00:00:03 Speaker 1: People still talk about it like it happened last week, and they talk about it in ways that are are deeply personal. So whether it's somebody you know who maybe has ancestors who were part of the Union or ancestors who were part of the Confederacy, they don't talk about it in terms of they went here, or they went there, or they did this or they did that. They say, we. 00:00:33 Speaker 2: In this series about the American Civil War will try to understand why it happened, who the players were, in their motivations, that's the big one, their motivations. What this war was and wasn't takes a nuanced perspective to understand it. It's striking to me how prominent this war remains in the American psyche, even one hundred and sixty one years after the final shots were fired. And like many, I understand the of the Civil War, but my deeper knowledge is limited. In recent years, we've heard updated narratives on the conflict from multiple sides, and it's been confusing and polarizing. This series is my attempt to understand the truth of the war for myself, and I'd simply like to bring you along. This isn't just a story about how America died. It's the story of how the modern world was born. I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this bear Grease series on the Civil War. My name is klay knucom and this is the bear Grease Podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Brought to you by to Covi's Boots. I'm a cowboy boot man and I've been wearing to cod was for years. They're the most comfortable boot I've ever put on. Good boots for good times. I'd like to start off by introducing our Civil War guru guest and my friend. 00:02:21 Speaker 1: I'm JD. Hewittt and history educator and also the creator of a YouTube channel called The History Underground, which has been going at this point for about six years. 00:02:37 Speaker 2: I've known J. D. Hewitt for over a decade and he reaches millions of viewers through his channel History Underground every year, and he's gained my respect as a reasonable voice of American history. He'll be taking us into the weeds of this Civil War that raids from eighteen sixty one to eighteen sixty five. The Civil War is the most written about event in American history, so I recognize there's no vacancy of knowledge about what happened. Six hundred thousand people were lost in this war, more than all other American wars combined, and in this battle the nation was entirely torn in two. We like to think of history as a static set of dates in a textbook, safe, distant, settled, but the American Civil War was none of those things. It was a violent, screaming rupture that rewrote the DNA of the continent and oddly still looms large in the culture, particularly in the South. President Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, looked over a scarred landscape and realized the terrifying stakes, declaring, quote that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. I think he said these words in faith, without real certainty of what he hoped for that it would actually happen. But it required a baptism of fire. Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, said the South was quote forced to take up arms to vindicate the political rights, the freedom, the quality, and state sovereignty which were the heritage purchased by the blood of our revolutionary sires. This disagreement had been boiling since the inception of the country in seventeen seventy six. The fiery secessionists of the South and their wealthy agricultural society clashed with the growing power of the American government, viewing it not as a triumph of democracy but intolerable tyranny of those who simply didn't understand their way of life. To compromise was to lose it all. In this series, we're pulling back the shroud of time to understan and why it happened. As the villains, heroes and moral crusaders will all get jumbled up in a complexity that's hard to understand. Most of them weren't as simple, righteous, or as evil as we once thought. Will march through the brutal reality of what actually happened, the mud, the blood, the unimaginable courage, and the catastrophic errors of this brother against brother war. We're going to start with a simple question. Here is the opening of my conversation with J. D. HEWITTT so growing up in the American South, the Civil War has loomed large in my life, and I think it has in yours. And you know, here we are one hundred and seventy five years past the Civil War, and I'm amazed at how it stayed in our culture. Yeah, I mean, aside from all the other wars that we've had in America, this one, I mean, the Civil War is unique because it was a war of Americans against Americans. 00:06:11 Speaker 1: Right. 00:06:11 Speaker 2: Why are we still talking about this. 00:06:15 Speaker 1: Man, is it is one of the defining moments in our nation's history. And it's funny that you mentioned that. So I'll go out and you know, I've had the opportunity to visit a lot of Civil War battlefields and there is a connection to this event that you said eighteen sixty one to eighteen sixty five, and people still talk about it like it happened last week, and they talk about it in ways that are are deeply personal. So whether it's somebody you know who maybe has ancestors who were part of the Union or ancestors who were part of the Confederacy, they don't talk about it in terms of they went here, or they went there, or they did this, or they did that, They say we so when the when the one hundred and fifty first Pennsylvania was advancing on our position, or when you know, the tenth Missouri, you know, was when when we were you know, advancing on the Confederates here at this spot. So it's a it's a fascinating conflict to study because even though it's one hundred and seventy years ago, it's still very present with us. 00:07:40 Speaker 2: After the Battle at Gettysburg, Union General George meet wrote his wife saying that in the last ten days he lived as much as in the thirty years prior in ten days. Henry Adams wrote about the upheaval of wartime, saying, one does every day and without a second thought what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps a life. Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, said the war uprooted institutions that were centuries old, transformed social life of half of the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations. Mark Twain would actually be wrong, because now we're six and even seven generations past the war and still talking about it. It's so intimidating to do a series on the Civil War. It's a big bite, And I mean some might even be like, what's Clay doing wading into the Civil War. I mean there are academics who've spent their entire careers studying single battles, which tells you how challenging this is going to be to do a general overview of the war and to give credence to its complexities. But I've got really specific questions that I'm going to try to understand. And like I said from the beginning, I'm just bringing you along on the questions that I would ask JD if he and I were riding down the road in a truck. But I'm going to start off with a personal question for JD. So, I grew up in Arkansas, and Arkansas was part of the Confederacy. Yes, And here I was in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties growing up, and it wasn't my dad that told me about the Civil War. I would have learned about the Civil War in school, but I vividly remember some of my friends, and I would have their names in my head. Who would have who would have talked to me? About the Confederacy and very very like in terms of endearment, like, Hey, Clay, we're from the South. You know our ancestors were Confederates. This is something to be proud of. This would have been long before I would have had any sense of really what the war was about, what it wasn't about. 00:10:09 Speaker 1: Like it. 00:10:10 Speaker 2: I'm not proud and I'm not ashamed of it. It's just kind of the way it was. It's like there was instilled in me culturally a sense of pride that our state was a Confederate state. 00:10:22 Speaker 1: It just was. 00:10:23 Speaker 2: And I think that would be fairly consistent to some degree across the American South, not everybody. Do you think that there is a similar sense of the Union States? Now you are from Missouri, which was kind of this state that was kind of caught in the middle. But my question to you is do kids in the North do they have conversations when they're fourteen years old about, Man, I'm so proud that our lineage was from the Union. I don't know if they do. 00:10:59 Speaker 1: I just from my own personal observation and what I know. No, you don't see that. You don't see that to the degree that you do in the South. 00:11:11 Speaker 2: Wow, because we lost and where the culture is insecure or a little bit bitter. 00:11:20 Speaker 1: I think there's an an element of so. So, after the Civil War, there's there's this movement called the Lost Cause movement, where it becomes deeply ingrained in in the South that that what this was was a struggle for states' rights and a second War of American independence, and that that the cause that the South fought for was was just. But but the outcome obviously didn't go the way that that it should have. So so there it okay. Here, here's here's one way to think of it. In the first Rocky movie, I like. 00:12:09 Speaker 2: Where this is going. I'm gonna understand this. 00:12:11 Speaker 1: And not who is the hero of that movie? In the first rock the first Rocky movie, Yeah, is it Rocky or Apollo Creed Rocky? Yeah? Who loses the fight? Yeah, Rocky, rockyses the fight. Man. He's this tough, scrappy guy who is the the underdog. And he gets in there and he slugs it out and he gives it his best, and he he loses the fight, but but he he wins the hearts of the people who are watching. And and I think there's an element of that where in the South, it's perceived that, hey, you know, our our ancestors that they went up against the most powerful nation in the world. You know, we went up against the big federal government and had all of the odds against us. But man our ancestors that my great great great grandpa fought hard, and that's something to be proud of, is it? 00:13:18 Speaker 2: Okay? If I'm just honest with you, and I want to ask you a question, what is your experience with the cultural connections to the Civil War where you grew up. I would suspect that some of you would have no real cultural connection to it. Others might have had an experience kind of like me. And I'm fully aware of the contentious nature of any alignment with the Confederates from both sides. I think there are people out there right now that would ostracize me if I showed any reluctance to not align with my historical heritage. But just as many might scorn me because of the connotation of racism associated with the Confederates, which is a very founded concern. You're kind of darned if you do, and darned if you don't. So I'll ask of you some patience from both sides, because I think the extremes of both of those ideologies are inaccurate. I'd now say that in my youth I was connected to some people that held onto the war in a very unproductive way, which, oddly to us at the time, never had anything to do with racism as far as I knew it. However, oddly, my brothers, who grew up in the same town, in same house as me, would not have had this exposure to any affinity to the Confederacy. It literally is a case by case, friend by friend basis. To look at me and make a generalization about everyone in the South wouldn't be accurate. But isn't that what makes it so interesting? But before we get started in the details of the content, here is a warning from JD. So. 00:15:03 Speaker 1: I want to be careful going into this, because when you're studying history, there's really two approaches that you have to take. You have to take what I call a thirty thousand foot view. So if I'm flying in an airplane and I look out my window, man, I can see everything broadly. But if I'm let's say I'm flying over New York City, Okay, man, I can see the whole expanse of that city. What I can't see is the name of that restaurant, or the name of that street, or what the people are doing on the ground. Okay, So I, in one sense, I get a clear view by seeing things broadly, but then I also need to get on the ground. So