Historian Allen C. Guelzo on Hard Choices and Robert E. Lee

On today’s episode of the podcast Ryan talks to Historian Allen C. Guelzo about his new book Robert E. Lee: A Life, the mystery of how Lincoln would have handled reconstruction had he not been assassinated, the importance of cherishing and protecting democratic principles, Lincoln’s complexity of depth and Lee’s complexity of confusion, and more. Allen C. Guelzo is an American historian who serves as Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He formerly was a professor of History at Gettysburg College. Guelzo received the 2013 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History for Gettysburg: The Last Invasion at an awards ceremony in 2014. He has written many books including Gettysburg: The Last Invasion and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $250 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org and pick podcast and enter DAILY STOIC at checkout. SimpliSafe has everything you need to make your home safe. This week, our friends at SimpliSafe are giving Daily Stoic listeners early access to all their Holiday deals—40% off their award-winning home security. Take advantage of SimpliSafe’s these deals and get 40% off your new home security system by visiting simplisafe.com/stoic. Uprising Food have cracked the code on healthy bread. Only 2 net carbs per serving, 6 grams of protein and 9 grams of fiber. They cover paleo, to clean keto, to simple low carb, to high fiber, to dairy free to grain free lifestyle. Uprising Food is offering our listeners ten dollars off the starter bundle. that includes two superfood cubes and four pack of freedom chips to try! go to uprisingfood.com/stoic and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can add the Cover to any mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. Right in time for the holidays, give the gift of better sleep and a present that will keep giving back, everyday of the year. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic this Black Friday and Cyber Monday to save on the biggest sale of the year. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Allen C. Guelzo: HomepageSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think one theme I read in the Stoics, and maybe I'm reading into it, but I think it's true. It's a study of focus on the sort of tragic, flawed, great men and women of history. Seneca is fascinated with Alexander the Great. Marcus Aurelius talks about Nero and Vespasian. He was up close and personal with Hadrian. Cicero and Cato, they talk about Marius and Caesar, of course. Postidonia is there when Marius dies. The Stoics were ambitious, but they also understood,

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  as Wright Thompson says, the cost of these dreams and the sort of company that the top level often forces one to keep, like sort of who their peers were. Marcus Aurelius, as it said, is sort of reluctant, almost cries when he's told he's going to be emperor because he knew how many bad kings there were. So What I try to write about in my books are these figures, the good ones and the bad ones. I learned this from Robert Greene. You sort of show the observance of a law, but also the transgression of the law. So I'm fascinated with these figures, people who were great and did great things, people who were unassuming and did great things, but then also really talented, brave even,

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  brilliant even, people who sort of went the wrong way. And I think Robert E. Lee is one of those characters. You have the indisputable fact that this guy commits treason. And he was not just a slaveholder, but not a particularly kind one, not even a particularly reluctant slaveholder. When I saw that Professor Gelzo had written this new book, Robert E. Lee: A Life, which came out in September, I rushed out to read it and I rushed to have him on the podcast. I also read his wonderful book, Reconstruction: A Concise History, which is a period of American history that I've talked a lot about on the podcast that I don't understand as well as I'd like to,

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  but remain interested in studying because to me, it's like what could have been. And we talk about that in today's episode. Professor Alan Gelzo is an American historian at Princeton University. He was formerly a professor of history at Gettysburg College. And his interest in the American Civil War was partially motivated by his grandmother, who actually attended lectures put on by the Grand Army of the Republic as a child. He received the 2013 Guggenheim Prize in Military History for his book, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which is one of his most popular books. He also wrote Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War. And then, as I said, Reconstruction: A Concise History. And then his other book, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. And as I said, his new book,

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  Robert E. Lee: A Life, came out in September. It's a great book and I think you'll enjoy it.

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  All right, well, I have a bunch of things that I want to talk to you about. But as I was researching for this, this is a question that perhaps you're uniquely suited to answer, as I've, in my reading and understanding of the Civil War and American history, I've always been fascinated with Reconstruction, sort of how it goes wrong, how it doesn't end up, you know, sort of accomplishing what it set out to accomplish in a lot of ways. I sort of see it as this tragical, this tragic historical what if. As someone who was born in occupied Japan, one of the few successful Reconstruction efforts, when you look at

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  Reconstruction, do you see it as a what could have been? Was it a historical inevitability? Like, what goes so wrong that, you know, 150 years later, we're still dealing with the consequences of coming up short there?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Well, Ryan, my guess, and this is only an educated guess, because this moves us into the realm of what if. And I've always found that what if is very soft ground to tread upon.

• 5:10Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  But my general sense of things is that Reconstruction fundamentally is overthrown. I don't even like to use the word failed, because that would suggest that there was some defect of intention in the reconstructors. Now, it was really overthrown by people who were opposed to its intentions and goals. In trying to understand it, though, I think one of the major problems that we deal with is that in Reconstruction, nobody really knew what they were doing.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  I don't mean that in specific instances, yes, people had specific jobs and specific responsibilities. I mean, in the overall sense, that Americans really did not have useful models of what to do in this thing called reconstruction. You could look to the past, but the past was not always terribly helpful because you basically got two versions of what you should do with territory or peoples whom you had conquered or reconquered, in this case, those who had been in rebellion. One of them was, I'll call it the Sulla option. I'm going back, of course, to the Roman civil wars, and that is,

• 6:32Speaker 01

  you cut off the heads of everybody who opposed you.

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, salt the earth behind you.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. The other option is the Julius Caesar option, where you start pardoning lots of people. Not everybody, but you start pardoning lots of people, and you try to get along with people, and you try to cause as little mayhem as possible. Well, look what that did for Julius Caesar. So you have these two options that are presented by people in the 19th century who are steeped in classical history, and neither of them really seem to be terribly workable. There's also not much for people to go on from reconstructions closer to the times of the 19th century.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  For instance, reconstruction in England after the Cromwellian interregnum. That tended to move in the direction of the Sulla option, and that did not always produce a great deal of stability either. Not too many people wanted to imitate a lot of the things that had happened at that time. But, on the other hand, what were you going to do? Simply nothing?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  So there's a big complication that emerges out of the fact that there's no real roadmap easily available for how to do this thing called reconstruction. There's no place you can take people, there's no book you can give them, Reconstruction for Dummies. And in large measure, reconstruction is a lot of improvisation. I think the improvisation pattern shows up in the way we handle the Reconstruction amendments, the 13th, the 14th, the 15th amendments. The 13th amendment is fairly straightforward, we're going to abolish slavery. Alright, we abolished slavery, and then people sat down and thought and said, "Oh, wait a minute, that's not enough. We need to do something more, we have to address the question of

• 8:28Speaker 01

  the citizenship status of those who've been freed from slavery." And so there comes the 14th amendment, and that, by the way, is only one of the provisions of the 14th. The 14th is a grab bag of at least five different provisions. But each of them, in its own way, is part of this pattern of improvisation. A problem comes up, we propose a solution, then we find that there are other problems. Right, the 14th amendment then comes into being. Then we realize, "Well, that didn't quite do the job." So we have the 15th amendment, which was much more specific about linking citizenship and voting rights. What you're seeing here is a steady unfolding of people who are feeling their way forward in really novel territory.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  And that provides lots of opportunities for making mistakes, provides lots of opportunities for people to sabotage, subvert, and undermine while the process of discovery is undergoing. And a result, as a result, what you get in Reconstruction is often some very disappointing results. The second thing I'd add to that is the timeframe. Reconstruction is usually dated as something which takes place between 1865 and 1877. That's just 12 years. And when you think long term, the kind of work that Reconstruction needed to do in

