into murder and assassination. But so Lincoln does see and knows The United States is going to change in a very fundamental way and that the war is propelling that He's not necessarily sugarcoating it, but he is not sort of leading with that. And there's lots of debate. and I think we've talked about, you know, what would have happened had Lincoln lived Reconstruction is a thorny and complicated question But Lincoln is too smart a lawyer not to understand That ending slavery through the violence of war the repudiation of secession in a way for him, that is by beating the South and by preserving the Union, you are really ensuring that the repepublic lives on And that for Lincoln is really the most important continuity is that that is preserved. This episode is brought to you by Best Western Hotels and Resorts. Summer is upon us. And you know what that means Vacation. 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Well, look no further than the award winning after Dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal with me, Maddie Pelling. And me, Anthony Delany. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre. From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals which trials and folklore feel transported back in time on A Dark, out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcast. And guess what? We're also now on YouTube After Dark podcast from History Hit The fundamental idea was that secession was completely incompatible with the Founder's vision and that if we were hold this thing together, it was to follow that vision first and foremost with all its vagaries. He articulated that as much. I want to go over just the bullet points of what you've just said. The difference in this nation from Civil War onward, destruction of enslavement, of course, emancipation inccreased power of federal governance, veryy important factor. I don't know that it was a declared accomplishment You know, that was kind of the evolution of the whole thing. It evolves over time for obvious reasons. You need a stronger government to manage these new challenges a nation committed to equality and independence Eventually a hundred years later, it becomes one man, one woman, one vote That's an ongoing process that has happened from the beginning until modern times All of that is the civil warar, right? in essence. Well, it's certainly made possible. And think I think for Lincoln, it isn't just a question of these things being stacked chronologically. That is if you don't preserve self government in eighteen sixty one. then you're never going to get a position where you can self govern your way to expanding the franchise to include women. or to include people of African descent Those expansions of democracy are contingent on a majoritarian democracy. and this is what The civil warar had threatened and Lincoln had said this. I mean, even Robert E. Lee famously in a letter to his son In January of eighteen sixty one, Lee says, secession is the essence of anarchy. And Lincoln said, you know, what secession will do because it is in response to his election as president and no one disputed that election. They didn't like the outcome. But there was no sense that it had happened Iirregularly, Lincoln was lawfully elected and they simply the southerners, white southerners didn't like the outcome of the election So they decide to blow up the system What Lincoln said at the time was, if that is allowed to stand, as he said in his first inaugural, if we can make the appeal from the ballot to the bullet thenen self government is gone and democracy, which is really in its modern phase only exists in the United States, the last best hope of Earth, you called it, it will be gone forever. becausecause all of the conservatives in Europe And it's important for listeners to remember where The fate of democracy as a practice is in eighteen sixty And the most recent major test had come in the eighteen forty eight Revolutions, the democratic efforts in England in Germany and Italy, in France, all of which are repudiated, and conservatives win that moment and they re establish empire in a much stronger way. So over the eighteen fifties, it's really just in America. and so for Lincoln by preserving democracy You can then do all sorts of other things. That's why for him, that's always the most important accomplishment Once you preserve democracy, you can then end slavery Once you preserve democracy, that democracy can decide we want to expand the franchise, first to include black men then to include all women then to include the direct election of U. S. senators, then to lower the voting age, that is the kind of circle of democracy expands But it only expands if democracy itself has been proven to be the form and that's what the Civil War itself accomplishes. Do you find your students putting this in the perspective of today's challenges? mean He is basically preserving the democratic principles of the Declaration and Constitution All of which is, you know been in place for about fifty years. or more suddenly is threatened by people who would like to throw the entire system out And that has always been the challenge in this country, hasn't it? It's basically boiled down to who gets a chance to vote? It is. I mean, I think unfortunately for our students and I understand a sense of cynicism, what I try to encourage in my students is skepticism and not cynicism. And the cynicism is, I think, generated by a sense that the vote is a blunt tool It takes a long time and you can see this in the civil rightights movement African Americans are act you know, they're agitating, obviously from the