when looking at history in general, you need to look at things from thirty thousand feet and you also need to look at things on the ground in order to get a full picture of what's going on. And what people tend to do is they'll go to one extreme or the other. And a lot of what people will do is they'll they'll take the example of an on the ground example and then they'll apply it broadly. So, for example, you and I are both turkey hunters. You bow hunt turkeys, not much, not much, Okay, So I know a lot of people who do, and are you know, love it. I have killed one turkey with my bow. For me, personally, I found the experience so dissatisfying that I never did it again. Now, if somebody were listening to this one hundred and fifty years from now and they hear me say, you know, I just find bow hunting turkeys to be unrewarding that it would be completely unfair to them. Are unfair to say, Oh, well, I heard this guy one hundred and fifty years ago say that bow hunting turkeys wasn't fun to him, so nobody enjoyed it. You can't. You can't take one individual's opinion and then apply it broadly, and then you can also can't take the broad and apply it narrowly. Now, when looking at the Civil War, the big question, well, you tell me what was the Civil War fought over? Mmm? 00:17:17 Speaker 2: Oh, hey, JD, I've got this book. I have a few answers. Well, I think the answer that most people would give would be that it's about slavery or states rights. 00:17:30 Speaker 1: States rights. But those are the two answers right that typically are are going to clash with one another. And the answer to that is, you know, was it over slavery or was it over states rights? The answer is yes, it's really both. But when asking the question, is it over states rights? Okay, the state's rights to do? 00:17:56 Speaker 2: What if an alien landed on planet Earth and he heard about this war, the first question that he would ask would be why did they fight? This is the logical place to start, and it may seem like the answer is obvious. However, some don't see it that clearly, and I'm trying to get into the weeds to really understand it. We're learning the simplified narrative is not always the full truth. So I've got to learn what caused the Civil War and not just take someone's word for it. And you're welcome to join me. With no ideological agendas, or at least in the purest way that I can avoid them. I'm just trying to understand the facts. And it goes all the way back to the founding of this country. I did not want to get into this so early. I honestly didn't think we would. But we're about to talk about the words spelled sla ve r y. 00:18:56 Speaker 1: How long do we head for this podcast? 00:18:58 Speaker 2: We got plenty of time, all right. 00:19:01 Speaker 1: So if you go back, and regardless of opinions, anytime you're studying history, it's best to go back and look at what the people actually said. Let the people in history speak for themselves. So of course you have Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder who rights the Declaration of Independence, and of course, in the opening line says, we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So a lot of people look at that and they're like, Okay, Jefferson says that all men are created equal. Okay, who does that mean? What does that mean? So that's important to look at. What's equally important is to look at what got cut out of the Declaration of Independence. So there is a section that Jefferson had in there that got cut at the last minute, and let me read it for you. So the Declaration of Independence is like a breakup letter to Britain. So after that opening line that everybody knows, there's a list of grievances that we roll out to Britain saying here's why we are leaving. Here's one of the things that Jefferson wrote that got cut out. Says he has waged cruel war against human nature itself. So he's talking about the king here violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in persons of a distant people who never offended him. Okay, now listen to this, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation TOI their So there he's talking about the slave trade and how brutal it was. This is piratical warfare, the approbrium of infidel powers. It is warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain determined to keep open a market where men in capital letters should be bought and sold. 00:21:07 Speaker 2: What interpret that for me? It seems really clear, but I don't I don't fully understand. 00:21:12 Speaker 1: So so what Thomas Jefferson, the slaveholder, by the way, is leveling as an accusation against the King of Britain is that this is a cruel man who is perpetuating the slave trade and slavery. 00:21:27 Speaker 2: By allowing slavery in these colonies. Yes, but he was a slave owner. Yeah, Okay, that section that was cut out, Like that's not like that act, that's like factual that that was in there. That's not like maybe this was in there, that was in there. How would Jefferson have justified his vehemence against this institution of slavery that the King of England was letting into these colonies and then he's a slave owner? Like how's how does that work. 00:21:56 Speaker 1: So it gets even more complex, in my opinion, in the American colonies. These people have inherited an institution that is thousands of years old. You can go back to the Bible and there it's talking about slavery. 00:22:15 Speaker 2: Lots of commentary about slavery in the Bible. 00:22:17 Speaker 1: Yes, yes, okay, So, and it's not just in American culture. This is this is something that exists in every culture. Native Americans are are enslaving one another. So this is an institution that gets inherited by the American people. And I think in the case of Jefferson and some of these other slaveholders, it's almost like they have a tiger by the ears and they don't want to let it go, but they don't want to hold on to it either. Now with with Jefferson, it gets even even more complex. The whole institution of slavery is from our afect of looking back on it, there's so many oddities to it beyond just the simple immoral nature of it. Are you familiar with a slave of his by the name of Sally Hemmings a little bit? 00:23:14 Speaker 2: That it was his mistress essentially. 