Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise

Sharing Malcolm’s latest project, a podcast called Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise. Imagine a time when the United States was split in two. And then had to put itself back together. It was a time of chaos and sometimes violence as millions of people fought for the right to become citizens. Americans struggled over questions like: who gets to be a citizen? Who has the right to vote? To own property? In short, who belongs? This was Reconstruction…the era following the Civil War. When Americans ended slavery and expanded voting rights. But none of this was easy. Many people consider the promise of Reconstruction unfulfilled. Why? In this episode, journalist Kai Wright shares the story of the legendary abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass and how he navigated a world without Abraham Lincoln. Find Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise on Audible or wherever you get podcasts. https://lnk.to/reconstructionRH See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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• 1:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  Pushkin.

• 1:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Hey, hey, Revisionist History listeners. It's finally happening. One of the most exciting projects I've ever been part of at Pushkin, our collaboration with Barack Obama on the story of one of the most consequential and overlooked periods in American history. The years after the Civil War, known as Reconstruction, when, after tearing itself apart over slavery, the United States tried to put itself back together. It's easily one of the most traumatic eras in American history. The South is a smoking ruin, consumed by violence and chaos in the aftermath of the war. There are millions of people in the South who, just a few years before, were treated as property, who are now asking to be treated as people.

• 2:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  The politics, the economics, the morality of the republic is up in the air. And Reconstruction is the time when the country struggles to meet those challenges, and both succeeds and spectacularly fails, in ways that would have consequences for the next 150 years. The series is called Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise, an eight-part podcast hosted by me in collaboration with Barack Obama. I'm going to play the first episode for you now. You can find the rest of the series on Audible or wherever you get podcasts.

• 2:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  After the War.

• 3:03Speaker 05

  Douglas is such a fascinating character, right?

• 3:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  Frederick Douglass, perhaps America's most famous abolitionist leader. A person who, as a child, escaped from slavery, who went on to become a global spokesperson for freedom. When he sat down with President Barack Obama, he really wanted to talk about this larger-than-life man.

• 3:26Speaker 05

  Douglas is constantly battling between a desperate belief that the better angels of our nature will win out. He has seen this possibility of genuine equality. But he has also seen the very worst. He himself has experienced slavery. He has watched slave catchers grab people and haul them away. And he has witnessed equivocation and cowardice and betrayal.

• 4:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  I am struck by that same thing, that he sees the best, and he also is clear-eyed about who we are and what we're capable of. And this is why I think he belongs in that kind of pantheon of founding father. Frederick Douglass is a founding father.

• 4:26Speaker 05

  He really is.

• 4:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  He really is.

• 4:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  I said that not only because it's true, but because Douglas is one of those people who should have been crushed by history. Instead, for a long time, he bent it to his will. The movement to end slavery did not begin with Frederick Douglass. That movement existed before the United States did. A year before the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia Quakers founded the nation's first anti-slavery society. And from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved people organized revolutions and plotted escapes. And the abolition movement churned out fiery figures that are now well-known: Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and David Walker, the radical John Brown.

• 5:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  But certainly, Frederick Douglass was best known in his own time, both in the US and abroad. And so, we begin our series with Douglas in the opening days of Reconstruction in 1865. He's a man who thinks he's just completed his life's work, but he's about to discover that his work has just begun.

• 5:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise.

• 5:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  One of our editors, Kai Wright, has been obsessed with Douglas for years, and particularly with the evolution of the man's politics.

• 6:03Speaker 06

  Can you help people understand just how big a deal Frederick Douglass is at this stage in history? I mean, like, today, he would have a billion Instagram followers, like, the most streamed podcast in history, right?

• 6:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kai called up David Blight, who is the Frederick Douglass expert. Blight wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Douglas. He's such a fan that when he spoke with Kai, he was wearing a T-shirt with a portrait of Douglas on it. I'm going to let the two of them tell the story of this influential activist's second chapter.

• 6:36Speaker 07

  That is interesting to think about. Yeah, he'd be, he'd either be the guest on every major podcast, or he'd be doing his own. He's a very big deal. At the end of the war, his image was everywhere. He really couldn't go anywhere without being recognized. Part of it was the hair.

• 6:58Speaker 06

  Think about the term "hair on fire." It's a shock of hair, a lion's mane.

• 7:03Speaker 07

  Part of it was just his presence and the voice, almost a shouting kind of baritone voice. I know of no country where the conditions for effecting great changes are more favorable than here in these United States. I found all kinds of stories in the press of people reciting the first time they saw Douglass. To a certain degree, he became a kind of wonder of America. Reception soiree to Mr. Frederick Douglass. The celebrated Frederick Douglass has been lionized in this city for several days, notwithstanding the severe rainstorm last evening.

