 I'm Jay Besanko, Deputy Archivist of the United States, and it's my sincere pleasure to welcome you to the National Archives. We have a special treat tonight, Archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Chogan, in conversation with award-winning author and historian Fergus Bordowich, as they discuss his most recent book, Clan War, Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction. During his presidency, Grant worked tirelessly to pass policies and legislation to protect the rights of African-Americans and to suppress the Ku Klux Klan. Grant's strong stance against terrorism and his passion for justice helped lay the groundwork for future civil rights movements and the fight for equal rights for all Americans. Dr. Chogan is the 11th Archivist of the United States and a political scientist with expertise in the American presidency. She might even tell you that Grant is one of her favorite presidents. Fergus Bordowich has been a historian and a journalist for over 40 years. He's the author of eight previous nonfiction books and countless newspaper and magazine articles. And he's the winner of the D.B. Hardiman Prize and the Los Angeles Times History Prize. I hope you enjoy tonight's program. Please join your hands together and welcome Dr. Colleen Chogan and Fergus Bordowich. Thanks so much, Jay. And thank you for spending this evening with us to talk about Fergus's very important book. And Jay stole my punchline. Grant is, I will confess, is one of my favorite US presidents and reading your book. I learned so many more things about Grant that I never knew. So to start us off, though, this is a book about Grant and the clan and reconstruction. Why did you decide to write this book? Well, in less than 400 pages. By the way, first, let me thank you for making this possible. And everybody who's come out tonight, it's just wonderful to be back to live audiences once in a while. I otherwise would have lived on Zoom like so many of us. And to see real people within handshaking reaches great. OK, let me set the scene here. Civil war ends in 1865. After that, the South is in chaos. Economically, it's collapsed. The wealth of the South, which was primarily in slaves, enslaved people, has disintegrated. Hundreds of thousands of bitter, defeated Confederate soldiers are returning to their homes to many areas that have been ruined by war. There are federal troops in the South. And I want to say at the outset here, part of the lost cause mythology is that the South was under this heavy-handed military occupation during Reconstruction. This is a myth. In July of 1865, yes, there were a million federal soldiers under arms. By 1868, which is kind of a core point in this period, there were only 12,000 across the entire 11 states of the former Confederacy. And those mostly in state capitals. And many of them on the Texas frontier. So there is no heavy-handed federal occupation. You have many, many defeated Confederates see the former Confederates seething about defeat. And you have nearly 4 million African-Americans who had been enslaved, now free. And intensely desiring to exercise their freedom. And eventually, and it does come to pass, the fruits of citizenship and so on. So we have these converging trends. And what's the federal government going to do? What's the Reconstruction going to be? What's it supposed to be? There's no real consensus. In short, Republican radicals dominate Congress at the time. The word radical in the 1860s and 70s does not mean what it does today. It specifically means people who are committed to a vigorous policy of reconstructing, rebuilding the South on a free labor basis and empowering African-Americans. Bringing citizenship and full participation in citizenship, eventually, to African-Americans. Congressional Republican radicals dominate Congress up on the Hill. But as you presumably all know, President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's worst mistake as a president was to allow him onto the 1864 ticket, is not a Republican. He's as far from a radical as could be. He sees his political future as essentially conciliating the Confederate South, bringing former Confederates back into the political system as quickly as possible, because that's going to be his future political base. And so you have a chaotic landscape of newly empowered African-Americans, bitter former Confederates, for the most part. And a very mixed bag of northernies, many of the troops, they're not abolitionists. They welcomed the end of slavery for various reasons, but they're not abolitionists. They don't necessarily support radical reconstruction. Should we leave it there for a landscape? Sure, that's a good landscape. And that gets to really the subtitle of the book, because when you think about it, why is there a battle for reconstruction? Because, as you said, the Republicans control Congress. There may be divergences within the Republican Party, but they control Congress. The Confederacy has been defeated. So why the battle is because Johnson largely, or what other forces? Well, OK, Johnson, as I just said, was a Democrat. He was an astonishing Unionist during the war in an excellent wartime record. He was the only senator from a southern state who didn't defect. So he was admired initially, even by the radicals, who did not realize that he was not one of them. Johnson is the president. He's in a position to veto any legislation that he doesn't support. And he does not support any radical reconstruction legislation at all. And he repeatedly vetoes forward-looking legislation that's aimed at the empowerment of African-Americans. And that involves