← Hillsdale College Podcast Network Superfeed
Loading summary
Transcript12 lines
- [00:09]
A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
- [00:13]
B
And I'm Juan Davalos. And we are back with the Great American Story, A Land of Hope. We're going to cover lectures 9 and 10 today. The house divides.
- [00:22]
A
In the previous two lectures, we've seen the question of justice, particularly over slavery, become a increasing division. And certain events in the 1840s, particularly the Mexican American War, which America's easy victory in as its Republican citizen soldier troops defeated the professional army of the Mexicans, massively expanded American holdings. And the American people needed to decide, would there be slavery in these new holdings or not?
- [00:51]
B
And that's what I find very interesting about these two lectures. Today especially, we tend to focus on the issue of slavery as an important part of American history. And, you know, obviously that is the title of this lecture, the House Divides is brought from a theme in one of Lincoln's speeches about the house divided cannot stand. And obviously what he's referring to is this issue of slavery and a different definition of justice. But there's a lot of topics in this lecture that are covered that are very interesting. There were a lot of things going on in American history, such as the Mexican War, like Jeremiah is mentioning, and you'll get to see those in this lecture, and the importance of those cannot be understated. Again, thinking of the growth of America, the westward expansion of America, and in this particular instance, the idea that Americans are now standing against settled armies and beating them and establishing themselves now a expanding country.
- [01:53]
C
Right.
- [01:53]
A
One of the major problems that Americans faced in their infancy was the threat from European imperial powers. We fought two wars with Great Britain. France was an ally and then an adversary and was going through all sorts of turmoil, but was still an imperial power. Spain was an imperial power. There were other imperial powers in Europe, and America was weak and vulnerable, unfortunately had the Atlantic Ocean to make exploitation by the European powers more difficult. But in the Mexican American War, we see America really emerge and solidify its status as a real country, a real formidable country. And it mostly not entirely put to rest questions of European acquisitions in the New World. So that allowed America to focus on what it was going to become and the type of nation it was going to create and build and sustain on the continent.
- [02:46]
B
If you enjoy reading and learning about American history, I encourage you to get the book by Dr. Maclay, the Land of An Invitation to the Great American Story. The course is based on this book. It's a wonderful book and we sell it in our shop. If you go to Hillsdale, Edu course. That's Hillsdale. Edu course. You can find all of the books for our online courses, including Land of hope from Dr. Maclay and the Books tab that's Hillsdale. Edu course.
- [03:18]
A
Now we return to Dr. Maclay in the Great American Story Land of Hope. Lectures nine and ten. The house divides Part one and two.
- [03:31]
C
When we look back at an event of colossal import like the American Civil War, there's a temptation to see it as inevitable, to see everything that happens as steps culminating in a result that was almost preordained. It's very tempting in this particular case to see it the way the audience of a Greek tragedy they always knew what the outcome of the play was going to be. The sole interest was in how the particular playwright was going to orchestrate the ending. We should resist this in the study of history, though. We should resist it because a real understanding of history involves us putting ourselves into the minds and situations and circumstances of the players in historical dramas, who are often faced with difficult choices, any one of which might well have changed the outcome in some dramatic or subtle way. So we should try to avoid that temptation to think in terms of inevitability. However, having said that, there are certain things that happen in the course of events that make certain outcomes much more likely than they would have been otherwise. And for my money, if you're going to find a candidate that may the Civil War, some kind of civil War, some kind of separation or effort at separation close to inevitable, it would be the Mexican War. That may surprise some people. The Mexican War is a rather obscure thing for many Americans who are not Texans, and certainly Mexicans are more acquainted with it than Americans are. But its long lasting impact is great. It opened up all the national questions that the Missouri Compromise had attempted to settle. In many ways, the Mexican War is a good reference point for the adage, be careful what you wish for going back, I'll just briefly scan a sort of early history of this that once Mexico won its independence from Spain, beginning in the 1820s, they sought to encourage Americans to migrate and settle in their northern colony, Texas. And they too got more than they wished for. The Americans started flooding in, and soon, by 1830 or so, the newly arrived Anglo American immigrants, many of whom had brought their slaves with them because they were coming from southern states, many of them, most of them, they outnumbered the Mexicans 3 to 1. By that time, Texas was becoming part of the American cotton kingdom. In effect, economically speaking, migration was turning into a kind of cultural conquest. Mexico was not very happy with this and tried in various ways to turn off the