 Let me welcome all of you to the Cato Institute's Hayek Auditorium. My name is Justin Logan. I'm the Associate Director of the Foreign Policy Studies Program here at Cato. And it's my pleasure to welcome you here for an event that is a bit outside of my normal lane, but that I'm extremely enthusiastic about having the privilege to moderate, which is today's forum on Professor Walter McDougal's book, Throws of Democracy. It is his second installment on American history in the grand sweep. It's really my pleasure, as I mentioned, to get a little bit out of my lane from the sort of day-to-day slogging of the policy debate in Washington and zoom out and get sort of a better look at the broader sweep of American history. And in particular, it's a great pleasure to get the opportunity to promote the work of Professor McDougal. It happens sometimes that interns and students ask how to become a better writer. And I tell them, read better, read better authors. I tell them to read people like E.H. Carr. I tell them to read people like George Kennan. And I tell them without question to read people like Walter McDougal. Like many people, I think, as I mentioned to Professor McDougal earlier, I came to be aware of Professor McDougal's work through this book, The Promised Land Crusader State, which is, I think, an excellent exposition of the various trends in foreign policy that have seized America at various stages in its history. Let me first introduce the main speaker today, Professor Walter McDougal, who's a professor of history and the Aloy Anson Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He's a graduate of Amherst College and a Vietnam War veteran, and he received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1974 and taught at Berkeley for 13 years before coming to Penn to direct its international relations program. Professor McDougal teaches US, European, and Asian Pacific diplomatic history, and is the author of many books. Most recently, the one that we're here again to talk about today, which is available for sale upstairs, Throws of Democracy, the American Civil War era. He is also authored, as I mentioned, The Promised Land Crusader State, and a number of other books, one for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for history, that being The Heavens in the Earth, a political history of the space age. He's also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and the editor of Orbis, its Journal of World Affairs. So to kick things off and discuss the book, Professor Walter McDougal. Thank you, Justin. I am honored to be here at the Cato, particularly for the very first event in this book season, I don't know how many I'm going to do, but today is actually the publication date, official date for this volume. So this is my very first presentation of the book, and I certainly am grateful to all of you for coming out to hear it. I'm also very honored to have the presence of Professors Rubin and Bill Belz with me today. I am a poacher as a synthesized, synthetic historian. I go into new fields to teach myself stuff and read what everyone else has written about it, and then try to put it together. And if I have new insights, that's great. But it means that when I get together with real experts, I'm in big trouble. So that's the situation the Cato has put me in today. So my thanks to Justin is contingent. Let me begin with a little scenario. 1857, James Buchanan has ridden into the White House on the wave of an economic boom even Americans had not seen before. Beginning back in 1846, such adrenaline boosts to the U.S. economy, such as Great Britain's adoption of free trade. That must be a holy date in the Cato Institute's calendar. The Mexican War, the California Gold Rush, railroad construction manias, land speculation, exports of cotton, of course, and then all sorts of commodities during Europe's Crimean War, all of that filled Wall Street with irrational exuberance. By June of 1857, the New York Herald grew worried. What can be the end of all this but another general collapse like that of 1837, only on a much grander scale? Government spoliation, paper bubbles, a scramble for western lands, and thousands of parvenues, in silks, laces, and costly frippery, are only a few of the crying evils. But worst of all is the moral pestilence of luxurious exemption from honest labor infecting all classes of society, unquote. Barish contrarians, like Winston Churchill's grandfather Leonard Jerome, bet stocks would soon fall. They sold short, then spread rumors of rickety companies. And when a dip in exports lent credence to their croaking, sure enough, markets tumbled, proud firms went broke, and the panic of 1857 was on. Back in 1835, downtown Manhattan had burned to the ground in a terrible fire. A broker named Jeremiah Calvin Lanfeer came to the city in the following year, hoping to get rich in the rebuilding of the financial district, and didn't really make much of a career for himself. But now in 1857, he believed that New York must burn again with the Holy Spirit. On a Wednesday in September 1857, he called businessmen to noontime prayer at the old Dutch church on Fulton Street. Six stragglers peaked in. The following Wednesday, 20 traders showed up, and a week after that, 40. During those days of stock market crash and depression that Walt Whitman called melancholy days, prayer meetings spread all over New York and then to Chicago, to Philadelphia, and soon to quote every nook and cranny of the great republic. But it hit northern cities the hardest because a so-called plundering generation of bankers, shippers, textile manufacturers, insurers, merchants, and investors felt called upon to repent, not just for the materialism of the era, but for their own complicity in the southern-based slave-worked cotton economy. Best-selling books interpreted the revival as a harbinger of the apocalypse and the millennium. Americans were finally turning from their sin, and this was going to prepare the way for the second coming. By February of 1858, newspapers ran banner accounts of this revival precisely because it was not led by clergy or by women, but by hard-boiled businessmen. It was the birth of the so-called muscular Christianity that would define the rest of the century. Now, spontaneous revivals are common in America, yet secular historians are never quite sure what to make of them. Certainly, no one has suggested that this revival of 1857-58 caused the Civil War. But it is plausible that the spiritual message reinforced the political message of the new Republican Party that had bred revulsion to the corruption and vice in American society and made Northern elites more receptive to anti-slavery agitation. Meanwhile, among Southern opinion leaders, the panic itself reinforced contempt for the North. The New Orleans Picayune judged the crash a divine judgment on the North's moral turpitude, while boasting how sturdy Southern banks had weathered the storm. De Boer's review declared the wealth of the South is permanent and real, that of the North fugitive and fictitious. The Charleston Mercury asked, why does the South allow itself to be tattered and torn by the death struggles of New York money changers? It all prompted Elihu Barrett to moan, it seems the North and South are wholly occupied in gloating upon each other's faults and failings. And he was right. In the run-up to the election of 1860, leaders of both sections were fed up with the compromises and lies they had lived with for decades. Americans began to speak truth, and the Union promptly shattered. Truth and its opposite, pretense or can't, quite unexpectedly turned out to be a major theme of this book. Now, many other historians, present company excluded by all means, know what they mean to argue in advance of researching a book because they want to discover a past that just happens to justify their current policy agenda. It's always been my practice to jump into a new historical field open-minded, or best of all, plug ignorant in the hopes that the evidence will impose some truths, some insights on me. And what the study of the Civil War era imposed on me was