• 9:57Speaker 01

  the post-Civil War South was simply not the kind of thing that could be done in just 12 years. But the political environment changes so dramatically over those 12 years that by the time we get to 1876 and 1877, the will to move forward through Reconstruction has simply evaporated. And one reason why it evaporates is you have the Panic of 1873. The Panic of 1873 sends a shiver through what had up to that point been a solid Republican governing majority in Congress.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  The 1874 elections bring Democrats back to a majority in the House of Representatives, you know, something they hadn't seen since before the Civil War. Well, once Northern Democrats and their Southern Democratic allies are in charge of the House, that means they're in charge of the budget. There's not going to be any more funding for Reconstruction initiatives. And so, in a sense, the program virtually dies at that point. It's going to rattle on for a little bit more, but it's going to have to do it without any kind of serious support from politics in Washington. Ulysses Grant said years later, looking back on this, that he really felt the big mistake

• 11:23Speaker 01

  in Reconstruction was that they didn't just put a military occupation in place and keep it there for 30 years. Because that would have allowed an entire new political generation to emerge in the South that could be free from the outlook of the old South, free from the prejudices, free to work with black and white together. That just did not happen in Reconstruction. And looking back on it, Grant thought that was a big mistake. I think we learned that lesson after World War II because we imposed long-term reconstructions on Germany and Japan. If we had simply walked away at the end of World War II, could there have been

• 12:08Speaker 01

  a renazification of what was left of Germany? Possibly. Could there have been a re-imperialization of Japan? Quite possibly. That did not happen, but it didn't happen because this time we committed ourselves to long-term occupation and reconstruction in those places. And the results, of course, are what we live with today. But we didn't do that in Reconstruction. And that was yet, I think, another mistake that grows out of the fact that people in 1865 to 1877 were really improvising as they went, and they didn't always make the right decisions.

• 12:48Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's funny that you mention a model, that they didn't have one in Reconstruction, and it's sort of a quirk, but I think also kind of a wormhole into history with the idea that the guy in charge of Reconstruction of Japan would have heard about these things directly from his own father, who was in the Civil War. Like, you know, we think about these events as being so far from each other, but Douglas MacArthur's father was a Civil War hero. Like, he would have thought about this, like, not in the abstract, but not, but his father's experience in the Civil War, but then also his father's experience in the occupation of the Philippines as well.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Well, here's another part of the story, and that is, in between the Civil War and the post-war occupation of Germany and Japan, we really do have two other opportunities to talk about Reconstruction. One is at the end of the Spanish-American War, and specifically about the insurrection in the Philippines, and the other is after World War I.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  I'm in less of a position as a historian to be able to speak with any kind of authority about the Spanish-American War. That one, I'm going to have to let people who specialize in that particular study speak with more authority than I have. But certainly in terms of the conclusion of World War I, we backed out of World War I as fast as we could get out. Within eighteen months of the conclusion of fighting in 1918, virtually all American troops had been withdrawn from Europe. And we, in some senses, Ryan, it was almost a faster runaway than what we executed in Reconstruction.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  And perhaps, and I can only say perhaps, some of that was actually motivated by the fact that a lot of the people in power at that time in 1918 were themselves Southern Democratic progressives, you know, people like Josephus Daniels, people like Woodrow Wilson, who regarded Reconstruction as a gigantic mistake, a gigantic imposition on Southerners, and who were quite determined that the post-war future in Europe was not going to look like post-war Reconstruction in the South. When you have someone like Woodrow Wilson describing D.W.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Griffith's Birth of a Nation as "truth told with lightning," this is a glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, then it's not necessarily a surprise then to find that Americans at the end of World War I really don't want to commit themselves to anything that points in that direction. What we do after World War II is very different, but a different generation has come to pass. And ironically, Douglas MacArthur, who really achieves his first marks as a leader in World War I, becomes one of the major leaders in World War II in the occupation of Japan and the pacification of Japan.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  That would make, I think, an interesting study in its own right. Once again, I'm out of my century. And I think it would be very interesting if someone could trace these questions about occupation, about reconstruction, through perhaps the the family experience of the McCarty's.

• 16:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's a tricky question, I guess, because, and this dates back to the Stoics. Seneca writes this fascinating essay on clemency, and I believe it's the first appearance of that word in Latin, the idea of like, how does the person with power treat the person or the people beneath them without power? And so when you look at the end of the Civil War, you look at the occupation of Japan and Germany, there is this sort of question of like, what is clemency look like? Is one being vindictive, or is one actually being just?

• 17:06Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it seems as if we really struggled with like, what our obligations were to the what they then called the freedmen, what our obligations were in the memory of all the soldiers who died in the war, what our memory, what our obligation was to the Confederates, who just a few years previous were fellow citizens, but then had done this horrible thing. It seems like Lincoln had a had a plan that obviously gets cut short, but some sense of like, how one threads that needle of being both merciful, but also not enabling the

• 17:47Ryan Holiday?

  seeds of whatever the movement that caused the crime or the war in the first place. And maybe that's just an extremely hard thing to do. How do you, coming out of the carnage of war or a crime, know how, what the right amount of, you know, that response is?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Well, we think that we know what Lincoln would suggest, because we go almost immediately to the last paragraph of the second inaugural. And these are words that are as famous as Lincoln himself is famous, with malice toward none, with charity for all. And we read that, and it looks like Lincoln is proposing a kind of post-war environment in which everything is forgiven. And it's forgiven largely because all of us are really the guilty parties and it does not behoove one guilty party to lord it over or to point a finger at another guilty party. Everyone has been involved in the crime of slavery and the price that has been exacted

• 18:54Speaker 01

  from the nation for removing and remedying that crime is a price which has been exacted from both North and South and nobody, North or South, has any right to complain about that. If they want to complain about it, then what they need to do is to file their complaint, not with Abraham Lincoln, but with God.

• 19:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, like 20% of the young male population, effectively.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and to look at that, it seems like, well, what Lincoln is recommending is exactly this kind of Stoic clemency, where you back off and you say, "Well, we're just going to let bygones be bygones." And yet, and yet, Lincoln is not by any means consistent with that view, if that in fact is what he meant by "with malice toward none and charity for all." Lincoln has this marvelous reputation as being a man of humility, a man preferring to avoid as much bloodshed and unhappiness as possible.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  And that's, and he garners that reputation from the fact that he wants to pardon deserters, he wants to pardon sleeping sentries. Reading through Lincoln's wartime papers, there's no kind of document more numerous than the documents or telegrams that Lincoln issues to commanders in the field saying, "Suspend the sentence, suspend the execution of so-and-so, send the papers to me." And he makes these comments about how he's going in to meet with the judge, Advocate General Joseph Holt, and he's going, he's going to go in to determine the results of these pardon cases, and these, he said, "These are my butcher days, and I'm going to, and

• 20:41Speaker 01

  I'm going to try very hard to soften this as much as I can." All right, that's true, but... Lincoln also made some significant exceptions to that. He made exceptions, for instance, in the case of Nathaniel Gordon, who was a slave trader. We didn't think the slave trade on the North Atlantic was happening after 1808. Well, yes, it was. And Nathaniel Gordon was one American who was in charge of a slave trading ship. He was apprehended, he was put on trial. The sentence for it was a capital sentence. He appeals to Lincoln. Lincoln's response is to say, no. No, I'm not going to pardon someone who is guilty of robbing Africa of her children.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  All he will give to Nathaniel Gordon is a week to 10 days, as Lincoln puts it, to make his peace with his maker. And Gordon is in fact hanged for that particular crime. So Nathaniel Gordon incident shows us that there is a harder hand inside that velvet glove than we might at first indicate. And then even on the other side of the second inaugural. Lincoln speaks in the very last public speech he gives on April 11th, 1865. He speaks about what glimmerings he wants to offer to people

• 22:08Speaker 01

  about the future of Reconstruction. And it's not terribly specific, but it does have some specifics. And among those specifics are extension of the vote to freed slaves, not to all freed slaves, but to some. And he identifies, says, "The very intelligent," how that was going to be measured, I have no idea. "But the very intelligent and those who have served our cause in uniform." In other words, those who had been black soldiers. "They should get the vote." This was a significant step on his part because strictly speaking, Lincoln had no authority as president to talk about voting rights. There is no incorporation doctrine in American jurisprudence at this point.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  So presidents, as representing the executive branch, have no authority to sell states, which determine what voting rights are to be and voting procedures are to be. He had no authority to say, "Well, this is what we're going to do." He could only make a suggestion and express what he might have as his own desire. Nevertheless, he doesn't. He's trying to point people in a certain direction. He's trying to nudge them in a certain direction. Less well-known are the documents he writes about protecting the freed slaves in their in their economic rights. The rights to own property, the rights to grow crops and sell them on the open market for profits they get to keep themselves.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Lincoln also specifies that kind of thing and other things that he writes. So if we had to guess, and again, I underscore, we can only guess because Lincoln plays his political cards so close to the chest that it's so difficult to predict. My guess is that what Lincoln would probably have done had he lived would have been, first of all, to lay more and more stress on voting rights for the freed slaves. Voting rights, A, because it was the right thing to do, and B, because that was how you were going to build up a political constituency in the South that would counterbalance.