eighteen, thirties and forties, they're agitating against slavery from the beginning of slavery, but for access to the vote. And for legal tools, and there are civil rights movements all through the nineteenth century and then into the twentieth century. It takes in other words, decades and decades of labor and then actively, of course, in the famous, the kind of classic civil rights era over the late forties, the nineteen fifties and then up to the kind of crescendo of the sixty four Civil Rights Act and the sixty five Voting R rights Act And I think for many young people today, the vote just looks like something that takes a long time to generate change. and it does, that's the point of democracy, is it supposed to be slow supposed to be processoral. It is not even I mean a parliamentary system works faster than our system So you know, it demands a level of patience I understand for people that are looking at climate disaster that's looming and other things and thinking, we have to act with immediate speed We can't wait another four years or we can't wait another two years. but underneath that impatience, what I try to at least to instill and you know how well it takes root in today's generation of students, I think we'll sort of see in the coming generations is an acknowledgement that we make these decisions together. And this even, I think transcends the vote itself that it is Americans people in other countries that are living in democracies who are responsible for making the changes they want to see in their world. And the Civil War has plenty of that. The U. S. Sanitary Commission, obviously the fact that there is a volunteer army of two point one million men The pre war army have been thirteen thousand soldiers. and so those two point one million men under arms that win the Civil War are volunteers. That is they are doing this not out of a I mean, there is a draft, but the vast majority of them volunteer And, you know, beyond the vote, democracies work by self action, by people organizing themselves. And that's one of those that's lessons that's a lesson, I think, as well It also creates a different kind of society. When you have those democratic pressures, you know, those voting pressures and the need to include people versus exclude them There are ripple effects throughout society, and that happens, of course, because of the thirteenth, four, fifteenth Amendment. All of those Reconstruction amendments, which we should visit briefly, because as you say, it's very complicated. eighteen sixty five, thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery, involuntary servitude in the United States, except for crimes, which is important. fourteenth Amendment, eighteen sixty eight granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and guaranteed equal protection of the laws and due process under the laws. We're hearing about all this stuff in the news these days. This is still, you know incredibly modern stuff This set a precedent for the direction that America would go in regards to equality, right? Certainly, I think Lincoln hoped so and he obviously isn't alive to see that happen. But as you noted in his opening, you, the opening part of the Gettysburg address, he talks about a nation conceived in liberty And importantly at another point, you know, one of the things that Lincoln says that's always resonated with me is he says, in giving freedom to the slave, we enrich or enhance freedom for everyone You know, that is the ending of slavery is not merely something that affects enslaved people, but it affects everyone because it changes in a qualitative way the nature of what liberty is and means. And the Civil War does not, of course, bring true equality, but by establishing a democratic government and certainly in the fourteenth Amendment by acknowledging and that's essential because the citizenship part that you mentioned is what basically undoes the Dred Scott decision Thred Scott been decided in eighteen fifty seven and in it, the Supreme Court said, Black people cannot be citizens. And it's bad law at the time and most people say that because they had been citizens of states. They had voted, they own property, they participate in courts. But the Supreme Court sort of wipes all of that out. So you need a fourteenth ammendment undo that and to establish a uniform set of citizenship, and then beyond that the promise of due process that there will be equal justice under the law for everyone. I mean, there are two ways in which the United States, there is a sharp disjuncture in which we can talk about the Civil War as a second American revolution. One of which is here with the kind of commitment to equality, to a colorblind law. And in the other and this is what Greg Downs emphasizes and in his book, is the way in which those amendments are adopted isn't really the way that cononstitutional amendments are supposed to be adopted. And this is true of the creation of West Virginia as a state. I used to live in West Virginia That's created by Fiat. and we can just be honest about that, that it does not follow the regular course. And neither, you know, the fourteenth Amendment is in a way sort of the southern states are kind of extorted to support that as a condition for being readmitted. And so there is an extra legal dimension here that as Americans, we need to acknowledge that it has not been a kind of smooth and uniform democratic process all the way through The war itself creates the conditions where people like Lincoln feel empowered and Lincoln is really conservative when it comes to the law But even Lincoln felt empowered to take that step of saying we are going