tap to outlaw slavery in 1829 and insist that all inhabitants of the region who were American had to convert to Roman Catholicism. Something that didn't get very far, to which these new migrants were resistant. And after all, Roman Catholicism was already becoming a minority culture in their region. Mexico tried to close off immigration that didn't really work. The stream of immigrants kept coming. Finally, 1834, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, we usually think of him as Santa Anna, came to power in Mexico. And his efforts to bring the American problem to a conclusion resulted in a war of independence on the part of the Texan Americans led by the famous Sam Houston, after whom the great city is named. Sam Houston was a Virginia native who had been governor of Tennessee and was a member of an adopted member of the Cherokee tribe. So a most interesting figure and an Indian fighter too to boot. It was clear that the conflict between Texas and Mexico was going to have to be settled by arms. It was. The Texas revolution was successful despite a minor setback at the Alamo along the way. In October of 1836, Sam Houston was elected President of the Republic of Texas. A month later a plebiscite was held that indicated that an overwhelming majority of Texans would like their independent nation to become part of the United States by annexation. This was appealed to the United States government. Andrew Jackson was still president at this time. And Jackson, rather prudently, I think in retrospect, sought to hesitate going down that road because he realized this would almost certainly lead to conflict with Mexico that the country didn't need at that time. This hesitation was prudent. His successor, Van Buren, also hesitated to provoke a war with Mexico. But many American southerners and Texans were not happy with this. Texas was vulnerable to domination by Britain or some other foreign power, but particularly Britain. And serving as an attractive source of cotton and tariff free markets that would compete to the detriment of the southern cotton producing states. It was to restrain the development of that area so greatly was going against the national mood in a way that actually comports very well with what I've described as a Jacksonian moment in the previous lecture. That is this confident, expansive, forward looking mood of westward movement towards the ocean, towards fulfilling what John L. O', Sullivan, a journalist, called our manifest destiny, our obvious destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence. That's a term manifest destiny. We hear, we think of it in fairly mixed bag terms, maybe even negatively, entirely as an arrogant way of saying we will take the land, it belongs to us. But it's more complicated than that. That's not entirely false. But it's also true that the advocates of Manifest Destiny saw what they were doing as a great beneficence. They saw it as the extension of liberty, of progress, of individual enfranchisement, and freedom, of the great experiment that was America, an experiment in liberty. A union of many republics. Quoting here, John L. O'. Sullivan. A union of many republics comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood. That's talking more generally about manifestosity, not specifically about the Texas situation, which of course included slavery, the toleration of slavery. So. But at any rate, there was this national mood, this expansive national mood. And in the end, these expansive forces proved too hard to resist. Congress finally in 1845, passed a joint resolution approving the annexation of Texas. And as Jackson had anticipated, it led almost immediately to trouble with Mexico. But the newly elected president, James K. Polk, was willing to take that on. He was willing to not only risk, but bring on a war with Mexico which began May 13, 1846. It was a short order war, very successful from a military standpoint, but a war that was controversial. Many in the north, particularly in the Whig party which had formed around opposition to Jackson, the name derived from the British Whig party they had formed in the 1830s opposing Jackson. And they tended particularly in the north, to be an anti slavery party. John Quincy Adams, for example, was a prominent member of that party. Adams, among others, saw this as an unrighteous war that was really calculated to expand the empire of slavery in general opposition to the Mexican War. Henry David Thoreau, the writer, was famously opposed to the Mexican War had something to do with opposition to the southern expansion of slavery. With the success of the Mexican War, the United States suddenly again added enormous amounts of territory to its already vast extent. In fact, by the conclusion of the Mexican War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it was a coast to coast continental nation that the United States had become, even acquiring a new ocean, the Pacific Ocean, to go with the one that it already had. And by and large many Americans, I would say more than not, accepted this in an almost exultant spirit, that this was yet another sign of divine favor, the triumph of republicanism over the lingering authoritarianism and monarchism of the old world and a revitalization of patriotic sentiment. There was a whole new generation of military leaders that came out of this. Some said the country has now entered a new epoch, which could be said for good or could be said for bad reasons or for unfortunate reasons. As the historian Robert Johansen said, it was almost as if God had kept the gold hidden until the land came into possession of the American republic. He is referring here, of course, to the