The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Writer S.C. Gwynne Discuss the Great Stories and Leaders of the American Civil War

Episode Date: August 8, 2020

On today’s Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan takes a deep dive into the American Civil War with author and journalist S.C. Gwynne. They discuss the immense bloodshed of the conflict and the strategies utilized, compare the merits of its most notable political and military leaders, and more.S.C. “Sam” Gwynne is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Empire of the Summer Moon (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award) and Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson. His most recent book, Hymns of the Republic, covers the final year of the American Civil War. Gwynne has written for Texas Monthly and Outside magazine.Get your copy of Hymns of the Republic: https://geni.us/fqGsThis episode is brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market is the best online location for getting healthy and sustainable groceries delivered to your doorstep. Thrive Market provides for over 70 diets and value systems, and members save 25-50% off retail prices. Plus, orders over $49 qualify for their carbon-neutral free shipping. Visit thrivemarket.com/dailystoic to get a free gift up to $22 with your first order.This episode is also brought to you by Trends. Trends is the ultimate online community for entrepreneurs and business aficionados who want to know the latest news about business trends and analysis. It features articles from the most knowledgeable people, interviews with movers and shakers, and a private community of like-minded people with whom you can discuss the latest insights from Trends. Visit trends.co/stoic to start your two-week trial for just one dollar.This episode is also brought to you by Future. Future pairs you up with a remote personal trainer that you can get in touch with from your home. Your trainer will give you a full exercise regimen that works for your specific fitness goals, using the equipment you have at home. It works with your Apple Watch, and if you don’t already have one, Future will give you one for free. Sign up at tryfuture.com/stoic and get your first two weeks with your personal trainer for just $1.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow S.C. Gwynne: Homepage: https://scgwynne.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/scgwynneFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/S.C.GwynneSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy

in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think to go for a walk to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud.

From the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support,

it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest

and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownalder, we will be your resident not so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently?

And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am a huge fan of today's guests. I read his books long before there was even this Daily Stoic podcast. I am a huge fan of today's guests. I read his books

long before there was even this Daily Stoic podcast. I think even before I'd started the Daily Stoic, you may be familiar with his book Empire of the Summer Moon. My actually first book by Sam Glinner, SC Glinn, has stated on the cover of his books. I first read his biography of Stonewall Jackson, which is fascinating and eye-opening. And honestly, I saw Empire in the Summer Moon on so many front tables of bookstores in airports and all over the country that I was a little bit leery of reading it. I thought maybe it's just trendy or maybe it's not very good or maybe it's maybe I'm just a little bit jealous. I don't know what it was, but I got around to reading it and it's just one of the greatest narrative nonfiction books of all time. It's up there with The Tiger and The Fish That Eight the Whale and Shadow Divers, three of my other all-time favorites.

And so I actually got to know Sam. I was invited to join a writers group in Austin a couple of years ago. And Sam got up and he was the first one to talk. He read something from his new book, which is now out, which is sort of what I was interviewing him about. It didn't have a title yet. He was doing a book on the final year of the U.S. Civil War. And so he read the intro to that book. And I'm a huge civil war nerd, as you know. So I nerded out about that.

I had all sorts of questions. And we've become friends. I've seen them at a bunch of the meetings, although obviously we're not able to meet anymore, which is sad. But Sam is an incredible writer, an incredible thinker, great Texan, he's written a great profile of Lance Armstrong. That's worth reading.

He's written a great book on the invention of the forward pass in professional and college football, which is fascinating. Just a great writer and his new book, Hems of the Republic, the story of the final year of the American Civil War is an incredible book, great writer, great thinker, definitely check out his stuff.

You won't regret it and we'll talk soon. All right, so one of the things that I've heard people say, and I've even kind of said at myself is, you know, as bad as things are right now, this isn't the worst moment in American history we sort of go, you know, it's not the Civil War or something like that. And given your latest book, maybe let's start there. How bad was it in the fall of 64 winter of 65? So, yeah, you bring up an interesting point. It's, you, let's dial back before coronavirus, but the question is, is how badly divided is this country?

