Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Hey, Hey, revisionist history listeners, It's finally happening. One of
Speaker 2: the most exciting projects I've ever been part of at
Speaker 2: Pushkin our collaboration with Barack Obama on the story of
Speaker 2: one of the most consequential and overlooked periods in American history,
Speaker 2: the years after the Civil War, known as Reconstruction, when
Speaker 2: after tearing itself apart over slavery, the United States tried
Speaker 2: to put itself back together. It's easily one of the
Speaker 2: most traumatic eras in American history. The South is a
Speaker 2: smoking ruin, consumed by violence and chaos in the aftermath
Speaker 2: of the war. There are millions of people in the
Speaker 2: South who just a few years before were treated as property,
Speaker 2: who are now asking to be treated as people. The politics,
Speaker 2: the economics, the morality of the Republic is up in
Speaker 2: the air, and Reconstruction is the time when the country
Speaker 2: struggles to meet those challenges and both succeeds and spectacularly
Speaker 2: fails in ways that would have consequences for the next
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty years. The series is called Reconstruction
Speaker 2: The Unfinished Promise, an eight part podcast hosted by me
Speaker 2: in collaboration with Barack Obama. I'm going to play the
Speaker 2: first episode for you now. You can find the rest
Speaker 2: of the series on Audible or wherever you get podcasts.
Speaker 2: After the War.
Speaker 3: Douglas is such a fascinating character.
Speaker 2: Frederick Douglas perhaps America's most famous abolitionist leader, a person
Speaker 2: who is a child escaped from slavery, who went on
Speaker 2: to become a global spokesperson for freedom. When I sat
Speaker 2: down with President Barack Obama, he really wanted to talk
Speaker 2: about this larger than life man.
Speaker 3: Douglas is constantly battling between a desperate belief that the
Speaker 3: better angels of our nature will win out. He has
Speaker 3: seen this possibility of genuine equality, but he has also
Speaker 3: seen the very worst right. He himself has experienced slavery.
Speaker 3: He has watched slave catchers grab people and haul them away,
Speaker 3: and he has witnessed equivocation and cowardice and betrayal.
Speaker 2: I am stuck by that same thing that he sees
Speaker 2: the best. And he also is clear eyed about who
Speaker 2: we are and what we're capable of. And this is
Speaker 2: why I think he belongs in that kind of pantheon.
Speaker 2: A founding father. Frederick Douglas is a founding father.
Speaker 3: He really is.
Speaker 4: He really is.
Speaker 2: I said that not only because it's true, but because
Speaker 2: Douglas is one of those people who should have been
Speaker 2: crushed by history. Instead, for a long time he bent
Speaker 2: it to his will. The movement to end slavery did
Speaker 2: not begin with Frederick Douglas. That movement existed before the
Speaker 2: United States did. A year before the Declaration of Independence,
Speaker 2: Philadelphia Quakers founded the nation's first anti slavery society, and
Speaker 2: from the beginning of the Transatlantic slave trade, enslaved people
Speaker 2: organized revolutions and plotted escapes, and the abolition movement churned
Speaker 2: out fiery figures that are now well known. Harriet Tubman
Speaker 2: and sojournal Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and David Walker, the
Speaker 2: radical John Brown. But certainly Frederick Douglas was best known
Speaker 2: in his own time, both in the US and abroad.
Speaker 2: And so we begin our series with Douglas in the
Speaker 2: opening days of recon Instruction in eighteen sixty five. He's
Speaker 2: a man who thinks he's just completed his life's work,
Speaker 2: but he's about to discover that his work has just
Speaker 2: begun by Malcolm Gladwell. And this is Reconstruction, the Unfinished Promise.
Speaker 2: One of our editors, Ky write has been obsessed with
Speaker 2: Douglas for years, and particularly with the evolution of the
Speaker 2: man's politics.
Speaker 5: Can you help people understand just how big a deal
Speaker 5: Frederick Douglas is at this stage in history. I mean,
Speaker 5: like today he would have a billion Instagram followers, like
Speaker 5: the most streamed podcasting history.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Kai called up David Blight, who is the Frederick Douglas expert.
Speaker 2: Blight wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Douglas. He's
Speaker 2: such a fan that when he spoke with Kai, he
Speaker 2: was wearing a T shirt with a porch of Douglas
Speaker 2: on it. I'm going to let the two of them
Speaker 2: tell the story of this influential activists second chapter.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting to think about. Yeah, he'd be he
Speaker 1: need to be the guest on every major podcast, or
Speaker 1: he'd be doing his own He's a very big deal.
Speaker 1: At the end of the war, his image was everywhere.
Speaker 1: He really couldn't go anywhere without being recognized. Part of
Speaker 1: it was the hair.
Speaker 5: Think about the term hair on fire. It's a shock
Speaker 5: of hair alliance made.
Speaker 1: Part of it was just his presence and the voice,
Speaker 1: almost a shouting kind of baritone voice.
Speaker 6: I know of no country where the conditions for affecting
Speaker 6: great changes are more favorable than here in these United States.
Speaker 1: I found all kinds of stories in the press of
Speaker 1: people reciting the first time they saw Douglass. To a
Speaker 1: certain degree, he became a kind of wonder of America.
Speaker 4: The reception so to mister Frederick Douglas, the celebrated Frederick Douglas,
Speaker 4: has been lionized in this city for several days, notwithstanding
Speaker 4: the severe rainstorm last evening, Frederick Douglas drew out an
Speaker 4: immense audience.
Speaker 1: You came to America from Europe, for example, touring the country.
Speaker 1: You wanted to see Niagara Falls, you wanted to see
Speaker 1: New York City, Washington, d c. A few other things.
Speaker 1: But if possible, especially if you came out of reform traditions,
Speaker 1: try to see Frederick Douglass.
