Jeremi Suri is a historian at UT Austin. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Jeremi's Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremisuri
This is Democracy podcast: https://podcasts.la.utexas.edu/this-is-democracy
Jeremi's Website: https://jeremisuri.net
Jeremi's Books:
1. Civil War by Other Means: https://amzn.to/3hRa3cT
2. The Impossible Presidency: https://amzn.to/3hTn5X8
3. Henry Kissinger: https://amzn.to/3WqkBOY

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:27 - Revolutions and governments
18:06 - American Civil War
27:18 - Lincoln and election of 1860
31:08 - Slavery
44:17 - Freedom of speech
56:00 - Death toll of the Civil War
59:19 - Ulysses S. Grant
1:01:27 - Ku Klux Klan
1:13:10 - Robert E. Lee
1:20:53 - Abraham Lincoln
1:36:01 - If the south won
1:44:37 - Hypocrisy of the Founders
1:50:39 - John Wilkes Booth
1:53:54 - White supremacy
1:59:17 - Disputed elections
2:09:38 - Politics
2:18:03 - Donald Trump and Joe Biden
2:30:48 - January 6th
2:55:46 - Hope for the future

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This is something that's hard for Americans to understand.

Our system is built with the presumption when war is over, when we sign a piece of paper, everyone can go home.

The following is a conversation with Jeremy Suri, a historian at UT Austin.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Jeremy, sorry.

What is the main idea, the main case that you make in your new book, Civil War by Other Means, America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy.

So our democratic institutions in the United States, they are filled with many virtues and many elements in their design that improve our society and allow for innovation.

But they also have many flaws in them, as any institutions created by human beings have.

And the flaws in our institutions go back to a number of judgments and perspectives that people in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries had.

And those flaws have been built into our institutions, and they continue to hinder innovation and growth in our society.

3 of the flaws that I emphasize in this book are flaws of exclusion, the ways our institutions exclude people, not just African Americans, many different groups.

The ways our institutions also give power to certain people who have position rather than skill or intelligence or quality.

And third, and most of all, the ways our institutions embed certain myths in our society, myths that prevent us from gaining the knowledge we need to improve our world.

In all of these ways, our democracy is hindered by the false reverence for institutions that actually need to be reformed, just as we need to highlight the good elements of them.

And the myth, the false reverence, what are we talking about there?

So there's a way in which we believe that if we love our country, it's somehow wrong to criticize our institutions.

I believe if you love your country, you want to encourage your institutions to get better and better.

I love my university where I work, but I want it to be better.

I love my family, but I'm constantly telling family members how they can be better.

That's what true knowledge leadership is about, not just cheerleading.

Because the other extreme is a deep, all-encompassing cynicism towards institutions.

So for me, I like the idea of loving America, which seems to be sometimes a politicized statement these days that you believe in the ideals of this country.

That seems to be either a naive or a political statement, the way it's interpreted.

So the flip side of that, having a healthy skepticism of institutions is good, but having a complete paralyzing cynicism seems to be bad.

Absolutely, both are ahistorical positions.

What I try to do as a historian is work in between those spaces.

The virtue is in the middle ground, for better or for worse.

And what we have to recognize is that our institutions are necessary.

That's what Abraham Lincoln was heroically fighting for.

our union, we have to believe in our government, and we as business people, as intellectuals, we have to be part of the solution, not the problem.

But that doesn't mean just ignoring the deep flaws in our institutions, even if we find personally ways to get around them.

What really worries me is that there are a lot of very intelligent, well-intentioned people in our society who have figured out how to live with the flaws in our institutions, rather than how to use their skills to correct the flaws in our institutions.

There's folks like somebody that lives next door to me, Michael Malice is an anarchist.

Philosophically, maybe more than practically, just sort of argues for that position.

It's an interesting thought experiment, I would say.

And so if you have these flaws as institutions, 1 thing to do, as the communists did at the beginning of the 20th century, is to burn the thing down and start anew.

And the other is to fix from within, 1 step, 1 slow step at a time.

What's the case for both from a history perspective?

So historically, there has always been an urge to burn down the institutions and start again, start with a blank slate.

The historical record is that almost never works.

Because what happens when you destroy the institutions, you gave the example of the Bolshevik Revolution.

When you destroy the institutions, all you do is in the jungle that's left behind, you give advantages to those who are the most powerful.

Institutions always place certain limits upon the most powerful in the jungle.

If you go back to the jungle, the most powerful are actually going to have the most influence and most control.

