The South Won the Peace? Part 1: Economic Policy

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Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host, John Harris, for what I believe will be a very interesting conversation

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I'm going to have today with someone who has not been on the podcast before. And we're going to talk a little bit about history.

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We're going to talk about Civil War, Reconstruction Era history specifically. Now, this is an area of history that I have studied because I've had to for grad school and for undergrad in my history degrees, but it's not an area that I consider myself necessarily an expert on.

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I know a lot more about the causes of the war and what happened during the war than I do about what happened afterward, even though I've had to read a bunch on it.

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But I want to let you know about a few sources that I found helpful before we even get started with this discussion. If you don't have any time and there's one book that's kind of accessible to read,

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I would recommend this book by Phil Lee. I've had him on the podcast to talk about reconstruction before, actually.

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So we've talked about this book, but it's called Southern Reconstruction by Phil Lee. And and then

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I was looking on my shelf to see what other references I have. And he's really I haven't actually read this whole book, but this is a reference.

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The Story of Reconstruction by Robert South Henry. I think he was part of the Dunning School, which means that today he would probably be considered some kind of like a lost cause mythologist or something like that, which is what the modern historical guild applies to anything that they don't like, whether it's a primary source or not, they just call it lost cause or something to dismiss it.

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But it's actually it's a good book. It has a lot of good facts in it. And I think it's very interesting.

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And then, of course, these are two books that I got recently, actually from the interview that we're going to have today.

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The George Bagby, he sent me this, the History of Reconstruction. And I didn't know about this book by John Rose Ficklin and then the

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Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. So one's about Louisiana, one's about Alabama.

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And this is by Walter Linwood Fleming, the one about Alabama. And so these are some of the books that I have on my shelf now to reference when this topic comes up.

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And I'm really looking forward to getting into educational discussion about this with another brother in Christ.

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So welcome to the podcast, George Bagby. Thanks for being willing to discuss Reconstruction. I'm thrilled to be here.

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Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. Now, as you know, we're getting into controversial territory just even talking about this.

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And I was thinking about this before the podcast, that this era is almost more important than studying the

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Civil War to understand for the purposes of present political utility.

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The left uses Reconstruction all the time. And the startling thing to me, in a way, is when you try to find right -leaning resources, if you want to call it that, right?

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Like, I just want the most objective historical resources I can find. But I'm saying for like actual political purposes, because this is so politicized, if you want to find an alternative, let's say on like The Daily Wire, PragerU, The Blaze, any of these big, more neoconservative -leaning outlets, what you find is they just parrot the same thing and try to emphasize that the

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Republicans are good guys. It's the same narrative, except we're the good guys. So it becomes a tug of war.

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The left says, we're the good guys. And then the right says, no, we're the good guys. But they have the same story. And it's interesting because when the left presents this, it's connected to present political stuff.

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So Donald Trump is the white lash, right? He's the, we had an

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Obama presidency. And now Donald Trump is the backlash against that. And this is something that, a pattern that we've just been repeating forever in the

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United States. This is Reconstruction -era stuff still happening, because that's what the

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Southern governments did, state governments. They just reinstituted all their oppression. And that's what

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Donald Trump is doing. And this is what I see, and this predates Trump. This is what I see every time a conservative or a

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Republican or someone that's not on the left ends up ascending politically. They'll rip this narrative out.

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Of course, they have a number of narratives. You know, they play the Nazi thing up and so forth. But this is another thing they do.

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They'll just try to connect someone like Donald Trump to all the people they think are villains in history and movements and eras in history that Americans will find distasteful.

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And so I think it's important to talk about this era, even though you don't find this.

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This is information you're not going to find on other right -leaning, especially Christian conservative talk shows.

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But we need to talk about it a little bit. So, you know, with that, thank you once again. And tell me a little bit about why you started republishing some of these,

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I don't know if you want to call these primary source. Or some of these people did probably live through the era. But some of these sources that have been forgotten and and then plug, of course, where people can find these resources that you're reprinting.

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Indeed. Well, my name is George Bagby, and I have been a high school teacher for 10 years.

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And I've been especially interested in the Civil War, in the antebellum

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South, and what's happened to the country since then. One of the reasons why we call this period we're discussing

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Reconstruction is because the nature of the Union was fundamentally changed by the

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Civil War. And the winning side remade the Union the way that they saw fit.

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And it was a kind of culture war against the old regime that that previously governed the

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United States. It was originally applied to the South, but it eventually extended northwards as well.

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So you have this radical change in an idea of why the

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Union was formed and like the overriding purpose of the federal government, what the federal government is there to promote, what they are there to intervene in, things like that.

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And Lincoln is the major figure of all of that. So when we when we talk about Reconstruction, we aren't talking about the rebuilding of the devastated

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South after the Civil War. We're talking about the rebuilding of American institutions after the

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Civil War. And that's one of the reasons why it is such an important subject. We've had a lot of conversation recently since our friend

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Martyr Made went on Tucker Carlson to talk about historiography and how narratives change and how we have establishment narratives that give us the perspective under which we are allowed to talk about different things.

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In this conversation we're having about historiography, we're questioning the establishment narrative about this period of history.

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We're questioning what some might call the post -war consensus, only in this case, maybe it's the post -Civil

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War consensus over what happened in American history. Yeah, post,

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I call it the post Appomattox consensus. Indeed. But, you know, is it really the post

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Appomattox? Because I don't know if you watched movies like Gone with the

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Wind or I'm trying to think of other pop culture references to Reconstruction.

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I'm sure if I thought about it long enough, I'd have more in my mind. But they frame the issue up through the 30s even and 40s and probably into the 50s.

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The issue is very much framed as a messy situation where, yeah, you had vigilante groups and so forth, but you also had clumsy policy and carpetbaggers and scalawags.

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And you're not allowed to have these images anymore. In fact, the word carpetbagger is still used.

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It's even used in the North as a negative pejorative. But somewhere along the line, and it wasn't it wasn't before I don't think before the 1930s, as maybe it was in certain academic circles,

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I don't know. But somewhere along the line, the narrative became that this is all white supremacy, that a very race centric view of Reconstruction, where the only story you're allowed to tell is a bunch of white

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Southerners decided to oppress minorities they didn't like. And that is that's it.

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Everything connects to that. And that seems like a fairly recent innovation to me. Am I right on that?

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I think it I think it is a more recent innovation, like after the 1960s, for instance, it becomes far more mainstream to talk about it that way.

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It is out of touch with reality in many respects.

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Thinking of white supremacy in an ideological sense, rather than in a more practical sense, if I can stretch the term a little bit, it distorts the picture in a very fundamental way to to think of of white supremacy as a bugbear that must be rooted out, identified, condemned, ritually denounced on every occasion.

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White supremacy at the time of the Civil War and Reconstruction meant that white

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European Americans had brought civilization to North America, civilization as we know it.

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They brought the dominant language, which is English. They brought the dominant religion, which is

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Protestant Christianity. They brought their forms of law, which were traditional for them.

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They weren't a universal construct meant for all humanity, as we typically think of it now and impose by force of arms all around the world these days on basis of that assumption.

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Right. These things were peculiar to the European diaspora of America, which is predominantly

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Anglo. And we typically call them the Anglo -Americans when they when they go to Texas, for instance.

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They're the Anglo -Texans when they go to California and all the rest. We call we call them Anglo -Americans, even though they contain large amounts of Irish and German and others.

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These people brought with them the the basic assumptions that we have about America, the

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American way of life, the American perspective, American law, American social norms. They are the source of that, not just because they're the majority, but because they had so much to offer in that respect.

