Brion McClanahan Explains the Unending Civil War

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. Today's episode is a special edition. We have the historian, author, and podcaster

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Brian McClanahan on to talk about thinking local and acting local as well as what led to the

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Civil War. Now, to give you some background, I've listened to Brian McClanahan for a few years.

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He has a show called The Brian McClanahan Show and he's an expert on colonial history, Civil War history, the federal period.

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Generally, he talks about current events and he relates them back to documents, original documents, and just has some really great content, in my opinion, if you're trying to understand the political situation in light of the intentions of the founding fathers, that kind of thing.

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Now, for the documentary, American Monument, I was traveling around the country conducting at least some of the interviews that went into that.

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And I thought to myself, if I had someone that I was interviewing and we had a little bit of time extra, then

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I would invite them to do a podcast with me. And so Brian McClanahan was very gracious. We did have a little bit of extra time so we were able to do a podcast.

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And so I was able to pick his brain about these subjects. And so I think it'll be beneficial for you.

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And if you like what you hear, you might wanna check out his podcast as well. And so if you haven't seen

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American Monument yet, please go to YouTube or Rumble. Last Stand Studios is the channel and you can type in American Monument.

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It should come up that way as well. But hopefully you enjoy this bonus feature. That's really what this is, a bonus feature for the

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American Monument documentary. And anyways, let me know what you think in the comments section.

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One last final thing I just remembered. This video was initially, I had an idea of doing different historical periods.

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So like a colonial history week, a civil war history week, maybe even like a World War II history week. I had this big idea of doing this with different experts.

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And as time got away from me and I had so many other projects, it just wasn't happening. And so that's still something

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I'd love to do in the future. But the reason, if you're watching, you're gonna see an intro that says civil war week is because when

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I was putting some of these together, I thought to myself, that's what this is gonna be for.

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So it's not for that. We didn't have enough interviews to merit a civil war week or a colonial history week or anything like that.

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But that's why you're gonna see that. So this is really just a extended conversation with Brian McClanahan after we did an interview for American Monument.

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And like I said, I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We have a special guest today for our Civil War Week special edition episode,

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Brian McClanahan, who I know you are involved with the Abbeville Institute. You have been for years.

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You've written a number of books on American history and now Southern history as well. You have your own podcast,

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The Brian McClanahan Show, which I do listen to. Today, we're gonna talk a little bit about kind of one slice of the pie.

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What led up to what is commonly called the Civil War? And in the popular imagination, slavery is the big word that most people would think of when they think of the

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Civil War, but in the sense in which we think about it today, it's not as we think about as a moral thing.

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And it really wasn't quite, it wasn't as simplistic maybe. So anyway, we're gonna talk about that today.

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I appreciate you being with me. Thank you so much. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it to be on your show. It's a great honor. Tell me a little bit about the

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Civil War, just basics for someone who's tuning in, just had the regular high school

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American history course. They think it was fought over slavery. I mean, that really wasn't the whole picture then.

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Definitely not the whole picture. And I think if you go back and look at the longstanding conflict, even if you point to Alexander H.

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Stevens, who's often, well, this guy said it's about the institution of slavery or it's white supremacy, whatever it is.

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He also said that slavery was the immediate cause. Okay, this is what he said. So what does that mean? There's something else going on here.

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Longstanding differences between the North and the South had been there since the 1770s. And the founding generation recognized this.

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They talked about it a lot during the Philadelphia Convention when they were drafting the Constitution. They talked about it a lot in the state ratification conventions.

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They recognized that Northerners and Southerners were different. They had different views on all kinds of things, whether it was economics, whether it was society, whether it was politics.

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And so you had these longstanding differences and those manifested themselves in a search for power.

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So I always point back to 1794. And I say, well, look, what happened in 1794?

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How many years? We had just had the Constitution for five years. In 1794, you have Rufus King and Oliver Ellsworth.