• 7:46Speaker 07

  Frederick Douglass drew out an immense audience. If you came to America from Europe, for example, touring the country, you wanted to see Niagara Falls, you wanted to see Washington, New York City, Washington DC, and a few other things. But if possible, especially if you came out of reformed traditions, try to see Frederick Douglass.

• 8:07Speaker 06

  But in the spring of 1865, this world famous man, who has spent literally his entire life working to abolish slavery, at the moment of his triumph, he's in a funk.

• 8:22Speaker 06

  He's kind of a guy who's lost for purpose, right?

• 8:27Speaker 07

  He is lost for purpose at the very end of the war. It's the way he described it. And he drew right from one of his favorite moments in Shakespeare. He said, "Othello's occupation is gone." I feel as though I have reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life. My school is broken up, my church... disbanded. He didn't know, he didn't know where to go. He didn't quite know what to do. Douglas, you see, he's one of the rare, rare radical reformers in history who lives to see his cause triumph in the middle of his life.

• 9:06Speaker 07

  He's only forty some years old, and he will face the challenge the rest of his life to sustain the victory of emancipation, the great transition from slavery to freedom. But no one knows, no one really knows yet where any of this is going. What he was certain of, Kai, is that the Confederate South was not going away. He kept warning, he warns, they're still there, the slaveholding spirit, he always is warning, is still out there.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  This ghost haunting the United States.

• 9:50Speaker 06

  I can't overemphasize how fast history moved in 1865. The war ends in April, and in less than a week, Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. That obviously catches the whole world off guard, but for Frederick Douglass, who, again, is already disoriented by the fact that he's just witnessed the completion of his whole life's mission, I just, I can't imagine how he processed Lincoln's death.

• 10:16Speaker 07

  Douglas was horrified, and there are many ways to understand that. He goes back to Rochester at the news of Lincoln's assassination, and a huge crowd had gathered in the central square of Rochester, New York, where he lived. And Douglas went and joined the crowd, and there were some speakers, and the crowd called for him. And it's a very moving statement he made.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  It is a day for silence and meditation, for grief and tears. Yet I feel that though Abraham Lincoln dies.

• 10:59Speaker 07

  The republic lives. He said at that moment,

• 11:06Speaker 07

  he had never felt a kinship with his fellow Americans. And by that, I think he meant white people.

• 11:13Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 11:14Speaker 07

  He'd never felt such a kinship

• 11:18Speaker 07

  as he did through Lincoln's death.

• 11:25Speaker 06

  Just think about these two men. Here's Douglas, a formerly enslaved child who now commanded the attention of the President of the United States. During the war, he was able to look Lincoln in the eye and challenge him to do more, to not only end slavery, but to arm black men in the fight to save the Union. And here's Lincoln, standing astride history, trying to save the Union, and gradually realizing that Douglas was right. The only way forward for the United States was to abolish slavery. Both Lincoln and Douglas are legendary pragmatists, cerebral by nature, but each of them see the national story in fully biblical terms. They're ready to partner in this divine task of rebuilding the United States.

• 12:11Speaker 06

  And then, bang. Partnership is snuffed out in one gunshot on Easter weekend, no less, just days after the end of the war. And the man who rises into the presidency as a result of that gunshot, he is no A. Lincoln.

• 12:30Speaker 06

  Andrew Johnson is an interesting character. He was literally the polar opposite of Lincoln. Manisha Sinha is Chair of the History Department at the University of Connecticut, and she has written a great deal about Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, America's troubled 17th president. She's an advisor on our series. Johnson seems to have been a person who really sort of lacked political skills. You know, he's petty, he's mean. He's vindictive, he's abusive, he's a drunk. He's not a great character to inhabit the office of the President of the United States.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  But Lincoln had picked Andrew Johnson as his vice president in 1864 as a show of national unity because Johnson was a Southern Democrat instead of a Northern Republican. The first sign of trouble came on Lincoln and Johnson's inauguration day.

• 13:27Speaker 07

  There are the stories that Andrew Johnson was a little schnockered on some brandy or bourbon or something because he had a horrific toothache that day. Now, he might have been sipping for other reasons, who knows? But he was not entirely sober at his inauguration as Vice President of the United States. Now, at that point, what Douglas and others knew about Andrew Johnson is he's obviously from Tennessee, he's from East Tennessee. You know, there's an old saying about Johnson, quote, "Old Andy never went back on his raisin", which means he knew where he was from. He was a damn good stump speaker. You know, he could jump on a wagon and get the farmers cheering about something.