00:23:17 Speaker 1: Essentially, Yeah, So here's what's really odd about Sally Hemmings. Jefferson's wife and Sally Hemmings were half sisters. They had the same father but different mothers. Okay, it gets even more complex than that. So Sally Hemmings's mother also had a white slave holding father and a black slave mother. So Sally Hemmings herself was what they referred to as a quadroon where she was genetically three quarters white and one quarter African American, but was enslaved, but was enslaved, but genetically was more white than black. Very odd, and it was said that that she was kind of a more dark complexed resemblance of Thomas Jefferson's wife. So Jefferson has children by both women, conceivably the ones from Sally Hemmings, you could have children who are slaves. That's where it gets really really weird for. 00:24:35 Speaker 2: Me, yeah, for everybody. 00:24:38 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So where the complications really get, you know, with the United States and we're trying to bring this country together. This gets cut out of the Declaration of Independence because the Southern colonies are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not We're not putting that in there. You have these thirteen colonies who are trying to come together to form a country, and right from our very founding document, there's already a fight about slavery. 00:25:08 Speaker 2: So during that time, there would have been a moral consciousness about slavery, because what we're going to learn is that there's a lot of different reasons that people were for against slavery. And today it seems like the glaring, glowing reason that someone would be against slavery would be a moral issue of human rights. But we're going to find that there were a lot of people who were like, well, I don't really care about people that much, but slavery is a bad economic system. It hurts us. So in the seventeen seventies there were people who had moral a moral compass that was saying, this is really really bad because these people are humans just like me and deserve the same rights as me. 00:25:56 Speaker 1: Again, we can't take an individual and apply it broadly, but there are going to be people who recognize the wrongness of enslaving another human being, and they are going to be people. George Washington has slaves, and then most of them are going to be freed upon his death and his will he is okay after I die, you know, this group of slaves can be freed. So yeah, there exists this this tension that they have. 00:26:27 Speaker 2: Wow, it's got to be one of the most unique positions that humans have ever been inside of his own enslaves. 00:26:36 Speaker 1: That's why in the South they called it our peculiar institution, and it was peculiar. Yes. Wow. 00:26:45 Speaker 2: By the eighteen sixties, America was the largest slave holding nation in the world, with almost four million slaves of African descent constituting roughly thirteen percent of the nation's population of thirty one million. The context of the Civil War was massive growth and economic development in America during the past fifty years. Prior to the war, we had grown numerically four times faster than Europe and six times faster than the world's average just in population. And with that the economy boomed with all kinds of industry, but specifically the extensive rail lines. By eighteen sixty, America had more railways than all other countries of the world combined. For the record, I'm getting a lot of these stats from a Pulitzer Prize winning book titled battlecryt for Freedom by James McPherson. It's a great overview of the Civil War about the thickness of an Appalachian Family Bible, and in it, McPherson states that by eighteen sixty the modern American economy of mass consumption, mass production, and capital intensive agriculture was visible. Basically the backdrop of the Civil War was rising prosperity. So we've established that from the very beginning of the founding of America this institution of slavery, which was we inherited this tiger from England, and in the Independent Declaration of Independence, there was verbage in there that was taken out that was like, hey, this is bad, we don't want it here, but it was that was not sent over. So there's this tension, i mean, for almost one hundred years until the Civil War about slavery, but the institution persisted. If you were to just poll people in the world and said in America and said what was the Civil War about, I think ninety percent of them would say slavery. But then there would be this other percentage that I've heard recently that would say, no, oh, that's just propaganda, you know, that's just anti American propaganda. That's like trying to make our history look really dark, and the war really wasn't about that. They would say the war was about states rights. I've heard that before. What what do you say about that? 00:29:22 Speaker 1: I would say that that, as in most cases, both extremes are wrong. So the war is not a war that is just strictly about states rights and about keeping the federal government out of individual states business. That that that's not it. You'll also hear some people kind of throw in stuff about about tariffs. It was a war about tariffs, and again you have to go back and look at what they actually said. It's slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, a little bit of a mention of tariffs. Now on the other extreme, for people who say that the Civil wars about freeing the slaves, that is also not true. This was not a war of abolition. If you were looking the north in you know, eighteen fifty eight, eighteen sixty, very very small percentage. And when I say small, I'm talking like one percent or less of individuals who would consider themselves abolitionists. Most of them were probably ambivalent to it. 00:30:32 Speaker 2: Just in different just difference, just like that's that thing they do down there. Yeah, it doesn't affect me, I don't care. 00:30:38 Speaker 1: Or here would be a good way for you and I to think about it. How do you feel about kids mining cobalt in Africa? 