Also, since I know our host is fond of historical lost books, a very valuable pre Civil War book to read for someone who wants to understand the origins of the Civil War is Hinton Helper's 1857 "The Impending Crisis" (https://archive.org/details/DKC0147/mode/2up). This book, along with Uncle Tom's Cabin, was one of the major pre-Civil War abolitionist publications that helped mobilize public opinion against the South (it was a best seller in the North and banned in the South under penalty of death, several people were hanged for owning it). Besides being an abolitionist, Helper was a Southerner, a racist, and a white supremacist (and by white supremacist I mean he lived until 1909 and as far as I know never wavered in his belief that all black people should be removed from the United States, financed to resettle in Africa or Latin America, and replaced by white immigrants).
The whole book is an incandescently angry screed against what he called the "Oligarchy" of slave-owners (more typically called "the slave power" in politics of the time) for basically completely wrecking the South -- destroying the economy, prosperity, development, and moral character of the region. It's fallen into some obscurity today because of Helper's politics ("Once for all, within a reasonably short period, let us make the slaveholders do something like justice to their negroes by giving each and every one of them his freedom, and sixty dollars in current money ; then let us charter all the ocean steamers, packets and clipper ships that can be had on liberal terms, and keep them constantly plying between the ports of America and Africa, until all slaves shall enjoy freedom in the land of their fathers") and also because a lot of it is a rather dry compendium of statistics (it's actually very impressive what he does statistically all by hand, hundreds of years before computers). Those statistics make a devastating case about the underdevelopment of the South in every way.
It's not an easy book to read straight through but it really takes you inside the free soil ideology and mentality and demonstrates how slavery was seen not as a fundamentally racial issue but an issue about opposing systems of ownership of human beings by an oligarchic minority vs. social and economic liberty for all. E.g. Helper accuses proponents of slavery of being "negro- worshipping" oligarchs who "support the worthless black slave and his tyrannical master at the expense of the free white laborer" -- this is the mentality that needs to be understood.
It's insane how much of the sentiment of the time has been lost or purposely misrepresented in popular media and contemporary understandings of the conflict. Even Lincoln said himself that if he could win the war without freeing a single slave, he would do it. When emancipation did come up as a strategy to help win the war the most popular idea on what to do with the freed slaves after the war was over was to send them back to Africa, not to enfranchise them and give them political power.
Unfortunately when you view the Civil Rights era as the definitive founding of the country and slavery as its original sin it leads you to paint over a lot of historical complexity with the wide brush of modern cultural values and you are almost forced to canonize abolitionists even as extreme as John Brown as saints in the catechism.
I guarantee this movie is better than One Battle After Another, the most over hyped film of the decade.
Speaking of history books have you read of Herbert Hoover's Freedom Betrayed? It's the best book focusing on the highest level of WW2 leadership. Hoover's only goal is the truth and tearing down the propaganda version of the war
Yes, for sure. One critic though pointed out though how the film “One Battle After Another” does actually show many of these Antifa and Black Liberation types in a very negative light. The prior black girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio abandoned her own daughter and betrayed her comrades to save her own hide. They are presented in disarray like the Days of Rage actual revolutionaries were with their ineffective techniques.
It reminds me of the phenomenon in which a talented director accidentally makes a Based movie like “Starship Troopers” that may have been intended as satire. The ideas in these films are just too compelling to make look bad. In the case of the Woke films, the director captures the degenerate and backstabbing ways of the activists in such an effective way that he leads the audience to gradually despise them for their actual character.
Definitely. There are several "hardcore" revolutionaries in the film that fold and rat out their friends as soon as they are facing personal consequences. The thing that really hurts the film is the cartoonish villains. It would have been based to have normal FBI agents instead of a creepy psychopath as the antagonist
They have to make the villains that cartoony or the film will just be Based, plain and simple. I can’t imagine how the bugmen can connect these absolutely terrible people as heroes in the film, but the “mediate literate” apparently connected with the mind sucking bugs in “Starship Troopers.” So who knows.
I’ve noticed they often make these bad guys (like the prison gang leader in “American History X”) have very strange sexual hangups or proclivities. Is that the case here with Sean Penn’s character?
You nailed it. Both Penn and Taylor's characters are sexual weirdos. The major spoiler is that Chase Infiniti is Penn's biological daughter. The whole plot happens because Penn wants to find and eliminate Infiniti to erase the evidence of his affair with Taylor so he can join the cartoonishly racist villain's club
Will definitely pick this up next. Hoover interests me as a historical figure because the popular understanding of him is he was a milquetoast and ineffective President, but the more I hear about him through various accounts of the early 1900s the more I feel like he was a cultural force of his era with his complete and total opposition to communism and the havoc it wrecked on the world. How the Great Depression and the "failures of small government" got pinned on him is beyond me, but I guess not surprising when you let libtards write the history books, I suppose.