• 14:11Speaker 07

  He's a former slaveholder, that was known, who never believed in secession,

• 14:18Speaker 07

  which is why he stayed in the Union. He was the only senator from a seceded state to stay in the Union, which is what got him on Lincoln's ticket. Which, by the way, I've always said this to all my dear friends who are Lincoln's scholars, why don't you ever talk about that? That's one of Lincoln's biggest mistakes.

• 14:36Speaker 06

  It's a horrible choice.

• 14:37Speaker 07

  It's a horrible choice.

• 14:38Speaker 06

  He makes a horrible choice.

• 14:39Speaker 07

  I mean, politically at the moment, it's a unity, it's a reunion ticket for this symbolism of the Southerner who stayed in the Union. He's a Unionist, he really was. But, a former slaveholder, a racist in his bones, and a fervent states' rights advocate.

• 15:03Speaker 07

  And of course, nobody expected presidents to be shocked.

• 15:11Speaker 06

  Andrew Johnson takes over the presidency at the start of the remarkable era that historians now call Reconstruction.

• 15:18Speaker 07

  We get to use the word unprecedented sometimes because it fits. The country had never been in this situation, the end of a massive civil war. America was now being reinvented, but how? What would it do? Who were the freed people? How would they be defined?

• 15:35Speaker 06

  Frederick Douglass couldn't have felt Andrew Johnson was fit to lead the nation through this conversation. But Douglass did have a clear idea about how to answer that crucial question of Reconstruction. Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot. We need voting rights, first and foremost. And the Republicans who controlled Congress mostly agreed. That's where Lincoln had been headed. Lincoln, when he died, one of the last speeches he made was to say, black men who are educated and who have served in the Union Army should get the right to vote. So that's like the first public endorsement of black citizenship.

• 16:19Speaker 06

  But Andrew Johnson?

• 16:21Speaker 07

  He wanted nothing to do with black civil rights, political rights. He wanted, to the extent we can understand him, he wanted black people to become a kind of an American serfdom. They would remain agricultural workers. They would stay in the South. They would be a backbone of the economy. To the extent Andrew Johnson thought much about all of that, that's as far as he ever wanted to go.

• 16:51Speaker 06

  He did think a great deal about how to handle the Confederacy. Remember, the Confederate states left the Union. They seceded and took up arms against the United States. And their leaders, many of whom had been members of Congress before the war, were actual literal traitors. So one of the big questions of Reconstruction was how to bring these states and their traitorous political leaders back into the fold. Johnson, he had been a senator from a Confederate state at the start of the war. He just personally refused to secede. So now he's president and he wants the traitors back in.

• 17:29Speaker 07

  They would be immediately readmitted to the Union. He would accept some disenfranchisement of ex Confederates. But even that, he had an alternative plan for, which was to require them to apply to him personally for pardons. And that is--

• 17:51Speaker 06

  That sounds familiar.

• 17:52Speaker 07

  Well, that whole staff of people working for the executive branch, just processing pardons for ex Confederates. They would literally line up at the White House or Executive Building nearby to get their pardons. Johnson liked the idea. See, Johnson was-- Johnson had the self-image of a poor boy. He's a poor boy from East Tennessee, hill country. And he did grow up with not much, although he had owned some slaves. And he was proud to tell you that. But he liked the idea of the old planter class, which he was not from, having to kind of cower to him.

• 18:29Speaker 06

  Right.

• 18:30Speaker 07

  So, yeah, that sounds familiar too, doesn't it? The guy with the sense of grievance is going to make everybody who might have looked down on him come and bend their knee. He loved that.

• 18:41Speaker 06

  And meanwhile, black people have to get caught in the middle of it.

• 18:43Speaker 07

  Black people aren't even going to be allowed in the middle of it.

• 18:49Speaker 07

  Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he is no friend of our race.

• 18:58Speaker 06

  So Douglas sees Andrew Johnson, and now he's got his new vocation. Now he has found his calling--

• 19:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 19:07Speaker 06

  --in opposition, essentially, to Andrew Johnson.

• 19:09Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. And what a great foil.

• 19:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  David Blight and Kai Wright will be back to talk more about this coming showdown. But first, I'm taking us to meet the man who really got it underway.

• 19:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Remember, Frederick Douglass and Andrew Johnson both need public opinion on their side after the war. Douglass argues that the federal government has an obligation to the newly freed people of the South. It must not only protect them, but give them the right to vote. President Johnson disagrees. He doesn't think the federal government should do much of anything. In fact, he's busy pardoning Confederates. But Johnson is only president by dint of a terrible tragedy. His power is tenuous. He needs some ammunition for his arguments. So he sends a man you've probably never heard of on a historic mission. It's a mission that will become hugely consequential for Reconstruction,

• 20:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  just not in the way Andrew Johnson hopes.

