Case that this obscure, British Consul played a pivotal role during his years in South Carolina. Christopher, of course, is andsuited to research write this historical tale of lyricalional diplomacy, intrigue, and espionage created as a longtime journalist, he has been immersed in the world of Foreign Affairs for decades, heading bureaus for the Washington Post and in the middle east and most recently, parisbasedhe Foreign Editor for the daily beast create for all his globetrotting, part of chris is rooted in the American South where he spent some of his childhood. In fact, without too much nudging, you could probably get a southern into. Ccent also an experience author. His first works he has written a couple of novels about jihadist terrorism. Nd a memoir about his father in his last book, it was about terror care force force. He will fill you in on some of the particulars on how the book developed, but the suffice to say the wait was well worth it. A review in the boston globe he tells and the wall theet journal commended book as thoroughly researched and definitely crafted, adding it will introduce people to a man who should be better known. One who fought the good fight at a faithful moment in history. Welcomend gemma, please join me in welcoming christopher dickey. [applause] mr. Dickey thanks thanks, brad. Hello, is this doing yeah, that works. Mr. Dickey its working . Ok, good. It is great to be here at politics and prose, which is really one of the great independent bookstores of the United States. I love independent bookstores. I think we should all applaud them. [applause] ive been looking forward to coming back ever since. 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. See that southern accent, i can hear creeping back in again. We will start the questions and answers before the talk. Where in the south . Actually, i was born in nashville, tennessee and my fathers family is from georgia, from north georgia from alanna and my mothers family is from west tennessee around union city , tennessee. 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 of it. 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, are you . [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. But, 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 this was a project i picked up and put 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 these planes that hit the World Trade Center . That was the beginning of the time i was not working on the book. Narratives change as they develop and so does the history that we are living. It took about 15 years before i came across the British Council who was Queen Victorias man in charleston, South Carolina from 1853 to 1863. He had been a footnote in countless books about the civil 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. Day and i just checked there isnt even a wikipedia entry. Actually, there is one in german. German wikipedia, why did they do it . Because they are very methodical and they got him in there somehow. Theres no englishlanguage entry for robert bunch so far. Eventually, i was able to find a lot of his private correspondence. I read through his letters that were scattered all over england, and i realized he was a critical player in that area for diplomacy and espionage meet and it was without the reporting that Great Britain might well have backed the secession of the slaveowning, cotton growing south. This minor diplomat and critically duplicative spider was thought of as a great friend and ally had helped defeat the confederacy and to determine the fate of the United States. I knew i had my man. The book taking shape was no longer in any respect going to be a work of fiction. This was a history of life thats might change the way we think about the civil war. In the meantime, a great deal of new history was being made. Theyve come to american soil of terror had come to american soil. 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 learned over a quarter century researching a corner of history while covering the Foreign Correspondent was the succession of American Military action abroad, most of which have 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 about the war were how badly we fail to understand its most obvious lessons. It needs to be remembered as a history of delusions. Simple strategies that lead to long nightmares of slaughter. About by whiche they mean a pathology that takes over politics and the press and eventually the whole people , discouraging all debate and dissension. Costs are not calculated, benefits are fabricated. The rhetoric of glory disguises the grotesque realities of combat until armed confrontation not only seems inevitable, it is inevitable. I will leave you to ponder the extent that this is a problem with us today. Certainly the first lesson we , should learn from the war in the states should be that its based on delusions, which our man in charleston, the British Council, understood and reported on with uncanny accuracy. The reasons the fighting began in 1861, and the reasons it turned out as it did, seemed simple to me when i was young and and or missing complicated when i studied the conflict more closely. States rights, free trade, the abolitionists, the souths 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, indeed the voices of the majority on each side were lost, and to an amazing extent have remained up secure too Many Americans ever since. And yet as they so perfectly clearly understood because it was stated it perfectly clearly by the people he knew both privately and publicly and in indeed was stated in the ordinance of secession for almost every one of the confederate states, ultimately, there was no question that the south seceded to defend slavery. And the north went to the war to stop the secession. This is a simple concept. You can reduce it to 140 characters. The next time you see anybody or hear anybody say the war was not about slavery, you can tweet that out. The south seceded to defend slavery and the north 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. Thats because people cling to delusions of greater faith and conviction than they devote to facts. Lets not debate why it was the south seceded and why it was the north went to war. Heres an aspect of history that is not denied so much as it is 80 north. Lets understand