the realization of how dangerous truth and debates over truth can be to a vast, hustling, diverse democracy. Indeed, I originally thought to entitle this volume, Truth So Far Off, a phrase borrowed from Bob Dylan's ballad, Joker Man. Joker Man, sorry, freedom just around the corner for you, but with truth so far off, what good will it do? And the first volume in this series, which takes the story down to 1828, was indeed titled, Freedom Just Around the Corner. But Harper Collins judged truth so far off too vague and off-putting. And so instead I chose this enigmatic phrase from Walt Whitman, by blue Ontario's shore as I amused of these warlike days and of peace returned and the dead that returned no more. A phantom gigantic superb with stern visage accosted me, chant me the poem it said that comes from the soul of America, chant me the carol of victory, and strike up the marches of liberdade, marches more powerful yet, and sing me before you go the song of the throes of democracy. Democracy, the destined conqueror, yet treacherous lip smiles everywhere, and death and infidelity at every step. Now in a few minutes I obviously cannot begin to convey a whole half century of good, bad, and ugly tragedy and comedy that was mid-19th century America. Suffice to say that I begin in the book by describing the many European travel accounts of America in the 1830s and 40s, all of which remark explicitly on the many ways Americans are not really democratic, egalitarian, religious, tolerant, and law-abiding. They just pretend to be all those things. In order, above all, to hold their loose, contentious union together, and to help themselves through their pretense and like-minded citizens to feel good about doing well. Which is what we all really want to do, right? We want to worship God and mammon at the same time. Those traveler's accounts, of which Tocqueville, as I might add, was one of the least authoritative, something I learned, alerted me to the many ways in which American realities are not what they seem, be it in politics, rhetoric, economics, social status, highbrow, or lowbrow culture. The results of our self-deceptions can be charming, or cruel, or simply pragmatic, as when we form conspiracies of silence over divisive issues and studiously ignore pressing items on the national agenda so as not to interrupt our collective pursuits of happiness. But, of course, pretences can also be cataclysmic when some, pardon the expression, inconvenient truth, like a house divided over slavery, at last pierces the nation's bone and marrow. Most of the time, however, and especially during election years, were in one, pretense rules. And indeed, that first volume ended with the campaign of Andrew Jackson in 1828, when Americans, I quipped, learned that their politics were not about Republican virtue, empires of liberty, or a new order for the ages. Rather, American politics were about winning elections. Jackson bolstered of having no platform at all, except for a vague call for reform. But his Democratic Party was a machine that knew the way to win American elections was to best your opponent in spending, scaring, promising, bribing, accusing, horse-trading, mud-slinging, demagogging, manipulating the media, rigging the rules, and, if necessary and possible, controlling the ballot box. After all, ours is a culture where children are taught not to discuss religion and politics in polite company, much less money or sex, which is to say the most important subjects in life. Now what for a Cato audience are the most important subjects I might touch on in just a few minutes? And I think three of which one will be a provocation, and the other two will be attempts to curry your favor, or at least those of you from Cato. First a provocation. Do you imagine the Jacksonian era to have been a libertarian golden age when old hickory vetoed spending bills, attacked privilege, respected state and individual liberties, ran a budget surplus, and paid off the national debt? Well, in truth, Jackson's self-delusions aside, his Democrat machine politicians and their cronies in the private sector feathered their own nests, especially in the ruins of the second U.S. bank, while pretending to champion the common man. In truth, econometric studies show that Jackson's fiscal and monetary policies damaged the booming mostly laissez-faire economy he inherited and had the effect of increasing the gap between rich and poor. Above all, Jacksonian democracy was a white male Protestant affair. His allegedly humanitarian Indian removals were a cruel pretense. His defense of slavery was unbending. His hurrah boys routinely mobbed and rioted against Negroes, Irish and abolitionists. And his court appointments, I think Professor Belts would agree, were noisome. Jackson may indeed have personified the Scots-Irish frontier libertarian, but the order and the law genuine liberty needs were sorely lacking in Jackson's angry era. To be sure, he was a fierce nationalist, who championed the Union in defiance of sectionalists like Calhoun. But therein lies another irony, because the libertarian, decentralized First American Republic, inspired by the precepts of Jefferson and Jackson, might have perpetuated itself, perhaps a generation beyond 1860, had the Southern Democrats not seceded, first from the Democratic Party, and then from the Union. Thereby enabling the Republicans to do what they couldn't do before, enact the tariff, the land grants, the transcontinental railroad, national banks and taxes that made up the so-called Second American Revolution. But to suggest that the antebellum U.S. was not a libertarian golden age is not to deny the validity of libertarian principles. Principles that I'm sad to say most Americans only make a pretense of upholding most of the time. Here, for instance, is a little bit of what I have to say about the post-Civil War era. Author Mark Twain names an era when he writes a novel called The Gilded Age, which describes the extravagance and corruption of post-Civil War life, unquote. So wrote the New York Public Library's reviewer in 1873. In fact, the novel had a co-author and it ranks as one of Twain's weaker efforts. But it fixed on that era an image of plundering capitalists and crooked politicians, an image reinforced by the journalist Matthew Josephson's 1934 book The Robber Barons. It hurled industrialists, railroad magnates, Wall Street speculators, venal congressmen and big city bosses into the same historical dungeon preserved for the American Republic's most heinous villains, privileged aristocrats, responsible for the fearful sabotage practiced by capital. That was a useful past in the 30s when Franklin Roosevelt focused voters' wrath on the money changers in the temple. But indiscriminate tags ceased to be useful when they infiltrate textbooks. To understand what was really going on after the Civil War, one need only recall some familiar themes that date back to the colonial era. Americans are hustlers in the good and pejorative senses of that word. Americans tolerate and even encourage corruption so long as it appears creative in the sense of evading artificial constraints, hastening economic development, and expanding opportunity for the many. Moreover, corruption, as Sam Huntington argues, is prevalent in all societies undergoing rapid change, technological, social, whatever. And since the United States has been the most dynamic nation on earth, thanks to its freedom and its rich endowments, it's only to be expected that every age of American history is awash in old and new forms of corruption. The post-Civil War generation was not distinctive for being greedier or more lawless than others. Or because government failed to regulate business in new ways. It was distinctive because the sudden spurts of industrialization, corporatism, urbanization, immigration, national markets simply threw up new temptations, new opportunities for ambitious businessmen and politicians while posing new challenges that American law and culture were not yet ready to address. So the question is to ask is not whether this or that move in the nation's myriad simultaneous