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When we juxtapose or contrast them with the state of the

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African -Americans in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, the vast majority of the

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African -Americans are illiterate. The vast majority of them have actually fallen out of touch with their native

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African traditions, and that has been for them for the better. Today, they are the the best.

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They're living at the highest level of any members of of the African nations in the world today.

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They have a higher standard of living. They have adopted Christianity. They have adopted the

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English language. They have assimilated to some degree. I don't know.

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I don't know just how much we can say on that front. That's a very mysterious subject, assimilation.

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But you and I both agree it is possible to assimilate into another nation. There is still some kind of racial difference, however, something that is unaccountable that we we can't we can't well explain.

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And certainly it's too controversial these days to attempt it. But when we talk about white supremacy in in the period context, it meant that African -Americans were getting civilizational accoutrements from European -Americans.

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That was the norm. That was the aspiration. John Lukács, who was a recent

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Hungarian -American historian who came over here during during or just after World War II and taught in Pennsylvania for the rest of his career, he wrote in in one of his books, the most incredible shift in modern

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American history was when African -Americans stopped looking at white

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America as a civilizational aspiration. And decided that they wanted to restore, recover, reinvent themselves as a distinct ethnic group and reject white social norms.

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He said that that was the most incredible event, the most substantial event of the 20th century in American history.

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Now, we might we might disagree with his his conclusion on that front, but I think we can all agree that that that was something that did take place.

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And we we could say that was a rejection of white supremacy. But that was a rejection of European norms.

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That was a rejection of European law, a rejection of European religion. Even even you might say, and according to some, rejection of European language in in preference for Ebonics, for instance.

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So that's that's an interesting subject of the the white supremacy idea and how it has changed its meaning over time.

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Yeah, yeah, no, I think we're probably not going to go down that rabbit trail, but it is interesting to note that up through the 70s.

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There was another definition, it seems, that when people use that term, they were thinking of.

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And and I say 70s because I remember John Wayne did an interview where he essentially said he was in favor of white supremacy on some level.

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And of course, in 2020, this was recovered, freaked people out. They wanted to take down a statue.

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And and this is a guy who employed and worked with and was very magnanimous and kindhearted to many blacks and not just blacks.

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I mean, he married Hispanic women and it's just an odd thing. How could he say this?

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And I think part of it is what you're talking about here is I remember I think one of his children waited on it and said, like, my dad wasn't racist, not not what you're thinking at all.

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He what he meant was and it's pretty much what you're talking about here. Like there's there's a civilizational difference when you think in terms of groups and not he's not necessarily he's not talking in terms of individuals.

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And and it's not a universal thing. It's not an ideological thing. Today, though, everything is universal.

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Everything's ideological. And of course, I'm not not for bringing back the term white supremacy or anything of that kind.

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But I think when you do study history, you have to be very aware of the way that these terms are used and how the definitions of them can change over time.

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And you don't one of the sins of a historian is imposing upon the past present definitions.

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That's a presentist fallacy. And it is a fallacy. So a careful historian takes those things into account, which it sounds like you're doing, which

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I appreciate. And and I think since we're already in forbidden territory here, I mean, even what you've just said, which

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I think is just a statement of facts. And this is this is the situation you're not you haven't even like applied any of your own opinions to anything.

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You're already poking a needle in the prevailing narrative because, you know, you were you're trying to contextualize things instead of read back our offenses.

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And our sensitivities in the present day back into a historical record.

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So I want to play for you a clip. This will help us get the conversation started.

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And these are all evangelicals, some of them more influential than others, but all influential on a certain level.

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And I could have put a lot more people in this montage. But these are these four or five, however many

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I put are the ones I decided to include. And all but one, I believe, connect the

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Reconstruction era to Trump and MAGA and those kinds of things. And essentially the narrative you're about to hear is that the

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South won the peace. So the North won the war, but the South won the narrative.

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They won the peace. They won. It would be a surprise to many Southerners that they won anything, but they reestablished themselves in governments that were not under the thumb of the federal government during Reconstruction and has some of their own autonomy.

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And that is representative of white supremacy in this narrative. And that is what we still live under, that that backlash against Reconstruction and the assumption, by the way, all the way in this is that the

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Union, the North, that these guys were all somehow egalitarians. They were racially,

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I guess, evolved on these questions and they should have just imposed their views on the

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South. But because they didn't hard enough, the South ended up winning the narrative and racism won.

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And we still have Donald Trump as president. So we still have racism. I mean, and I'm not kidding you. That is how these people think for the most part, with the exception of Alan Guzzo, who

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I'll play first, who will accept that narrative to some extent. And then, hey, we're the good guys.

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We're the Republicans, I'm sure. So here's the montage. And then, George, I'll get your reaction to it.

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The American Civil War ended in 1865 and a new conflict immediately began.

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The North won the first war. The South won the second. Disgruntled Southern whites organized themselves into ad hoc militias to terrorize

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Southern blacks and their white Republican supporters into silence. We should have imposed a real occupation on the defeated

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Confederacy until a new political generation grew up in the South, which learned a newer lesson about race and rights than white supremacy.

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Bryan Stevenson, I've heard him say this numerous times. He said the North won the war, but the South won the narrative.

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Because we lost, we need to reshape that to make sure that we were the noble ones, that we were the noble ones.

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So now this has carried on through the years, through Confederate monuments, through textbooks.

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It became, in most states, illegal to paint the Confederacy in a negative light in a textbook.

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So you could not tell a negative story about the South when talking about the

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Civil War. I think the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. That idea of racial hierarchy, of exploitation of black people for economic benefit, it survived.

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And we see evidence of that throughout the 20th century. Post -Civil

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War and post -emancipation, you have this brief period of reconstruction, and then you have this white backlash in the form of Jim Crow.

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The entire Jim Crow era is essentially an attempt to reestablish white supremacy after race -based chattel slavery is abolished in the 13th

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Amendment. All right, your reaction, George? This is what I expect to hear from mainstream sources in every case.

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It is a gross truncation of what is actually going on in reconstruction.

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And even a merging of two distinct political regimes.

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We have a long period from 1865 to the election of Rutherford B.

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Hayes in 1876, where the South is under military occupation, where the

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Southern governments are made of radical Republicans.

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And the rule is an irregular and violent intervention of black and white militia groups.

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You've got the Union Leagues, and you've got the famous Ku Klux Klan, and they're intervening in elections.

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They're suppressing voters. And this is happening both on the Democrat and Republican sides.

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The Union League being the Republican militia arm. Exactly.

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And that's the famous carpetbaggers, which are a very interesting group we can talk more about, who were leading rabble -rousing and arming black militias and marching them around, saying that they were going to seize the land of the ex -Confederates.

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They were going to take the property of the ex -Confederates. They were going to force them to immigrate abroad, really radical things.

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And they were frequently confronted in pitched battle with their opponents.

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And we know some of the mythology, at least, of the Ku Klux Klan, which rose in opposition to that, among other things.

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But then after the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, a very complex affair, a very controversial election,

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Hayes agreed, as a compromise with his Democrat opponents, to withdraw the garrisons from the

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South. And civil government was restored in Southern states. Southerners finally emancipated from the yoke of Reconstruction, where Democrats and ex -Confederates generally were excluded from office.

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This is something you can find in the 14th Amendment, for instance, which says that people that were engaged in insurrection...

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We've learned a lot about that just in recent years, because it's been politicized once again.