• 20:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is our dude, right? So in my many years in New York City, I have come, walked past this monument many times. We're in the corner of 116th Street and Morningside Drive, on the edge of Columbia University, on the border between Columbia and Morningside Park, one of the crown jewels of Manhattan. And there is this statue, which I have passed, and it's never occurred to me to stop and wonder who it is. And it's this, actually, quite imposing statue of a man in, what looks like a man in his 60s or 70s, wearing a kind of long imposing cloak, holding on to his hat, and a very determined look on his face.

• 21:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  And it says, "Carl Schertz, a defender of liberty and a friend of human rights." So this statue dates to 1913. At the dedication ceremony for this statue, Joseph Choate, the one who led the movement to get it built, said, "This day will not end the memory of Carl Schertz."

• 21:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Does anyone remember Karl Schurz today? I don't think so. I've never seen anyone standing in front of that statue. The man actually seems lost to history, like a lot of what happened in the Reconstruction era. At the end of the Civil War, Karl Schurz was in the vanguard of American politics, one of the people who had rallied around Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to save the Union.

• 21:56Speaker 07

  If you think about it, this was a-- we still haven't talked about generations in politics. And this was a generation of political leaders. They won the Civil War. They mobilized as no one had ever imagined. And here they are in 1865, victorious. It's a remarkable generation.

• 22:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  And Karl Schurz is right there, in the middle of it. He's a German immigrant who fought and lost in movements against European monarchy before coming to America and joining Lincoln's political coalition. He sees the United States as a laboratory for democracy, as an example to the world: no more royalty, no more aristocracy, and no more slavery.

• 22:45Speaker 06

  The awesome thing about Schurz is, on the one hand, he's like, he's on kind of the side of liberal democracy for all these mass movements in the 19th century. He's like a streak running across the 19th century.

• 22:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  Finally, I found someone who's gotten into Karl Schurz as much as I have: John Grinspan, a historian at the Smithsonian Institute who studies the politics of the 1800s.

• 23:09Speaker 06

  And the other thing is Karl Schurz is incredibly kind of needling and pushy. And the Yiddish word "nudnik" is the word I think of for him. He's such a difficult, sometimes annoying individual, that it's fun to see the humanity in somebody who's involved in all these kind of glorious movements.

• 23:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's the summer of 1865, just a few months after the Civil War has ended and after Lincoln has been killed. Andrew Johnson, the new president, asks Karl Schurz to come to the White House. Schurz thinks, here's an opportunity to shape the Reconstruction effort that's just begun.

• 23:47Speaker 06

  He sees some things he thinks Johnson is doing wrong. And he, in a maybe naive way, thinks he can go to Johnson and talk him into a better policy.

• 24:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  What follows is a little digression, but it's hard to resist. And it tells you something about how Americans were handling both the trauma of war and a president's assassination. On the way to Washington to see Johnson, Carl Scherz stays with friends in Philadelphia. The family had lost two sons in the war. Unlike so many others, they wanted to communicate with them through a séance. The night Scherz arrives, they invite him to join in. He wrote about it later.

• 24:31Speaker 06

  One of the daughters, an uncommonly beautiful, intelligent, and high-spirited girl of about 15, had shown remarkable qualities as a writing medium. When the circle was formed around the table, hands touching, a shiver seemed to pass over her. Her fingers began to twitch. She grasped the pencil held out to her, and as if obeying an irresistible impulse, she wrote in a jerky way the messages given her by the spirits. He asks that the girl call up the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, who's just dead for a few months at that point. And he claims that, at the séance, the spirit of Abraham Lincoln tells him that Johnson is going to send him

• 25:15Speaker 06

  on an important mission. It's classic Carl Scherz that he has Lincoln come back from behind the grave to give him a promotion.

• 25:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  But now, after that side trip to the spirit world, he has a real president to meet. I asked historian Manisha Sinha about that encounter. So Scherz goes to Washington, sits down with Johnson. And what does Johnson explicitly ask him to do?

• 25:43Speaker 06

  So Johnson asks Scherz to go to the southern states and says, I want you to report on the conditions in the South right now. And I think he wants to use Scherz. He wants to send Scherz to the South to report back to him. Hey, everything is fine. It's all hunky dory. And, you know, the South can rejoin the Union.

• 26:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, so from Johnson's perspective, he's looking, he's looking for a kind of cover story. He thinks, he thinks Schertz is going to come back with something that, that kind of justifies him sort of washing his hands of the whole thing and moving on. Why does he think Schertz could, would be such a willing dupe?