monopoly games was corrupt, how do you define corrupt, but whether the alleged corruption was creative? And then the answer becomes very clear. During the so-called Gilded Age, manufacturers like Carnegie, Rockefeller, DuPont, and McCormick turned out mass-produced, high-quality products at unbelievably lower costs, and so made the United States economy the largest and richest in history. Financiers and railroad promoters, well, sometimes they were effective shepherds of capital, but too often they were wolves in sheep's clothing. And as for the politicians, they achieved little. Besides making immigrants docile, blacks invisible, and democracy a bad joke. Libertarians have a saying that you don't have to be a libertarian to affirm. Whenever a government does anything, it creates a privileged class and a criminal class. That's worthy of contemplation. The old muckraker New Deal adage about business corrupting government, well, obviously that has a certain validity, but the so-called Gilded Age for the first time exposed the power of government to corrupt business. And so to the final item, the second item, another item on the post-Civil War agenda, American civic religion or civil religion and our language of liberty have rendered our us Americans almost incapable of imagining reconstruction after the Civil War as anything but a morality play. People in the South and North at the time and 140 years later seathed, blushed, and above all blamed the stereotyped characters in the drama. But blaming Robbs, blacks, and whites both of their full humanity. In truth, flawed human nature as revealed through personalities, politics, confusion, and clashes of interests within all camps. After 1865, so muddled America's efforts to put Humpty Dumpty back together again that one is left wishing reconstruction had been a simple morality play. Imagine this sober analogy. Imagine the United States Army has overthrown an oppressive regime in the name of expanding freedom. The victors expect to be cheered by all save the old regime's minions and they expect to help the people realize democracy. Instead a hard lengthy occupation ensues because bad guys mount an insurgency and good guys bicker among themselves. Ethnic, regional, and political factions become violent and all reassess monthly who is most likely to come out on top when the U.S. soldiers go home. Meanwhile the clock is ticking as Americans grow weary and wonder if the occupation is only making things worse. Of course history knows no perfect analogies but the parallels between reconstruction and Operation Iraqi Freedom are worth pondering. Perhaps the carnage and the waste of the Civil War were needed to save the Union and free the slaves. Perhaps the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous all together. I'm eager to hear what Professors Rubin and Belts will think about that. But Abraham Lincoln, unlike Jefferson Davis, was never sure that his cause was holy or that fighting for a holy cause made Americans themselves holy or that victory meant the holy cause was achieved. That is why Lincoln admonished people to act with malice toward none and charity toward all with firmness in the right only as God gives us to see the right. Alas few Americans after 1865 had ears for that message. Too many people were dead and that is why pretense won out after all. Reconstruction, this was pretty much of an original idea two and a half years ago when I thought of it but then lots of other people thought of it pretty much at the same time. Reconstruction was America's first experiment in regime change, nation building and the forced exportation of democracy. The experiment was crippled by Lincoln's death but it was also pitterfully underfunded, fundamentally ill conceived, resisted by white southerners and resented by white northerners eager to get back to hustling in pursuit of their happiness. Reconstruction was a scandalous failure but Yankees pretended otherwise. In the decades after Appomattox, orators, veterans, women, children, brass bands gathered each year on Village Greens to celebrate the sacred war that crushed the rebellion, that purged America of her original sin and sanctified the nation to fulfill its millenarian mission as the last best hope for mankind. In truth, that is not in the least bit ironic. Democracy thrives on pretense and the post-Civil War pretenses about a classless society, Horatio Alger's stories, the melting pot, the frontier as a safety valve. All that helped the nation immeasurably during turbulent decades of industrialization, urbanization, assimilation of immigrants, conquering global markets, building a world-class navy and preaching a progressive gospel of social uplift at home and abroad. By 1898, when the Spanish-American War broke out, Americans were once again primed to crusade. This time in the belief they could do for the whole world what they had proven unable to do for their own conquered self. We have been living that pretense ever since. Thank you. Thank you, Professor McDougal, for that stimulating presentation. I'll now introduce our two commenters on the book, the first of which is Professor Ann Sarah Rubin, who is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She's a leading scholar in particular on the Confederacy, having published several works on the topic, including A Shattered Nation, The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868, which was the winner of the 2006 Avery O'Craven Award. She also coauthored the Valley of the Shadow, two communities in the American Civil War, and is currently working on a multimedia study of Sherman's March entitled Through the Heart of Dixie. She graduated from Princeton University and earned her master's and PhD degrees in American history from the University of Virginia. Professor Herman Belz is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, a leading scholar in American history with a particular focus on reconstruction. He is the author of some 56 articles, or chapters and books, and 19 essays. His first book was awarded the Albert J. Beverage Award of the American Historical Association, and he was a visiting research scholar in the James Madison program at Princeton University in the academic year 2001-2002. He was also appointed to the National Council on the Humanities in 2005, having earned his PhD in history from the University of Washington. So now for some comments. Professor Ansara Rubin. When I first sat down with Throws of Democracy, I found myself constantly nodding in recognition and agreement. A synthetic survey with an actual authorial voice, an argument, a point of view. This was great. And McDougal's essential argument made so much sense, portraying 19th century America as a nation of hustlers, people on the move and on the make. It worked so elegantly as an explanation for the market revolution and expansionism, for the rise of universal white manhood suffrage and evangelical Christianity. And it all seemed to be there. The five points, millennialism, social reform, Alexis de Tocqueville, manifest destiny, abolitionism, all of the chaotic richness that makes this my favorite period in American history. But I also found myself wondering how well would McDougal's paradigm fit the sectional crisis of the 1850s, fit the civil war itself, and the reconstruction years. And I'm leaving the discussion of reconstruction to Professor Bells. And instead what I'm going to do is just focus my remarks on the war and on the Confederate experience. Now historians of this period really struggle and argue over a couple of questions. Why did the civil war come when it did? Was the war inevitable? Was any war inevitable? And then also, why did the war turn out the way that it did? Why did the North win? Why did the South lose? Was that also inevitable? Was that also foreordained? McDougal's Americans of the late 1840s and 1850s are nothing if not self-deluded. They're sometimes interlocking, sometimes at odds. Gospels of, as McDougal called them, slavery, commerce, and Christ forced Americans to lie to themselves and to others in order to minimize their differences and get along. And