Speaker 5: But in the spring of eighteen sixty five, this world
Speaker 5: famous man who has spent literally his entire life working
Speaker 5: to abolish slavery, at the moment of his triumph, he's
Speaker 5: in a funk. He's kind of a guy who's lost
Speaker 5: for purpose.
Speaker 1: Right, he is loss for purpose at the very end
Speaker 1: of the words the way he described it. And he
Speaker 1: drew right from one of his favorite moments in Shakespeare.
Speaker 1: He said, a fellow's occupation is gone.
Speaker 6: I feel as though I have reached the end of
Speaker 6: the noblest and best part of my life. My school
Speaker 6: is broken up, my church disbanded.
Speaker 1: He didn't know, He didn't know where to go. He
Speaker 1: didn't quite know what to do. Douglas see, he's one
Speaker 1: of the rare, rare radical reformers in history who lives
Speaker 1: to see his cause triumph in the middle of his life.
Speaker 1: He's only forty some years old, and he will face
Speaker 1: the challenge the rest of his life to sustain the
Speaker 1: victory of emancipation, the great transition from slavery to freedom.
Speaker 1: But no one knows, No one really knows yet where
Speaker 1: any of this is going. What he was certain of
Speaker 1: kai is that the Confederate South was not going away.
Speaker 1: He kept warning, he warns, They're still there. The slave
Speaker 1: holding spirit he always is warning, is still out there.
Speaker 5: This ghost haunting the United States. I can't overemphasize how
Speaker 5: fast history moved. In eighteen sixty five. The war ends
Speaker 5: in April, and in less than a week Abraham Lincoln
Speaker 5: is assassinated. That obviously catches the whole world off guard.
Speaker 5: But for Frederick Douglas, who again is already disoriented by
Speaker 5: the fact that he's just witnessed the completion of his
Speaker 5: whole life's mission, I just I can't imagine how he
Speaker 5: processed Lincoln's death.
Speaker 1: Douglas was horrified, and there are many ways to understand that.
Speaker 1: He goes back to Rochester at the news of Lincoln's assassination,
Speaker 1: and a huge crowd had gathered in the central Square
Speaker 1: of Rochester, New York, where he lived, and Douglas went
Speaker 1: and joined the crowd, and there were some speakers, and
Speaker 1: the crowd called for him. And it's a very moving
Speaker 1: statement he made.
Speaker 6: It is a day for silence and meditation, for grief
Speaker 6: and tears. Yet I feel that though Abraham Lincoln dies,
Speaker 6: the Republic lives.
Speaker 1: He said at that moment he had never felt a
Speaker 1: kinship for his fellow Americans, and by that I think
Speaker 1: he met white people. He'd never felt such a kinship
Speaker 1: as he did through Lincoln's death.
Speaker 5: Just think about these two men. Here's Douglas, a formerly
Speaker 5: enslaved child who now commanded the attention of the President
Speaker 5: of the United States.
Speaker 3: During the war.
Speaker 5: He was able to look Lincoln in the eye and
Speaker 5: challenge him to do more, not only in slavery, but
Speaker 5: to arm black men in the fight to save the Union.
Speaker 5: And here's Lincoln standing astride history, trying to save the
Speaker 5: Union and gradually realizing that Douglas was right. The only
Speaker 5: way forward for the United States was to abolish slavery.
Speaker 5: Both Lincoln and Douglas are legendary pragmatists, cerebral by nature,
Speaker 5: but each of them see the national story in fully
Speaker 5: biblical terms. They're ready to partner in this divine task
Speaker 5: of rebuilding the United States. And then bang, partnership is
Speaker 5: snuffed out in one gunshot on Easter weekend, no less,
Speaker 5: just days after the end of the war. And the
Speaker 5: man who rises into the presidency as a result of
Speaker 5: that gunshot, he is There's no a Lincoln.
Speaker 7: Andrew Johnson is an interesting character. He was literally the
Speaker 7: polar opposite of Lincoln.
Speaker 5: Manisha Sinha is chair of the history department at the
Speaker 5: University of Connecticut, and she has written a great deal
Speaker 5: about Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, America's troubled seventeenth president.
Speaker 3: She's an advisor on our series.
Speaker 7: Johnson seems to have been a person who really sort
Speaker 7: of lacked political skills. You know, he's petty, he's mean,
Speaker 7: he's vindictive, he's abusive, he's a drunk. He's not a
Speaker 7: great character to inhabit the office of the President of
Speaker 7: the United States.
Speaker 5: But Lincoln had picked Andrew Johnson as his vice president
Speaker 5: in eighteen sixty four as a show of national unity
Speaker 5: because Johnson was a Southern Democrat instead of a Northern Republican.
Speaker 5: The first sign of trouble came on Lincoln in Johnson's
Speaker 5: inauguration day.
Speaker 1: There is a story that Andrew Johnson was a little
Speaker 1: schnocker on some brandy or bourbon or something, because he
Speaker 1: had a horrific toothache that day. Now he might have
Speaker 1: been sipping for other reasons, who knows, but he was
Speaker 1: not entirely sober at his inauguration as vice president of
Speaker 1: the United States. Now, at that point, what Douglas and
Speaker 1: others knew about Andrew Johnson. He's obviously from Tennessee. He's
Speaker 1: from East Tennessee. You know, there's an old saying about Johnson.
Speaker 1: Quote Old Andy never went back on his raisin, which
Speaker 1: means he knew where he was from. He was a
Speaker 1: damn good stump speaker. You know he could jump on
Speaker 1: a wagon and get the farmers cheering about something. He's
Speaker 1: a former slaveholder that was known, who never believed in secession,
Speaker 1: which is why he stayed in the Union. He was
Speaker 1: the only senator from a seceded state to stay in
Speaker 1: the Union, which is what got him on Lincoln's ticket. Which,
Speaker 1: by the way, I've always said this to all my
Speaker 1: dear friends who are Lincoln scholars, why don't you ever
Speaker 1: talk about that. That's one of Lincoln's biggest mistakes.