the 14th Amendment. And there's a lot of ancillary legislation that eventually is folded into the 14th Amendment. Johnson is essentially a stone wall. And there are several wars that are taking place in this book. Much of the book is taking place on Capitol Hill, actually. It oscillates back and forth between Capitol Hill and what's happening in the small towns and rural areas of the South. So one battle is between one and the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. So the other major topic in the book, of course, is the Klan. So tell us, for people I didn't know the origins of the Klan, and tell us how that grows, who starts it? How does this come to be? Yeah, well, the origins of the Klan are very well-documented because early Klan's men were very proud of the Klan, and they wrote about it. So there's records. Excellent records. They're kind of depressing, but there's records. But in terms of quality of information, they're quite good. The Klan was founded in the autumn of 1866 in the small city or probably a large town, more properly, of Pulaski, Tennessee, which is about 80 miles south of Nashville. It was a town damaged significantly during the war. The original Klan's men was a group of half a dozen young Confederate veterans, all of them university educated, which is significant because throughout the leadership the Klan comes from elites. This is not a movement of hooligans and louts. It's a movement of elites who lead people to commit barbarous acts of terrorism. Anyway, the original Klan was a kind of wacky boys club, a young men's club anyway. The name Ku Klux Klan doesn't mean anything. It has no meaning whatsoever. They were sitting around in a law office. The building is still there and trying to come up with a kind of spooky unusual name for this club that they had in mind. And they hit on Ku Klux Klan. I could go on about some of the other names that they were knocking around that are so laughable that if they've chosen one of them, it might never have become what it became. Anyway, and mostly they do goofy things around town in odd costumes. They pop up at local picnics and whatnot, wearing these robes with crazy horns and so on. It was not, at this point, terroristic. That comes about six months later. One of the kinds of antics that these early Klansmen adopted because it entertained them was harassing and scaring African-Americans. Newly freed, a very present Iran Pulaski, the county's about 50-50, or it was then anyway. They were not killing people, but they were scaring people and that was, to them, amusing. About six months later, a group of senior Confederate officers meet in Nashville and they set out to create a terrorist organization because the idea of the Klan, this spooky brotherhood, has kind of caught on. It's already spread in surrounding counties and they see its potential. I'm surprised in the book how quickly things escalate. It goes pretty quickly and the tool is violence, but really what enables the Klan to be effective as a terrorist organization, as you put it, is fear. So talk about using the instrument of fear. Well, the Klan has essentially two goals. They're intertwined. One is to, if possible, scare African-Americans back into a condition as close to slavery as possible, to scare them out of public life. Because remember, as I said at the beginning, black Americans are beginning to enter public life. They're able to vote much earlier in the states than the 15th Amendment because states have that power to enfranchise people and most of those states have reconstruction Republican-led governments which are eager at the beginning to enfranchise black voters. Many are participating. There were at least 2,000 African-Americans who held public office during reconstruction on all levels. It's 2,000, probably more. So one object is to scare black people out of public life. The other is to destroy the Republican Party. The Republican Party is embryonic. It didn't exist before the Civil War. So it's being built from the ground up. It's a grassroots party in the South. And different kinds of people become Republicans, African-Americans almost entirely become Republicans. But also some native-born white Southerners who've just decided to throw in their lot with the future as opposed to oppose the future. And these are very interesting people to read about and to write about who really are really struggling to overcome their kind of visceral distaste for being around black people. Butters are trying very hard and succeed in many cases. They tend to be ones who are targeted by the Klan and killed, actually. And then there are some Northerners who were smeared as so-called carpet baggers. And that is a slur and a smear. And I prefer not to use the term, like Scallow Eggs, native of Southern Whites, it's an insulting term. So fear, the Klan, let's put it bluntly, there is nothing that any present-day terrorist organization in a faraway country perpetrates against helpless civilians that the Ku Klux Klan did not perpetrate in the United States. And bear in mind that the Klan's crimes, at least 2,000 coincidence, the number is similar, at least 2,000 people were murdered by the Klan, probably substantially more. Many, many, many, many more were terrorized, brutalized, beaten, shot, raped. The Klan practiced any kind of barbaric, abusive people that you can imagine. This is tough stuff to handle in the book, frankly. It is. I didn't want to sugarcoat anything, because it's imperative to know what Americans were doing to other Americans, that this is the record, it's history, it was airbrushed, sugarcoated for 150 years, and we ought to