throughout the 1850s, these splits became increasingly difficult to manage as slaveholders and opponents of slavery struggled over the issue of the expansion of the peculiar institution into the Mexican war territories. What I really liked about this book, in fact, was how empathetic I found McDougal's writing to be that he really did allow you to feel both sides of the slavery issue and to understand that each was acting out of rational fears and rational concerns. Or as he puts it, each section's rational measures of self-defense look to the other like mad provocations. And as I was reading that, I thought, oh, this is exactly like if you've ever read Albion Torgé's novel of reconstruction called A Fool's Arendt, where he has a wonderful explanation of the coming of the Civil War, which he divides into four categories. You have the northern idea of slavery, you have the southern idea of slavery, you have the northern idea of the southern idea, and then the southern idea of the northern idea. And I thought, oh, this is exactly like it. Now, ultimately, McDougal's portions blame all around. Neither northern Republicans nor southern fire eaters had a monopoly on hypocrisy or on corruption or self-delusion. Neither group of extremists saw much advantage in compromise. Each was happy to be rid of the other. And then, of course, to quote Abraham Lincoln, the war came. McDougal sees the war as a crisis of coalescence, one of many international battles over nationalism, industrialism, and liberalism. He also seems to see the war as a necessary scourge, as he puts it, a sanguinary salvation for the American Union. And I think this is actually a pretty common viewpoint that Americans have. It's certainly the viewpoint, I think, most prevalent in popular culture, if you think about Ken Burns' Civil War documentary, for example. This idea that the war had to happen for the United States to become a mature nation, for it to become united, for us to start using it as a singular instead of a plural, and it's the kind of necessary step on the road to becoming a superpower. For McDougal's part, he makes the claim that what made the Civil War special was the character of nationalism it bequeathed, and that this nationalism was, in his words, fused with the cult of material progress disguised as a holy calling. This may have been true for elite white Northerners. I do have a bit of a problem with this definition. I think that for the times where McDougal's discussing the war and reconstruction, Union seems to mean Yankee, and I at least found his arguments to be a bit less convincing when he was discussing African Americans and when he was also discussing white Southerners. Much as McDougal also focuses on the rise of republicanism and of expansionist governments in the North, he also really downplays the strength and vitality of Confederate nationalism, with the result being, I think, a miscasting of the reasons that the South ultimately lost the war. McDougal argues that Jefferson Davis's, quote, anachronistic cause was less likely to arouse zeal and emphasizes the struggles that the young Confederacy faced, food shortages, troubled fiscal policy and the like. And he relies heavily on the work of his former colleague Drew Gilpin Faust in arguing that women withdrew support from the Confederacy and thus accelerated its demise. I would argue that this is not entirely the case. And I'm going to address these two issues separately for a couple of minutes. First of all, to the question of the strength of Confederate nationalism or its ability to inspire zeal and patriotism in its followers, the vast majority of white Southerners, even those who had been unionists throughout the winter of 1860-61, transferred their allegiances to the Confederacy with a minimum of backward glances. It's shocking, actually, to see how quickly it happens and how they just sort of never really talk about the United States again. I think in large part that this transition was eased by the ways that the Confederacy drew on staples of American culture and made them their own by the way that the Confederates used the Revolutionary War and images of George Washington and so on to argue that that was where they came from. That was their myth of origin, rejecting instead later bursts of sectionals and things like nullification or the compromise of 1850. This war to protect the Founder's values, however nebulously the Confederates defined those values and defined those Founders, let me just say they're not protecting John Adams values, would appeal to non-slave holders and unionists as well as to long-time Souther Nationalists. Confederates also imbued their political culture and identity with a pretty healthy dose of Christian rhetoric. Just as an aside from all this, I think McDougal does a wonderful job of weaving religion into his narrative. I think that's one of the real strengths of this book is how organically the discussion of religion is woven in. Confederates believed themselves to be God's chosen people and they saw confirmation of this in fact in the early victories of 1861 and 1862. Now this becomes more problematic later in the war when the Confederacy starts losing but they kind of work around that and they say well God's just testing us, God's chastening us. Now as much as Confederates argued that their nation was based on constitutional principles, on revolutionary antecedents, on Christianity, there was also a very potent mix of fear and rage in it. This fear was the end of slavery, often couched in the language of so-called black rule or race mixing and the rage was against the invading Yankees, often demonized to the point of near dehumanization. White supremacy and the protection of slavery were integral to the Confederacy and even non-slaveholders understood the benefits and status that accrued to them. At the same time this discussion of slavery sort of rarely appeared in public forums, it certainly wasn't a subject open to debate. The second issue that I wanted to bring up is this reason for Confederate defeat or Union victory actually as I would prefer to see it couched. McDougal's exactly right in showing us that the Confederacy struggled mightily as the war went on, pressured externally by the Union army, internally by enslaved Americans who were freeing themselves and its own structural instabilities. Confederates rather quickly discovered that states' rights, particularly when they were guarded jealously by state governors, was not really a strong foundation from which to launch a nation and fight a war and so every time Jefferson Davis attempted to increase centralization, McDougal points this out, whether it was through taxation or impressment or conscription, he faced all kinds of internal opposition and much of that opposition was directed exactly personally towards Davis. There wasn't a kind of party structure to channel that. At the same time, all Confederates were struggling with shortages of foodstuffs with runaway inflation. These effects did hit lower class whites particularly hard. These hardships and shortages inspired also the perception that certain kinds of exemptions and particularly the exemption for owners of 20 or more slaves alienated even supportive yeoman. What I think happens though or what I think we see in the Confederacy is family interests taking precedence over national interests. Letters from the women to their husbands, for example, begging them to desert. Letters from women to the national Confederate government asking that their men be granted furloughs. Many historians during the 1980s and 1990s charged that the Confederacy ultimately lost the Civil War because of failures of will, essentially claiming that Confederate patriotism was not strong enough to sustain a viable nation and that this withdrawal of public support for the Confederacy ultimately led to defeat on the battlefield If you look in the footnotes, this is who McDougal seems to be primarily drawing on. More recently though, historians like Gary Gallagher, Aaron Sheehan Dean, me, sorry, have discounted that view and instead argued that the Confederacy was