 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Okay, we're back. We're live. We're talking about history today. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. And more specifically, this is History Lens. History Lens, yes. And that's John David Dan. He's a history professor at Hawaii Public, Hawaii Pacific University. Yes, right. And so what about History Lens, John? What do we mean by that? Right. So essentially what I want us to do is I want us to look at contemporary events, current events, through the lens of history. So taking, for instance, what we're going to talk about today, this poll in 2011 that showed that more Americans believed that states' rights was the cause of the Civil War than believed that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. And you can see the poll right there. And sure enough, there it is. It's a pure research poll. And so this is wrong. This is a misperception about the past. And so I want to be able to inform the present with interesting and accurate and accurate interpretation. I'm going to get that way. I mean, you know, there's been, when I went to high school and college, there were Civil War buffs all around me. Right, right. They lived for it. They studied every little detail of it. It was, I don't know what it was. It was that generation, my generation. Well, so the reinterpreting of the Civil War to emphasize state rights and to deemphasize slavery is actually a century-long process that begins in the 1870s and the 1880s with the memoirs of Southern generals and other confederates who did not want to talk about the slavery issue, which was indeed the central issue of the war. But they were uncomfortable with this because slavery had been abolished and it was an embarrassment. And it's like, okay, the norm of the American nation had changed. Slavery was no longer acceptable. There are two levels here. I mean, one level is, yeah, we had a big problem and it was getting worse. As you and I talked about it last time, under the hood, this was irreconcilable. Right. You couldn't have a country with some states through slavery and others. In fact, you couldn't have a country with slavery in general in the 19th century. It was impossible. But the other thing is that the way it presented through the years and certainly in 1861 was does a state have the right to secede from the union? How strong is the union? How strong is the United States? Could we prevent a state from just backing out of the deal? Right, right. So that's a debate that's going on and that's certainly there in 1861. I'm not denying that. And of course, that's a debate that happens because Jefferson makes this argument in the Kentucky Resolutions about the union as a voluntary compact. But this is widely refuted by 1861 by many politicians, including Lincoln, who says, no, no, this is actually an inviolable union of the American people. It doesn't have anything to do with individual states. It's a union of the American people. So Lincoln's interpretation is completely different. But so the states' rights is there. But the thing is, the question of that time is not willy-nilly should the South secede from the union. The South has no intention of seceding from the union just because they feel like it or they don't like the North. The Confederate states want to secede from the union because the union is threatening their institution, the peculiar institution, the institution of slavery. I'm just remembering something. They used the term to refer to the South and the organization of states in the South as the Confederacy. But wasn't there, before the United States was established, before 1789 and all that, there was the Confederate states of America? Well, there were the Articles of Confederation, which was an absolute disaster. Yes, didn't work. But if funny, they should use the same term as had been used earlier, which didn't work. Right. But what the South wanted was a confederation of states. They felt like this would protect their institution the best. They didn't even want a national government telling them what to do. And that was actually a great shortcoming of the Confederacy because they couldn't fight the war unless they agreed how to fight the war and under which command the troops should be and they couldn't agree on this. So yeah, the state's rights issue is definitely there. But again, if we go back and we look at the 1850s, the decade that precedes the Civil War, then we will see an explosion and it's not an explosion about states, right? It's actually an explosion about slavery. And it's really it's slavery in the new territories. The question of them. Not the existing states. Well, that comes into play too later in the 1850s. But initially, it's a question of what to do about these new territories that that the United States had gotten in the war with Mexico. So how do you deal with this? Should they be slave or free? Who gets to decide that? How is it decided? All of these questions have to be answered. What's the difference? Depending, you know, of course, somebody has to decide. But suppose I take state X or about to be state X. Right. And I say, is it slave state or not? What difference does