gold rush that drew so many Americans and others in a mad rush to California and parts west in search of instant riches. But all the success and the giddy sentiments didn't change the fact that the war had been controversial. And this amazing growth that the nation was experiencing was bound to lead to problems and proved to be a mixed blessing. The Missouri compromise, remember, is a very delicately balanced thing. It involved the extension of the 3630 latitudinal line drawn westward from the southern boundary border of Missouri, that states and territories above that line were non slave states, free states, and ones below that line could introduce slavery. And so as soon as the war was over, even before the war was over, David Wilmot, a congressman from Pennsylvania, introduced a rider, really, to a appropriations bill, military appropriations bill, stating that there would be no introduction of slavery into the territories acquired by the Mexican war. It's interesting, Wilmot was not opposed to Texas being admitted as a slave state, but the Wilmot proviso was meant to ensure that no additional states were added from the war itself. At the same time, to illustrate the gulf that was developing, Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina responded the Wilmot proviso by expressing unrestrained disdain that slaves were possessions that were protected under the fifth amendment to the Constitution. So any provision that would prohibit that would be a violation of the Constitution, a violation of the notion of due process of law. That's the gulf that you have opening up that reflects the cultural gulf that I was talking about in the last lecture. How to bridge this gulf. Well, one suggestion that was made was to invoke the principle of popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty meant that instead of just making a decision on a national level about whether slavery would go here or there, it would allow for solutions to be made locally, kind of local option. And, you know, this was an idea that had some appeal to Americans. It went with the fundamental idea of self rule right. People get to decide the laws by which they're governed. But it ran against the fundamental natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, and so was in conflict with foundational presuppositions of the nation itself. Time would tell whether it would have any use at all in managing these divisions or make them grow worse. Meanwhile, the California gold rush had produced such a population explosion on the west coast that the need quickly Arose for some kind of government to manage the lawlessness of this area had not yet, even yet achieved territorial status. A lot of interest in simply have California go straight to being a state, a free state. And in the end, a controversy ensued over that, because California would decisively. The emission of California would decisively tip the balance towards free states. And in the end, a compromise was wrought. The so called Compromise of 1850 was actually several separatists, separate acts that go under that rubric. I'll put it very simply because it had a lot of features. The idea was that California would be let in to the union as a free state and a tough, much tougher than had previously existed. Fugitive slave law would be instituted which would compensate the southern states, the slaveholding states, for the unequal status that the admission of California would commit them to. The south was doomed to be the lower right corner of America by the admission of California. That was the idea. The strict fugitive slave law would ensure that the south had its property rights in slavery protected and that it would not be threatened. In retrospect, it's hard to see how anybody could have taken seriously the idea that this compromise could work. But at any rate, it soon became clear that the northern states were simply not going to accept a strict fugitive slave law because after all, the enforcement of a fugitive slave law implicated them in the activity of affirming and sustaining slavery. It's one thing to think the south can have its peculiar institution down there and we don't like it, but we don't have to look at it, we don't have to see it, and we don't have to actively cooperate collude with the south in perpetrating this atrocity, but to be openly involved in it, to be required by the law to help round up fugitive slaves in the streets of Boston and send them back to the conditions from which they fled. That was more than a great many people, including people who didn't have strong feelings about slavery, a lot more than they were willing to tolerate. So it generated intense resistance. It was ultimately ineffective. The Wisconsin supreme court declared it unconstitutional, Vermont passed laws nullifying it, and so on. Pastors invade against it from the pulpit. And right around this time, Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin appears. And it couldn't have been better time from the standpoint of public sentiment. Meanwhile, another seemingly unrelated issue arose that would contribute to the disturbing of the national balance. And that was the question of the transcontinental railroad. Now that we had a transcontinental nation, we needed a transcontinental railroad. But where was it to be? Would it be in the far south or would it be in a more midwestern trajectory or path? There was a southern route promoted by Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, and there was a more northern route, more midwestern really. Route that was promoted by Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, senator from Illinois. And to make it palatable