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America’s Wars – Wars from 1800-1860 – Edward L. Ayers (Author Interview, 2023)
192 Plays11 months ago
Ep 044 – Nonfiction. From 1800-1860, America grappled with 4 major wars: the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars, the Mexican War, and the lead-up to the U.S. Civil War. Historian E joins me to discuss these wars & his new book, "American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860."
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Transcript
The Need for Honest History Education
00:00:00
Speaker
I don't think that we have put slavery and native dispossession and war, frankly, at the center of our stories. Why do we call this period? It's the era of expansion, right? Well, yeah, we did expand. And the story is of the frontier. Well, why was it the frontier and so forth? So I consider myself a patriotic person who thinks it's not unpatriotic to acknowledge these facts.
00:00:30
Speaker
And if we're going to teach our children an honest and powerful history, we need to do it by acknowledging these truths. But today, this idea that you can't teach anything that hurts white people's feelings or somehow suggests that we were not always God's chosen people is misguided because it doesn't align with the historical record. That doesn't mean you hate America.
00:00:55
Speaker
It doesn't mean you're not loyal to its principles. It doesn't mean you want to indoctrinate children. It just means you want to tell the truth.
Introducing Edward L. Ayres and 'American Visions'
00:01:23
Speaker
Today, I am really excited to have on the show, Edward L. Ayres for his new book, American Visions, the United States 1800 to 1860. Edward Ayres is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal and has won the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes for his innovative histories of Civil War America. He is president emeritus of the University of Richmond, where he is executive director of New American History. And thanks for joining me.
00:01:52
Speaker
Um, really excited to, uh, to talk about this book. Um, I know besides writing, you do a lot of stuff, uh, or have done a lot of stuff. Um, first, I gotta say you did an entire, this is something that I nerd out on great courses lectures so much. And you did an entire great courses lecture on, it was a new history of the American South. Um, which, um, I'm actually, I'm listening to you right now. So I've, even though this is the first time that we've
00:02:23
Speaker
We've spoken here and I've heard your voice. It's like your voice has been in my head for several days now. So now I can actually put a face to this discombobulated voice that stood in my head. But yeah, but you've also, so you were about to say something?
00:02:40
Speaker
I'm just going to say, you got this East Tennessee accent echoing in your head. That's a lot. Often here on broadcast media, so it's good for you. Yeah, no, it's great. It's very, very soothing. You've done podcasts before. You're on Medium, you're on Bunk. You mentioned to me,
00:03:01
Speaker
that you did it while you were writing this book, or actually while you were editing this book, you visited 60 different places around the country. Tell me about that trip real quick, because I'm curious about that journey. Yeah.
Exploring Historical Narratives at US Sites
00:03:14
Speaker
And people can read this on Medium. Just search for my name on Medium.
00:03:22
Speaker
The idea was that it's hard to see this period of American history, 1800, 1860. We don't really have a good name for it. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit later. Basically, we define it by a war that hasn't happened yet. And so partly because I'm really interested in public history.
00:03:43
Speaker
founding board chair of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, which everybody needs to go see on this podcast. It really is remarkable. And it took us 13 years to build it. We joined the Museum of the Confederacy with the American Civil War Center. And I think we tell the story the best in the United States. So it's remarkable. And so I've worked a lot with, you know, Colonial Williamsburg and lots of other places. And so
00:04:08
Speaker
I've always been interested in how the story that we write in books gets translated to people who just show up at a battlefield or at a national park site. And it's also the case that my wife and I both just turned 70 and decided that we should have another adventure. And so we bought an RV and got her to agree to go out and
00:04:37
Speaker
We drove 15,000 miles, visited 24 states, I think, and as you mentioned, the 60 sites. And the premise was we're visiting places where history happened and to see what's happened to that history since. And so our last trip took us from, we live in Virginia, took us to Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Oklahoma again, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and home. That was our last
00:05:06
Speaker
tour 25 states and so what that meant was as we're coming back to Virginia we actually ended to pick up anticipate some of the themes of this conversation where this period began which is the battle of Horseshoe Bend where Andrew Jackson defeated Red Stick Creek Indians and so even so chronology and geography just don't always align you know we weren't able to start at the beginning and follow. That sounds like a dream trip though I wonder if I mean
00:05:37
Speaker
I would mean, me and my girlfriend have talked about, we talked about this during the pandemic. I think a lot of people during the pandemic were like, wouldn't it be fun to like get an RV and like travel around?
00:05:47
Speaker
I don't know if I could get her to go to all these historical sites with me, so I'm glad that your wife is on board. Yeah, well, my wife's not really interested in this history junk either. And that was part of it. In each place, I didn't let anybody know I was coming. I wasn't looking for the conversations behind the scenes or anything. I just wanted to see, what can people see if you showed up at the battle horse you've been? Now, I'm a big fan of the National Park Service. I think they do an incredible job. And I'm a chat with the historians on site.
00:06:13
Speaker
But part of this was to judge things through the eyes of my wife. What if you were not really interested at all in any of this? What might resonate with you? And I'm happy to say everywhere we went, she found something that was
00:06:29
Speaker
interesting tour. Great. And so it's a useful discipline to travel with a non-geek as a full-time geek to do all this. So the journal describes what we found at each place, you know, so Battle of Saint Jacinto. How is that remembered? And that you look out and you see sort of the Houston oil derricks and things, you know, from on the sidelines. And
00:06:58
Speaker
But the Alamo, how is the story of that changed over time? So not to give away the punchline, but generally I found that
00:07:08
Speaker
these people are doing a remarkably good job. Volunteers, people in the communities, we visited really out of the way places. And everywhere we went, there's people at Goodwill telling the full story. And so there's been sort of a sub-industry in the history of business of critiquing the way that the stories are told. But everywhere I went, a lot fuller accounting of roles of slavery and of
00:07:34
Speaker
American Indian history and so forth, very even-handed. So it was a heartening story. And so I think we have two or three more episodes to post, but people can go and check out whatever particular place they're interested in. Part of this is to remind young people that no matter where you live,
00:07:54
Speaker
history has happened beneath your feet, but there's history nearby that you should check out. So it's meant to be an inspiring story. And it was a blast and my wife are still married. Matter of fact, we're having our 50th wedding anniversary next year. Congratulations. Yeah, well, thanks. And I thought it was good to do a stress test here at the end. It really was as strong as it seemed. The first question I like to ask everyone who comes on this show is if, in your own words, could you just tell us what is your book about?