be done with that. We should know exactly what was happening and what people were capable of and so on. But it can become pornographic to, I mean, I wrestled with that question, actually, to just page after page after page of viciousness. So you get enough to know what was being done, but I hope not so much that you can't bear continuing to read. So you have the growth of the Klan and its terrorist reign, and then enter in the book comes Ulysses as Grant. The country somehow survives. Johnson, Grant enters the picture as president. Tell us about Grant's views about African-Americans, about slavery, had they changed over time, why does he become a warrior against the Klan? Yeah, well, I regard Grant as an heroic political figure. He was, as you all know, of course, he was commander of the federal armies and led them to victory in the Civil War. At the time, he had the charisma of George Washington. He's constantly compared to George Washington. And he's commander of the army for several years after the war, but he is, in a way, tiller-made as the next Republican candidate for president. He is a war hero, everybody. And the Democratic Party is shattered because of the war, split between southern and northern wings, fascinating story in its own right, but we tried to parse that too closely. So Grant, in a nutshell, his father was an abolitionist. Grant was himself not a pre-war abolitionist. He certainly found slavery very distasteful. He grew up in southern Ohio on the edge of just north of Kentucky. Slavery was there in the world that he grew up in. And I think as a younger man, he took it as just part of the given that was the American Midwest in his day. He briefly owned a slave who was bestowed upon him and his wife by his father-in-law. Grant was not happy about it. And he freed the man after approximately a year, freed him. He could have sold him. He needed the money, which is something about what his values were. What about that time Grant was what, selling firewood or something about, you know, he was that desperate. He was close to desperate, living in Missouri, by the way, at that time. You can visit his farm there. It's a great site, National Park Service Site, if you were out that way. Anyway, long story short, Grant stands out among many of his contemporaries during the war, contemporary officers, in that he, one, welcomed a fugitive slaves into his camps and gave them work. There were other officers who sent them back to their masters. He also advocated pretty early on for the arming of, not just formerly enslaved people, but black Americans generally in the army. Others were dead opposed to it, including William Tecumseh Sherman, a great general. I mean, a more creative general than Grant, actually, but was deeply racist, as were many men like him. He was from Ohio as well. He was a northerner, but he refused to have black troops in his armies. Grant welcomed them. So he's, you can see at this point how he's evolving during reconstruction. He's not a natural politician. He may be the most logical candidate for the presidency, but he kind of doesn't know how to be president. And he has to learn on the job. So it takes him a while, a year, two years, to come to groups of what he can do as president to deal with the Klan, I should say. We haven't talked about it yet, but we can go on. Right, so I mean, he's starting to wage this war against the Klan, which ends up pretty successful, but it takes him until about 1872 to be able to eradicate it in some of the largest states where the Klan is present. So how does he do it? Yeah, well, we should say that the Klan metastasized. It spread at breakneck speed from that founding in Tennessee. It spread within months in Alabama, Georgia. Carolinas, of course. All over the former Confederate South, virtually everywhere, and including the one state that has often said to have been the only one that became Confederate after the war, which is Kentucky. But that's another story. So the Klan, at its peak, 1868, 69, 70, probably had 300,000 to 400,000 members. Way more than it ever had in its iterations in the 20th century. And there were counties, and this is quite documentable, in upcountry, upstate South Carolina, which becomes the main target of the Klan War, 60% to 80% of white men are members of the Klan. Virtually everybody, virtually everybody. So the power of the Klan is immense. And bear in mind, in 1868, there were 12,000 federal troops in the South. And they're nearly all infantry. And it doesn't take a lot of analysis to realize that it's kind of tough for infantrymen to catch men on horseback. It's a significant fact about why the Klan spread so fast so far and was essentially so successful, both through killing, torturing, and so on, driving, as we said earlier, blacks out of public life. So Grant has essentially become a radical. He didn't start out there, but he's become a radical because he genuinely believes in the 14th Amendment, 15th Amendment. He lobbies for them, as far as a president, could do that in those days. He says he wants this legislation. And a factor which has to be woven in here is that the Republican Party in the South is increasingly a black party, a black party. And it's perfectly clear to Republicans everywhere that if blacks are scared out of the polling place, the Republican Party is going to lose southern states. It's much easier to scare whites out of it because white redeemers, as they were called, are very divisive. So at any rate, it's imperative both politically and for the stability of the country. So Congress passes three enforcement acts. I'd love to explain these in detail, but I