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Rufus King, who was from New England, but had eventually settled in New York, and Oliver Ellsworth, who was from Connecticut, they confront

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John Taylor of Caroline, who had just been sent to the United States Senate from Virginia, and they say, hey, John, we got a question for you.

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What do you think about secession? Because you know what? It looks like Virginia's gonna dominate this government and we want out.

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We want New England to leave the Union. John Taylor wrote about this and he's shocked. He said, I'm shocked.

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We're five years under the Constitution. Here's New England talking about secession. Why? Because of political power.

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New England had figured at that point, because of various reasons, they weren't gonna control the reins of government. Now this, of course, is during the

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John Adams, well, I'm sorry, during the George Washington administration we eventually get John Adams administration just a few years later, but they still didn't think they were gonna control the government.

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And by the early 1800s, they didn't. And so you start seeing secession ramp up in New England.

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At least discussions of it ramp up in New England. So these longstanding differences, what were they? Well, they came down to things like trade.

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They came down to things like taxes. You know, the status of territories.

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No, it was just slavery. That was the only difference. But it was the only difference, right? That's right. Territories. The status of the concept of liberty.

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What kind of liberty did they have in New England compared to what they had in Virginia or South Carolina? All of these things were different.

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And you had Governor Morris of New York and the Philadelphia Convention actually stand up and say this. We have all these differences.

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If right now we're incompatible, let's just get rid of this union today. But if we think we can put these together, let's try to do it.

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So the founding generation recognized very early on there was differences between North and South and a lot of it had to do with slavery.

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And so when you say this war is about slavery, you have to start opening different, it's like an onion, right?

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Well, you gotta, it stinks, right? So you gotta peel all these things off to get to the various parts of the onion.

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And that's where you get into some of these other issues that I think are just as important. Well, I know David Hackett Fisher had written the book,

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Albion Seed, tracing European civilization to the United States, what is today the

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United States. And I mean, you look at the South and you have primarily in the Appalachian region,

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Scotch -Irish, you have the Cavaliers more in the lowland and the Piedmont areas. And then in the

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North, you have Puritans and they had very different conceptions of all the things you're talking about. I know in some of my research, religion also was very different.

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The Congregationalist churches eventually went Unitarian and Transcendentalist, these ideas. And so I just found that interesting that it wasn't, this predated what we would think of as the quote unquote slavery debate, but eventually there was a slavery debate, which we know that the war itself wasn't really over that directly, but it did lead to some secession in the lower

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South. So what led up to that slavery debate that we commonly hear about? Sure, so you start looking at a debate over slavery.

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Again, I mentioned New England. Well, in 1815, there was a secession movement in New England called the

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Hartford Convention, right? So the War of 1812 was ongoing, New England's being damaged by the war, their shipping's being destroyed.

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They're actually openly trading with the British at times, which was treason. But they think, well, we gotta get out of this union.

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So what do they want? Well, they elicited a series of constitutional amendments that they wanted to have added to the Constitution that would, in their mind, create this better union.

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So one of the things they wanted to get rid of was the Three -Fifths Compromise, Three -Fifths Clause, which allowed slaves to be counted as three -fifths of a person towards representation.

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They thought that unjustly gave the South more representation in Congress. So you have that, and of course, there are other things, you can't have presidents from the same states, you know, two elections in a row, well, because Virginia's dominating.

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New states have to be admitted by two -thirds majority in Congress. Well, why? Because if you get territory, and this is the key, you get territory that adds states, well, who's gonna live in these states?

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A whole bunch of farmers. Well, these farmers aren't gonna be in line with New England merchants, so they're gonna vote a different way.

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So the real issue of slavery started occurring over the extension of slavery into the territories. We saw this in 1787 with the

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Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery in the Old Northwest. Jefferson, in fact, was certainly in favor of that, though he didn't write the

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Northwest Ordinance in 1787. He was in favor of that because he thought, well, maybe this would keep slavery bottled up in the

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South. And this essentially became one dominant part of American history. Keep slavery bottled up in the

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South, don't let it expand, not because of moral reasons oftentimes, it was because of political reasons.