How awful is this situation we are in right now, in terms of division and partisan politics and everything else. So if you draw what happens in the war's final year, is you have all of these things come to the fore that really, they were present in some ways early on the war, but they got very important later on. These were partisan divisions. There was a war took this lurch into a much more bitter and violent thing in the last year. For example, one thing that happened was the expansion of this guerrilla war, an informal war, often in the border states. Sometimes between like people

who sort of war uniforms like union and militias and confederate and quote cavalry who weren't really. Sometimes it was just people against people. It was an explosion of, you know, informal violence, kind of a civil war within the civil war, and if you look at a place like the Missouri, it was absolutely out of control. So this happens. You have the economic destruction of the South, just an astounding, I mean, the numbers of refugees that were on the road, I mean, people with nothing.

The Confederate dollar was approaching essentially being valueless. I mean, so much so that the Confederate Army, I think paid $1,000 for a pair of shoes in the final year, Confederate dollars. You just have the rise of all of this stuff. And one of the things I think that exacerbated this feeling of bitterness was the presence

of about 180,000 black soldiers in the Union Army, which was 10% of the Union Army. This was a terribly difficult thing for the Confederates to deal with, even though they themselves approved black soldiers later in the war, but you had no quarter given, no captives taken, things like that.

Anyway, the prisoner exchanges. You're right, right, the prisoners, the prisoner exchanges were suspended. Initially because the, the Union soldiers objected to the fact that Confederates wouldn't give black soldiers, black Union soldiers, the rights of combatants. But later it was because Grant actually saw

that in a war of attrition, why would he want to go one for one prisoner exchanges? He wouldn't want to do that. So what happens is you see the rise of these absolutely ghastly prisoner of war camps. And even though Anderson Bill or Libby or something are the ones that might come to our minds, right? Confederate prison camps, El Myra in New York

was had a death rate only like a percent less than Anderson Bill. So all of this, it's just gets so ugly and so bitter and so desperate. That's why I wanted to write about the last year of the war because it was so radically different from my biography of Stonewall Jackson was, you know, the first two years of the war. It seemed like a fun war. I mean, I'm kind of joking because lots of people tried to do these in bullets. But it was so innocent by comparison. It was people called it a band box where people were still marching off to war with bands playing

and lighten their eyes and it was gonna be glorious and a quick victory. And the end was just bloody awful. And so as it's creating towards this darkness, what I think's also interesting, and you talk about this in him, and also Bruce Katton talks about it in his book, is that somehow also, at least on the northern side, it all sort of gets infused with a meaning and a purpose that probably wasn't there in those early years, too, right? Right. People forget this. It's why the question of what was the Civil War about as such a loaded question

because we can go on for a long time about that. But the first part of the war was about restoring the union. That's what it was about. Congress set it, Lincoln set it over and over again. Everybody said the Republican set it. The leader said the war is about restoring the Union. And what Lincoln was going to do was recruit 75,000 soldiers and send them south to those southern capitals that has seceded and drag them back into the Union.

That's pretty simple, pretty simple purpose of a war. And lo and behold then, in, well, first in September of 1862, and then actually officially in January of 1863, we had this emancipation proclamation, by which Lincoln deliberately changed the nature of the war. He turned it from a war that was officially to restore the union to a war of black liberation, which was one of the most astounding things that ever happened in American history. He was criticized for not going far enough by certain people, but when you look back

on it, pretty radical. Yeah. I think one of the things I take from my study of the Civil War, and I wonder sort of what you think, is that it's in these sort of dark moments and whatever it contributed to the dark moments and however many mistakes were made from sort of this suffering from being dragged along, there are these moments of sort of ordinary heroism and then also extraordinary heroism where human beings sort of manage to rise above, you know, whatever sort of situation it got themselves into. And I feel like the emancipation proclamation was one of those, you know, the Gettysburg