really defeated by the North's superior resources, material resources, and a much larger population. What these new historians have sought to change the question from, instead of saying, why did the Confederacy lose, you ask, why was the Confederacy able to survive for four years for as long as it did? What I think we're starting to see and certainly what I argue is that you have Confederates faced with multiple loyalties with conflicting loyalties. People might ask for family members to come home, but oftentimes then those family members would return to the field. You might also have the idea that a woman would be writing to the Confederate government asking for a furlough for her husband. That's actually demonstrating a certain amount of faith in the Confederate government. She actually thinks that they're going to be able to help her. And I also argue more that oftentimes when we see Confederates writing about their longing for peace, they want the war to be over. That doesn't actually mean they want the war to be over and them to be back in the union. It means they want independence. They want to win the war. So yeah, thanks. The other argument I would make is that even though the Confederate nation state ceased to exist in the spring of 1865, there's clearly some lingering sense of allegiance to the Confederacy in the hearts of white Southerners for generations. And during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, veterans and descendants groups flourished and helped to recast this Confederate experience into a noble lost cause from which slavery and white supremacy was almost entirely excised. This book is so rich that I could talk about it for hours. But I'm pretty much out of time. And so let me just say that while I have some quibbles with McDougall's treatment of issues in the war and perhaps reconstruction as well, overall I found this book incredibly impressive, highly readable. And to give it the highest praise I can, I was marking it up thinking, oh, I'm going to steal this for my lectures. So thank you very much. Okay, good. Well, it's really great to be here at Cato and to see a nice audience like this meet new professors. I don't know Professor McDougall personally before this. I'm very happy to meet you, Walter. And we have a lot of friends in common. I'm sure we'd, well, I would prefer to get to meet you in a somewhat more genteel setting at the Cosmos Club or someplace like that. But we'll do the best we can here. And I'm going to say that this is a really splendid work of history, is provocative, spirited, deeply informed and thoughtful. But I don't have time for further compliments. So I'm going to get right into the thing and say that the theme of the book in some deep sense is expressed this way. McDougall writing, I believe the United States so far is the greatest success story in history. If you love history or just love the United States of America, you may relish this volume. Good is encouraging. McDougall says further American history quote is a tale of human nature set free end of quote. But after you read the book, you might wonder whether this liberation was a mistake. You will want to know what human nature in America was set free from. What was it set free from? Was it simply old Europe with its corrupt oppressive institutions? Was America set free from nature itself? Was it set free from God and religion? Was it set free from natural law or that which is right by nature? Well, this is not a work of philosophy. And Professor McDougall does not answer these questions, but we can draw inferences from what he does say about these questions. If American history is human nature set free, maybe the blessings of liberty that our Constitution refers to should be described as the mixed blessings of liberty. Now, one question raised by this book in the light of my introduction to these points is whether American history shows that liberated Americans can govern themselves well, that is, to the end of human flourishing happiness and safety. Doubts might arise when you read this book or when you hear these talks this morning. Maybe reading the book is better. But consider the case of Reconstruction. Reconstruction is a failure. We hear it this morning. We read it everywhere. There's no doubt about it. It was a failure. It made losers of even more Americans than the Civil War did, according to Professor McDougall. Specifically, freed blacks did not get real freedom. Emancipation brought segregation quoted by the quote from McDougall, which is in that Wall Street Journal, a review this morning that is very timely, a good planning. I've seen it. Is it a good review? Good planning. Oh, yes, it's a good review. It's a good review. The reviewer takes you seriously after all. Besides that, national government got bigger. And what? At the expense of what? At state's rights. State's rights is liberty, except when it's not liberty. But for the time being, state's rights means liberty. Reconstruction was a continuation of the war, the Civil War. And what Reconstruction policy did, according to Professor McDougall, is to establish, quote, the template for all future occasions when the U.S. won a war only to lose the peace. I think he read that from the book. Well, the moral of the story, you might think, was that it would have been better not to have the Civil War in the first place. Reconstruction continued the war. If we thought the war was won by the North, you're wrong. It was lost because Reconstruction continued the thing. The issues of the war were carried into Reconstruction. They were not resolved satisfactorily to any extent. And so Reconstruction sets the template for losing the war that you thought you had won. Well, I don't want to go too far here. McDougall is an ironist. He is not a counterfactualist. Right? Yes. For the purposes of argument. He's not a counterfactualist. There is a book by one of Richard Ransom, I guess it is, on a three-page book, Counterfactual History of the Civil War. This is a real work of history. This is not counterfactualism. So McDougall doesn't go that far. He does not take the side of the Southerners and their claim that the right of secession informed by the spirit of progress and civilization, as Jefferson Davis put it, when he argued in January 1861 before he left the Senate, he didn't argue that the right of secession informed by the spirit of progress would settle the sectional conflict over slavery and preserve the union after the sections had separated, then they would be drawn back together in a voluntary contract. Well, see, McDougall doesn't go into Davis and say that he had this insight that everybody else in the North rejected. This is an important point. McDougall has good things to say notably about Abraham Lincoln. And I argue that Lincoln's judgment and his influence on the war had its effect on Reconstruction, although the going was rough. Would you piss me that water over there? Absolutely. The going was rough. The key issue is what to do with the emancipated slaves. That's a quote from the book. They were free, but what did freedom mean? No one knew. The answer says McDougall depended on who could get his hands on power to mold a new South. Fair enough. Seems realistic, and I go for that, but I want to point out that power presented itself in two forms, two basic normative forms. One was the Constitution, meaning essentially representation, separation of powers, federalism. The second normative form in which power presented itself was American civic religion. I need to define this briefly. In the language of Professor McDougall, American civic religion is a covenant, mostly unspoken and unacknowledged that binds the Federal Union together despite the diversity of its regions and peoples and it promises the nation a millenarian destiny so long as the Union survives. Well, that's, I'm going to let it go with that and say that's the key thing. So right away you see Americans are free, but they also somehow bind themselves in a Constitution and in a civic religion. So they're not utterly free. It's not the sovereign autonomous self that is at the root, at