US Identity Formation: 1800-1860
00:08:25
Speaker
You know, it has a shorter title than many of my books. It's just the United States, 1800 to 1860. And the point of it is, is
00:08:34
Speaker
how much of what the nation is was created, not at the founding, because the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence were just kind of sketches for a nation. But by 1860, most of the shape of the nation, its politics, its religious profile, its boundaries, its self-understanding had been defined. And I'm not sure that people really understand how much of the United States crystallized
00:09:02
Speaker
in those first three generations of the 19th century. I say in the preface that nobody at the time would have imagined that a fluke of a topographical fad and a failed political collection would end up creating the most widely used phrase in the world.
00:09:22
Speaker
which is okay, you know, nearly 200 years later. And that's kind of emblematic. So Johnny Appleseed, who nobody would have thought is now sort of every kid who knows or thinks they know who Johnny Appleseed was, right, with the pot on his head and all that. And so sometimes things that seemed, and it was often things that seemed unlikely at the time had endured. Most of the people we teach as the creators of American literature
00:09:49
Speaker
were not acknowledged as such at the time. Harmon Melville basically gives up. Walt Whitman has to publish his own books. So the people that we imagined as being most typically American were running contrary to a lot of what America thought it was. So it's about all the different things that are happening in that period. A lot of it is about
00:10:18
Speaker
the words and the stories that people were using to make sense of what the United States was. And it turns out that my publisher frames the book in the promo literature as a lot of our histories now are either very pessimistic about who America is or they're very celebratory kind of
00:10:44
Speaker
you know, what a wonderful country we are. And what I do is focus on the ways that the great wrongs of this period, and there never have been deeper wrongs in American history than during this period, the creation of the largest, most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, and the dispossession of indigenous people of the whole continent. Both those things happen in the middle of all this.
00:11:10
Speaker
The story that we often tell ourselves is that, well,
00:11:15
Speaker
that people didn't really know any better than, you know, that they just thought that's the way things were supposed to be. But at every step of the way, people were saying, this is a violation of what America should be. This is a violation of all people are created equal. This is a violation of the spirit of the New Testament and loving each other. So I'm trying to acknowledge the great wrongs, but not stop there to say that there's a tradition in American history from the beginning
00:11:45
Speaker
people holding us to our highest ideals. This is not political correctness to say that those things are wrong or being woke or whatever that means, right? It is what it is, is that there has never been a time when people didn't understand what was going on and didn't raise their voice against it. So it's trying to find a
00:12:02
Speaker
A tone that is not setting in judgment of people, but is celebrating people who are often on the margins who were, you know, considered it strange for one reason or another, maybe because they were women and dared write books or give speeches. And a lot of black people who were denied political power.
00:12:21
Speaker
spoke truth that we need to listen to today. So it's ironically a hopeful book because it suggests that there's a more patriotic history that we possess that is honest about the things that we've done in our past that are
00:12:39
Speaker
not worthy of celebration. So it tries to find a different kind of voice. That was not as efficient as it might have been, but it was a hard book to write, AJ, and so it takes a lot of time. No, that's excellent. Yeah, I'm curious if the original title that you sent to your
00:13:00
Speaker
Um, your, your publishers was maybe much longer and they're like, let's just, let's cut it down to American visions. Um, but regardless, um, I love that you've chosen to, because you're right. A lot of the, um, the history and.
00:13:17
Speaker
I mean, frankly, maybe for good reason, a lot of the history we're getting now does kind of have a bit of a pessimistic tone because so many of the wrongs that have been committed in this country have not been talked about. That hasn't been aired in public.
00:13:34
Speaker
Um, you know, it's, it's uncomfortable. Or they're neglected, you know, the battles in the schools now. Well, let's don't dwell on that. You know, slavery is over, right? Let's don't. And so I'm trying to find a way how we might be honest with our kids, uh, at the same time that we don't, we actually inspire
00:13:52
Speaker
love for the country, for its founding principles. You don't have to love everything that has been done in its name in order to love the country. I see this as a new form of patriotic history, one that celebrates its ideals, not every action that it took. Well, I want to come back to that towards the end of the interview because I've got a few questions along those lines.
00:14:13
Speaker
But I want to start off with, so your book is, there are four wars that I don't want to talk about. The War of 1812, the Seminole Wars, the Mexican War, and the Civil War, the lead-up right to it. So maybe we'll just start with the War of 1812. And my listeners and viewers might be a little burned out on the War of 1812,
00:14:38
Speaker
because this will be the third time on the show we've talked about it. But for those who have not heard those other episodes, could you just very briefly, what were the causes of the word 1812 and what kind of characterized that war?
00:14:55
Speaker
I would say our older podcast backstory, which people can find the entire archive of, we had an episode on this called the War of 1812. Which one was that? And I write about this on the travel site too, because we ended up going to several places that are foundational to the War of 1812. And they cover all the way from the Great Lakes, Lake Erie, to the Gulf of Mexico, to the Chesapeake Bay.
