Africans in America; 104; Judgment Day; Interview with David Blight, Professor of History and Black Studies, Amherst College. 4 of 4

No, just go right into the dark, because I think we're not going to say that much. So we're rolling now. Why don't you start with just give me a, give me a sense of what David Walker's appeal was, what was he saying and what did this mean in its time? Well, David Walker's appeal, which he published first in 1829, is a classic example of a black abolitionist taking the two great traditions that black abolitionists relied upon, one of which was the natural rights tradition out of the American Revolution, and the other of which was a kind of biblical conception of history, a kind of apocalyptic conception of history. And what Walker wrote in 1829 was a 75-page pamphlet that argued many things, not the least of which was his direct appeal to Southern slaves to rise up, attack their slay, their owners, and strike for their own freedom. But what's most interesting about it is that Walker made himself and a self-appointed, literary liberator of his own people,

and what he does in this document is he appropriates Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. At the same time, he appropriates the Old Testament tradition of this apocalyptic view of history where God can enter history and intervene on behalf of his people. The mix of that became arguably the most radical abolitionist document published before the Civil War, partly because it is this direct appeal for insurrection among the slaves, and because it is such a fortune. Walker uses an Old Testament liberation theology mixed with the natural rights tradition of the Declaration of Independence and particular.

What he draws from the Declaration of Independence is Jefferson's language about the right of revolution. And from the Old Testament, from the Bible, what he particularly draws, he draws upon moments in the Bible where God enters history on behalf of his people and overturns the society. David Walker's appeal in a literary form is a great example of an American Jeremiah. It's a warning to the people that if they don't change their ways, it's a warning to the nation. That if the nation doesn't change its ways on slavery, God will enter history and destroy the earth as he says at one point in the document. God will enter history on this people and wreck the nation. What is David Walker saying in terms of the Declaration of Independence itself? What's most interesting about Walker's use of the Declaration of Independence is that it demonstrates

in many ways what what one scholar once called I'm sorry I didn't say that right I'll start that over. What's most interesting about Walker's use of the Declaration of Independence is that it demonstrates that the Black abolitionists, even early in this story, this is still the 1820s, to Black abolitionists that document was never to be de-revolutionized. To Black abolitionists, the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution was a source of a kind of founding creeds of their own movement. What what Walker does with the Declaration of Independence, as he says, that blacks are part of the language of Jefferson's first principles of the document, especially the principle of the right of revolution. I can say that it didn't better. The next question I want to ask you is also about what the response in the South particularly appeal. What kind of response does it get and why? David Walker got the attention of the South

and at least four Southern legislatures. They held special sessions and votes to censor the document. A number of copies of Walker's appeal were found in Savannah, Georgia. Apparently Walker sewed copies of his appeal into the clothing that he sold to sailors in his shop and his in his store in Boston. I believe the figure isn't about 60 copies of Walker's appeal were found in Savannah, Georgia. When that occurred, the document was condemned and a price was put on David Walker's head. What Walker's appeal is evidence of is that abolitionist documents like this could get the attention of the South, could inspire a kind of reaction and it is often out of these reactions

to abolitionist literature that the abolition movement itself begins to radicalize because when abolitionists begin to realize the kind of intransigence, the kind of resistance they're up against in the South, that's when they begin to realize they're in for the long haul. This is a great segue to the next major abolitionist publication which is Garrison's Liberator. Talk a little about the public, about Garrison's influence is what sort of drove him to doing the Liberator and also the difference between his view of history and and and and is the Liberator and Walker's. William Lloyd Garrison was the real thing in the sense that he was a professional radical. Garrison first published his newspaper The Liberator, the longest standing anti-slavery newspaper in the 19th century in 1831 in Boston. Garrison had actually cut his teeth

as an abolitionist though in Baltimore, in the South, working with Benjamin Lundy and opposing the colonization movement. Garrison was also one of the few white abolitionists who shouldered up to David Walker and actually published parts of, he serialized parts of Walker's appeal in the Liberator and in 1831 after Walker's death. But Garrison becomes in some ways a kind of combination of a radical abolitionist and almost an anarchist. Some of his doctrines like his doctrine of never joining political parties of urging his fellow abolitionists to not vote to not participate in the American Republic because in Garrison's view the American Constitution was a covenant with death because it supported slavery. Many of these, much of this doctrinaire approach by Garrison was difficult at times for other abolitionists to follow,

particularly black abolitionists because to many black abolitionists the emergencies of their lives were daily affairs. They had to become in some ways more practical abolitionists, but what they had in Garrison now was a voice and a newspaper that was challenging the United States like nothing ever had before and Garrison developed a very important following among the free black population of the North. Yes. Garrison also, in his writing, defines himself as a quaker and even though he publishes Walker's appeal, he's critical, he keeps his distance from some of the languages that Walker puts forward. Right. Well, one of Garrison's doctrines was what he called non-resistance. He was a pacifist. He had roots in Quakerism and Garrison believed. As hard as it is sometimes for us in the 20th century to fully understand this kind of outlook, Garrison believed that through

moral swation, as it was called at the time, by an onslaught of persuasion that southerners over time could be convinced of the sin of slaveholding. It was, in many ways, the project of the radical abolition movement of the 1830s led principally by William Lloyd Garrison to advance this idea of slaveholding as sin. It comes out of the evangelical tradition, it comes out of the second grade awakening, it comes out of this Christian evangelical notion that if you can convert individuals to salvation, you can also convert whole societies. I didn't quite finish off that distance attracted to William Lloyd Garrison, even attracted to this pacifist persuasion. They are themselves, like Charles Remon in Boston and others, they're attracted

to this pacifist outlook because they are themselves deeply imbued with this evangelical tradition of Christianity. But over time, black abolitionists living in northern cities, living again with the daily emergencies of the lives of fugitive slaves, find it increasingly difficult to abide by a kind of doctrinaire approach to anti-slavery, which Garrisonianism represented. And in many ways, to be a Garrisonian was to tow the line on four or five of these principles that Garrison advanced, not the least of which was non-resistance and pacifism. In the 1830s and into the 1840s, Garrison has a broad black following, but by the middle of the 1840s, the black side of the abolition movement is beginning to change because they simply have no choice.