• 26:22Speaker 06

  That's an interesting question. I think he's also calculating that he wants to send someone who would be believable to the radical wing and to the entire Republican Party.

• 26:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  In mid-July, Carl Schertz begins his fact-finding mission. He boards a steamboat from Washington to the South Carolina Sea Islands. A US military officer takes him to a plantation near Beaufort, far down the eastern coast, just shy of the South Carolina-Georgia border. Schertz is excited by what he sees.

• 26:55Speaker 07

  Fields free from weeds, the cotton plants healthy, the cornfields promised a rich yield, everything breathing thrift, order, and prosperity. We passed by a large log house in which a colored preacher was exhorting his congregation, for it was Sunday.

• 27:11Speaker 06

  This is an area where the Union Army abolitionists, freed people themselves, are experimenting in systems of free labor that would replace slavery. Freed people's idea of free labor was linked to their own traditions of economic autonomy. They envisioned free labor as sometimes even ownership of land, but definitely control over who they labored for, how much they labored, and what they would get for it.

• 27:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  But this pleasant picture would not hold up for long. Schertz leaves the Sea Islands and takes another boat to Charleston, South Carolina. That's where he starts to encounter the real devastation of the war.

• 27:57Speaker 06

  He writes about how long it takes getting into Charleston before he sees a living creature. This city that was so glamorous and sophisticated on the eve of the war now looks like it's just completely in ruins. He really sees the impact on urban civilian populations and the degree of destruction and the degree of, the word he keeps using is sullenness, the degree of anger and resignation and frustration that he runs into among the, especially the white elite southern population, who previously had been so dominant in a place like Charleston, now will barely speak.

• 28:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  Schertz travels further into South Carolina. He rides on miserable trains through 95-degree heat. His mule-drawn wagon breaks down. The roads are nothing but deep sand. He visits Columbia, the state capital, and finds it reduced to what he calls "a confused mass of charred ruins." He passes through the remains of General Sherman's infamous march and sees a broad black streak of desolation.

• 29:04Speaker 06

  Reconstruction has barely begun. The war is, in a sense, over in that the major armies have surrendered and Jefferson Davis has been captured, but there's no sense of order or peace. There's just degrees of chaos. And he talks a lot as he travels, especially to former Confederates and to white southerners. And he gets a sense that there's a consensus that the Confederacy has lost and secession has failed, but there's no agreement on what should come next.

• 29:33Speaker 07

  They want to fight the war over again, and they are sure in five years we are going to have a war bigger than any we have seen yet. They are impatient to get rid of this damned military despotism. They will show us what stuff southern men are made of. Such is their talk.

• 29:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  Schertz makes his way to Savannah, Georgia. He finds a city still reeling from mob violence that broke out on Independence Day.

• 30:00Speaker 06

  In Savannah, when they hold a Fourth of July celebration in 1865, the war is over. It's a Fourth of July celebration. It should be fairly patriotic. Basically, the only people that attend are Union soldiers and freed slaves, and they are attacked by an angry white mob.

• 30:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  Historian Manisha Sinha says Carl Schertz wasn't the only person to witness this kind of thing. The patriotic holiday had become a flashpoint.

• 30:28Speaker 06

  We see evidence coming from all over the South. The only people who want to celebrate the Fourth of July are freed people. It's not southern whites who are very sullen and hate the Fourth of July, interestingly enough, at that point. And black people really sort of seem to tie their demands and their freedom claims and their rights to the national government, to the Union Army, and to celebrating the nation.

• 30:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  Schertz then takes a train to Atlanta. He spends the weekend there and finds yet more lawlessness.

• 31:00Speaker 07

  The planters in that region seem to have combined to keep the Negroes in their former state of subjection and to kill those that refused to submit.

• 31:10Speaker 06

  There's a regular drumbeat at this time of open, regular violence against African Americans, formerly enslaved people across the South.

• 31:22Speaker 06

  One scout at the time estimates that there's a murder a day happening somewhere, and Schertz sees a lot of it.

• 31:28Speaker 07

  The demoralization of the people is frightful to behold in its manifestations. Travelers are frequently attacked on the public highways. Cotton is stolen in enormous quantities. Horses and mules are run off whenever they are not watched with the utmost care. And the perpetrators are almost never arrested and punished.

• 31:50Speaker 06

  I'd say the general direction of the whole trip is, as he moves further south and certainly further west, he runs into more and more chaos and more and more violence and more and more kind of evil plans by former Confederates to do whatever they can to get as close to re-enslaving people as possible.