that have to the union? I mean, to the whole country. Right. Right. So if you get if if a slave state is admitted to the union, that gives two more senators on the side of slavery. So there's this pitch battle being fought. Congressional representation and representation in the Senate will be changed dramatically by whether or not these new territories are free or slave states. So a slave state would be more likely to side with existing slave states without a doubt. And there would be the slave state block. So the people in the slave states wanted to expand that block because they would have more power in Congress. Exactly, exactly. So that's the that's the kind of the drumbeat after the war with Mexico is what's going to happen with these territories and who's going to get power out of it? Because by this time period, slavery is a very controversial issue. Abolition is in the north is very strong. The slaves are demonstrating pardon me, the slaveholders are demonstrating a very strong defense of slavery. So there's these there's these the battle sides are set. Why did it become such a controversial issue? It had existed, you know, for hundreds of years. Right. Right. That's why now what was happening that made it controversial? I suppose you could look to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is a time period in which, you know, European intellectuals are saying, you know what, freedom and liberty are these concepts that are sacred. And you see this reflected in the American Declaration of Independence. And so so a lot of things that were assumed to be okay in 1500, 1600, were absolutely not okay by 1700 and 1800 because of this idea about humans, about the the equality and the liberty of humans that came out of the Enlightenment time period. So yeah, I think that's interesting how you're a history professor. Yeah, sometimes you see something happening right now. And you accept that because that's now. Right. And you and you look through the lens of history backward, right to where people, you know, took a different position entirely. Yes. And you re judge that period of time. You can say it's not acceptable. For example, Mark Twain. I don't know if you saw this recently. Mark Twain, there's a school somewhere in the Midwest, where they want to take all the Mark Twain books out. Because Mark Twain referred to the African Americans under the N word multiple times, hundreds of times in some of his books. And the people in the school and outside the school who care about that issue, right, you know, are demanding that those books be removed. And apparently they will be removed. What I find interesting is that Mark Twain, or whatever, you know, his vocabulary, was a great piece of American history. Now we judge him retrospectively. Yes. But of course, Twain was writing in the time of the Civil War. He didn't serve in the Civil War. He went out to the West, actually, so he could escape the war. He came to Hawaii. That's right. But so he's writing in that time. And in some of his stuff is is racist. Yeah, it is. It is. So so you know, this is a that's a different question, the question of how we have changed our interpretation of of the civil wars reflected in this debate about civil war statues, what we should do about them, how to treat civil war heroes. Should they be heroes? Should they be considered traitors? That's definitely, you know, something that has become top burner in in American society. This point about controversy. So in 18, let's say 1850, I'm not sure that's the exact year. Exactly the date. So 1850, you look back on the constant on the days of the Constitution, you say, you know, those guys accepted slavery back then. I mean, they didn't make a big deal about it in the Constitution. It was it was it was the status quo. They didn't argue. They accepted it. So now 1850, we're looking back. We're looking at the mores of 1850, and we're re-judging what happened at the time of the Constitution. I was saying it was flawed in that way. Well, it was it was a new way of looking at slavery, certainly by the 1830s. But by the 1850, then the battle lines were set. Many Northerners were anti-slavery for a variety of reasons, not just abolitionists. And the South was solidly behind the institution of slavery, with the exception of a few progressives who still believed that slavery was evil, slavery was maybe even a sin. So the battle lines are set. And the president, Zachary Taylor, who was a war hero, was not much of a politician. He actually he was a slave holder himself, but he sided with the North after the Mexican War in this debate about what to do about the new territories. And sure enough, he got himself into deep political trouble. And so in 1850, there was a real crisis about what to do like there was in 1819 with the Missouri crisis and the Missouri compromise when Missouri came into the Union. And so what do we do the American politicians and people said, what do we do? And truth is, before the compromise of 1850, Southerners were planning a convention that summer to consider secession. So it wasn't this fully 11 years before that's correct. So if we can bring up the compromise of 1850 map. So some famous American politicians step in. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John Seacal, who by the way, are all dodering in their their old age. The two of them die shortly after the compromise is completed. And they come onto the Senate floor and they give speeches, impassioned speeches about the Union and about compromising. So the compromise of 1850 is the result of compromise. And if you can bring the map up again then. So the map shows this compromise, which was worked out in Congress. And so you can see that the territories, the new territories, California is going to come in free. Utah and New Mexico territory are coming in with popular sovereignty. The people of those states decide. That's correct, they decide. And then you have the abolition of the slave trade in Washington DC. And then, and probably most importantly, you have a new fugitive slave law. So that's good in terms of the, we don't need to look at the map anymore. But so this new fugitive slave law is key. Because the new fugitive slave law is a very strict law. It allows you slave owners to go back and get slaves who had escaped long, long ago. Slaves from the 1830s now were in fear for their lives because they were going to be brought back to slaves. They had fled to the north. The slave owner could come to the north. Exactly. The slave holder hired slave catchers. The slave catchers would ride north and they would pick up people. Sometimes they picked up people who had simply forgotten their manumission papers at home. And they picked up people, in other words, who were legitimately and lawfully free. There was no trial for this. There was simply a judge who got paid $10 if he ruled in favor of the slave owner and $5 if he ruled in favor of the escape slave. I think I know how he would rule. What's manumission? Manumission is simply freedom. And they were doing that. Oh, yes. Some slave owners decided they felt badly about it and they would manumit their slaves or some slaves could actually buy their freedom if they earned enough money. So these kinds of things happened. So in the slave who was free then, even in the north, by the 1850s then with this new law, would want to carry his papers because if not the slave catcher could come and bring them back to slavery. Whether he was manumitted or not. So what about somebody in the north who would protect and give comfort to an escaped slave? Would he be subject to this federal law as part of this compromise? Yeah, actually, yes. There were prosecutions against people who were harboring fugitive slaves. So you had to be very careful. The 1850s was a time period when it was locked down for escaped slaves. And this fugitive slave law turned many northerners who had been what we call compromise unionists in the spirit of the compromise of 1850 into stark mad abolitionists. It would be. I mean this sounds like Germany in 1939. It's awful. I'm in front of a moral level. Awful. Yes. So what you have then is the dramatic growth of abolitionism in the north because of the fugitive slave law. Well, we're going to take a break on that note. And when we come back, this is John David Andes, a history professor at White Pacific University. We're talking about the Civil War, the causes, part two. When we come back, we're going to tell you what this graphic is that we're using as a background today. You're probably curious. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Dave Stevens, the host of Cyber Underground. Every Friday here at 1pm on thinktechkawaii.com. And then every episode is uploaded to the Cyber Underground, that library of shows that you can see of mine on youtube.com. And I hope you'll join us here every Friday. We have some topical discussions about why security matters and what could scare the absolute bejesus out of you. If you just try to watch my show all the way through. Hope to see you next time on Cyber Underground. Stay safe. Such an interesting discussion, John. Thanks, Jay. And then I must say that the Pew poll is so interesting because this has happened in 2011, which is how many years after. And it's not that these people were alive at the time or they were there, they could observe. It's a sort of an American collective culture thing. And since school districts are all around the country and they're different, they're managed differently, textbooks are not the same, teachers is not the same. So it's really a poll of what the teachers were teaching people about what happened in the Civil War. Right. So there were other polls that were taken that have been taken since then that measure this in the North and in the South. And sure enough, there is a difference between the North and the South about how they think about the causes of the Civil War. Because even after the hundred years, after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, when we no longer considered states' rights to be the central cause of the Civil War, we considered now slavery to be the central cause of the Civil War because quite frankly historians gathered data which showed that slavery was in fact the central issue of the 1850s. Even after that, you had schools in the South still teaching the states' rights, resisting