to Congress is going to pass the thirirteenth Amendment, and then we are going to basically require southern states at the end of the war to ratify it. And you know so we need to acknowledge that Even as we acknowledge the continuity of democracy and the expansion of democracy, that there are moments when this happens when you have to watch very carefully the boundaries of how that legal change is occurring. Are you looking for the perfect podcasts to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights? Well, look no further than the award winning after Dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal with me, Maddie Pelling. And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre. From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to which trials and folklore feel transported back in time on A Dark, out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcast. And guess what? We're also now on YouTube After Dark Cus from History Hit The days of two hundred fifty, I mean, these are broadstrokes celebration themes I'm glad you mention the eighteen forty eight revolutions. I mean, this is a time when really the world is going in a different direction And Americans today don't really put this in perspective that at that time, it could have been a given that we had tried. We'd done almost seventy five years of very hard work Clearly half the country did not believe in what was happening and it would have just collapsed And you know, it could have become an entirely different story but for standing up for those principles. and a lot of people sacrificing their lives. It's a remarkable story that really does sit in the two hundred and fifty theme in my opinion. Iportant also to recognize that, you know, part of this country doesn't even know about this and there's juneteenth, which doesn't happen until june nineteenth, you know, eighteen sixty five It takes a long time for these lessons to be learned, of course That's a short time. But I mean, over time it's demonstrated many times how how difficult it is this is to absorb what has happened. It is. So juneteenth is the end we sort of regard it as an anniversary ending slavery, the moment when the last US troops reached sort of the part of Texas where the news of the emancipation Proclamation hasn't necessarily reached. And I mean, in fact, slavery doesn't end until the very end of the year in Kentucky. As Lincoln had always promised, slavery would remain intact in the Union and under the Constitution longer than outside of it And so enslaved people are held in bondage even past that point. The interesting thing that I hear you raising here is how we think about this at this moment today at the two hundred and fiftieth because so much of the certainly from the White House and the kind of, even the sort of official channels of thinking about this are a very narrow reading that goes backwards as opposed to going forwards. whichich is in fact, what Lincoln is trying to do at Gettysburg is to say What is the most important and best part of what the founders were hoping to accomplish? Your word at the beginning here of becoming You know, and it's a brilliant use of the passive voice. Lincoln did it once or twice, so I'll allow it. Thank you. You know, that we understand that America is not static and that there is a core here in our sort of best moments of democratic inclusivity of expanding the circle of we and that what Lincoln did and what Northern Victory meant was that that process continued. And what I hope we take from that today is understanding that we can continue to move forward, not strictly to look back and imagine a past that was somehow peaceful or uniform or homogeneous, which of course it never was, but to sort of begin from that democratic premise and continue working to fulfill that and to satisfy that in a way that is inclusive as Lincoln envisioned it and not exclusive And this of course gets us to debates about birthright citizenship, as you mentioned in the fourteenth Aendment and the things that are happening now. But as Lincoln understood, you know, this is a promise forward, not just an obligation to the past. I think of it as timely, as a matter of fact, all of what we're going through. you've got to it's a shame in some regards, it's difficult but it's also a reassessment. And when you're going to be a country that does something on this level, and tries to marry ideals with reality. you're bound for times when the argument gets raised in many different quarters. This in general makes what was and sometimes is still considered to be a war of reunification, the civil War a struggle instead for human rights new American commitment to independence and equality together. which in every regard, it was not, at least for anyone who wasn't a white European Christian ancestry and of course, male And if you think that was all just a result of modernity overtaking The ways of the world, I disagree. I just I think that you can consider South Africa stayed apartheid into the nineteen eighties. You know, it was not a foregone conclusion that America would go the way it was. You know, it had to be made to happen. Yeah, and I think the most dangerous part of thinking about it as you say in terms of modernity is the inevitability that well, obviously, we were going to move to a more democratic system and that you know we would not continue to have senators elected by state legislatures in these sort of secret cabals. Clearly women were going to get the right to vote. None of that is clear in the mid nineteenth century. And so as a kind of lesson in history it is that we have to attend very closely,