00:30:47 Speaker 2: I'd say that's that's bad. 00:30:49 Speaker 1: Yeah. Is it something that you think about and advocate for on a daily basis in your life? Right? No? Probably not. You Take somebody who lives in northern Wisconsin. Their world is so much smaller than hours, like they might live their whole life and not hardily travel outside of their own county. What's going on anation in Mississippi is a galaxy away to them. So it's not a war solely about states rights. It's also not a war about abolition, but slavery is at the center of it, and and from the Declaration of Independence all the way until the firing of the first shots at Fort Sumter, we are in a continual fight about slavery and the expansion of it in this country. 00:31:39 Speaker 2: And it was in some ways it's confusing and was even designed to be not clear because the different sides kind of hid that from the top of their agenda. It's almost like if I had beef with you and I knew that you'd get real fired up if I brought this up at the top of the top of the hour I might hide it, kind of shuffle the papers a little bit and put it down a little bit lower. That's the way I understood some of what I some of the research is that you know, it's like, hey, don't poke the bear quite like that, But really, I mean it really was about slavery. 00:32:21 Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, if you go back, Okay, so we fight our war of independence, we win where we are free from British rule. Now we've got to put this country together and form it into one again. In mapping out our constitution and putting together the foundation of this country, we have the issue of slavery that is going to be at the center of it. Now. At this point, the founders have a couple of options. One, you can do the moral correct thing and say, okay, new country, slavery doesn't exist, we're banning it if that happens. So if you have some of the northern representatives who put their foot down and say we're not going to have slavery, what do you think would happen with the if you're would have broke up. 00:33:18 Speaker 2: The union like they would have been like, well, we're not going to be a part of your country. 00:33:21 Speaker 1: There's no country. Well, there is there's two countries. Yeah, you would have had two countries right from the get go, and then. 00:33:31 Speaker 2: It was a compromise to unify the country. 00:33:34 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So in the southern colonies you would have had slavery enshrine, and who knows how long it would have persisted. Probably I've seen some estimates into the late eighteen hundreds, maybe the early nineteen hundreds when things start industrializing. The second option, and this is where things get a little bit dicey, is to have slavery. But when you are counting your population for representation in Congress, how do you count the slaves? The South says, oh, these are people, these are members of our population. We want to count all of them. Oh really, that gives them more power in Congress because that because now they have a larger population. 00:34:22 Speaker 2: Vote, they really have vote voice. 00:34:25 Speaker 1: Correct. But there hey, for our purposes, there's still people we're still counting in our population, so we can send more representatives Congress, thereby having more power. Uh. The northern colonies are like, whoa, whoa, you can't do that. These are you know, you're you're enslaving these people. They can't vote or anything like that. You can't count them. So so what they end up doing is a third option, which is called the three fifths Compromise. 00:34:50 Speaker 2: The three fifths Compromise gives congressional representation to three fifths of the total population of slaves. Is why why does that sounds? JD believes it was ultimately positive for the abolition of slavery in America. 00:35:08 Speaker 1: To me, the three fifths Compromise is a genius move on the part of the founders because what it does is a it preserves this country, so it makes sure that we're one country and not two. That's going to keep slavery from existing far beyond what it does. And also the three fifths Compromise strips away a certain element of power from the southern colonies in Congress. So what that does is it puts slavery on the road to a slow death. 00:35:46 Speaker 2: Okay, I see that. 00:35:47 Speaker 1: I see also in the Constitution there's a twenty year moratorium on the or a twenty year allowance rather on the international slave trade. And then after twenty years they're cutting it off. Now that win was that, So that's gonna be a it's gonna cut off in eighteen oh eight. 00:36:07 Speaker 2: So seventeen seventy six like at the founding of the country, they said it's gonna last twenty. 00:36:11 Speaker 1: Not seventeen seventy six. This is going to be after the American Revolution when we are putting the country together. So this is going to be like seventeen eighty seven, Okay, at the time that the Constitution goes into effect. From that point on, where you're gonna have twenty years where you can import slaves from Africa. But after that twenty year period, it's done. Yeah. Yeah, So when when that band goes into effect, Thomas Jefferson again, the slave holder celebrates it. Finally Transatlantic slave trade is over. He's overjoyed while having slaves on his plantation. Yeah. Wow. 00:36:50 Speaker 2: So who is he talking about in the Declaration of Independence when he said all men are created equal? What do you think he thought? 00:36:59 Speaker 1: I don't know. There's a complexity there that I don't think I fully understand. 