address is one of those. And then I think pivotively, sort of pivotively, this moment where Grant figures out, and you talk about this so interestingly in your book, that it's, that war isn't what people thought it was, that it wasn't these, it's not these sort of brilliant strategic maneuvers, but it's like who wants it more. And, and this place he gets to where he says like, no, we're gonna win this thing. I'm not gonna give up. I'm just gonna grab it with all I have to meet. That's not as glamorous or as glorious

as the emancipation proclamation, but it is sort of a hard one insight. It's a great moment in the war. And Grant, what's interesting is you might think that, well, hey, the unions got enormous advantages of men and material and you name it. Wealth, what's so hard about this? Why don't we just go fight a war of attrition and you open your wrist and I open my wrist

and we'll see who believes it at first. But in fact, this was the hardest thing for the union to do, which to muster the will to do this. And this goes back to Lincoln's original choices of his commanding officers that were disasters that did not have the will, could not muster the will, could not understand that that was what it was was going to be needed to beat the South, all those things.

It was a really incredibly hard thing to do. And it took Lincoln a very long time to find someone who could do it. You would think there might be somebody, you know, up there who graduated from West Point, who understood that he had this country that was four times as big as the other country with times so wealth.

Let's just go, let's just go and fight until whoever wins wins or whoever bleeds the death, bleeds the death first. But yeah, it was a really interesting moment. And Grant, one of the things I say about Grant is that I discovered for myself anyway about Grant was that, you know, they called him the hammer or they called him, the guy who wouldn't give up. I mean, this incredible. But actually, when you look at what that means up close, what it actually means in a battle to do that, it's really, really difficult to watch. And someone like McClell and Faltyd so many times were not having the sort of the guts, in some ways to sacrifice his own men, right?

And then you see, and this is what I wrote about in the book, in hymns of the Republic, when you see what Grant did, I use the example of Governor Warren, who's a division commander, and who is just, his men are just sent again and again and again at least, against Lee's trenches. And there is no way they're ever going to break them. And it's just slaughter.

And the charge at Cold Harbor is just slaughter. And it's slaughter, and I think in the book I say it's by the fourth time that Warren is ordered to do this Send his men again into the slaughter. I mean imagine if you're one of these guys You know you're going in and you're gonna die there is you can't you cannot assault 12 foot deep trenches that are impervious to artillery That's what it looks like up close you have to be willing to do that and Grant was willing to do it. It's really astounding when you look at the actual on the ground, what it's like for that division commander,

you know, Brigade, you know, I've heard core commander division, Brigade and regimental commanders as they look at what's going to happen to them. It's a radical and really brutal view of the war that absolutely did not exist in 1860, in a one or two or three, even. Where does Grant draw that strength from? I've always been fascinated by that. Like where does that sort of, because it's not just the willpower,

I mean, there's this argument sort of early on in the war that if the South had sort of done this sort of Fabian strategy that perhaps they could have, you know, lasted for longer and and even that's really hard, right? Like to do a strategy that you get criticized, it's almost like taking the criticism is harder than enduring the losses or the danger of battle and Grant seems to have this remarkable ability to like find what he thinks is right. Stick to it even as people are calling him a drunk, even as they're calling him a butcher, even as he's seeing the bodies pile up.

Where does this kind of fortitude and commitment come from inside of him? Well, I think it comes from the whiskey primarily. Okay. Just kidding. No, no, that is the joke. Grant is my hero, just a bit of... So, the interesting thing about Grant to me is if you look at... I don't know the answer to your question, how something gets in someone like that.