to southerners, Douglass proposed taking the territory west of Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska territories and allowing each of them to be settled by terms of popular sovereignty. That is, they would each be allowed to decide for themselves whether slavery would be permitted. What Douglass was proposing may not have sounded like a big deal, but in fact it was a momentous proposal because he was in effect proposing to repeal the Missouri Compromise, the act that had kept the peace since the 1819, 1820 controversy. The fire bell in the night that Jefferson so feared. It was in fact a blunder on his part. And the passage of the Kansas Nebraska act by Congress was a blunder. It bore unwelcome fruit almost immediately. It destroyed the Whig party, weakened the Democratic party in the north, and it brought back into politics an obscure congressman from former congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, more of him in a few moments. Violent conflict was developing between the settlement communities in particularly Kansas, because in fact one of the things Douglass had not reckoned with is that the demographics of these communities could be influenced by the migrants who were invited in. And if pro slavery people migrated en masse to Kansas, then Kansas would in a popular sovereignty kind of situation, elect to be pro slavery. He hadn't really reckoned with that conflict erupted. John Brown, who we'll hear more of later. A fanatical anti slavery abolitionist really figure, attacked a pro slavery group and killed a number of its members along with his sons. The situation became referred to as bleeding Kansas nationally and it was becoming a national disgrace. So much for the efficacy of popular sovereignty. And this violence spilled over into the halls of the Congress. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave an impassioned a bitter speech against a man from South Carolina who was objecting. Sumner was objecting to his support for slavery, for the slave power, the rape of a virgin territory producing a new slave state. And Andrew Butler, Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina he accused of being a man who embraced slavery as his mistress, as his harlot. An insult that almost seemed to be guaranteed a fierce reprisal as it was shortly thereafter, Sumner was met on the floor of the Senate by the nephew of the senator and was nearly beaten to death by a gold headed cane. The reaction to this interest by the way is interesting. In the north, people were horrified. Emerson said, I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one state. We must get rid of slavery or get rid of freedom. On the other hand, in the south, the Richmond Inquirer praised the attack and said that Sumner should be caned every morning. Brooks the caner received hundreds of new canes in endorsement of his assault. And one of them was inscribed hit him again. So there you have the widening division. By this time Sumner had become a member of a new political party, the Republican Republican Party. The Republican Party coalesced around the anti slavery elements in the Democratic Whig and the Free Soil Party. A small party I have not mentioned in these remarks, but in 1854 it arose. In 1856 it was big enough to mount a presidential campaign. It was the second largest party in the country, but it was a strictly sectional party. An important fact that I'll come back to in a minute. 1856 election. The Democrats did well. They were still the only national party. And James Buchanan, the candidate, was not involved in the Kansas business. He'd been out of the country, so he wasn't tainted by association with it. But. But even before he could get to work on the Kansas issue, something truly momentous happened. And this time from the direction of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case Dred Scott v. Sanford. This was a blockbuster decision, one that ratcheted up the tensions between the sections and between the branches of government by several orders of magnitude. It's a complicated case, but it boils down to the fact that Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia, was purchased by an army surgeon who brought him into free territory. And after the death of his owner, he sued. The slave, Dred Scott sued to be set free on the grounds that he had had this residence in a free state. Free territory had made him free. The case went through the courts and ended up in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland wrote the decision. And the decision went far beyond the mere demands of the case. Taney wanted to settle the issue of slavery once and for all, which is far from being what he did. First, he dismissed Scott's claims, claiming he did not have legal standing to sue because he was not a citizen, because he was a black man and the framers of the Constitution did not extend citizenship rights to blacks. Second, he said that the Constitution, excuse me, that the Congress lacked the power to deprive any person of his property without due process. Essentially, Calhoun's argument and slaves were property. And then finally, an even bigger stunner, Missouri Compromise was found to be not merely moot under the Kansas Nebraska act, but unconstitutional from the very beginning because it had excluded slavery from Wisconsin and the other northern territories. This was a stunning decision, as I've said, both north and south, and it again ratcheted the conflict even further. All eyes turn now to Stephen Douglas, who was the last remaining prominent Democrat who had national, and not merely sectional sources of support. And his campaign for The Senate in 1858 