the base of American liberty. That's not just a pretentious thing. That's an erroneous thing, that sovereign autonomous self, the way you get it in Rawlsian philosophy. Now get back to the nuts and bolts. The problem of Reconstruction was to re-inaugurate the national authority and get the seceded states back into their proper practical relation with the Union. That was Lincoln's way of putting the matter. This approach, I say, was practical, exigent, and superficial. Practical because it was not theoretical and Lincoln was at pains to deny any theoretical understanding or theoretical theory of the status of the states. Reconstruction was exigent because politics, representative politics where you have elections was essential to the constitutional system. Thirdly, Reconstruction was superficial because organizing loyal Republican governments involved surface things such as forms, procedures, and institutions rather than underlying things, deep forces like society, economy, and race relations. Now, the strategy problem for adopting Reconstruction. Moderate Republicans wanted to get Reconstruction over with and get on with the nation's duties, get on with what Americans do. Radical Republicans wanted to rule the South indefinitely and make it into a liberal egalitarian capitalist market. In those days, liberal egalitarianism was compatible with capitalism. Not now. Democrats wanted to organize loyal governments, hold elections, and get the seceded states re-admitted to the Union, but encouraged by President Johnson and with the state police power in their hands, they were content to practice what they called masterly inactivity. Well, Republicans argued about Reconstruction policy. A power struggle took place in 1866 between Johnson and congressional radical Republicans. Moderate Republicans were somewhere in between. Racial violence broke out in July 1866. The Republicans in New Orleans, Louisiana, Republicans were inspired and supported in winning big election victories. They went on to adopt the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867, 1868. These measures enforced and augmented the Reconstruction policy adopted the previous year, or two years, the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. This is the gist and the substance of Reconstruction policy. It's 1866 to 1868. When subjected to tail analysis, the making of Reconstruction policy is not a pretty picture. As Professor McDougal says, the effects of the war were catastrophic. Southerners were broke. Cities laid waste. Violence rampant. McDougal writes, it is hard to imagine even Lincoln persuading northern Americans to bear the burden of rebuilding the South after the suffering its rebellion had caused. So we have impenitent and rebellious secessionists threatening to reverse the results of the war versus revolutionary radical Republicans threatening to overthrow the constitutional order as it appeared to each of these sides. But this is a key thing that keeps it from happening. Both sides, the ex-secessionists and the radical Republicans, not to say the moderates, had reason to accept the continued existence of the Union as a matter of constitutional and political right. They said they had reason to do it. It's not that they were dedicated to it and believed in it, heart and soul. They had political reason to accept the Constitution as the rule of constitutional and political right. The Southerners accepted it because under the Constitution, they could claim a right to be represented. Radical Republicans rejected this claim, but moderate Republicans recognized an element of validity in the claim. The question was who would determine the meaning of constitutional and political right with respect to the practical issues, what to do with the emancipated slaves and what to do with the South? Well, the answer was the Third Eye of Congress determined that in the reconstruction policy that I have enumerated in 13th, 14th Amendment Surrights Act Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which enforced those plus the 15th Amendment. And I would go and argue in these comments that Professor McGeagle's narrative provides a measured evaluation that treats reconstruction as something other than simple and abject failure. Now, he's already explained how a morality play, what a bad morality play reconstruction looks like. And he says it was not a simple morality play. I take it to mean that when you get right down to it, reconstruction was not a morality play. It was a real political event and real political time according to the nature of political life, which continued, even though Americans were set free, they didn't escape the character and the necessities of political life. Well, I am given, now my time has elapsed, and that's why I would say that a fresh and original angle, I thought, Walter, was to talk about the continuing negotiation that the border state representatives carried on in the 70s and into the 80s, providing a kind of a halfway, but not abject failure. And I want to read this. The border state whites were by no means enlightened, says McGeagle, but they, in this quote, they led in melding freedmen into the wage labor market, granting them education and limited legal protections. They offered a compromise based on a second-class citizenship for blacks that the whole nation might find it could live with. Then he quotes Santa Ana, having dealt with the great crisis of civil war and come out victorious, Americans, and this is, to be honest, the Americans, one where they get through these great crises, but Walter's way of putting it is, then Americans resumed the pursuit of happiness through, quote, complete absorption and material enterprise and prosperity. Then, honestly, the next line says, so what else is new? And that's the end of my comment. Well, thank you to you both, whoever invited these two colleagues of mine. I thank you, and as it was you, for such gracious and learned commentators, and merciful as well. Do justice, but love mercy. I think the best way that I can just keep this under control and limit my remarks so I won't ramble and yet still address the general comments made by both is simply to read a couple of other short sections of what may become the longer version of this presentation that I gave this morning, just as I'm jotting down my thoughts of how to summarize the whole book. And this might address in particular, or it might also get both of the commentators, it might provoke them into giving their shorthand judgments about whether the Civil War was inevitable, whether it was necessary, whatever that word means, in order to address the counterfactual issue. Okay, so here are these sections. It's tempting indeed to interpret the Civil War as a tragic but necessary triumph of truth. Alas, the evidence is just as compelling that truth neither caused nor resulted from the Civil War. Partisans on both sides expressed at most half-truths, and what really triumphed was pride, and I was influenced by children of pride obviously. Even Lincoln wrestled with the truth as long as he could, then was slain the moment he fully embraced it. It seems to me what really occurred was that anger, fear, and self-righteousness moved a critical mass of Americans to risk damming the evils on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line while largely ignoring their own. By the late 1850s, southern fire-eaters, heirs of those proud Cavaliers, your Jefferson's and Washington's, said in effect, you Yankees may boast your schools, farms, and factories, and to believe God and the Constitution favor your cause, but y'all are hustlers and hypocrites, and we won't let you feel good about doing well any more. By the late 1850s, northern free-soilers, heirs to the proud Puritans that John Adams said in effect, you planters may boast of your chivalry, cotton, and smiling slaves in the belief God and the Constitution favor your cause, but you wring your wealth from lies and the lash, and we won't let you feel good about doing well any more. Thus did the civil religion schismatize into reciprocal heresies. The civil religion, you're right, I