But what's interesting about Grant though, is that if you look at his life up until that point, he's had just more setbacks than you can shake a stick at. It's just setback after setback. Once he gets out of West Point, it's just, and to the point where he's selling firewood on the street in St. Louis, and now all his ventures, every venture that he did, he went to, at some point, he had this idea he was going to ship ice from the northwest down to San Francisco and sell it. Of course, the ships were become the ice melted. There was some other thing where he was going to, I don't know, ship animals somewhere

and they all died. Every single thing he tried went south, and he's this bright, I don't know, ship animals somewhere and they all died. And every single thing he tried went south. And every, every, and he's this bright guy who can't make anything work. And he finally ends up, you know, it is a clerk in his father's leather, tannery, working for his brothers. And he's, he's just, and well, and we should also mention washing out of the army for drinking, which wasn't really in a culture where all they did was drink. I mean, how could you tell the alcoholics from the people who

drank all the time? I mean, it was hard to do. It was because he couldn't hold his liquor. But but so you have this guy who, I mean, imagine what it was like. Okay, so he's standing on the corner in St. Louis. He's selling firewood and a buddy of his, I guess it's Longstreet or I think it's Longstreet. Seize him. He's can't believe it. This is Grant. He was Longstreet was in Grant's wedding.

He goes, well, we've come, you know, well, you know, we, will you come in and play a game of, of Brad with us in the hotel here. And Grant says, fine fun and goes in. Can you imagine that he's playing with his successful West Point counterparts, right? And he, and at the end of this, I mean, they can't believe that this is Grant.

And at the end of this, he actually presses a gold coin or a dollar coin or five dollar coin. I guess into Longstreet's Palm and says, I owe you this from before Longstreet says, you can't grant, don't do this. You have no money, poem and says, I owe you this from before. Longstreet says, you can't grant. Don't do this. You have no money. Grant insists, okay, this is Grant.

But the point being that he put up, he went through all of this adversity over and over again. And it was kind of adversity without let up. And it didn't discourage him. It just never did. It should have. The guy should have just been jumping off a dock or he should have been drinking again, which nobody sort of notices. He didn't

after he washes out of the army. When he's at that moment of selling firewood in on the streets of St. Louis, this guy should be drinking. If there's any time you should be drinking, he's not drinking. He's pressing a coin into Long Street sand because on some level he believes things are going to be okay. So Grant just wouldn't accept defeat and it was handed to him over and over and over again. And so you see the wilderness was a terrible defeat for the union. It wasn't the PR didn't say that. That's not what the Prophet gave him. This bad is Chancellor's film. It wasn't the PR didn't say that, what the prophet gave him is that, this bad as chancellors feel. Granted, see it that way.

He turned his army south. He said, let's, what we're gonna go around this way is gonna be okay. You know, he just didn't see it that way. And I guess the point I'm making is that, that particular persistence was, was president in his whole life, oh overall his post post-West Point life To that moment and it was typical of the man. He just

You know, he wouldn't accept defeat. I mean the gosh the the charge at Cold Harbor alone where all those Sassons of men went down and a half an hour. That should have defeated him. It didn't Yeah, no, I'm so moved by that story and fascinated by it. And I actually, I tell the, the, the firewood story and instillness is the key a little bit. I, I sort of, I was doing this chapter on the, on the power of confidence, sort of contrasting confidence and ego, ego sort of seems flashier, more, you know, compelling. It's, it's more extroverted, but there's a scene. I think Longstreet comes across Grand,

and he says, like, good God, Grand, what are you doing? And Grand just says, oh, I'm solving the problem of poverty. There's this sort of, he has this ability, I think not to be swayed by external events, good or bad, and has this sort of even keel this tranquility I think not to be swayed by external events, good or bad, and has this sort of even keel this tranquility through all of it, which I just found to be so sort of moving and inspirational and probably just sort of exactly what the nation needed in that moment.