was clearly a prologue to a presidential run. His opponent, the aforesaid Abraham Lincoln, a rising star in the Republican Party, who had been a Whig congressman and had left politics for a time to be a highly successful lawyer, but had been goaded back into politics by the Kansas Nebraska act and who was incensed by the Dred Scott decision. Lincoln, of course, is a man of an incredible life story, the stuff of American legend. The uncommon common man who rose from a very humble frontier circumstances to become President of the United States. We know actually very little about his early life, except that he described it as being summarized in one sentence, the short and simple annals of the poor. But he made his way in the world and eventually became highly successful politician. Lincoln had a strong belief in the Declaration of Independence, which for him had almost the authority of Holy Writ. He revered it, he recurred to it. He insisted that the Constitution need to be read in light of it as founded upon it. He was committed to the notion of natural rights, that it was the will of government was always subject to the edicts of nature and nature's God. He had always loathed slavery, although he was not, strictly speaking, an abolitionist. He was anti slavery, but understood that the Constitution permitted slavery. And as long as that was the case, it was the law of the land. And as a lawyer, he had extraordinarily high regard for the law, as we'll see in a moment. His debates with Douglass, which are talked about more in the book, but we'll just pass over, were classics of American political oratory and were genuine debates and worthy of study. Even today. They're not like the joint press conferences with gotcha questions that we have gotten used to in present times. So at any rate, Lincoln made a good showing. He didn't win, but he made a very good showing and became a national figure through the campaign in Illinois. And by the time the 1860 presidential election rolled around, Lincoln was the leading candidate in the Republican Party and a very plausible candidate for election, except for the fact that the Republican Party was a sectional party. The Democratic Party was the sole remaining national party. If it could hold together. Well, it couldn't. Douglas would be nominated by a minority of Democratic delegates. There were two other dissident elements in the Democratic Party and then the Constitutional Union party. So Lincoln had a chance to win for that reason, because the division of the opposition vote. He won 180 electoral votes from all 18 free states and only from those states, not a single electoral vote from the rest of the country. From the South. Douglas failed miserably getting 12 electoral votes. A far distant second, excuse me, a far distant last in this four way race. So this was a momentous thing. Lincoln had been elected president on an entirely regional ticket. This gave South Carolina and other more radical parts of the south the pretext they'd been looking for for proposing and carrying out secession from the Union. As a last gasp effort before Lincoln became president, Congress narrowly passed a constitutional amendment. This is not very well known by Americans. This was called the Corwin Amendment. It was supported by Lincoln and Seward and other Republicans. It would have explicitly protected slavery where it already existed. The text read as follows. No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to to abolish or interfere within any state with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said state. This is an extraordinary amendment. Extraordinary that Lincoln and Seward were willing to sign onto it. This tells you how frightened they were at the prospect of the nation falling apart. They would, as ardent anti slavery advocates, be willing to accept something so counter to their fundamental moral commitments and propositions. But in fact matters had come to the point where if it had passed and had been the 13th amendment, it would not have solved the problem. There did not seem to be any solution. What Lincoln had predicted two years before, that a house divided against itself cannot stand proved to be prophecy.
- [35:31]
D
Hey there, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Great show this week. Our friend Molly Hemingway is back. Senior journalism fellow here at Hillsdale College, Editor in chief of the Federalist. You see her on Fox News. The brand new bestseller, Alito the Justice who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution. We will talk in depth with Molly Hemingway about the book and about what she's learned about Justice Alito. Plus Janie Nitza, lawyer and New York Times best selling author, tells us about her new children's book that she co authored with a Supreme Court justice that's Neil Gorsuch. The book is Heroes of 1776, the story of the Declaration of Independence. All that this week on the radio. Free Hillsdale Hour. Find it at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio, including YouTube. You know the Robertson family from the hit TV show Duck Dynasty. Now Hillsdale College offers you the unique opportunity to learn alongside the Robertsons as they dive deep into Hillsdale's online course, the Genesis Story. Every Friday on the Unashamed Podcast, the Robertsons will share their insights and perspectives, learning from Hillsdale professor of English Justin Jackson. Take a trip down south to Louisiana for this one of a kind learning experience we call Unashamed Academy. Visit unashamedforhillsdale.com and enroll today. That's Unashamed F O R hillsdale.com to experience the Genesis Story alongside the Robertsons.