Well, black and white abolitionists by the 1840s shared many things. They shared the same platforms, many of the same ideals, and many of the same struggles and experiences. But the lives and experiences of black abolitionists were also quite different. They could not afford the kind of debates over abstractions that Garrisonians often fell into, whether they were abiding by the doctrine of non-resistance or abiding by the doctrine of non-voting, became increasingly irrelevant to black abolitionists whose lives were driven every day by the emergencies of the fugitive slave crisis, of building schools, of trying to create orphanages, of trying to get land, of simply

dealing with the dailiness of living in free black communities in northern cities essentially in a Jim Crow world. Such that in the 1840s, a black abolitionist becomes as much a community building organization as it is an anti-slavery movement. Black abolitionists always had to deal with both sides of this equation, which was building lives for free blacks and their families in the north at the same time, trying to come up with reasonable strategies to attack slavery in the south and doing both of those at the same time. I want to talk a little bit about using black abolitionists and white abolitionists as sharing some of the lives and experiences to be that's a perfect lead in the talking about what the kind of anxiety that the nation of particularly in the north has around abolition's activity, and we're talking about Philadelphia, Philadelphia Hall Fire, 1838. So let me talk about what, just talk really about the fire in Philadelphia

in the structural moment in time after an abolitionist movement, right that it seems supposed to be. Well, by 1838, when Philadelphia Hall is burned in Philadelphia, this overt attack on an abolitionist meeting and an abolitionist site, the organ, sorry, thank you. Thank you very much. I said, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I still want to talk about that. Start that over. Well, by 1838, when Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia is burned, an overt attack on an abolitionist meeting and an abolitionist site, the organized anti-slavery movement, both in terms of organizations and with newspapers and so on, is now seven and eight years old across the north. It's been around long enough. It's been involved in petition campaigns by now in Congress. It's been around long enough to stimulate a popular reaction. And what occurs by 1836 through 1838

is increasingly anti-abolitionist mob violence. The case in Philadelphia is one of the best examples, but it's also the time when Garrison was attacked in Boston and dragged through the streets when other abolitionists were attacked on trains and thrown off of railroad cars. And perhaps one of the most famous examples is when Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist in Alton, Illinois, was attacked and assassinated and became, in effect, the first great martyr of the anti-slavery movement. But this moment in the history of abolitionism is important because it demonstrates that the anti-slavery movement by the late 1830s had in the perception of many, many northern whites become a true threat to the social order. Abolitionists were now seen by many whites as radicals who were going to create disorder. They were going to create that disorder because they were bad for

business. They were going to ruin the prosperity out in an Alton, Illinois and the kind of trade that merchants were engaged in on the Mississippi River and across the river with Missouri. They were bringing women to the platform and having women speak in public, which was a brand new affair and a threat to the order as people understood it. And perhaps most notably, they brought black abolitionists onto platforms, speaking in public, telling their own stories in their own voices. All of this now, to many white northerners, was a threat to the social order as they understood it. Let's talk a little bit more about the nature of the nature of this threat. What kinds of other abolitionists respond to these kinds of attacks? Aren't they surprised? I mean, one sent you to expect southerners to be outraged. But northern outrage is surprising. It's going to surprise you as I mentioned, surprise them in some sense. It's a very anti-abolitionist

violence. It's a very interesting turning point for the abolitionists themselves, Black and white, because they now realize they're not only up against a deep southern intransigence and an increasingly organized defense of slavery from the South. They've been reading that and hearing that since the 1820s. Now what they realize is they are faced with violent reaction to their movement within their own northern communities. And one of the most interesting effects that anti-abolition violence had on abolitionist is that it made abolitionism now also a cause of civil rights. It made free speech a cause. It made their very right to petition Congress to speak in public, to publish their newspapers, to not have their printing presses destroyed a major issue. In other words, it gave them now a way to appeal to their own constitutional liberties as abolitionists. And it is yet another factor in an increasing radicalization of the movement that we see happening by the late 1830s and into the 1840s. And I'd also point out that

as is true of most reform movements in American history, when movements like this encounter serious reaction, it causes the leaders of those movements to increasingly organize. Only one movement like this realizes the reaction is up against, does it begin to define what it's all about? That's one other thing I could say. Well anti-abolition violence also begins to force abolitionists like Garrison and his followers who have heard of or have been denouncing organized politics into increasingly more political behavior. Even though they're reluctant to get involved in politics, they increasingly have to get involved in public affairs and politics because that's where they're being attacked. When we think about the North and understand the lives of Black people in the 1840s especially, what does it look like if you're a Black person

coming to the North trying to make sense of this so-called free society? What are Black people doing and what are you up against in trying to carve out a Black for yourself? Well when Blacks came to the North and lived in Black communities in Philadelphia or Boston or New York or out West even in Cincinnati, they found themselves living in largely all Black enclaves. They found themselves living in communities where they created their own churches, where they struggled to create their own schools, where they occasionally as in New York would create orphanages, where they also tended, they tried to create a mutual relief associations to try to provide people with insurance policies, with the ability to buy land if they wanted to move out to rural areas. But most importantly I think over time what Black communities in the North faced was a problem of basic physical security, especially as the fugitive slave crisis and the fugitive slave problem heats up in the 1840s

and after 1850. To be Black in a Northern community was to live in a situation of physical insecurity. Well when Blacks came to the North and were living in cities such as Philadelphia and New York Boston or even out West in Cincinnati, they found themselves living largely in all Black enclaves, increasingly though what they encounter is a society that we would later call a Jim Crow Society. It was a society of very strict racial segregation. They found they were living in communities now with the immediate emergencies of providing schools for themselves, of building their own churches, of even creating occasionally orphanages, of trying to create insurance companies or mutual aid societies to help each other buy land if they wanted to move out to rural communities. But whenever they tried to travel or particularly when they tried to get employment and jobs they found

themselves living in a racist world. Northern society in Jacksonian America as we so often call it was a society where democracy was spreading more widely. The right to vote was spreading more widely but it was a white man's democracy and a lot of the most famous fugitive slaves who come north and live in northern communities were in some way shocked because they had come to the land of Canaan. They had come to the free north and they found themselves now living with a new and in some ways more insidious, more cunning kind of racism in the north than they had encountered even on the plantations of the south. Talk a little bit about what that looks like in terms of the kinds of rights that Black people have and don't have in the kind of struggles that they encounter. Well one of the hardest things Blacks faced in Antebellum northern cities was employment, finding jobs that were open to Black people. Jobs weren't closed off to them. They might get jobs as caucuses in the ports. They might get jobs on railroads. They might get daily employment

in towns and cities but by and large Blacks began to have to organize, they began to organize their own economic development associations to try to create jobs. What they also found themselves doing increasingly was also organizing for their own physical security. A great example of that is David Ruggles and the Vigilance Society of New York and other Vigilance societies created in northern cities. These were organizations not only to protect and harbor fugitive slaves but these were organizations designed in part to protect the physical security of the communities they lived in. Well one of the things that Black communities had to organize in northern cities were what were called Vigilance Committees. David Ruggles in New York City created probably the most