don't ever define it in a kind of normative way. Historians are good at not defining their terms. If I had an audience of political scientists, I'd be in trouble. But one of the chief tenets, or two, I'll say this, two of the chief tenets of the American civil religion that sort of bubbled and coalesced into existence during, well, going all the way back to 17th century England, but particularly in the time of the nation's founding, one tenet was the sacredness of the Union itself, because whatever providential mission God had in store for the United States of America, the author of history, and so forth, whatever it was, it couldn't be achieved if the Union cracked up. The Union had to remain. The Union was sacred. That was one tenet of the civil religion, but a second tenet of the civil religion was that Americans believe in their God-given right to feel good about doing well, which is to say to achieve all the material prosperity, all the blessings of liberty promised by our founders, but not to feel guilty about being so rich and so free and powerful and so forth and so on, but to feel good about it, because America itself is a good force, a force for good in the world, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's why a lot of this pretense becomes necessary, because we're all going around, political correctness is our current version of this, we're all going around pretending that we think all the rest of you are just fine, and we value your opinions, and you value our opinions, and you can believe in whatever you want to believe or nothing at all, and I'm not going to criticize you even though I hate your guts, and I think you're an atheist or a heretic, because we all need to feel good about doing well, and I have to respect your right, just as you respect my right. But what happened in the 1850s is that it got to the point where Yankees and fire readers began damning each other, damning each other. And so here we go to the final section. Here's where I'll quit. In short, the idyllic South imagined by people like Jefferson Davis and the earnest North imagined by people like Abraham Lincoln were mythical. Their advocates argued, for instance, over slavery in the territories, but that did not cause secession. By winter 1861, Kansas was a free state, and the rest of the frontier organized into territories with no mention of slavery one way or the other. Abolitionists condemned slavery in the South itself, but that did not cause secession. Lincoln repeatedly said he had no intention of disturbing slavery where it existed, and no power to do so anyway. Indeed, sober Southerners like Judah Benjamin and Alex Stevens argued that slavery was safer inside the Union than it would be without. Likewise, the sections argued about tariffs, homestead acts, and a Pacific railroad, but none of that caused secession. The tariff in 1860 was the lowest in 30 years, and Southern congressmen could easily have blocked the Republican program if they had stayed in the Congress. No, the sufficient condition for secession, I would argue in this atom-braided version, the sufficient condition for secession was wounded honor and pride. Ever since the 1819 debate over Missouri, Southerners had weathered storms of moral abuse. They were called evil, barbaric, violent, licentious, and worst of all, un-Christian. Still, Southern leaders spent 40 years searching for ways to stay in the Union with their honor intact. What made them lose hope, perhaps, was the 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry by the treasonous John Brown. Why? Because Brown meant to stoke a bloody slave rebellion? No. No, it was because people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and preachers across the North eulogized John Brown as a Christ-like martyr and likened patriotic Southerners to Pontius Pilate and the Pharisees. Most whites in the Deep South embraced secession after Lincoln's victory the following year. Most whites in the Upper South did so after Lincoln called for troops to suppress secession. There's no easy way to sort out the motivations of all these people, although I quickly bow to my colleague to elaborate. There's no easy way to sort out the motivations of all the people in the South since pride, fear, self-interest, bigotry, and conviction could all be made to point in one direction. But an analysis of secessionist editorials is suggestive. Only sporadically did editors complain about slavery in the territories, non-enforcement of fugitive slave codes, or economics, where they almost unanimously vented was moral outrage over the hateful slanders hurled in the South by corrupt, heretical, hypocritical Yankees they once thought of as their countrymen. The South, where the editor of the New Orleans be, in the eyes of the North is degraded and unworthy. Thank you very much to all of our speakers for that discussion. We now have time for questions and answers, probably about 15 minutes of them. I would just ask all of those who have questions to keep their questions brief, to wait for the microphone, and to ask a question, not make a statement. We'll start there in the back on the aisle in the gray sweater. How seriously did most Americans take their Bibles in this period? I've heard that both Northern and Southern churches brought in Hebrew scholars to justify their respective positions on slavery. And when the tide started turning against the Confederacy in the Civil War, serious Confederate Christians thought that God was opposed to them, not because of slave owners breaking up marriages by selling slaves and tearing asunder what God had joined together. And with the knowledge of biblical justice, why weren't reparations taken more seriously for slaves that were too often not prepared to be liberated so immediately without the ability to support themselves as free people? Okay, I guess I'll take that one. I think you're exactly right. I think Northerners and Southerners took their Bibles very, very seriously. I think exactly what you were saying about the ways that Confederates believed that they were God's chosen people believed that when they struggled in the war, God was chastening them. Jefferson Davis declared something in the neighborhood of about a dozen days of fasting, humiliation, and prayer over the course of the war. In terms of the idea of reparations or some kind of... Let me back up for a second. I will say this, which is that I think looking back today, we want slaveholders to have felt guilty about owning slaves or to have felt some sort of moral quandary over it. They really didn't. It's really just not there in their writings. They didn't really feel guilty about owning slaves. They didn't really feel guilty about breaking up slave families. They would sometimes want to project that public posture but you can have someone sort of publicly invading against the breaking up of slave families and then privately when they run into trouble and run into debt, that's how you're going to raise your capital. I don't think that guilt over slavery played a huge role in the way that Confederates felt about their nation or the way that the war turned out. I'm not sure if that's quite the answer, quite the question you were asking, but you want to take it? No, I don't. Let's go ahead and have a question. You were the one that brought up right there in the end. Hi, yeah. My name is Michael Zeck. I'm the author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party. It's a history of the GOP. In support of your point, it's Professor Rubin. You mentioned North versus South when millions of Northern Democrats supported the Confederates and a quarter, more than a quarter of Southern fighting men were on the Union side. You also mentioned Sherman's March to the Sea. I hope you mentioned that Sherman's personal escort was the first U.S. Alabama cavalry, so I think it's misleading. I'd like you to address why so many historians talk about the Civil War North versus South when I believe it was Patriots versus Rebels. Thank you. That's me, too. I would say that North versus South is the convenient shorthand. I don't know that I'd