Lectures in History: FEED DROP A250 Abraham Lincoln and Conditions Leading to the Civil War

[00:00:04]This week on the lectures and history podcast, we're bringing you a special feed drop from C-SPAN's America 250 coverage. Pulitzer Prizewinning author Edna Fields Black joined fellow scholars for a conversation hosted by the Abraham Lincoln Institute exploring Abraham Lincoln and the events that set the nation on the path toward the Civil War.

[00:00:24]The discussion was recorded at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC.

[00:00:34]So, good morning. So, my name is David J. Kent. I am a Lincoln historian and the author of several Lincoln books, uh, including my most recent Lincoln in New England in search of his Forgotten Tours, which just came out like two weeks ago. Uh but for today's purposes, I'm doing double duty as the executive committee and board member of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and as the immediate past president of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia. So the Lincoln Group of DC is co-sponsoring the event this year because of the special program. About three years ago, we started encouraging a variety of Lincoln groups to focus on Abraham Lincoln's commitment and adherence to the Declaration of Independence and the American founding, which especially important in this 250th anniversary year. So, you can find out more about the Lincoln Group at linkian.org and the uh Lincoln and the American founding at lincoln250.org.

[00:01:38]So with that short introduction, it's my pleasure to introduce the first outstanding panel for today's program.

[00:01:45]The panel is entitled Paths to the Civil War, and we'll examine how we got from the founding to the war that almost ended the nation. And the award-winning panelists are Dr. Eda Fields Black of Carnegie Melon University. Her most recent book, Ki Harriet Tubman, the Kbehi River Raid and Black Freedom During the Civil War, was the winner of both the 2025 Gilda Lurman Lincoln Prize and the 2025 Puliter Prize as well as many many other awards um including being named one of the best non-fiction books of 2024 by Bloomberg and one of the best civil war books of 2024 by Civil for Monitor magazine. Now, she'll be joined on stage by Dr. Richard Cowardine of Oxford University. His most recent book, Righteous Strife: How Waring Religious Nationalist Forged Slinkin's Union, uh was awarded the 2025 Harold Holder Book Award and he received the 2025 Richard Nelson current award of achievement both from the Lincoln Forum.

[00:03:00]Now, Carine won the Gilda Lurman Lincoln Prize way back in 2004 for an earlier book on Lincoln, but just a week or so ago, it was announced that Righteous Strife had won the 2026 Bill Lurman Lincoln Prize.

[00:03:17]Now, our moderator for today's outstanding panel is Steve Inscape of National Public Radio. Inscape is a career journalist who's covered the Pentagon, World Politics, and previously hosted Weekend All Things Considered.

[00:03:32]But for the last 20 years, we probably know him best as the host of NPR's Morning Edition program.

[00:03:40]Steve is also a widely published author and his most recent book is Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America. So, please welcome our extremely distinguished panelists. Thank you.

[00:04:02]>> Wow.

[00:04:10]>> Good morning.

[00:04:12]>> It's good to see you all here. Uh oh, got a little bit of feedback. Hopefully, we'll work on that. Uh it is great to see such a big crowd here. I mean, almost all the seats are filled, although I see the presidential box is empty for some reason. Um, but it is an honor to be at Ford's Theater. It's an honor to be on stage, and it's really uh humbling for me as somebody who tries to write to be on stage with these two writers whose style and research are so extraordinary. And I want to just talk about that a little bit and have a conversation about what they've learned uh about our past and what it means for our present. and Dr. Black Edit Fields Black is the way that I should say it.

[00:04:52]Thank you. I want to begin with you and just talk about Comi. Uh this is an extraordinary story of the Civil War that I didn't know at all until you wrote about it. So what is the story?

[00:05:05]What were you trying to find out?

[00:05:08]>> So the story uh in Kumbi is about the Kihei River raid uh which took place in June of 1863. This is South Carolina >> on seven rice plantations in South Carolina and it's a story of Harriet Tubman and her uh Civil War service as a spy for the US Army um and her leadership of a group of seven I'm sorry, eight or nine spies, scouts and pilots who piloted three armed boats um US Army boats up the Cumbi River with the second South Carolina volunteers and the third Rhode Island heavy artillery. Um, it's also a story of the Cumbi freedom seekers and the 756 enslaved people who were freed in the six-hour raid. And we get to learn who they are and hear them tell their stories in large part through the US uh civil war pension files. Um, and this is a source which had little been little used by historians uh previously. And so I use those pinchion files to reconstruct the Cumbi community so that we know who got on the boat, right? And what were their lives like um in bondage on these rice plantations in this extremely deadly environment? Uh and then what was life like after the raid?

