papers conference. thank you so much for joining us for this discussion at a moment in our nation's history when greater understanding of the legacy of congressional violence and polarizing partisan politics is essential to enable our country to move forward in a constructive way. i'm ann thornton vice provost and university librarian at columbia. the john jay papers project will soon culminate in publication of a seven volume scholarly edition of the voluminous papers of founding father john jay. this series involved decades of work by our dedicated experts and will introduce generations of students and researchers to this founding father's pivotal role in shaping american democracy. the libraries at columbia are grateful to be able to partner on this keynote presentation with the forum. a program of the office of the university president we are also excited to collaborate with c-span 3. which will air this program in the coming weeks? i am delighted to introduce our keynote speaker followed by our moderator who will join for a discussion after the address. our keynote speaker professor joanne freeman is the class of 1954 professor of history and american studies at yale university. professor freeman's work specializes in an early politics and political culture her interest and political violence and polarization dirty nasty politics has made her expertise particularly relevant in recent years. professor freeman's first book affairs of honor national politics in the new republic explored political combat on the national stage in the founding era. by examining both the public and private papers of key figures such as thomas jefferson, aaron burr and alexander hamilton professor freeman reveals the profoundly unstable political world grounded on the cone of code of honor her work offers deep insight into the anxieties and political realities of leaders struggling to define themselves and their role in the new nation. professor freeman's most recent book the field of blood violence and congress and the road to civil war focuses on physically violent clashes in the house and senate chambers and how they shaped and savaged the nation. the book demonstrates how these conflicts elicited and raised tensions between the north and south ultimately igniting in the civil war field of blood won the national public radio book of the year award in 2018. professor freeman has long been committed to public history. she is co-host of the popular american history podcast backstory and is a frequent public speaker commentator and historical consultant whose work has appeared in the new york times the washington post and atlantic magazine. she is a trustee of the library of america and member of the board of directors at the national council for history education. i'm also very pleased to introduce my colleague at columbia university and our moderator for this program professor stephanie mccurry, the r gordon hoxie professor of american history and honor of dwight eisenhower. professor mccurry's work specializes in the american civil war and reconstruction the 19th century united states and the american south her current focus is on the epic human drama of processes of reconstruction in the 19th and 20th centuries her book confederate reckoning power and politics in a civil war south won the frederick douglass award and was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. she is a member of the advisory board of the guilder. lehrmann institute of american history. following professor freeman's keynote address professor mccurry will moderate a discussion and we encourage you to submit your own questions using the online tool available in this live stream. at the conclusion of the discussion. i will provide very brief closing remarks including instructions for registering for the jay papers conference and information about a digital exhibition that the columbia rare books and manuscripts library has mounted to celebrate the conclusion of the jay papers project and provide public access online to holdings in the extensive jp papers archive. once again, thank you very much for joining us tonight. and we hope you will enjoy the program and now it is my pleasure to turn the virtual podium over to our keynote speaker professor. joanne freeman. thanks, ann. and before i begin, i actually really do want to thank the john jay papers columbia university libraries and columbia university office of the provost for inviting me here to speak this evening, and i want to thank all of you whoever you are lurking out there wherever it is you're lurking for coming this evening and joining us in this talk and conversation. i'm going to start my comments this evening by saying something that is really obvious. but i feel the need to say it and that is we live in strange and difficult times. some of that strangeness for me has been the ways in which my study of the past and my existence in this particularly problematic present have been bumping up against each other. as a political historian who writes a lot about political violence. i've spent many years trying to figure out how politicians in the past made decisions and chose courses of action in times of intense conflict and extremes. and along those lines ive been really curious about how and when violence meshes up with politics. and now here we are at our very own moment of conflicts and extremes and even some violence. well what i want to do this evening is not to talk about the present but actually to go into the past and look at two moments of enormous conflict and extremes in american history. the late 1790s and the 1850s. so basically the subject of my first book and the subject of my most recent book. to see what these two crisis points can tell us about conflict crisis and threats of violence in american politics. it's more on that to come. for now, i want to first look at the 1790s and basically discuss what was the nature of the crisis in the 1790s? how did national politicians respond? and then what was the outcome? what does it tell us? i'll do the same for the 1850s and then at the end i'll conclude by highlighting a comparison between the two periods that i think is worth noting particularly today. okay, so let's plunge into the 1790s and the crisis. now it would be hard to exaggerate the sense of crisis in the 1790s generally and the late 1790s particularly the national government at that period was new untested untried and experimental. many people assumed that one bad choice one poor decision and the entire experiment might crumble maybe to be swallowed up by one of the world's great powers like england or france maybe to collapse into a cluster of little confederacies. now if you truly believe that one stupid decision might bring a country toppling down. you can understand the mood of that time and why it was such a fraught period now there were two big looming threats by the late 1790s that are worth mentioning as i launch into my discussion this evening number one was the french revolution. so to federalists one of the two parties at the time more conservative federalists, they were terrified that the social disorder of the french revolution would somehow contaminate the united states and bring chaos and fanaticism and social upset in its wake that was the federalist big fear. for the jeffersonian republicans, they were afraid and again they had good reason that the nation might slip back into becoming a monarchy so might basically fall back into old habits might become a aristocratic and really in line with the rest of the world which in this period was pretty much a series of monarchies. so you have this fraught period where people are afraid things are going to collapse you have these two real fears that are sincere and there's a reason for people to be scared of them. politics throughout this entire decade is mean rotten and nasty including nasty newspaper attacks name calling street violence dirty tricks and more actually in his old age. john adams refers to some of the street violence using the word terrorism. which tells you what it felt like to him at the time. so here you have this moment things are already bad get to the very end of the 1790s. you have the united states on the verge of going to war with france. and of course any time you're on the edge of a war of some kind public sentiment is going to get stoked up. and you had a presidential election coming the election of 1800 which given everything that i've just said clearly was perceived as a really consequential election. it was something that was going to really make some kind of a major decision that had very big sticks. that election the election of 1800 represented the first time that power in the national government would transfer from one political party-ish entity to another and in that election you had on the federalist side john adams running for re-election. and charles c pinkney running for vice president on the republican side you had jefferson running for president and aaron burr for vice president. now again, given everything that i've just said, it's not a surprise to hear that the contest was fierce and in the lead up to the election, there were a lot of really dirty tricks of one kind or another there. there's one particular favorite that whenever i discuss this election. i have to mention only because it's so simple. it's so effective for part of the campaign near the election itself. there were federalist newspapers in new england that announced that jefferson had died. that's ingenious. that all right. it's very hard to disprove and for a little while when you look around a newspapers, you can see people tragedy jefferson has died. now what's going what's going to happen in the election? all kinds of names being called all kinds of horrible things people being said from one person to another