that, resisting this new narrative, and still teaching states' rights as the central cause of the Civil War. But slavery is core in the history of this country. It is core. Civil war and slavery still relevant. It is. It is. That's right. You know, it was something that affected us right down to the DNA. It still does. Yeah. Yeah. So you want to tell us. Yeah. So right, let's bring this graphic. So this is, you know, just before war, and this is pretty, can you shrink it down yet? This is a vicious beating that Senator Charles Sumner took on the floor of the Senate in 1857. Shortly after a very important Supreme Course was ruled in favor of slavery, in favor of the slaveholders, then Charles Sumner got up and gave this speech which castigated slaveholders, called them a slaveocracy. And really, I mean, Sumner was prone to bombastic language. That's true. But he didn't deserve that. So what happens then is the cousin of Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina comes down out of the gallery, walks into the floor of the Senate, begins to beat Charles Sumner with a cane. And other senators from the South who were sympathetic to the caning created a wall so that other senators couldn't stop this. Sumner was nearly beat to death. Oh, gee wish. Yes. And on the floor of the Congress. Yes. He took him three years to recover and to get back. He made a full recovery and came back to the Senate. And of course he's a committed radical abolitionist. But this is illustrative of the tensions, the tremendous tensions between the North and the South. Holorization. Yes, in 1857. And so there are a variety of things which cause those tensions. The Fugitive Slave Law is one of them. But then also you have a problem with Kansas. Because of course the compromise of 1850 puts some of the West and some of these new territories in order. But Kansas, the territory of Kansas was what was called Nebraska territory in that time, was still hanging out there as a territory. It wasn't organized as a state. And so Senator Stephen Douglas from Illinois, he wants to run a railroad across the nation. This is in 1854. And he wants to run it through Illinois because he's from Illinois, right? He wants to run it through Chicago. That's right. So, but Southern senators want to run it through the South. So in order to get them to compromise, he says, okay, you allow me to run my railroad through Chicago. And in return, I will allow Kansas to come in as a state in which popular sovereignty will decide whether it's slave or free. Kansas, of course, is just to the West of Missouri, which had been a big fight in 1820. And so the agreement is struck. Kansas is now under popular sovereignty. And free soil settlers run into Kansas to try to make it a free state. Slave, pro-slavery settlers run into Kansas to make it a slave state. There are two constitutions approved, one slave, one free. There are two capitals, Lawrence and LaCompton. And so now you have these dueling constitutions that go forward to the national government. And the national government has to decide what do we do about this? Well, in the meantime, it's not a question for the courts. It's the courts get into it. Honestly, it's the administration mostly that is recommending does the Congress accept a slave or else. It was part of the compromise. That's right. And the administrations in this time period are pro-slavery. So they're saying, hey, we're going to accept the pro-slavery constitution. And this enrages the free soilers in Kansas. There's a lot of violence in Kansas, actually. Another character who we're going to talk about in a minute, John Brown. In fact, you can bring his picture up. John Brown, there's John Brown. You can look at his eyes. These are the eyes of a zealot. He is not a happy candidate. And he's a zealot for abolitionism. John Brown takes his sons to Kansas Territory in 1854. And he attacks a settlement of pro-slavery settlers with broadswords. And he hacks five settlers to death with essentially machetes. So there's a lot of violence that takes place in Kansas. And Kansas is what we call bleeding Kansas in this time period. So that's another source of that tension which leads to the caning of Charles Sumner. How does Kansas resolve? Well, eventually, Kansas comes in as a free state. But it's only during the Civil War. And it's the Lincoln administration. So prior to 1861, it was unresolved. That's correct, yes. So it's really interesting when you take a given territory and carve it up this way. It almost sounds like the territories in Eastern Europe being carved up after World War II. Yes. I mean, that's right. This is the central question. The central question is what's going to happen with these territories? And it blows up. The compromise of 1850 did not work. It did. It worked for a few years. And then it blew up in the faces of Congress. And they had to figure out what are we going to do. And then there's a court ruling that says that slaves can be taken anywhere in the country. The Supreme Court is composed mostly pro-slavery justices. And they rule. And that's what causes the caning of Charles Sumner. Because Sumner denounces this. And by that time, the congressmen