Speaker 3: It's a horrible, horrible it's a horrible choice.
Speaker 1: I mean politically at the moment, it's it's a unity,
Speaker 1: it's a reunion ticket for this symbolism of the Southerner
Speaker 1: who stayed in the Union. He's a unionist he really was,
Speaker 1: but a former slaveholder, racist to in his bones, and
Speaker 1: a fervent states rights advocate. Of course, nobody expected presidents
Speaker 1: to be shot.
Speaker 5: Andrew Johnson takes over the presidency at the start of
Speaker 5: the remarkable era that historians now call reconstruction.
Speaker 1: We get to use the word unprecedented sometimes because it
Speaker 1: fitness uh. The country had never been in this situation.
Speaker 1: The end of a massive civil war. America was now
Speaker 1: being reinvented. But how what would it do? Who were
Speaker 1: the freed people? How would they be defined?
Speaker 5: Frederick Douglas couldn't have felt Andrew Johnson was fit to
Speaker 5: lead the nation through this conversation, But Douglas did have
Speaker 5: a clear idea about how to answer that crucial question
Speaker 5: of reconstruction.
Speaker 6: Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.
Speaker 5: We need voting rights first and foremost, and the Republicans
Speaker 5: who controlled Congress mostly agreed that's where Lincoln had been headed.
Speaker 7: Lincoln when he died, one of the last speeches he
Speaker 7: made was to say black men who are educated and
Speaker 7: who have served in the Union Army should get the
Speaker 7: right to vote. So that's like the first public endorsement
Speaker 7: a black citizenship.
Speaker 1: But Andrew Johnson, he wanted nothing to do with black
Speaker 1: civil rights political rights. He to the extent we can
Speaker 1: understand him, he wanted black people to become a kind
Speaker 1: of an American serfdom. They would remain agricultural workers, they
Speaker 1: would stay in the South, they would be a backbone
Speaker 1: of the economy. To the extent Andrew Johnson thought much
Speaker 1: about all of that. That's as far as he ever
Speaker 1: wanted to go.
Speaker 5: He did think a great deal about how to handle
Speaker 5: the Confederacy. Remember, the Confederate states left the Union, they
Speaker 5: succeeded and took up arms against the United States, and
Speaker 5: their leaders, many of whom had been members of Congress
Speaker 5: before the war, were actual literal traders. So one of
Speaker 5: the big questions of reconstruction was how to bring these
Speaker 5: states and their traitorous political leaders back into the fold. Johnson,
Speaker 5: he had been a senator from a Confederate state at
Speaker 5: the start of the war. He just personally refused to secede.
Speaker 5: So now he's president and he wants to traders back in.
Speaker 1: They would be immediately readmitted to the Union. He would
Speaker 1: accept some disenfranchisement of ex Confederates, but even that he
Speaker 1: had an alternative plan for which was to require them
Speaker 1: to apply to him personally for pardons. And that is
Speaker 1: existence well, that whole staff of people working for the
Speaker 1: executive branch just processing pardons for ex Confederates. They would
Speaker 1: literally line up at the White House or executive building
Speaker 1: nearby to get their pardons. Johnson liked the idea. See
Speaker 1: Johnson was Johnson had the self image of a poor boy.
Speaker 1: His poor boy from East Tennessee Hill country, and he
Speaker 1: did grow up with not much, although he had owned
Speaker 1: some slaves, and he was proud to tell you that.
Speaker 1: But he liked the idea of the old planter class,
Speaker 1: which he was not from having a kind of coward him. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that sounds familiar too, doesn't The guy with the sense
Speaker 1: of grievance is going to make everybody who might have
Speaker 1: looked down on him come and bend their knee. He
Speaker 1: loved it.
Speaker 3: And meanwhile, black people have to get caught in the middle.
Speaker 1: Of the Black people ain't even gonna be allowed in
Speaker 1: the middle of it.
Speaker 6: Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he is no friend of
Speaker 6: our race.
Speaker 5: So Douglas sees Andrew Johnson and now he's.
Speaker 3: Got his new vocation.
Speaker 5: Now he has found his calling in opposition essentially to
Speaker 5: Andrew Johnson.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and what a great foil.
Speaker 2: David Blight and Ky Write will be back to talk
Speaker 2: more about this coming showdown. But first I'm taking us
Speaker 2: to meet the man who really got it underway. Remember,
Speaker 2: Frederick Douglas and Andrew Johnson both need public opinion on
Speaker 2: their side. After the war. Douglas argues that the federal
Speaker 2: government has an obligation to the newly freed people of
Speaker 2: the South. It must not only protect them, but give
Speaker 2: them the right to vote. President Johnson disagrees. He doesn't
Speaker 2: think the federal government should do much of anything. In fact,
Speaker 2: he's busy pardoning Confederates. But Johnson is only president by
Speaker 2: dint of a terrible tragedy. His power is tenuous. He
Speaker 2: needs some ammunition for his arguments, so he sends a
Speaker 2: man you've probably never heard of on a historic mission.
Speaker 2: It's a mission that will become hugely consequential for reconstruction,
Speaker 2: just not in the way Andrew Johnson hopes. This is
Speaker 2: our dude, right. So, in my many years in New
Speaker 2: York City, I have come walked past this monument many times.