And maybe you can pass that with the ego of McClellan, which couldn't deal with setbacks that were half as bad, because he felt like if the army was, aside from the empathy, which is a very real thing, and not all of us are cut out to command troops, or hundreds of thousands of troops, where some of them will inevitably die. So not being sort of sanguine about that. But I think my read as McClellan's ego was so tied up in the winning and the losing that he couldn't risk losing to get to the win, which Grant's confidence allows him to get to. That's really well put. Write that down. That's exactly. That's a really good summary of McLean and Grant. That's exactly what it was. But Grant had this fundamental visceral optimism and he always had it in spite of how bad things were and it really carried him through. Just to finish out that story,

I think that story about Longstreet and Grant is really moving and it's really inspirational and it's kind of this great kind of pre-war moment because it's not that long before the war starts after that. But then you have the punchline to this story which is at Appomattox where Grant seeks Longstreet out. And this is Lee surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia. seeks long street out. And this is Lee surrendering, the army of Northern Virginia. And Grant goes to him and says, Pete, let's have another game of Bragg someday.

And there he was, this absolutely miserable broke guy in this street with that kind of holding his own. He was self-possessed back then when he was off. And he's just a self-possessed back then when he was all. And he's just a self-possessed and ego-less when he says, let's have another game of Brexit someday, Pete, at Epimeth. No, it's really important. It's tears to my eyes. It really does because there's something so ego was missing from both of them. I guess that's what you were saying.

Yeah, no, no, you're totally right. I had Andrew Roberts on the podcast resilient. He wrote this great biography of Churchill, right? So Churchill's favorite moment in like English history is the surrender at at Appomattox when Grant, you know, lets the men take their horses and says they will need them to plow fields. Yeah, I think that confidence plays through because here he's able to be magnanimous and merciful in this moment of great triumph, which I don't think, if you're looking at the beginning of your book and you're seeing where these trends are going, that everything's getting harder and everything's getting

meaner and it's inexorably going towards more violence, more death. If you're predicting the ending, extrapolating out those trends, you don't guess apomatics. No, no. It's Lee's greatest moment, and it is absolutely an astounding moment. And speaking of Churchill,

well, it tangentially related to Churchill, but I've just been reading about the Boer War. And it's really interesting because people said, well, because at that moment, of course, Lee could go ahead of going along with Jefferson Davis, could have gone along with a lot of his staff members and a lot of people in the South who thought, let's go to the hills. We're just keep fighting this war. And we can use any model you want to. We can use the model of the gorillas, a Mozby's gorillas in northern Virginia, who were never caught or just kept causing trouble. But anyway, there's this moment, when Lee says, no, we're not going to do that.

But I'm already about to bore with the Bores did that. They did. I'd forgotten this. They did exactly that. They lost a couple of big battles, right? It was the end, and then they took relatively small numbers of them, but the last, the end of the borrower was just grizzly.

It was, it was kind of a, in a way, it is what might have happened if Lee hadn't done that. But yeah, there are these moments that are so, and both Grant and Lee and these stories that we're telling here are transcending the moment. They're transcending themselves. They're transcending whatever petty ego-driven feelings they might have had. Well, so that was something I wanted to ask you about. Let's transition to the command cheese. And then I've got one more civil war question for you after that. But I think I'm fascinated by this debate about civil war

statues and statues in general. It's something I've talked about a bunch of daily still. Because what you were talking about with Lee and what I was talking about with Grant and all these people, and actually, Churchill's a big proponent of this too, this idea of a kind of a collective history and a collective set of myths, although I totally grant that it got perverted and it became symbols of white

supremacy and so on and so forth, these are wonderful moments in American history where we do transcend the tribalism and the awfulness and the violence and the hatred and people who however flawed were able to do the right thing. And I feel like we've lost the ability to tell those stories. And then to me that kind of explains where we are now, where we don't, as a population, we don't have any sense of who to turn to for inspiration what we want our leaders to be like. I don't know. I'm just curious what you think about the symbolism of these historical moments and how

they should be taught and used as we navigate the future. Yeah. It's interesting. I've never agreed with the idea that we should expunge the Confederacy from all American history so that no one would ever see anything about us or knowing whatever know. I don't see why that's a good idea. I'm not sure whatever lessons there may have been to be learned. They're not going to be learned if you if you if you don't see a marker or something somewhere and yes, obviously the

question of interpretation is very important. But I mean, I started off taking the historians point of view that, well, no, we shouldn't, we should contextualize them, not take them down, but I realize you're kind of going to lose that battle. Certainly here in Texas, we're losing that battle. Now, and you can't really win. You can't defend slavery, and it's impossible to do.