• 24:22Ryan Holiday?

  It would have given him enormous political power.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and it's what you're going to need to counterbalance. The old Confederate leadership, who are still going to be alive and breathing and sure enough, expecting to run the show. So, all right, voting rights. Second, I think there probably would have been some movement toward redistribution of land, especially land that had been confiscated during the war from Confederates.

• 24:46Ryan Holiday?

  And when Sherman does this, he thinks he's following Lincoln's intention laid out to him at their final meeting, right?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Well, this is in the, and Sherman captures some of this in what's known as Special Field Orders Number 15. When he has executed his famous march to the sea, he's at Savannah, he meets with black leaders there, he's being prodded somewhat by Secretary of War Stanton. So what he does is he issues this special field order that sets aside a large swathe of territory up through Georgia and into the coastal regions, the Low Country of South Carolina, setting it aside for freed slaves to farm on their own. Now, he has to, when he does this, he has to concede that this is simply possessori title.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  In other words, it's not absolute title because he doesn't have the authority to grant absolute legal title to anything. But possessive title, there's a beginning. And I think that what Sherman was doing was taking signals through STEM through for what Lincoln's overall view of things was going to be. So I think there is reason to think that Lincoln would have looked at redistribution of confiscated Confederate property precisely because you can't detach political rights from economic rights very easily. That political rights can be isolated and they in many cases can be stripped away as

• 26:21Speaker 01

  we see in Jim Crow when there is no substance of economic rights linked to them at the same time. So I think there would have been that movement on Lincoln's part. I think also there is another possibility that people don't often consider, and that is the West. For Lincoln and many of Lincoln's Republicans, it's important to remember that the Civil War was really, it was really fought over the West.

• 26:50Ryan Holiday?

  Who gets to control the future of the West, slave or not slave?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Precisely. We think of the Civil War as North versus South. Well, that, yes, that's true, but it's North versus South over who gets to control the West.

• 27:03Ryan Holiday?

  California, Arizona, Nevada.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  And everything in between. That huge stretch of territory that was known simply as Kansas, Nebraska. All of this, all of this, I see Lincoln viewing as a possibility for black settlement, for moving freed slaves to a place where they're not going to be constantly harassed, pestered, oppressed by those who had been the former white ruling class. So there are these possibilities. Ryan, again, these are only possibilities as best I can discern them. We just don't know because Lincoln wouldn't tell us.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  And in that last speech that he gives, he dangles this tantalizing announcement that he has something planned that he's going to issue as a statement about new directions in the post-war years. But he never says what they are, and three days later, he's assassinated. So we never actually find out. The only clue we have is that in his last cabinet meeting on the fourteenth of April, eighteen sixty-five, of course, he goes to Ford's Theater that night. But in the cabinet meeting that he has that morning, Secretary of War Stanton lays

• 28:30Speaker 01

  out a plan about military government of the southern states, of the former Confederate states. And that plan may have been a reflection of what Lincoln was hinting at in that April eleventh speech. Now, if that's the case, that would have meant that Lincoln was considering moving in exactly the direction that years later, Ulysses Grant wished the federal government had moved in. And if that had happened, and if that was Lincoln's intention, perhaps the whole history of Reconstruction, perhaps the whole history of race in America, might have turned out very, very differently.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  But again, I have to emphasize, we just don't know. And bear in mind the fact that Lincoln had just been elected for his second term. The tradition, of course, was that you didn't look for more than a second term. That meant that he would only have been president up until the fourth of March, eighteen sixty-nine. Even if Lincoln had had in his vest somewhere a plan with all the things that I've described, he would really only have had another three and a half years or so to implement that. And that's not a whole lot of time to do something as far-reaching as the kind of Reconstruction that I've been describing.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  And so it means that if he didn't have a successor that was willing to carry that out, it might have been Ulysses Grant who would have been willing to carry it out, but maybe it wouldn't have been. Unless there was a successor who was willing to carry that out, we can't even be sure that even Lincoln would have been able to pull off the kind of Reconstruction that the nation needed.

• 30:20Ryan Holiday?

  No, I mean, I find this so fascinating and I want to get to Robert E. Lee. The last thing I would just, I think, maybe, just to put a button on this, I'd be curious for your thoughts, is, so Lincoln gives his speech, he starts to lay out his plan, he extends some of those orders to Sherman and Grant, and then, as you said, he's assassinated. I think, as my understanding of the Civil War has evolved, it's sort of like, oh, the assassination was, in effect, both a political and a military event, in the sense of, like, the war continues. It continues with the assassination, it continues through Reconstruction.

• 31:01Ryan Holiday?

  We have this idea that the Civil War, you know, just ends. And I read Albion Torre's novel, A Fool's Errand, and it was, it actually helped me understand so much of American history, just the idea of, oh, yeah, these people who went to war to tear America apart about the preservation of slavery, they're not just gonna, they're not just gonna lose the war and then go, oh, we were wrong about everything. They acknowledged the impossibility of starting their own nation at the end of the war, but their political aims, priorities,

• 31:41Ryan Holiday?

  and principles remain essentially intact. You could argue, all the way up through the Civil Rights Movement, and to a certain degree, some of those people still have those same aims, and they're with us today.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Oh, I think that's true. I think we live with the damage that was done by the failures, the overthrow of Reconstruction. And, in a sense, maybe, in the long view of history, maybe we expected to do too much too quickly with too little. We did not commit what we needed to commit. On the other hand, as I emphasize, people didn't know that. People went into Reconstruction unsure of exactly what it was they were entering into and what it would cost. And one thing which, alas, is notorious in a democracy is that representative bodies

• 32:38Speaker 01

  are often quite reluctant to foot the kinds of bills that are necessary for that. We were willing to pay for the costs of the Marshall Plan. Because we had seen what kind of hellishness Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had been willing to turn loose on the world. After people had had a sense of what the Nazis did, after people had had a sense that the Soviets were only too willing to move right in and continue their own version of those kinds of oppression. Yes, we were willing to make those kinds of sacrifices and pay those costs. But at the end of the Civil War, it's very different.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  And a Congress which, for most of its history, had been notorious for its penuriousness, simply resumes that. It's just not willing to pay for that, and people in the North were not willing to pay the kinds of costs that would have been necessary. And so you have a situation where you take the Union Army at the end of the Civil War. Over the course of the war, we have mobilized something like about three, between two and three million soldiers. We immediately demobilize. And very quickly, the United States Army shrinks back towards its pre-war size.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  So you move into the Reconstruction period, the Army has shrunk back to about 77,000 men. Budget cutbacks, mandates, still more. By the time we get to the end of Reconstruction, the numbers of soldiers available for Reconstruction duties of various sorts has become almost ludicrous. You're talking about dividing a company here, a company, you can't even commit a regiment. It just becomes little penny packets of soldiers. Who are expected to do the impossible in policing large stretches of southern territory. And of course, it doesn't work.