00:15:24
Speaker
And so the causes of it are basically the United States felt like unless it declared its independence again from the most powerful empire in the modern world, it was not going to be taken seriously. And the British are seizing American seamen on the seas. But they're also, most importantly, threatening to ally with
00:15:47
Speaker
American Indian opponents of the United States were trying to stop the viral spread of these white settlers just flooding into their land across that entire border from the Gulf to the Great Lakes. And so the United States, you know, Tom Jefferson famously says that it's going to be a mere matter of marching.
00:16:09
Speaker
to take Canada, that we could go up there and do that. So try to end the British threat from the north, try to end the British threat from the west with American Indians, try to end the British threat from the east and the south on the high seas. So it's basically, that's what it
00:16:27
Speaker
what causes it. But it is, in the travel log I write about this, I give a link to, there's a very funny brief video online that it's a fake promo for a fake movie about the war of 1812. And the guy has, it looks just exactly like a war movie, right? But the guy's explained to his wife, why he's going off to fight. He says, it's about honor,
00:16:56
Speaker
or taxes. It's not clear at the time, frankly, and it's not been clear in American history ever since what that war was about. Even I think in Europe, if you talk about 1812, people are like, oh, Napoleon.
00:17:14
Speaker
And they didn't even know there was a war going on. The War of 1812, right? In many ways, of course, the United States War is really just kind of reverberation of that in the same way that acquiring the Louisiana Purchase is just a reverberation of European events. And we're not big enough to make history ourselves.
00:17:32
Speaker
in 1812, we're just trying to navigate. So the irony is that in this war, which seemed to go so badly at every step, but then you have Commodore Perry, Unlikely Victory, and Lake Erie, and then you have Fort McHenry and an unlikely repulsion of the British in Baltimore, and then you have the deeply unlikely Battle of New Orleans with Andrew Jackson. In each case,
Impact of the War of 1812
00:18:01
Speaker
And it's interesting when you visit the small scale, certainly of Lake Erie and of the New Orleans, you know, just a few thousand people changed the shape of the entire United States. So at the end, we also visit the Prophetstown where Tecumseh and Tinsco-Ottawa live. I was born just north of there, actually. Yeah, it's very interesting. I'm from that part of the country.
00:18:27
Speaker
Well, it's beautiful, you know, and it's also haunting to go there to see, you know, the visions that those native leaders had for how they might ally with the strongest empire in the modern world to stop the spread of the United States.
00:18:44
Speaker
And not to ruin this for any of your listeners, but the United States did not lose. And as a result, won enormous victories that its consequences basically shaped everything that followed. Most importantly, the breaking of the power of the American Indians. And at Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson breaking the power of the Creeks is enormous. And so the
00:19:12
Speaker
The inputs to the War of 1812 are disproportionate to the outputs. And other outputs of it are, of course, we come out with the national anthem eventually, and we come out with a sage national capital that had been burned to the ground and it's sort of a new tradition of that. And we come out with something we've not had before of post-revolutionary heroes of Perry and Jackson. And so in many ways, the United States is created by
00:19:42
Speaker
victory in the War of 1812. And all of the expansion to the Mississippi over the next two generations is enabled by the War of 1812.
00:19:57
Speaker
the feet of the creeks opens up over 20 million acres of basically what becomes Alabama and large part of Georgia. And so the War of 1812 is not fought to expand slavery, but had there not been the War of 1812 that basically seized all that land that ended up being the richest cotton soil in the nation, you wouldn't have had the expansion of the slave empire.
00:20:24
Speaker
So I wonder if you would really underestimated in its in its consequences with the slavery aspect. So I had I had another guest professor in this show and was talking about the lead up to the War of 1812 and talked about so this period, 1800, 1860. I don't know if you would agree with this first, but I would say slavery largely defines
00:20:51
Speaker
most of the conflict that's going on, which we can talk more about. But he made the point, this other professor of sovereignty made the point that a lot of the hawks in Congress at the time had visions of, they were southerners, of conquering Canada and expanding slavery into Canada. How first is that a very, I don't know, is that kind of a mainstream thing?
00:21:20
Speaker
Second, like how likely would that, I mean, how much does slavery touch the word 1812, I guess, is what I'm getting at.
00:21:30
Speaker
There's different ways, the expansion to Canada wouldn't occur to me, but by this time slavery is beginning to be legally ended in much of New England. And so that strikes me that expanding into Canada would not have been the highest priority of the United States, right? But I would say that, you know, Andrew Jackson writes his wife after horseshoe Ben says, soon,
00:21:57
Speaker
we will see great mansions and these fields of cotton. And so he doesn't say using the force bondage of enslaved people. You don't have to. I mean, he himself is a slave owner and had marched a coffel of enslaved people from the Mississippi to his plantation outside of Nashville. So he's deeply implicated himself. But at this time, you know,
00:22:24
Speaker
what the Cotton Empire might be is beyond imagining. As I point out to people, by the time in just 40 years, it expands over an area the size of continental Europe.