- [37:30]
C
So Lincoln was president and immediately plunged into the demands of war. His entire presidency was filled out and defined by the needs of warfare. It was extraordinary. He was the first American president of which that could be said. Initially, he tried to be conciliatory. The first inaugural address was an effort to sort of plead with the south not to go, not to endorse this mad proposition of secession. We are not enemies but friends, he said at the end of his speech. We must not be enemies. The passions of the moment must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of Union. Beautiful, beautiful image. Such oratory hadn't been heard in Washington since Jefferson's time, but it had no effect. Lincoln's strategy needed to shift when he faced his first crisis, the siege of Fort Sumter, a federal facility in Charleston harbor, which was the white hot center of secessionist sentiment. Secessionists had demanded the evacuation of the fort. Buchanan had refused to do it, but Buchanan's effort to resupply the post had been driven away by Confederate artillery fire. That was the situation when Lincoln became President. When Lincoln was told by Sumter's commanding officer, Major Robert Anderson, that he had only a few weeks worth of supplies left, Lincoln made the decision again to attempt resupplying him, and the Confederates opened fire on the fort and after 30 hours of shelling, forced its surrender. This was a seeming defeat for the Union, but was actually a victory for Lincoln because it forced the south to fire the first shot. Immediately after Fort Sumter, Lincoln called upon the Northern states to supply militiamen to help carry the battle against the Confederacy and the war began for Lincoln, a couple of important points. The restoration of the Union was always the chief goal of the war. All other objectives took second place to that, second and third, fourth place to that. This conviction lasted well into the war as being the central part of the northern agenda. It might seem obvious that the north would have huge advantages in this war. But as with the revolution, there were advantages on the other side. The south, like the Americans in the revolution, only had to hold on to their territory. They had to be able to fight a defensive war on familiar ground on their homeland. So the south had that advantage. And they had the advantage of having some of the most talented military men. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Joseph Johnston, and so on. These were all southerners and very accomplished, proven generals. And there was, similar to the revolution, the prospect of gaining diplomatic recognition. Recognition from one of the European powers. Why not? The English textile mills needed southern cotton. If it was possible that the south could show military resiliency sufficient to hold their own, perhaps the British government would come in on the side of the South. It was not unthinkable. So Lincoln had a very complicated job ahead of him. He wanted to reunite the Union. He didn't want to destroy the South. He wanted to destroy their will to fight enough to cause him to put down arms, but not so much as to disable them, to bring them back into the Union. This was a complicated task, and there were times when public opinion flagged in support of it. Lincoln had a hard time finding a strategy that would be sufficient to perform the tasks he needed. He started out with a strategy of basically using a blockade of the south, the so called Anaconda strategy, named after the snake that squeezes its prey to death. And that would have worked, but it took too long. The public was antsy for some kind of sign, some victory in the field that would indicate that this was not a hopeless struggle that was going to go on and on forever. Lincoln went through a series of generals. General George McClellan, very frustrating General who won some battles, but failed to press the advantage. The bloody standoff at Antietam, Antietam Creek in Maryland. Lincoln used that as occasion to begin to think about using the emancipation of slaves as a war measure as a strategy to both expand the moral scope of the war, the moral meaning of the war, and to supply additional troops and additional moral credibility in the larger world for the Union cause. He had to do this in a way, though, that was constitutional, Lincoln believed, and the importance of constitutionality and preserving that. So he believed that under the terms of his constitutional powers as president. He had the ability to free slaves in those areas that were in rebellion against the country as a war measure, strictly as a martial law kind of measure. So that he did. He actually didn't free all the slaves. He didn't freeze the slaves in places like Kentucky that were not part of the Confederacy. But this narrow tailoring of the Emancipation Proclamation that performed the act was frustrating to many observers then and now. It's not a very stirring document. It's a list. The historian Richard Hofstadter called it a bill of lading, really just an invoice. Some argue that it didn't free a single slave, which actually is not true. But all of these comments missed the point of Lincoln's statesmanship. He wanted to advance the cause of abolition, but in a way that was not a violation of the existing legal structure of the country. The fortunes of the war went up and down in ways that we don't have time to detail now. But I do want to bring out a couple of important moments. In the middle of 1863, there were two important victories by the Union forces. One at Vicksburg, which brought control of the Mississippi river and cut the Confederacy in two. The other at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, where the northward thrust of Robert E. Lee had been stopped and Southern morale took a dive. It was a great victory, and it occasioned one of the great speeches of American