another favorite that has strange echoes of today. there was a advertisement of sorts like a banner of sorts that appeared in newspapers at the time and the slogan on it was adams and religion. or jefferson and no god, so they're laying it on the line as far as how extreme they feel that this contest is going to be now as the contest came closer people became more desperate. and here i am happy to be able to have a brief john jay moment in my comments this evening because in new york. when it became clear that new york had just elected a republican legislature that would choose republican electors and probably bring thomas jefferson into the presidency alexander hamilton, no great fan of thomas jefferson came up with a plan. and he wrote about it to new york governor john jay asking him to put it into play. so basically what hamilton wanted was and these are his words the immediate calling together of the existing legislature. so given that the new legislature is not going to support his politics. he says to jay. okay, let's call the one that's here. now. it'll be friendly or to us and that'll let things turn out better in the election now. i want to read his words here because it gives you just an absolute sense of the climate at that moment. hamilton says to jay i am aware that there are weighty objections to the measure. but the reasons for it appeared to me to outweigh the objections and in times like these in which we live it will not do to be over scrupulous. it is easy to sacrifice the substantial interests of society by a strict adherence to ordinary rules. the scruples of delicacy and propriety ought to yield to the extraordinary nature of the crisis. they ought not to hinder the taking of a legal and constitutional step to prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of the state. okay, so that's extreme emotional a little dubious in its logic. to hamilton, it's necessary. it's a crisis and during a moment of crisis normal rules. don't apply. john jay to his great credit inscribed on the bottom of that letter. proposing a measure for party purposes, which i think it would not become me to adopt. so john jay little applause for john jay. he actually hears this and basically says this is partisan and not very not a good idea, and i'm not going to do this jay in this period of crisis and extremes was a very calm always seen individual they were in a lot of them around at this point. so i always make an attempt to pause and praise j for being that person it mattered. okay, so now back to the 1800 contest in the end thomas jefferson and aaron burr burr the two republican candidates tied. and the election was thrown into the house to break the tie so now real anxiety set in. what would happen? would everyone play fair would federalists do something sneaky to try and grab back power? it ultimately took 36 votes in the house to break the tie ultimately on jefferson's behalf and during that time out of fear of what would happen and what the federalists would do at least one state began to organize arms in case they needed to go to washington to seize back the government. in fact republicans openly threatened violence against federalists in congress when it became clear that the fate of the election was hanging. in a pretty extraordinary letter from thomas jefferson written to james monroe in early. 1801. jefferson says that if the federalists somehow had passed a law that put the government into the hands of some government officer who wasn't one of the candidates or if the federalists somehow prevented an election quote. we thought it best. to declare openly and firmly one and all that the day such an act passed the middle states would arm and that no such user patient even for a single day should be submitted to which is an extraordinary statement, right? we let it be known jefferson is saying that if they do something fishy there will be violence. now in the end the election was decided obviously for jefferson brewery became vice president. but as i just noted there was open talk of violence in washington relating to that election, but equally important was what was happening alongside and beneath those threats of violence. because even as national politicians were preparing for the worst. when you read their correspondence to each other and you see them trying to reason their way through this moment of crisis again, and again in one way or another they would say to each other. well, i i mean i know this is extreme, but the other side they wouldn't really do that would they i mean things that bad. i mean, i don't think they would do that. they're kind of in this with us. so there was this kind of fundamental faith even by people who are on opposite side and this election. the probably the other side wasn't quite so bad that they would go to the ultimate extreme. that kind of faith of politicians in each other and then ultimately in the system itself. they worried about the system. they were ready to arm in case the system didn't do it it was supposed to do but that thread of faith and belief was important. it actually allowed this electrocess to continue and generally speaking in american history when you have these hyper fraught moments one of the things that pulls the nation out of them are constitutional moments like elections or supreme court decisions some formal moment in which the constitution does something and people can say, oh, okay. there has been something formal that happens. so 1,800 they're still faith that people have in each other and the government. so bear that faith in mind as we jump ahead to another moment of conflict and extremes and that's the 1850s. by that point the nation's crisis over the fate of slavery was moving towards its peak. for decades the nation had been trying unsuccessfully to compromise its way out of its conflict over the fate of slavery. and compromises typically would hold for a while but events would shift opposition to slavery evolved the nation continued to push westward and each new state raise the issue of slavery because suddenly there needed to be a discussion as to whether that state would be a free state or a slave state. now unlike the 1790s. during this time period really the first half of the 19th century. this was a really violent period in american history. the 1790s had might have had dirty nasty politics, but what we're talking about here really is physical violence riots street violence of various sorts that are almost routine. i remember stumbling across a diary entry. think from the 1840s in which the person who wrote it said something along the lines of only two people died in the election today. which tells you what they're like, so we're now in a slightly different world in this time period and they were riots over immigration and over elections and over issues of class and race and politics was really routinely violent. um and this violent state of affairs was true in the united states and was true in congress as well. congress truly is was a representative institution. now in congress much of the violence was provoked by southerners. for decades in congress southerners protected their violence laden slavery regime by threatening and physically attacking its opponents to slavery in congress. often armed with knives or guns or both they tried to intimidate attackers against slavery and between 1830 and 1860. there were at least 70 physically violent incidents in congress in the house or in the senate or in the capital building. and by physically violent, i mean fistfights canings people pulling knives and guns on each other threats dual challenges and mass brawls. the strategic use of violence worked for southerners for quite some time for cultural reasons among others in part it was because southerners were far more comfortable with man-to-man combat than northerners who were plenty violent, but they tended to prefer riots southerners really were much more comfortable with man to man violence and they were very willing and eager to use threats of duels against northerners whose constituents considered that a barbaric crime of sorts and it put northerners in a difficult situation if they did something that a southerner didn't like the southerner might play with the dual challenge. the northerner would be i think at various times. i've called this the northern congressman's dilemma. what do you do because you don't want to fight a duel and your constituents don't want you to but you don't want to be humiliated and so southerners played with that sort of ambigued ambiguity to again help their cause defense slavery in congress. so for a time the balance of power in congress was southerners use threats and violence to get their way northerners responded by grabbing at rules of order. to save themselves rules that often obviously were not enforced. in part because hiding behind rules seemed unmanly and people would say that time and again, southerners often prevailed with this rough game of politics getting concessions getting attention getting popular support getting northerners to silence themselves to submit to southern demands to resign from committees rather than face southern threats and any number of other things. and southern threats weren't necessarily individual and minor and personal. so i want to give you an example of a much more sweeping southern threat that took place in 1850 during compromise over what came to be known as the compromise of 1850 logically enough. at one point in a really heated debate over what clearly by that point was recognized as a high-stakes debate over slavery. representative thomas klingman a north carolina wig rose to his feet in the house and declared that if southern interest were not protected in this compromise than southerners in congress would fight. and he explained that the southern