One quote from early in the book regarding the fight against spreading communism in post-WW1 Europe: "Relief of hunger and sickness as far more powerful than machine guns. The rising hope of freedom was mush more effective than the preachments of Karl Marx."
He was committed to peace and absolutely opposed to supporting Stalin.
For anyone feeling faint after looking at the page count you don't have to read all of it. The book is more like a collection of essays organized around the same topic. You can easily read one section or even one chapter and learn a lot.
Flynn’s depiction of “Robin Hood” (1938) captured my childhood. His devil may care and boldness are great for male archetypes. While others were black pilling, he was pranking his enemies, humiliating the wicked king, and swooping in to steal his girl.
This depiction of John Brown could have been a mugshot from the Portland ICE riots. Totally unhinged and feral.
I'm very much looking forward to your podcast on Foote's "The Civil War: A Narrative."
One thing that might be worth bringing up is the "narrative" aspect of his 3 volume set. Foote was, first and foremost, a novelist. And, he brought a novelist's voice to telling the history of the conflict - very different from most historians who take a more analytical approach to writing history.
It might be worthwhile in thinking about your upcoming podcast to supplement Foote with James McPherson's 1988 book "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era." It's now 40 years old, and a synthesis of the previous generation's scholarship on the conflict, but McPherson's history has stood the test of time. Compare and contrast the two approaches to telling the history of the Civil War between Foote and McPherson.
I also am particularly fond of McPherson's "Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief" and his "Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief." The two pair well together, and given your interest in Jeff Davis, this would make for an excellent podcast as you continue down your Civil War era.
Back when I used to teach U.S. history at the undergraduate level, I assigned a paper asking students to address the central question: "Was the Civil War inevitable?"
Here's a copy/paste of the relevant part of the assignment:
"Among professional historians there is a consensus that the institution of slavery – whether directly or indirectly – was the root cause of the American Civil War (1861-1865). What is not as well understood are the problems of inevitability and contingency.
Many historians view the Civil War as a conflict between two competing socio-economic systems that was bound to happen, whereas others view the Civil War as a conflict that began when politicians refused to compromise. While both sides agree that slavery was the precipitating factor, they disagree as to whether or not the war between North and South was inevitable.
For historians the concept of inevitability is important because it makes clear the timing of certain events. In other words, when were certain events bound to happen? Was the war between North and South inevitable from the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution when some states abolished slavery and others continued its use? Or, was war inevitable at a much later date? If the war was inevitable, when was it inevitable?
Likewise, contingency is important because it allows historians to examine why certain events played out the ways in which they did. At the heart of contingency is the question: what if? Take a specific event and imagine an alternative. Would history have played out the same way? If so, why? If not, why not? What if Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans had been willing to compromise on the issue of the expansion of slavery into the western territories: would the war still have happened?
For this paper you will need to read the primary sources in Jonathan Earle’s John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, James Henry Hammond’s “Cotton is King” speech, William Henry Seward’s “Irrepressible Conflict” speech, and the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession. After reading these primary sources write a 7-8 page paper that addresses the following question of historical inevitability and contingency:
“Did Americans in the years leading up to the Civil War believe that conflict between the Northern states and the Southern states was inevitable? If so, why did they believe this? If not, why did they not believe that war was in the near-future?”
Your paper must have a clearly defined thesis and use specific examples from all the primary sources to support its claims. See the syllabus for the grading rubric."
Hopefully this framing will be of use as you think about the podcast - particularly as it relates to the idea that "bad things happen when people believe that bad things will happen." We must put on our psychic armor to prevent this!
P.S. If you haven't yet gotten a copy of Earle's "John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry: A Brief History with Documents" it's available fairly cheap on Amazon. Worth picking up, especially for the documents.
Threatening Mr E. Grove with the incoherent ramblings and ravings of a Free Subscriber that I am set to unleash on this substack to get him to hold off on reviewing this series until I finish the whole anthology (I am halfway through volume 1)
Interesting to see how certain countries decide to go out guns blazing rather than die a thousand cuts of bureaucratic capture of a more tenacious political opponent. I think of the Axis Powers who launched their sudden attacks knowing that they started the war with something like only 3% of the world’s oil production/reserves. By sheer resources, they were dead upon arrival. However, they didn’t want to let their opponents get the drop on them (in the case of USSR) or to gradually get starved out of resources (in the case of Japan). Not defending this tactic, but it’s compelling to consider how militaristic and aristocratic states tend to initiate conflict even when on paper it seems like they’d never win a long campaign.