that when secession finally seemed inevitable, the strategic notion that made it actually seemed possible was based on a single simple and wrong calculation. Assumed, thatsts britain, the the most harmful 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 devil power to guarantee the s 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. Why . Why would the secessionist believe that . Because raw cotton was the most Important International commodity of the 19th century. You can say that it was to the 20th century what oil is to the 21st. Without it, the textile mills of britain and france would shut down and hundreds of thousands of people would lose their jobs overnight. And britain got 80 of its slaveowningthe south. So the secessionists figured that britain would have no choice but to back them. , the confederate tail would wag the british bulldog. I dont think i will say that again. [laughter] but what they didnt count on is that the british might hold their nose and accept the fact that they grew it. 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 on this whole slave grown cotton 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 in the struggle to shut down the middle passage. Bunch 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. Bunch used that extensively. He reported on it in an honest an enormous detail. It also escaped nobodys notice that the south was running low on slave labor and the price of slaves had risen astronomically. One of the things people dont understand is that there was a bubble market in humans just before the civil war. To keep expanding its cotton growing economy, the south needed more land. It could conquer that. That was a big part of what manifest destiny was about. Thats what the war with mexico was about and that is the effort to take over Central America and cuba were about. They conqueredce the land they needed more slaves , 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 about slaves 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 Southern States would have no choice but to reopen the Transatlantic Slave Trade that even when the confederate constitution banned it officially in 1861 the british envoy to washington wrote back and said dont pay any attention to that. That is something they are saying for now and something that they will change course on 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 was it that drove bunch to do all this . Ultimately 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. A pro, whose job involved and i love this phrase excursions into the mystery of Human Behavior disciplined by the Practical Application of his own deductions. [laughter] mr. Dickey which i think some of my colleagues of the Washington Post will find a familiar approach to the job. Thanks to the man in charleston the United States remained united even in the minds of some war between the states goes on. Thank you. [applause] so now, questions and answers. Yes . I have two questions for you. I grew up in charleston and i was curious if you knew where he was living when he was in charleston. He started out on trad 58 trad street. This is not 58 trad street now, but its just a couple of doors away, and then he moved to meeting street. My real question is, in South Carolina in the revolutionary war, we basically had a civil war. A lot of very hard feelings. The royalists lost and a lot of ts or down innc charleston. Charleston were down in charleston. I can see why there economic reasons to cooperate on both sides come to the civil war. But do those old hard feelings still influence some of this politic between the confederacy and britain . It was kind of confused in charleston as a result of those emotions. Some of the correspondent to be 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, 1861. Maybe we could answer to the queen again. Maybe this is our destiny, and overall, we are aristocrats and it fits with what we want to do. At the same time, he would note that they were celebrating the day that the british pulled out of of charleston so there were mixed messages with the same people and in the same community. You mentioned that he had so many dispatches and reports to london, etc. Something through washington otherwise through british ships. Apparently, he was using 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. In fact, he was at the center of the diplomatic incident in 1861 because he had spies everywhere and he was doing his best to intercept the correspondence he could but we think that he 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 bunch had been involved in the effort to talk to the confederate government about observing the british neutrality. He threw a fit and demanded that bunch be removed from the office and the british refused to do that because they knew what he had been reporting and what his loyalties were and they refuse to take them out. So because of this confusion , it created an enormous amount of tension and set the stage in what is called the trent affair where the british and the , americans almost went to war. All of that happened in the space of three months. Said he used a code so he used a code mr. Dickey 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 onetime pad. In fact, there are uncoated correspondences where he keeps telling the british minister to washington i think im going to master this code thing. Im doing my best but its timeconsuming. He would break out of the code frequently so some are in the code and some are are hand written. Then theres a couple of the correspondence that if its not a onetime pad, it might allow them to decode because its like this and then its been written across it. Thank you for this. I come at 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 in which we still see reflected in charleston very seriously. Im sure you are probably aware that emmanuel was a founder of the church and i am glad you mentioned him several times in your book. I am curious when you were left last in charleston, how much time you spend there, and what your thoughts are about contemporary charleston and if you had seen the statue that is in hampton park . The last time i was in charleston was a few months ago before the incident at emmanuel ame. I havent been back there since. I looking forward to going back am 