On the other hand, it's incredibly selective. When you say, oh my God, you know, a robbery, yeah, it's him, he did it. It just ignores so much history. I mean, where I come from is Connecticut. It was the center of the slave trade. Half of my state's economy was the slave trade. This was what sent ships in the middle passage to Africa, chained black people on decks four feet high, with two foot spacing between them and then dragged them across the ocean. These were people, my buddies from New York, Rhode Island

and Connecticut and Boston. That's who financed them. That's who launched them. Which was more egregious, owning slaves or financing and equipping voyages to the middle passage or ensuring them the way Etna did or financing the way JP Morgan did. I mean, at some point, we're going to start to point fingers of blame at people selectively. And this is what I object to and I always say is, you know, at some point, you're going

to be taken down the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Monument. And some point you're going to be taken down the Washington monument and the Jefferson monument. And I don't think they should be taken down. You know, Jefferson did wrong things. Washington was not a terribly enlightened slave owner. There were lots of people in New England where I came from. I mean, you have to go and rename, have to schools and parks and everything in Brown University and Harvard. I mean, all these places, Yale, I mean, you wouldn't have to rename, but you'd have to, a lot of the buildings there were from slave money.

So my argument always is, you know, this country, this is why I love Lincoln's second inaugural, because he's talking about, it's a national sin of which we're all guilty. It's wound around the core of the country. We're all guilty of it, generationally. We're all guilty of this thing. You know, 15 U.S. presidents had slaves 10 well in office. I mean, it's wound around the core of the country. And Lincoln, that's why to me, the second inaugural

is the greatest speech ever made with the peace in it saying, you know, interpreting the war as blood atonement, you know, for 200 years, 250 years of slavery. This is what it had to be. No, that's what I guess I was going to sound. Sorry, what are you saying about? Yeah, I was going to say, I think what makes Lincoln such a brilliant leader was his ability to actually navigate that complexity, to not simplify it, to sort of deal with the endless contradictions and complexity of it in short, of course, that was more right than wrong to me as maybe one of the most impressive things that a head of state has ever done.

Yeah, I mean, to me, it's probably the single most. And there were, I'm sure there were maybe people who were thinking this, but no public people were saying anything like what Lincoln said. And so my feeling is that you, I don't know, at some point you have to, if you're gonna take down Lee, I think you might have to take down Jefferson too. You want to do that. And I'm not saying I want to take either one down,

but it points up the, I mean, you can't just be selective. And everybody, and when I say that, people say, yeah, but those Confederates, they fought for it, you know. Hey, actually, you know, I mean, most of those kids were not, most of those kids were 18. They were drafted. They were drafted, and they were kids, and they couldn't have told you anything

about the compromise of 1850 or the Missouri. I mean, they didn't know about that anything about the compromise of 1850 or the Missouri. I mean, they didn't know about that stuff. They really didn't. So I don't know. The fighting for it makes them really evil. But anyway, and in fact, in New England now, there are movements now to start looking at the sins of those people.

But I'm not sure they should be expunged either. I don't know. I don't know that expunging people is a good idea. I mean, slavery is what we need to understand is that slavery is a great sin that our country committed. I'm just following Lincoln here. Yeah. And the Civil War was its blood atonement.