won't do that to you. This is very intricate and interesting pieces of legislation that define the Ku Klux Klan's behavior as federal crimes. You might say, well, weren't these always crimes? They were not federal crimes. What the Klan did, a murder, would be a state crime. You couldn't prosecute it through the federal courts until the enforcement acts were passed. And they were passed under the legislative umbrella of the 14th Amendment. They were meant to put teeth into the 14th Amendment, the point being, what difference does it make if you have rights if they can't be enforced? So this is a great story between, because it's grants initiative and leadership. But you make it clear in the book and all of your work previously, this wouldn't have been done without his cooperation, without the work in Congress. And you go into great detail about the hearings and what is done. So if this happens and the three enforcement acts are passed, which are successful as enforcement acts when we come to 1872, then why isn't the Klan defeated? And why don't we have a different ending in American history? So how does this change? How does the story change? OK, well, I have to say, Grant did defeat the Klan. That did happen. That did happen. He sent troops into the 7th Cavalry, the 7th Cavalry, as it happens, not only the 7th, but yes, Custer's regiment without Custer. Custer was a reactionary Democrat who wanted no part of Reconstruction. But the officers Grant did dispatch were first rate. And I should say here, I thank Mara, I think the National Archives, because some of the best material I got came from downstairs. Oh, terrific. In this building. In this building. Terrific. In this building, and the Adjutant Generals reports from the Army, the reports coming out of South Carolina by this dynamic, courageous, enlightened, and extremely well-educated officer, Lewis Merrill, major in the 7th Cavalry, their literature. They're so well-written, they're so detailed. He went in, he broke the Klan in South Carolina. It's a great story, but I'm not going to go too much into the details, except to say that he penetrated it with spies, and he sent his troopers out to actually run down the Klan, and they did. He broke it. He got confessions from something like, or he prosecuted not confessions, something like 5,000 members in upstate South Carolina alone. And this is happening elsewhere in the South. It's not only South Carolina. The Klan imploded. Well, why was that? Didn't they fight? No, they did not. They were very brave in their own minds when they were attacking, kidnapping, murdering, raping, helpless civilians in isolated places all over the South, but faced with the 7th Cavalry with carbines and ready to use them, the Klan collapsed. I mean, it's a really significant part of the story, but facing down terrorism and facing down insurrection, which is what it was. It was used by everybody, was insurrection. It was the way it was seen by everyone, except those who apologized for the Klan. So what happened, as you say? Yeah. What happened? Well, the pivotal year, here's 1874. Typically 1877 is pegged as the end of reconstruction. But what happened in 1874 was that the Democratic Party, which is welded together from former Confederates in the South and very conservative Democrats in the North, yes, the parties weren't the same then as they are today. The Democrats won control of the House of Representatives. You presumably know. Money bills originate in the House of Representatives. Congress would not pass any bills to finance the military, to support continuing the military in the South, or equally as significant to pay for federal prosecutors to prosecute the Klan. So even though thousands were arrested, thousands, and there were thousands of confessions, Klan and some began informing on each other in hopes of getting later sentences. So that snowballed. Very, very few actually ever served the sentences that they received, and the sentences rapidly became lighter and lighter and lighter because the courts were grossly overburdened, grossly overburdened, and you had judges, federal judges, handing out sentenced, for terrorist activities, and sometimes even murder of $25, $100 a year in jail, few months in jail. Some were sent to federal prison for fairly long sentences, but not many, and they were eventually all pardoned a few years later. So there are many ways of answering what happened. One is what I just described, and because it's legislative, it's important to understand that's not usually mentioned. The Northern public was tired of reconstruction. And I think the Northern electorate really, really bears the heaviest burden of guilt for failing to continue registration of reconstruction by abandoning the radicals of the Republican Party, the most forward-looking cutting edge of reconstruction. And losing interest, it's that war weariness, people were sick of the Civil War, they were sick of the South, they were sick of the South's problems, and in the very openly racist America of the 1860s and 70s, they were sick of black people's problems. They didn't want to hear it anymore. And I'm generalizing greatly here, but the results showed up in the polling booth. And the Democratic, the Republican Party rather shifted. It changed, it became a different animal by the 1870s. It became no longer the party that was rooted in the reforms, the idealistic reforms of the antebellum period, but it became the party of power and money. There's no mystery to this. It's not an accusation, it's just what happened. It's what happened because this gets into a whole, what did America become? From the 