• 34:43Ryan Holiday?

  Who probably shared some of the beliefs of the people they were supposedly protecting the freedmen from.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Well, here's, yeah, the record of the occupation forces, if we can call them that, in the post-Civil War era, is very uneven. You have some people who are genuine and zealous. People like General Oliver Otis Howard, who is in charge of the Freedmen's Bureau at the end of the war, but also has to oversee some aspects of Reconstruction. You have people like Philip Sheridan in Louisiana. On the other hand, you have people like Winfield Scott Hancock, a Civil War hero in Texas, who has very little sympathy with the freed people. People like George Gordon Meade in Georgia, again, the hero of Gettysburg, but in the post-war period,

• 35:32Speaker 01

  he finds himself much more in sympathy with white Southerners than he does with the aspirations of the freed people. So there's a problem there with the available personnel. Who are you going to put in charge of places like this? Of course, the ultimate personnel problem was the President of the United States, and that was Andrew Johnson. So that when you have, for instance, a military commander in one of the southern districts who is, in fact, prepared to use military resources to protect the rights of the freed people, someone like Daniel Sickles, a colorful and sometimes madcap figure in his own right,

• 36:15Speaker 01

  but nevertheless, Sickles was willing to use military resources that way. President Johnson has prevailed upon to revoke his appointment and appoint someone else who is perfectly willing to get along with white Southerners. So there's another factor. And the Andrew Johnson thing, yeah, the idea that Lincoln is succeeded by Andrew Johnson, it was like taking, if I can put it this way, it was like taking the assassination and making it exponentially worse.

• 36:46Ryan Holiday?

  Right, right. No, and it's, it's, I think COVID has helped me understand too, just how like even as something, you know, much more clear cut than, you know, the complications of a civil war where you just have a sort of a threat to public safety, a pretty clear path forward for how to deal with it. And then you have people on different elements of a spectrum as far as how they believe it, how much they're, they really care about other people, how susceptible they are to misinformation or competing goals, you know, you, you realize, oh, a lot of these things come down to political will, they come down to empathy, they come down to financial constraints. And then, as you said, they come down to how elections shake out and which party ends up on top.

• 37:31Ryan Holiday?

  And something that we all should have come together and resolved, you know, ends up languishing much longer than it should. I suspect that so much of the civil war and the aftermath of the civil war comes down to just these sort of banal realities of making the system work. And that's why we get the legacy that we have today.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Well, one of the, one of the difficulties we face in situations like this is that when you have the terrible political conflict and alongside it, the terrible political paralysis, it is precisely the sort of thing that tempts people to throw their hands in the air and wonder if this thing called democracy is really worth it, is really capable of solving these problems. And it's at that point that people will turn to other kinds of political solutions, authoritarian solutions in some cases.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  I think that it is absolutely and utterly important to keep in view how much we need to pursue, to cherish and to treasure democratic principles.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  And to protect them because democratic principles can be very fragile, especially in times of great social or political stress. That fragility can be very threatening. And I think that we need to do as much as we can

• 39:09Speaker 01

  in keeping in view what is going to conduce to the health and the future of our democracy. Because it is our democracy which is the promise of the future. Our conflict, our political conflicts are about the promise of the immediate now. And it's so easy to be distracted that way.

• 39:30Ryan Holiday?

  And do you feel like, as I know you've been somewhat critical of Lincoln as a wartime leader and as a politician. I've always, you know, you hear in school, you know, Lincoln jailed newspaper editors or, you know, accused people of being seditionists or whatever. Again, with COVID, watching, you know, sort of real harmful misinformation or people abuse this or that, which has real long-term and immediate health consequences to the public. Did it give you any more sense of just how vexing that problem must have been for him? Again, I'm not condoning it, but it sort of made me go, oh, yeah, he didn't have many tools in his toolkit. When you've got, when people are actively acting in bad faith and the stakes are so high,

• 40:15Ryan Holiday?

  our system doesn't really have much in the way of a response for dealing. It's like our whole system so depends on people doing the right thing voluntarily that when that doesn't happen, it feels like we're really stuck.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Well, I can't, I can't speak with any kind of real authority about present situations. One of the great problems about being a historian is you tend to know less the closer you get to the present. So don't ask me what happened last week. Ask me what happened in 1865. I can tell you about that. With Lincoln, what you see is very interesting this way because. Yes, there, there is the reputation that attaches to Lincoln that Lincoln moved in very dramatic ways to exercise power. I've seen some people describing him as a dictator,

• 41:08Speaker 01

  a totalitarian, and that, that I think is, is pretty excessive, pretty, pretty tedious. When you look at how Lincoln manages the politics of the Civil War, it, it really is extraordinary because on the one hand, he has a very strongly divided North to be the president of. And he has many people who are willing to rally around him loyally, but he has many other people who are very determined in their dissent and for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, sometimes it's indispensable reasons. Sometimes the reasons are linked

• 41:48Speaker 01

  to race and, and, and racial denigration. Other times, other times the reasons have more principle, and that is, what about suspending, suspending the writ of habeas corpus? What about arresting newspaper editors? What about silencing free speech? And those events like that do happen during the Lincoln administration. I think there are two things to bear in mind looking at the way Lincoln addressed a, a, a national crisis of, of this sort. And that is, that Lincoln tends to take a comparatively easy hand to them. When you look at the total number of civil liberties crisis events, things that involve the arrests of people,

• 42:33Speaker 01

  imprisonments and so on, waving away the writ of habeas corpus. Basically, the total number for these amounts to about 14,000. And when you figure 14,000 out of a population of over 20 million people in the North, we're not talking about massive suppression of civil liberties. And in fact, that 14,000 tended to be a grab bag that included smugglers, other people operating on the legal fringes, people who were accused of bushwhacking and guerrilla activity, crews of blockade runners. So when you factor all that in...

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Lincoln adopts a remarkably tolerant view towards dealing with his critics. There are occasions when newspapers get shut down, and sometimes it's because commanders in the field do it, and not because Lincoln has ordered it. This is what happens with Ambrose Burnside and the shutdown of the Chicago Times in 1863. But there are occasions when Lincoln does order the shutdown of a newspaper. He does that with two New York newspapers in 1864. Not only shuts them down, but has their publisher and the publishers and editors imprisoned. Well, that's a pretty severe case of things. On the other hand, he backs off almost at once.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  And the papers resume publication, the editors and publishers are released, and things go on as they had gone before. And there are plenty of newspapers out there across the North which are violent in their criticism and attacks on Lincoln, who never suffer any penalty. One editor in Dubuque, Iowa, published an op-ed calling for Lincoln's assassination. The man was never arrested, his paper was never shut down. He basically got away with that. That would almost be unimaginable today. Someone like that would immediately get a visit from the Secret Service at least. Sure. But that doesn't happen with Lincoln.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  One of Lincoln's most thorny critics, Clement Volandega, is arrested when Volandega gives a speech that he is accused of saying and encouraging people to resist the draft or to desert. He's arrested, he's put on trial before a military tribunal, he's sentenced to sit out the war in Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. There's a tremendous civil liberties outcry over this. What does Lincoln do? Lincoln...