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Well, if I can get a free state and they're gonna vote with us on these particular issues, well, then we control the government.

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South was saying, well, we get slave states and they can vote with us on these issues, well, we're gonna control the government. So it all came down to the

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Senate, right? Having equal free and slave states. So as you start looking at 1820, you get the Missouri Compromise, Missouri comes in as a slave state, you have this line drawn in the sand, then you have this opened up again in the 1840s, the 1850s, and you start seeing this debate over the extension of slavery.

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That became the why slavery question. Most Americans weren't concerned about slavery morally, and there were certainly people that were, and rightfully so, but it was people were concerned about power and the slaves extending.

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And plus, a lot of Northerners were interested in stopping it because they didn't want blacks living in those territories.

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So there was racial element to it. Yeah, so for reasons that would not be progressive in our modern day and age, at least, they wanted to, for quote -unquote racist reasons, keep slaves from coming into areas where they were gonna live.

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In fact, Ohio had exclusionary laws. So did Illinois, you couldn't live in those states, or you had to pay a tax, essentially, to live there if you were not white.

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You had the Republican Party platform of 1856. Free soil, free men,

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Fremont victory. Free speech, Fremont victory. I mean, it was about free white labor settling in those territories.

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David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, who wrote the very famous Wilmot Proviso in 1846 during the Mexican War, his whole goal was to keep slavery out of the territories because he didn't want competition.

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He wanted these territories for free white labor. He said it, openly said it. I want free white labor. So it was a competition.

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There was certainly a racial element to this that Northerners were driven to try to keep slaves out of these

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Western territories as well. That's fascinating because that casts the whole issue in a different light, in a way.

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It wasn't that you had a region of the country that just wanted slavery so much, wanted to bring slavery everywhere with it.

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It was more of, it sounds to me like what you're saying is the influential members of the Southern society would have mostly been slaveholders.

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So if you prohibited them from going to Kansas or somewhere in the territories, then the influence of the

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South would not be present in those areas, which means they vote with the economic interests of the North. That's correct. And what were those, the economic interests?

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Well, I mean, certainly it was the Hamiltonian system. It was what Henry Clay called the American system. You want federally funded internal improvements.

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And you gotta think a lot of farmers in the West, what are they tied to? The Mississippi River. If you can have access to the

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Mississippi, well, you get your product out to market. Of course, in New England, it was central banking. It was tariffs.

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It was things that Hamilton wanted in the 1790s that they were also in favor of.

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Now, the interesting thing about that, if you look at American history carried after the war, and you look at the populist movement, a lot of Midwestern, Western farmers who had been pro -union became populist because they figured out, we cut a deal with the wrong side.

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We're farmers, Southerners were farmers. This economic interest is not ours. We might've been behind free land,

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Western land, or we might've been behind internal improvements, but we also got big banks. We got big corporations.

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We have big business now dominating these things. Railroads coming out, steamrolling our land. I mean, this was something they couldn't get behind.

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That's just today's flyover country. That's correct. That's what we, you know, red states, you know, and they can be in the Midwest, the

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West, or the South. They kind of think very similar to one another. That's interesting. So when you look at the

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Civil War itself, and you look at, okay, so there were states in the Lower South who were concerned that the extension of slavery was gonna keep them from being able to move to these

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Western territories and exerting their influence. You had the, most of the states in the

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Upper South, that wasn't their reason, right, for seceding. Absolutely not. I mean, you had, in April of 1861, when

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Sumter was fired on, you only had seven states out of the Union, and that was it. So you still had eight slave states that were in the

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Union. So at that point, when Lincoln called for 75 ,000 troops to put down the rebellion, which was his word, then you had several states which had already explicitly rejected secession, secede from the

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Union, including Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, these Upper Southern states that weren't on board with the initial push for secession.