prominent one. These were organizations ostensibly to protect and harbor fugitive slaves but they really became organizations of community security. Organizations through a variety of means that tried to protect the physical security of Black communities in northern cities which were always under the threat of white hostility even white violence. Well indeed they were under the particularly after 1850 they were under the threat of slave catchers because of the new fugitive slave act of 1850 and these Vigilance Committees were in many ways the original version of what we would later call the underground railroad. Sometimes Vigilance Committees were armed they certainly were armed after 1850. After the passage of the fugitive slave act Black and some white abolitionists

across the north began to iron themselves in self-defense and in self-protection and indeed fought back against slave catchers in many famous examples. We were going to do the white and black abolitionists. Well black and white abolitionists often had different agendas by the 1840s and certainly in the 1850s but one of the greatest frustrations that many black abolitionists faced was the racism they sometimes experienced from their fellow white abolitionists. In many cases within the Garrisonian movement in particular the role of the black speaker or the black writer or the black abolitionist was in some ways prescribed as the famous case of Frederick Douglass's relationship with the Garrisonians. The Garrisonians wanted Douglass to simply get up and tell his story

to tell his narrative on the platform. They didn't want him to speak about northern racism to take on the whole picture of the anti-slavery movement as much as he did and it had a lot to do with why Douglass eventually broke with the Garrisonians. What kind of... what was... tell me and talk a little bit more about the challenge that this posed for both white and black abolitionists? Well it was a problem for white abolitionists as well because in many ways what they had discovered with black speakers is the authentic black voice and they were using it all that they could whether it was Douglass or whether it was Henry Garnett or whether it was others but for black abolitionists it became very often simply a case of the demand for recognition, the demand for mutual respect and it was also especially frustrating to black abolitionists to deal sometimes with the kinds of abstract debates that abolitionists would have,

that white abolitionists would have over doctrine and increasingly in the 1850s black abolitionists didn't have time to struggle over doctrinaire questions of tactics and strategy. They were by the 1850s about the business of building their own communities and trying to organize real strategies against slavery in the South. Do you want to add something to that? No I don't think so. I don't think I really hit that one. No, I don't think so. That will work for someone. I could add one little thing. Many white abolitionists had certain expectations of what black abolitionists were to provide or to perform within this movement. Very often black abolitionists had different, very different perceptions of what their role ought to be. So there was a struggle among white and black

abolitionists about just what the proper role of a black abolitionist was in this movement. We're going to make this interesting statement. He says that if I can't say essentially what I'd be like I'm going to say that your idea of abolition is abjects slavery. The future tips you're talking about the future tips coming to the North in this period in the 40s and how this is beginning to change things. Talk about that and the significance of that literature and what that does in the English movement. Well there's really a great transition that occurs in black abolitionism in the 1840s because now you've got a transmission of generations. The earlier generation of black abolitionists tended to be northern born. They tended to be garisonians. They tended to be organizers of newspapers and communities. But increasingly in the 1840s the black abolitionists of prominence are fugitive slaves.

Are people born in slavery in the South like Frederick Douglass like Henry Highland Garnett and many others who have now whose anti-slavery training, if you will, was on southern plantations. They have a very different perspective. They have a very different experience. They're less patient with with doctrine. And they are now about the business of the emergencies of black life in the North and of attacking slavery and meaningful ways in the South. This transition now is also driven by the writing of these slave narratives. Frederick Douglass is a narrative in 1845 is perhaps the most famous but there were many others as Josiah Henson's narrative, the Solomon Northrop's narrative and eventually as Harriet Jacobs narrative in the late 1850s. These stories of the fugitive slaves, their own autobiographies in their own voices in many ways became the most important kind of anti-slavery literature. And in many ways the slave narratives of the 1840s carved out a readership that Harriet Beecher Stowe then exploited so brilliantly with Uncle Tom's cabin in 1852.

The slave narratives themselves served many functions. They were escape stories which American readers loved. They were stories of from slavery to freedom. They were classic American tales and that they were ascension narratives, stories of people rising out of the depths of something to something higher. The probably the most important function those narratives served for black abolitionists is that it gave them their own authentic voice. It gave them a way now to declare their own freedom in their own language. Okay. Well the slave narratives in the 40s and 50s garnered a huge northern readership. Frederick Douglass's narrative sold 30,000 copies in the first five years after its publication.

And what's now happening in many ways is white northern readers are seeing slavery through the eyes of former slaves. They're understanding slavery now through the real stories of former slaves. In the south on the other hand white southerners are now beginning to react. They're beginning to react to the stories of fugitive slaves themselves. And they will especially react to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin after it exploded on the American readership in 1852. In fact, between 1852 and the Civil War, white southerners would write one counter Uncle Tom novel after another trying to answer or to counter some of the basic plot lines and stories of Uncle Tom's cabin. But the white south was especially upset about was the depiction both in the slave narratives and in Uncle Tom's cabin of owners like Simon LaGrieve, the famous character that Harriet Beecher Stowe created.

They just could not abide allowing the north to believe that slaveholders were like Simon LaGrieve. But of course in the slave narratives in Douglass's narrative and in others, a white northern readership had been introduced to a variety of Simon LaGrieve by the real names long before they ever read Uncle Tom's cabin. One of the things that happens with the fugitive narratives is that, which fascinates me, is that you have a series of maps of fugitives writing back to their masters and publicly sort of talking to their masters in the narratives or actually in letters that are published. Well, the slave narratives were in some ways an argument with America. They were an argument with the system of slavery. And in some cases, they were even personal arguments by former slaves with their own former masters. Frederick Douglass wrote a famous letter in 1848 to his old master, Aaron Anthony, which was a direct challenge to his own former master and he published the letter publicly.

These were ways now that a former slave could not only publish his own story to release his own identity to sort of gain a kind of order over the chaos of his or her own life, but it was a way now to directly challenge the people who had owned him with a free voice from a free place. And in this sense, it is one of the most direct kinds of challenges that probably ever occurred in this long north-south dialogue that we have in the 30 years before the Civil War. Let's leave that business for a moment. We can all roll up. Okay, thanks. Yeah. Can I stand up just for a second, just a second? Do you want some water, sir?