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But people engaged in insurrection cannot run and hold office. When the

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Union troops were withdrawn by Rutherford B. Hayes, you have a new regime in the

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South, which we call the Redeemer governments in the South. These were very interesting ex -Confederate

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Southern conservatives who openly campaigned for the support of the

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Black population and won a plurality of support from them. So people like Wade Hampton in South Carolina, people like General Nichols, Francis Nichols of Louisiana, people like John Gordon of Georgia, all of them ex -Confederate generals, they won election in their states as Democrats, and they ran on a platform of order, of campaigning against corruption and wasteful spending, which was the case with the

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Republican governments in the South. Now, an entire generation later, we're only talking about the 1870s in that point.

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By the 1890s, according to the historian C. Van Woodward, that's when you see the inauguration of what we know as the

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Jim Crow regime. So in all of these cases of these historians who are talking about how the

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South won the peace, they are truncating 30 years, 40 years of history.

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They're going from 1865 up into the 1890s and saying that when

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Grant and Lee shook hands at Appomattox, then Jim Crow began.

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And that is not at all the case. There is a tremendous amount of history that's just skipped over there. And this is a good example of why

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I'm republishing the old books that I'm working on, why I have a small print house.

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I want to get these substantial histories of Reconstruction into a condition where they're available again.

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They're readily accessible and not just in a facsimile reprint edition, which looks like you're reading a

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Xerox copy. I'm reprinting Dunning School histories of Reconstruction because these are histories that are based in the primary sources, and they're going to fill in a lot of that gap of what happened in all those lost decades that Alan Guelzo so conveniently skips over.

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I want to get to the Jim Crow and all that, but I want, first of all, the Dunning School, because I've referenced that too.

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And some people might not know what we're talking about. So tell people what website they can go to to get your books.

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And I want to keep plugging that. And then explain what the Dunning School is. Well, I'm running my operation on a shoestring, and so I haven't set up a website yet.

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But you can find links to most of my books on my Twitter profile. So if you look at at TallMenBooks on X, you can see the links to most of the books that I have in print.

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I'm always updating that, and I'm always bringing new books out. TallMenBooks on X. Got it.

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That's correct. And you can buy them wholesale there. You can also look up these books on Amazon, though you're going to pay

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Amazon a substantial fee for the middleman. But anyway, the Dunning School, this was founded by a great teacher at Columbia University, a northerner, a

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Yankee, named William Archibald Dunning, who was influenced by the great political scientist

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John Burgess, who some people call the father of political science.

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Burgess pioneered the academic study of politics. But Dunning was educated in Germany, in part.

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He was very interested in what he called a scientific approach to history, which involved immersion in primary source material and the testing of hypotheses according to scientific methods.

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In brief, that was his approach. But it meant that all of his students went out and did an incredible amount of scholarship at a state and local level to write state -specific histories of Reconstruction.

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The most illustrious of his students was Walter Linwood Fleming of Alabama, who was a student at the

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University of Alabama. He got his master's there, taught high school for a time, and then went off to serve in the

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Spanish -American War. When Dunning was finished with his war service, he went to Columbia to study under Dunning, got a

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PhD, and then taught at a college level at places like Vanderbilt for the remainder of his career.

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Dunning was very influential on a generation of Southern students and academics. If you know the book,

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I'll Take My Stand, it is dedicated to Walter Linwood Fleming, who was the professor of a number of those students.

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Fleming wrote a very famous state -specific history of his home state of Alabama, which

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I've republished. That was the first book I republished. This one? That's correct.

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Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, a state -specific history, mostly on Reconstruction.

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He talks about military action and the Alabama government during the war, but primarily the focus is

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Reconstruction. Fleming also assembled a large two -volume work of primary source documents on Reconstruction that remains the go -to resource for the original material on Reconstruction.

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Reports on the Klan activity, testimonies about vigilante groups, records from the

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Freedmen's Bureau, all sorts of interesting things. Eyewitness accounts of the South during Reconstruction, famine and starvation, the reorganization of the labor system in the

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South during Reconstruction. All of that is in that volume. I have intention to republish that sometime, but I have a feeling that it won't sell very much.

29:42

It's of primary interest to history nerds like you and I. Yeah. So, I'm glad you're doing that.

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The Dunning School then, it's so vilified today. It is so vilified. When I went to college initially, in undergrad,

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I remember, I mean, I did Eric Foner, right? Like everyone. So, that was my first dose of Reconstruction history was

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Eric Foner stuff, which, you know, for those who don't know, I mean, I'm pretty sure he studied under Howard Zinn, right?

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And he was, he's an avowed, he's a Marxist. I'll just put it that way.

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He's a Marxist. And, you know, the narrative that you just heard in those clips from evangelicals,

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I mean, they probably got versions of that from folks like Foner. And Foner, that was his main thesis.

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And everything comes back to a social history. It's all race. And it's, you know, it makes, it really,

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I put it this way before. You look at the American, the country of America, and you, you know, think of it as a carpet.

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And there's this section, this one corner called the South. And you just sweep all the dust, right?

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All the problems, all the ailments afflicting the whole country goes right in that corner.

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And you can then blame that corner. And that's what I think so much of the modern narrative does.

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And, of course, when you start digging into it, it's much more complex. It's not, that narrative doesn't hold up.

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But the Dunning School is hated by those kinds of guys because the Dunning School does exactly what you just said.

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I mean, they, they're steeped in primary sources. They're trying to capture the complexities of this and understand it's not just this simplistic narrative that we're given today.

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So with that, let's get into Reconstruction a little bit. And I do want to get into some of the social stuff.

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But let's start with economics because I think economics is a huge, huge overlooked part of Reconstruction.

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And even when it's brought up, it's always tied to race. North and South.

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I think you mentioned this earlier that Reconstruction wasn't just rebuilding the

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South. That era was also a restructuring of the entire country in so many ways.

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The railroad played such a big part of this. The Republican Party's economic system and the

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American system that Henry Clay had envisioned is now blossoming. And there's corruption abounding.

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I think the Grant administration, by some accounts, is the most corrupt administration we've had in the country.

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And so talk to me a little bit about all of that. Well, this is one of the reasons why

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I just throw up my hands when I hear Alan Guelzo saying the South won the peace.

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Right. Because it's overlooking the incredible devastation of the

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South by 1865. We should remember the destructive campaigns of people like Sherman and Sheridan who wiped out agriculturally productive areas, burning barns, destroying farm implements, slaughtering draft animals, things like that.

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But maybe just a survey of the economic situation in the South gives us a better picture of the huge difficulties people had to overcome in this section of our history.

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Every single bank in the South failed in 1865 and 1866.

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Everyone was reduced to a barter economy. Credit was unavailable, which was one of the reasons, by the way, and I don't think

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I'm being revisionist in saying so, this is one of the reasons why the so -called carpetbaggers were such an important element in the antebellum

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South, because a person of modest means from the

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North could bring their savings to a Southern community, buy a large farm at a tax sale, and go into business.

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They were the only people that could afford capital improvements. They were the only people who could pay wages.

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They were the only people with credit connections outside of the most elite circles of Southerners who might know people in New York or Boston and go and get a relationship with a banker elsewhere outside of his own region.

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So the carpetbaggers are extremely important, and there is no doubt that the carpetbaggers saved whole regions of the

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South from death by starvation, because they injected capital into this devastated region, and they were able to make improvements and just keep food production going.

34:44

Real quick, I interject here. You've heard me say on the podcast, I mean, not you, but people listening, that after the war, there's estimates that there was one million of the former slaves who died, who starved or got diseases, and this is an estimate, but it was incredible, the amount of devastation.

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Mississippi went from, I think, one of the richest states, if not the richest, to one of the poorest states.

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The war had such a devastating impact. The total war policies of Sherman, Grant, and ultimately

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Lincoln really did devastate the South in ways that we can't even conceive of today.