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They wanted to stay in the Union. They wanted to try to figure something out. You had a peace conference in January of 1861, which

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Lincoln, by the way, said, don't, it's not gonna work, and don't really buy into anything they're selling. And it was to try to come up with a compromise.

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How can we save the Union? How can we bring these Southern states back in the Union? This was the whole point of the

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Corwin Amendment, which Daniel Croft has pointed out was really the Lincoln Amendment. Well, we'll make slavery permanent in the

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South. We can't ever abolish it, which, of course, they could in any ways. It's not constitutional for them to do it, for the general government to abolish slavery at that time.

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So we'll make it permanent, but yet we're gonna keep it out of the territories. And during the debates, this was brought up.

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Well, look, you're arguing the wrong thing here. We've never said you could abolish slavery in the South. Lincoln himself said, I can't abolish slavery in the

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South. It's all about the territories. Can we have access to the common property of the United States?

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And the key to all that, and we have to remember this, the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision said that it was illegal for the federal government to prohibit slavery in the territory.

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So Southerners are looking at it saying, you're going against the Supreme Court, which is what you've always abided. You always said that's the final law, the final arbiter.

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You're saying that this is not now the final law of the land. I mean, there's a higher law than that.

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So where do we go from here? If you're not gonna follow the Constitution as the Supreme Court interpreted it, then how can we trust you on anything?

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And I think, and we look at modern society, we have this debate all the time. Supreme Court ruled on this. Well, does it matter?

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Or does it not matter? Should we listen to the court? Should we not listen to the court? This is the same issue back then. You have progressives saying, well, an issue that your listeners,

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Roe v. Wade. This is the final, the court's spoken. So if the court's spoken, well, if we're gonna follow that line of thinking, then

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Southerners could say the exact same thing in 1858. The court has spoken. You can't do these things now.

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So all these little nuances to this just doesn't make any sense. Well, I've been in, in my studying history,

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I've been in classes on other wars, other than the Civil War, like World War II class. And you find out how complex some of the issues, all the nations that were involved in that, of course, very different motivations, depending on what side you were on.

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And World War I is even more complicated. It's hard to even find who are the good guys, who are the bad guys. But in the

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Civil War, it seems like today, that is, that's one of the wars that you're not allowed to have a nuanced discussion about it.

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It seems it's just bad South, slavery, racism, good North, righteous, you know.

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Why is that? Why do historians today kind of look at it with these, this simplistic kind of?

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Well, I think it's part of, your question with World War II and World War I, those are European wars to begin with. And so Americans can look at that and say, well, we lost a lot of people here, but it doesn't directly affect our character as a people.

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But that war here in America, it defines who we are. I mean, it was a turning point in American history.

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So if that's gonna be it, then we, you can't just say, and I was reading a speech from a

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Northern partisan at a dedication to a Union monument in the 1890s.

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And he said, look, at the beginning of the war, it was all about saving the Union. We all recognize this, there was nothing there.

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But as we moved on, then it became something more righteous and just, because essentially what he's admitting, if this war was all about saving the

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Union, that would be an immoral war. You're slaughtering people just to keep people in a Union. So it had to be something bigger.

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It can't just be about a Union. If that's the case, that makes the

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North no different than say the British or any other imperial power throughout history that just slaughter people to keep them subjugated.

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Killed over 600 ,000 people, a million starving afterward to what? To preserve a Union. To preserve a political entity.

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What does that mean? So it had to have some, I mean, think about American wars. We didn't just go into Iraq to topple

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Saddam Hussein. We went into Iraq to help the Iraqi people. You can't just do the one, you have to do the other.

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We didn't go into Vietnam just to topple a communist regime. We went there to help change the hearts and minds of these people and make them better.

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We built schools and hospitals and all this. This is the way the military started to sell these things. And so you have to have some other moral justification for this.

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This is kind of a hypothetical question because you mentioned the Corwin Amendment. And if that passed, well, that would have enshrined slavery for generations perhaps.