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Lincoln alters his sentence to expulsion to the Confederacy. And it's almost as though, well, you know, Volandigan likes the Confederates so much, let him go hang out with them. The Confederates, of course, have no time for Volandigan. They send him off on his own. He runs the blockade, ends up in Canada, and then eventually simply crosses back over into his home state of Ohio. And at that point, people come to Lincoln and say, should we arrest Volandigan again? And Lincoln says, no, no, no. Unless he's actually causing some kind of disturbance, you know, real civil disturbance, just let him go.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  And that hands-off approach tended to be more of Lincoln's than the approach of, let's say, a Woodrow Wilson, who didn't mind throwing Eugene Debs into jail, even though Debs was running for president against Wilson, but he throws Debs into jail because of Debs's criticism of the draft in World War I. So Wilson is much more intolerant on civil liberties issues. Even Franklin Roosevelt. The idea that you take an entire group of unoffending people, Japanese Americans, and

• 46:42Speaker 01

  you take them and intern them in internment camps, and you do it for, at least for most of them, for three years of the war until 1944, that's a civil liberties violation on the most staggeringly public scale that Lincoln never even comes close to. So when I look at Lincoln's handling of crisis times like this, Lincoln's approach is much more willing to take risks. And I think his willingness to take risks with democracy is nowhere more apparent than when he runs for reelection.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  If anybody, if anybody in American history had reason for saying, "Look, we've got a national emergency. This is a civil war."

• 47:36Ryan Holiday?

  How could it have been the moment to declare yourself to suspend elections?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Right. If ever there was a moment to do that kind of thing, certainly 1864 would have been it. And yet, that never seems to have even crossed Lincoln's screen, even at the moment when, by the end of August 1864, he's convinced he's going to lose the election to George McClellan. What does he do? He writes this so-called blind memorandum, laying out before his cabinet. He doesn't actually let them see it, they'll read it later, but he lays out what would have been his provisional plan of action for cooperating with McClellan in the event that McClellan won the election. Now, of course, McClellan doesn't win the

• 48:22Speaker 01

  election, then Lincoln opens the document and reads it all to them, and I would love to have been a fly on the ceiling at that cabinet meeting, just to watch their reactions. But he's willing to take that risk. He's willing to undergo the ultimate trial of a democracy and democratic leadership, and that is election. And of course, it turns into a resounding validation of Lincoln's leadership. But just think of what the alternative might have been. Suppose McClellan had won the election of 1864. Well, he's elected on a platform which commits him to peace. He would have found himself, at some point

• 49:05Speaker 01

  or other, and probably sooner rather than later, committed to some kind of negotiations with the Confederacy. Look, in 1864, if you open negotiations with the Confederacy, no one's going back to shooting. There's been too much bloodshed. And that would mean that you would have had an independent Confederacy.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Probably worse than that, if I can make it sound worse, you would probably have had some provision in a negotiation for rendition of fugitives from slavery. In other words, people who had run away during the war, found some kind of refuge with the Union armies, or enlisted in the Union armies as soldiers. It's very difficult for me to imagine that a McClellan settlement would not have included some provision about rendition. After all, that's what we did at the end of the Revolution. It's what we did at the end of the War of 1812. Why wouldn't it have happened here? The Confederates-

• 50:04Ryan Holiday?

  And we had the Fugitive Slave Act before that, so I mean-

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 50:08Ryan Holiday?

  The idea, right.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  It's impossible for me to think that that would not have been part of some kind of settlement. And I think in those terms, of the sheer catastrophe that that would have been. And yet, Lincoln runs that risk. The dimensions of which I'm sure he was keenly aware of. But he runs that risk because over and above his own personal political fate, he has put the survival of democracy itself. And he says to a group of well wishers who'd come to him after the election, he says to them, "We could not have free government without elections.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  If we had canceled this election, it would have been effectively conceding the whole game to the Confederates." It would have been saying, "You're right, democracy doesn't work."

• 51:06Ryan Holiday?

  Well, for a guy who supposedly shredded the Constitution, in fact, sort of when it came down to it, there's this sort of ultimate fealty towards it.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Lincoln once replied to a letter sent to him by Salmon Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury. This was in September of 1863, and it concerned emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation had been in operation since January 1st of that year. But the proclamation made exceptions. I mean, this is a war powers proclamation, so he can only free slaves in those areas that are quote unquote "at war" with the United States. That meant in the proclamation, he has to exclude the slaves of Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, border states that legalized slavery but stayed in the Union during the war.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Well, he makes those exceptions in the emancipation proclamation. Nine months afterwards, Salmon Chase writes to him and says, "We really need to go the distance. We need to emancipate all the slaves, not just the ones in the areas where the Confederacy is still resisting us." And Lincoln writes back to him, and it's a sympathetic, it's a respectful letter, but it's also, it's also got some, some real steel in it. And he says, "If I do that, then am I not setting the Constitution aside? Would I not be in the boundless field of absolutism?"

• 52:44Speaker 01

  And as soon as Lincoln says that, when you read that, you have an opening into how the man's mind operated in terms of the imperatives of the crisis he was facing and the imperatives of the Constitution he had sworn to uphold. And that makes for such a remarkable moment. A man who is committed to emancipation, but also committed to the Constitution and who is trying to bring the two together as closely as he can without destroying either one or the other.

• 53:21Ryan Holiday?

  So as we, as it sounds like what we're really talking about here is that sort of the power of, of individuals to make sort of choices ultimately. And we talk about the great man of history theory, that it does, at certain points, come down to what an individual does or doesn't do in, you know, big moments. And I do want to talk about the new book, because I'm fascinated by Robert E. Lee. At a sheer human level, I have always been fascinated and horrified with sort of Robert E. Lee pacing in his house, deciding whether he's gonna side with his state or

• 54:00Ryan Holiday?

  his country. And I thought maybe you could sort of give us some insight into that terrible dilemma and how he ends up, I think, we could pretty safely say, making the wrong call. But how does he get there? How does that happen? And what's your take on it?

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Robert E. Lee, in the spring of 1861, whenever this seems to be coming apart, and no one knows how to glue it back together again. Robert E. Lee, it is very, it is very, very difficult to pin this man down. This is one of the frustrations I had in writing a biography of him. Because he zigzags. He has written to his wife in the 1850s, as the crisis between North and South is beginning to heat up, to furnace heat. He writes to Mary Custis Lee, and he says to her, "Slavery is a moral and political

• 55:04Speaker 01

  evil in any country." And when you read that, you think, okay, you've got it. You've got the tiger by the tail. You know what the story is. You know that slavery is wrong. What are you gonna do about it? In the same letter, he then goes on to say, "But it's really more of a problem for white people than it is for black people."

• 55:26Ryan Holiday?

  What we can convince ourselves of is so incredible as human beings.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  I know. I mean, you want to say, have you ever seen what slavery looks like, really? Have you ever seen, have you ever read the advertisements for fugitive slaves in the newspapers in the South? There's one here that I've got in my box of note cards here. This is from, this is from North Carolina in 1838. And the advertisement reads like this. Run away or stolen from the describer on the 27th of last month. A negro woman and two children. The woman is tall and black.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  And a few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M and she kept a cloth over her head and face and a fly bonnet on her head so as to cover the burn. Now.

• 56:27Ryan Holiday?

  That sounds terrible for white people, yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  But that is what slavery is. And what's more, it's slavery that permits this man to publish this as an advertisement in a newspaper over his own name. Micahia Ricks, Nash County, July 7, 1838. That's slavery. And for Lee to look at that and say, this is an evil. You think you got that right. But then to look away from it and to say, well, I'm really not, I'm really, I'm really not going to see it for what it is. I'm going to pretend it's this other thing. I'm going to pretend it's more of a problem for poor little me, a white southerner, than

• 57:13Speaker 01

  it is for that woman in North Carolina who had had a hot iron branding her face. That, that is, that is a zigzag, a moral zigzag of the most extraordinary proportions. And it's, the only thing I can compare it to is what, is what W.J. Sable wrote about, about Germans in the 1930s, that they could look on what was happening and look away from it, just determined not to see it. And he's determined not to see this. Now, the same thing happens as he's making this decision. He has said, and he says this right up through March of 1861.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Secession is illegal. Secession is not constitutional. Secession is nothing but revolution. And he doesn't mean that as a compliment.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  The only flag that I want to serve under is the Star Spangled Banner. We have to preserve the kind of union that the founders bequeathed to us. He says this in letters that he writes to members of his family. Then comes the moment in April of 1861 when Francis Preston Blair Sr., acting as the intermediary representing Abraham Lincoln, makes to Lee this offer. "We want you to take command of whatever federal armies go into the field to suppress the secessionist rebellion." Because that's what it is. It's a rebellion. It's not a revolution. It's a rebellion.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  It's an insurrection. And Lee says to him, "I can't do that. I can't take that command because I can't raise my hand against my native state." Which is, in this case, he's referring to Virginia. Then he goes and has this interview with Winfield Scott, says the same thing, resigns his commission in the US Army. That's the second decision he makes.