00:37:04 Speaker 2: A complexity that I don't fully understand. I think that is a good answer. The wildest part of all this historical revision is that we have such clear side of people's flaws today, and it makes us think that we would have never made the same errors had we been there. Because the flaws are just simply so huge. However, today we know that that document was literally talking about all men. It didn't really matter what one man might have thought. But we know that really it was talking about all men. And the progression of human society and a moral consciousness over time is complex, even bewildering. I mean to think that at any time it would have been acceptable to completely subjugate another human being into your service. The institution of any version of slavery has never been okay, fair, or morally correct. We can all agree the subjugation of another human being against their will is the basest of all evils. As dark as the world continues to get today, the ideas and practices of our society have progressed in some ways, and this is good. When I asked JD what caused the Civil War? I didn't expect it to get in such a heavy conversation about slavery so quickly. But hard questions require hard answers, and I just frankly think it's interesting. But what is also interesting is that technology is actually going to get us into the next phase of this. 00:38:45 Speaker 1: Story, I mean, moving forward. You know, slavery is probably you know, on the decline who we've got the end of the Transatlantic slave trade, but really, what kind of fouls everything up is? In the late seventeen hundreds, there's a guy by the name of Eli Whitney who is going to invent something called the cotton engine, which gets shortened down to the cotton gin. So you're from Arkansas, I know the part that you're from, probably not a lot of cotton farming. 00:39:20 Speaker 2: The other side of the state. 00:39:22 Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, So have you ever held a. 00:39:24 Speaker 2: Cotton yeah, with a seed in it? Yeah, yes, I have. 00:39:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a super labor intensive crop with Prior to Eli Whitney's cotton gin, you have to separate all these seeds out and it's kind of a laborious process. Eli Whitney invents this thing where it separates the seeds from the cotton. Now you can manufacture large amounts of usable cotton. That, combined with the end of the Transatlantic slave trades, so we're not bringing any new slaves in, makes the slaves present here in the United States way more valuable. And now now slavery is going to become a deeply, deeply profitable enterprise that is going to enrich a lot of people. In the South, which is why they call it King Cotton. We've become the number one export of cotton in the world. 00:40:19 Speaker 2: In seventeen ninety four, Eli Whitney patented the Cotton Gin, which in a single day could do the work of fifty men. The production output of the machine lowered the labor needs for actually taking the seeds out of cotton plants, but what it did was increase the need for manual labor to pick cotton because now they could produce so much more because of the cotton Gin. This technology revolutionized the cotton industry, thrusting the American South into great prosperity as it would start to produce over two thirds of the world's cotton, accounting for cotton being half of the entire US export economy. A way that I've kind of understood this is the American South in cotton was kind of like modern day Saudi Arabia with oil. It was just something that was in massive demand of the world that was regionally specific in a limited resource, and the American South produced a lot of it. And where you have great economic prosperity, you have a massive defense of the thing that's fueling that prosperity. But I'll also add that this wealth was primarily generated for plantation owners, not necessarily the common man. Even though we had this newly democratic representative government for a long time, politicians were still from the upper class. I mean to some degree they are today still and in many ways early America and the government was not much different in Europe. So it really was the upper crust, elite plantation owners of the South that were primarily fueling this thing. And later we're going to learn about all the different reasons that people fought for both sides, and it's astonishing to look at what people actually said for the reason that they fought. But whatever was happening, the agricultural economy of the South and the industrial economy of the North, and the way of life that was produced in both of these regions began to pit people against each other like never before. I'm just trying to understand this. It's just so darn interesting. 00:42:41 Speaker 1: J D. 00:42:42 Speaker 2: I want to read you a quote from from James Hammond of South Carolina. He's the guy that coined the phrase King Cotton. He had the King Cotton speech to Congress that was so famous, and here he is talking about the institution of slavery. He says, in all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. It constitutes the very mud seal of society. Such a class you must have, or you would not have the other class, which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. Your whole hireling class of manual labors, he's talking to people that don't have slaves. Your whole hireling class of manual labors and operatives, as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated. 00:43:46 Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah. 00:43:48 Speaker 2: He says that slavery is the natural and normal condition of society. The situation of the North is abnormal and anomalous. That is a wild quote that gives a window into the warped ideology of the time. I am dumbfounded, but it's windows like this that start to stitch together a picture of the time and why people did what they did, how they thought. We're about to start talking about the abolitionist movement. These people that wanted from moral grounds to cancel slavery. But we need to establish the primary driver of the opposition of slavery in the political world before the rise of the abolitionists, because the abolitionists were by far the minority. Some people were opposed to slavery on moral grounds. Other people were opposed to slavery simply because it was bad economic policy for a territory. Can you explain the economic reasons that slavery would have been bad? 00:44:58 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So most people are Again, there's going to be a small percentage of people who oppose slavery on moral grounds, like these abolitionists. A lot of people oppose it on economic grounds. So let's say that you are an immigrant to the United States, all right, from Germany or Ireland or wherever, and you're looking for a job. You have somebody who maybe has a plantation, or they have a factory, or they have a mine. If in these new territories that the United States is expanding into, if slavery exists there, how hard is it going to be for you to compete against free, unpaid labor. So for this, the Emerging Republican Party, their official platform, was not an abolitionist platform. So again, the war's not going to be waged as some moral crusade to free the slaves. Their official platform was against the expansion of slavery into these new territories. 