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Indeed, and I actually have some of those figures here in front of me of the loss of the

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Black population in various regions of the South. Mississippi lost the largest amount that we know about.

35:40

According to a Reconstruction governor of Mississippi, he claimed that a substantial number of the

35:47

Black population of Mississippi had starved to death in the years following the peace.

35:53

Mississippi did lose approximately one -fifth of its Black population in the decade after the

36:00

Civil War, and we have census figures for that. Now, we estimate that one -fifth of the population disappears.

36:10

That's mostly due to natural population growth figures that we have in decades before the

36:17

Civil War, the kind of population growth you would expect. There's certainly a huge increase in infant mortality.

36:25

There's certainly a huge decrease, we can speculate, in fertility.

36:32

But something like 20 % of the population of Mississippi disappears, or the expected growth that we would see in that community is eliminated.

36:43

Now, many of them probably left the state. We actually don't know the story there. I don't know if you're from the

36:50

South, your family. I am, I'm from Louisiana. So my grandfather and his family are

36:56

Mississippians and rural Mississippi. He died actually this year, earlier this year, he was 101.

37:04

So he remembered slaves, he remembered Confederate soldiers from his youth. He would talk to them, you know, ex -Confederate soldiers, ex -slaves.

37:11

And, you know, they were just in grinding poverty. Just the stories are incredible of survival and trying to,

37:21

I mean, it's just we don't, it's a world that we can't conceive of. That's the best I can say about it. But one of the things that he harbored till he died was, he never hated anyone, as far as I can tell, except maybe a few commanders in World War II who were wasteful with men and some bosses he had that he didn't like.

37:44

But, you know, he was a very affable, very magnanimous kind of guy. And one of the things, though, he believed till he died was that the policies of the

37:56

Northern government during the Civil War were absolutely destructive, were to blame for the plight that, you know,

38:05

Mississippi was in. I mean, it's because, and you think about it, like his family, even in the 1920s when he was born, they were still struggling with the same problems that emerged, you know, 60 years before he was born.

38:21

Well, less than that, actually. You know, we're talking reconstruction. You know, we're talking only like 40 years, 50 years before he was born.

38:30

And you put that in perspective, you know, what's 40 years, 50 years ago now, right?

38:36

You know, we think of that as like, oh, that wasn't really that long ago, right? My parents lived through that time.

38:42

Well, your grandparents, that wasn't that long ago for them. And some of the, they live with the effects of this.

38:49

So that for my family, even though I'm sitting here in 2024, this stuff resonates with me knowing the family history and going to the family graveyard and seeing the impoverished, you know, it's still not a very prosperous area.

39:07

But, you know, knowing what it was and hearing the stories, the oral histories, it connects you.

39:14

Absolutely. You know, so anyway, it was a devastating time period. Well, that was all part of Walter Fleming's inspiration to write his work.

39:24

His father was a Confederate veteran. Fleming grew up around all of those people. And that was certainly his stated inspiration for making that his life's work because he cared about those people.

39:36

For us, it is typically a more distant connection. It is something rather remote in the past.

39:43

We don't know anyone that experienced these things. It is much more abstract. But it's an important thing for us to cultivate because we want to have the right attitude about our homes.

39:55

We want to have the right attitude about our ancestors. And it is pathological to hate one's own people.

40:03

And this is what we were expected to do. This is what we were expected to do and trained to do in the academy.

40:09

Even people coming through high school are taught to ritually denounce their own ancestors unless they come from a favored minority group, of course.

40:19

We could do an entire podcast on that, which we don't have time for. But I'm sure in your experiences and my academic experience,

40:26

I met so many people that were in history or even in the past for some of the worst reasons.

40:33

And it came down to, they really hated the people that they came from.

40:39

And it didn't make any sense. They were going to go back and teach them a lesson. They were going to teach history or go back home at the church.

40:46

They were going to preach against the people that brung them up. It's Oedipus.

40:53

It's the tragedy of Oedipus all over again. He's at war with the people that gave him his life.

40:59

And primarily Southerners that had this view. I grew up in New York, so I would be like, you don't know what you're talking about, man.

41:09

I've seen the contrast. You're comparing, you're holding everyone to a standard that's just a utopian standard that doesn't exist anywhere.

41:21

Indeed. They have some dogmatic thing that they want to impose on society.

41:26

It's an ideological vision and has no appreciation for their organic realities.

41:32

Getting back to those realities. Yeah, sorry. Talk to me about greenbacks and banks and railroads.

41:40

We were talking about the displacement of the black population and the suffering of the black population which is a fascinating element here.

41:50

To try to understand the racial dynamic and the racial disparity that comes out of this. These former slaves, the freedmen in places like Mississippi, they're walking around after they've been told that they are now free, they can do whatever they want.

42:09

They can go to town. They can have a rip -roaring good time if they've got some money or something.

42:18

They can go and do whatever they want in the city. Huge numbers of them start walking around in the post -war

42:26

South. There's a huge problem with vagabonds. There are these vagrants that are wandering around in large groups.

42:34

Most of them black. Some of them are white as well because they've lost everything that they have.

42:40

Or they've been made homeless by one of the military campaigns. There's plenty of that going on, both black and white.

42:47

20 % of the farms have been abandoned in the post -war South. This is roughly related to the death toll.

42:59

Almost one in four men of military age, white men of military age in the

43:07

South, were dead in 1865. Another 20 % were wounded, most of them amputees.

43:15

We're talking about almost an entire half of the able -bodied male population dead or wounded by 1865.

43:28

The ones that survive the experience, they come home but maybe they can't do anything useful when they get there.

43:36

The white Southerners are then slapped with four years of back taxes by the

43:42

Union authorities who say, well, you never left the Union. You've always remained in the

43:48

Union so pay up all these taxes that you skipped out on during these years of war.

43:55

That would be an impossible challenge for people like you and I who haven't gone through any sort of war, the sacrifices that entailed.

44:04

Or for people that actually have financial resources or lines of credit that they could rely on.

44:11

It meant that a tremendous number of people lost everything that they had. The vast majority of white

44:19

Southerners before the Civil War owned their own land. They were free farmers.

44:25

That was the predominant way of life. After the Civil War, the majority of the white population was reduced to a sharecropping relationship which was a solution that was implemented to deal with a huge number of people whose only asset was the labor they could perform with their hands.

44:48

They had no other assets at all. They couldn't get any credit. They could not establish themselves on any property.

44:55

All they could do was do something menial and agricultural. That was virtually the entire black population of the

45:04

South. Outside of cities like New Orleans where there was a free black population that has their own history.

45:12

This was the situation around the South. The majority of people...

45:21

They were reduced to a condition where they were forced for survival if not forced by local authorities.

45:30

There were a number of laws passed immediately after the end of the war against vagrancy.

45:38

People couldn't travel around without any means of employment. Among others,

45:46

Reconstruction Governor of Mississippi said this was done to curb the risk of starvation.

45:55

Everyone needs to go to work so that we do not all starve. There's an effort to mobilize the working population, the proletariat, if you will, in agriculture.

46:09

They have to go and live mostly in housing reminiscent of if not actual slave housing on the farms because that's what's there.

46:22

You can't just build new housing for the new working relationship. This is the way of life up into the 20th century in the rural

46:34

South. This is the majority of the white population and the vast majority of the black population.

46:40

This is the way that they live and work. They don't get any wages because no one has any money. Farmers only are paid once a year at harvest time.

46:49

A question for you real quick here because this has brought up the anti -vagrancy laws and that kind of thing to prove.