My sense of Confederate strategic thinking at the beginning of the Civil War:
1. Leadership: Jefferson Davis is an experienced political operator, a former Secretary of War, and a successful military officer. Lincoln, on the other hand, had a few weeks in the militia and was a one-term Congressman.
2. Cotton: Cotton was the most valuable export crop in the United States and the southern states had virtually all of it. By voluntarily embargoing cotton at the outset (a massive strategic mistake) they thought that they could compel Great Britain to mediate a peaceful resolution.
3. Willpower: they thought that the northern states did not have the stomach for a long war.
I think it’s a serious misunderstanding of American history to believe that the civil war was avoidable. Lincoln was *not* an abolitionist and tried to compromise with the South. As he said in the Second Inaugural all he wanted to do was prevent the territorial expansion of slavery, on the assumption that if it was confined to the old south it would gradually die out. The South immediately seceded.
There’s a good book called the F Street Mess that traces out the contemporary politics of the South’s attempt to get a permanent hammerlock on the Federal government and impose the legal structure of slavery on the entire country. It was the white Free Labor concern about this, and not the abolitionist movement, that led most immediately to the civil war
I know Errol "in like" Flynn has a notorious reputation (probably revised to contemporary standards - I don't care) but he is one of my favorite actors, having as much fun as possible without winking at the camera.
I've been working my way through Foote's trilogy and really enjoying it. So many larger than life characters that Foote does a great job weaving in. (Nathan Bedford Forrest and Dan Sickles are a few personal favorites) I'll add the Ambrose book to the list.
I'm interested in reading about the reconstruction era when I get through the trilogy. I've heard that "The Prostrate State" is good. Any recommendations?
Not related to this article, but as a West Point grad, it is so huge that West Point put lee’s portrait back up in the library. Hegseth is the most underrated member of trumps cabinet
Reading Disease in the Public Mind rn and one of the things that is surprising to me is just how constant the archetypes we see today in America have been throughout our country's history (even the schizo ones).
In a lot of ways, John Brown was really the first free subscriber
Also, since I know our host is fond of historical lost books, a very valuable pre Civil War book to read for someone who wants to understand the origins of the Civil War is Hinton Helper's 1857 "The Impending Crisis" (https://archive.org/details/DKC0147/mode/2up). This book, along with Uncle Tom's Cabin, was one of the major pre-Civil War abolitionist publications that helped mobilize public opinion against the South (it was a best seller in the North and banned in the South under penalty of death, several people were hanged for owning it). Besides being an abolitionist, Helper was a Southerner, a racist, and a white supremacist (and by white supremacist I mean he lived until 1909 and as far as I know never wavered in his belief that all black people should be removed from the United States, financed to resettle in Africa or Latin America, and replaced by white immigrants).
The whole book is an incandescently angry screed against what he called the "Oligarchy" of slave-owners (more typically called "the slave power" in politics of the time) for basically completely wrecking the South -- destroying the economy, prosperity, development, and moral character of the region. It's fallen into some obscurity today because of Helper's politics ("Once for all, within a reasonably short period, let us make the slaveholders do something like justice to their negroes by giving each and every one of them his freedom, and sixty dollars in current money ; then let us charter all the ocean steamers, packets and clipper ships that can be had on liberal terms, and keep them constantly plying between the ports of America and Africa, until all slaves shall enjoy freedom in the land of their fathers") and also because a lot of it is a rather dry compendium of statistics (it's actually very impressive what he does statistically all by hand, hundreds of years before computers). Those statistics make a devastating case about the underdevelopment of the South in every way.
It's not an easy book to read straight through but it really takes you inside the free soil ideology and mentality and demonstrates how slavery was seen not as a fundamentally racial issue but an issue about opposing systems of ownership of human beings by an oligarchic minority vs. social and economic liberty for all. E.g. Helper accuses proponents of slavery of being "negro- worshipping" oligarchs who "support the worthless black slave and his tyrannical master at the expense of the free white laborer" -- this is the mentality that needs to be understood.
It's insane how much of the sentiment of the time has been lost or purposely misrepresented in popular media and contemporary understandings of the conflict. Even Lincoln said himself that if he could win the war without freeing a single slave, he would do it. When emancipation did come up as a strategy to help win the war the most popular idea on what to do with the freed slaves after the war was over was to send them back to Africa, not to enfranchise them and give them political power.