• 59:16Ryan Holiday?

  Again, you think, okay, he just can't side with the Confederacy. You think you've got him pegged.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Right. You think at this point, he's simply going to say, "I'm going to take a neutral position. You know, I'm not sympathetic with the Confederates, but I can't do things to Virginia because Virginia represents my family and my family networks. I can't fight against them." That was a little specious, anyway, but never mind.

• 59:43Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  It's that he makes a third decision, and that is to accept an invitation to go to Richmond. And when he gets to Richmond, he's presented with a commission as general of Virginia's state forces, which he accepts. You watch this man take this step by step by step, and each step that he takes is one step away from his original allegiance as a United States Army officer and a citizen of the United States. And by the time you get him to Richmond, by the time you get him to the end of April 1861, he's in bed with the Confederates.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  And you will, you read his letters at that point and you realize something has been, has gone very wrong for him. He is not enthusiastic about the decisions he has made. And he's, even as commander of Virginia forces, he's telling Virginia, "You gotta be on the defensive. Don't take any action that's gonna provoke anything from the Lincoln government." To the point where in Mary Chestnut's famous diary, there's this interesting passage about, that Mary Chestnut records, about Southerners whom she knew, South Carolinians mainly, who really believed that Robert E. Lee was, was a sleeper cell.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  That, that Robert E. Lee was not really sympathetic with the Confederacy, that he was not to be trusted, and that he was gonna end up being put on trial as a traitor to the Confederacy. So what you're looking at is the zigzag. A man who sees what is right and does something else. And I don't know if I can bring this back to, to stoic terms, but, you know, I remember this passage in, in Plutarch's essay on moral virtue, where he's, he's quoting Euripides, saying, you know, "I've got a mind, but nature, nature is taking me in this different direction."

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  "God sends evil for us to recognize, and we see what it is, we know what is good, but we don't do it." And watching, watching Robert E. Lee in this case is like watching someone who is acting out a script that could have been written by Plutarch or the Stoics that way. You just watch him take these steps that get him in deeper and deeper and deeper until he can't get out again.

• 1:02:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's like he's making these half decisions, even though each decision to any outside observer is obviously a step in the wrong direction. The idea of resigning your commission as your country is in the midst of experiencing a rebellion, taking a commission in your state, which is inherently at odds with your country, it's like he just can't, you said it a couple of times, it's like he just can't face what's happening. And because I think if he could face it, it would make obvious what he had to do clear, but he doesn't want to have to do that. So it's this sort of denial, and denial, and denial, and denial, until he's sort of,

• 1:03:01Ryan Holiday?

  he's so far down, it sort of made the decision for him.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  He is a master of denial this way. And the funny thing is, the denial pays its evil dividends all through the war in his life. Because through the war, no one is a sharper critic of the Confederate government than Robert E. Lee. He never has a good word to say about Confederate governors, about the Confederate Congress, even ultimately about the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. There is such a market absence of enthusiasm on Lee's part, that the diary of the famous

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Confederate workler, John Beauchamp Jones, Jones records in his diary from time to time these suspicions. Lee isn't really seen as being totally on board with what the Confederacy is doing. And then, in the very dying months of the Confederacy, what does Lee do? Lee becomes this advocate for recruiting black

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Slaves as Confederate soldiers and emancipating them and their families.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  I mean, this is, this is such, this is what I was saying about zigzagging. This is such a zag that-

• 1:04:27Ryan Holiday?

  Right, it's like if he could have gotten there earlier, he would have spared himself the whole trouble and kept the country together.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, this is the point. The newspapers in the Confederacy, the Charleston Mercury goes berserk over this. They accuse, this is, all right, this is February and March of 1865. They're saying this about General Lee? Yeah, you know what they're saying? They're saying Robert E. Lee is a traitor. Robert E. Lee has sold us out. Robert E. Lee is nothing but an old Federalist. This is what the Confederate newspapers are saying about Robert E. Lee.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  And then, of course, the Confederacy only lives for a few weeks longer. And on the road to Appomattox, what is he saying to people? He says to William Nelson Pendleton, "This is how I knew it was going to end all along."

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  At the very, in the, in the closing weeks of the war, he goes undercover of night, like Nicodemus going to Jesus. And, and he goes to, to Robert M. T. Hunter, who was a Confederate senator from Virginia, but more importantly, he had been part of the three commissioners that Davis sends to Hampton Roads at the end of January, the beginning of February, 1865, to, to meet with Lincoln and Seward. So, so Lee goes to Hunter, and Lee says to Hunter, "The Confederacy is done. The Confederacy is over. You need to take the floor of the Confederate Senate and tell them that Jefferson Davis

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  is delusional, that we can't fight on, that we need to make whatever terms we can possibly make with, with Lincoln." And Hunter, Hunter listens to this. Hunter said afterward, it's in an article he wrote for the Southern Historical Society papers, that it was very clear to him that Lee believed the war was lost.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  And Hunter responds to Lee and says, "Look, I'm only Senator Hunter. And no one's gonna listen to me in particular. But if you, General Lee, if you will publicly say that, that'll make all the difference in the world." To which Lee responds, "I can't do that. I'm a soldier. That would be mixing politics with the military. I can't do that." And so after this night-long discussion that these two have, Lee goes away and nothing like that happens.

• 1:06:49Ryan Holiday?

  Meanwhile, you know, he commits many more troops to die on the battlefield for a war that he knows is lost.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and even on the retreat to Appomattox, Henry Wise, who'd always been something of a pain in the neck to Lee, Wise says to Lee, you can almost hear him pointing his finger at Lee, "If you don't believe that there's a possibility of Confederate victory, then every person who dies on this march is blood on your hands." And Lee just wipes it out, wipes it away, said, "Oh, don't talk that way. That's not the way we should be talking. I don't want to hear anything like that." Well, there we are with denial. There we are with the zigzag again. The funny thing is about Lee, well, I mean funny in the sense of ironic, because there's no laughter to be attached to it.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Lee actually becomes more of a Confederate partisan after the war than he ever was during it. It's only after the war that he begins to write, and he's doing this not publicly, he's doing it privately in personal correspondence. It's only then he starts making these arguments about the legitimacy of secession, the need to resist consolidated government. "George Washington was only doing the same thing that I did." That's after the war. You know, in a sense, Robert E. Lee joins the Confederacy once the Confederacy is dead.

• 1:08:19Ryan Holiday?

  The lost cause of the Confederacy.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Now, again, he's not a lost causer in the sense that the lost cause takes life in the 1870s after his death.

• 1:08:31Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  But there is a piece of it there, and he is making apologies for himself and for what he has done. He will never come to the point of saying, "I was wrong." You know, during the war, he'll point the finger and say, "The Confederate leadership was wrong. They took us down this path, and look at what we're all suffering because of this." After the war, he'll say, "Well, you know, what we did, we did because there was some theoretical justification for it." One thing Robert E. Lee will never do is take personal responsibility. You know where you see that in a very striking fashion is right after Gettysburg.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Lee is well-known on the field of Pickett's Charge, after Pickett's Division has been brutally shot to pieces, and it comes streaming back in pieces to him. He stands there, and he says, "This is all my fault. This is all my fault. Everyone tried to pull together now. I made this decision. This is my fault." That's what he says there, and that's usually what historians say, and they say, "Well, look, you know how generous Robert E. Lee was." Look at what Lee starts saying a few days later. Look at what he writes into his official report. That's when he starts not saying, "This was all my fault." Now, that's when he starts saying, "Well, if only Jeb Stuart had been here. Well, if only this.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Well, if only that." Robert E. Lee is what I would call, psychologically speaking, anyway, he is a perfectionist. And like most perfectionists, when he makes mistakes, he has a very hard time admitting that he has made them. If mistakes are made, they're usually because of someone else's fault. And this is a pattern which repeats itself throughout Lee's life.