• 32:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  Schertz finally reaches the end of his journey, New Orleans, in September. He's been traveling for two months through a treacherous landscape. He is, by now, completely exhausted and miserable. He writes about sweltering nights in the wretched country taverns, and about nights spent in desperate fights with ravenous swarms of mosquitoes. He gets dengue fever, or as he calls it, "break-bone fever", and he's just appalled by all that he has witnessed in the South.

• 32:41Speaker 06

  This is the most shiftless, most demoralized people I have ever seen. If I can only make my main report, I shall open the eyes of the people of the North.

• 32:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  Schertz returns to Washington, DC. He's ready to write a report to the president documenting all the devastation and lawlessness he's seen. This is precisely the assignment Andrew Johnson had given him. And now, Schertz has the evidence he needs to make the president face reality.

• 33:14Speaker 06

  This reconstruction thing is not going to be fast, it's not going to be easy, and it's going to take effort on our part.

• 33:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  But Andrew Johnson is no longer interested in what Carl Schertz has to say.

• 33:24Speaker 06

  He doesn't want Schertz around anymore. He doesn't want Schertz involved anymore. He seems to regret ever giving him the position to begin with.

• 33:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  And he certainly doesn't want to publish a report. Schertz writes it anyway. He includes everything he has seen, organized by topic: the rampant violence against black people, and the "utter absence of national feeling" among Southern whites. He calls for troops to stay in the South, for black suffrage to be a condition of any Confederate state's re-entry into the Union. He says there needs to be a reconstruction of the "whole organism of Southern society", to bring it in harmony with the rest of American society. This is the report he delivers to Andrew Johnson, and which he gives to Johnson's Republican enemies.

• 34:14Speaker 06

  I think Johnson miscalculates enormously.

• 34:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  I mean, this is sort of a spectacular own goal by Johnson. He finds this guy thinking this guy will be his kind of willing dupe. We'll go back in someone with some credibility with the abolitionists will go and give a nice whitewash for what's going on in the South that will justify Johnson's own agenda. And the guy returns and he's not playing ball. He's determined to tell the truth. And now Johnson's stuck. He created this mess, this political mess for himself.

• 34:50Speaker 06

  Exactly. And I think Johnson realizes then that Schertz's report and other such reports coming out of the South is going to result in the failure of his own restoration plan.

• 35:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  That plan being do as little as possible. Republicans ultimately forced the president to formally submit Carl Schertz's report to Congress, thereby making it a fully public document. But the president attaches a note in which he tries desperately to obscure the facts. His damage control is kind of, it's kind of audacious. In his, in his note, he says perplexing questions were naturally to be expected. I love the, the grammatical construction of this, you know? Mistakes were made. Perplexing questions were naturally to be expected from the great and sudden change in the relations between the two races.

• 35:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  But systems are gradually developing themselves under which the freedmen will receive the protection to which he is justly entitled. And then he celebrates the spirit of nationality, which is rapidly emerging from the sectional animosity of the war. It's like, it's one plus one is three.

• 36:05Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And especially for Johnson to talk about freed people's rights is a bit, in your face, a bit rich, exactly, in your face, rich. And, you know, but he really wants to tell northerners, hey, the South is no longer bitter and they're not bitter against the Union or you, that they have all accepted it. And in fact, Schertz has just witnessed the precise opposite.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  I think 100,000 copies of it go out, which is a huge number back then. And it shows up in basically all the newspapers. And by the end of the year, Schertz's report is really influencing how people are thinking about Reconstruction.

• 36:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  Carl Schertz's report ended up being the most radical thing he ever did. He went on to have a successful career and then faded into obscurity. But his report on the condition of the South helped change the course of history. Because the Republicans in Congress immediately began to challenge Johnson's policies. They put forth their own bold ideas for how the country should be put back together. And this sparks what is really the first big battle between the branches of American government. The White House versus Congress. Who will have the last word on the direction of the Union? The following year, 1866, is one of the most momentous years in American political history.

• 37:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  And that's when Frederick Douglass steps back into the fray.

• 37:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  Here, I'm going to turn our story back to our editor, Kai Wright.

• 37:53Speaker 06

  So you now have two starkly contrasting visions for how the country should be put back together. There's Andrew Johnson's approach, quick and easy, with everything essentially going back to how it was before the war. And then there's the approach Carl Schertz advised in his report. Make black people full citizens with the right to vote and use the military to enforce that right if need be. In January of 1866, Congress convenes a set of hearings to debate the matter. They're considering a big sprawling constitutional amendment that will settle things once and for all. This is what will ultimately become the 14th amendment to the US Constitution.