00:22:37
Speaker
American slavery does, right? And over areas that had not only not been in slavery, but had not been in the United States. So if you think about taking at Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and then Louisiana, and taking New Orleans, you know, with the Louisiana Purchase, and then controlling the Mississippi as a result of the War of 1812,
00:23:03
Speaker
the expansion of slavery becomes feasible in a way that it had not been before. But what it also does is, like it had the stories, it feeds the hunger for ever more expansion farther west, which leads to other wars, right? So I think it's like the revolution as a whole
00:23:23
Speaker
People can go and argue about what role did slaveholders play in causing the revolution or writing the Constitution of the United States. But what could not be debated that had the United States not been its independent nation and able to expand slavery at its own will, it would have been a much smaller presence. I mean, if we're still a part of Great Britain in 1834, you know,
00:23:47
Speaker
it maybe could have stopped the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean but or it could have followed the path of Mexico which 1829 ends slavery right so it's uh this is one of these
00:24:03
Speaker
It's like talking about the Civil War. Did Robert E. Lee fight for slavery? No, but he fought for a nation based on slavery. Was the War of 1812 about slavery? No, but did it lay all the foundations for what slavery became? Yes. Let's move along to the Seminole Wars. All right. Because I am interested in talking about Native Americans and some of what you write about
00:24:31
Speaker
what was going on with Native Americans in the country. But similar with like the War of 1812, could you just give like a brief overview of what started that and what characterized the fighting? Well, ask me to be brief, you notice it's not the easiest one. But, because these are complicated things, but the short version of the duos is immediately following, so this is still
00:24:55
Speaker
a consequence of war, 1812. Andrew Jackson's the great hero. He's determined to drive native people from anything that the United States wants, basically, and feels justified in doing so on the side of progress and natural rights. And so there's perpetual
00:25:17
Speaker
war against the native people of the eastern United States from 1820 all the way through the 1830s. And people know that the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which Jackson kind of just rams through. And then the
00:25:36
Speaker
five or six years after that, it's basically low-grade warfare to drive American Indians in the Cherokee and the Choctaw and the Creek and Chickasaw and the Seminoles from the Eastern United States, especially in the Southeast, but there's wars against the Black Hawk in the North and Indiana as well. So we don't really think of that necessarily as war, but it's
00:26:01
Speaker
military, militarily enforced removal. You know, they try with treaties, I use the, you know, purchase and various kinds of agreements. But if the American Indians will not leave, then they bring in military force to do so. And that's how the final trail of tears of the Cherokee and the creeks and shock calls is empowered basically by the War Department.
00:26:26
Speaker
through contractors. One of the things that makes it so terrible is that they just sell out cronies for the lowest bid and who then basically cheat American Indians out of the kind of support they deserve to make this migration to the Indian territory. Well, the Seminoles are geographically positioned so that they had the strongest position. They're in basically uninhabited Florida.
00:26:54
Speaker
And the United States Army can't figure out a way to remove them and spends just untold amount of money. So Jackson is all about government frugality and all this stuff, but they spend
00:27:09
Speaker
I don't want to give an inaccurate number. I don't remember off the top of my head, but more than you can imagine, basically per seminal person to drive out of Florida. And also the deaths of American soldiers they send down there and who are not equipped and nothing the United States possesses just works well in the swamps of Florida to try to give people
00:27:34
Speaker
drive people out. They try new kinds of guns and repeating rifles and things. Our cult emerges then. But basically, there's two seminal wars. They drag on for years.
00:27:50
Speaker
They had a different general every year for eight years to try to bring this to completion. And it's interesting how invisible this is in the American memory because it was the story we tell about. We are really good at fighting wars. The United States has been really good at that all along.
00:28:09
Speaker
And I don't mean that in any sarcastic way. Mobilizing a democratic society quickly with new technologies and volunteer armies and professional armies. Good at it. Seminole War was not an example of that. They really couldn't figure out how to drive these American Indians out of their native lands and in many ways failed.
00:28:28
Speaker
If you added up the amount of money they spent to remove a few thousand people, it would have made no sense whatsoever. And it was bloody and diminished the reputation of the United States Army. I wonder if, so we hear about, and you note in your book about the people, the visionaries who spoke out against slavery and of the evils of that, do we have
00:28:57
Speaker
people who have a vision for cohabitating with Native Americans who spoke out against the Seminole War or in some way offered a vision for that was less violent? Yeah.
00:29:12
Speaker
But one of the heroes of the book is a man named William Appess, A-P-E-S-S. And he was of mixed Pequot and white ancestry in Massachusetts and Methodist minister. And so he used the language of Christianity to hold white Christians to the standard of
00:29:32
Speaker
are you behaving like a Christian when you're doing these things? And he also railed against, it was against the law in Massachusetts for a clergyman to marry a person of native and white ancestry. And he says, first of all, he is. And he says, I know many people who are of the first quality who are of this. So this idea was, well, we've already seen what it is.
00:29:57
Speaker
He would be on the side of assimilation, the sense of Christianity and intermarriage. I think the end of property holding, all those kinds of things. And a lot of the Cherokee, of course, one of the most powerful places we visited on our trip, New Echota in Georgia, they say, look, we're creating a capital. We have a newspaper in our own language as well as English. We adopted all the laws of the United States.
00:30:23
Speaker
slaveholders. You know, we're growing the things that you grow. We speak English. We send our children to boarding schools in New England. What else could you ask of us?
00:30:33
Speaker
And what they could ask of them is, get off the land, we want it. So you have everything from the red sticks, fighting against the United States with the division of Tecumseh, of let's abandon alcohol, let's abandon Christianity, let's abandon cotton cloth, domesticated animals.
00:30:54
Speaker
all the way to people like William Appess, who were saying, we're doing everything we could possibly do. So what it shows is that they do have vision. And in many ways, the struggle to stop the Indian Removal Act mobilized a lot of people who would then become active in the anti-slavery movement. The
00:31:15
Speaker
People may remember William Lloyd Garrison, the liberator, doesn't emerge until 1831, what we think of as immediate abolition. Well, the movement to stop this possession of American Indians had already been going on for several years, and a lot of the language was the same. This is unchristian.