I hadn't realized that we had so many bull-affected bodies until you started to read about it. I love it. I remember it's interesting, too. I mean, 20,000 people. Do we have quiet outside? Quiet outside? Do you have any roll? Yes. Well, the fugitive slave law, as part of the Compromise of 1850, had great stakes for the south. The free soil impulse in American politics had already been unshucked, if you like, by the Mexican War. And what's has taken this for the south is their belief that a condemnation of slavery anywhere was to condemn it everywhere. Now, the fugitive slave law in 1850 says to the south now that not only is slavery legal, but it sets up a federal judicial system now for the retrieval of any slave who escapes onto free soil. It sets up a whole apparatus of adjudication. It writes into the Constitution in effect the right of slave ownership and the return of slaves to their rightful owners.

It now made the federal government and northern citizens complicitous in the process of retrieving and retaining slaves back to their masters. It also has great stakes for northerners, white northerners, because it is the first time really in the lives of many white northerners that the slavery issue, the slavery problem kind of comes home to their neighborhoods, it comes home to their communities. It means now to harbor a fugitive slave or even to be aware of a fugitive slave is to be committing a felony. In many ways, a lot of white northerners were converted to a kind of free soil cause and moderate anti-slavery impulse by this fugitive slave act because it brought home the problem of slavery into northern communities. I can come back to that business.

The fugitive slave law is important for many reasons. It becomes in some ways a measure of just how important this problem of the escape of fugitive slaves had become. Southerners have been demanding for years some increased federal authority in the retrieval of fugitive slaves. It's also an interesting legal turning point in American history because never had there been such a federal judicial system set up to adjudicate a crime before in American history as this alleged now crime of being a fugitive slave. A fugitive slave law required every state to have special magistrates to adjudicate fugitive slave cases and those magistrates as the law dictated would be paid $10 for every fugitive slave they return to their owners and $5 for every alleged fugitive slave that they acquitted.

A lot of northerners looked at this and they said wait a minute this law denies the right of trial by jury it sets up a clearly unfair system in the adjudication for a lot of northerners they simply couldn't understand legally how this thing could be constitutional from the beginning and yet it was passed. And it was passed of course because it was part of a much broader political compromise to try to contain this problem of the expansion of slavery into the west and if you like the expansion of fugitive slaves into the north. The talk a little bit more about the impact that the fugitive slave law has on northern Maine it seems also that a lot of northerners who might have supported a lot of northerners. That's a Nebraska act and why this becomes the next struggles national struggles and what's again what's at stake?

Well the Kansas Nebraska territory was all of the vast land left of the Louisiana purchase it was a vast area of the west and the northwest. What's at stake in the Kansas Nebraska act in 1854 is whether that territory would now be settled as slave territory or free territory. The Kansas Nebraska act as passed and written by Stephen Douglas in the US Senate in the spring of 1854 not only said that this part of the west would be settled on a basis of popular sovereignty which was the idea of holding a referendum and letting the people who settle that territory simply decide whether it would be settled. But the southerners put Stephen Douglas's feet to the fire his fellow southern Democrats put Douglas's feet to the fire and they demanded an explicit repeal of the old Missouri compromise line 3630 parallel across the continent which said from 1820 on the slavery could never exist north of that line. To a lot of northerners their conception of the future of the west was held together by this geographical guarantee that slavery could never exist above the 3630 parallel.

The Kansas Nebraska act now in 1854 erases that 34 year old vow which had the sanction of the Constitution. It now meant that the settlement of this vast territory of the west and the northwest was open to slavery. It was open to the possibility of three four five six eight new slave states. What it put at risk was the conception of America's future as a place of free labor a place where the small man the small farmer the immigrant could take his family west get land free or cheaply and provide a future a subsistence future at first but a more prosperous future beyond that for his family. What the Kansas Nebraska act stimulated was the biggest political reaction really in American history across the north and it wasn't as much a reaction against slavery itself as it was a reaction among white northern voters now defending their conception of America's future. Talk about these two there's a few of America's future that white southerners are particularly disturbed by which is the free soil field which which which which you mentioned before but doesn't include talk about what that is and what it is.

Well increasingly in the 1850s white southerners are threatened now by what in the north is being called the free soil impulse that even been a political party in 1848 called the free soil party and what that was rooted in is what we tend to call free free labor ideology. But what that is is a cluster of ideas it's the belief in republicanism it's the belief in in every individual man's mobility to move west and to get new land it's it's the belief in the in the in the immigrants ability to achieve a better future for his children it's it's the belief that unless you leave the west free for white man's mobility. That the concept the early 19th century the early 19th century conception of an American dream is put at risk.

What is it? Go ahead. What does that mean if you're a black person thinking about the west? Right well to blacks this notion of free labor ideology or keeping the west free soil is much less the issue and whether slavery actually will exist in the west because if slavery exists in the west it's only going to be reinforced in the south and if it's reinforced in the south then then the lives of blacks in the north are going to be just that much less secure. In the other hand the reaction to the to the Kansas Nebraska act and the birth of the republican party the birth of this new anti slavery political coalition was a source of real hope to northern blacks and particularly a black abolitionist who were who were responsible for thinking about anti slavery strategies. What I meant to see now black abolitionist saw was a new political coalition forming in the north that truly could threaten the future of slavery and to the extent that the republican party and this new political coalition could threaten the future of slavery black abolitionists were interested in it.

But the republican party eventually the party of Abraham Lincoln was not led by genuine abolitionist though abolitionist found a home in it. They knew that this party really stood largely only for stopping the expansion of slavery but a threat to slavery in the west was the hope of a threat to slavery in the south. It also seems that there's another that the other part of the whole free slow movement and this is really explicitly said by Wilmot and other people this is about white people. It was very clear for a few people in the west I am championing a future white men so that they don't have to be put into shame but it's a free black man. Talk a little bit about this is another vision of America.

Well the free slow movement from his very beginning was fraught with racism. David Wilmot author of the Wilmot Proviso in 1846 in the midst of the Mexican war said that stopping the expansion of slavery in the west was to preserve it for white men's freedom. There is no question that that racism itself was one of the roots of the free soil movement was keeping the west free for for the mobility and movement of white settlers. On the other hand what black northerners now had to face was the difficult struggle the difficult choice of trying to find a home in a new kind of political movement which was anti slavery which was going to stop the spread of slavery in the west at the same time they had to deal with all of this impulse that was born essentially from a kind of Jacksonian era white man's liberty to move west and own the west. What was in it for blacks and what they refused to ever let the Republican Party forget was that nevertheless to put slavery on a course of ultimate extinction as Lincoln said in 1858 was not only the interest of black people but it threatened the south and that which could threaten the south was something that blacks now had to find in a very difficult way to find a home in in the 1850s.