Speaker 2: We're in the corner of one hundred and sixteenth Street
Speaker 2: on Morningside Drive, on the edge of Columbia University, on
Speaker 2: the border between Columbia and Morningside Park, one of the
Speaker 2: crown jewels of Manhattan. And there is this statue which
Speaker 2: I have passed and it has never occurred to me
Speaker 2: to stop and wonder who it is. And it's this
Speaker 2: actually quite imposing statue of a man in what looks
Speaker 2: like a man in his sixties or seventies, wearing a
Speaker 2: kind of long imposing cloak, holding onto his hat and
Speaker 2: a very determined look on his face. And it says
Speaker 2: Karl Schurt's a defender of liberty and a friend of
Speaker 2: human rights. So this statue dates to nineteen thirteen. At
Speaker 2: the dedication ceremony for this statue, just to choke, the
Speaker 2: one who led the movement to get a built said,
Speaker 2: this day will not end the memory of Carl. Does
Speaker 2: anyone remember Carl Schertz today? I don't think so. I've
Speaker 2: never seen anyone standing in front of that statue. The
Speaker 2: man actually seems lost to history, like a lot of
Speaker 2: what happened in the Reconstruction era. At the end of
Speaker 2: the Civil War, Carl Schertz was in the vanguard of
Speaker 2: American politics, one of the people who had rallied around
Speaker 2: Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to save the Union.
Speaker 1: If you think about it, this was a we saw
Speaker 1: them and talk about generations in politics, and this was
Speaker 1: a generation of political leaders. They won the Civil War,
Speaker 1: they mobilized as no one had ever imagined, and here
Speaker 1: they are in eighteen sixty five, victorious. It's a remarkable generation.
Speaker 2: And Carl Schertz is right there in the middle of it.
Speaker 2: He's a German immigrant who fought and lost in movements
Speaker 2: against European monarchy before coming to America and joining Lincoln's
Speaker 2: political coalition. He sees the United States as a laboratory
Speaker 2: for democracy, as an example to the world, no more royalty,
Speaker 2: no more aristocracy, and no more slavery.
Speaker 8: The awesome thing about shirts is, on the one hand,
Speaker 8: he's on kind of the side of liberal democracy for
Speaker 8: all these mass movements in the nineteenth century. He's like
Speaker 8: a street running across the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: Finally I found someone who's gotten into call shirts as
Speaker 2: much as I have John Grinspan, a historian at the
Speaker 2: Smithsonian Institute who studies the politics of the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 8: And the other thing is Carl Schurtz is incredibly kind
Speaker 8: of needling and pushy, and the Yiddish word nunik is
Speaker 8: the word I think of for him. He's such a difficult,
Speaker 8: sometimes annoying individual that it's fun to see the humanity
Speaker 8: in somebody who's involved in all these kind of go
Speaker 8: arious movements.
Speaker 2: It's the summer of eighteen sixty five, just a few
Speaker 2: months after the Civil war has ended, and after Lincoln
Speaker 2: has been killed, Andrew Johnson, the new president, asks Carl
Speaker 2: Schirtz to come to the White House. Shirts thinks here's
Speaker 2: an opportunity to shape the reconstruction effort that's just begun.
Speaker 8: He sees some things he thinks Johnson is doing wrong,
Speaker 8: and he, in a maybe naive wa thinks he can
Speaker 8: go to Johnson and talk him into a better policy.
Speaker 2: What follows is a little digression, but it's hard to resist,
Speaker 2: and it tells you something about how Americans were handling
Speaker 2: both the trauma of war and a president's assassination. On
Speaker 2: the way to Washington to see Johnson, call Shirts stays
Speaker 2: with friends in Philadelphia. The family had lost two sons
Speaker 2: in the war. Unlike so many others, they wanted to
Speaker 2: communicate with them through a seance. The night Shirts arrives,
Speaker 2: they invite him to join in. He wrote about it later.
Speaker 9: One of the daughters, an uncommonly beautiful, intelligent, and high
Speaker 9: spirited girl of about fifteen, had shown remarkable qualities as
Speaker 9: a writing medium. When the circle was formed around the table,
Speaker 9: hands touching, a shiver seemed to pass over her fingers
Speaker 9: begun to twitch. She grasped a pencil held out to her,
Speaker 9: and as if obeying an irresistible impulse, she wrote in
Speaker 9: a jerky way the messages given her by the spirits.
Speaker 8: He asks that the girl call up the spirit of
Speaker 8: Abraham Lincoln, who's just dead for a few months at
Speaker 8: that point, and he claims that at the seance, the
Speaker 8: spirit of Abraham Lincoln tells him that Johnson is going
Speaker 8: to send him on an important mission. It's classic Carl
Speaker 8: Shirts that he has Lincoln come back from behind the
Speaker 8: grave to give him a promotion.
Speaker 2: But now after that side trip to the spirit world,
Speaker 2: he is a real president to meet. I asked historian
Speaker 2: Militia Sinha about that encounter. So Shirts goes to Washington,
Speaker 2: sits down with Johnson, or what does Johnson explicitly ask
Speaker 2: him to do?
Speaker 7: So Johnson asks Shirts to go to the Southern States
Speaker 7: and says, I want you to report on the conditions
Speaker 7: in the South right now. And I think he wants
Speaker 7: to use Shirts. He wants to send Shirts to the
Speaker 7: South to report back to him. Hey, everything is fine,
Speaker 7: it's all hunky dory, and you know the South can
Speaker 7: rejoin the Union.
Speaker 2: Oh so, from Johnson's perspective, he's looking He's looking for
Speaker 2: a kind of cover story. He thinks he thinks Shirts
Speaker 2: is going to come back with something that kind of
Speaker 2: justifies him, sort of washing his hands of the whole
Speaker 2: thing and moving on. Why does he think Shirts could
Speaker 2: would be such a willing dupe?
Speaker 7: That's an interesting question. I think he's also calculating that
Speaker 7: he wants to send someone one who would be believable
Speaker 7: to the Radical Way and to the entire Republican Party.
Speaker 2: In mid July, Carl Shurtz begins his fact finding mission.
Speaker 2: He boids a steamboat from Washington to the South Carolina
Speaker 2: Sea Islands. A US military officer takes him to a
Speaker 2: plantation near Beaufort, far down the eastern coast, just shy
Speaker 2: at the South Carolina Georgia border. Shirtz is excited by
Speaker 2: what he sees.