plan of attack was simple if fighting with parliamentary gamesmanship, which he called the style that northern gentleman engaged in when they fight northern gentlemen used rules. so we'll try that first if that doesn't work he then went on then we're gonna fight like southern men with force. and as he explained at the end result would be a quote collision as electric as the battle of lexington followed by the collapse of congress. now that is a big threat and it sounds like an outlandish threat and some people at the time correctly said really but not everyone dismissed it that easily and that's in a sense. what significant about the southerners and the threats that they're using in this period is that for them to work they needed to seem plausible. and people saw enough of southerners using and threatening violence to believe that these threats were indeed plausible in this case. some congressmen hearing that threat began to count how many of their colleagues seem to be wearing guns. so someone in the house guest i believe 70 or 80 people seem to be wearing guns and he remarks some of them are even northerners even some northerners are armed a friend of his thoughtmost probably less but still the fact that they're counting guns at this moment tells you something. equally interesting. people came to the capital to watch the coming of what seemed likely to be a sort of congressional doomsday, right that something horrible is going to happen. there's going to be a big battle in congress people came. there's a letter from a north carolina congressman who writing to his wife who says there. there are now great crowds here who just want to see the big battle in congress and they drift away when it becomes clear that there's not going to be a big battle. so there was a really thick thread of violence and a real threat of violence in congress throughout these decades largely centered around the issue of slavery. but that balance of power changed in the mid and late 1850s with the arrival. of a northern antislavery party the republican party republicans campaigned on the idea that they were dedicated to fighting the slave power. and in congress some of them did that quite literally some of them came to washington with guns. and time and again when you read the periods equivalent of the congressional record you see time and again republicans standing up during a debate and saying something along the lines of where are different kind of northerner. we're not here to sit down. we're here to stand up. you can't bully us anymore. you can't push us around anymore. we're different kind of northerner. so not surprisingly with the arrival of these northerners who not necessarily eager to fight, but we're willing to the balance of power in congress and not surprisingly there was more violence and i want to offer one instance that that shows you where things stood in this case in 1858 as far as what was going on in congress and the level that things reach. and in this case, it's during an evening session this incident. i'm going to talk about evening sessions were always bad ideas because men went to dinner and they drank and then they came back and slugged each other around in the house or senate. so when i was doing my research for this my most recent book if there was an evening session, i sort of assumed that something bad was gonna happen because it almost always did. so in this case. it's an evening session republican galusia grow of ohio, which is a great 19th century name galusia grove. objected to something while standing amidst some southerners and democrats. one of those southerners lawrence kit of south carolina objected to the objection and basically told grow go object on your own side of the house right go object somewhere else. don't stand a month. amidst us and object. grow insisted that he wouldn't take orders from a whip holding slave driver. at which kit marched over to grow grant his collar to throw a punch, but grow beat him to it and slugged kit and knocked him flat knocked him to the ground. at this a stream of southerners raced across the house some maybe to break things up more probably to join in. and seeing a fellow republican being overwhelmed by southerners republicans rushed over jumping on chairs and tables in their rush to get to the point where this fight was happening to defend their ally and the end result was a mass brawl. scores of congressman many of them armed we're running at each other in the space before the speakers chair armed groups of northern and southern congressmen engaging in battle running at each other in the space before the speakers chair. one reporter at least one at the time said it looked remarkably like a battle. and in some ways you could say that's what that was. that's serious violence. that's not just a threat now it ultimately ended and people did what normally happened in this period when there was violence in congress as they all sat down and tried to go on where things were before because again, it's a violence period but again people notice that this suggested something. extreme and alarming about the state of a pairs of between northerners and southerners. ultimately this led to a time in congress right before the civil war. when increasing numbers of congressman came to congress armed. not because they wanted to shoot each other but because they were afraid that they might have to as senator james henry hammond of south carolina put it. unless the slavery question can be wholly eliminated from politics. this government is not worth two years. perhaps not two months purchase so far as i know and as i believe every man in both houses his armed with a revolver some with two and a bowie knife. now hammond considered it he goes on and it's really remarkable letter to say it was fully possible that the wrong words from a republican could quote precipitate at any moment a collision in which the slaughter would be such as to shock the world and dissolve the government. he then went on to explain that he himself had a gun a loaded gun in his desk in congress, and he describes in this letter how he was not a man who tended to walk around armed. he didn't like wearing an gun regularly, but now he had one loaded and in his desk because if there was going to be warfare in congress he wanted to fight with the self. now again, we're talking about. serious threats of violence here, and we're not talking about people in the case of hammond and actually most others that i've found in this period people aren't eager to gun each other down. they're afraid that they might have to but their arming and coming to congress not assuming that the institution can really protect them. not fully trusting their colleagues even in this period what they're going to do or how they're going to do it. so this is really a point speaking of faith and government at which politicians had lost faith in each other and in the institution of congress. and of course not very long after that the government in a sense does dissolve or at least there's secession and there's the civil war now. i'm not drawing straight lines between the past and the present at all in this case. you really can't do that, but what i do want to point out is the importance of faith in the processes of government that i mentioned in the case of both of these moments of extreme. violence and conflict part of the logic behind the creation of the us constitution was that it created and declared formal processes of government. these people creating the constitution understood in their bones the degree to which process mattered in government and in politics and the constitutional process of government was intended to offer pathways out of crises. whether that was a crisis over an election over a supreme court decision over impeachment whatever it was the constitution was at least supposed to offer some way out. and jefferson basically said as much after the election of 1800. he was asked by a friend. what would you have done? if things had gone differently, what would you have done if armed people had had marched or at the federalists had stolen the election or whatever, what would you have done if things went really badly? and jefferson basically said well, you know we might have had needed to have another constitutional convention. we might have to tweak the constitutional a little bit but the fact of the matter is we'd go back to the constitution. it would show us the way out and we'd go on. so there was that assumption that the constitutional process and and granted you can deploy and use and interpret the constitution in all kinds ways but still the process of government is considered a kind of political pathway. and i think that's an important point to make in our current climate because i think it's easy to get caught up in the give and take of insults and threats and what ifs in a time of crisis like our own the process of government matters enormously in such times and it's being challenged and questioned and maybe reinforced or maybe not reinforced. we're seeing it questioned in one way or another and defined and redefine on an almost daily basis and keeping our eye on that ball matters. thinking about the structure how it's supposed to work and actually not paying attention to folks who are making false claims that are not based on the actual process of government. it's worth thinking about that. it's worth remembering that because processes of government are and will remain crucial to whatever we do in coming out of this particular moment of crisis. without that kind of a structural anchor we risk devolving into a government where might makes right. which in many ways isn't really a government at all. thank you very much. i will stop speaking there and i will turn things over to stephanie mccurry who will ask some questions and