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But luckily that did not pass. And the way that slavery ended was probably the worst possible way.

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Unfortunately, it could have ended under the circumstances of a war -torn region, mass starvation, et cetera.

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But if there had not been a war, was there another way?

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I know the rest of the world seemed to be able to kind of exit from chattel slavery, end it somehow in a peaceable way.

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Was there a way that this could have been avoided? That's a good question. It's one that's very hard to answer. I think some

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Southerners viewed slavery as a progressive institution. They were trying to adapt it to the modern world.

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Well, can we use it in industrial setting? Will it survive? Can we use it in factories? Can we use it?

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And there were some cases where they were trying to do that, ironworks and other things. So could it have survived another 30, 40 years?

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Absolutely. I think there's no doubt about that. But maybe mechanization, some other things, even public interest in ending the institution,

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I think there would have been more of that. The question then became, well, how do you do it in a way that's beneficial to blacks in America that wouldn't put them into a situation where they'd be a permanent underclass?

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Because certainly this was discussed in the North. Well, you just make them a permanent underclass. And then they can't vote.

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They're just gonna be a labor force. Well, you don't want that because that's dangerous and detrimental to those people.

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So then what do you do with the fact that people have sunk a lot of capital in this? Well, how do you deal with that?

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In other places, it was, well, you have to pay them. There's compensation. There's other things. Even Lincoln was wrestling with this.

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You know, he floated a compensated emancipation plan. In Delaware, in fact. Delaware was in the

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Union during the war as a slave state. And the largest slave owner in Delaware was a Republican. So he approached the

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Republican and said, hey, look, I wanna, through a surrogate, I want to float this plan. And how much would it cost to free all of your slaves?

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And he gave them a number. Lincoln looked at it, showed it to some advisors, and they said it'll never pass Congress. They're not gonna pay that much money.

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So there's all these different issues. I think eventually the weight of public opinion would have gone against it.

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And you would have seen some gradual emancipation. Lincoln himself said at one point he's willing to extend it to 1890, even 1900 perhaps.

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It could have extended that long. And one thing you said about the Corn Amendment, it did pass the Congress.

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And some states did ratify it. So it was there. I mean, this was a very possible amendment to the

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U .S. Constitution. Yeah, it's interesting. I think it was Brazil. Brazil was the last country. Brazil, 1881.

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Yeah, and they went that far, but didn't have a war over it. So to just kind of put a cap on all of it though, so you have the war, not primarily slavery being the cause, but secession and then an invasion and a war, but leading up to it, the tensions between these two different sides in the

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North and the South, the extension of, or I think you phrased it, the extension of slavery factored into that, economic interests factored into that.

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Was it just a civilizational clash then? Is that the best way to view that conflict? I think, yeah.

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I mean, look, if you go back and look at Charles Beard, whose book on American civilization points that out.

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And you had two civilizations in America, different in many different ways.

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It was economics, it was social, it was political. They had different views on the powers of the general government. They had different views on the nature of different peoples in society.

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They had different views on expansion. They had different views on economy. And I think eventually religion, you brought that up.

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You had the Puritans in New England, and then you had more traditional

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Episcopalians or Anglicans in the South. You also had other religions as well, but Southerners were certainly much more interested in a more traditional church than in New England.

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So you had all these things working against each other. And I think that that civilizational clash was bound to take place at some point.

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It's just a matter of when. So are we still in that? Absolutely. I mean, has the war even solved anything?

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This is the major question. Is the war over? No, it never has been. I mean, if you think about a cultural war, it's never ended.

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I mean, we're still going through Reconstruction right now. And what America's because, and that's because of one size fits all government.

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What America's, what's happened is America's allowed the winners, the 50 plus 1 % to dominate to the losers.

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And that culture at times is not gonna be receptive to different people, whether you're on the right or the left.