00:46:12 Speaker 2: As America expands westward, each territory and state must decide if they'll allow slavery or prohibited, whether they'll be a slave state or free state, because each state has unique power in Congress, and for decades there was a balance of the number of states, so no one had power over the other. So the biggest rumblings of the actual war or over the expansion of slavery, because everyone knows that's going to dictate its long term fate. But something foundational that happened in the eighteen thirties was the Second Great Awakening, which was a Christian movement that fueled the ideas of abolitionists. Thankfully, people started saying slavery is clearly evil on moral grounds, which was kind of a new idea, we've got to do something about this. In eighteen fifty two, a book called Uncle Tom's Cabin was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white school teacher from Connecticut, and it was published. The fiction novel highlighted the cruelty of slavery, through the life of a mother escaping slavery by fleeing to the North, and the eighteen hundreds, the book would be the most sold book in America, only behind the Bible. The book was so influential that Abraham Lincoln would actually meet this lady and he would say to her, so, this is the little lady who started this great war. The book is actually credited with fueling the Civil War. But we shan't get ahead of ourselves, boys, because in eighteen fifty six, there is a man who becomes the tip of the spear of abolitionists, much different than the peaceful school teacher. 00:48:00 Speaker 1: At the center of this is going to be John Brown. John Brown is an extreme abolitionist. He also has kind of a religious vein in his beliefs that he is the instrument of God's wrath against slavery and the slave holders. So there's an incident that happens in Lawrence, Kansas, where Kansas gets sacked by pro slavery individuals, and in retaliation, he and his sons are going to go in and start murdering pro slavery individuals out a place called Pottawatomie Creek. And it's not just going and murdering people. It is violent like he's hacking them to pieces with a broadsword. Wow, yeah, this is this is a weapon of terror where where he is sending out a message if you come to Kansas with the intent of trying to spread slavery here, this is what you can expect. So there is going to be an extreme level of violence right there on the border between Missouri and Kansas that is going to kind of be the forerunner to the violence that we see in the Civil War. This is where things really start to split in this country. 00:49:28 Speaker 2: So after the conflict in Kansas in October of eighteen fifty nine, John Brown forms a wild plan to go into Virginia and seize a US arsenal at Harper's Ferry that holds thousands of guns. His ideas to distribute these guns to the slaves and create a slave revolt. 00:49:49 Speaker 1: So he wants to secure this arsenal and then essentially use the Appalachian Mountains, which which run all the way to down you know, to you know, through Tennessee and into Alabama, basically use that as a line to be a modern day Moses in his mind and shepherd these slaves out of the south, get them to the north, and arm these slaves and incite a slave rebellion. 00:50:22 Speaker 2: So he has seventeen whites and five blacks, yes that are that are with him. And what's so astonishing is that historians look back at it and they're like, this was a suicide mission. Yeah, like there was no way that this was going to work. And you kind of see in the way that he would later talk about it before he was hung foreshadowing yes, this doesn't go well for him, but it was almost like he knew that it was going to fail, but almost like prophetic in the sense that he knew that his strength was in being a martyr. So he goes in. The mission fails. He can't take the armory and the fort at Harper's Ferry. Some of them get killed, a bunch of them get captured. 00:51:13 Speaker 1: Right overall, if you're looking at it as a military operation, it's it's a failure in that regard. By the way, do you know who who put down the raid? No, Robert E. Lee. 00:51:27 Speaker 2: Really he was the US general that was that went in to fight John Brown. 00:51:33 Speaker 1: Robert Lee is going to be the man who puts down this attempted. 00:51:37 Speaker 2: I got a feeling he's going to play a big role in this story. 00:51:39 Speaker 1: Yes he does. We might hear about him at a later time. 00:51:43 Speaker 2: So what happens with the legacy, because that that's the whole the whole story of John Brown is really not what he did, but what he became, what he represented, and how he was so influential in this war, you know, ten years prior to when it started, or almost a decade. 00:52:00 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So he's captured, he's tried for treason, and is hanged in early December of eighteen fifty nine, and John Brown becomes a symbol for the people in the southern slave holding states who have been you know, thinking that you know there's all this agitation and stuff like that, and that you know there are abolitions who are against them. This man has just tapped into their deepest fear and that is a slave rebellion. But this is going to hit this country like a meteor. Now on the northern side, the opinion is kind of split. There are some people who look at this and they're like, this guy is crazy and this is absolutely wild. There are going to be some people who look at John Brown and say that's our guy that finally, finally, somebody, somebody did it. Yeah, so this is going to be another one of those big fractures right here on the threshold of the Civil War. 00:53:09 Speaker 2: I want to read a quote from John Brown because what has put him in the pages of history was the way that he handled himself in the courtroom before he's hung. This is kind of a long quote, but I find it so interesting. So this is John Brown at court for treason against the United States government. He says, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted of a design on my part to free the slaves. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, and the soul called great, every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. So basically, he's saying, I have chosen to act on behalf of enslaved people with no rights. If I had acted in this way to rich people, you guys would be making a bronze statue of me. He goes on to say, this court acknowledges too, that as I suppose the validity of the law of God, I see a book kissed, which I supposed to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even under them. So he's quoting a Bible verse doing to others as you would have them do unto you. It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. So he's kind of given them a lesson on the Bible. And he said, I endeavored to act up to that instruction. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and the blood of in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done. Basically, he gives this like powerful speech. He knows he's going to die. Yeah, he is basically in the gallows at this point, and he knows he's going to be a martyr. And it works like powerfully. Here's a quote. Brown has become an idea a thousand times pure, better and loftier than the Republican idea. Henry David Threau pronounced Brown a crucified hero. I mean, he becomes like something way bigger than what he was, and it just put a was like throwing a match, a match onto the haystack. 00:55:49 Speaker 1: Yeah, and noticed all of the religious language that is being interwoven into this. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that he was a saint and said that the gallows of John Brown would become as glorious as the cross. Wow. So so among some he is seen as this messianic figure. Yeah, and then on the other is the most dangerous man in America. So a former president John Tyler, in response to John Brown's attempted inciting, you know, this slave rebellion, said either this country I'm paraphrasing here, either this country is going to protect our interest or we are going to leave. That is a former president of the United States, who by the way, would go on to support secession, who is advocating for the breakup of the country that he had led just not too many years before. Wow. Yeah, so that this country's coming apart. 00:56:58 Speaker 2: It's eighteen fifty nine in this this country is coming apart. But to accomplish my goals for this episode, let's go back to my original question of what caused the Civil War? I'd like to jump ahead two years and kind of into the content of the next episode when the states begin to secede. I think what JD Is about to tell me is going to put the nail in the coffin regarding really what this war was about. 00:57:27 Speaker 1: To our original statement on what was the cause of the Civil War. If we're going to allow the people of history to speak for themselves, well we probably need to apply that here as well. So when all of these states secede, they issue kind of their own version of the Declaration of Independence their causes for the seceding states. Listen to what the state of Mississippi says when they say, we are leaving, and this is the reason why. So they have their opening paragraph that says, we're basically obligated to let you know why we are separating, and then they open with this. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. The greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce on the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the Institution and was at the point reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition or a dissolution of the Union whose principles had been subverted. To work out our ruin that we do not overstate the dangers to our institution slavery, A reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove. Then they give all of these reasons of how they've been hostile, how the US has been hostile, and they go all the way back to the Ordinance of seventeen eighty seven, talking about the hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, so they're going even back before you know, the Constitution. And then they talked about the nullification of the Fugitive Slave Acts, and you know, all kinds of different stuff. And here's one of their things that they level against the federal government. It advocates Negro equality socially and politically, and promotes insurrection John Brown and in incendiarism in our midst Alexander Stevens, who is going to become the vice president of the Confederacy. Jeffersons Navy is going to be the president, is going to give a famous speech called the Cornerstone Speech where he says that slavery is the cornerstone of the Confederacy. I don't know how it gets much more clear than that. Yeah. 01:00:26 Speaker 2: Wow, this series is my journey into personally understanding the Civil War. I know that we all come from unique backgrounds in this country, and our association with this war is different. But this conversation has been so informative to me personally, and I hope that you'll follow us on the next episodes of this Civil War series by Bear Grease. On the next one, we're going to talk about Abraham Lincoln, We're going to talk about the secession of the States, and we're going to continue to lead right up to the very first shots of the Civil War. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. We're putting our heart and soul into this. Thanks for listening to Brince, this Country Life and Lakes, Backwoods University, and as always, keep the wild places wild because that's where the Bears live. See you on the next episode.