then i believe we're going to open things up more broadly so that you guys can ask questions as well. well, thank you so much joanne. that was marvelous and i think certainly opens the way for me to start thinking along with you about then and now and you certainly let us write up to this. i think i can speak for both of us and saying i'm sure we all wish the topic tonight was not so relevant to our own political moment historians like to be relevant, but not this relevant. it's been really too much because we're citizens as well and we have to live through these crises even as we try to think our way through them and so we're so grateful to have you here to join us and not process. we are two days past the inauguration of a new president. we are too weeks past an attempted coup an attack on our capital. we are a little more than two months past an attempt to subvert the results of a presidential election. and now on a friday pre cocktails we take a deep breath. and we try to think about what we have just been through i think everybody i think that's a safe assumption we land at the weekend and we're like dear god like i don't know about you, but i was holding my breath all day wednesday. and when biden got out of the car, all i could think about was lincoln coming into washington in 1860 one and anyway historians know a little too much. sometimes totally true in this particular case, right speaking provisionally democracy prevailed against violence. so we can take a breath. but democracy is premised on respect for the will of the people. relate through elections and the peaceful transition of power. so whatever the united states just went through. it was not that. so there'll be a lasting set of consequences. i think to this that we're just starting to think about. um so as you all know joanne has written about one or two ages of political conflicts and extremes and i've written about another picking up where she left leaves off in the 18 and 1860 and moving through now into reconstruction. and so i think we're well positioned at least through, you know, the 1870s and i'm sure in the q&a we'll have plenty of people asking even more recent questions, but i just wanted to jump right directly to the present joanne. and ask you just because i value your opinion. what were you think we are and one way to do it is to ask what you thought when you listen to biden's inaugural address. because this is one way of pacing american history, and i think what was so interesting about it. was that biden really did try in that address to say something about the political moment that he thought we were in historically considered same thing kind of that we're trying to do he was clearly thinking historically he offered a story of america as he said at one point that linked past moments of crisis and challenge to the current one and many many of the references and i think the explicit ones were to lincoln in the civil war. he quoted lincoln's commitment to the emancipation proclamation to the first general address and then stunningly for me. he sort of late in the game said we're in an uncivil war and we must not let it lead to disunion. so he's he's you know, he's thinking for his speech writers are thinking what is this like? and to my mind overall the tone and the language and even the pacing seemed lincolnian like it seemed to have some of that division unity resolve kind of thing, but the address was replete with references to historic events from all over american history. and so i was just really curious what you thought about because you're set of references is so much earlier and so different and i just was wondered if you would kick us off by talking a little bit about what you thought about this inaugural address and his way of position his attempt to position us historically. one thing i thought and i'm sure many many people thought the same is talk about a challenging position to be put in right at this particular moment after what just happened and after what's continuing to happen and and trying to assume a position of leadership and not entirely sure how different people are going to accept you or not accept you as a leader, you know, i this is going to be very typical, you know, i think back to the first president who was in a difficult situation and basically never entirely knew who he was talking to or how he was addressing them and how you know it there was a similar sense of improvisation to some degree that we've been experiencing recently and that is not always present in american politics, but the thing that most struck me about biden's an augural address actually wasn't the historical references. it was the word unity. because i think that word can have a lot of different meanings and i think we've been watching since that address some of the ways in which that word unfolds. so unity can mean everyone in the nation together or unity can mean people the nation joined in some basic sense of commitment to the constitution in the nation and and differing along many lines and what we're seeing at least in public rhetoric particularly from republicans, but still also among democrats is debate about what unity is and what unity means now to me thinking about democracy, you know, democracy is grounded basically on the opportunity for argument and debate and protest and dissension right that it's bound together by the fact that the people as as stephanie just said a moment ago. can protest and express their needs of people don't have to agree? that said i think that very fact means that there have to be lines beyond which you can't cross. if there's a lot of dissension that's allowed there has to be some dissension. that isn't and i think you know, we're at a moment right now where people are having that kind of debate. now. what happens is has there been a line crossed if it has been crossed. what does that mean? which we do about it. so that's a very long-winded way of saying we're talking about unity and in doing that we're talking about what i always tend to write about as the we who is the we when we talk about we the people what is the nature of the country. what is the nature of our union which is a very historical question. that's what struck me the most and that's what i've been watching for even today as i was preparing for this. i was sort of dipping in and out of things online and it's it's defining and fighting over unity interestingly is is right where we are right now. well, i mean it's an interesting answer especially given the fact that the partisan positions that are already being staked out or precisely around this question of what unity requires so i certainly appreciate your you know, having us focus on that for a minute but your comments also both the ones you made about the 1790s and the 1850s, but also this answer, you know, there's just this kind of assumption in american public life. i think that our political culture prohibits violence it is actually not true. okay, unfortunately as we know violence has been an element. i mean, this is why they didn't want women to vote in the antebellum period and after the civil war because polls were so violent the places that there was one of the arguments and i just sort of book about violence in national governance. so yeah right that i mean you couldn't even go to the polls without engaging rowdy drunken people on by the by reconstruction gunplay at the polls. i mean you to risk your life to vote. so i think this is a fiction that violence has not long been an element of american politics, but that's the way we think about democracy that we resolve our conflicts in other ways and so forth. so one of the things that it makes me given that we are in a moment of such present violence, so ubiquitous violence, it isn't actually in congress. it's around it and it's in state capitals and everywhere else. which is a world. i'm very familiar with working on the civil war and reconstruction. so i wanted to ask you about. would you how would you think the relationship is or maybe more importantly the dynamic between partisan polarization in congress and in the states and public life more generally like what? how do you i mean you and i might think about this a little differently because you've always worked on congress and on those politicians who are represent their constituencies in congress, but from my point of view in the 1850s what's going on in the states is the leading indicator that the political organization person session is really far advanced in the states before you see it showing up in congress and the level of violence and paramilitary organizing around like let's get out of this union. it's going on for 18 months in a place like, south carolina, so you're seeing the reverberations of that in congress, but the actual you know, the minute men associations are being informed in marching around secession conventions in places like south carolina, and this makes me think a lot about now is like you you know, you you very rightly reminded us at the end your talk that one thing we think about is, you know having maintaining faith in our system, but i think this is precisely why we're at such a terrible moment because we we might even have had congressmen involved in organizing and insurrection. well, right and that's kind of one of the points. i want to make in regard to what you're saying. absolutely that you can't look at congress and say everything is coming from there, but i also don't think you can divorce what's happening there with what's happening on a state level because there's almost in this period a sort of cycle of extremism in which congressman used extreme rhetoric to gun up support the newspaper. send that back to the states the states respond in whatever way they want and send their response back. there's like a sort of cycle and