Gary Gallagher: evaluation

Transcript context

…And of course, the beautiful, dark, ironic hypocrisy was illustrated by the Confederacy when they were the first to pass a national draft in American history. Like, irony is wonderful- … in history. Another thing that I love to teach is that the most intrusive central government in American history, by far, until deep into the 20th century, was the Confederate central government, because it had to do things to keep the war going that it couldn’t have done unless the central government stepped in, such as passing the first national conscription law in American history. The government, the US government never forced people into uniform before the Civil War. The Confederates did it first. They did it in the spring of 1862. They passed a national graduated income tax. And when taxing didn’t work, when their money became so devalued, they then passed what they called the tax in kind. They would take a percentage of your crop. They allowed the government to impress horses and mules and enslaved labor to work on… All of these were intrusions from the central government that drove true state rights people crazy in the Confederacy. Confederates didn’t have political parties because they said the founders didn’t want them, so we won’t have them. But what they did have was a sort of nationalist, “We’re gonna let the central government do whatever it needs to do.” That’s Jefferson Davis’ wing, and Robert E. Lee’s over there, too. And the people like the vice president, Alexander Stephens, who said, “You can’t do all this stuff because the states should have more power.” The only reason the war lasted as long as it did is because the central government did things no one ever would have believed they would do. He also got rid of habeas corpus just like Abraham Lincoln did in selected situations. And of course, we should really emphasize that on both sides, those volunteers, on the Confederacy, there’s a very large number of people percentage-wise that volunteered to fight. And then I believe the volunteer period was one year, and then there’s all kind of funky stuff that the government started doing to trap those people into then serving and-…

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