00:31:36
Speaker
How could we, if you're supposed to love people like you love yourself, how can this possibly be? And they discovered too that this fixation on what they call skin, you know, which we later end up calling race, which they accurately just call skin, is
00:31:56
Speaker
pre-sages the attack on racism against Black people. So it's interesting to see this. Now, if you'll permit me to say so, today we're posting on the site that you pointed out. I'm new executive director, newamericanhistory.org.
00:32:13
Speaker
I believe people would find it very interesting. And it's Sister Project, which is bunkhistory.org, which is a real-time curation of every representation of American history every day. And believe me, there's lots of war from every period on there. But we have a new site dedicated to this book just came out today. And on that, there are five powerful videos in which we imagine
00:32:37
Speaker
in their place and time and the appropriate gender and ethnicity of some of these people. And there's a video, a one-minute video, highly produced of William Apess on his way to a church to give this sermon. So we're trying to give ways, especially for young people, to be able to imagine this incredibly remote period. Nobody could tell me, what does things look like in the 1830s? People kind of know about powdered wigs and so forth of founding, and they could picture Civil War uniforms.
00:33:07
Speaker
Is that hoop skirts? Doesn't know what's going on. So we're making history visually accurate to convey that. So yes, there were, and this is also when women first mobilized, was to try to stop Indian removal. And they filled a giant room in Washington with petitions that they would send in. So it's interesting to see how much of the effort against slavery was prefigured in the effort to stop Indian removal.
00:33:36
Speaker
something interesting. Don't you think it's interesting that at this point of time in American history that it was, as you said, it was a crime in, I think you said, New Hampshire and Massachusetts for a white person to marry a Native person
00:33:56
Speaker
I remember I've always been without outing anybody in my family. Some of the older, very much older people of my family have often said that we have Cherokee ancestry. It's always Cherokee. We do too. My wife's family. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember reading an article about how
00:34:21
Speaker
That is actually something that got started after the Civil War for people to more identify with the land. Have you heard of this? Chances are none of us have Cherokee ancestry. Maybe some of us do. But is this something you're familiar with? Yeah, well,
00:34:44
Speaker
Ours is more plausible than yours, if you're from Indiana, I would say because we lived really in the midst of what had been the Cherokee land in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina. So that's plausible in that case. Right now,
00:35:01
Speaker
Many people are claiming to be American Indian. And so you have this thing, everybody wants to be part Indian, but people don't want to have to be restricted to a reservation and have their rights taken away from. So I think at the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, they have powerful exhibits about continuing fascination of white Americans with American Indian identity and ancestry. And when I'm growing up in the 1950s,
00:35:31
Speaker
Every boy, every white boy wore loincloth and wanted to play cowboys and Indians, and it was just a fundamental part of all that. But today, it's a problem for Indian nations because so many people want to claim Indian ancestry, but if you're trying to protect the sovereignty of your
00:35:50
Speaker
of your nation, you kind of have to look at the records to see who actually belongs. So it's a very unstable situation right now. There was an article just last week in the Times of the Post about was there really that much of an increase in American Indian population in the last census, or is it just that people wanted to be honorary Indians? So that's the thing is that in all the culture of this time, you know, Black Hawk's autobiography, 1833, is a bestseller in which he's basically
00:36:20
Speaker
you know, telling white people, you know, what are you doing? You know, this is wrong. And people buy it. And, you know, George Catlin's Indian Gallery travels all over the United States and in Europe. People flock. And, of course, last of the Mohicans. And so people, white people are very sympathetic to American Indians, but it does them no good whatsoever when it comes on the actions of the federal government.
00:36:45
Speaker
So, and it's also regionalized by this time, even though as you're pointing out that in New England, it's illegal for intermarriage. It's New England criticizing the South for where most Indian removal takes place in the 1830s. Many ways that a lot of it had already taken place on the North and that kind of feeds that regional tension that helps feed into the Civil War to kind of look ahead maybe to another war you want to talk about.
00:37:13
Speaker
Well, yes, before we get to that, I do have a question that almost certainly does not have a simple answer, but what's your assessment of Andrew Jackson?
Complex Legacy of Andrew Jackson
00:37:25
Speaker
Bad guy, good guy. What's the assessment? Yeah.
00:37:33
Speaker
He was really good at mobilizing these ragtag armies to win these battles in 1814 and 1815. And he was really good at sort of saying the things that can mobilize the largest number of white men. But, you know, from he was
00:37:59
Speaker
In some ways, out of touch with his time, even though we see him as a symbol of his time, he had a very old-fashioned perspective of what manliness was and what the United States would be. So I think, you know, historians today would think the most important thing he did was the Indian Removal Act, you know.
00:38:19
Speaker
And he no longer seems the embodiment of democracy that he seemed to the Democratic Party deep into the 20th century, you know, until not too long ago. He was seen as the very symbol of democracy. Well, yeah, if democracy is property only owning white men, you know, but if you're anybody else, Jackson seems retrograde. So he was really good at what he did.
00:38:46
Speaker
Sure. This is my answer to your question. But what he did was contrary to the desires of a lot of Americans, but not enough to not elect him. Well, I mean, he's like one of those, you know, I'm constantly putting what I know as an adult against what I learned when I was in school. But I'm also I'm always just kind of like thinking, like, you know, what did I learn growing up in
00:39:14
Speaker
you know, maybe what is the reality of what actually happened? I think the whole country is actually kind of taking that same... Yeah, I'd say Jackson's probably undergone the greatest revision and diminution of anybody in the last quarter century. And from, you know, being the hero of the common man, you know, to being the embodiment of these great wrongs in American history. So on the other hand,
00:39:41
Speaker
the United States wouldn't be the United States if he'd not won these military victories. In general,
00:39:50
Speaker
I'm not really much of a fan of passing judgment on people of the past. Something I often say is that I'm morally superior to every dead person who's ever lived, right? They can't defend themselves. But 100 years from now, people will live back on us and they go, what in the world were they thinking and saying? So I think that history is fundamentally an exercise in humility.