46:56

For example, in the New Jim Crow, I'm pretty sure that's in that book they talk about this, the vagrancy laws were a reestablishment of white supremacy by Southern whites and the assumption being that these

47:12

Southern whites own all these plantations where sharecropping is happening and they're benefiting from the labor of the former slaves still and they're still in a slave master relationship.

47:22

What you're saying is that no, that's not the picture really.

47:29

Well, I don't want to put words in your mouth. What is the picture? Who owns these farms that both whites and blacks in the

47:36

South are working? Capital owns these farms and this is part of the reason why the radical school in Reconstruction is dominated by these

47:49

Marxist historians. They are raging against the concept of capital.

47:55

In every society that's ever existed, there are people with resources, perhaps most of them have inherited those resources from their ancestors.

48:06

They may have done little on their own account to accumulate those resources, though every society has entrepreneurs, every society has self -made men who come out of nowhere and accumulate a lot of resources.

48:20

But this is normally something that people inherit. This is part of the disparity between the races.

48:27

One of these races conquered that land. One of these races had experience and executive roles in the military or in business.

48:39

One of these races brought their native language to that land.

48:45

They speak it fluently, they read it, they write it, they know the literature, they know all the lore. One of those races made the laws of that land, formed the government of that land, and they did it to suit themselves, not the

48:59

Navajo. There is a disparity there and that is called white supremacy typically these days.

49:07

It's much better to understand that as the heritage of the United States and of all sorts of intrinsic value.

49:15

We talk about the value of the Constitution or telling constructive stories about ourselves.

49:23

That is what we're talking about here. We should not let the left dominate the language that we use to describe these things.

49:31

They want to call it all white supremacy and that is just ouroboros. That is a self -hatred and a consumption, a self -defeating proposition.

49:42

The capital, they own the land and capital always must make a relationship with labor.

49:50

This needs to be, this is essentially mutually beneficial. If the owner of the farm doesn't have anyone to work the farm, then he is going to go broke and his farm is going to go up for auction and he will reduce on the economic scale himself.

50:09

He will become a proletariat, someone who only has his labor to sell for his living.

50:16

He is strongly induced to make a deal with labor and we see a real interesting example of that.

50:25

The end of the sharecropping system in places like Mississippi, it takes place in the

50:35

Great Depression. In part, there is an awful lot of people who fail in that period in the 1930s.

50:43

These landowners in Mississippi have credit connections at that point and they pull out all the stops and exhaust all of their credit options and finally go bankrupt, a great many of them in the 1930s.

50:59

Some of these people are descendants of carpetbaggers from Reconstruction. Some of them are native

51:05

Mississippians who managed to keep the family land after the Civil War. But the sharecroppers that live on the land, their lifestyle doesn't change until World War II when a great number of these sharecropping concerns finally go bankrupt.

51:25

The land has a new infusion of capital. The new capitalist farmers of Mississippi, because they're coming from another part of the country, they're bringing more resources with them, they're able to industrialize the farms.

51:40

They're able to buy new tractors and combines and the agricultural labor is made redundant. And this is one of the reasons why the

51:48

Mississippi Delta country is filled with empty towns these days. Because it used to require a large population there doing menial labor, working in former slave housing, because that's what was there, and picking cotton by hand.

52:05

But by the time you get to the 1940s and 1950s, most of that has been mechanized. And that population now has nothing to do.

52:14

Which is why the Mississippi Valley, as an example, is filled with empty cities, has a large unemployment rate, and a real dysfunctional economic circumstance, even though it's the most wealthy agricultural land in the country.

52:30

Kind of telling the end of the story there. During Reconstruction, that sharecropping system is invented.

52:37

And of course, it's deplored everywhere. It's a miserable way of life from a modern perspective.

52:43

But it was a very stable way of life. And I try to tell this story frequently.

52:50

I travel around in the Mississippi Valley giving history lectures. And I try to tell this story constructively.

52:59

As a rule, I'm about telling a constructive story. But I try to emphasize the stability of that lifestyle, even if these people were not consumers like you and I.

53:11

And they had no resources to travel, they had no resources to buy trinkets or luxuries, or go out to eat like you and I do.

53:19

It was a completely different way of life, but it was a very stable way of life. And it fostered an awful lot of cultural richness.

53:26

It fostered one of the most famous literatures in the world. People like William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.

53:33

It fostered very famous musical styles that we enjoy and export around the world. It fostered things like country music and the

53:39

Delta Blues. So it's an extremely wealthy thing artistically, even if it is not wealthy economically.

53:47

So there is an upside to it in a certain sense. And that lifestyle was kind of standardized and modernized in the early 20th century.

53:57

Well, for country music fans, I was thinking of that song by Alabama, Song of the South. I don't know if you listen to that genre, but there's a line.

54:05

They say they talk about being impoverished and picking cotton.

54:11

We all pick the cotton, but we never got rich. But then Daddy was a Southern Democrat, and they say,

54:17

Daddy got a job at the TVA. He bought a washing machine and then a Chevrolet. That's what you're talking about here.

54:25

That song is probably 15 years old or something, but they're just talking about their dad's life.

54:33

Just to connect us to the past, this is not ancient, ancient history. This is not in our lifetime, but this was in the lifetime, some of us, of our dads, of our granddads.

54:46

They would remember it. It's fascinating stuff. Now, talk to me if you can.

54:52

I don't know unless you want to say more about the economics of the South. This is a big topic, so we're not going to be able to comprehensively cover everything at all.

55:02

The North, there's a lot of stuff happening in the North during this time period.

55:07

We're talking about post -Civil War, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s.

55:13

Of course, we're leading up to the Progressive Era and the robber barons, as they're called.

55:21

The railroad, of course, is one of the most corrupt and inefficient government projects up to that point in American history.

55:33

The greenback, of course, becomes the standard currency. Well, they get off.

55:40

Well, actually, I'll let you tell the story because I don't want to mess this one up. I know economically though, there's changes when it comes to banking and when it comes to currency at that point, and some of it leading up to what we have now with the

55:57

Fed and all of that. It's a radically different world economically than anything that we're accustomed to.

56:06

You mentioned the greenbacks. The greenbacks were America's first federal paper currency.

56:15

That's an extinct form of money. It's an extinct media.

56:21

It had a brief lifespan. Lincoln printed these bills to pay for the war.

56:27

They were to be redeemed at some point after the war. When we talk about the redemption of paper currency, that's not something any of us are experienced with.

56:40

That's something very foreign to us. The idea was that paper currency is a stopgap to use in place of real currency, which was hard currency, which was gold and silver, which according to the

56:54

Constitution is the only thing the federal government can issue. Well, in the time of war, an exception was made, and they said, well, let's inflate the currency.

57:03

Let's pay the bills with an IOU, basically. Now, the idea was that these things could circulate in place of gold, but at some point they would get redeemed by the federal government, which means the federal government would buy them back with lawful money, with gold and silver.

57:24

During Reconstruction, that was eventually done. The federal government eventually got some bills through Congress that allowed for the redemption of those notes with gold and silver.

57:36

People that did have green backs, which is the origin of the color of American currency, by the way.

57:43

The very first paper currency was green. I think the ingot we trust, too. Indeed.

57:49

Even when we renewed the paper currency, if you look at old bills from the early 20th century, they actually say on them, this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private, and is redeemable in lawful money.

58:06

They used to say that. They don't say that anymore. Because you had banknotes, right?

58:11

Even Dixie was the Dix, which was a banknote if I'm not mistaken, right? That's right. That was a private currency.

58:18

And we had these in the United States. It was decentralized and the actual money is precious metals.

58:27

And everything changed after the war. Indeed. We have a totally new monetary regime, which is fiat currency.