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If Trump's in office, well, the left goes nuts. And they think, I mean - They wanna secede. They wanna secede. If Biden's in office or Obama, the right wants to secede.

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I mean, this is where we are. And I think this is when Governor Morris pointed out, if we have incompatible things right now, let's just get out of this thing and not worry about it anymore.

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And maybe more people should have listened to that back in 1787. There was real talk about disunion in 1787.

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The threat then was, of course, that you had the British and the French, and they would just come in and take over the

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South, the North, and you'd have all these conflicts here. So you can understand there was this real fear about it then.

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Well, we gotta keep this thing together because we got these other big powers out there that could just take us over. Now, I don't know.

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I mean, you've got Texas, this is the size of many European countries. Florida, you've got states that are the size of European countries.

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Would that be so easy to take over? Definitely not. And so I think that's why people are openly talking about it again.

23:31

Well, in closing, kind of, I mean, this is a good kind of opening, I think, for what you advocate on your podcast and in your writings.

23:37

I mean, I don't know if you came up with it, but the tagline, think local, act local. I know you, I think it says that at the beginning of your show in the intro.

23:46

What should Americans, you know, if you wanna think local and act local and not be part of this, you know, cold war that we're still in, what should they be doing then?

23:59

Well, I think when you look at this idea of federalism, what does that actually mean? It means local communities.

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It means working within yourself. I always say, start with your family first. You can't do anything unless you start with your family first and work out from there.

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I mean, Aristotle said this, the family is the most important part of your, if you just wanna look at philosophy, the family is the most important thing.

24:19

Then you go to your local community. It's your town council. It's your county commission. Those are two areas that you can have a lot of impact.

24:26

If you think about it, if you and I wanted to have a rally and we had a hundred people that thought like us and we could go and rally for something.

24:32

And we took those hundred people and we went to Washington, DC and we went to the steps of the Capitol. We had a hundred people on the steps of the Capitol. Now in COVID, we'd probably all be arrested for not wearing masks or something.

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But before in normal times, when you had a hundred people, nobody would pay attention. Nobody would even come out and look at that.

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But if you and I took a hundred people and we went to the steps of your local county city hall and we said, hey, we want this done.

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The mayor is gonna pay attention. The county council is gonna pay attention to what you're doing. So local is always good.

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And you know who also knows this? The left knows this too. George Soros is pumping a lot of money into local action because he knows this is how you can change society.

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Your local school board. What's some of the most important thing? Educating kids. So what we're doing here, educating kids. Well, if you can control your school board, you can control the way that history is taught or the curriculum used or these type of things.

25:23

So then you go to your state, which state in which I live is the size of the United States in 1790.

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There's 4 million people in my state. There were 4 million people in the United States in 1790.

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So if you think about scale, that's a big place. Think about California.

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I try not to. But if you think about California and the representative ratio there, it's awful. But it's a huge place.

25:48

So people in California that feel lost, well, but you have your local. You could change things in your local community and just say, you know what?

25:57

We're just gonna kind of not really, not actually, not literally wall ourselves off, but we're gonna wall ourselves off from some of these terrible things that are happening in our state.

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And we're gonna try to create a real environment here that's just normal. Yeah, and some places are doing that.

26:10

You can open your business here. You don't have to wear a mask on your private property. They're trying to change their local community and it's out of step with the rest of the state.

26:20

Yes. Which is, it's an interesting phenomenon. I don't know where this is all gonna go, but it's certainly interesting.

26:26

I didn't know where this discussion was gonna go, but I have this discussion kind of in the context of the Civil War, looking kind of where we're sitting to where we're sitting here now in 2021.

26:36

Some things have changed, some things haven't. Yeah, they really haven't. I mean, history is timeless in so many ways.

26:43

We talk about the same things over and over again. I think that's because of the structure of America. First of all, one of the great things about America, and I know the left is trying to shut this down more than anything else, is free speech.

26:52

It's for you and I to have this conversation about things that are important to people and to have the ability to go on and have open discussion.