00:40:13
Speaker
And I would say that, you know, my experience in, you know, writing about the Civil War, people like to pass judgment on generals. It's like, can you imagine trying to command a Civil War army with no force of communication on this thing? So, you know, it may be, my whole form of history is empathy.
00:40:37
Speaker
Let's just try to include everybody in the story and try to imagine it from their point of view. And ironically, if you do that, it's kind of self-correcting. Democracy sort of asserts itself and respect for people who were
00:40:55
Speaker
mistreated or who were treated unjustly kind of rises if you just listen to what people actually said. So that's kind of what this book is. Let's expand the chorus and hear what most people had to say. And if you do, it turns out that not everybody is in favor of Andrew Jackson and not everybody, you know, you get the idea. It's that
00:41:15
Speaker
That's a way of democratizing history without preaching about it, right? I'm not trying to cross my arms and act as if I, you know, some paragon of moral virtue. It's just like, wow, I've read what people said.
00:41:31
Speaker
they saw pretty clearly that this was wrong at the time and resisted it. Unfortunately, they couldn't vote if they were women or if they were black men, but they could see what was going on. So I kind of disconnect the story a little bit from what we think of as politics to expand politics to be a broader conversation.
00:41:54
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, that's a long riff. I thought of Andrew Jackson, your excuse me for going on. Yeah, that's great. That's perfect. Let's talk about, because I promised the audience at the beginning of the show, we were going to talk about four wars and God darn it, we're going to do that. Let's talk about the Mexican war. And I'm curious if you can just talk again, just kind of very briefly how that started and then how that connects to the story that you're telling here.
The Mexican War and Its Implications
00:42:22
Speaker
Yeah, the Mexican War is, along with War of 1812, a foundational war that has kind of a blank space in our memory, you know, that people don't
00:42:37
Speaker
can't quite wrap their minds around what that was really all about. And we spent quite a bit of time in Texas on this last trip at the Alamo and San Jacinto. What year, by the way, did the Mexican war start? 1846 and seven and eight is when it's going on. And so what I found in Texas is that the war
00:42:59
Speaker
for Texas independence, the Alamo bleeds into the Mexican war in very indistinct ways, even though for 10 years, Texas claims to be an independent nation, right? Trying to have it both ways. And then what you find is that
00:43:20
Speaker
The story certainly of the Alamo, I went back and watched the old David Crockett film from 1955 because at the Alamo now, this huge collection given by Phil Collins, yes, the Phil Collins of rock music in the 80s. He'd been a boyhood fan of David Crockett and built this
00:43:44
Speaker
multi-million dollar collection of artifacts about the Alamo, which are now on display. But they're all about just the battle. What wall did Santa Ana's troops crawl over or whatever? And David Crockett, who unfortunately I say lives in Texas only long enough to get killed, but is seen as a great Texas hero. And it's like,
00:44:08
Speaker
Really? Two months? That's enough to be a Texas hero? And there's a great evasion there. And this goes back to what we were saying about the War of 1812 and about the Revolution and about the Confederacy, for that matter. What role does slavery play?
00:44:23
Speaker
Well, what we need to remember is that Mexico had outlawed slavery in 1829, and whereas the white settlers not only were taking land, which they'd been invited by the Mexican government, and it goes back to our other story, why? To help fight against the Comanches, right? So if you have white settlers there to occupy northern Mexico, the Comanches are going to have a buffer.
00:44:49
Speaker
right, but give enormous amounts of this wonderful land to white settlers. And Stephen F. Austin, you know, not really a fan of slavery, but he says people aren't going to come if we don't allow them to bring enslaved people. And so slavery, what the white settlers of Texas
00:45:11
Speaker
are defending in part is the right to have African American slavery. You just don't see that in the story, right? That's just because they're fighting against this big central government. If you can imagine how this fits into current day politics, right? It's the state against the centralized government of Santa Ana and all that.
00:45:35
Speaker
But there is a new exhibit at San Jacinto, as they say in Texas, that shows the
00:45:44
Speaker
5,000 black people in slavery in Mexico or in Texas in 1835, grows into something like 160,000 by 1860. And it becomes one of the fastest growing areas of slavery. So from the Mexican point of view, they were a non-slave holding republic
00:46:06
Speaker
defending itself against an avaricious slave holding United States in which most of the soldiers are, you know, volunteers are from the southeast and most of the settlers of Texas are. But we don't really have a good story about the Mexican War except that
00:46:29
Speaker
the halls of Montezuma, the United States turned out to be better at fighting a war than we could have imagined. Really excellent generalship. And of course, you know, a lot of people who become famous 15 years later in the Civil War sort of earned their spurs or stripes in the Mexican war. And then we end up getting most of North America as a result, including California, which immediately has a gold rush. So it's like,
00:46:59
Speaker
pieces don't really fit together except that maybe it's what people thought back at the time that this was God's will that we were supposed to have North America, because otherwise you would not have predicted anything like this outcome. And I quote Albert Gallatin, who's been a
00:47:17
Speaker
supporter, an advisor to Thomas Jefferson who says, this idea that God intends for us to, because of racial superiority, to defeat the Mexicans is sacrilege. We created the United States to say that everybody has a right to self-government. Why do we think that we have this special right? So I'd say that we have a very unstable
00:47:39
Speaker
understanding of the war with Mexico. Ulysses Grant later calls it a wicked war that was provoked by the United States precisely to take Texas. And then once we got Texas, give us the rest of the continent. So it's hard to tell
00:48:01
Speaker
First, it was hard to tell a hard story about it, and now it's kind of hard to tell a positive story about it other than the outcome of it was good. Now, you could argue, and nothing is fair to say, and there's excellent recent books about the Mexican War, that it's not like Mexico was really in control of this area, and it's not like it was really flourishing under this area being what became Western United States.