• 38:35Speaker 06

  And as all of this is consuming the national conversation, Frederick Douglass leads a delegation of black men to the White House.

• 38:45Speaker 07

  They managed to get this appointment. They weren't invited.

• 38:47Speaker 06

  David Blight again, Douglass's biographer.

• 38:50Speaker 07

  They went in with a prepared statement. They were able to get through part of their prepared. They went there to lobby the President of the United States for the right to vote.

• 39:00Speaker 07

  And protection and all the other rights. They got through part of their prepared statement and Johnson interrupted them. He was not going to be preached to by a bunch of black men. In fact, at one point, he said, I especially don't want to be preached to by people like you. And he meant Douglas, who can round out periods and put in fancy words. Wow. Oh, yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 06

  People who know how to use their words. I don't want to be spoken to.

• 39:27Speaker 07

  No, don't you ever speak to me like that. Johnson held the floor for 45 minutes. Johnson went on and on and on. And part of Johnson's speech, which is what it was, this was not a discussion. He said, you know, I once owned slaves, but I want you to know I, I owned slaves, but I never sold one. That's, he said that to them. I guess believing that would not offend them. I mean, it's like, yeah, no, no, he's real. It's amazing. It got worse. Douglas would try to interrupt, you know, like, Mr. President, may I, uh, uh, Mr. President, may I?

• 40:07Speaker 07

  And then Johnson finally just said, no, you will not speak to me. And at some point, they're about 50, 55 minutes in. Douglas said, well, we're finished here. He asked his whole delegation to get up and they walked out.

• 40:27Speaker 07

  Johnson can barely disguise his own racism. He doesn't see Douglas the way Lincoln sees him as a black leader. Uh, and as, as somebody who's putting forth some legitimate ideas about black rights and reconstruction. It's just the opposite. He sees, he demeans Douglas and he calls him the N word. And he says, oh, he'll cut my throat off just like any other slave. Douglas said he heard it. I've always imagined Douglas turning around, looking at Andrew Johnson, you know, wishing he could.

• 41:00Speaker 07

  You know, take his teeth out, but probably just walked out and said, oh yeah. They went over to a hotel, they wrote up a statement, they published it immediately the next morning in a Washington DC paper describing exactly what had happened. And then Douglas wrote a new speech, this Douglas always did this. When something big happens, he'd go to his desk and he wouldn't know exactly what he thinks about something until he went to his desk and he wrote a new speech and he called it "Sources of Danger to the Republic." And it's a barn burner. He just butchered Johnson in this speech.

• 41:38Speaker 06

  I know of no greater misfortunes to individuals than an overconfidence in their own perfections. And I know of fewer misfortunes that can happen to a nation greater than an overconfidence in the perfection of its government.

• 41:58Speaker 06

  Douglas opens the speech by warning, "Look, don't think there's something divine or almighty about the institutions that support American democracy, starting with the Constitution itself." There were neither thunderings, nor lightnings, nor earthquakes, nor tempests, nor any other disturbance of nature when this great law was given to the world. The Constitution is just a piece of paper, ideas on a page. It is simply a human contrivance. It is the work of man and men struggling with many of the prejudices and infirmities common to man.

• 42:41Speaker 06

  And it is time to deal with those prejudices. Douglas says, "If you want this to be a democracy, it's gotta be a real democracy." Make it a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and for all of the people, each for all, and all for each. Blot out all discriminations against any person, theoretically or practically. Keep no man from the ballot box, or jury box, or the cartridge box because of his color. Exclude no woman from the ballot box because of her sex. Let the government of the country rest securely down upon the shoulders of the whole nation.

• 43:26Speaker 06

  But really, in this speech, Douglas is here to talk about leadership. He says, yes, we must update the Constitution. But even then, no matter what is written in that document, our liberty actually depends on something more active. That, that is the lesson of the Civil War. He says, imagine if Lincoln had not been president during the war. Imagine the wartime commander in chief as the guy we got now. Had that other embodiment of political treachery, meanness, baseness, ingratitude, the vilest of the vile, the basest of the base, the most execrable of the execrable

• 44:06Speaker 06

  of modern times, he who shall be nameless occupied the presidential chair. Your magnificent republic might have been numbered with the things that were. Douglas wants them to get rid of the veto. He wants them to limit presidents to one term, and he wants them to get rid of Johnson's ability to pardon Confederates for sure. The president, he says, has too much power. Mr. Johnson has sometimes overstepped this power in certain conditions of his mind, which are quite frequent, and mistaken himself for the United States instead of the president

• 44:49Speaker 06

  of the United States. There's a line in it that gives me chills when I read it today. He says, "Our government may at some point be in the hands of a bad man. When in the hands of a good man, it is all well enough. We ought to have our government so shaped that even when it is in the hands of a bad man, we shall be safe."