bring their pistols into the chambers for self-protection. I am not kidding you. The country was coming apart, literally coming apart. Yes. I think that's why we had a Civil War. I guess so. So yeah. So this reaches its pinnacle in 1859. In 1859, Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, he's beginning to do a run for the presidency. He's planning on doing a run for the presidency. In 1859, the Dred Scott decision, this is this decision before the Supreme Court, the Dred Scott decision has said that slaves can be brought anywhere in the nation. That means potentially that states that were formerly free states now can become slave states. So the North is very upset about this. The South is feeling celebratory. John Brown steps into this. And John Brown thinks, I'm going to resolve this issue on my own. I'm going to cause, I'm going to foment a slave rebellion. He plans an attack on Harper's Ferry, which is a federal arsenal. And Harper's Ferry is an important place because it lies at the junction of two important rivers. And there are railroads that have junctions there. And so his thought was that if I free the slaves in Harper's Ferry, in which is western Virginia, then that slave rebellion will spread along the Appalachian, the ridge of the Appalachian mountains, and slavery will be defeated. Well, it was a crazy idea. But John Brown was full of crazy ideas. So he goes ahead and he does it. He gathers his sons with him. Frederick Douglass was invited along. Frederick Douglass says, no, it sounds like a crazy idea. I'm not going to go along with it. I mean, it's a really crazy stuff. It really helps you understand the nature of the times. Right. That's right. Take a risk like that. The fierceness of John Brown is just unequaled. So so Brown takes his sons and a few others. And indeed, he gets he invades the or attacks the arsenal there. And it's very poorly guarded. So he's able to take it over for a few hours. And then eventually he's captured. And most of his crew is killed. Robert Lee is the commanding officer who rides into Harper's Ferry with troops to put down this rebellion and capture John Brown. So John Brown is captured. And he is sent to the gallows. He's convicted and sent to the convicted of treason and sent to the gallows. And on his way to the gallows, he hands a note to his executioner. And the note says, this nation will be bathed in blood until slavery is dead. And that's like a paraphrase. Hither and young. Oh, yes. The northern press must have taken that everywhere. So how did everyone react to John Brown? Well, Southerners were appalled at John Brown. Some believe that he was a zealot. And some believe that there were lots of John Browns in the north that maybe Abraham Lincoln was an ally of John Brown. So it really frightened the south. If their homes and their sanctity is not safe from the depredations of slaves and slave rebellions, then what is safe? But Abraham Lincoln immediately denies any connection to John Brown and says, look, I'm a moderate. John Brown's not, doesn't belong to the Republican Party. He's a zealot. He's kind of a crazy person. So Abraham Lincoln says, no, no, no, it's not a part of me. There are others. There are abolitionists who say, you know what? John Brown did a good thing. So this is further polarizing the country. Oh, absolutely. And then in 1860, there's the election where Lincoln wins. But before 1860, immediately after John Brown is executed, Southerners begin to mobilize the militia system. This had been a system that was proposed in 1850 during the first thought of secession. So what you have in the south is you have many military academies, Virginia Military Institute, other academies. That's correct. And they're very good schools today. But so you have all of these military academies and you have these cadets who are training daily. And the militia system was taking these young cadets and then adding locals to these cadets to form small armies. Well, there's this idea there, but it doesn't become operational until after John Brown at Harper's Ferry. So John Brown was really an important polarizing effect and important stimulant. Well, it's one could say John Brown does more for the civil war than anyone else, because the militia system means that the South has the capability of forming an army and is willing to fight and shed blood for its cause, which is the cause of slavery, the protection of slavery. And so what is the north? How is the north going to respond? So then, of course, Abraham Lincoln runs. He is elected. His election is the center. His election crystallizes all of this. Yes. I mean, Lincoln says, look, I'm going to leave slavery where it exists. I only care about slavery in the territories. He makes this very clear. But honestly, the South is not listening. Abraham Lincoln is not even on the ballot in most of the states that become a part of the Confederacy. John, we're going to have to leave it there. I hope we can continue from this exact point. Well, but we did answer the question of the causes of the civil war. Slavery is the central cause of the civil war. Here we are on the virtual lip of it. Right. Thank you, John. Love to talk to you.