Let's start with that and talk about that. You know, let's talk about that. And when we have to get certainly point fingers at Stonewall Jackson and say, well, we can't possibly have him on an elementary school in Dallas. You know, I think it's so easy to sort of expend your mental and political capital on sort of judging and putting historical figures

into neat, clean categories, then to look the complexity of our own sort of ethical and moral contradictions in the mirror. Sort of like, I don't know in a sweatshop, but I bought a t-shirt from one. How complicit am I in that system? I have stock, I have investments in companies that, you know, steal water from Africa, you know, like you put your money in an index fund and the next thing, you know,

you're helping some water, some water company, you know, do some horrendous environmental or ethical thing. Like, it's so much easier to look and go, this was a bad person and not have to apply that level of sort of judgment on yourself. Yeah, that's a good point. I applaud the national conversation about the subject. I think it's a good idea, but it tends to be a little one-sided, as you say. So I love your book Empire of the Summer Moon.

I think it's one of the great sort of narrative, nonfiction books of all time. I think it's incredible. Here's a sort of historical, what if that might require an hour of conversation. So feel free to tackle it however you want. So the way you sort of present the book is it's this sort of clash of civilizations, right? And there's sort of mistakes on both sides. It's sort of inevitable. It becomes this kind of blood feud. So let's say we were charting a historical course, we had the ability to do it otherwise. Is that actually possible? Is there any way that the Western expansion could have happened differently that

does not involve the clash of civilizations in the way that you so fascinatingly present in the book or was it to war like people eventually having to settle it out and there could only be one victor I Don't see any way to avoid it. I don't I don't and one of the reasons is because let's just say we have a war between England and France in the 17th century the end of the war we can have a Treaty we can have a peace there can be some executions and there can be some reparations or something or maybe a prince gets put on a throne And life goes back to normal in some way Because the two countries were fundamentally similar

economically If and I'm going to talk about the planes Indians now that which is a different from let's say I don't know Ira Koei or Eastern or Woodland Indians or something. The Plains Indians had a life that revolved around one thing and that was the buffalo. Every single thing came from the buffalo pretty much. I mean, you're the weapon and the weapons and the meat and the clothing and the lodging and I mean, everything came from the buffalo. And it had for a long time. And there was no way that planes Indians were ever going to be able to

just go, but for one, they were nomadic. They didn't have a village that they could go back to and say, okay, well, we lost. Let's hold a town council meeting and get on and talk about farm financing or whatever they would. They couldn't do it. There was no domicile. The lifestyle dependent on the buffalo who by 1874 had pretty much been killed by US government policy, all 60 million of them in the southern plains. And so you take away the center of their life. And you believe them in a position where they really don't have anything left. I mean, there's nothing. So, so let's just say, could you have made a piece that said, okay, we'll give the command she's Colorado.

Could you have done that? Because that's what you would have had to because they're, they're never accepted being being farmers and corn farmers. If they were given 160 acres, they always subletted to some white guy. They, they did not want that. They never wanted it. They never took it. The planes in he is not talking about. The East Coast Indians did. But so let's just say you could, let's say in a perfect world, you could say, well, I'll tell you know, we're going to give them the equivalent of the carada territory, which would be a pretty good hunting ground, even for no, no, man's. That treaty would have been broken the day it was made.

You could have made that treaty in Washington, but it would have been broken on the ground by people, by westward moving settlers the day really, and it would have been completely broken in a little pieces within a year or two. And so, I guess I'm pessimistic. I don't see any way with those particular circumstances of the planes in the ins anyway that you that you ever could have settled it put them,

you know, given them something that they would have wanted and then had the people on the ground obey the terms of that deal, not a million years. And if you look at the whole trail of tears and everything else that, you know, all of the kind of dislodging of Native Americans in the southeast was, I don't know, somebody counted it up, Angie DeBoe or somebody, 360 broken treaties. It just, they just, you, even if you tried it, as well intentioned as you might be, you say, okay, we're going to put them in Alabama here and this one's going to work. No, it's not. Treaty's gonna be broken, they're gonna be driven away again.