1870s, subject of my next book. Oh, there you go. So you know, you referred to this earlier in the conversation that there's many, many episodes in this book that are difficult to read and difficult to get through because of the descriptions of violence, whether they're murders or sexual assaults or other intimidations. So that's part of the book. And we can talk about, if you'd like, how we deal with as a country the fact that I think that very few people understand that these things happened on American soil. I think if you talk to most Americans, they would never believe that these actions actually happened on American soil in our history. So that's, I'd like to hear your comment on that, but also on the more, a little bit more of a positive note, there is aspects of the book that show these glimmers, like you said, of African-American service. 16 African-Americans serve in Congress during Reconstruction. Like you said, you have thousands that serve at the local level or at the state level. There are office holders. So can you talk a little bit about a couple of those stories as well? Sure. Yeah, I mean, there's a great abundance of very, very interesting African-Americans who has just said, held office. On pretty much every level, right up to the U.S. Senate. But they're very, very numerous in states, especially South Carolina and Mississippi, which have very large black populations, as long as those are still governed by the Republican Party. But there were black office holders in the South until the turn of the 20th century, every shrinking number, because there were some parts of the South where enough blacks were still able to vote. They were, virtually everybody was disenfranchised by the beginning of the 20th century. But up to then, there were pockets that were still numerous enough to elect people to Congress and so on. One guy who figures as significantly as I could, brush him in in the book is Robert Elliot. Fascinating guy. He was a congressman from South Carolina during this period. His speeches in Congress are some of the best. You could ever read, by the way, bear in mind this is an era of great oratory. And you have many people whose speeches are essentially spoken literature. And you can read the Congressional Globbing downloaded with a couple of clicks. It's great, not everybody's great, but I mean, Elliot was a wonderfully eloquent man who, very curious origins. Maybe that he wasn't even a US citizen. Little murky, little murky. But he went to South Carolina, he became a lawyer, and he, on the basis of his abilities and his eloquence, he very rapidly rose in South Carolina in state government and then in Congress. And he was not alone. There are quite a few. Robert Smalls, another congressman from South Carolina, was a hero of the Civil War. He was a slave. And he was a harbor pilot in Charleston. And one day, I think it was 1862, maybe 63, he took his boat and he just sailed it to the Union, out to the Union blockade fleet and joined the Union Navy. And he served in Congress for a long time. Very interesting individual. And kind of at the other, another type of man, they are all men who entered public office, although women, black women, figured very significantly in the communities that were developing, but they didn't have the opportunity to hold office. A man named Wyatt Outlaw. He's the beginning of the book, actually. He's killed very cruelly in 1870. By the way, Outlaw was the family name. It's not a pejorative. There are a lot of people with that name in that part of North Carolina, near, well, Graham, near Greensboro. And he was a guy who also had been enslaved. Very, very capable individual and natural leader. And this is one of the things you see, writing about the African-American communities, they were very diverse in all the same community. There were leaders there already. There were plenty of people who were literate. It's part of the lost cause myth that former slaves are also ignorant and stupid, the word of the era, that they couldn't possibly be capable of governing themselves, much less governing white people. It's just absolute nonsense. These states were filled with capable people. Wyatt Outlaw, I mean, paid with his life, paid with his life precisely as many other black local leaders did because he was a leader, because he did speak out, and because he was capable, those were the primary targets of clan violence. What about my other part of my question? Because we're so focused here at the National Archives on civics education and history education, what to do about the fact that this episode in this era, this part of American history is undertaught, not very well understood, and certainly the realities of it are not confronted. Yeah, well, we need to take this on board. We're a mature enough country that it's preposterous to still be sugarcoating and airbrushing truths from American history. And this is, I don't wanna call it, it's not just simply a dark period, very dark cruel things took place, but it's a very complex period filled with people who were politically creative, who were dynamic in their own communities, including white Southerners as well, who were not reactionaries. They're very interesting people. It's not all of a piece. Reconstruction is not sort of one thing, but I think it's imperative for us as a people, and this is why I wrote the book, frankly. This is why I wrote the book, to understand that we Americans don't have some special dispensation, that we are somehow absolved from any of the, those darker possibilities in human nature that we condemn or fear in faraway places. Whatever happened under ISIS or al-Qaeda happened here, happened here, and the people perpetrating it were people like us, they're people like us. They weren't just, as they said, a bunch of hoodlums and louts. They were people who were white leaders in their own communities. So I think it's, I don't think we have any real choice, but to be honest about the past. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote back in 1935, I can only paraphrase him rather than quote him literally. It's in the book. It's near the end of the book. He said basically that if history is either a science or an art is a joke if we don't tell the truth. So one last question before we turn to the audience. If you have questions for Fergus, we'll be happy to take some of these questions. The last thing I wanna ask you, I thought after I finished reading the book, do you think could have anything been done differently to affected the outcome? Or were the forces of history as such at that particular point in time, they were too overwhelming that at that point in time that the civil rights of African Americans were not going to be realized for 100 years subsequent. Is there anything else, agency, that could have been done by Grant, by members of Congress, could have things gone differently? Yes. Okay. Yes. Yes. Okay, this is speculation because we're talking about things that didn't happen. Right. That's always fun. It is fun. It is fun. We'd all like to rewrite. Right, rewrite, re-arrange history. A lot of history. Okay, there's the block of time from 1865 to 68. Had Lincoln not put Andrew Johnson on the ticket, his first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, was an abolitionist. He was a very, very capable member of the Senate, not a glamorous guy, not charismatic, but very capable and experienced. The whole reconstruction story would have been different. Okay. But let's move to Grant. Grant comes in from March of 1869, he's inaugurated. It was perfectly clear that when sufficient troops were sent to the South, sufficient to break the clan and ensure that it didn't rise again, or some new kind of iteration of the clan. The clan does die as an organization by 1873, 74. What comes after that is something different. It's not the clan, but there should have been more troops in the South. Congress should have paid for those troops. There's, Congress should have been, should have paid for the prosecutors who were necessary. The clan had surrendered, they had surrendered. They accepted that they were guilty of their crimes, but they weren't adequately prosecuted. That's money, that comes down to money, and that comes down to the voters in this country. And there's a lot more that could be said, but sure those things could have been different. About 1877, is that already, it's too late by that point? It's too late, it's happened in 1874, as I said earlier, when Democrats take control of the House of Representatives. 1877 is an anti-climax. It's an anti-climax. And nor the- It's the product of these things, not really the cause. Exactly, right. Yeah, I mean, Rutherford behays, nothing to criticize in his values, but politically, he did what his voters wanted him to do, which is essentially wrap it up. Wrap it up in the South. And it's not quite true that there was a secret backroom deal in 1877, but the handwriting was on the wall, let's say. It was already. Yeah, as I say, it's my next book. Okay, terrific. Come back in three years. Okay, there we go, that's good. Questions for Fergus? Matt. Just building on that. But Congress is out of session for eight months. When they do come back into session, there's a famous moment on the House floor driven by Thaddeus Stevens and his friends with the clerk and they don't seat the former Confederate representatives and then you get the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, everything that came after that. But it's always struck me that those eight months are so critical. If Congress had been in session, maybe that nascent movement wouldn't have been given life or even where many in the former Confederate States didn't like it, they knew that the page had turned. You weren't going to be able to treat African-Americans like this. What do you make of those eight months? Well, I think you just expressed it pretty well, frankly, I agree with you. That was a moment of possibility. It was a moment of possibility. But the man sitting in the White House was who he was. And initially, even radicals like Sumner, thought Johnson was going to be great. Read Sumner's letters as you can probably have. He didn't understand what Thaddeus Stevens did. He knew what, he had Johnson's number right at the start. But others didn't. They remembered him as this hard-fisted wartime governor of Tennessee. So it took Congress, members of Congress, a while to understand that the game had really changed. And Johnson still had the power of the veto. But you're quite correct in saying, based on the reports of travelers in the South, that initially the Confederates were beaten. They knew they were beaten. They knew they were beaten. It took a while for the lost cause to be invented. So there are too many hypotheticals there. But yeah, it was a moment of possibility. Yes, we're here. Can you wait till the microphone comes? No, thank you for your talk. Could you maybe comment a little bit about the historiography of the lost cause and how it sort of peaked in 1910s, 1920s with a revisionist scholar in the White House screening birth of a nation. But sort of left a long tail in the public consciousness where even until maybe 10, 20 years ago, this idea of both sides being righteous, states rights, the