congressman. no and our deliberately deploying newspapers to have that kind of local impact, so and i think i think it partly depends on the state. i mean i do think in some states. they were more ready for extreme violence then congress was i think it's i'm gonna forget which state it might even be south carolina where the governor wrote to congress and and said if there's going to be violence you guys have to start it. i can't start it from where i am, but you guys can do it. so for sure it's it's not all or only happening in congress, but what interests me particularly and i guess this is part of what interested me about congress is that they're performing to an audience very deliberately. not in a way that you know, the violence is fake because they're performing it to an audience but explicitly because they know it's going to have an impact. and you know in this period congress nowadays were used to the president being at the center of everything in this time period it's congress. that's the center of the news and congress that has all the column inches in newspapers. so people are remarkably. attuned to what's going on in congress. i found there was a humor magazine called vanity fair which came out i think in 1858 when that the first issue was right around that huge fight and one of the things that each issue did in that periodical was it would collect together like in the last week a string of ridiculous things that congressman had said one and then another and another and put it into a conversation. the only way you would understand the humor in that would be if you knew the debates. so to me that was remarkable, i could read it and i could say oh, that's so and so who stood up on this day and said that's and such so that's that's i think weaving those things together is part of this process. my work hasn't focused on that so much, but i think absolutely agree that you can't look at one without the other. i mean you're making me think about what's going to happen next again in this dynamic between the larger public the states these these citizens organizations or patriot organizations. so called and and congress and the the focus now is congress we hope that respect for process put some guardrails back on this alone. i don't know. so i guess i'd like to ask you about that. i mean they're going to the we there's going to be an impeachment. there's going to be an investigation ongoing into the into the conditions and organization of that attempted coup or insurrection, whatever prefer to call it. and so i'm wondering what do you think the worst case scenario is here given your knowledge of congress. and what do you i mean, i guess part one another way to put it is do you think there's any chance that that 19th century world that you know where the processes were returned to. do you think there's any chance that that the that they respect for process and of government as a political pathway can get us out of this or do you think we live in live in such different times that? you'd like to think that but you're not like putting any money on it. well, i'm putting money on anything is a different matter for me, but i guess i would say do i think it's impossible that political process and and even more specifically attuning the constitutional process might help us, you you know, i i'm not a scholar of contemporary politics and i'm not a scholar of constitutional interpretation in the present day. however, the electoral college sure needs to be discussed doesn't it? and that might be a way in which there would be some tweaking of the constitution that addresses some problems that are increasingly exposed in elections. so i that's an example of a pathway that might happen. now that said, you know the thing that i've been watching this last week, it's not going to be surprising is um the fact that members of congress are trying to bring their guns on to the floor that that people are unsure in congress whose armed and who isn't that they're trying to get around the machine that's supposed to detect them. you know, there's a whole thing going on which bound up with the fact that some people don't know if some of their colleagues we're in on what happened. there's a fundamental lack of trust in that institution. don't know how i it is don't know how far it goes but in a way, you know members of congress wondering if other members of congress were setting things up so that they might get hurt or killed. that's you know, that's talk about crossing lines. so you know, i don't know what that means. i know that you know, i ended my talk by talking about the 1850s late 1850s as a moment where you had that that sort of thing. um, you know, i don't know. i think it these are moments leaders need to step up and in some cases be able to engage in conversation and if they can't then we're stuck right debate and compromise. there's no way out. if people aren't willing to talk, i mean in the in the late 1850s, there was one congressman who referred to words and congress that were going to set people off as missiles. so don't send any missiles our way. he said to a northerner. it's a southerner saying to a northerner don't you send any missiles our way because then there's going to be bloodshed when you're in that state where you're not sure what you think of your colleagues and you're not you don't think the institution can defend you. you know, that is an extreme moment of extremes, you know, worst case scenario. i don't know i really you know a lot of people like to say, oh, are we gonna have a civil war? i'm not. i'm not gonna say that and i don't particularly think that i just don't think history repeats in that way, but i don't know what's going to happen and that's partly because what's going on in some ways it like violence isn't unprecedented in this way, but this combination of things. yeah, pretty unprecedented and because of that, you know, this is a moment of extreme contingency. i was going to talk about that in my comments and then figured i didn't have time but, you know during a moment like this and like those crises when people really aren't sure what can happen. that kind of moment is just you know, the most fraught moment of all because on the one hand you can think anything horrible might happen. i have to be alert and aware the other side of that and i think that's important to think about now as well is if it's a moment of extreme contingency when anything might happen, it's also the possibility for a moment of reform for moment of something better. so, you know, i don't know i i what comes next but i think the fact that i really don't know in and of itself is is interesting. yeah. no, that's that's i'm in 100% agreement with you there and this what way you made this point that it's a combination of things that are unprecedented. i mean, i think that's true because even those of us who studies say reconstruction where political violence is rampant directed, you know against african-american's on a daily basis we're voters depression is bureaucratic and literally you can't vote if you're dead levels. of violence it's not at the capital. it's and the president is not an instigator exactly that i was watching that certification of the vote on the sixth. and that was the thing. that was just blowing my mind is that you can imagine a violent scenario around a state legislature all of us who write on the south and the 1870s 1860s and 70s know about that but at the national capital and and with the present president in the center of the provocation these you're right. these are completely unprecedented things and maybe unprecedented things will have to happen like the expulsion of members who inside violence. i mean you have a few examples of that coming up before but we have a few minutes left and the last thing i wanted to ask you about which you've probably been asked about before in the last couple of weeks, but i was just one of the most shocking images i think of that of those events of november 6th. what we need any ways was watching this person carry a confederate flag on a massive flagpole through the what is statuary hall or through one of the hallways? obviously in front of a picture of sumner in front of portrait of sumner in front of a portrait of color, but this giant confederate flag carried by an insurrection is right-wing mob a maga army really in the capital and you know, it's a potent statement. i mean, it's the most it's like most recognizable symbol and it's a potent immediate statement of democracy itself, right the flag of a pro slavery nation now a contemporary sign legible to everybody that says that those who carry it do not think all men are created equal right? that's what it says. it's a pro slavery symbol and that black citizens are not fit to exercise the the privileges and rights of the citizen of the voter of the citizen and you know this sense of taking back our country. it goes perfectly with the confederate flag and as you've already referred to this, but it you know, it really is fundamentally a fight the whole thing. from the election and the the attempt to suppress the election or not have the election certified in the states all the way through is really is fundamentally about who are the people i mean, it's the most basic question that dates from emancipation. and one of the things that i just want to dimension to you is that historians have gotten like people are often so this is really about race and white supremacy and where this fits in in our attempt to think historically about the current moment because a lot of people including biden want to say this is not who we are right. that's a very common statement right now. this is not who we are and i think biden's has said it and as you probably know there's been some pretty heated debate among historians in the last month