So anyway, that's just my view. No, I think it's fascinating. Is this sort of inevitable sort of, yeah, just clash of civilizations? And I think what you did so well in that book that I think a lot of historians would not have been able to do is you just sort of presented it as it was for what it was rather than sort of making a lot of historians would not have been able to do, is you just sort of presented it as it was for what it was,

rather than sort of making a lot of sweeping judgments like we were just talking about, and you just sort of presented humanity as humanity, which is both dark and heroic, and fascinating all at the same time. Well, thank you. It was, I think it was the partly time. Yeah, well, thank you. It was I think I think it was the the Partly my own naivete or my or the fact that I hadn't been teaching at a university say for 30 years because I'm not sure I could have written the book

I approach as a reporter which I was and I'm basically a magazine reporter You know, and you just try to be as objective as you can, try to tell both sides of the story and move on. And there aren't, you don't find huge theoretical constructs working in my, well, either that really any of my books, but especially that one. So, to wrap up, I wanted to go really briefly to the Stonewall Jackson book, because, so there's this, obviously, the sort of the art of momentum, Mory, the sort of going out well, sort of preparing for the end of life, seems to be the sort of constant theme and so it philosophy and mostly fascinated with it. I've always found those sort of last words of Stonewall

Jackson to be beautiful and haunting and I wanted to ask you sort of what they meant to you. You can tell the you sort of what they meant to you. You can tell the listeners sort of what they were. And what do you think he meant? And is there symbolism in there? What does he mean? Well, it's interesting that you bring up this kind of idea of the good death.

Yeah. Do you read Drew Gilpin's Fast Book? The Republic of Suffering? Yes. I mean, what a incredible book. I mean, it's wonderful. It's one of my absolute favorite books and about this book. I'm going to think about right now with the pandemic as well. Yeah, it really is. The context is there. There was this idea of death, the death that you kind of always wanted, the death that the soldiers never got. You wanted to die in your own hearth

with your loved ones around you with the Bible being read over you, and this is what obviously didn't happen for so many soldiers in the war. It happened actually, Jackson did get it. I mean, and he has let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees. The final quote from Jackson, apparently referring to this river that ran by the house that he grew up in, on where he used to play.

The guy who raised him actually had some slaves, and one of the slaves was an older man who befriended Jackson and his sister, and he would row them across to the trees on the other side of the bank, where they would just play. So it was just a really early kind of idyllic, happy memory that was his last memory. And so if you had to take the

Drew Gilpin foused ideal death, the good death, complete with the quote. I mean, and I tend not to think that that is made up. Some people have said it might be, but those people didn't know about the river and the trees. They didn't know about that. Only Jackson knew about that. So he said something to that effect anyway, but it was a... Yeah, his death is a curious... It was the most surprising thing to me in the book, not only that kind of how emotional it was, but how motion... It moved for me, but for the country too. I mean, there were chapel bells and new hamps you're ringing for him. I mean, everybody felt that, which is kind of weird

for an old dead Confederate white guy. Yeah, yeah, no, it's such a, I don't know. It's just such a haunting sort of humbling metaphor, I think. And yeah, you don't know if he's talking about heaven, is he talking about going back to when things were more peaceful, you know, is it crossing over to the other side? It's just, yeah, let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees. It seems like that's how you're supposed to go. Yeah, and I think it clearly is, I mean, he believed very deeply in heaven

and the afterlife, and I think it is that, I mean, who knows how he, in his semi-delirium there that he chooses these words, but I have to think heavens in there somewhere. I do too. Sam, thanks so much. This was amazing. It's great, Ryan. It's always so much fun to talk to you about the Civil War.

Oh. I I appreciate it. I have a few more beers and talk some more Civil Wars. Anytime, anytime. Okay. Talk to you soon. you on iTunes or any of your favorite podcasts listening apps, it really helps and tell a friend. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.