58:41

It is inflationary by design. You have this new business relationship with the federal government and federally chartered corporations.

58:54

The first federally chartered corporation in American history was

59:00

George Washington's Bank of the United States, which was Alexander Hamilton's brainchild.

59:06

And the whole point of the Bank of the United States was it would be a federally chartered private organization.

59:13

It was not owned by the federal government. It was owned by private investors. But it had the name

59:19

Bank of the United States. It made it sound more official. And the job of the Bank of the

59:24

United States was to be used as a depository for treasury funds.

59:31

That was going to give it a lot of its initial capital. And it was going to facilitate large interstate business projects.

59:42

Railroads, for instance. A railroad that goes from one city to another inside of one state is certainly of value.

59:50

But a railroad that spans several states and yet remains the same business is of greater value to the whole country.

59:58

It's going to connect regions together and knit the country together. So that was one of the things the

01:00:04

Bank of the United States was meant to encourage. Now, that became a political football in antebellum

01:00:10

America and eventually Andrew Jackson both pays off the national debt and ends the

01:00:16

Bank of the United States and prefers state and local banks over federally chartered corporations.

01:00:24

Andrew Jackson goes so far as to enunciate the Jeffersonian position, which was corporations are not in the

01:00:32

Constitution. The federal government has no legitimate authority chartering federal corporations.

01:00:38

Now, we see from the Washington administration, there was another point of view. The Hamiltonian point of view was that the federal government can do whatever they find to be convenient, especially when it comes to what is economically beneficial.

01:00:53

So Lincoln ran on a platform of a strong and large federally chartered central bank and also encouraging and chartering new federal corporations.

01:01:06

So Lincoln charters the very first federal corporations since George Washington. He charters the transcontinental railroads.

01:01:15

In particular, two of them, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific. The Union Pacific is still with us today.

01:01:23

It's a class one railroad and it's the oldest federal corporation in America that can operate in all 50 states.

01:01:31

Now, this is one of the reasons why Hamilton is so very important for us to take seriously.

01:01:39

Hamilton is very worthy of study, though I know you and I have lots of southern sensibilities.

01:01:46

We really love our Thomas Jefferson and our decentralized thinkers in American history, in antebellum

01:01:53

American history primarily. Hamilton envisions the economic world we

01:02:01

Americans live in today. He is a prophet of that world. He foresees that.

01:02:07

He sees huge business interests dominating American life.

01:02:14

He foresees stock exchanges being a center of attention for millions of households all over the world.

01:02:24

Speculation in business activity being a major interest in investment.

01:02:31

He sees most Americans living in urban areas and working for wages and becoming consumers, buying industrial goods.

01:02:42

He sees that as the future, the economic life of the

01:02:47

United States. And, of course, that's the world we live in today. He wants to issue currency.

01:02:54

He wants to encourage people to take out loans. Famously, Hamilton says the federal government should spend at a deficit.

01:03:00

For us, a debt will be a public blessing. If it's not excessive, he said, and he certainly had nothing like our deficits today in mind when he said that.

01:03:10

He was no fool like our leadership tends to be in that regard. This was one of Lincoln's signal transformations of the

01:03:21

American Union. Lincoln applied Hamilton's vision to the future of the

01:03:26

American Union, and he patronized these large new corporations. You mentioned the

01:03:32

Grant Administration and their reputation of excess and corruption.

01:03:38

That's been the view of the Grant Administration for most of my career in history, but these days

01:03:47

I encounter all sorts of people who are reading Ron Chernow's revision of Grant and saying, no,

01:03:53

Grant was actually a hero and one of our best presidents, which I have never heard in my life.

01:03:59

That's just happened. Fox News, I think, ran with that. It's like in the last,

01:04:05

I don't even know, like five years maybe, all of a sudden, Grant's this big hero to be praised.

01:04:13

And you're right, I never heard of that before that. He was certainly one of the worst.

01:04:20

He was one of the most corrupt, and this was mostly due to the new influence of these business combines in Washington, D .C.

01:04:29

Now, I'm not here to bash businessmen across the board. That's not at all what this is about.

01:04:36

This was a new era and the government was giving people resources.

01:04:42

And this was the way that the railroad bill was organized, the Transcontinental Railroad Act that Lincoln pushed through during the war, actually, forming these corporations, even when there were bigger fish to fry.

01:04:56

One of the incentives was that for every mile of track these companies laid down to complete the

01:05:03

Transcontinental Railroad, they would be given treasury bonds that would mature at a future date.

01:05:10

So they were given largesse directly from the government.

01:05:16

This was like a government cash payment for a business operation that would eventually turn a profit that would go only into private hands.

01:05:27

This was not a government -owned operation. This was a private business operation. And the government was giving them treasury bonds for every mile of track and they were giving them public lands.

01:05:39

Now, this was a really extraordinary thing. Eventually, and this happened mostly during Reconstruction, these federally chartered corporation railroads were given land equivalent to the total area of Texas.

01:05:59

Now, this is related to another point that we didn't yet talk about. During Reconstruction, there was so much talk about what to do for the freedmen, for the free slaves of the

01:06:10

Old South. And there was an awful lot of radical talk. We haven't touched on it, but there were a lot of radical

01:06:18

Republicans in Washington that said, we need to expel the white population from the South. They're disloyal.

01:06:23

They're traitors. They don't have the right ideas. They're all backward Jeffersonian farmers.

01:06:29

Let's force them to go to Mexico or Brazil. And we're going to redistribute all the land in the

01:06:35

South to the loyal Black population. Grant had an idea to Africanize the state of Georgia.

01:06:44

Expel the white population from Georgia and redistribute all the Black population to resettle them in Georgia.

01:06:51

That obviously didn't happen. Those were very radical ideas. Much, much more popular today, perhaps, than they ever were back then.

01:07:02

These are talking points among the radical Reconstruction historians these days. People like Foner and Howard Zinn would talk about that.

01:07:10

And it's interesting because the Republican Party was so adamant about keeping Blacks contained in the

01:07:16

South and not coming up North. They didn't want them going out West.

01:07:22

I don't know. Is there a parallel there? Because I know you're talking about the radicals here.

01:07:30

Even Lincoln wanted to think about resettling the

01:07:36

Black population in other places. That's the whole Liberia project. Yes.

01:07:43

Go ahead. The idea of the resettlement of the

01:07:49

Black population abroad, the colonization of the Blacks, is something that Lincoln never renounced as policy.

01:08:00

I did a stream with another YouTuber, Pete Quinonez, my friend, concerning that subject specifically.

01:08:09

There's an essay about that. Walter Fleming wrote an essay in another book that I republished that I called

01:08:15

Southern Concerns. It's a collection of his monographs about the colonization policy of Abraham Lincoln.

01:08:23

Lincoln was interested in buying an island in the Caribbean for this purpose, and Grant nearly succeeded in doing so.

01:08:31

Grant was one vote away from buying Hispaniola, buying what is now

01:08:38

Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His purpose was to resettle the free

01:08:44

Blacks of the South and make it an American dependency. He wasn't going to spin it off as a

01:08:51

Black republic like Haiti. He was going to make it an American dependency in the Caribbean, but that did not happen.

01:08:57

He lost it by a single vote. There were defections in the Republican ranks that kept that from happening. All of that to say, one of the famous phrases to come out of Reconstruction is the pledge of 40 acres and a mule for the free population, the free

01:09:14

Black population of the South. That never happened. There was a tremendous amount of rabble rousing and an awful lot of violence that came after that because when the radicals are saying, we are going to seize your home and expel you from your native land, there are a few kinds of rhetoric more inclined to make people pick up arms and feel like they have to defend themselves to the death than that.