27:00

I don't want the left to be silenced. They should be able to speak freely what they want to say, and we should be able to combat that with our own voice.

27:09

And the structure of America lets that happen. And if you think about the beauty of federalism, it would allow for all these different things.

27:14

And you think about the war itself, we go back to that. It would allow for different communities to have different things.

27:20

And of course, well, what about slavery? Well, I understand that was, you know, we don't want that, right? That's a bad thing. It's good that it's over.

27:26

Nobody wants slavery. But it would allow the North to be the North, the South to be the

27:31

South, the Pennsylvania to be Pennsylvania, New York to be New York. This is what the beauty of it was.

27:36

Well, I think about the abortion issue. You brought that up earlier. I mean, a lot of money is poured into pro -life national organizations and they have little to show for what they've done.

27:46

But if you went to your, even your town, you know, local town, your county, your state, you can probably get a whole lot more done.

27:54

And some states have tried to do that. Sure, absolutely. And of course, then you get in the issue of the Supreme Court again. We brought that up.

27:59

And then what do you do? So we have all these different, you know, hypocritical things for one side or the other. I mean, it's, history is a mess.

28:06

And I think that that's the complexity, going back to your original question, why is everything so simple? Well, it's not.

28:12

History is not black and white. It's a lot of gray. And I think that's the important thing about it.

28:18

And the war is that way too. This why slavery issue is not about, you know, a moral crusade on one side and an immoral crusade on the other.

28:27

Certainly there was part of that. There were abolitionists fighting to free slaves. There were Southern slave owners fighting to keep slaves.

28:32

We know that happened. But for most people, it was something even bigger than that. For some, it just came down to these people invaded my town and I'm gonna wanna kick them out.

28:40

Or others, it's because, well, this is the founding fathers and, you know, there's been a lot of work done on this. I'm gonna go fight to save the

28:45

Union. I mean, so everybody had different motivating factors. Some, it was just because they needed a job. And in New England in particular, there were a lot of Union soldiers who were fighting for a paycheck.

28:54

And this is well known. So that's the time, anytime you get an army, you have that situation. Right, right.

28:59

I know I have four, trace back to four soldiers that fought in the Confederacy.

29:05

Poor as dirt, never would even dream of owning a slave or anything like that.

29:11

But again, invaded. And that was the reaction. And I think that for most people who live in the

29:18

South or who have that heritage, that's what they're thinking about when they see these monuments that are being torn down and everything else.

29:24

And the same for the North. I have, you know, family that's fought for the North and I wouldn't wanna see their monuments taken down either.

29:29

Cause I do know that both sides, there were good men in both armies. And they recognize that themselves.

29:35

And this is why after the war's over, you have Union and Confederate veterans getting together and shaking hands and saying, look, let's just bury the hatchet.

29:42

I mean, we were both doing what we thought was right. We were both fighting for our own cause, whatever that cause may be.

29:48

You fought well, we fought well. Let's just say it's over. And that reconciliation was important for America for a long period of time.

29:57

And that reconciliation is really what's over. I mean, that's the sad part of it all. Well, it allows someone, and I just go back to the think local, act local.

30:05

It just allows someone to appreciate the differences that exist somewhere else. And that you don't have to be like me in every way or the region that I live in.

30:14

You can be yourself over there. You can, you know, I think you've said before, sweep your own porch kind of thing. And that's what

30:21

I want to encourage people to do. And if anyone listening wants to, I mean, this has been kind of an,

30:27

I think a helpful conversation and probably raised a lot more questions than even this answer. But if you want to know more, you can go to, is it brianmcclanahan .com?

30:36

Yes, with an O, Brian with an O. Brian with an O, brianmcclanahan .com. And you can check out his books and resources.

30:42

And you have these discussions on your show all the time about thinking local, acting local, history,

30:48

I find it fascinating. And I just appreciate you giving me some of your time. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. God bless.