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. I think that, 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 when nikki haley comes out and says we have to take the flag down. That is good 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 remember that that flag was flown by robert e. Lee and when he he rolled it up when he surrendered and he put it away. It wasnt flying over washington and lee when he was the president there. It was a response to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and thats what that flag represents. When i was going to school in atlanta, most of the state flag of georgia was the battle flag of northern virginia. It was flying over the State Capitol the whole time my father was teaching at the university of South Carolina. I am glad people are finally looking at that issue more or less in the face although thereve been 100 plus pro Confederate Flag at rallies. I dont know how big scattered around the south. And there will continue to me, but i dont want us to forget or underestimate the ofer of the families emmanuel nine. I dont think we will. And their unbelievable acts of forgiveness. Mr. Dickey christianity. In christianity. Mr. Dickey absolutely. Thank you. Yala going to have to fight is out there. Yall are going to have to fight it out there. [laughter] the noting that 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 mr. Dickey not yet. And what you might recommend to those trying to get a broad view of history that seems to be reflected. Mr. Dickey i would recommend that every grade buy this book. [laughter] mr. Dickey but, i dont think thatll happen in texas. Its still one of those places politicians stand up and talk about secession. What are they thinking . Well, are they thinking . Two questions. The first and the smallest if is if this is made into a movie who would you like to play , bunch . Mr. Dickey i dont know. I havent given it any thought. The second question, when you decided this was a person of interest, where did you start your research and what primary resources did you discover . Mr. Dickey i focused on bunch when i was doing this research about Richard Francis burton and going through the dispatches at the British National archives at q which is a great place to , work if any of you are researchers and you havent been, you should go. It is terribly well organized. Looking at 19th century diplomatic correspondence they 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. I would photograph hundreds of pages, sometimes a thousand pages in a day and i could look at everything on my computer when i was working on the ook. That correspondence, a lot of it has been looked at for about maybe half a dozen books and papers over the years. What hadnt been looked at is bunchs responses with the various ministers here in washington. And that was scattered all over the place. There was in oxford, you can find his correspondent which s, the minister in d. C. And his correspondent correspondence with other ministers was with Norfolk Records Office in nesk, england. And then as it happened, the biggest trophy and i would recommend that if you can get them to let you in that you go there. Its the most unusual Research Experience ive ever had. The biggest trophy is aaron dale castle in west suffolk which is the duke of norfolk estate was and still is. It is an enormous castle. If you ever saw the movie young victoria, it doubled as windsor palace in young victoria. And the archives were kept in the archive tower. And you go in through security and then you go up the archive tour and they have a table covered with green cloth and you sit there and you look through and lions ence lyons letter book and all that stuff. It is just fantastic stuff, it is also a funny, funky place to be. You are up there with all these boxes of letters from people. You are looking at leaded glass. There are the young victoria posters that they have. It is just a great place. That was the mother load in terms of refining the picture bunch. It was diplomatic ispatches . Personal correspondence with the british ministers he is very witty and very acerbic and doesnt hold anything back in the personal correspondence. He sometimes says outrageous things but usually true. Both parties like the bible, a telephone book i think it would be random symbols. The code was in greek letters. A onetime pad is a pad that is given out to two parties or multiple parties and then there is a way of figuring it out. It is a onetime pad, it was an original for both parties. There was this correspondence when they started using encryption and the correspondence that i read in 1859 around the time of the john rown up there when it looked like everything was going to go to hell in a handbasket. The ones that are decrypted are talking about Troop Deployment in South Carolina as a result of uprisings in the interior. You have to guess what these hings are. You mentioned the trent affair. One of the people that was arrested and that was William Wilsons soninlaw. The reason where im going orcoran who founded the galley here. Also, the National Arboretum and a few other things, made his money selling u. S. Government bonds in britain to finance the mexican war in the 1850s. Did you come across him . I didnt have any details ctivity. Any details. There is a wikipedia entry about him . He was an interesting and very benevolent guy in lots of ways. He supported churches and found a home there the always home the louise home. He was a good guy but he believed strenuously and states rights. I believe he had freed his own slaves and washington in the 840s. Well have to look that up. Why did he leave and how did he get out . He left on a british warship. The british were able to move their warships in and out of charleston through most of the conflict and certainly up to 853. He left because it looked like the siege of charleston was about to begin in earnest in 1863. At the time, the thinking was it was time for him to go. E had lost his accreditation given by the federal government at the end of 1861 but the british would not remove him. They were afraid that in 1863, the federal forces moved in and he would be in an ambiguous and dangerous position so they took him out. What was the role the elationships with your subject . The british had 14 consoles n the United