honorable general Lee, and on the other side, Grant being a drunk, the reconstructionist being avaricious and failures. And only really in the past decade or 15, 20 years, and your book is part of that, trying to push back the narrative in the scholarly sense and also in public consciousness. So why was there 100 years, not only in public consciousness of this all being a massive failure? OK, 100, 150 years in two minutes. Well, one, beginning even before 1874, southern states, former Confederate states, one after another were redeemed. It was the word, the white supremacist of the time used. White supremacy was a term used proudly then, by the way. This isn't an anachronism, an anachronism being projected backward. That's what they proudly announced that they were about. Once they took political power in the various southern states, climatically in South Carolina, 1877, they could write their own history. Once Republicans lost control of this, they never recovered it. There was really no debate about how history books were going to be written in the South. They were written by former Confederates. Part of it's that. But then you might ask, well, I should also say there was a gigantic outpouring of writing by former Confederates right up well into the 20th century. Everybody who ever worked, where uniform it seems, was writing a memoir about the wonders of the Confederacy and how the white never damn thing to do with slavery. That's it. But how was it that the rest of the country embraced this story, the lost cause mythology, and made it a national story? OK. Some of you will have heard of the Dunning School of Historians. William Dunning was a scholar from New Jersey. He was in Northernry. He taught at Columbia University. He was the most influential scholar of Reconstruction. And he essentially, I can't say single-handedly, but pretty close, transformed the southern version of Reconstruction. And the Civil War into a national story, which included a denigration of African-Americans, wrote off the Reconstruction governments as unutterably corrupt and failures without exception. And Dunning educated not one, but two generations of historians. And as late as the 1950s, even people who were not literally students of Dunning are writing history books. Alan Nevins, who was from, I believe, Massachusetts, Yankee, a liberal Democrat from New England, writes about Reconstruction in Dunning's terms in the 1950s. And I mean, one other punctuation to this, most of you will know this, probably, was the film Birth of a Nation, OK, 1915. A great, horrible movie. Cinematically, it's really terrific. Everybody should see it. But it's values, they're values of racism. And it's intensely racist. And it encapsulates virtually every false cliche about Reconstruction that you would find in any history book that you're not going to take time to read. The first film ever screened at the White House. By Woodrow Wilson. Yes, amazing. Who, incidentally, is often thought of as being from New Jersey. He was not. He was raised in South Carolina during the war. And then, sorry, in Georgia during the war, and then in South Carolina. He was imbued with lost cause values. So you were saying that once the Whites were basically allowed to vote and take control of the southern states, the lost cause mythology was in clay, whatever the word is. Realistically, isn't that also the case for all of the anti-Black laws? I mean, once Whites were allowed to vote, couldn't you pretty well write off Black interests in the south? You made it sound like Whites in the north sold out the Blacks. But realistically, isn't it the Whites voting in the south that killed off the Blacks? Well, of course. But it was a longer process than people often think. I mean, there were Black office holders in Congress until the turn of the 20th century, elected from the south. But yeah, of course. Of course, they could legislate. White redeemer state government could legislate anything they wanted. And they become more and more restrictive. I mean, and to me, the crucial thing is laws that legislatively made it impossible for Black people to cast votes. It took a while. It took longer than we think for that to completely take hold. But it did happen. Yeah, of course. I'm very hard on Northern voters because they shouldn't have known better. Those conditions are only enabled by the North. And the North sets the structural conditions that enable the South to do what you're saying. Yeah, I mean, Black Republicans in the south were betrayed by White Republicans in the north. Yes. Thank you, fascinating talk. And I'm looking forward to reading the book. I wanted to ask, what was the basis and inspiration for what sounds like a successful counterinsurgency strategy 150 years in the past? Or would you say that it was a successful counterinsurgency strategy given the fate of reconstruction and the rise of the lost cause narrative? OK, it was successful up to the point where it had to stop. Because of financing, something as banal, so it would seem, as just budget. Congress wouldn't budget the money. It wouldn't budget the money. Those troops should have remained in the South. They should have been multiplied. And also, I should have said this earlier, and this bears on the last question, that it seems clear to me that former Confederates should have been barred from participation in public life much longer. Andrew Johnson is over there in the White House writing pardons at breakneck speed to get them back into public life. Just turn them out like that. And there is a strong sentiment in the north to conciliate, to bring the country back together, to