• 1:10:24Ryan Holiday?

  It's kind of interesting how someone could be so physically brave.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Ryan Holiday?

  And, you know, strong under fire in so many ways for a very long career. But at its core, essentially be a moral coward.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Well, let's put it this way. I think that streak of perfectionism has long roots in his own experience with his father, Light Horse Harry Lee. Light Horse Harry Lee was a hero of the revolution, a light cavalry leader of almost instinctive genius. The problem was that was his only genius. And once, once the war was over, Light Horse Harry just cannot adapt civilian life. He expects, like a lot of other officers of the Continental Army, that he's going to settle down. He's going to invest in land. He's going to become a wealthy man.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  It's going to be the legitimate reward for having been a hero of the revolution. Yeah, he invests in land all right. All the wrong investments. He burns through his first wife's cash. He remarries to a Carter. Then he burns through her cash, or at least what cash her apprehensive Carter family would allow her to have, which was not much, because they suspected Harry Lee. It's so bad that in fact, Light Horse Harry winds up in debtor's prison. And the whole family eventually abandons the traditional Lee estate of Stratford Hall and moves to much smaller, more modest quarters in Alexandria. That's where Robert Lee grows up.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  But it's not just economics. I mean, Light Horse, I'd like to say this because I think it illustrates Light Horse Harry very well. If Light Horse Harry was alive today, he'd be investing in ski resorts in Bangladesh.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  That was just, he had this Midas touch in reverse. But it's not just economics, it's politics too. He's a Federalist in a Jeffersonian Virginia. When the War of 1812 breaks out, he goes to Baltimore to support a Federalist newspaper friend. He ends up being subjected to a riot that beats him within an inch of his life. And after that, he just gives up. He leaves the country. He departs for the West Indies. Robert is six years old. He never sees his father again. I think that that loss of a parent before the beginning of adolescence

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  is one of the most grievous wounds that the human heart can suffer. And on top of it, Robert has to become a surrogate for his father and his family. He becomes his mother's son. He takes care of his mother. He takes care of the horses and their broken down carriage. He manages his mother's medicine. He manages his mother's money. When he announces he's going to go off to West Point for an education, his mother is distraught. She says, how can I do without Robert? He is both son and daughter to me. Robert.

• 1:13:43Ryan Holiday?

  That's always healthy.

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. Robert saw himself as redeeming, as having inherited the responsibility to redeem the damage that his father had done. And that meant that Robert was always going to pursue perfection. And you see it in his conduct at West Point. I mean, he graduate, no demerits. He's second in his class, but only by a whisker. And in everything he does, everybody observes about this man, perfect deportment. They called him the marble model because he was so concentrated on doing absolutely the right thing

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  that would always show that he was not Light Horse Harry. Now, sometimes that breaks down because underneath that was a regular Light Horse Harry Lee temper, which could sometimes be nearly manic.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  But he spends most of his life trying to keep the lid on that as strenuously as he can. And that will mean that he will, in fact, indulge denial of a different kind, and that is denial of responsibility. I think a case in point is this: after the surrender at Appomattox, Lee is associated with two documents, one very well-known, and that's General Orders Number Nine, which is the document that is distributed to his surrendered army, telling them, reassuring them, "We only gave up because of overwhelming numbers, we did bravely, and we were honorable," et cetera, et cetera. That's one document, and that's the document

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  that, again, is supposed to be one of the foundations of the lost cause. The truth is that Lee didn't write it. It was written by Lee's military secretary, Charles Marshall, who handled all of Lee's outgoing correspondence. And, in fact, Marshall, in his memoirs, says that Lee, Lee read over what Marshall wrote and actually struck out what he considered the more inflammatory parts. So we don't actually know what the original of General Orders Number Nine looked like, but this was, this was, this was actually Marshall's document, but it was issued over Lee's signature. The other document Lee writes is his official

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  report to Jefferson Davis. And it's a report, of course, which is never really going to catch up with Davis, because Davis, at this point, is on the lam and will be until May 10th, when he's tracked down and captured in Georgia. But in that official report, ooh, it's a very different story. In that official report, Lee is talking about how his army has fallen apart, how it has been plagued by desertion, how people were not obeying orders, that they had lost the fervor that they had previously demonstrated in military conflict. You read this report, and you set it aside, set it beside General Orders Number Nine, you think, was this written by the same man? And, of course, the answer is, not really.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  But the report, the report is pure exculpation. He, now, the message is this: he is not responsible. Why was there a surrender of his army? Because the army fell apart underneath him.

• 1:17:02Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you've been so generous with your time. I had one last question for you if you have time to answer. Oh, sure. Go ahead. Yeah. So what I think is so... This idea of Lee being morally complex in denial, a perfectionist to his detriment, ultimately betrays his country, which there's no argument about. It's impossible to separate the reality of that from the reality of the lost cause, which comes after. And as the son of an army officer, I believe your son is a career military officer. How do we explain?

• 1:17:45Ryan Holiday?

  How do we wrap our heads around this guy becoming a lifelong fixture fascination hero of the current US military culture? I mean, not as much today exactly, although the remnants are still there. But for 150 years, this guy, who there were no allusions about at one point, becomes the idealized, almost Christ-like figure of not just a terrible cause, but the reality of him being a somewhat fair-weather, not particularly competent executor of that cause. It's so baffling to me.

• 1:18:27Ryan Holiday?

  And obviously, you've wrestled with this writing the book, and I've read some of your articles about it. How does that happen? And how do we get out of it? Partly, this is because Lee himself... Lee himself, once again, zigzags in the years after the war. On the one hand, Robert E. Lee actively deplores...

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  Any kind of resistance to federal authority. He becomes the president of Washington College. He builds this little institution, which almost didn't have a pulse at the end of the war, into a real educational powerhouse. And I have to say also, a progressive educational powerhouse. Because he takes a school, which had been not much more than a Greek and Latin academy, and turns it into a school with concentrations on engineering, on business, even on journalism. In that respect, if you just look at the five years that he is the president of Washington

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  College, he is the very model of a forward-looking educational thinker. And his rationale for that, very largely is this: We have to rebuild the South. We're now, once again, part of the United States. Well, we have to take ourselves up by our own bootstraps. And we have to rebuild, and the best way to do it is to do it in practical ways. Not to sit and wail and complain and point fingers. So there's that part of Lee. And that's connected to the fact that he actively resists any attempts to join in Confederate reminiscence events. He doesn't go to reunions.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  He doesn't call his former officers to come join him in Lexington, Virginia, where Washington College was and is located today. He doesn't attend reunions when he's invited in 1869 by David McConaughey in Gettysburg to come to a reunion of the general officers of Gettysburg that McConaughey is trying to sponsor. Lee writes back and says, "No, no, no. No, I won't come. I don't really believe in these kinds of events. All they do is promote ill-feeling, and we've got to put an end to that."