States. Only two of them were paid professionals, the rest were more or less what you would call honorary consuls so they did report to the crown. In savannah, there was a big slave owner, it was a very rich an, he married anne harris and was an heiress. There was one in mobile alabama that can never be in mobile alabama, he cannot stand it. There is another, i dont think we will know enough about how he as paid. He was a little more sympathetic to the south in his official correspondence then bunch was. There was one in richmond who was also ok. It was an honorary consul. Earlier, there had been a bestselling novelist. Bunch was a professional and the other professional was archibald who was the council in new york city. Rchibald was running a whole spy network in cuba at the same time. One of the things that i discovered when i was at the National Archives was that they were two sets of diplomatic ispatches. One is the set having to do with more or less conventional, political and economic ssues. Tariffs, customs barriers, things like that. The particular issues on the ground that they were in. The other set of correspondence is the slave trade correspondence. In the 1850s, the single biggest division was the slave trade office, they were tracking the slave trade everywhere on the globe. Bunchs reporting is almost evenly divided between the slave trade and the conventional orrespondence. In the slave trade correspondence, what would they talk about . One of the things that you have to know that most people dont know is that the slave trade was outlawed by Great Britain and the United States. Great britain emancipated its wn slaves. The south did not, the southern United States. The slave trade went on to brazil until 1850. Also, to cuba until after the american civil war. The slave trade to cuba was huge. The slave trade to cuba was a little bit different than the slave trade to the United States. Growing cotton was one thing, growing sugar was something else, what the cuban economy depended on was the importation of africans that could be bought for 50 or 100 a piece. They could be worked to death and then replaced with cheap african labor again. That is horrible. What is really harmful is that almost all of that trade was taking place under the stars and stripes, the American Flag. The reason for that was going back to the war of 1812 and before, the american said the british could not search American Flag vessels. The americans refuse to sign a reaty of mutual search for suspect slave ris. Slaveries. What happened was, the slavers were go out and they would pick up their cargoes and if thats a british vessel approaching, they would run up the stars and stripes and refuse to be searched. Because the americans erratically were on the same side as the british in this issue, there was an american squadron as well. This meant most of their time not capturing slavers but interfering with the british efforts. You also have to remember that the federal government was controlled by the south until the 1850s. That was what the south did not want to lose, that is why there was so much anger and paranoia and fear in the south. They saw they were going to lose control of the senate. One of the things they wanted to do was take over cuba. Cuba would have given them to more states. All of that is almost lost in American History, people dont know this stuff. It is not a secret, people just dont know it. It tell you why the cubans feel the way they do about a lot of ssues. It tells you how corrupt the north was as well as the south and how much it was implicated in the harbors of the slave trade. When people talk, im sure they have books about the slave trade here. The slave trade in the middle of the 19th century was every bit as horrible as the slave trade had been at any point. There were examples of people starting to reopen the slave trade with africa. They would pick up 400, 500, 600 slaves and lose 150 to 250 when they got sick. A lot of them did because they were crammed in. One naval officer said there wasnt enough space to die n. This is what the secessionists wanted to reopen. This is what they wanted to offer, this is what they said was good. There was a chapter in the book where a ship was brought into Charleston Harbor and it stank. One of the characteristics of slave trade ships was that they were putrid and people could smell it. Hey didnt see the people. They took the slaves off that ship and put them in fort sumter and you read the charleston mercury which was a big proslavery, prosecession organ. They said they were happy, well fed, dancing. You read the dispatches of the men who took care of them, the sheriff that took care of them who was a prosecession, proslave trade guide and he said he describes the people as so weak that they couldnt get over this to get into the fourth. They would have to sit down his window legs over. Die one after another after another. Even when they were put on the biggest american warship of that time, the niagara and taken back to africa, liberia, they continue to die at the rate of several a day. When anybody tells you that it is not about slavery, oh, yes, t was all about slavery. [applause] i have a question. Does a great note and on. That was a great note to end on. Figures like bunch become unexpected heroes because they seize the moment somehow. They are really fascinating. I wonder if you have any thoughts about why bunch did this . What causes them but to act that way at the moment . One of the fun things about writing a book like this it is always a process of discovery. When things come together in nonfiction, it is telling you stuff that you wouldnt know and would not have been smart enough to write in fiction. The thing about bunch is that he is not a heroic character. What he did was heroic. He is not heroic, he is going to have to South Carolina and he is going there because you think he will advance his career. He is tired about writing about ships coming out of ports and he wants the political question. There was a political question which was what was called the negro act. They were accused of plotting a rebellion and horrific stories came out from the torture of people. People are trying to parse the truth from the fiction in that. It was just a horror story that lingered with everybody. They come from the