In fact one of the things about one of the things that makes life in the 1850s so desperate for blacks indeed on the eve of the most revolutionary changes arguably in the history of American race relations. Most black leaders in the north collapsed into a kind of despair by the mid and late 1850s because they saw a future now that was arguing about white men's liberty in the west that was arguing about stopping the spread of slavery and especially in the wake of the Dred Scott decision they found themselves living in a land that said they had no rights. Well the significance of the Dred Scott decision is that it comes in the wake of bleeding Kansas it comes three years after the Kansas Nebraska Act the country has now struggled for three years to understand the implications of popular sovereignty in the west and how the west would be settled free or slave.

And now this case of old Dred Scott finally gets to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says not only did Dred Scott not have the right to even sue in a federal court because he's black in a citizen but it goes one step further it goes for a much broader decision and in Chief Justice Tony's words blacks had no rights which whites had to recognize. In the wake of the Dred Scott decision spring of 1857 to be black in America was to live in the land of the Dred Scott decision which in effect said you had no future in America. So for the next three to three and a half years down to the outbreak of the Civil War and we must remember nobody knew that war was coming when it was coming to be black in America in the late 1850s was to live in a land that said you didn't have a future. Now a lot of legislatures in the north were what kind of reaction that the Dred Scott decision have that a lot of legislatures begin to respond and they're on way to this talk a little about that.

Well in the north legislatures and Republican politicians responded to the Dred Scott decision by questioning whether this was a Supreme Court decision that they should abide by. One of the issues that was clearly at stake in the Lincoln Douglas debates the Douglas and Lincoln's debates with Stephen Douglas and Illinois was indeed whether the Dred Scott decision was something Republicans would adhere to would live up to would even try to enforce and Stephen Douglas pressed Lincoln on this of course and Lincoln in effect ultimately said that the Republican party would remain hostile to the Dred Scott decision. And particularly cut that part out I wouldn't go on anymore. Staying with the whole question of the Lincoln who seems to get some right back in the comments how much time we have to make.

Black reactions to Dred Scott might be something to pursue here too. Well the Dred Scott decision did cause a genuine level of despair in northern black communities by the summer of 1856 and for some years after that. In speech after speech in 1857 and 58 Frederick Douglas would do his customary thing he would begin with hope in his speech. But he usually ended his speeches in 1857 and 58 with that biblical line that said I walk by faith and not by sight. He was struggling by that point to make the argument to his fellow blacks that they had a future in America and of course many black leaders in the wake of the Dred Scott decision were organizing immigration movements. They felt they had no choice but to try to organize immigration schemes either to the Caribbean to Central America or even to West Africa. Well first that period between 1857 and the outbreak of the war in 1861 is a time of increasing desperation among northern black leadership.

They begin to struggle with each other over how to define their futures. They have bitter debates over immigration schemes and whether to stay in America, whether to join this Republican party or find some way to join it, whether to organize even some kind of third political party movement. There had been a movement in the 50s called the radical abolition party. It's a desperate time for black leaders because they've been told now that their people have no future in the country and their struggle now is to define a future. The Dred Scott decision, the birth of the Republican party, this whole new political crisis over slavery is also important in the south among slaves themselves. We have plenty of evidence that shows us that beginning in 1856 with the presidential election campaign of 1856 and again in 58 congressional elections and certainly in 1860 there's a lot of reaction in the southern white press saying that that slave owners should keep their slaves away from political meetings because the more slaves gather around these political meetings the more they're going to become aware of the political crisis over slavery.

From 1856 to the outbreak of the Civil War there's a great deal of talk in the southern press about what we're called insurrection scares. They were insurrection scares particularly in Texas in 1860. Now often these were plots about which people knew next to nothing. These were fears as much as they were reality but there's no question that among the slaves in the south in certain areas they were becoming completely aware that there was a larger political crisis out there in the land over them over slavery. In fact there's a fascinating case in South Carolina in the late 1850s where a judge is sentencing a white man who had actually helped a fugitive slave escape from his plantation and in his instructions to this man when he's convicted the South Carolina judge says that he calls these fugitive slaves free agents quote unquote.

He says to this man you must be aware that these people were holding in bondage they have brains he says they have lives they have hands and bodies they can act and you by helping them may be fermenting an insurrection and it's a fascinating realization here by a southern judge that if they don't continue to find ways to clamp down on the slave population this larger political crisis over slavery may envelop those slaves as well. And indeed the greatest fear that white southerners had in the late 1850s one of the reasons they most feared this Republican party in the north and feared the election of Lincoln is because they feared for the security of themselves the security of their own plantations the security of their own communities against the very slaves they own. The more there was a larger national political crisis over slavery the more fearful southerners became of the security of slavery itself within their own communities and in that sense blacks in the South still living as slaves blacks in the north organizing in their own communities are very much important players in this story of the coming of the Civil War.

There's a realization all over America by the late 1850s that this crisis that is happening in the country has everything to do with black people wish it away as many white people wanted the crisis had everything to do with blacks. That's great. Talk a little bit about Abraham Lincoln. Talk a little about who he is and then what he represents as a Republican when he becomes so coming into the Republican party when the views are about race and about the future of America at this time. Well, Abraham Lincoln was a. Abraham Lincoln was a Henry Clay wig his political roots are in the wig party of Illinois in the 1830s and 1840s it served one term in the US Congress in the late eight he'd been in the Congress during the Mexican war.

There's no question Lincoln had always been anti slavery in the sense that he believed it was immoral it was wrong it ought to be put as he said in 1858 on a course of ultimate extinction. There's no question that that Abraham Lincoln was a free soiler in the sense that he was opposed to the expansion of slavery but Lincoln was also no abolitionist he had never joined any abolitionist organization sees not reality. It was very hard for blacks in the late 1850s to find a home in this Republican party very hard for them to put their confidence in the free soil movement because the free soil movement was not on its surface certainly about black rights in the north. It was not about the right to vote even in northern states are only a handful of northern states that even allowed blacks to vote this was a political party now that really offered again and again in the late 50s and only offered blacks a kind of a half loaf or as Frederick Douglass said of Lincoln's candidacy in 1860 what Lincoln and the Republicans brought to the cause was what Douglas called an anti slavery tendency.

Douglass knew as other blacks knew that the Republican movement was not an abolitionist party was not an abolitionist movement in the sense that they had learned that they had come to understand for the last 25 years. But what the Republican party represented and the way that blacks could find ways of hope in it is that Republican party especially when blacks now listen to Southerners what that Republican party had the capacity to do was break up the union and to the extent this party was causing enough trouble that it could cause political disorder that it could threaten the union that it might bring some kind of break in the nation. Then the Republican party did in spite of itself represent real hope. Now Frederick Douglass nor did any of the rest of black abolitionists really know what that this union would look like they didn't know where where secession would ever go if the South ever really did it they didn't know that the civil war would come as soon as it would but the fondest hopes that black abolitionists have in the late 1850s.