about whether that's true. so jill lepore gotten a lot of heat for saying this is off the grid of american history. to which many people a thousand op-eds about reconstruction later clear that many people don't think so and then people like 1080 coates saying this is the worst of its history. this is the united states. this is our history and it's the worst part of it and it's being publicly embraced. so i just wanted to ask you. how when in the period you write about there is white supremacy for sure, but in political life it's submerged under sectional conflict under pro slavery versus antislavery. there's not actually white supremacists beating to death, you know, black people black citizens and and a an attempt to suppress their vote or embracing a pro slavery nation, and i guess what i just wanted to ask you is whether you think that this kind of racial conflict. how what is the early american history of that? i mean is this part of the story from the beginning and it was just submerged in other things or is this as something that the conditions of contemporary life or maybe post-emancipation life in some way and have brought to this moment. what history is this part of this? not just the confederate flag, but what it means and it's being carried now not by southerners or exclusively by southerners, but by people who want and to make a statement not necessarily about secession or a set or a civil war but about their contempt for the political rights of their fellow citizens. well there there is. um, there is a long history of african-american's using symbols and using rhetoric to make statements about who they are and where they fit, you know, there's and this part of it comes from the revolution the american revolutionary period where there's all of that rhetoric floating around and all of that idea about the people and citizenship and and the rights of a people it makes perfect sense that there are african-american at that moment who know and can see that rhetoric and use it and deploy it so, you know, there's certainly a history of people of all kinds sort of yoking those kinds of claims even claims that are that extreme, you know, it's you don't need me to say that what i think is particularly interesting about this moment though, and it does have to do with that flag and the that image incredible image of hit the guy with the confederate flag between calhoun and sumner. it's sort of mind-blowing we're engaged in not just a discussion about who we are as people but we're engaged in a argument over our history as a people and how that affects who we are one of the fascinating things to me about what was going on at the capital on january 6 was the ways in which the people they were claiming history. like there was a guy dresses george washington kneeling in front of the capital right? there's this guy marching around with the flag. there were weird attempts to justify what was going on by grabbing at american history in some way that's fascinating to me, you know, it's obviously not about history. it's about many other things but the the deliberate deployment of these myths like literally singing costumes and and including that in the attack as a justification that to me is is fascinating, you know partly because it's not as though the revolutionaries were running around saying i want my personal rights, right? i mean, that's just not the logic of revolution. they you know, it's the revolutionaries were not breaking away from a tyrannical government. they broke away from one government and immediately started making other governments. so the logic doesn't fit but the fact that there needs to be that kind of ownership. and that that was at being acted out on the floors of the capital that day. that's kind of that was kind of mind blowing to me and it's such a dramatic. example of you know the power of history and how how easily it can be warped or claimed in all kinds of interesting ways and why it's important that kind of surprised me and that one image really brought it to light but there was a lot of other weird costuming going on there that was part of the same thing connecting them this person to our history making claims at what the history is playing that history is justification for what they're doing now. there was a lot of identifying going on in a weird. i just didn't expect to see costumes i suppose. part of what i'm saying and the fact that they were there shows you how intensely people felt that need to make that kind of identifying. yeah. i mean, you're right and the and it's not just costumes right? i mean in 1860 south carolina secessionist pro slavery people voters organize as you know minute men bringing back to mind. they wear the caucade and and this patriot language is everywhere. it's also attempting to be deployed in this exclusionary way. we're the patriots and so that you know, it really is. it's it's really disturbing to watch when the mob is mostly white the people whose rights they're attempting to deny aren't actually there except in the position of capital police or congress people. they're not there's not a contesting mob they're not represented. and so there's that's a this flood of represent of racist representations that are being right part of that also is up with the fact that the people engaging in this expected to have no responsibility or consequences, right a hundred percent. i mean, that's that's one of the things that is being confirmed. i mean impunity is a white privilege and i just can't wait to see that at least cold to an end because that's that's the 19th century and you know, yeah a test right? let's let's have an insurrection or an attempted coup against the capital of the united states in an attempt to over. throw an election do that and then say no i shouldn't have any response. you know, we were allowed to walk out. i mean test case because you can't avoid the meaning of what happened. so the question really is so what does that mean about what we're going to do about it exactly 100% and without without even looking at this q&a. i can be pretty sure there's some questions on there about that. but let me have a quick look and we have plenty of time left to for you to engage with your audience and my role is just to read to you. the first question has to do with how part is in violence of the late 18th century compares to the violence. we saw in january 6th. you've talked about that a lot. but if you want to just you know address it directly, that would be great. one of the interesting things about partisan violence in the late 18th century is that period did not assume something that we take for granted. so we assume that our political system is grounded on a two-party system at this point in the united states. they did not assume that parties and particularly national parties were a good thing. they thought that it represented a group of people who are out for themselves and not out for the country and you see a lot of people in the 1790s on each side climbing. well, we're not we're not a party. they're a party, but we're not a party. so even as all of this divisiveness and and nastiness that's going on that in some ways sounds familiar to us based on our modern politics. what's unfamiliar about it is their thoughts about what it meant and what the logic of it symbolize. so while we might say, well, that's a very partisan period they looked at it and thought we're all falling apart like it's done. why is this happening? you know, it didn't filter them like normal politics in any way so part of what's interesting in american history is the role of parties and in some cases the the pragmatic role of parties one of the things that i find interesting about. the right around the real turn the very end of the 18th century beginning of the 19th century is you see politicians national politicians trying to figure out how to do things at parties now do so, for example, there's a letter from thomas jefferson and he is trying to figure out he has a pamphlet that he wants to distribute. and he doesn't know how to get it out widely. and he writes to someone and he's like aren't there these clubs that meet. like could we so, you know, he's trying to do what networks of political parties do so there's a pragmatic component of it that i think we don't think about but in a period we're communications not easy and we're parties organized parties are new that that had a lot of appeal and a lot of importance one of the interesting things about the you know, the rise of andrew jackson. is he brings really in a sense modern parties with him? and the last book that i wrote the field of blood has a kind of main character at its center who gets swept up into jackson and all the he represents and what's striking about his diary is you can feel the way in which he suddenly feels a member of a club and there's never been a club like it before and there's a brotherhood and there's an intenseness and you can feel the weird personal appeal of party. and how that kind of appeal can really create a national structure that you know again now we take for granted, but that can do a lot of things. well, the next question is actually directly related and a great one i think for us which for you i mean, which is our audience member asks considering the central role of twitter and chat groups now for january for january 6th. how did the media in the early republic either intensify or de-escalate political violence? that's a great question and one of the things that's been most striking to me really throughout the administration of a tweeting president has been that social media is doing today in many ways what the telegraph began to do in the late 1840s and 1850s. so the telegraph comes along right at this moment when national politics is becoming particularly polarized and suddenly things