necessarily want to convey it as Patriots versus Rebels. I think Union versus Confederate. In terms of your numbers, I wouldn't say that there were millions of Northern Democrats who opposed the war. Certainly, the peace Democrat movement in the North was at its peak in 1862, early 1863, as the war progressed, that movement became in fact weaker and weaker and weaker. In terms of Southerners supporting the Union Army and fighting the Union Army, that was actually what I wrote my senior thesis on in college. Of course, I'm quite familiar with that. That number is roughly, I want to say, about 50,000 to 60,000 in total, maybe a little bit higher. I don't think Southern Blacks who fought for the Union Army. That's a completely separate issue, though. Of course, African Americans fighting for the Union Army and whether they would have been at all supportive of the combat. I see your point, which is maybe North versus South is not the most elegant. It is, however, the kind of generally accepted, agreed upon vernacular way that we talk about it. It's the same way that I use the term, the Civil War, when in fact, as we all know, the official government term is still the war of the rebellion. But the Civil War is our kind of agreed upon vernacular. I have a long, wonderful footnote. If you do buy the book, look at the footnotes. Keep a finger back there in the back because a lot of them are discursive and a lot of them have local color and humor involved. Or they just have interesting discussions like the agonizing debate I went through myself over whether to call it the Civil War. I don't know if you happen to see that footnote. I finally decided that if Nathan Bedford Forrest himself turned out to be a Civil War in the end, that was good enough for me. Right down here in the front. John Samples, Cato Institute. In my studies of progressivism, which makes the question a little bit unfair since it's outside the scope of the book, but I've been struck in reading and writing by progressives the centrality of the concept of reconstruction to them. For somebody like Herbert Crowley, that's really what he's about and it's sort of his theory of political development and so on. But it also means for him two things. One is nation building clearly and also a fairly deep pastility to the older America that he identifies, which is Cato's America, the America of individual rights and limited government. What I'd like to do is just hear you talk a little bit about that connection that I think I'm historically ignorant about. That is the notion of the progressive idea of construction and how it's informed by and rooted in the older theory and practice of the actual reconstruction era. Is there a connection and if so what kind? Well, John, did you say the progressives appeal to the concept of reconstruction, right? And you want to know whether that appeal is directed to post-Civil War reconstruction? Well, I guess I'd have to take your word for it, but you're talking about Crowley, not Crowley. Maybe you're suggesting that was not well done that reconstruction, so we got to make a better reconstruction. Crowley sees Lincoln as more than an American and he goes back to Hamilton. He wants to rebuild. Not rebuild, he wants to, well, I guess reorganize and in a sense reconstruct the political economy and the society in a progressive way, looking to the future. I'm not sure I can give you much satisfaction about that. You know, Wielder Wilson writes history in the United States and it kind of glosses over reconstruction because he has to. He's a southerner and he has to, he's a Democrat. See, the Democrats have limits. The Republicans don't have limits. Ordinarily, the Democrats don't have limits. Don't get me wrong. The Republicans are the party of responsibility. The Democrats are the party of anarchy, but that's another matter. Professor McDougal? Well, this area is beyond my competence. If I write a third volume in this series, then I'll have to deal with a progressive era, but at the moment I'm still, I'll claim plug ignorance about it with this exception. And that is I have forgotten whether it's in the text or in another footnote, but I do address the phases of the historiography of reconstruction and how Americans mainstream sort of changed its mind over whether reconstruction was a failure or a success, whether Andrew Johnson was a bad guy or a good guy, believe it or not, that he's had his good periods. And one of those was the progressive era, where a lot of elitists who call themselves progressives, both Republicans and Democrats, Woodrow Wilson, you know, and Taft and so forth, people like that, endorsed segregation. They believed that the outcome in the South had sort of was natural, that the races were re-separated and that there was a hierarchy. And they believed that, of course, in elitist leadership and reconstruction or reinvention, if you will, of American institutions through the exercise of their superior education and theory and knowledge, this was what progressivism was all about. And they did a lot of good things to progressives. But the condemnation of reconstruction and the image of segregation and Andrew Johnson and racism and all that, the idea that that is somehow foreign to the progressive mentality, I think is wrong. I think it's part and partial of it. Right there on the left, on the aisle. Yes, you, sir. Jim Duhlman, affiliated. It strikes me on the question of the Norse opposition to the expansion of slavery that if it hadn't been for that, probably Stephen Douglas would have been elected president with the probable result that we'd had neither this union nor war. It seems even more broadly that if the North had freely accepted Southern expansion of slavery, we would have had neither this union or war. So how do you conclude that the cause of the war, and this is directed to Professor McDougal, how do you conclude that the war ultimately did not come down to the Norse opposition to the expansion of slavery rather than some of these underlying issues? I would withdraw the word conclude and substitute propose. You're certainly right. Without this issue, and the way it was approached by both sides, then the pride issue that I raised, the wounded pride and all the rest would never have come into play or certainly wouldn't have led to disunion. So there are necessary conditions and then we argue about which one or one or two or three were sufficient conditions and years is certainly a necessary condition and then we can quibble about the other. But the point is again, as I said, the Southerners had been struggling with this thing since 1819 and they and their Northern interlocutors had figured out ways to keep the union going so we could all pursue our happiness for quite a while and so it seems to me as I suggested that it could have kept going under a Douglas type of reign. Douglas himself made some terrible decisions that brought about the I'd like to say that in this situation the territorial expansion issue is the superficial issue. But it becomes it's not superficial because so it seems easy to settle. I mean you just said it Douglas wins everything's fine but it's not the case. The underlying issues, the deep issues, profound issues are there. Now the question is what provides an occasion for those things to come up and to erupt and people have their breaking point and so forth. But the other thing I'd say in here, you want to get the idea of truth versus error. It's not truth versus pretense it seems to me. Because pretense, hypocrisy is attributed by space to virtue. I mean everybody, you know, it's a very human thing but truth versus error doesn't mean much today maybe in a lot of the academic circles but it did then and I want to say that Walter gets back to Rusty's Brownson at the very end and you know Brownson, a flaky guy who is actually coming back into some sort of recognition because the Protestant willfulness that directs America so often can and has to be checked by a kind of Catholic natural law. And Brownson does that and that's why I think it's very important that you finish the book with Brownson as a truth seeker.