01:09:43

That's what happened to the Kulaks in Eastern Europe. It would have meant mass death, and not just for the white population of the

01:09:53

South, but also the Black population. If you're talking about ethnic cleansing and the mass movement of peoples, when the

01:10:00

Soviets tried that with their ethnic minorities, it meant that people died on both sides.

01:10:06

The people the Soviets were trying to destroy, the Kulaks, they died by the millions, and the people they moved around were also dying.

01:10:14

It didn't work out, and we can all be thankful that Grant never accomplished that, though that was the stated goal of many of his officers.

01:10:23

It's very ironic that in the midst of all of that talk, all of that rhetoric about ethnic cleansing in the antebellum scene, railroads were given tremendous amounts of land that they could sell off at private profit.

01:10:40

And Americans were not given anything. This was at the same time millions of white Southerners are losing their property because they can't afford taxes, can't arrange labor.

01:10:50

Their sons are all dead. The Black population is wandering around, starving to death, or otherwise going into peonage.

01:11:00

And at the exact same time, the government is handing out millions of acres of federal land to private businesses.

01:11:09

This results in an incredible amount of corruption in Washington, D .C. One of the most famous results is that lots of people are organizing, trying to form these highly profitable corporations, which only have to build railroad track.

01:11:22

It doesn't need to be economically productive. It doesn't need to be a railroad line with a business plan that makes any sense.

01:11:31

If you can build some railroad track, you can get federal treasury notes, and you can get federal land grants, and you don't even have to finish the railroad.

01:11:43

And so this is a very perverse incentive. There are lots of legitimate businessmen that build the great railroads of the

01:11:50

United States out of that program. And the federal government accomplishes what they were wanting to accomplish.

01:11:55

They want to build a national railroad network, and they do that. And we have the best in the world for a long period of time.

01:12:02

Probably still do. And that's a legacy of reconstruction, by the way. But there are plenty of crooked actors that are just there to make off with the federal largesse, and they go and they gather in the lobbies of Washington, D .C.

01:12:16

to buttonhole passing congressmen and make them bribes, and say, well, what if I buy you a vacation house on the

01:12:26

Jersey Shore? What if I take you to dinner? What if I give you some jewelry? What if I give you money in an envelope?

01:12:33

These are the famous lobbyists that that's where we coined the term lobbyist.

01:12:41

These are special interest groups that go to Washington, D .C.

01:12:47

hotels and public functions to try to get their will in Congress to get some of that sweet federal money.

01:12:54

So that's part of the corruption of the Grant administration. And that kind of corruption actually takes down a number of Grant's cabinet.

01:13:03

It takes out his vice president. It takes out his private secretary. They're all indicted for this sort of illegitimate behavior.

01:13:13

So let's do big picture economics then and relate what you were saying about Hamilton to the reconstruction era and then what we have today.

01:13:20

So you have the merger of private and federal government, general government interests and the railroad being the prime example of that where there's bribery, there's there is a manipulation of the public monies in favor of private ends.

01:13:40

And then you of course have a tariff policy, which we haven't really talked about, which the tariff is much higher than it was before the war.

01:13:51

And then you have the monetary policy. I guess they have paper currency, but then they get back on,

01:14:02

I think it's in the 1870s, right? They get back on the gold standard or at least the act of 1875 where there's a process of moving towards this

01:14:13

Hamiltonian vision of a national currency that's eventually backed by a gold standard.

01:14:19

But there's still the consolidation of these and the penalization of these private banks who are issuing their own bank notes and local currencies and that kind of thing, that disappears and it becomes one system under a general government.

01:14:43

So is that a good big picture summary there? No, that's very good of the monetary history.

01:14:50

They do punish. I mean, I know there are taxes and stuff on banks that continue to issue their own currencies and that kind of thing or their own bank notes, as I understand it.

01:15:03

Murray Rothbard has a great history of that. Our mutual friend,

01:15:08

Dr. Samuel Smith, was a specialist in that matter. And I remember many conversations

01:15:15

I had with him on that subject. So if you're interested in the monetary history, that's a great resource.

01:15:22

The History of Money and Banking in the United States by Murray Rothbard. I think the reason for talking about the economics of this first before getting into some of the social stuff, even though we have talked about some of the social history is a lot of what we're dealing with today, some of the big problems come back to economic policies.

01:15:44

Are you there, George? Yes, I'm here. I had lost you there for a second. Okay, I lost you.

01:15:50

I was summing up what we had already talked about and just saying that I think that a lot of the problems we have today are economic in nature.

01:15:58

And we need to also talk about that when we're talking about the Reconstruction Era because a lot of our problems began there.

01:16:05

And I think this is the libertarian critique. This is like the Tom Woods concern and the

01:16:13

Thomas DiLorenzo concern when they talk about this. They tend to focus more on those things.

01:16:19

And there should be a focus on those things in addition to the social history, which we haven't gotten into as deeply.

01:16:25

Indeed, yes. And that's a really interesting side of the story. The private currencies and the local and regional banks that used to issue script that would circulate locally.

01:16:40

It's one of the reasons why the lower Mississippi Valley was called

01:16:46

Dixieland. There was the bank in New Orleans that issued a paper currency, a private currency.

01:16:53

It was English on the front and French on the back due to the French heritage in Louisiana.

01:16:59

And on the back of the $10 note, it said Dix. And so these notes were called

01:17:05

Dixies. And the whole region was called Dixieland because this was the media in that region of the country.

01:17:13

Well, after the Civil War, when the economy of the

01:17:18

United States is far more centralized and more focused on industrial interests, there remain private currencies circulating in certain regions, but they are explicitly targeted by federal policy.

01:17:36

They are penalized and regulated in new ways. So this is really the end of an era.

01:17:43

You may remember Andrew Jackson had his famous pet banks.

01:17:49

These were state banks that Jackson patronized with federal contracts and such, kind of decentralizing the banking system.

01:17:59

And that had good sides and bad sides to it, we might say. These banks tended to be more corrupt than the

01:18:06

Bank of the United States was that Jackson had disestablished. But the system that comes into being in Reconstruction and what we might call the

01:18:18

Gilded Age is much more centered in the main American cities. And New York becomes the great financial center of the

01:18:26

United States, and it remains that to this day. Now that is a top -heavy kind of system, and we saw some of the downsides of that with the bailouts of our financial institutions back during the

01:18:37

Great Recession, during the Bush administration. A decentralized system is going to have more standards of support.

01:18:47

It's going to be more diversified, necessarily, and more stable as a result of that.

01:18:55

But this is all connected with the Hamiltonian transformation of the

01:19:00

United States. You mentioned other federal policies such as tariffs and federal spending, just tax policy and budgetary policy.

01:19:14

This is one of the big transformations in our history of the

01:19:20

Union. After the War for the Union, the federal government gets involved in welfare programs for the very first time.

01:19:30

And this is the famous Freedmen's Bureau, which was established to relieve the famine of the freed slaves in the coastal south.

01:19:40

So people know, we're getting into the social history now. It sounds like. Indeed. Well, I won't go far into it.

01:19:47

No, I think we should. Okay. Well, the Freedmen's Bureau was about distributing food, clothing, and theoretically, housing.

01:19:58

So it was going to be the implement of the radical policy of the seizure and redistribution of property around the south, the famous 40 acres and a mule.

01:20:11

Now, like I said, that did not happen. There was some redistribution at a local level.