that happen at the national center. are throughout the country in 45 minutes? and the spin is taken the politicians no longer control spin at all and what you see is things happening and people not entirely being sure how to control them or what the message is. there's an incident in 1850 when one senator pulls a gun on another senator again during the compromise of 1850 not very compromise and in its working out and of course like most of these fights there's a scuffle i think someone called it a stampede the guns pulled away. they all sit down but then a new hampshire senator stands up and he says, you know we have to address something here and that is in 45 minutes. the nation is going to be reading that we're wallowing in gore in the senate because they're going to rereading about the fact that guns were pulled. what do we do about that? so i think the way that the telegraph scrambles kind of some of the basics of democracy and how it works and how the people learn about what their leaders are doing and how leaders lose control of the spin about what's being sent out. i think social media is kind of doing a similar thing now and i think we're really at a moment where you know, and you can feel it people. can't quite figure out what to do. like, do you control it? how do you control it? should we control it should everyone control it? do we? you know, we're at a moment where there's clear recognition that social media has an incredible power. and now what you know, it's it's fascinating, but it absolutely those kinds of questions of technology and communication get at the absolute core of democracy. how a 100% i mean the it's great the way you point immediately to information technology and this sort of innovation of the 18th 1850s and you're right. i mean, it makes popular it makes the popular and popular politics bigger and more volatile and less under anybody's particular control and given the the secrecy with which people can operate on social media right now. that's another dimension of it. so we have a great question here about something i was thinking about. well, it's hard not to think about it. what did i see today? and the name of an organization? well, this is about women and violence. this was about a thing was called. patriotic women's america first women's paid patriotic women's america first organization something like that was like, oh my god, but one of the audience members says that political violence in the early republic appears to be carried out only by men. have you found evidence that women either participated or influenced these acts? this is an explosive issue right now, not at all surprising to those of us who study white supremacy historically and but a shock i think to the public to see how prominent women are and white women exclusively in this kind of mago world and the organization of it and the funding of it. and so yeah. is there any early republican version of this that you would i saw it in secession, but that's closer. i think to now than what you mostly look at. well, there were i mean if you go to the early part of the early republic back to the 1790s there were certainly women involved and engaged in politics. that's also a less violent period so the men aren't as violent either but you know the revolution launched an assumption on the part of not just white men that people could be much more engaged in the political process, you know, not buying british goods made you you were conducting a political process by doing it. so people are politicized society is politicized and women were part of that. and so and there was not surprisingly a lot of anxiety. caused by that so there's like a genre of newspaper. essay. i remember finding a long time ago. um, but the essays in one way or another all center on women who know too much about politics. so there's one about a woman who knows who's beneath the pseudonym when reading all these political essays and newspapers. she knows who all the pseudonyms are and this article is like what a horrible mother he knows all the students. there's another article a satirically has a woman who wants to be the door man of congress and she talks about her qualifications, which of course are not qualifications because they're making fun of her but this idea of women feeling themselves that they had power in politics goes to this period as far as women and violence goes it's so mixed in the later period you know it just even looking among the sort of elite folk that i've written about on the one hand. there's sort of the told, you know mail assumption that you shouldn't be violent around women. so for example when during the most famous violent incident in congress the caning of abolitionist senator charles sumner the person who does the caning preston brooks of south carolina enters the senate sees a woman in the room and sits down and waits for her to leave before he came sumner because it would be improper of him to do this violent act while a woman is in the room. now that said having a woman in the room in a different situation with different people might be a useful thing. so i think women are very involved in the process. it's just that sometimes they're influence is unpredictable because it partly depends on men and what they're going to want to happen and then what women have to do to confront that? yeah, and also which women because it's pretty rich the preston brooks would can you know bow to propriety with a woman in there when we all know the amount of violence that slaveholders felt completely comfortable exercising in their domestic domain shall we put it that way and so another question that we have has to do with with the founders people like jan hamilton and how seriously they thought the threat of demagoguery and populism was to the long term in other words to the long term stability of the republic. i mean we have reason to worry now about our ability to channel and control and suppress and dig our way of this and explosive moment and to what extent did they worry about popular violence and demo to demagoguery. i i think i can guess the answer but popular violence was a big element of the revolutionary era. did they have trouble putting that genie back in the bottle and did about that? they did i mean, so so first of all demagoguery and violence in their mind would have gone together and i would say the two foremost fears that they had in the very early years of the republic was demagoguery. and foreign influence and and those are the two things that they thought would sink the republic and that's what's always syncs republic so that were some of the things they were about i think there was concern about violence, but there was more concern on the part of federalists than on the part of republicans federalists were not fully comfortable with the missingness of democracy, they essentially felt that by allowing people to elect people to office that was democratic and if they didn't like what people did in office the next election, they could take them out but protesting in the streets and all of that entailed they were not necessarily comfortable with republicans jeffersonian republicans were more comfortable with it some of them to the point that they were comfortable with violence, but they're all so elite white men's so many of them weren't necessarily comfortable with it either. so i think violence partly in their mind represented the dangers of democracy and the question was how did how did you feel about democracy and how willing were you to embrace those kinds of dangers and i think there was kind of a spectrum of beliefs about that in this time period and it's a spectrum or a split that may be continued right up to and to the civil war because and even in the 1850s people like hammond and those in south carolina, they they would say this is a republic not a democracy. phrase that we haven't seen the back of right and they called democracy mobocy. it's just like it was like a late 18th century view except now. they're the democrats, right? it is a late 80th century view, but it was a view that made sense in 1799 because democracy wasn't a good thing yet. and so how republics fall? right, right how republicans there's a there's a quote from a massachusetts politician and he says something along the lines of and this is 1799. i believe our republic is our government is republican and our people are democratic and one or the other has to rise or fall for the country to work. and and that's very much touching on this and that's you know, the early years of the government one of the major major controversies really is the nature of democracy who has a right to engage in what and how much protest is safe in a democratic republic and we're still there. we might have to make new rules as one of the late night guys says here's a great question. we might be able to take two more. maybe only one depending on the time but this is a great question for you joanne because one of the audience members is asking whether you think there was a shift from the role of honor to the role of ideology for explaining the causes of violence and you know in the early they're saying from say 1790 to 1860. i mean, do you think there's even in that, you know first republic so to speak that there's a shift from honor to ideology as organizing or providing the map to the kind of violence that you chart. so well, that's it. that's a great question. i think. in a sense ideology and honor are sort of progressing along on two separate lines and by that i mean honor especially in the early period that i talk about personal honor has a very political function because you don't you can't say i am a federalist. i am an anonymous federalist fighting with the team, but you can say i'm a man of honor who's principles tend to be this way and you should trust me so honor