[00:06:38]>> I want to just underline what you're doing here uh because I find it inspiring and important. Uh we're here at Ford's Theater at an event honoring Lincoln about whom every word that he ever wrote or spoke someone has collected in in books and and carefully examined and they should. Uh but you're finding people who were part of that same story whose names may have been well they were lost in a file somewhere.

[00:07:03]They were unknown until until a few years ago. Why was that important to you to do?

[00:07:11]It was important to me to be able to tell the story from the perspectives of the enslaved people because we hadn't heard it before. Um because these are some of these folks uh were actually my ancestors and it's me looking for my own family members. Um, and in looking for my family members, finding the voices of the enslaved people who were liberated on the Cumbi.

[00:07:40]>> I wanted to know something about that.

[00:07:41]I'm reading the book and I come across this sentence that I write down or phrase. Hector Fields, my great greatgrandfather, who's a charact Did you know that that your ancestor was in the story when you started?

[00:07:53]>> No.

[00:07:54]>> Oh, wow.

[00:07:56]>> I did not. I knew that my father is the last of his siblings born in Green Pond, South Carolina. It's about a mile or two from where the raid took place. Um, and I was entrusted with some family business which required me to find Hector Fields and find his descendants and where they're buried.

[00:08:17]>> Wow. Um, and so in looking for Hector, uh, the first place I turned was to the pension files because there was a Hector Fields who was a Civil War veteran in Buford, South Carolina. Well, we're from Colatin, South Carolina, which is the next county over. So, I didn't think I was related to this man at all. And in the course of my research, I found actually I am and found how our family got from Buford to Colatin as well as how they got separated before the Civil War, during the Civil War, where the Fields family was in bondage um and met members of their enslaved community.

[00:09:02]>> I'm I'm going to bring Richard into the conversation in a minute, but I want to ask one other thing about research. So, you mentioned pension files. They're here in Washington mainly, right? There are. And it's it's just papers.

[00:09:12]Nothing's been digitized. It's thousands, millions probably pages of of papers. So, you just browse quickly on a Saturday afternoon through the several million.

[00:09:22]>> But you did another thing that I want to explain. This river is like this winding river in the lowlands of South Carolina.

[00:09:29]It's really hot. It's grassland. It's forest. It's also farms and had been plantations. Uh, how did you make sure you knew the ground that you were writing about? What did you do?

[00:09:40]>> I was in residence on the Cumbi at Neore's Wildlife Foundation for 18 months.

[00:09:47]>> You went and lived there for 18 months.

[00:09:49]>> I lived down there 10 days out of every month for 18 months. I hiked um I hiked the the river and the rice fields. I met the people who currently own the plantations and they gave me keys basically so I could go anytime I needed to. We did a number of reenactments. We went up the boat up the cumbi in boats several times. Myself and the scientists who were affiliated with the research center >> and we did a reenactment walking through the rice fields barefoot. So, I really tried to experience the land and the river and the critters, especially the alligators. Um, >> there were lots of alligators.

[00:10:37]>> There were lots of alligators. There were fewer snakes.

[00:10:40]>> Okay, that's >> But there were lots of alligators.

[00:10:42]>> Let me tell you the right number of sta snakes for me.

[00:10:46]>> Zero.

[00:10:47]>> Just Okay. What did it feel like? Rice fields barefoot. They're flooded, right?

[00:10:51]So, you're walking through. They're flooding >> and you don't know what's down there.

[00:10:54]>> No, you don't. They were very slippery, very prickly, and you put your foot down in the mud, the pluff mud, and it sinks your leg sinks up to your knee.

[00:11:10]>> Wow.

[00:11:10]>> So, the morning before, early in the morning before we went out, I'd written a couple of paragraphs about the freedom seekers running through the rice fields.

[00:11:21]and we're in the rice fields and a baby alligator swam into the rice fields with us. And because by that time I was an alligator expert, I knew that the mother was not far behind. So I try to go running through the rice fields and almost ended up flat on my face.

[00:11:42]>> Wow.

[00:11:42]>> And I had to go back and rewrite that entire bathroom.

[00:11:46]>> Working a little more fear.

[00:11:49]Wow. Um, Richard, I don't know if you walked through a rice field to study.

[00:11:53]>> I have never walked through a rice field.

[00:11:55]>> It's good to know. It's good to know.