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  When he's written to by Thomas Rossiter, one of his old cavalry officers, about a project for erecting a monument to the Confederates, he actually says to Rossiter, "Don't do it. Don't bother with this kind of thing. This is only going to make for ill-feeling between the sections, and that's not what we want to have happen." So on the one hand, there is a Lee who looks like he's accepted the consequences of the war and is trying to build the South back up in a way so that it once more is part of the United States. Okay, that's great.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  But then, then you also look at the Lee who tinkers with the idea of writing a reminiscence of the service of the Army of Northern Virginia. This is the Lee who will write to Lord Acton to say, "What the Confederacy was doing was really the same thing the American revolutionaries and George Washington were doing." This is the same Lee who will advise Southerners not to be all that trustful of blacks. And if they do have to extend the franchise to blacks, then they should do it in such a way that only a small number will qualify, even if you have to disqualify an equivalent number of whites.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  But make sure you rig the game so that the number of black voters is small enough that they really won't have any say in things. And you read that, and you think, "Well, this is a continuation of the Confederacy by another name." It's the zigzag, Ryan. It's the zigzag. And it's the zigzag that I have found perplexing in this whole project. At the very beginning, if you picked up biographies of Lee, like the great four-volume biography by Douglas Southall Freeman, which is kind of the mountaintop biography of Lee, even to these days. I mean, it won a Pulitzer Prize back in the 30s when it was published. And as a biography, it is quite

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  a technical achievement. The research that went into it was extraordinary in its detail. There had been nothing like it previous. Yet Freeman is very frank about saying that Robert E. Lee's character is, and this is his word, "simple." That when you look at Robert E. Lee, you just see a straightforward apostle of duty and uprightness, and there's nothing complicated about the man at all. He's like the southern version of King Arthur.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  And that's echoed by a number of other Lee biographers. I think of people like Clifford Doughty. They say the same thing. There's no complexity to Robert E. Lee. He is a straightforward apostle of duty.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  I came to the project of Lee suspicious of that.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Because someone who was a straightforward apostle of duty is not going to treat that offer in April of 1861 the way Lee did. I had to look at this, scratching my head, and say, "How do you write the biography of someone who commits treason?" And I don't use that word offhand, Lee.

• 1:24:17Ryan Holiday?

  That's the definition of treason.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at the constitutional definition of treason. I'm looking at the oath that Lee took as a graduate of West Point. I mean, today, we take the oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. Actually, the oath Lee took in 1829 was even more pointed. It was an oath to the United States.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  So this business of squirming around and saying, "Well, you know, I've got this prior loyalty to..."

• 1:24:49Ryan Holiday?

  A higher duty.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that doesn't square at all with the oath that he took in 1829. So I look at this, and what I see is complexity, not the complexity of depth. What you encounter in Abraham Lincoln is the complexity of depth.

• 1:25:09Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, that's beautiful, yes.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  But what you meet in Lee is the complexity of confusion, of confused purposes. Because what stands immediately behind that confusion of purposes are these driving forces that I think emerged out of that trauma, that original trauma in his life. These passions for perfectionism, these passions for personal independence, for personal security.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Those passions also generate complexity, but it's a different kind of complexity. And it's a complexity without connection, without depth, and without a whole lot of coherence. So, no, the man is not simple. The man is complicated, and in some respects complicated, in some of the worst ways that you can be complicated, because it's a complication of shallowness.

• 1:26:02Ryan Holiday?

  I've been confused, is well said.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that is, that is the great struggle, to me, or at least it was my struggle, in trying to figure out Robert E. Lee. I had a friend that, for the years I was working on this book, would say to me, and he had a point to this, because he was from Texas, and he would say to me, "Have you figured him out yet?" And I'd keep having to say, "No, I haven't figured him out yet." It took, it took a very long time to try to piece together what was going on in Lee's mind. And you do it sometimes because there will be a comment he will drop. And sometimes it'll only be one comment, it'll be one sentence.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  But he'll drop it, and you'll look at it and say, "Wait a minute, that's, that's the crack in the teacup that shows you the whole interior." And you find it, you find it at some, at some very peculiar moments. Let me, let me, let me give you one last one, in, as we're moving towards the end here. In 1857, Lee's father-in-law, George Washington Park Custis, died. And in his will, Custis did something very strange. First of all, he, basically, he cut Robert Lee out of the will.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  In other words, here was one example, coming back years later, of people mistrusting the Lees.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  So Custis cuts his son-in-law out of the will. That means that Robert E. Lee does not inherit the Custis plantation Arlington on its bluff overlooking the Potomac.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  But it does mean, maddeningly enough, that Custis points to Lee as the executor of his will. So on the one hand, he takes away from Lee, on the other hand, he hands him the responsibility as executor of the will. Well, part of that will was a demand, A, for the payment of cash legacies to Lee's daughters, ten thousand dollars for each of them, which was quite a fortune in those days. And B, the emancipation of all the Custis slaves within five years. Now, the dilemma this poses for Lee is that old man Custis had run Arlington really into the ground, fiscally speaking.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  So Lee approaches the problem the way you would expect an army engineer to approach the problem. You know, this is all going to be algorithms and equations, not people. The slaves at Arlington rebel against this. They believe, they are convinced, that old man Custis had simply emancipated them in his will, and that they should be let go. And this creates a tremendous tension between Lee and the Custis slave population at Arlington. And it eventually blows up when three of them run away. They're apprehended in Maryland and brought back. When they're brought back, Lee accosts them, says, "What did you think you were doing?"

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  And their response is, "We ran away because we consider ourselves as free as you are."

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  This is what, at this moment, the marble image cracks.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  And Lee orders them whipped. According to one account, he even takes the whip in his own hand and lays on himself. Afterwards, you read the letter that he writes to his son Custis about it. And this is a letter which is really bizarre. He, he says, "You will have read about what happened in the newspapers." And then he adds this, "Your grandfather has left me an unpleasant legacy." In other words, he had lost control. And the one thing Robert E. Lee did not want to do was lose control. He doesn't apologize for having beaten slaves, mind you. What he's

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  upset about is he lost control. And it's what I think is really revealing is when he says, "Your grandfather has left me an unpleasant legacy." Which grandfather was he talking about? Was he talking about George Washington Park Custis? Or was somewhere at the back of his mind, the, the outline of Light Horse Harry, the undependable, the unpredictable, the vehement, the temperamental, was that the grandfather that was also at work here? I can only wonder. But it's those moments that Lee lets down his guard, lets down the

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  marble image of perfection, and lets you see something of what's going on inside him. So I look at the man and I find not simplicity, not the servant of duty, what I find is an agonized complexity that cannot make up its mind, that cannot follow decisions that we would consider to be obvious, but is instead being driven.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  By these monsters that emerge from out of his own experience and character. And that makes his story, not the story of someone who is either heroic on the one hand, definitely not that, I'm sorry, people who commit treason are not heroic. At the same time, not also a Stalin-like monster, but rather someone who cannot figure out his own propensities and is doomed to be controlled by them as much as he fears their control.

• 1:31:59Ryan Holiday?

  Professor, this was absolutely incredible. I loved the book and I really, really enjoyed this conversation.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  Well, thank you, Ryan. I've enjoyed talking with you and talking about Lincoln, talking about Lee, although I will be the first to admit that I enjoy much, much more talking about Lincoln and that my next opus, which I'm already at work on, will be about Lincoln. I have, as I said to someone, I have written my Confederate book. I have done that with a Civil War history and always feels they have to do. I've written my Confederate book. Now it's back to where I really belong and feel at home, and that is with Abraham Lincoln.

• 1:32:42Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I can't wait to read it. Demand more of yourself in 2022. And one of the ways you can do that is by joining us in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. All you have to do is go to dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up. Remember, Daily Stoic Life members get this challenge and all our challenges for free. But sign up, seriously. Think about what one positive change, one good new habit is worth to you. Think about what could be possible if you handed yourself over to a little bit of a program. We all pushed ourselves together. That's what we're going to do in the challenge. I'm going to be doing it. I do the challenges, all of them, alongside everyone else. I'm looking forward to connecting with everyone in the Discord challenge, all the other bonuses.

• 1:33:26Ryan Holiday?

  Anyways, check it out. New Year, New You, the Daily Stoic Challenge. Sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge.