Its also great to be here in to see and see so many friends from the washington post. The post has turned out for me tonight and i appreciate that. Im going to tell you a little bit about the book and how i came to write it and then move as quickly as possible to questions and answers or questions and attempted answers about the book and about the south end of the confederacy and maybe the Confederate Flag if youre not tired of talking about that already. I can hear it again. We will start the questions and answers before the talk. Actually, i was born in nashville tennessee and my fathers family is from georgia, from north georgia in atlanta and my mothers family is from west tennessee around union city tennessee. Then i went to Elementary School in atlanta and went to oregon when i was about 11yearsold and i did my best to lose my southern accent as quickly as i possibly could. Everybody made fun of me because its the kind of thing you were in the lunch line and they say Say Something for us and you say what do you want me to say and they all cracked up. But it comes back. If i go into a filling station in South Carolina and immediately im speaking with a southern accent. Its almost safer sometimes to do that otherwise you get that you arent from around here argue. [laughter] so, 25 years ago i was reading a biography of the famous british explorer Richard Francis who visited the United States in 1860 and disappeared for several weeks somewhere between washington, d. C. And new orleans. I dont know what he was doing. And i dont think anybody does. I had a hunch that there might be a compelling story to be told about british spies in the American South on the eve of the American Civil War and if you sort of played with those elements, fiction or nonfiction maybe you could sort of have them meet the confederacy. And it seemed like a good idea. So i picked this up and put it down. But one day that i said im going to do nothing but work on this book was early in september, 2001 i closed the door and turn off the tv and did you see the fit hit the World Trade Center said that was the beginning of the time i was not working on the book. Merediths change as they develop and so does the history that we are living. I can across the British Council who was Queen Victorias man in charleston South Carolina from 1853 to 1863. He had been a footnote about the countless excellence of the war but nobody looked closely at who he was and what he was doing in fact all interpretations of what he was doing almost completely wrong. Indeed, to this day there isnt even an entry. Imagine anybody gets one that actually there is one and its in german. Why did they do with . Because they are very methodical and they got him in there somehow. Theres no englishlanguage entry so far. Eventually i was able to find a love lot of his private correspondence. I read through his letters that were scattered and archives all over england and i realized he was a critical player in that area for diplomacy and espionage need and it was without the reporting that Great Britain might well have backed the secession of the slave owning content going south. This minor diplomat and critically duplicative spider was thought of as a great friend and ally had helped defeat the confederacy to determine the fate of the United States. The book taking shape was no longer in any respect going to be a work of fiction. This was a history of life change the way we think about the civil war. Growing up in the south i thought a lot about the civil war. But in the meantime, the great new deal of history was being made. Theyve come to american soil of the United States set out to occupy the foreign land. The far right movement claiming the name of the tea party developed a powerful following even as a black man that loves to echo lincoln was elected president of the United States and then just a month before this book was to be published, news broke of the perfect massacre at a church in charleston, and once again the furious debate began about the confederate battle flag and the civil war and what it is we should or should not remember about all that. The coincidence was appalling but it wasnt completely surprising. One of the things i had researched in the corner of history while covering the Foreign Correspondent was the succession of American Military action abroad both of which have been forgotten is had been forgotten is that the one war that never ends for many people in the United States is the war between the states. And one of the most important lessons i learned about were his how badly we fail to understand its most obvious lessons. It needs to be remembered as a history of delusions. They lead to long nightmares of slaughter. The french right about by which they mean a pathology that takes over politics and the press and eventually the whole people discouraging all debate. Costs are not calculated, benefits are fabricated. Its a competent alarm confrontation not only seems inevitable, it is inevitable. I will leave you to ponder whether this is a problem today. Certainly the first lesson we should learn from the war in the states would be that its based on delusions which our man in charleston, the British Council understood and reported on with uncanny accuracy. The reason seems simple to me when i was young and enormously comforted when i studied the conflict more closely. The south loss of the dominance of the federal government and the rapacious economies of action to slavery all drove them towards secession. Amid the turmoil, the extremists played off of each other so effectively that the voices of moderation in deep voices of the majority on each side were lost and to an amazing extent have remained up secure too Many Americans are since. And yet as they so perfectly clearly because it was stated it perfectly clearly by the people he knew both privately and publicly and in deed was stated in the ordinance of secession for almost every one of the Confederate States also there was no question that the south succeeded to defend slavery. And the north went to the war to stop the secession. This is a simple concept. You can reduce its 240 characters. The next time you see anybody or hear anybody say the war was not about slavery you can send that out. They went to war to stop secession. Thats what the civil war was about. There should be no debate about that today and yet there is. Lets not debate why it was the south succeeded and why it was the north went to war. Heres an aspect of history that is not denied so much as it is ignored. But understand when secession finally seemed inevitable by strategic notion that made it actually seemed possible was based on a single simple and wrong calculation. Thus the session is assumed that the present, the most powerful nation on earth had no choice but to support the cotton growing confederacy with official recognition and support if it came to a fight they believed the british would supply the money, the arms and the naval power to get into this house separation from the union. They would sweep away with was a paper blockade. They would bottle up what was in fact a tiny federal army at the beginning of the war into that would be checkmate came over. Because raw cotton was the most Important International and the economy. It was what well list the 20th and 21st. Without it britain and france would shut down and hundreds of thousands of people would lose their jobs over night. And britain got 80 of its coffin from the slave owning south. So the secessionists figured that britain would have no choice but to back them. The confederate tail would wag the british blog. I will say that again. But what they didnt count on is that the british might hold their nose and accept the fact that they grew. Both london could say that was an internal problem for the United States but there were limits. Where the british drew the line on this whole question was on the question of the trade with africa which the public and politicians in britain and indeed in the United States have recognized for more than 50 years as essentially a holocaust and which the successive British Governments fought against religiously deploying the naval squadrons off the coast of africa, cuba and south america and eventually spending an estimated 2 of the gdp in Great Britain and the struggle to shut down the middle passage. What he did in his secret dispatches was to take the rhetoric of the southern extremists and turn it against them. The fire eaters as they were called or due to slavery was not a Necessary Evil in the world which was the popular view, but a positive good for the inferior black race, which god in fact created to be enslaved. And this being the case they said that the slave trade with africa must be reopened. In fact how could you say that it was a bad thing because that would be denying that it was a good thing. He reported on it in an honest detail. He also a scapegoat but these notice that the south was running low on slave labor and they have present astronomically. One of the things people dont understand is that there was a double market in humans just before the civil war. To keep expanding the economy, the south needed more land. Thats what the poor in mexico was about and that is the effort to take over Central America and cuba were about. But to do once weve got the land, once it conquered they conquered the land if needed more to work the land because it wasnt worth that much unless you could open it up and plant and grow it and then it would eat it up and he would move on. The great thing is that they were portable. As youve expanded west you could keep taking the labor force with you. They didnt have to think about it in fact they didnt get a chance to think about it. So, all of this played into the dispatches and so convincing was he with his arguments that the states would have no choice but to reopen the Transatlantic Slave Trade that even when the confederate constitution bandit officially in 1861 the british envoy to washington washington would beef the Foreign Office saying dont pay any attention to that. That is just something they are saying for now to change the course immediately when under your independent if that happens. Every time the crown came close to backing of the confederacy, and there were those times certainly in 1861 and 1862 the question of the slave trade came up and every time the south gave the wrong answer to the british cabinet. So what is it that drove them to do all this . Alternately even though he was no master spy in keen respects he was a little bit like george smiley. He was a professional representing the interest of the government as best he could. Whose job involved, and i love the phrase excursions into the mystery of Human Behavior disciplined by the Practical Application of his own deductions. Thanks to the man in charleston it remained united even in the minds of some war between the states goes on. [applause] so now, questions and answers. I was curious if you knew where he was living in charleston. Its just a couple of doors away then he moved the Meeting Street my question is in South Carolina in the revolutionary war we had a civil war. A lot of very hard feelings. While they are economic reasons to cooperate on both sides in the civil war. But do those old hard feelings still influence some of this politics between the confederacy and britain. This packet was kind of confused in charleston as a result of those emotions some of the correspondent to veto to be co correspondents said they are recording me and they made me the head of the society. They are doing this and that is the whole thing going on in 1860, 61. Maybe we could answer to the queen again. Maybe this is our destiny is overall we are aristocrats and it fits with what we want to do. And at the same time, he would note that they were celebrating the day that the british port of charleston so there were mixed messages in the community and with the same people. As to at something through washington otherwise through british ships. Apparently, he was some kind of a code because i find it very odd that the messages were not intercepted and read. Some of them were not the ones that actually would have revealed what he was doing. He was at the center of the diplomatic incident and 61 because he had spies everywhere and he was doing his best to intercept the correspondence between think that it wasnt opening diplomatic bags. What had happened is in order to get his correspondence out after the war had begun often have to envoy careers who were hit and miss. A lot of them are naturalized americans who had come from britain. And