history, Lincoln's speech at the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg, sometimes called the Gettysburg Address. It's a memorable speech, and it's only 300 words long, so it would be tempting to just read the whole thing to you. But what Lincoln did with this speech of fewer than 300 words is to redefine the war, not merely as a war to preserve the Union, but as a war to preserve the democratic idea, the idea of government of the people, by the people, for the people. A phrase that will be forever associated with Lincoln and which America he took to exemplify in the world as such. It's reaching back to the Founding. Reaching back. He begins with four scored seven years ago. Our fathers bringing forth onto the continent a new nation. It echoes those sentiments of Hamilton and the other founders who saw in American history and in the American Founding a larger purpose being carried out on the behalf of all of humankind. This was to be a land dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Language that Lincoln took directly from, guess where. The Declaration of Independence. It was a baffo speech. Winston Churchill has praised it as the ultimate Expression of. Of the majesty of Shakespeare's language. What a wonderful way to phrase it to include not only American oratory, but the entire range of English literature. That's one moment. But the other moment I want to talk about is the time in the early part of 1864 when Lincoln had to run for reelection. His opponent was General McClellan, with whom he'd had a falling out, shall we say, over his conduct of the war. Mcclellan was fronting a platform that would seek an early peace with the south on the south's terms. In other words, if he won, the game would be up. Lincoln's efforts would have been in vain. And it was a harrowing time for Lincoln because he came to feel, not without reason at that point in the war, despite the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, that the war might be lost, especially if the election didn't go the right way. Fortunately, by the time the election came, that was not. That was not the case. But one of the things that I think we are not sufficiently mindful of is the courage and steadfastness that he had to show much the way George Washington was courageous and steadfast during the ups and downs of the revolutionary war, and keep his eye on the prize, keep him aware of the fact that the goal he sought was the right goal, despite the comprehensive public disdain and impatience of the American public to which he was subjected. We think that courage in politics is like a Hollywood movie, and the music swells in the background and the camera pans around the cheering crowd. And in fact, Lincoln suffered mightily. Depression, fear, dread, loss of confidence in himself and in the rightness of his goals. But, as I say, by the end of the election of 1864, thanks to victories by general Sherman and others, victory was, if not in hand, closely nearby. At his second inaugural, which was in March of 1865, Lincoln gave an amazingly conciliatory speech, recognizing, to the degree he could, the understandableness, if not legitimacy of the southern motives for going to war, and that in some way, the problem of slavery was a national problem and not merely a regional one, and that the war perhaps had been an atonement for the whole nation's sins in failing to curb this institution at an earlier time when perhaps it could have. Finally, in April, not long after the speech, after a last flurry of resistance, General Lee surrendered his army to general Grant at appomattox courthouse in Virginia. And it's a beautiful scene which I describe in some detail in land of hope, and I'll only say for now that it was a scene in which the mutual respect of all parties, and particularly of the Union soldiers for the surrendering Confederate soldiers is kind of breathtaking and mirrors the conciliatory character of Lincoln's second inaugural speech. With malice to none, charity to all that spirit, let me read you General Joshua Chamberlain of Maine, who was at this ceremony, the surrender ceremony, wrote the following the Confederate soldiers were coming forward and presenting their arms and stacking them and these were men who had been just days ago, mortal enemies. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood, men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness, could bend from their resolve, standing before us now, thin, worn and famished, but erect and and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond. Was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured on our part. Not a sound of trumpet moor, nor roll of drum, nor a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath holding such deep sympathies. At the conclusion of the worst war in American history, a war that variously estimated at 620,000 dead, up to 800,000 and a million and a half casualties, one in four soldiers who went to war never came home. One in 13 returned home with a limb or more limbs missing for decades to come. In every village and town in the country, you could see the evidence of the scars and mutilations of this war. And yet Chamberlain's words suggested there was possibly room in the days and years ahead for a reconciliation, the kind of conciliation that Lincoln had called for in his second inaugural and to which it would turn out that he gave his life. We will pick up that part of the story next time. Thank you.
- [53:21]
B
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit hillsdale.edu course. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis Story, Classic Children's Literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos, and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you'll learn will enrich your life and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at Hillsdale. Edu coursetoday. That's Hillsdale Edu course. Thanks for listening.