So the revolutionaries who are usually the vulnerable turn out to then be the victims of the revolution.

And this is exactly what we saw with the French Revolution, with the Russian Revolution.

So the record for that is not a great record.

But I think we should be very cautious about that.

The record for working through institutions is a much better record.

Now what we have to be careful about is as we're working through institutions not to become bought into them, not to become of those institutions.

So what I've written about in this book and in other books, my book on Henry Kissinger, for example, is how it's important when in an institution to still bring an outsider perspective.

And I think most of your listeners are inside outsiders.

They're people who care about what's going on inside, but they're bringing some new ideas from the outside.

I think the correct statement to say is most of the listeners, most people aspire to be insider outsiders, but we, human nature is such that we easily become insider insiders.

So like, we like that idea, but the reality is, and I've been very fortunate because of this podcast to talk to certain folks that live in certain bubbles.

And it's very hard to know when you're in a bubble that you should get out of the bubble of thought.

And that's a really tricky thing because, like yeah, when you're, whether it's politics, whether it's science, whether it's, and any pursuits in life, because everybody around you, all your friends, you have like

a little rat race and you're competing with each other and then you get a promotion, you get excited and you can see how you can get more and more power.

And then you forget that you just collectively have created a set of rules for the game that you're playing, you forget that this game doesn't have to have these rules.

Like the financial system, everybody starts to like collectively agree on a set of rules that they play, and they don't realize we don't have to be playing this game.

special kind of human being, as opposed to being an anti-establishment on everything, which also gets a lot of attention, but being just enough anti-establishment to figure out ideas how to improve the establishment.

I think it's important to be an iconoclast, which is to say you love ideas, you're serious about ideas, but you're never comfortable with consensus.

I've written about that actually a lot in the New York Times too.

As someone who's half Jewish and half Hindu, I don't wanna live in a society where everyone agrees because my guess is they're gonna come after people like me.

I wanna live in a society that's pluralistic.

This is what Abraham Lincoln was really fighting for in the Civil War.

It's what the Civil War is really about and what my book's about, which is that we need a society where institutions encourage, as you say, different modes of thought and respect different modes of thought and work through disagreement.

So a society should not be a society where everyone agrees.

A democratic society should be a society where people disagree but can still work together.

I think you get there by having a historical perspective, always knowing that no matter what moment you're in and no matter what room you're in with really smart people, there are always things that are missing.

No 1 is clairvoyant and the iconoclast is looking for the things that have been forgotten, the silences in the room.

And also, I wonder what kind of skill, what kind of process is required for the iconoclast to reveal what is missing to the rest of the room?

Because it's not just shouting with a megaphone that something is missing, because nobody will listen to you.

It's honestly where I have trouble myself, because I often find myself in that iconoclastic role, and people don't like to hear it.

You know, I like to believe that people are acting out of goodwill, which I think they usually are, and that people are open to new ideas, but you find very quickly, even those who you think are open-minded, once they've committed themselves and put their money and their reputation on the line, they don't wanna hear otherwise.

So in a sense, what you say is bigger than even being an iconoclast, it's being able to persuade and work with people who are afraid of your ideas.

Yeah, I think the key is, like in conversations, is to get people out of a defensive position.

Like make them realize we're on the same side, we're brothers and sisters, and from that place, I think you just raise the question.

It's like a little thought that just lands.

And then I've noticed this time and time again, just a little subtle thing, and then months later, It percolates somewhere in the mind.

Because I also realized in these battles, especially political battles, people often don't have folks on their side that they can really trust as a fellow human being to challenge them.

And because in these battles, you kind of have a tribe and you have a set of ideas and there's another tribe and you have a set of ideas.

And when somebody says something counter to your viewpoint, you almost always want to put them in the other tribe as opposed to having, truly listening to another person.

That takes skill, but ultimately I think that's the way to bridge these divides is having these kinds of conversations.

That's why I'm actually, again, optimistically believe in the power of social media to do that, if you design it well.

But currently, the battle rages on on Twitter.

Well, I think what you're getting at, which is so important, is storytelling.

And all the great leaders that I've studied, some of whom are in this book, some of whom are not, whether they're politicians, social activists, technologists, it's the story that gets people in.

We're trained, at least in the United States, we're often trained to argue.

You're told in a class, okay, this part of the room, take this position.

This part of the room, take this position.

And that's helpful because it forces you to see different sides of the argument.