one of them got caught, actually two of them got caught and one of them had a note saying that theyve been involved in the effort to talk to the confederate government about observing the british neutrality. He threw a fit and demanded that he be removed from the office and they refuse to do that because they knew what he had been recording and what his loyalties were and they refuse to take them out so because of this confusion is created an enormous amount of tension and set the stage where the british and the americans almost went to war. All of that happened in the space of three months. A lot of the letters, not a lot but quite a few of the letters that i got were in code, and i fear that it was a one time. In fact there is uncoated correspondence where he keeps telling the british minister to washington i think im going to master this code. Im doing my best but its timeconsuming. He would break out of the code frequently so some are in the code and us are hand written. Then theres a couple of the correspondence that if its not a one time might allow them to decode because its like this and then its been written across. Thank you for this. I cannot this from a different perspective as a descendent of people who were enslaved. So i certainly take the whole issue of slavery, its causes and its ramifications, the way that we see its still reflected in charleston very seriously. Im sure you probably are aware he was a founder of the church and i am glad to back you mentioned him several times in the book. I am curious when you were last in charleston how much time you spent there and what your thoughts are about contemporary. Its now in the new hampden park the last time i was in charleston was a few months ago before the incident. I havent been back there since. Looking forward to going back in a couple of weeks as a matter of fact not only to talk about my book but also to get a better sense on the ground for the way things are. I have a lot of friends in charleston who been writing to me and have been talking about the situation. And of course my father lived in South Carolina in columbia for about 25 years and i was horrified obviously by what happened but gratified by the reaction to it by the powers that be in the State Government that says we have to take the flag down if you have a republican state senator. They say that its time for it to come down and i think thats good and the debate is good. Its good for people to render that remember that flag was flown by robert e. Lee and when he surrendered he put it away. It wasnt flying over washington and lee when he was the president of their. It was a response to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and thats what it represents. Most of the state flag in georgia was the battle flag of Northern Virginia and flying over the State Capitol was teaching in South Carolina. As a people are looking at that issue more or less in the face although thereve been 100 plus protein federate flag rallies. I dont know how big, scattered around the south. And there will continue to be. But i dont want us to forget or underestimate the power of the families. It is in the act of forgiveness and christianity. You will have to fight it out the texas state board covering textbooks and the approval of them has been recently considering history books and the treatment of slavery. Im curious whether you have had any opportunity to talk about your book in texas and what you might recommend to those trying to get a broad view of history that seems to be reflected. I dont think that is great happened in texas. Its one of those places politicians stand up and talk about secession. What are they thinking . What are they thinking . Stack to two questions. The first and the smallest if you were in a movie who would you like to play wax [laughter] i dont know. I havent given it any thought. Where did you start your research and primary resources did you discover. I was going through the dispatches at the British National archives which is a great place to work if any of you are researchers and you havent been coming you should go. It is organized for this work anyway at the 19th century diplomatic correspondence he were were bringing out the original correspondence. So they bring it out and you can photograph it. You can can take a digital camera and photograph it. So thats what i did. I would go into the queue, get what i wanted, bring it up and i would photograph hundreds of pages and then i could get everything on my computer when i was working on the book. But a lot of it has been looked at for about maybe half a dozen books and papers over the years. What hasnt been looked at is the correspondence dating back to 1853 with the various ministers here in washington and that was scattered all over the place. At oxford have the luxury you could find his correspondence with John Crampton who was the minister here in dc up until i think 1856. And then his correspondence with other ministers was that the Records Office in north oak england and then as it happened, and i would absolutely recommend that you get them to let you and they could go there and it is the most unusual Research Experience ive ever had. The biggest trove is that castle which is the duke of the estate was and is and an honest castle. If you ever saw the movie young victoria, it doubled. And the archives are kept in the tower and you go in through security and go up the creek tower and the other table covered with green cloth and you sit there and look through his correspondence with the british minister to washington during the war. And its just fantastic stuff but its also kind of a funny place to be because you are out there with all these boxes of letters and youre looking through the class out over the british countryside and there were these sort of leaning against the wall are these young victoria posters theyve gotten. So it is just a great place and that was the mother load in terms of really refining the picture of the bunch. So what was through the diplomatic dispatch. Is with the british ministers was very witty and acerbic and doesnt hold anything back in the personal correspondence. And he just says sometimes outrageous things but usually true. At one time both parties as to the same comments like the bible or telephone book. In this