reunite the country. And this, to a degree, is underpinned by racism. Because it's ultimately at the expense of black people, I mean, as somebody else said, I think, your neighbor here, this civil war was described well into my lifetime as being a tragedy, a tragic war of brother against brother, which is a very sort of romantic way of looking at it. Was it a tragedy or a necessity? A necessity can also be a tragedy. Personally, it needed to be fought. It needed to be fought. Problems of race and slavery could have been dealt with in theory much earlier in the Republic's history, our history. In practical political terms, they couldn't. And 750,000 people paid the price in blood between 61 and 65. But it was, I think, really poor politics, not to say morally questionable, to conciliate white southerners at the expense of black southerners. I think it's important to recognize, like at that time in the 1870s, the state is very, very small in the United States. It's just the beginning of the growth of the modern state, which takes 50 years, at least, to build. And this is well before the New Deal. So in the 1870s, when you're talking about the capacity of the courts to be able to handle some of these things, yes, they could have done it, but they would have had to have really, that would have had to have been a concerted effort to grow the administrative state and the judicial state in order to be able to do what you're saying. And simply the capacity wasn't there at that point in time. Not that they couldn't have, but they would have had to grow. It was very controversial. Exactly that point. It was extremely controversial. I think there were only something like 12 federal prosecutors operating in the entire former confederacy in 1872, 74. The Justice Department was created, in part, to deal with this situation, by the way. So the Attorney General is a new invention. Yes, there was. One of these things exists, the structure that we think of today. There's no bureaucracy, there's really no federal bureaucracy to put, or not much of one anyway. And despite some very, very capable people, the Grant's Attorney General, he had several, but the pertinent one is Amos Ackerman, who was a fascinating guy who looms large in my book. Originally from New Hampshire, but he spent his entire professional life in Georgia. Owned slaves at one point, but he repudiated slavery. For the war, he became a Republican, and a really dynamic and enforceful Attorney General, trying his best to carry through these prosecutions. But he's wrestling, it was like. Yeah, there's not much of there there. There's no there there, that's right. Any other questions? OK, one more, and then that will be the last one. Representing those folks who went to public school and learned nothing about this, this is all going to be informed by the 1865 podcast, which was a wonderful historical drama about what happened right after Lincoln's assassination. And I'm curious, it focuses so much on Edwin Stanton, and how he was really the lasting legacy of what Lincoln was after he dies. At least that's what they portray. And I'm a little curious of how big of an impact his death was in terms of this time period, and especially as Grant is coming on the scene. Wow, well, OK. Edwin Stanton is the only radical in the cabinet during any part of Johnson's administration. He's a close ally with Thaddeus Stevens, a hero of mine. Those who care or are interested in Thaddeus Stevens, his house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is now about to become a world-class museum. Should be opening next year 2025. It's a terrific project. Check it out. So at any rate, Stanton is the only radical. He's the only radical in the cabinet. He's embattled. He's not able to sway anyone. He's a thorn in the side of Johnson, as you would know. And Johnson's determination to push him out of the cabinet is what prompts impeachment. This is so deep in the weeds that I have time to go into it. And it's a terrific political battle whether Stanton will survive in the cabinet or not. Grant is a significant figure in this, because Stanton is ultimately replaced for a while by Grant. Grant yields the spot back to Stanton. And as I say, it's great politics, but injury. I mean, I think the real energy behind Reconstruction is coming from Congress. It's all in Congress, in both houses, because Republicans, especially during Johnson's years, heavily dominate Congress, as has already been said. Democrats, Southern Democrats, all left. They turned traitor and left. So there's a tremendous disproportion. If you look throughout American history, Congress is usually most dynamic when one party has a huge majority. Look at the early years of the New Deal and so on. I think Stanton is more significant to me anyway as a symbol than as an actor. Well, I want to thank everyone who came out tonight to hear this wonderful discussion. And I thank all of our viewers who joined us online. We will be having more of these discussions at the National Archives going forward this year. So keep an eye out. Keep an eye out for the emails and invitations. And I hope you will continue to join us. I want to thank Fergus so much for joining us and telling us about your terrific book. I highly recommend it. We will be selling the book outside here from our gift shop. And Fergus is going to be signing books. So if you have not yet purchased it, you have your opportunity and also makes a lovely gift as well. So thank you so much for joining us at the National Archives. And we hope to see you again. Thank you. Thank you, Colin. Thank you, Fergus. And thank you all for being here.