[00:11:56]But you did another another extraordinary feat and and I I want to suggest that what you were discovering here was something that's in plain sight but easy to overlook. What was it you were trying to find out when you wrote this book, Righteous Strike?

[00:12:12]>> Um, I came to it oh 20 years ago.

[00:12:17]Started only 20 years ago. it it wasn't written in response to current Christian nationalist issues. Uh I came to it having written in the 1990s a book that explored evangelicals in politics in the pre-Ivil War period. um a society where 75% of the population are associated with churches where 40% of the population are in uh relationship with evangelicalism and explored in that book the way in which churches in particular shaped the way in which u American citizens approached the issues of the day particularly of course slavery. Um and I integrated uh religion and politics and a kind of uh uh uh sort of the interreationship of religion and politics in that book. It stopped in 1861. I then uh wrote the book on on Lincoln. Lincoln a life of purpose and power in which I was particularly interested in the um the moral dimensions of Lincoln's purpose. Mhm.

[00:13:21]>> Aware that he was not in no sense a conventional believer, but knowing that there was something profoundly moral about the position he was taking in both the pre-war and during the war.

[00:13:32]>> Let's remind people, many people here will know Lincoln never belonged to an organized church.

[00:13:36]>> No, he bel he he did not be he was never a member of an organized church. He attended uh the First Presbyterian Church in Springfield. And of course as president, he was a regular attender of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.

[00:13:51]But like many Americans of his time who attended church, he was not actually a member. Um you become a member of a church by having a commitment. You make a commitment to Christ. Yeah. Uh in the case of Christian churches. And Lincoln never made that commitment. Um his wife did. And that's a quite a common pattern in this period that the the the women members of the family are more likely to be church members than than the men.

[00:14:17]>> Yeah.

[00:14:18]>> Um so I came to this book uh Roger Strive wanting to do two things. One was to explore the the inter relationship the interpenetration of religion and politics during an existential crisis of the union. big questions about the nature of the union hadn't necessarily to be addressed. Uh people who was what was the purpose of the war is my question. And when you ask that question, you find um thousands of voices articulating what the war was about. But I divided them into I divided them into two camps basically during the war. The anti-slavery religious nationalists and the conservative religious nationalists.

[00:15:04]They all wanted the union to be retained. They wanted to fight for the union. But the conservatives simply wanted a return to the old union. The union as it was under the old constitution uh with the racial order largely unchanged. Whereas the anti-slavery nationalists increasingly saw the opportunity during the war to turn the war into a war for emancipation.

[00:15:27]Now those positions I think have been well understood by political historians of the civil war. But what I feel the politics of the war has never really addressed is how these political positions were infused with an essential morality and a Christian essentially Christian morality >> which you see in Lincoln's speeches through the war. Right. Indeed. He's talking he's referring to God.

[00:15:50]>> Exactly. And that was the second element of the book which is to place Lincoln in that conversation. A conversation which Lincoln wanted. Uh Lincoln not only received hundreds of petitions and memorials from um believers from Christian churches and groups but he invited deputations to the White House.

[00:16:08]He had correspondence significant correspondence with believers with with religious believers not not all of them Christians but mostly Christians. Um and that was a conversation which I think he welcomed. Um, and what I wanted then secondly to do in the book was to show how Lincoln's ideas of God and of the place of God in American society had changed dramatically from the way in which he saw God as a young man when in new Salem he read Tom Payne, he read the other writers of the of the enlightenment he probably espoused a sort of deistic faith. Um, >> deistic meaning agree in a kind that there's some kind of >> there is a god. I mean, Lincoln Lincoln was not an atheist. Lincoln believed in a in a creator god. Um, but this is a god who sets the universe in motion. Uh, it runs according to u reason and science. Um, the course is then unchanging once it's been set in motion.

[00:17:09]Um, so it's a this god is not a mysterious god. Uh it's very sort of explicable. During the war, it's quite clear that Lincoln's views change. He becomes what you might call a providentialist. He speaks increasingly of providence, which he never did before the war. Um he comes to see God as an active force in American life. Uh uh this is no longer a remote God. It's a god who uh is mysterious and in some ways unknowable but you had somehow to get to know. There's a a wonderful document um I think it's perhaps the most significant document. Um you you you mentioned that um era searched out a lot of materials and that a lot of my materials were there in in plain sight.

[00:18:00]Lincoln's faith has long been a question of contention, a matter of contention amongst historians because actually he didn't address that in uh uh in in many public settings or in many settings where you could assume absolute sincerity.