But in fact, those on 1 side never convinced those on the other side through argument.

It's through a story that people can identify with.

It's when you bring your argument to life in human terms.

And someone again like Abraham Lincoln was a master at that.

He told stories, he found ways to disarm people and to move them without their even realizing they were being moved.

Yeah, not make it a debate, make it tell a story.

That's fascinating, Because yes, some of the most convincing politicians, I don't feel like they're arguing a point, they're just telling a story.

I mean, when we look at what Zelensky has done in Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion, and I know you were there on the front lines yourself, it's not that he's arguing a position that persuade us, we already believe what we believed about Russia, but he's bringing the story of Ukrainian suffering to life and making us see the behavior of the Russians that is moving opinion around the world.

Well, the interesting stuff, sometimes it's not actually the story told by the person, but the story told about the person.

And some of that could be propaganda, some of that could be legitimate stories, which is the fascinating thing, the power of story is the very power that's leveraged by propaganda to convince the populace.

But the idea, 1 of the most powerful ideas when I traveled in Ukraine, and in general, to me personally, the idea that President Zelensky stayed in Kiev in the early days of war, when everybody from his inner circle to the United States, everybody in the West, the NATO, everybody was telling him, And even on the Russian side, I assume they thought he would leave, he would escape.

From foolishness or from heroism, I don't know.

But that's a story that I think united the country.

And it's such a small thing, but it's powerful.

It's the most basic of all human stories, the story of human courage.

And I remember watching his social media feed on that.

And he was standing outside, not even in a bunker, standing outside in Kiev, right?

As the Russian forces are attacking and saying, I'm here, and this minister is here, and this minister is here.

We're not stooges of the Americans who told us to leave.

We're staying because we care about Ukraine.

And the story of courage, I mean, that's the story that babies grow up seeing their parents as courageous, right?

And that's also the stories for better or worse that are told throughout history.

Because stories of courage and stories of evil, those are the 2 extremes, are the ones that are kinda, it's a nice mechanism to tell the stories of wars, of conflicts, of struggles, all of it.

And the reason I believe studying history and writing about history is so essential is because it gives us more stories.

The problem with much of our world, I think, is that we're confronted by data, we're confronted by information, and of course it's valuable, but it's easy to manipulate or misuse information.

It's the stories that give us a structure.

It's the stories where we find political value.

And what do you get from studying history?

You learn more stories about more people.

Yeah, I'm a sucker for courage, for stories of courage.

Like I've been in too many rooms, I've often seen too many people sort of in subtle ways sacrifice their integrity and did nothing.

And people that step up when the opinion is unpopular and they do something where they really put themselves on the line, whether it's their money, whether it's their well-being, I don't know.

And of course, during the war, like Ukraine, you see that more and more.

Now, other people have a very cynical perspective of it that's saying, oh, those are just narratives that are constructed for propaganda purposes and so on.

There's heroes out there, both small and big.

1 set of heroes I learned about writing this book that I didn't know about that I should have are more than 100, 000 former slaves who become Union soldiers during the Civil War.

We think of it as North versus South, white Northern troops versus white Southern troops.

There are, as I said, more than a hundred thousand slaves, no education, never anything other than slaves who flee their plantations, join the Union Army.

And what I found in the research, and other historians have written about this too, is they become some of the most courageous soldiers because they know what they're fighting for, but there's something more to it than that.

It seems in their stories that there is a humanity, a human desire for freedom and a human desire to improve oneself, even for those who have been denied even the most basic rights for all of their lives.

And I think that story should be inspiring to all of us as a story of courage, because we all deal with difficulties, but none of us are starting from slavery.

That's really powerful, that flame, the longing for freedom can't be extinguished through the generations of slavery.

There's some deep sense in which, while the war was about, in part about slavery, it's not, the slaves themselves fought for their freedom and they won their freedom.

Because if you say it's a war about slavery, then it sounds like it's an argument between the slave masters and the other white guys who didn't want slavery to exist.

But it wasn't, it was a war over freedom, especially after 1863, into the second year of the war, when Lincoln, because of war pressures, signs the Emancipation Proclamation, which therefore says that the contraband, the property of Southerners, i.e.

Their slaves, will now be freed and brought into the Union army.

Already the slaves were leaving the plantations.

They knew what was going on and they were going to get out of slavery as soon as they could.

But now it becomes a war over freeing them, over opening that opportunity for them.

And that's where we are in our politics today.

The challenge of our time is to understand how do we make our society open to more freedom for more people.