Speaker 9: Fields free from wheats, the cotton plants healthy, The cornfields
Speaker 9: promised a rich shield everything, breathing thrift, order and prosperity.
Speaker 9: We passed by a large log house in which a
Speaker 9: colored preacher was exalting his congregation for it was Sunday.
Speaker 7: This is an area where the Union Army, abolitionists free
Speaker 7: people themselves are experimenting in systems of free labor that
Speaker 7: would replace slavery. Freed people's idea of free labor who
Speaker 7: was linked to their own traditions of economic attime. They
Speaker 7: envisioned free labor as sometimes even ownership of land, but
Speaker 7: definitely control over who they labored for, how much they labored,
Speaker 7: and what they would get for it.
Speaker 2: But this pleasant picture would not hold up for long.
Speaker 2: Schwartz leaves the Sea Islands and takes another boat to Charleston,
Speaker 2: South Carolina. That's where he starts to encounter the real
Speaker 2: devastation of the war.
Speaker 8: He writes about how long it takes getting into Charleston
Speaker 8: before he sees a living creature. This city that was
Speaker 8: so kind of glamorous and sophisticated on the eve of
Speaker 8: the war now looks like it's just completely in ruins.
Speaker 8: He really sees the impact on urban civilian populations and
Speaker 8: the degree of destruction, and the degree of the word
Speaker 8: he keeps using is sullenness. The degree of anger and
Speaker 8: resignation and frustration that he runs into among the kind
Speaker 8: of especially the white elite Southern population who previously had
Speaker 8: been so dominant in a place like Charleston, now will
Speaker 8: barely speak.
Speaker 2: Schurtz travels further into South Carolina. He rides on miserable
Speaker 2: trains through ninety five degree heat. His mule drawn wagon
Speaker 2: breaks down. The roads are nothing with deep sand. He
Speaker 2: visits Columbia, the state capitol, and finds it reduced to
Speaker 2: what he calls a confused mass of charred ruins. He
Speaker 2: passes through the remains of General Sherman's infamous march and
Speaker 2: sees a broad black streak of desolation.
Speaker 8: Reconstruction has barely begun. The war is in a sense
Speaker 8: over in that the major armies have surrendered and Jefferson
Speaker 8: Davis has been captured, but there's no sense of order
Speaker 8: or peace. There's just kind of degrees of chaos. And
Speaker 8: he Trat talks a lot as he travels to especially
Speaker 8: to kind of former Confederates and to white Southerners, and
Speaker 8: he gets a sense that there's a consensus that the
Speaker 8: Confederacy has lost and secession has failed, but there's no
Speaker 8: agreement on what should come next.
Speaker 6: They want to.
Speaker 9: Fight the war over again, and they are sure in
Speaker 9: five years we are going to have a war bigger
Speaker 9: than any we have seen.
Speaker 6: Yet.
Speaker 9: They are impatient to get rid of this damned military
Speaker 9: despotism they will show us what stuff Southern men are
Speaker 9: made of. Such is their talk.
Speaker 2: Shirts makes his way to Savannah, Georgia. He finds a
Speaker 2: city still reeling from mob violence that broke out on
Speaker 2: Independence Day.
Speaker 8: In Savannah. When they hold a Fourth of July celebration
Speaker 8: in eighteen sixty five, the war is over. It's a
Speaker 8: Fourth of July celebration that should be fairly patriotic. Basically,
Speaker 8: the only people that attender are Union soldiers and freed slaves,
Speaker 8: and they're attacked by an angry white mob.
Speaker 2: Historian Minitia Sinha says Carl Schurtz wasn't the only person
Speaker 2: to witness this kind of thing. The patriotic holiday had
Speaker 2: become a flashpoint.
Speaker 7: We see evidence coming from all over the South that
Speaker 7: the only people who want to celebrate the fourth of
Speaker 7: July are freed people. It's not Southern whites who are
Speaker 7: very silent and hate the Fourth of July. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 7: at that point, and black people really sort of seem
Speaker 7: to tie their demands and their freedom claims and their
Speaker 7: rights to the national government, to the Union army and
Speaker 7: to celebrating the nation.
Speaker 2: Shirts then takes a train to Atlanta. He spends the
Speaker 2: weekend there and finds yet more lawlessness.
Speaker 9: The planters in that region seem to have combined to
Speaker 9: keep the Negroes in their former state of subjection and
Speaker 9: to kill those that refuse to submit.
Speaker 8: There's a regular drumbeat at this time of open, regular
Speaker 8: violence against African Americans four willion slaved people across the South.
Speaker 8: One scar at the time estimates that there's a murder
Speaker 8: a day happening somewhere, and Enshirt sees a lot of it.
Speaker 9: The demoralization of the people is frightful to behold in
Speaker 9: its manifestations. Travelers are frequently attacked on the public highways.
Speaker 9: Cotton is stolen in enormous quantities, horses and mules are
Speaker 9: run off whenever they are not watched with the utmost care,
Speaker 9: and the perpetrators are almost never arrested and punished.
Speaker 8: I'd say the general direction of the whole trip is
Speaker 8: as he moves further south and certainly further west, he
Speaker 8: runs into more and more chaos, and more and more violence,
Speaker 8: and more and more kind of evil plans by former
Speaker 8: confederates to do whatever they can to get as close
Speaker 8: to re enslaving people as possible.
Speaker 2: Schurtz finally reaches the end of his journey in New
Speaker 2: Orleans in September. He's been traveling for two months through
Speaker 2: a treacherous landscape. He is by now completely exhausted and miserable.
Speaker 2: He writes about sweltering nights in the wretched country taverns
Speaker 2: and about knights spend in desperate fights with ravenous swarms
Speaker 2: of mosquitoes. He gets dengey fever, or as he calls it,
Speaker 2: break bone fever, and he's just appalled by all that
Speaker 2: he has witnessed in the South.