00:48:26
Speaker
It's not as if the Mexican government was stable and a beacon of democracy. All those things are true, but it's also the case that at the time, many people famous like Henry David Thoreau says that this is an unchristian and
00:48:45
Speaker
unjust war that we should never have been in in the first place that it's designed to expand slavery. That of course ends up being the primary result is it expands the United States enough for the Confederacy to emerge not too long afterward and lead to the Civil War. So you know again this is one of these cases and it turns out too that the Mexican War is the first one that's heavily reported by Telegraph and it's when Currier and Ives first
00:49:14
Speaker
come on board and making these imaginary lithographs of some battle that nobody ever saw. All the soldiers look suspiciously alike, lined up against each other and so forth. But Americans become weary of it and also disgusted by the stories they hear of atrocities by American soldiers against Mexican civilians and the shelling of
00:49:39
Speaker
of Mexican cities in which civilians are killed is it becomes a topic of public displeasure. And so the United States goes into the war proclaiming it's on the side of liberty, ends the war, not so sure about that and that we didn't really wage it well.
00:50:02
Speaker
the gold rush and we think that... Would you say that the first maybe large-scale anti-war movement happens around this time? Well, yes, large-scale. I mean, something I meant to mention before is that New England didn't support the War of 1812 and threatened to secede, right? And so, which the Confederates used later to point out the hypocrisy of the North. When you don't like something, you talk about leaving the Union,
00:50:27
Speaker
Now we don't. We're somehow traitors. So there was opposition to that. There was opposition to the Seminole War. There was opposition to Indian removal. And there's opposition to the War of Mexico. And there's the case too where the Whigs are
00:50:46
Speaker
speak against the war, but then end up being the great beneficiaries by promoting its generals as their presidential candidates. I think that's something else that happened. We used to think that the Whigs were the good guys in all of this because of things they said against the war at the beginning, but they made their peace with it pretty quickly when it was to their advantage. It's a muddy situation that I think is hard to
00:51:15
Speaker
tell an inspiring story about other than, we did a good job with all this land we won later. Yeah. Well, let's transition to the Civil War. So much has been written about the Civil War. You yourself have written multiple books about the Civil War.
Unpredictability Leading to the Civil War
00:51:31
Speaker
I'm curious, what new things do we have to learn about the Civil War and the lead up to the Civil War that you talk about? Yeah. This is kind of an awkward question for me, AJ, because
00:51:41
Speaker
I argued before in several places that we've got to be careful about telegraphing the Civil War as if people knew it was going to happen. So in 2009, we had the first event in the nation on the sexual centennial of the Civil War at the University of Richmond. I invited a lot of great historians to you are to have a session on
00:52:10
Speaker
1859. But they couldn't know anything that happened after the end of 1859. And they all agreed that nobody saw the Civil War coming, right? That the big event would have been silver and gold discovered in Colorado or the revival of 1857. John Brown was a big deal, but that's probably nice. And because that was my whole point is that
00:52:36
Speaker
The Civil War was not so much coming as it suddenly crashed. It was more tectonic, like an earthquake, than it was like a storm, even though that's the language, the coming storm, the impending crisis and all that. Well, it had been impending for 25 years, but nobody could have imagined the Civil War that actually occurred.
00:53:00
Speaker
And nobody could have imagined the end of the largest system of slavery in the world in just five years. And nobody could have imagined the death is equivalent of eight million, if it happened today, eight million people dying, right? So that been my whole point. It's like pushing against the grain of its industrial nation versus an agrarian nation and all this sort of stuff. I'd sort of, you know, spoken out against that, including some, you know,
00:53:28
Speaker
people I admire very much like, you know, James McPherson, I just sort of said, well, you know, it's maybe not as evident that it's going to happen as it seemed in retrospect. Now, in this book, partly because I am listening to all these voices who are raising warnings about various kinds of things, you can see the culture kind of rotting from inside is what I point out. You know, you find that it becomes
00:53:59
Speaker
common, expected for white southerners to disdain the white North and vice versa. There's really no basis for comedy, for mutual understanding. And then you have, you know, Uncle Tom's cabin and, you know, the Dred Scott and all this. And each of these erodes the cultural resources of the United States to withstand a shock.
00:54:23
Speaker
And then that shock is the election of Abraham Lincoln, right? And so I wouldn't say I'm revising my earlier revisionism, but I am saying that political events are still what brings on the Civil War.
00:54:37
Speaker
the cultural foundations of the nation had been weakened over the preceding 20 years, partly by the war in Mexico, partly because of Indian removal, but mainly because of the expansion of slavery into Texas and then prospective expansion into California and Kansas and Nebraska and all those kinds of ways. And the comparison with today is not accidental. Once you've used up
00:55:06
Speaker
all your assumptions of goodwill of your opponent. You're weakened. The nation is weakened to deal with any kind of crisis. And I think that's kind of what happened in the Civil War. So what I say is that the abolitionist did not cause the Civil War.
00:55:23
Speaker
but they may very well have caused emancipation to emerge from the Civil War. They created a sort of a stockpile of positive representations of black capacity, of reminding us of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and of the Bible, saying that these people deserve freedom.
00:55:43
Speaker
So again, I never gave you a quick answer of the sort you requested or anything, but that's how I think that all this cultural change, it both erodes the nation, but then it supplies the nation with idealism when it really needs it. And the Civil War ends better than anybody could have imagined with the end of slavery and the reunification of the United States, none of which seemed evident as late as 1864.