[00:18:17]Lincoln wrote this document called which has been labeled the memorandum on the divine will and it begins it's probably probably September 1862 um just around the time of Antitam and it begins the will of God prevails in great contests both parties claim to act in accordance with the will of God both maybe and One must be wrong.

[00:18:48]God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.

[00:18:52]In the present civil war, it is quite possible that God's purpose is quite different from the purpose of either party.

[00:19:01]And yet the human instrumentalities being just as they are human instrumentalities including of course Lincoln himself are of the best adaptation to achieve God's purposes. So the issue was to find out what God's purpose was.

[00:19:19]And he said to the visiting uh Chicago Christians in again in September of 1862 before he's issued the Emancipation Proclamation, they say that the the truth must be somewhere and you know you you and Ling, yes, of course it is. And uh I'm I'm I'm seeking as as as hard as you are to find out what that truth is.

[00:19:40]Um, and it might be supposed he says to these uh ministers from Chicago that if God really wants to make his will known, he might make it known perhaps directly to me and not and not come by Chicago.

[00:19:53]Um, there's a twinkle in the eye when he says that, of course. Uh, but he he's Lincoln is is a searcher for for a truth for a and and he never he never becomes a Christian during the war. I mean there are those who want him to be but the second inaugural um is I think the document which we will all know and uh there were might be those who say look the second inaugural was a political document he's talking to the public building public support >> that he wants he's thinking about after the war he's thinking about bringing the nation together so it's with a malice toward and uncharity to all um the sins of the nation the offenses are national offenses is they're not the offense of the south, the offense of north and south. The north has benefited from slavery. Slavery is a national sin and therefore there must be national repentance. And you might say, well, and of course there are many references to to God and to scripture in the second inaugural. But you might say um this is Lincoln just um idiomatically decorating uh what is essentially appeal for unity.

[00:21:01]>> C-SPAN's lectures and history podcast continues in a moment. Now back to C-SPAN's lectures and history podcast.

[00:21:08]>> The key document is not the second inaugural in itself. It is in it in in association with a letter that he writes soon after the second in. He gets a letter from he gets is in correspondence with thoroughed. I always think that thoroughed is a great name for a political fixer.

[00:21:25]>> Political political fixer. Yeah.

[00:21:26]Incredible. Incredible name.

[00:21:28]>> So weed is written to to >> we don't have names like that. What's the matter? Anyway, go on. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

[00:21:35]>> U Weed has written to to Lincoln and Lincoln misreads uh the letter. He thinks it's a compliment of the second inaugural. Isn't quite that. Um but Lincoln responds saying very interestingly he says um uh it is a document which he is proud but he thinks it will not go down well because it contains a truth that will not be comfortable to most uh most people. But he said um that there is a will of God, there is a God and that his will prevails is a truth that I thought ought to be said.

[00:22:10]And since um uh in so far as there is humiliation in what I said and since the humiliation belongs primarily to me, I thought it ought to be said. In other words, here's Lincoln privately saying the will of God is a fact of life.

[00:22:27]>> Yeah. Um, this is this is not Lincoln.

[00:22:31]Um, before the war, it was said by some that he was a uh he was playing a trick on the on the public because he was pretending to be a Christian and he wasn't.

[00:22:40]>> I have uh hundreds of follow-up questions. I'm going to try to restrict myself to a few. Uh, in a moment I'm going to ask you about uh Christian nationalism, religious nationalism, uh, and what you mean, but I want to bring ETA back into the conversation. You mentioned conservative religious nationalism that was pro-slavery and uh anti-slavery or progressive maybe we would say religious nationalism. We're going to talk a little bit about what that means. But I want to talk about that in terms of people. you uh have this book full of enslaved people, formerly enslaved people, black soldiers, also white soldiers, white generals, uh and even uh slave owners are presented to us as real people and human beings and even their ancestors are are explored and it's extraordinary range of of characters. So, I'm interested uh in how some of those different kinds of people thought about God and thought about their faith and what role it played in the lives they were living.

[00:23:46]>> I think that we have a clearer understanding of what the slaveholders thought and of what they wanted the enslaved people to think about God. Um surely they thought that God was on their side, right? And you speak of providence that there was some kind of providence that was guiding them to be wealthy, right? And to have control over other people and other people's labor.

[00:24:21]>> The idea The idea is I'm rich and it's because I should be rich. I was destined to be rich. I deserve to be rich. Go on.