case i think that it was the random symbols. In this case it would be random symbols and the code was in greek letters but not all of it. So the one thing is actually a notepad that is given out to the two parties were multiple parties and then there is a way of figuring out the correspondence of the letters. But if it is a onetime pad its almost impossible to decrypt. So was appreciated as in the original for both parties . There is a correspondence with especially they started using the encryption of the correspondence that i read in 1859 or under the time of the john brown affair where it looked like everything was going to go to hell in a handbasket and the ones that are too cryptic are talking about Troop Deployment in South Carolina as a result of suspected uprisings in the interior and things like that. But you sort of have to guess what these things are. Local note you mentioned, one of the people arrested in that on the high seas hideaways was William Wilson corcorans soninlaw from louisiana was serving as a secretary to the two diplomats. The reason im going and i hope you can respond is that corcoran has been also found that the oak Hills Cemetery and a few other things made his money selling the government on december 102 france and the mexican war in the 1860s. Do you come across him . They are in the account of the affair in the arrest but i didnt get into any details about the activities were what they were doing. Is there a wikipedia entry of that . He is an interesting and a benevolent guy. He supported churches and founded a home. He was in the states rights and back to the south. He had i believe he had freed his own slaves in washington and in dc. I think that you said in 1863 why did you leave and how did he get out. He left on the british warship because of the british were able to move in and out of through most of the conflict in and up through the early 1863 left because it looked like the siege was about to begin in earnest in early 1863. In fact charleston never felt. But the thinking is that it was time for him to go. He had actually lost the accreditation given by the federal government at the end of 1861 but the british would have removed them. They were afraid however that in 1863 the federal forces moved in he would be in a dangerous position and so they took them out. Did the British Government have any diplomatic representatives in the south . And if so, what was the role in the relationships with the north subject . They have 15 consoles in the United States in 1860 the only two of them were paid professionals. The rest were more or less what you would call on every consoles although they did report. For instance, in savanna he was a big slaveowner and was able rich man and very unreliable reporter. Others were desperate to get out of the ones but the ones that were more or less british citizens there was one in mobile alabama that seemed never to have been in mobile alabama ap just couldnt stand it but there was another one who i think probably we dont know enough about how he was paid with william in new orleans was quite good. His correspondence by and large was pretty straight. There was one in richmond was also okay but he was again almost an honorary consul in earlier there had been a bestselling novelist. The other professionals archibald who was the consul in new york city and he was running a network in cuba at the same time. There is a whole set of diplomatic dispatches from all these consoles. They had to do with more or less conventional Political Economic issues there were customs barriers and things like that and the particular issues on the ground in the sports they were in. The others of correspondence as the slave trade correspondence because the british were obsessed with the question of slave trade. They were tracking the slave trade on the globe and punches reporting were almost evenly divided. It is as follows the political. In the slave trade correspondence. One of the list goes people dont know is that the trade was outlawed by Great Britain and the United States in 1807. They emancipated their own slaves in the caribbean and elsewhere in 1833. The slave trade went on to brazil at the 1850 and to cuba until after the American Civil War. Growing cotton was one thing. Growing sugar was something else. Sugar is steadily for the people that work and what the cuban economy depended on is the importation of africans who could be bought for 50 or 100 apiece could be worked to death and then replaced with cheap african labor again. Now that is horrible. But what is really horrible is that almost all of the trade in the 1850s was taking place under the stars and stripes, the american flag. And the reason for that is going back to the war of 1812 and before. The americans refuse to sign any treaty of mutual search for the suspect flavors so what happened is the sleepers would go out and pick up their cargo and if they saw the british vessel approaching, they would run up the stars and stripes had refused to be searched. It was off the coast of africa. Theyd spent most of the time not capturing but interfering in the british efforts to capture. You also have to remember this is something people forget the government was controlled by the south until the 1850s. That is what the south didnt want to lose and thats why there was so much anger and paranoia and fear in the 1850s is because they saw they were going to lose control in the senate. Cuba would have given them two more states to back the slaveholding cause. All of that is almost lost in history. People dont know this stuff. People just dont know it. If you know it starts to tell you a lot of things. It tells you how dropped the north was as well as the south and how much it was implicated. They are almost all going to be about the slave trade in the 18th century and early 19th century but the slave trade in the middle of the 19th century was every bit as horrible as the slave trade had been at any point. They would take on and they start to open up. The british were reporting and they would pick up 400, 500, 600 slaves and was 150 to 250. They were crammed in as a naval officer. They would visit one of the ships after its been stopped set up as an enough space to die below the deck and this is what the secessionists wanted to reopen and what they were arguing