Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
8 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“I think what we take away from that supports my argument that this is a war between two mid-19th century nation states that have a sense of how you fight a war.”
02 / evaluation
“One reason that rules of war were codified was because Henry Halleck, who was a Union general in Missouri, was dealing with this guerrilla activity and he said, “We need to get some rules about who’s a civilian, who’s not a civilian.”
03 / evaluation
“I think what you would expect is going… I mean, they would talk about Union occasionally, but what that means to them, it’s a union without slavery.”
04 / evaluation
“I prefer to see this as a war between two mid-19th century republics, one of which didn’t last very long and spent its whole life in the midst of a great war.”
05 / evaluation
“Most of the white North, by our standards, was very prejudiced. They were against the expansion of slavery into the territories because they thought that would circumscribe white opportunities to make an economic life in these federal territories, and they didn’t want that to happen.”
06 / evaluation
“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.”
07 / evaluation
“I still think it’s a magnet for… I mean, we’re in an unbelie- we’re far more diverse now as a people than we were during the Civil War because we continue to act in the same way as it did in the Civil War, only they’re not Germans and Ir- people come from everywhere here now.”
08 / evaluation
“We think of it as state rights because as you lead up to the Civil War, you hear white Southerners talking about it all the time.”