Unfortunately when you view the Civil Rights era as the definitive founding of the country and slavery as its original sin it leads you to paint over a lot of historical complexity with the wide brush of modern cultural values and you are almost forced to canonize abolitionists even as extreme as John Brown as saints in the catechism.
I guarantee this movie is better than One Battle After Another, the most over hyped film of the decade.
Speaking of history books have you read of Herbert Hoover's Freedom Betrayed? It's the best book focusing on the highest level of WW2 leadership. Hoover's only goal is the truth and tearing down the propaganda version of the war
Yes, for sure. One critic though pointed out though how the film “One Battle After Another” does actually show many of these Antifa and Black Liberation types in a very negative light. The prior black girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio abandoned her own daughter and betrayed her comrades to save her own hide. They are presented in disarray like the Days of Rage actual revolutionaries were with their ineffective techniques.
Yes, I saw it and can confirm Tyrana Taylor's character is sadistic and evil. The French 75 are a bunch of losers
It reminds me of the phenomenon in which a talented director accidentally makes a Based movie like “Starship Troopers” that may have been intended as satire. The ideas in these films are just too compelling to make look bad. In the case of the Woke films, the director captures the degenerate and backstabbing ways of the activists in such an effective way that he leads the audience to gradually despise them for their actual character.
Definitely. There are several "hardcore" revolutionaries in the film that fold and rat out their friends as soon as they are facing personal consequences. The thing that really hurts the film is the cartoonish villains. It would have been based to have normal FBI agents instead of a creepy psychopath as the antagonist
They have to make the villains that cartoony or the film will just be Based, plain and simple. I can’t imagine how the bugmen can connect these absolutely terrible people as heroes in the film, but the “mediate literate” apparently connected with the mind sucking bugs in “Starship Troopers.” So who knows.
I’ve noticed they often make these bad guys (like the prison gang leader in “American History X”) have very strange sexual hangups or proclivities. Is that the case here with Sean Penn’s character?
You nailed it. Both Penn and Taylor's characters are sexual weirdos. The major spoiler is that Chase Infiniti is Penn's biological daughter. The whole plot happens because Penn wants to find and eliminate Infiniti to erase the evidence of his affair with Taylor so he can join the cartoonishly racist villain's club
Will definitely pick this up next. Hoover interests me as a historical figure because the popular understanding of him is he was a milquetoast and ineffective President, but the more I hear about him through various accounts of the early 1900s the more I feel like he was a cultural force of his era with his complete and total opposition to communism and the havoc it wrecked on the world. How the Great Depression and the "failures of small government" got pinned on him is beyond me, but I guess not surprising when you let libtards write the history books, I suppose.
One quote from early in the book regarding the fight against spreading communism in post-WW1 Europe: "Relief of hunger and sickness as far more powerful than machine guns. The rising hope of freedom was mush more effective than the preachments of Karl Marx."
He was committed to peace and absolutely opposed to supporting Stalin.
For anyone feeling faint after looking at the page count you don't have to read all of it. The book is more like a collection of essays organized around the same topic. You can easily read one section or even one chapter and learn a lot.
Flynn’s depiction of “Robin Hood” (1938) captured my childhood. His devil may care and boldness are great for male archetypes. While others were black pilling, he was pranking his enemies, humiliating the wicked king, and swooping in to steal his girl.
This depiction of John Brown could have been a mugshot from the Portland ICE riots. Totally unhinged and feral.
I'm very much looking forward to your podcast on Foote's "The Civil War: A Narrative."
One thing that might be worth bringing up is the "narrative" aspect of his 3 volume set. Foote was, first and foremost, a novelist. And, he brought a novelist's voice to telling the history of the conflict - very different from most historians who take a more analytical approach to writing history.
It might be worthwhile in thinking about your upcoming podcast to supplement Foote with James McPherson's 1988 book "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era." It's now 40 years old, and a synthesis of the previous generation's scholarship on the conflict, but McPherson's history has stood the test of time. Compare and contrast the two approaches to telling the history of the Civil War between Foote and McPherson.
I also am particularly fond of McPherson's "Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief" and his "Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief." The two pair well together, and given your interest in Jeff Davis, this would make for an excellent podcast as you continue down your Civil War era.
Back when I used to teach U.S. history at the undergraduate level, I assigned a paper asking students to address the central question: "Was the Civil War inevitable?"
Here's a copy/paste of the relevant part of the assignment:
"Among professional historians there is a consensus that the institution of slavery – whether directly or indirectly – was the root cause of the American Civil War (1861-1865). What is not as well understood are the problems of inevitability and contingency.