If indeed they still have hope that they have a future in America that future is going to depend on some kind of rending of the country some kind of breakup of the nation out of which would come a struggle over slavery itself. And of course that is eventually exactly what's going to occur but in 1858 or 1860 people did not know that what black abolitionists in the late 1850s had to struggle to find a way to do is to put their hope in a political movement that was only marginally in their interest. And in many ways that tells us a lot about black political history in America this has in many ways been the case throughout our political history.

The actual interest of black rights the actual interest of improving the lives of black communities has to find a home in larger political movements that exist for many other reasons as well. Will you take care of this plane? I'd like to let you know that. Well black abolitionists in part found a home in the free soil movement because this free soil movement which becomes the Republican Party advanced what we call the anti-slavery interpretation of the Constitution. And basically all that meant was that was the belief that the Constitution could be used to stop the spread of slavery wherever the federal government had jurisdiction. And at one point in 1851 Frederick Douglass said that if the United States Constitution cannot be put to the service of advancing freedom if it cannot be used to restrict the life of slavery then the only alternative left in America was overt revolution either leaving the country or revolution from within.

So in a sense these are the these are the choices now that abolitionists are going to face in the 1850s increasingly facing an entranjus and south a political culture and a political party system tearing itself apart but a political culture that is always trying to find compromises to hold the union together to to compromise this problem of slavery in the west. Abolitionists face these choices of trying to find ways to use the existing law of using the Constitution to threaten slavery to restrict it to control it in any way they can and as long as some kind of anti-slavery use of the Constitution survived in the 1850s there was still hope. If not as Douglass said revolution was probably the only alternative and that again is what makes important the Dred Scott decision by 1857 because through all these years it's now 37 years since the Missouri compromise the first great compromise of the 19th century for 37 years the struggle has been over whether the Fifth Amendment or various other parts of the Constitution is to be used to protect the right of the ownership of slaves or to restrict the spread of slavery.

Now here's the Supreme Court in 1857 saying no what the Fifth Amendment means is a man has a right to take his slaves anywhere in the United States he so chooses black people have no rights that white people must abide by and black people therefore have no future in the country. So again in the wake of 18 of the spring of 1857 to be black in America was to live in the land of the Dred Scott decision which means is to live in the land of the Dred Scott decisions interpretation of the Constitution. Well I think John Brown sought out Frederick Douglass for several reasons one was Douglass's great symbolic significance in the North and in black communities he saw Douglass as somebody who could probably help recruit for him recruit young blacks to his cause.

He also sought sanction I think from abolitionists like Frederick Douglass for the schemes he was planning and indeed he wanted Douglass to personally join him. John Brown lived for a full month in January of 1858 and Douglass's home in Rochester, New York where Brown actually wrote his so-called provisional constitution that he was going to put in place in Virginia after he attacked Harper's Ferry. But their relationship was very interesting in many ways what Douglass found probably in John Brown with somebody who would go and do deeds who would commit acts that most other people simply wouldn't. And again this is the late 1850s this is this period of increasing desperation in black life in the North and among black abolitionists. Here's John Brown who out in Kansas in 1856 had gotten involved in this border civil war who had attacked pro-slavery people who had led a band of warriors who had actually attacked a plantation in Missouri and helped 11 slaves escape and transported them across the North into Canada.

Here is somebody who had gone out and lived and acted upon these radical abolition doctrines and who had a plan crazy as it may have been to attack a federal arsenal and try to create slave insurrection throughout Virginia. In the end it was not something Douglass would join because he thought it was an act of desperation. He knew it was doomed to fail. He thought everybody involved in it would probably either die or end up in federal prison. On the other hand Douglass's relationship with John Brown is not unlike the relationship many other abolitionists had with John Brown. They were glad John Brown was out there. They were glad John Brown was going to do this because frankly by the late 1850s they didn't know what other alternatives were left. There is an increasing sensibility among abolitionists by the late 1850s though they do not know how to plan it that slavery is only going to be destroyed through some kind of violence.

We should be very careful about giving them prescience about this. There is a lot that is prophetic about abolitionism. There is a lot that is prophetic about abolitionism in the late 1850s but they did not know exactly how slavery would end but they were increasingly convinced it was going to end in some kind of violence. There was a man with the courage and maybe the were with all to organize in some way to begin that process. Hence they supported him and Douglass personally supported him. Even down to that last meeting they have in August of 1859 at a stone quarry outside of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania where Brown makes one last attempt to personally recruit Douglass into his band of men for the attack on Harper's Ferry which would occur two months later. Douglass says to Brown you will all be captured. You will be enveloped in steel I think he said and he said I cannot go with you and Douglass went home. Of course Douglass's involvement in this was in any legal definition as a participant in the conspiracy.

There is no question Douglass knew as much as any abolitionist. He certainly knew as much as the so-called Secret Six New England abolitionist as to what John Brown was really up to. After Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry and his capture of course Douglass fled for his life into Canada and off to Great Britain and he escaped in Rochester, New York with only about 48 hours to spare when federal marshals came to try to arrest him. As a co-conspirator in effect in John Brown's Harper's Ferry raid. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry is probably most significant because of the reactions it caused in its wake. In the North the reaction was profound. Every poet seemed to have to write a John Brown poem. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, name an American author at the time. They all found in Brown a kind of perfect martyr to the abolitionist cause.

But possibly. Well there are many mysteries about John Brown. One of those mysteries is sometimes why didn't more blacks join him? Why wasn't his band or his army larger? And part of the answer to that is that Brown never fully explained his plan, his plan of attack on Harper's Ferry and what he expected to do after that to very many people. And indeed the question is often asked why did more slaves from within Virginia join him? Well in part they didn't because the raid only lasted 48 hours. But it's important to remember that slaves in the South and free blacks in the North, fugitive slaves in Canada where he recruited were always suspicious of there would be liberators. There were suspicious of those people who would risk their lives to try to establish their freedom.

And join John Brown was to join a movement was to join an effort the end of which you just would not know and many of them who actually do join Brown. The blacks who joined John Brown were themselves former slaves and in at least two instances were going back into Virginia to find their own families. And there were very personal reasons to join this this little army that was going to try to attack a federal arsenal and to try to start some kind of enveloping slave insurrection. Who's the other person besides the shield green? Yeah, I don't remember the details. He gets a letter. He gets a letter from his wife. That's danger filled new. That's right. No, but there were at least two. It's newbie who gets the letter. That's right from his any other senior. But that's already in the film.