caribbean and he had actually won the lottery and bought his freedom before he became a preacher and is very prominent figure in the black community in charleston. The lesson for whites is that well want any free people coming from the caribbean. What they would do is in a british boat ended with even a black stevedore on it, he had to be thrown in jail and held that until the ship left. If a bond was not paid, he would disappear into the world of the slave trade, the domestic slave trade in South Carolina. That was the issue that bunch seized on. He thought he could make some political headway. Eventually he got that law modified in a way that was acceptable. He was a careerist. That is what he started out doing. From his earliest days with his wife and his child, you see his correspondence, his actual absolute revulsion. The way the people around him talked about it, the way they talked about reading their slaves, there is one incredible revealing dispatch, they had been there for like two months. They talk about the conversation with a lawyer who lived next door to him who said that he personally beat his own slaves, both men and the women after making them undress and telling them they were lucky to be touched by him. It gives you a feel for the atmosphere. Bunch basically said i cant accept this. He was a member of the jockey club. He would go to all the dovering. Dinners. Everybody thought he was their best friend. When he sailed out on the warship in 1863, he said he must be removed because he was too ympathetic to the south. Wasnt there a mutiny of slaves aboard a ship . Yes, that was much earlier. Remind us what occurred, then. There was a really good movie about it. What happened it was about 20 years and it didnt involve my people directly. I didnt follow it as closely as others. One of the Great Stories of a mutiny that i can tell you about is the same ship, the echo was taken by the confederates when the war began. It became a privateer. It seized a ship down off the oast of south america that had several black crew members, ncluding a cook. That ship was being taken back to charleston as a prize of war. The cook killed the crew and sailed into new york instead. He became a great hero and was on display in pt barnums circus as a great hero. There is a great account of this ack in 1861. There were mutinies. There were slave mutinies. The specifics of the arm stad, im not the one to tell you about that. I was involved in the civil ights in the 1960s. How much of a movement was there . Fter the mexican war, how much f a movement was there to take ver parts of mexico . We didnt do it. Will we did a lot of it. Land. All the empty and he was wondering if mexico had slaves. No. The idea of a lot of southerners was to expand into mexico and takes lives there. There was also an effort, the amous William Walker xpedition. So all of that was going on. I was talking to someone who was interested in a lot of the same issues like the three of us in the world and it was interesting at the emperor of france, when he took over mexico, he was actually convinced by slidell, one of the guys who eventually rise up in paris that the south would act as a buffer state between imperial mexico and the Union Government of the north. In fact, the reporting from the french consul and the British Consuls were saying that is not true. They wanted mexico for hemselves. You have to remember that cotton burned out the land. I lived in austin for quite a while, part of the reason that americans were able to take over texas is because the indians stopped the mexicans and the spanish. When they went north of there, they wiped them out. It would have driven the way men for the south. There were only three or four or 5000. Only a few thousand in california. Part of the reason the americans took over, they would like the english in australia and america. Americans came pouring in. The other thing that was going on, the other thing that was going on is the gold rush that began in 1849. Suddenly there was this huge imperative to get to california and precisely because of the comanche, it was hard to go across the continental United States. One way was through the isthmus. Another way was through nicaragua. The other way was through the jungles of panama. These were all competing to some extent. There you go. [applause] please formed a line to the right and fold up your chair. Youre watching American History tv. 48 hours of programming on American History every weekend on cspan3. Follow us on twitter cspan history for information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. Tonight on q a i was a reporter, i covered politics and i got interested in political power. See these books, Lyndon JohnsonNational Power of zpuds political power. But i thought, you know, when youre a reporter, i went a couple of really minor awards but when you win an awards you think you know everything. The first time robert moses started talking to me, i realized i didnt know anything about power at all. Pulitzer prize winning robert caro talks about his audio project on power, looking at the evolution and exercise of political power in america. And he shares his progress on the next volume of his multipart biography of Lyndon Johnson. He had some compassion in the beginning. But the ambition was the overriding consideration with him. It was only when compassion and ambition coincide, he realizes if he wants to be president s he has to pass the civil rights bill that he really turns to it. But then you say so was he feeling fault . Not all the. Because all his life, he had wanted to help poor people and particularly poor people of color. Tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspans q a. The world war ii battle of midway took place june 4 june 7, 1942. Up next, author Anthony Tully gives a perspective on the battle. This 45 minute talk from the macarthur memorial is part of a day long sinc symposium. We will kick off our Afternoon Program with a live perspective from some of the things we have been hearing about. We talked a lot about midway and the strategic setting from a u. S. Perspective. Anthony tully will build on that and it will go a little deeper on the japanese side. In many ways, they are just as central to the battles outcome as any u. S. Action. Anthony tully is a noted expert on the n h