was good and thats why theres a chapter in the book where it was called the eecho or the putnam was brought in to charleston harbor. They were putrid and people could smell it. They took all of the unfinished fort sumter in 1958 where they took them off the ship and put them into words sumter and you read the charleston mercury which was a big proslavery secession. You read the dispatches of those that took care of them and who is a process session proslavery and she describes the people so weak that they couldnt get over the high ticket into the fort. They would have to sit down and swing their legs over with one after another after another and even when they were put on the ship and taken back to africa. They continue to die at a rate of several a day. Its not about slavery, yes. It was all about slavery. They were unexpected heroes because they seize the moment somehow. A really fascinating and i wondered if you have any thoughts about why they did this and also what causes somebody to act that way at that moment. Thats one of the Things Writing a book like this fiction or nonfiction. Its telling you stuff you never would have known i wouldnt have been smart enough to write in fiction. And the thing is hes not a heroic character. Hes going down to South Carolina because he thinks it is going to advance his career because he is a consul and hes tired of writing about ships coming in and out of the ports and he wants a political question. There was a political question which was called the negro seamen acts which came after denmark jesse who in 1852 was accused of plotting a rebellion and a horrific story came out in the torture of other people and they were trying to parse the truth of the fiction of that but it was a horror story that lingered with everybody. It was a figure in the community and charleston. So the lesson was we dont want any free people coming from the caribbean so that they would what they would do with a british boat landed even though it was on it he had to be thrown in jail and held there until the ship left. Hed sort of just he was sort of just disappear into the world of the slave trade in South Carolina so that is the issue and he thought he could meet some political headway and he negotiated with the governors and get all of that and eventually he got the law modified in a way that is acceptable. That is what he started to do. But then you see in the correspondence this absolute repulsion that the way that the people around him talked about it, the way they talked about beating the slaves. There is one incredible revealing dispatch when youve been there like two months. He talked about a conversation with a lawyer who lived next door to him who said that he personally beat his own slaves after making them undress and telling them they were lucky to be touched by him. He gives you the feel for the atmosphere. So he said i cant accept this. But he was a member of the club, he would go to all of the dinners. Everybody thought that they were the best friend. But when he failed out. It must be removed because he was too sympathetic to the south. [laughter] they were on the ship it was much earlier before that. There was a really good movie about it. But what happened was i am trying to remember because it was about 20 years. It didnt involve people directly so i didnt follow it as closely as others. One of the Great Stories of the mutiny is that which i can tell you about was at the same shed, the echo was taken by the confederates won the when the war began and it became a privateer, and it seems to seized the coast that had several black crewmembers including the cook. It was being taken back to the privateer. He became a great hero and in fact was on display at pt barnums circus as a great hero it was a great account of this in harpers weekly in 1861 so there were mutinies when these issues happened but the specifics im not a person to tell you about that. Thank you. Im glad im holding my own. It took me back 50 years with the strength of character and the grace of soul which is exactly what made it so incredibly powerful. How much of a movement was there . After the mexican war how much was there to take over parts . We took all but there was a lot of backandforth about the country. The idea was to expand into mexico and take them there. It was the famous walker expedition to nicaragua, the filibusters so all of that was going on. In fact talking to a french scholar the other day who is interested in a lot of the same issues and it was interesting that the emperor in france emperor in france when he took over mexico and installed maximilian he was convinced by one of the guys that wound up in paris that would act as a buffer state between imperial mexico and the Union Government Union Government in the north when in fact the reporting from the french consuls and the british consuls would say thats not true they wont mexico for themselves. You have to remember the cost and burden of the land. I lived in austin for quite a while and one of the things people may or may not be aware of is that they were able to take over texas is because essentially they stopped the line from Corpus Christi and when they went forth they wiped them out and joked we need to keep them close enough that there were only three or 5,000 mexican civilians in all of texas. Only a few thousand in california and part of the reason they took over they were like the english showing up with the wives and the kids. They came pouring in, four or 5,000 when the revolution broke out. It was to take all of mexico. The other thing about was going on, not to go on and on im sure people are getting hungry but the other thing that was going on is the gold rush that began in 1849 and that there was a huge imperative to get to california and precisely because of the comanche and so on it was hard to go across the continental United States, so everybody was looking for a quick way through the business and another was through the jungles and animal and these were all competing to some extent so that have hugely increased the value in Central America and southern mexico as well as northern mexico. [inaudible] after words on booktv. Claire mccaskill talks about her life and political career in an interview with politico editor
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