In many ways, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry is most significant because of the reactions it caused both in North and South. In the North poets reacted everywhere. Ralph Aldoamerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Greenleaf Woodier, and many others all wrote poems about John Brown. It was as if they had found the perfect sort of abolitionist martyr and to understand John Brown and John Brown's raid, you really do have to understand him in the context of this Christian conception of martyrdom. And indeed, he sought martyrdom. There's no question about that on a personal level. But it's equally interesting to look at politicians, to look at Republicans, to look at the broader political culture in the North and how people respond to Brown. A lot of Republican politicians in late 1859 and then in the election year of 1860 will condemn John Brown's acts. They will condemn him. They will say he deserves to be hung. But they'll do it in such a way as to put greater emphasis on slavery itself. On how this problem of slavery, if the country doesn't find a way to deal with it, if the country doesn't find a way to stop its expansion, it's going to face more and more John Brown's and more and more violence.

And in that sense, John Brown's acts at Harper's Ferry did have the kind of political impact that one can suspect he had hoped for. John Brown becomes now in some ways the template, the subject, the possibility that everybody is talking about as this election year of 1860 begins. And in the South, of course, the reaction was in many areas near hysteria. There were attacks in the South on Northerners who were teachers. There was an itinerant piano tuner in Tennessee who was tired and feathered. There was a northern born college president in Alabama who was forced out of his position. There were many southern communities who believed that the next attack somewhere in the South was going to come into their community. That was in part, of course, because John Brown had actually kept maps of the southern states with X's drawn on many southern communities. The purpose of which we really don't know, but when those maps were published and written up in newspapers, many southern communities believed that they were next, it caused an especially hysterical reaction in the state of South Carolina.

And when the election year comes in South Carolina in 1860 and the Democratic Party plans to have its national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, the very real context in which these political events now occur in the South is the context of the aftermath of John Brown's raid and the fear of continuing enveloping slave insurrections. How about the slave, the southern action among slaves in special Virginia? Well, within Virginia, within the immediate community around Harper's Ferry in northern Virginia, the response among slaves to John Brown was not much. Brown went out into three or four different farms and plantations and freed some dozen or so slaves. But most of the slaves, perhaps all of the slaves in Virginia, did not know the raid was even coming.

They didn't know who this John Brown really was. And again, slaves were always suspicious of there would be liberators. They had a kind, if you like, of a peasant consciousness that slaves were protective of the few things they had. The few things they had were their lives, their families, maybe a garden plot. And to put all of that at risk, they needed to know exactly what they were putting at risk for. What happens in Virginia, of course, is that the white Virginians use this aftermath. They use the fact of the lack of slave support for John Brown, and after all the raid only lasted 48 hours. White Virginians will use the lack of slave support for John Brown to try to demonstrate their case about the loyalty of slaves. There will be a great deal of rhetoric in late 1859 and 1860 in Virginia about the loyalty of Virginia slaves to their masters and to the system because they did not join this insurrection. No question that John Brown's raid and then Brown's hanging gave blacks in the North a hero as they had never had before.

This was a genuine martyr now in the Christian tradition. It's extremely significant in the sense that this was a white man who put his life and his courage on the line to try to free black people. There just hadn't been many examples of that in American history. John Brown became in the fullest sense of Christian martyr. There were pilgrimages to his grave site up in Lake Placid, New York. The day of his execution became a day that was celebrated. Black celebrated Brown now in song, in church services, and in poetry. And indeed there was not a black gathering after the outbreak of the Civil War, whether that was a recruiting session to try to raise militia and troops or whether that was a church gathering to support emancipation efforts where John Brown's body, the famous song, was not sung. John Brown became now a principal member of a kind of pantheon of black heroes.

I mean, and the eulogies. The reaction of Northerners to the Kansas and Nebraska can be puzzling, but what one has to understand is what's at stake for northern voters. What's at stake for Northerners now is their conception of an American future which keeps the West free, which leaves it open to the mobility of small white families moving west, getting land, building new communities. Being able to establish a society in the West that's based on the individual work ethic, being able to establish communities in the West where they don't have to compete with oligarchies like slaveholders. Being able to establish communities of homesteading where the land is essentially free or very cheap, and they've come to believe that a territory that becomes slave labor, degrades free labor. Gobbles up the land and establishes a political culture run by oligarchy.

They become convinced due northern voters in the 1850s that slavery is in some ways a kind of conspiracy against their conception of what society and labor and liberty ought to mean and be in the American future. Moreover, northerners really reacted to the Kansas and Nebraska Act because they believed that they had been living in a political culture that had a guarantee, that had a guarantee against the spread of slavery anywhere north of the 3630 parallel in the entire West. Now, it is true that many northerners would never move to Kansas or moved to Nebraska or move beyond Iowa somewhere, but lots of immigrant Americans who are now moving out of those eastern cities, coming out to Ohio or even out to Illinois. The most important thing in America's future was the availability of land in the West, and anything that threatened that future was a threat to their future.

And the Kansas and Nebraska Act now said, in effect, the entire American West is open to the future spread of slavery and all that would come with it. So it was as though the Kansas and Nebraska Act had erased a 34-year-old guarantee that it somehow protected northerners' conceptions of what the American future would be like. So for northerners, the South wasn't part of America's future. No, northerners wouldn't say that the South wasn't part of America's future, but what northerners were saying now is they didn't want slavery to be part of the future in the West because slavery would threaten their values, their sense of a work ethic. They were especially concerned that wherever slavery went, it tended to degrade the meaning of labor, it tended to degrade the meaning... Was a civil war inevitable over slavery in America? No, a war was not necessarily inevitable over slavery in America, but a deep conflict over slavery was.

Any nation that establishes itself on these kinds of creeds as America did, and that makes America unique, if you like, a nation that founds itself on first principles, all four of which are right there in its founding document, the Declaration of Independence, a nation that founds itself on the creeds of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the right of revolution, the doctrine of consent, and the doctrine of equality. And yet, develops one of the largest systems of human bondage in the world is living a national life of contradiction. It therefore sets up a contradictory history that inevitably is going to lead to conflict. You could argue, as many have, and I think there's much to this, that America was, in some sense, destined probably for some kind of violent conclusion to the slavery problem in part because it was a republic. Now, there are other nations in the world that freed their slaves without violence, without massive violence. Russia is the classic case. In Russia, Serfdom was destroyed by an edict of the Tsar. With virtually no violence whatsoever, it was ended in an autocracy largely without violence.