01:20:17

For instance, the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina were dominated by small, wealthy planters before the

01:20:28

Civil War, and they were mostly abandoned by those same planters who left their slaves on the islands, and those islands were occupied by the

01:20:39

Union. The post -war situation involved

01:20:45

General Sherman making agreements with a number of those communities, basically designating them

01:20:52

Black -exclusive communities and saying that white people were not allowed in those areas.

01:21:00

Now, that was a regime that lasted for a time, and it basically in effect meant that the property owned by the white planters on those islands had been redistributed to their former slaves.

01:21:12

Now, that arrangement actually didn't last. It had a sunset at a certain point, and pardon me, and white people were allowed to go and buy property and conduct trade in those communities later on, but there was a span of about 10 years where that was the case there.

01:21:38

The Freedmen's Bureau is the first example we have in our history of the federal government going into relief work to distribute necessities to the unlucky, or to the lower classes in our communities.

01:21:57

Now we just take that for granted, but another economic aspect of this new system that emerges during Reconstruction is this new tariff regime, and you mentioned formerly

01:22:13

Henry Clay's American system, which was the economic policy of the

01:22:19

Republican Party. Very ironically to me, this is something that our woke evangelical friends are overlooking when it comes to their criticisms of Trump, because Trump is quite the throwback to that old

01:22:39

Republican system that Abraham Lincoln was promoting, or even pre -Republican figures like Henry Clay had come up with.

01:22:49

The idea is that you want to have an industrial consumer society in the United States, so you want a federal government that will sponsor business activity and protect their businesses from competition from abroad.

01:23:03

So you have barriers for the movement of money leaving the country.

01:23:09

You have protective tariff regimes to protect various industries. Now in antebellum

01:23:15

America that was very controversial because the industrial interests of the United States were concentrated in the

01:23:21

North. The South did not have industry, so tariffs did not make sense to the South. The South wanted a free trade economy because they wanted to buy industrial goods, and they were a huge market for manufactured goods, but they wanted cheap industrial goods.

01:23:37

And they did not want a colonial relationship with the North, where they were paying inflated prices to Northern factory owners.

01:23:46

The same people who were consuming the raw materials that the South was producing. That was a colonial relationship, and the

01:23:53

South felt like they were a trapped market. Well, after the Civil War that relationship, really the opposition to the high tariff

01:24:02

American system regime had been destroyed in battle. And so now the

01:24:08

South was in a position, this is the way, the South obviously did not win the

01:24:14

Civil War. They did not win the peace. They were in a totally submissive colonial relationship at that point.

01:24:23

They had to deal with high cost for manufactured goods.

01:24:30

The North got all the protective tariffs that they wanted. And this was the primary mechanism by which the federal government was funded.

01:24:38

It was taxes on imports into American ports. So taxes that were charged on manufactured goods that were being imported into the country.

01:24:50

This is ironically exactly what Trump has talked a lot about ever since he emerged on the political scene.

01:24:56

And it's quite the throwback to old fashioned Republican policies. It has nothing to do with race problems and such, but it really is a throwback to this period of American history.

01:25:12

Trump has even talked very explicitly about high tariff Republican presidents around the turn of the century.

01:25:20

People like William McKinley. Trump has been bringing him up in interviews recently, which is really extraordinary.

01:25:28

He is the only major political figure in my lifetime that talks about people like William McKinley who raised tariffs and according to that narrative incentivizes

01:25:42

American industry. Well, it certainly protects American industry. There's no doubt about that. It certainly disadvantages consumers of industrial goods, especially farmers.

01:25:55

But in our America, which as I said is

01:26:00

Hamilton's version of America, where the vast majority of us work for a living, the vast majority of us are consumers.

01:26:09

We buy everything that we need to live. This American system that Henry Clay had in mind of a protective tariff to incentivize and protect

01:26:20

American industry so that American industry serves the American marketplace and not the factories of China, say, that seems to make more sense in our current situation.

01:26:33

When the vast majority of Americans were farmers as they were in 1860 or even as they were in 1920, most

01:26:43

Americans remained on the farm, that high tariff regime may have been a bad deal for most

01:26:51

Americans. I think now when something like 2 % of Americans are primarily engaged with agriculture, maybe that high tariff regime makes much more sense for us.

01:27:04

I'll just put that out there. I'm not here to give policy. Well, let's switch gears a little to the social history.

01:27:10

I know we've touched on it a little and you mentioned just recently that the Freedmen's Bureau was the first essentially welfare type mechanism that the federal government had ever, as a matter of policy, enacted on a region of the

01:27:26

United States. I know this is framed often by a previous class of historians that the connections that existed between dependency and so forth and trust and mutual benefit and that kind of thing, between former slaves and their masters were now, those were cut, and now it was between the government and these former slaves, which is a dependent relationship which you could argue has existed ever since then with the exceptions of people who have gotten out of that, but there are certainly large classes of people in the

01:28:10

Black community who are dependent on the government in some way.

01:28:17

I think in the Republican, sort of neoconservative framing of this, Johnson is blamed for everything.

01:28:23

It's all Lyndon Baines Johnson's fault. And so, before that, it was all good.

01:28:29

And there were some I've delved into that quite a bit and crunched some of the numbers.

01:28:34

I think there are some stuff to that narrative, some merit to it, but there's also I don't think it's the full picture at all.

01:28:41

This seems to start in reconstruction. And that dependency, like I said, is a one of the things that we're still contending with.

01:28:51

We're trying to figure out policy ways to deal with this. And it's obviously not even just one class of Americans.

01:28:59

It's not just those who have descended from former slaves.

01:29:05

It's now people in all kinds of other settings as well who are hooked up to this dependency.

01:29:12

So this is one of the consequences of reconstruction policy.

01:29:20

And then we mentioned before the animosity, the racial animosity, the poisoned race relations that existed in the

01:29:26

South. You mentioned the Klan. You mentioned the Urban Union League, rather. Why don't we talk a little bit more about that, and the

01:29:33

Redeemer governments, and Jim Crow, and, I mean, this is where the social justice crowd camps, right, is on this.

01:29:41

Absolutely. And they frame today's politics, the politics of MAGA and Trump. In fact,

01:29:47

I didn't play for you the rest of the clips, but if I were to, you'd find Phil Vischer in the one clip where they're talking about the

01:29:53

South winning the peace. He starts to go on to say that this is the result of Southern, basically the daughters of the

01:30:04

Confederacy, erecting monuments, wanting to remember their grandfathers and fathers, and then coming up with this cartoon that their fathers never did anything wrong.

01:30:13

It's very odd to me. The monument issue itself demonstrates, if you just look at the plaques and the context around it, it was certainly remembrance, but you see the same thing happening in the

01:30:26

North. It wasn't anything odd, or there wasn't anything different about what was happening in the

01:30:34

South and what was happening in the North with the erection of monuments, except for the fact that they had less money, and it took them longer, perhaps, to raise money to erect these things.

01:30:42

But it was for the bravery of their fathers and that kind of thing. But then Phil Vischer goes on, and he says, the

01:30:49

South will rise again. It's just like we're going to take our country back. It's the same thing. And, you know, most of the guys

01:30:57

I just played earlier, they're trying to connect that narrative that they have about Reconstruction to today's politics, and that Trump is the incarnation of white supremacy, and the

01:31:08

Klan was the incarnation of white supremacy in the Reconstruction era, suppressing black folks because they just hated black people.

01:31:16

And I know it's so much more complicated. I know many of even the race riots were sparked by immigrants and competing for jobs and that kind of thing, and it wasn't this simple, we just hate minorities.

01:31:29

But with all that said, I want you to start the story wherever you want to start it, and maybe talk us through that, and where do you disagree with the prevailing narrative about this?

01:31:41

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