Speaker 9: This is the most shiftless, most demoralized people I have
Speaker 9: ever seen. If I can only make my main report,
Speaker 9: I shall open the eyes of the people of the North.
Speaker 2: Shirts returns to Washington, DC. He's ready to write a
Speaker 2: report to the President documenting all the devastation and lawlessness
Speaker 2: he's seen. This is precisely the assignment Andrew Johnson had
Speaker 2: given him, and now Shirts has the evidence he needs
Speaker 2: to make the President face reality.
Speaker 8: This reconstruction thing is not going to be fast, it's
Speaker 8: not going to be easy, and it's going to take
Speaker 8: effort on our part.
Speaker 2: But Andrew Johnson is no longer interested in what Carl
Speaker 2: Schurtz has to say.
Speaker 8: He doesn't want Shirts around anymore. He doesn't want Shirts
Speaker 8: involved anymore. He seems to regret ever giving him the
Speaker 8: position to begin with.
Speaker 2: And he certainly doesn't want to publish a report. Schertz
Speaker 2: writes it anyway. He includes everything he has seen, organized
Speaker 2: by topic, the rampant violence against black people and the
Speaker 2: quote utter absence of national feeling among Southern whites. He
Speaker 2: calls for troops to stay in the South, for black
Speaker 2: suffrage to be a condition of any Confederate state's re
Speaker 2: entry into the Union. He says there needs to be
Speaker 2: a reconstruction of the quote whole organism of Southern society
Speaker 2: to bring it in harmony with the rest of American society.
Speaker 1: This is the.
Speaker 2: Report he delivers to Andrew Johnson, and which he gives
Speaker 2: to Johnson's Republican enemies.
Speaker 7: I think Johnson miscalculates enormously.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is sort of a spectacular own goal
Speaker 2: by Johnson. He finds this guy, thinking this guy will
Speaker 2: be his kind of willing dupe. We'll go back and
Speaker 2: someone with some credibility with the abolitionists will go and
Speaker 2: give a nice whitewash for what's going on in the South.
Speaker 2: That will justify Johnson's own agenda. And the guy returns
Speaker 2: and he's not playing ball. He's determined to tell the truth.
Speaker 2: And now Johnson's stuck. He created this mess, from this
Speaker 2: political mess, for himself exactly.
Speaker 7: And I think Johnson realizes then that Shirts's report and
Speaker 7: other such reports coming out of the South is going
Speaker 7: to result in the failure of his own restoration.
Speaker 2: Plan, that plan being do as little as possible. Republicans
Speaker 2: ultimately forced the President to formally submit Carl Schurtz's report
Speaker 2: to Congress, thereby making it a fully public document. But
Speaker 2: the President attaches a note in which he tries desperately
Speaker 2: to obscure the facts. His damage control is kind of
Speaker 2: it's of audacious in his In his note, he says,
Speaker 2: perplexing questions were naturally to be expected. I love them
Speaker 2: the grammatical construction of this, You know, mistakes were made.
Speaker 2: Perplexing questions were naturally to be expected from the great
Speaker 2: and sudden change in the relations between the two races.
Speaker 2: But systems are gradually developing themselves under which the freedmen
Speaker 2: will receive the protection to which he is justly entitled.
Speaker 2: And then he celebrates the spirit of nationality which is
Speaker 2: rapidly emerging. For the sectional animosity of the war. It's
Speaker 2: like it's one plus one is three.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, And especially for Johnson to talk about free people, right,
Speaker 7: it is a bit in your faith, a bit rich,
Speaker 7: exactly in your face rich. And you know, but he
Speaker 7: really wants to tell nor that does Hey, the South
Speaker 7: is no longer bitter and they're not bitter against the
Speaker 7: Union or you that they have all accepted it. And
Speaker 7: in fact, Shout has just witnessed the precise opposite.
Speaker 8: I think one hundred thousand copies of it go out,
Speaker 8: which is a huge number back then, and it shows
Speaker 8: up in basically all the newspapers, and by the end
Speaker 8: of the year, Shirtz's report is really influencing how people
Speaker 8: are thinking about reconstruction.
Speaker 2: Carl Schurtz's report ended up being the most radical thing
Speaker 2: he ever did. He went on to have a successful
Speaker 2: career and then faded into obscurity, but his report on
Speaker 2: the condition of the South helped change the course of
Speaker 2: history because the Republicans in Congress immediately begin to challenge
Speaker 2: Johnson's policies. They put forth their own bold ideas for
Speaker 2: how the country should be put back together and This
Speaker 2: sparks what is really the first big battle between the
Speaker 2: branches of American government, the White House versus Congress, who
Speaker 2: will have the last word on the direction.
Speaker 1: Of the union.
Speaker 2: The following year, eighteen sixty six is one of the
Speaker 2: most momentous years in American political history, and that's when
Speaker 2: Frederick Douglas steps back into the fray. Here, I'm going
Speaker 2: to turn our story back to our editor, Kai writ.
Speaker 5: So you now have two starkly contrasting visions for how
Speaker 5: the country should be put back together. There's Andrew Johnson's approach,
Speaker 5: quick and easy, with everything essentially going.
Speaker 3: Back to how it was before the war.
Speaker 5: And then there's the approach Carl Schurtz advised in his
Speaker 5: report make black people full citizens with the right to vote,
Speaker 5: and use the military to enforce that right if need be.
Speaker 5: In January of eighteen sixty six, Congress convenes a set
Speaker 5: of hearings to debate the matter. They're considering a big,
Speaker 5: sprawling constitutional amendment that will settle things once.
Speaker 1: And for all.
Speaker 5: This is what will ultimately become the fourteenth Amendment to
Speaker 5: the US Constitution. And as all of this is consuming
Speaker 5: the national conversation, Frederick Douglas leads.
Speaker 3: A delegation of black men to the White House.
Speaker 1: They managed to get this appointment. They weren't invited.
Speaker 3: David Blaite again, Douglas's biographer.