becomes a way of graphing and navigating the political realm. and there still is in that period ideology. i think what changes is. with the rise of parties personal honor isn't necessarily needed in that kind of a way and then i think it becomes bound up with ideology in a more interesting way in the later period so i don't i think they're kind of moving along their own lines and then they ultimately get more entangled. in a slightly later period one of the things i really loved about i think it was the field of blood was or possibly it was affairs of honor, but it's just that the ship that this world you describe early on where everything's organized around political truth. i think that's just a really useful concept and then there's parties and so ideology in some sense is more. you know can be more clearly an organizing principle in a party. whereas this this but i you know, we might be back. we now have a party and a political chief, you know, we're in this moment. we you know, we just i think part of nobody thinks we'd be in this mess without our former presidents. so, you know the political chief here's what what's interesting about a politics of chiefs and i remember finding this when i was researching the election of 1800 and i spent a lot of time reading through people's letters and and through newspapers and any number of other things and then i remember sitting on the train coming back from the archives and thinking to myself like, what did i see and trying desperately to think about like what what am i gonna what insights am i going to draw and then i realized actually the question is, what did i not see because there was no discussion of ideology at all. it was all strategy. it was this person again this person it was against newspapers and how they were going to be used it and that at that point even though federalist republicans had substantial differences at that point still they were they were it was pragmatic in a way is what they were grappling with. so i think we'll take this one last question and exercising my feminist discretion here. i'm going to pick this one. and a and easy one for anybody. so my apologies on this but one of our audience is asking how domestic life especially between the founders and the women and the children in their lives shape responses to the periods major questions, and he really pardon be really embarrassing because my computer unplugged. oh, it's a zoomtastic moment. well, we needed one, so. and i have now provided it. okay, so do you want me to repeat it joanne? yeah, i know domestic and women and children somebody is asking a great question about the private and the public really and the person on the political they're asking how did domestic life especially between the founders and the women and children in their lives shape responses to the periods major questions and conflicts. and so that's a tough one, but i think an interesting one it is. um, and i think i think it relates to bigger issues. you know, i do think if you think differently about the political process and who should be involved in it and people's rights to express themselves and who are those people that's going to bind that up. but i think it makes me think of the diary of a senator. he's in the first congress. and he describes in this diary a dinner party that he's at. where there was a woman at the table and she was very politically engaged. he had a lot of opinion. she had a lot to say about politics. and he says in his diary something along the lines of i really wanted to go on a walk with her husband to understand how that was acceptable and he's not even saying it at like he was horrified. he honestly is like oh, but how did you think that was? okay, like i want to understand sort of how he thinks that okay, and this is certainly you know, this guy actually is a republican and he doesn't like the aristocratic federalists. so i i think this is another case in which when we think about politics and violence and partisanship we tend to draw lines and i think sometimes those lines are to draw than others. i mean, i would just say myself that this has been one of the preoccupying questions of my academic and intellectual life, which is how the politics and dynamics of power within the household and the family shape fundamentally political choices people make in the electoral arena and political life and it's just so hard for me to listen to these conversations about political violence, especially given the kind of people we're talking about like james henry hammond, you know without we have in other words. let me put it this way. we have to find a way to make domestic violence part of that conversation. otherwise, i think we're we're missing a huge piece of the story, but i think after that q&a, which is testament to your the provocations and richness of your talk, i'll turn it back to ann thornton who will wrap us up. wow. thank you so much for this invigorating time. we've spent with you and i want to acknowledge again are incredible keynote speaker. joanne freeman and our fantastic moderator stephanie mccurry for such an important. timely and illuminating discussion you really enabled us to better assess current challenges with faith in american government and the current climate of society through the lens of the kinds of lessons. we can draw from our history. so thank you both so much. you're watching american history tv every weekend on c-span 3 explore our nation's past american history tv on c-span 3 created by america's cable television companies and today we're brought to you by these television companies who provide american history tv to viewers as a public service. here 2018 was the centennial year of us participation in world war one and american history tv marked the anniversary with a variety of programs. how you do? my name is michael mccloskey. i'm here to talk to you a little bit about what the average soldier from the american expeditionary force in world war one with thought felt carried that sort of thing in reality when you were in the trenches in 1918. they would not have looked anywhere near as nice as this the average soldier found himself up to his knees in mud muck and mary especially in belgium belgium. had a very high water table along with that mud. mug and meyer was everything else that was in it. europe had been at war for the past three and a half years america didn't enter until april 1917 and we didn't get boots on the ground in europe until 1918. by that time you had three and a half years of war conflict death. gas warfare all of that is mixing with what the soldiers had to live in. there weren't just one trench. you had a frontline trench you had a secondary trench you had a tertiary trench you had supplies in the back where you had a cook wagon. you had artillery behind that. so the trench line was not just one trench. it was an entire complex. but that was your home for better or for worse. 1917 you actually had a mutiny in the french army half the french army mutiny. they said we won't go any further. we'll hold the line, but we won't go any further a great deal from the french army actually wound up court-martialed many executed. they just couldn't tolerate that sort of thing, but it did tell the high command what the situation was the americans make it in 1918. and when pershing was over observing all the allied commander said, oh we'll use the army for plugging holes. we'll put them here. we'll put them here. we'll put them here in pershing said no, i've been watching what you're doing. we're not going to have that. we're going to fight as a unified american command or not at all. and that's how he managed to keep the army together because he realized that if they allowed the allied commanders from europe to utilize the american forces the way they want not much would change. so income the americans with a different attitude and a lot of people say well the americans made the difference. well, we made a difference we didn't make the difference at the same time you had to take into account the internal collapse of germany itself. they've been blockaded they had been fighting a war on two fronts. they were running out of supplies. their economy was in shambles generations of men had been lost. they didn't have much more to run on. then take into account the new forms of combat that were taking place tank warfare had been introduced the battle of cambray. that was another factor involved and then you take the americans showing up at pretty much the same time and you wind up getting the defeat of germany that was going to take place. the american soldier had just as much bad. experiences as the europeans as the french as the belgians as the english the difference was we wound up over there for just a year. the rest of europe winds up fighting it for four so the suffering of the soldiers cannot be attic will adequately described here in this trench line. on american history tv you can watch lectures in college classrooms tours of historic sites archival films and our series on the presidency and the civil war and all of our programs are archives on our website c-span.org/history where you can also find our schedule of upcoming programs. harry s. truman and dwight eisenhower grew up within 180 miles of each other in america's heartland next on the presidency a look at these two-term presidents and one-time allies whose political roads diverged during the contentious 1952 presidential campaign when ike declared his intention to be the republican standard bearer their meeting at president. kennedy's 1963 pianeral provided a chance for reconciliation speakers are the truman library supervisory archivist samuel rushay and eisenhower library deputy director tim reeves, the library's co-hosted the event

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