Many historians view the Civil War as a conflict between two competing socio-economic systems that was bound to happen, whereas others view the Civil War as a conflict that began when politicians refused to compromise. While both sides agree that slavery was the precipitating factor, they disagree as to whether or not the war between North and South was inevitable.
For historians the concept of inevitability is important because it makes clear the timing of certain events. In other words, when were certain events bound to happen? Was the war between North and South inevitable from the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution when some states abolished slavery and others continued its use? Or, was war inevitable at a much later date? If the war was inevitable, when was it inevitable?
Likewise, contingency is important because it allows historians to examine why certain events played out the ways in which they did. At the heart of contingency is the question: what if? Take a specific event and imagine an alternative. Would history have played out the same way? If so, why? If not, why not? What if Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans had been willing to compromise on the issue of the expansion of slavery into the western territories: would the war still have happened?
For this paper you will need to read the primary sources in Jonathan Earle’s John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, James Henry Hammond’s “Cotton is King” speech, William Henry Seward’s “Irrepressible Conflict” speech, and the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession. After reading these primary sources write a 7-8 page paper that addresses the following question of historical inevitability and contingency:
“Did Americans in the years leading up to the Civil War believe that conflict between the Northern states and the Southern states was inevitable? If so, why did they believe this? If not, why did they not believe that war was in the near-future?”
Your paper must have a clearly defined thesis and use specific examples from all the primary sources to support its claims. See the syllabus for the grading rubric."
Hopefully this framing will be of use as you think about the podcast - particularly as it relates to the idea that "bad things happen when people believe that bad things will happen." We must put on our psychic armor to prevent this!
P.S. If you haven't yet gotten a copy of Earle's "John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry: A Brief History with Documents" it's available fairly cheap on Amazon. Worth picking up, especially for the documents.
Threatening Mr E. Grove with the incoherent ramblings and ravings of a Free Subscriber that I am set to unleash on this substack to get him to hold off on reviewing this series until I finish the whole anthology (I am halfway through volume 1)
Interesting to see how certain countries decide to go out guns blazing rather than die a thousand cuts of bureaucratic capture of a more tenacious political opponent. I think of the Axis Powers who launched their sudden attacks knowing that they started the war with something like only 3% of the world’s oil production/reserves. By sheer resources, they were dead upon arrival. However, they didn’t want to let their opponents get the drop on them (in the case of USSR) or to gradually get starved out of resources (in the case of Japan). Not defending this tactic, but it’s compelling to consider how militaristic and aristocratic states tend to initiate conflict even when on paper it seems like they’d never win a long campaign.
My sense of Confederate strategic thinking at the beginning of the Civil War:
1. Leadership: Jefferson Davis is an experienced political operator, a former Secretary of War, and a successful military officer. Lincoln, on the other hand, had a few weeks in the militia and was a one-term Congressman.
2. Cotton: Cotton was the most valuable export crop in the United States and the southern states had virtually all of it. By voluntarily embargoing cotton at the outset (a massive strategic mistake) they thought that they could compel Great Britain to mediate a peaceful resolution.
3. Willpower: they thought that the northern states did not have the stomach for a long war.
In each of these things the south misjudged.
I think it’s a serious misunderstanding of American history to believe that the civil war was avoidable. Lincoln was *not* an abolitionist and tried to compromise with the South. As he said in the Second Inaugural all he wanted to do was prevent the territorial expansion of slavery, on the assumption that if it was confined to the old south it would gradually die out. The South immediately seceded.
There’s a good book called the F Street Mess that traces out the contemporary politics of the South’s attempt to get a permanent hammerlock on the Federal government and impose the legal structure of slavery on the entire country. It was the white Free Labor concern about this, and not the abolitionist movement, that led most immediately to the civil war
Thanks MG.
I know Errol "in like" Flynn has a notorious reputation (probably revised to contemporary standards - I don't care) but he is one of my favorite actors, having as much fun as possible without winking at the camera.
He took an impromptu sailing voyage with his buddies and made a short documentary about it, Cruise of the Zaca.
I've been working my way through Foote's trilogy and really enjoying it. So many larger than life characters that Foote does a great job weaving in. (Nathan Bedford Forrest and Dan Sickles are a few personal favorites) I'll add the Ambrose book to the list.
I'm interested in reading about the reconstruction era when I get through the trilogy. I've heard that "The Prostrate State" is good. Any recommendations?
Not related to this article, but as a West Point grad, it is so huge that West Point put lee’s portrait back up in the library. Hegseth is the most underrated member of trumps cabinet
Reading Disease in the Public Mind rn and one of the things that is surprising to me is just how constant the archetypes we see today in America have been throughout our country's history (even the schizo ones).