Speaker 1: They went in with a prepared statement. They were able
Speaker 1: to get through part of their prepared state. They went
Speaker 1: there to lobby the President of the United States for
Speaker 1: the right to vote and protection and all the other rights.
Speaker 1: They got through part of their prepared statement, and Johnson
Speaker 1: interrupted them. He was not going to be preached to
Speaker 1: by a bunch of black men. In fact, at one
Speaker 1: point he said, I especially don't want to be preached
Speaker 1: to by people like you, and he meant Douglas, who
Speaker 1: can round out periods and put in fancy words, wow,
Speaker 1: oh yeah.
Speaker 3: People who know how to use their words. That I
Speaker 3: don't want to be.
Speaker 1: Stopped you speak to me like that. Johnson held the
Speaker 1: floor for forty five minutes. Johnson went on and on
Speaker 1: and on, and part of Johnson's speech, which is what
Speaker 1: it was, this was not a discussion. He said, you know,
Speaker 1: I once owned slaves. I want you to know I
Speaker 1: owned slaves, but I never sold one. That's he said
Speaker 1: that to them. I guess believing that would not offend them.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, no, no, he's really it's amazing. It
Speaker 1: got worse. Douglas would try to interrupt that, you know,
Speaker 1: like miss President may I, Miss President may I. And
Speaker 1: then Johnson finally just said no, you will not speak
Speaker 1: to me. And at some point there about fifty to
Speaker 1: fifty five minutes in, Douglas said, well, we're finished here.
Speaker 1: He asked his whole delegation to get up, and they
Speaker 1: walked out.
Speaker 7: John and can barely disguised his own racism. He doesn't
Speaker 7: see Douglas the way Lincoln sees him as a black
Speaker 7: leader and as somebody who's putting forth some legitimate ideas
Speaker 7: about black rights and reconstruction. It's just the opposite. He sees.
Speaker 7: He demeans Douglas and he calls him the N word,
Speaker 7: and he says, oh, he cut my throat off, just
Speaker 7: like any other slave.
Speaker 1: Douglas said he heard it. I've always imagined Douglas turning
Speaker 1: around looking at Andrew Johnson, you know, wishing he could,
Speaker 1: you know, take his teeth out, but probably just walked
Speaker 1: down and said, oh yeah. They went over to a hotel,
Speaker 1: they wrote up a statement, they published it immediately. The
Speaker 1: next morning in a Washington d c. Paper describing exactly
Speaker 1: what had happened. And then Douglas wrote a new speech.
Speaker 1: Douglas always did this when something big happens, go to
Speaker 1: his desk, and he wouldn't know exactly what he thinks
Speaker 1: about some until he went to his desk and he
Speaker 1: wrote a new speech, and he called.
Speaker 6: It Sources of Danger to the Republic.
Speaker 1: And it's a barn burner. He just butchered Johnson in
Speaker 1: this speech.
Speaker 6: I know of no greater misfortunes to individuals than an
Speaker 6: over confidence in their own perfections. And I know a
Speaker 6: fewer misfortunes that can happen to a nation greater than
Speaker 6: an over confidence in the perfection of its government.
Speaker 5: Douglas opens this speech by warning, Look, don't think there's
Speaker 5: something divine or almighty about the institutions that support American democracy.
Speaker 5: Starting with the Constitution itself.
Speaker 6: There were neither thunderings, nor lightnings, nor earthquakes, nor tempests,
Speaker 6: nor any other disturbance of nature when this great law
Speaker 6: was given to the world.
Speaker 3: The Constitution is just a piece of paper, ideas on
Speaker 3: a page.
Speaker 6: It is simply a human contrivance. It is the work
Speaker 6: of man and men struggling with many of the prejudices
Speaker 6: and infirmities common to man.
Speaker 5: And it is time to deal with those prejudices. Douglas says,
Speaker 5: if you want this to be a democracy, it's got
Speaker 5: to be a real democracy.
Speaker 6: Make it a government of the people, buy the people,
Speaker 6: and for the people, and for all the people, each.
Speaker 1: For all, and all for each.
Speaker 6: Blot out all discriminations against any person, theoretically or practically.
Speaker 6: Keep no man from the ballot box or jewelry box
Speaker 6: or the cartridge box.
Speaker 1: Because of his color.
Speaker 6: Exclude no woman from the ballot box because of her sex.
Speaker 6: Let the government of the country rest securely down upon
Speaker 6: the shoulders of the whole nation.
Speaker 5: But really, in this speech, Douglas is here to talk
Speaker 5: about leadership. He says, yes, we must update the Constitution,
Speaker 5: But even then, no matter what is written in that document,
Speaker 5: our liberty actually depends on something more active that That
Speaker 5: is the lesson of the Civil War, He says, Imagine
Speaker 5: if Lincoln had not been president during the war, imagine
Speaker 5: the wartime commander in chief as the guy we got.
Speaker 6: Now had that other embodiment of political treachery, meanness, baseness, ingratitude,
Speaker 6: the vilist of the vile, the basist of the base,
Speaker 6: the most execrable of the execrable of modern times. He
Speaker 6: who shall be nameless occupied the presidential chair. Your magnificent
Speaker 6: Republic might have been numbered with the things that were.
Speaker 5: Douglas wants them to get rid of the veto. He
Speaker 5: wants them to limit presidents to one term, and he
Speaker 5: wants them to get rid of Johnson's ability to pardon
Speaker 5: Confederates for sure.
Speaker 3: The president, he says, has too much power.
Speaker 6: Mister Johnson has sometimes overstepped this power in certain conditions
Speaker 6: of his mind, which are quite frequent, and mistaken himself
Speaker 6: for the United States instead of the president of the
Speaker 6: United States.
Speaker 5: There's a line in it that gives me chills when
Speaker 5: I read it today. He says, our government may at
Speaker 5: some point be in the hands of a bad man.