How did the American Civil War start and why?

So the American Civil War starts because of our flawed institutions.

The founders had mixed views of slavery, but they wanted a system that would eventually work its way toward opening for more people of more kinds, not necessarily equality, but they wanted a more open democratic system.

But our institutions were designed in ways that gave disproportionate power to slave holders in particular states in the union, through the Senate, through the Electoral College, through many of the institutions we talk about in our politics today.

Therefore, that part of the country was in the words of Abraham Lincoln, holding the rest of the country hostage.

For a poor white man like Abraham Lincoln, born in Kentucky, who makes his way in Illinois, slavery was an evil, not just for moral reasons.

It was an evil because it denied him democratic opportunity.

Why would anyone hire poor Abe to do something if they could get a slave to do it for free?

And his economy of opportunity for him had to be an economy that was open and that did not have slavery, particularly in the new states that were coming into the union.

Lincoln was 1 of the creators of the Republican Party, which was a party dedicated to making sure all new territory was open to anyone who was willing to work, any male figure, who would be paid for their work.

Free labor, free soil, free men, basic capitalism.

Southerners, Southern plantation owners were an aristocracy that did not want that.

They wanted to use slavery and expand slavery into the new territories.

The clash and our institutions that were unable to adapt and continue to give disproportionate power to these Southern plantation slave owners.

The Supreme Court was dominated by them, Senate was dominated by them.

And so the Republican Party came into power as a critique of that.

And Southerners unwilling to accept, Southern Confederates unwilling to accept that change went to war with the Union.

So who was on each side, the Union, Confederates?

What's like the demographics and the dynamics of each side?

The union side is much, much larger, right?

In terms of population, I think about 22 million people.

And it is what we would today recognize as all the states basically north of Virginia.

The south is the states in the south of the Mason-Dixon line.

So Virginia and there on south, west through Tennessee.

So Texas, for example, is in the Confederacy, Tennessee's in the Confederacy, but other states like Missouri are border states.

And the Confederacy is a much smaller entity.

It's made up of about 9 million people plus about 4 million slaves.

And it is a agricultural economy, whereas the northern economy is a more industrializing economy.

Interestingly enough, the Confederate states are in some ways more international than the northern states, because they are exporters of cotton, exporters of tobacco.

So they actually have very strong international economic ties, very strong ties to Great Britain.

The United States was the largest source of cotton to the world before the Civil War.

Egypt replaces that a little bit during the Civil War.

But all the English textiles were American cotton from the South.

And so it is the southern half of what we would call the eastern part of the United States today with far fewer people.

It's made up, the Confederacy is, of landed families.

Wealth in the Confederacy was land and slaves.

The Northern United States is made up predominantly of small business owners and then larger financial interests, such as the banks in New York.

So the union also outnumbered the confederate.

By far, but it is a really interesting question because there's no conscription in the constitution.

Unlike most other countries, our democracy is formed on the presumption that human beings should not be forced to go into the military if they don't want to.

Most democracies in the world today actually still require military service.

The United States has very rarely in its history done that it's not in our constitution.

So during the Civil War, in the first months and years of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln has to go to the different states, to the governors, and ask the governors for volunteers.

So the men who take up arms, especially in the first months of the war, are volunteers in the North.

In the South, they're actually conscripted.

And then as the war goes on, the Union will pass the Conscription Acts of 1862 and 1863, which for the first time, and this is really important because it creates new presidential powers, For the first time, Lincoln will have presidential power to force men into the army, which is what leads to all kinds of draft riots in New York and elsewhere.

But suffice it to say, the Union Army throughout the war is often 3 times the size of the Confederate Army.

What's the relationship between this no conscription and people standing up to fight for ideas and the Second Amendment?

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The American population is already armed before the war.

And so even though the Union and the Confederate armies will manufacture and purchase arms, it is already an armed population.

So the American presumption going into the war is that citizens will not be forced to serve, but they will serve in militias to protect their own property.

And so the Second Amendment, the key part of the Second Amendment for me as a historian is the well regulated militia part.

The presumption that citizens as part of their civic duty do not have a duty to join a national army, Prussian style, but are supposed to be involved in defending their communities.

And so Americans have, throughout their history, been gun owners.

And gun ownership has been for the purpose of community self-defense.

The question coming out of that is what does that mean in terms of you have access to everything?

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Jeremi Suri: Civil War, Slavery, Freedom, and Democracy | Lex Fridman Podcast #354