America, because it was a republic, and because slavery became so central to the national economy, because people on all sides were in some way invested in this system in one way or another because it was so important to the economy, slavery, therefore, is going to be defended if it's prosperous. It grew, of course, in leaps and bounds in the 19th century. American slavery was the only slave system in modern history that naturally reproduced itself, or the slaves grew geometrically. And, of course, in time, by the 1820s and 1830s, white southerners were beginning to defend slavery in a very organized way as a positive good, as a system that is the best kind of labor, as a system that is the best kind of organic society. Because America was a republic, where opinion was supposed to be free, where dissent was free, southerners were going to over time defend this system. And yet on the other side, because it's a nation founded on these creeds of liberty and equality, inevitably, there was going to be an anti-slavery movement, and those two movements were eventually going to clash.

So, yes, the conflict without question was inevitable, whether it ends in the kind of war we had is a bit of another story. That has to do with the breakup of the political culture in the 1850s, with southern decisions to secede from the union. That has to do directly with the nature of disunion that leads to war, and the Republican parties and Lincoln's insistence on preserving the union, and therefore going to war to do just that. What were the visions of how slavery would end? Well, visions of how slavery would end in America is a difficult problem to understand, but from very early on in the age of the American Revolution, there are many people who believe, Jefferson seemed to have believed himself as did many of those Jeffersonian idealists, as we call them, that somehow in the American Republic eventually slavery simply would die out. It would wane, it would erode, it couldn't quite live in the same air with American liberty over time.

But, of course, a lot of that thought is happening before the invention of the cotton gym, before the vast expansion of slave labor and cotton production across the deep south. In many ways, if the United States had not had this vast and rich soil of the great deep south, the Mississippi Valley, and even parts of the southwest, let's not forget Texas. If America had not had this rich and seemingly limitless supply of land to the west in the early 19th century, of course, slavery would never have spread as far as it did. It is possible that slavery might have somehow been snuffed out over time if you can imagine counterfactually that the American, North American continent ended at the Appalachian Mountains. On the other hand, because there was this vast west, Americans have to struggle now with the spread of this institution, on the wake of the War of 1812 and by the 1820 Slavery is expanding in the leaps and bounds. And the population of slaves is growing geometrically into the west.

And indeed, the westward movement was part of southern history, and slaves were part of that westward movement within the south. By the 1820s, 30s and 40s now, Americans have got to try to imagine a future of whether it has slavery in it or not. And this was the task not only of abolitionists in the north, of free black abolitionists who moved to this free soil of the north and tried to imagine the future in their own communities, but of course it's the task of white southerners to imagine a secure future for this system that they now are becoming increasingly committed to both economically and morally. When Americans thought about the future of slavery in the 30 years before the Civil War, they increasingly began to think about it with a sense of dread. It's one of the great ironies and contradictions of antebellum America. It's one of the great ambiguities of antebellum America, because on the one hand, this period of American history is a time of tremendous hope. It's a kind of golden age of hope and literature, and in art we call it the American Renaissance, the writings of Emerson Thoreau, Whitman, and so many others, and we should add to that Frederick Douglass.

But on the other hand, it's also a society living with a contradiction, deep within itself, with an increasing sense of dread that their future involves a conflict that they may not have solutions for. And one can see that sense of dread all over the culture by the 1850s. This tremendous sense of hope that's alive and well with this expansionist country begins to run into the wall of the politics of slavery by the 1850s. And of course, the event that opened that issue up probably more than anything else was an expansionist war. It was the Mexican War, which once and for all brought slavery out of its shell back out into the political culture. It could no longer be gagged in Congress or kept out of political debate.

It was outside in American life now forever, and it had to be dealt with. In that sense, blacks within America, Africans within America are the very real center of the story. And that if America is to be what it says it is in its founding documents, if it is to find a way to create a future that in some way fulfills any of those creeds, it has to find a way to explain to itself why black people are kept in slavery and white people are free. It is ultimately a contradiction that forces answers to questions as simple as that. And now you find by the 1850s a lot of white northeres, let's remember the vast coalition that's put together in the Republican Party by the late 1850s are white voters, are immigrants themselves or the sons of immigrants. These are people who grown up believing in America as a place that's essentially a white man's country, but they come to believe that it must be a country where the future where slavery can no longer be allowed to exist. And in that sense, a lot of white racist northerners do become anti-slavery in the sense that they want a future where they don't have to compete with the system rooted in a labor system like slavery.

Okay, I'm going to say about Lincoln at this point. Well, the election of Abraham Lincoln was not the only thing white southerners were reacting to in 1860 in this movement towards secession. They were reacting now to their perception of a political party that now could control the presidency, could control the federal government, would restrict the future of slavery. And southerners for years now, whatever the Republicans should start that one over. Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 threatened white southerners. And it is in part the reason that this secession movement begins in the wake of Lincoln's election. But white southerners now are reacting to a political movement, the Republican Party, that they believe, stands not only for the restriction of the spread of slavery into the West and sort of cutting off slavery's future, but they have for years believes whether they're interpreting this rightly or wrongly.

That the condemned slavery anywhere is to condemn it everywhere. And what white southerners are particularly responding to in the secession crisis of 1860 and 61 is their conception now. And this was no simple thing for white southerners to do. There was a great deal of impulse against secession in the South. What they're responding to in great parties, their own sense of a kind of shrinking South, which meant a shrinking system of slavery, a shrinking of their way of life as they knew it, a shrinking of their political economy as they understood it. They saw in Lincoln and the Republican Party, whatever that Republican Party said it stood for, as a threat to the future as they understood it.

Now blacks in the South, slaves all across the South are not unaware that this crisis in the larger politics is happening. They're not unaware that somehow out there in the national election somebody's been elected to the presidency that has threatened the hell out of their masters, that has caused great tension all over Southern society. They're also not unaware of John Brown's raid, which occurred only a year before the election of 1860. Something out there in the larger political world is causing the South to retreat in on itself, to organize itself in a kind of unusual, desperate way. And indeed, lo and behold, has forced them even to secede from the Union and form their own government. Its forced white southerners to be organizing in militia groups, blacks go out to watch these militia march. They go to listen at political meetings whenever they're allowed to. They're very much aware in the South that something out there is happening and it's probably got a lot to do with them.

We know that in part because of a lot of interviews done a long time after emancipation in the Civil War where elderly slaves remember the late 1850s and they remember that election year of 1860 and how the masters and their families were so upset and always out marching and always going to political meetings and lo and behold it had something to do with them. We ran out. We ran out. We had a concert. Well, Twitter likes 3-4-7s. Yeah.