Speaker 3: When in the hands of a good man, it is
Speaker 3: all well enough.
Speaker 5: We ought to have our government so shaped that even
Speaker 5: when it is in the hands of a bad man,
Speaker 5: we shall be safe.
Speaker 1: Indeed, you know, can you imagine the first time I
Speaker 1: read that? I mean, it was well, I'd have read
Speaker 1: it before at some point, But you know, you can
Speaker 1: read a Douglas speech six times and find something new
Speaker 1: in it. But I used to ends. I used to
Speaker 1: end talks on Douglas with that during Trump's first term,
Speaker 1: then just end with that. I wouldn't mention Trump. I
Speaker 1: mean I didn't have to. You know, it was so poignant.
Speaker 1: But you know what he's saying there is we got
Speaker 1: problems without our constitution. There are structural problems with it,
Speaker 1: but we still do depend on human character on some level.
Speaker 1: It's such a prescient warning for all sorts of political systems,
Speaker 1: all sorts of places in the world. Democracy is a
Speaker 1: great thing, but it first needs law and structure. But
Speaker 1: then in these people who believe in it, and one
Speaker 1: without the other probably won't work.
Speaker 5: Frederick Douglas took this speech on the road campaigning for
Speaker 5: a bold new constitution, and Andrew Johnson barnstormed across the
Speaker 5: country with his own speech. It was an election year
Speaker 5: on top of everything else, so the president wanted voters
Speaker 5: to give him a new Congress, one that would support
Speaker 5: his vision for a quick and tidy reconstruction.
Speaker 7: He even says the real traders to the Union were
Speaker 7: not the former Confederates, but they are the radical Republicans
Speaker 7: of the abolitionists. These are the real enemies to the Union.
Speaker 7: Johnson is stuck in this very rigid racist view, so
Speaker 7: he thinks the majority will support him because he can
Speaker 7: play the race guard, and he does that constantly. If
Speaker 7: you give black people rights, you're taking them away from whites.
Speaker 7: He says that constantly, and he's stunned when northern whites
Speaker 7: do not get duped by his race guard because they're
Speaker 7: seeing what's happening in the South. So the sympathy is
Speaker 7: for freed people at that point. There is no sort
Speaker 7: of racial unity between northern whites and Southern whites. And
Speaker 7: this issue Johnson completely mistreats the political situation.
Speaker 1: And it totally backfired on Jones. The Republicans overwhelming won
Speaker 1: those congressional off year elections both houses and returned a
Speaker 1: veto proof two thirds majority of both houses of Congress
Speaker 1: that next fall.
Speaker 5: And for the next three years from eighteen sixty six
Speaker 5: to eighteen seventy, Congress passes law after law over andrew
Speaker 5: Johnson's vetos. They actually grow so tired of his obstruction
Speaker 5: that they impeach him in eighteen sixty eight. He's the
Speaker 5: first ever president to claim that dishonor Johnson survives by
Speaker 5: a single vote, but it hardly matters. He's a lame
Speaker 5: duck president, a leader without a party, and with Johnson
Speaker 5: out of the way, Congressional Republicans radically redesigned the United
Speaker 5: States of America.
Speaker 7: This would be a tremendous moment. It is kind of
Speaker 7: a refounding of the republic because suddenly you get this
Speaker 7: momentum for the first federal civil rights laws that are
Speaker 7: pasted to this type, the constitutional amendments, especially the Fourteenth Amendment.
Speaker 3: The Fourteenth Amendment.
Speaker 5: Establishing the idea of universal citizenship to anyone born in
Speaker 5: the United States, regardless of race or any other status,
Speaker 5: with equality before the law for all citizens, the Fifteenth
Speaker 5: Amendment establishing voting rights for black men at least, and
Speaker 5: civil rights laws that spell out how all these new
Speaker 5: rules are going to work.
Speaker 7: The founding principles of an interracial democracy in the United States.
Speaker 7: It's really an exciting moment in American history.
Speaker 5: Black Southerners leap at the opportunity as well.
Speaker 3: They rush to the polls to vote. Thousands of black men.
Speaker 5: Hold public office, and they helped create some of the
Speaker 5: most progressive state governments in the history of this country.
Speaker 5: States like South Carolina, create the first public slace schools,
Speaker 5: expand legal rights for women, abolished debtors, prisons, and so
Speaker 5: much more.
Speaker 1: They did engineer a remaking in the United States. And
Speaker 1: it's the only time for that brief moment from essentially
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty six to sixty eight sixty nine seventy, that
Speaker 1: that moment when the term radical had a sort of
Speaker 1: consensus traction.
Speaker 3: It's hard to matter in the United States. Radical was then.
Speaker 1: In power for three years. Yeah, by the way, the
Speaker 1: greatest legacy of the original Republican Party. Try this on
Speaker 1: as an irony. They believed above all in activist aggressive
Speaker 1: use of federal power. I mean, look at the ways
Speaker 1: they had just used federal power. That period is the
Speaker 1: laboratory where an American government, the idea of government was reinvented,
Speaker 1: for better or worse. You can hate it, you can
Speaker 1: love it, you can like parts of it. But that's
Speaker 1: the ear you got to you want to understand rights
Speaker 1: in America, you've got to go to reconstruction. You want
Speaker 1: to understand the role of government and society. Got to
Speaker 1: go to reconstruction. You want to talk about what governments
Speaker 1: other people and what people o their governments, you've got
Speaker 1: to go to reconstruction. You want to talk about race
Speaker 1: in America, you've got to go to reconstruction, because it
Speaker 1: kind of all starts there in the modern sense, and
Speaker 1: we relive it now every day, all the time.
Speaker 2: All the time. I would add that if you want
Speaker 2: to understand education in America, you've got to go to
Speaker 2: reconstruction as well, because that's when public education as we
Speaker 2: know it was established and much of it, but the
Speaker 2: people who'd just recently been enslaved
Speaker 6: La