00:56:09
Speaker
So I'm a big believer in contingent events and unexpected outcomes.
00:56:18
Speaker
I draw hope from that. Sometimes history is worse than we can imagine, but sometimes it's better than we can imagine. As somebody who grew up in the segregated South and then watched the Civil Rights Movement come out of nowhere and led by people without political power, I believe that we have within ourselves capacity for a better United States than sometimes we can imagine right now.
00:56:40
Speaker
Yeah, well, what do you think are some of those types of lessons that can be drawn from this period? What is important do you think today to pay attention to from between 1800 and 1860 that's relevant? I'd say several things. One, the people who spoke most powerfully in favor of justice did not do so from any external
00:57:06
Speaker
ideology or inspiration. They're just saying, let's be true to the Declaration of Independence. Let's expand it. All men and women are created equal. It doesn't matter what skin color you are, you're created equal.
00:57:22
Speaker
And it's also the case that while the churches of the period did not really stand up to face the moral challenge, a lot of people of religious faith did. And especially a lot of Quakers and other people are saying, let's be true to the spirit of what we claim to be as the American religion of Christianity. Are we behaving in a Christian way to treat people this way?
00:57:44
Speaker
No, we are not. But it's also the case that other principles of free expression, of people saying, you're not going to tell me what I can say. I'm going to be Walt Whitman. I'm going to write this kind of poetry if I want to. And I'm Henry David Thoreau. I'm going to say these things. And I'm Frederick Douglass. And I'm going to give this speech.
00:58:03
Speaker
So I think that people speaking the truth, even if they don't have any power or authority is important. So all these things are fundamental to the United States. We're a country basically based on innovation and change and improvisation. And so.
00:58:23
Speaker
I'd say my book is unusual in the sense that I give so much power to poets and painters and musicians because they are changing the culture. Politics of the 1850s in particular is broken. Again, it's kind of another foreshadowing of our own time.
00:58:42
Speaker
You know, people lose confidence in their political leaders to lead the nation. And it was well-placed with lots of confidence, as it turned out. But even if politics seems broken, there are resources within ourselves that can lead us to a better country.
00:59:01
Speaker
Well, I'm going to ask a question that is, it's impossible to answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway because I'm curious how you might answer it. Hypothetically, if the US lost the Revolutionary War, what do you think the world would look like today? You know, I think the United States would have been Canada.
00:59:28
Speaker
It's hard to say too much wrong about Canada, it seems to me. Now, the difference is Canada did not behave any better than the United States when it came to indigenous peoples. So that gives you some indication that people of this ancestry are self-righteous and believe they rule the world. And it doesn't matter if you're English, Canadian, or American, right? What would have happened if
00:59:55
Speaker
If in the British Empire, the Native people had not been displaced, you couldn't have had the slave empire expand the way that it did. So, it depends on when you stop the story. Has the United States been a great force for good in the 20th century?
01:00:10
Speaker
It has, right, in World War II in particular. But I think that we would have had a lot more complicated history of the world, but I think the United States would have been Australia or Canada with the same sins that those places have endured as well. The big, for me, unknown is what would have become of slavery.
01:00:36
Speaker
You know, people forget that the British Caribbean was a far larger slave empire than the United States was at the beginning of this period. But that the British, partly because it wasn't part of their own nation, but distant islands, did abolish slavery in the 1830s. The big question is, if the United States were still a part of Great Britain, would that have stopped abolition?
01:01:02
Speaker
anywhere? Or would it have meant that the British would have abolished slavery in North America? So you can hear what I'm... I don't think that we have put slavery and native dispossession and war, frankly, at the center of our stories. Why do we call this period?
01:01:23
Speaker
It's the era of expansion, right? Well, yeah, we did expand. And the story is of the frontier. Well, why was it the frontier and so forth? So I consider myself a patriotic person who thinks it's not unpatriotic to acknowledge these facts.
01:01:42
Speaker
that if we're going to teach our children an honest and powerful history, we need to do it by acknowledging these truths. But today, this idea that you can't teach anything that hurts white people's feelings or somehow suggests that we were not always God's chosen people is misguided because it doesn't align with the historical record. That doesn't mean you hate America.
01:02:07
Speaker
It doesn't mean you're not loyal to its principles. It doesn't mean you want to indoctrinate children. It just means you want to tell the truth. And this has been a really terrific interview. My last question for you here is, what are you hoping readers take away from your book?
01:02:27
Speaker
that there are a lot more people in American history than we might have thought. And that this period is a lot more interesting than it seems. And that in many ways, we're still working through the challenges the people in these 60 years confronted. Great. And if folks want to stay in touch with what you're doing, what you're working on right now, how can people stay in touch with you? Well,
01:02:52
Speaker
Thank you for this. I hope people will look at newamericanhistory.org and bunkhistory.org. And we're working hard every day to make history a living, vital presence in American life. We have no political agenda. We don't ask anybody for money. We don't ask you to sign up for anything. We're just saying American history is so rich and exciting. And as your podcast is showing, right, that there are people who
01:03:21
Speaker
want to know more about our past. Those are the places where you can best see where I'm putting my energies is to look at those things. If anybody, you know,
01:03:35
Speaker
finds this book intriguing, if you go onto New American History, click on scholarship, you'll see this book. We link into the original source of everybody, I quote, there's 100 books and pamphlets that you can go on the internet archive directly and see that. There's also the road trip that you described. There's also the videos that I've talked about. All different ways to imagine this period that I think is foundational to who we are.
01:04:05
Speaker
Well, Edward Ayers, American Visions, the United States, 1800 to 1860. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. Check out all of the cool work Ed is doing. What a great story you've got here. And thank you so much for your time today.