• 45:13Speaker 07

  Indeed. You know, can you imagine the first time I read that? I mean, it was, well, I'd read it before at some point, but you know, you can read a Douglas speech six times and find something new in it. But I used to end, occasionally, I used to end talks on Douglas with that during Trump's first term. They'd just end with that. I wouldn't mention Trump. I mean, I didn't have to. You know, it was so poignant.

• 45:41Speaker 07

  But you know, what he's saying there is we got problems with our constitution. There are structural problems with it, but we still do depend on human character on some level. It's such a prescient warning for all sorts of political systems, all sorts of places in the world. Democracy is a great thing, but it first needs law and structure, but then it needs people who believe in it. And one without the other, problem won't work.

• 46:15Speaker 06

  Frederick Douglass took this speech on the road, campaigning for a bold new constitution. And Andrew Johnson barnstormed across the country with his own speech. It was an election year on top of everything else. So the president wanted voters to give him a new Congress, one that would support his vision for a quick and tidy reconstruction. He even says the real traitors to the Union were not the former Confederates, but they are the radical Republicans and the abolitionists. These are the real enemies to the Union. Johnson is stuck in this very rigid racist view.

• 46:57Speaker 06

  So he thinks the majority will support him because he can play the race card. And he does that constantly. If you give black people rights, you're taking them away from whites. He says that constantly. And he's stunned when northern whites do not get duped by his race card because they're seeing what's happening in the South. So the sympathy is for freed people at that point. There is no sort of racial unity between northern whites and southern whites on this issue. Johnson completely misreads the political situation.

• 47:33Speaker 07

  And it totally backfired on Johnson. The Republicans overwhelmingly won those congressional off-year elections, both houses, and returned a veto-proof two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress that next fall.

• 47:49Speaker 06

  And for the next three years, from 1866 to 1870, Congress passes law after law over Andrew Johnson's vetoes. They actually grow so tired of his obstruction that they impeach him in 1868. He's the first ever president to claim that dishonor. Johnson survives by a single vote, but it hardly matters. He's a lame-duck president, a leader without a party. And with Johnson out of the way, congressional Republicans radically redesigned the United States of America. This would be a tremendous moment. It is kind of a refounding of the republic because suddenly you get this momentum for

• 48:30Speaker 06

  the first federal civil rights laws that are passed at this time, the constitutional amendments, especially the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment, establishing the idea of universal citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of race or any other status, with equality before the law for all citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment, establishing voting rights for black men at least, and civil rights laws that spell out how all these new rules are going to work. The founding principles of an international democracy in the United States. It's really an exciting moment in American history.

• 49:11Speaker 06

  Black Southerners leap at the opportunity as well. They rush to the polls to vote. Thousands of black men hold public office, and they help create some of the most progressive state governments in the history of this country. States like South Carolina create the first public schools, expand legal rights for women, abolish debtors' prisons, and so much more.

• 49:40Speaker 07

  They did engineer a remake in the United States. And it's the only time for that brief moment from essentially 1866 to 68, 69, 70, that that moment when the term radical had a sort of consensus traction.

• 49:59Speaker 06

  It's hard to imagine in the United States.

• 50:01Speaker 07

  Radical Republicans.

• 50:02Speaker 06

  Radical was the consensus.

• 50:04Speaker 07

  They were in power.

• 50:05Speaker 06

  For three years.

• 50:05Speaker 07

  Yeah. By the way, the greatest legacy of the original Republican Party, try this on as an irony, they believed above all in activist, aggressive use of federal power. I mean, look at the ways they had just used federal power. That period is the laboratory where an American government, the idea of government was reinvented, for better or worse. You can hate it, you can love it, you can like parts of it, but that's the year you got to, you want to understand rights in America, you got to go to Reconstruction. You want to understand the role of government in society, got to go to Reconstruction.

• 50:47Speaker 07

  You want to talk about what governments owe their people and what people owe their governments, you got to go to Reconstruction. You want to talk about race in America, you got to go to Reconstruction because it kind of all starts there in the modern sense. And, and we relive it now.

• 51:04Speaker 06

  Every day.

• 51:05Speaker 07

  All the time.

• 51:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  All the time. I would add that if you want to understand education in America, you've got to go to Reconstruction as well, because that's when public education as we know it was established, and much of it by the people who'd just recently been enslaved.

• 51:38Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 52:22Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 53:09Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 53:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's whoop.com for your free month of Whoop.