[00:24:28]Correct. Yes. Um and so and then using Christianity really to try to keep enslaved people um in bondage. We know a little bit less. I mean I there's this broader literature out there about Christianity among the enslaved uh throughout the US South and various periods. If I'm speaking primarily about the Low Country and about the rice plantations, there's one document that frames a lot of things for me and that is Minus Hamilton's life story. Here's an 88-year-old man who tells his story of what happened to he and his wife on the morning of the raid. and he tells it to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson who is the commander of the first South Carolina volunteers a few weeks after the raid.

[00:25:25]>> This is a black regiment I guess we should say.

[00:25:27]>> Yes, a black regiment. The first one um enlisted in South Carolina and Mr. Hamilton talks about his age and how he knows his age and he says he knows it because the slaveholder old master louns allowed the bonds people to write it in a big book when they came of sense right and among the Gulligi this catching sense was and is an institution in which through which people join the church, right? Through which they join the AM church. It's when young people would be sent out to the forest literally um for weeks at a time to learn how to pray.

[00:26:18]>> Wow.

[00:26:19]>> And they're out there by themselves.

[00:26:21]>> Does the presence of alligators make it more likely that one would pray? I'm sorry.

[00:26:25]>> Well, the alligators are not in the forest. Got it. The snakes are in the forest. There are snakes in the forest.

[00:26:31]Yes, the alligators are are by the river.

[00:26:34]>> So, you know, we don't have much that from enslaved people that tells us about their religious practices, their religious beliefs. But I think minus Hamilton talking about catching sense, right? That this was a a time when a young person would join the church and that it was at that moment that the slaveholder then allowed them to write their ages themselves in the big book. We also learn quite a bit in the pension files about marriage >> and about marriage customs and about who was marrying enslaved people on the plantations.

[00:27:20]Um and it was a clergy person and it could be black someone who was you know a black person or a white person. You had certain plantations and certain periods of time where you had almost these itinerant white preachers who came once a year, twice a year and they would marry several people.

[00:27:41]>> Huh?

[00:27:41]>> And then you had other plantations and other moments in time where you actually had black preachers, right? So we know that religious instruction is happening at a certain level. We know that religious practice is happening at a certain level. We know less about the details. Um, and we do know that the enslaved and formerly enslaved considered their marriages that were performed by these Christian ministers.

[00:28:12]Um, and I use that term, you know, openly. Um they considered their marriages sacred and they considered their marriages uh to be you know until death do did they part even though in reality they were not they didn't have a legal backing and it was really they were married until the slaveholder determined that they should no longer be.

[00:28:40]>> Wow.

[00:28:41]>> Yeah. And when I think about the white soldiers who were involved in this raid, I'm imagining there are all sorts of religious, moral, and racial points of view. There are people who would be abolitionists who are in favor of equality. People absolutely not abolitionists, probably a lot of people who had no strong opinion before the war.

[00:28:59]>> Yeah. And there were abolitionists who were not in favor of equality, right?

[00:29:03]They didn't think that they wanted to end slavery, but that didn't mean they thought black and white people should be equal. And someone like Colonel uh James Montgomery who was the commander of the second South Carolina volunteers was very much how can I say this? Um he was very sort of fire and brimstone.

[00:29:27]He was very militant in his Christianity uh and ran his regiment in some very uh >> you could say it.

[00:29:41]It's just us and C-SPAN is all >> uh some ways that people thought were were pretty harsh, right? but he's instilling his own version of Christianity into these black soldiers.

[00:29:58]Um things like, okay, all of the folks who've been living together as married people, you know, sometimes for decades, you've got to get married again, right?

[00:30:09]And if you don't get married >> because your previous didn't count Oh, under the flag. under the flag, but also, you know, by someone who he saw as a man of God, then you're not married and you can't live together. Your union is not >> Do you mean to say he did not consider the black preachers to be legitimate, >> weren't educated and so forth.

[00:30:33]>> Yeah.

[00:30:34]>> Um, and I love that you add under the flag >> because this is going to take us back to Richard. Uh, that's religious nationalism, right? That's what we're So what what is that as you understand it as it was in the first half of the 19th century?

[00:30:50]>> Yeah. I use the term in a very simple way. I know it's it's a contested term but I use it simply to mean that religious vision and nationalist purpose are fused that you understand.

[00:31:03]I say you the the citizen understood that the uh nature of the union the nature of the of of the nation was a nation under God and that the nation was to be understood in both scriptural and secular terms.

[00:31:18]>> Um not everyone subscribed to that but the vast majority I think did and this was the animating discourse of politics during the war. So there you won't find that you'll find the term nationality being used. I don't think you'll find the term religious nationalism being being used but I think it encompasses it embraces as a term what I'm exploring which is how this interpenetration of religious vision for the nation under God and this secular vision of the the nation as a democratic republic surviving the separation the secession of the south and being reunited u it's a way of expressing that interpenetration You can't understand the politics of the civil war without understanding the religion. The religion of the civil war is infused with politics. So um you know you have a you have the pulpit and you have the political platform. You have elections uh running through I say every month of the war in one one place or another secular secular elections. You have preachers preaching every Sunday through through the war, particularly on those days of that Lincoln calls of fast days and thanksgiving. Nine of them, more than any previous president and any president since such a remarkable outpouring of religious expression on those those those days. So you have uh you have these two platforms secular ostensibly secular ostensibly religious but actually the secular platform the secular newspapers the editors of newspapers are using uh religion as part of their attempt to mobilize political support because they know that they're speaking to an audience that is also religious.

[00:33:07]>> This is their language.

[00:33:08]>> That's their language.

[00:33:08]>> This is their beliefs. So my my purpose purpose which is why I use the term religious nationalism as I it isn't one that is used then it of course has a meaning today. It wasn't I don't think it would have anyone would have known what I meant at the time but it wasn't an expression that was current.

[00:33:26]>> Did people believe that uh America was God's chosen country or that we were God's chosen people?

[00:33:32]>> Um yes yes many did. Many did. Um Lincoln said that uh we're almost chosen people.

[00:33:44]Usual Lincoln cautioned about these things. But there was a um a profound sense that um the United States uh was a recreation of old of the old Israel. But what God um did with old with with Israel in the Old Testament was what God was now working his purpose out through through the United States. Um so a profound sense of American exceptionalism um which has this kind of religious religious dimension. Of course it's an exceptional society too. And this is why Lincoln is so determined that the the the union should be held together. It has a hugely powerful secular purpose.

[00:34:27]Here we have democratic republicanism, the first mass democracy in republican form the world has ever seen. That has to be preserved. If it fails, that is the last best hope of of the world gone. So there is a secular dimension to this American exceptionalism. But there is also a profound Christian or religious dimension to it. a sense that America has a special purpose under God. Um, of course that the term under God only finally comes into play in the 20th century in for informal way. But this is how I think it is seen. I mean there are some major u religious figures there names that everyone here will will recognize. Henry Ward Beecher, Matthew Simpson, but um across the union from local pulpits every week and more often than that um local people take the stand and they are respected. You know they they are speaking a language that um is quite common. It they're using these exceptionalist lang this this exceptionalist language Christian exceptionalist language. um it's very much part of the air that people the intellectual air that people are breathing. Uh so >> like everybody's starting a church, right? This is the era when there's this constant constant like breakups of religious groups and people just go off and start their >> at one level. Um the first two chapters of my book look my my book look at um the fracturing of religion and the extent to which religion and denominations and churches can be a force for national unity and the extent to which as we see before the civil war they are a force for national national breakup. Um but what is what strikes me is just how common the sentiments are across those many different um denominations and sects. Um there is a a an understanding that America's place in the world is special that the second coming of Christ can be uh can be looked to. There's a millennialist optimism on the part of so many fighting for the for the union. There's carnage, there's bloodshed, there's bloodshed, there's sacrifice, but there's also optimism.

[00:36:45]There's also a faith that in the end the union will be reunited and that means that the the America that emerges from that will be a cleansed nation.

[00:36:55]>> Uh I'll ask you both then. Uh I mean this is something that's been written about. I think of Drew Gilpin Faust's book about about the culture of death at that time. How did the people in your books think about the enormous sacrifice that the country was facing, the people who were being killed all around them?

[00:37:15]>> I think that the freedom seekers on the cumbi were ready to make that sacrifice.

[00:37:28]Um, it's extraordinary to try to imagine what they thought was going to happen when the US gunboats came, right? And they got on the boats.

[00:37:42]Um, and I think the wives really of the men who enlisted, 150 Cumbi men enlisted in the Second South Carolina volunteers the morning after the raid, ages 14 to 70.

[00:37:58]and their wives are very clear that their husbands were going to war, right?

[00:38:05]They were going to war.

[00:38:08]And how I interpret that, I don't know that they knew all of the details, right? I don't know that they knew about the larger Civil War.

[00:38:22]>> They were going to war against slavery.

[00:38:25]They were going to war for other people who were still in bondage and they were very clear that that's why basically why the union came to get them and then what their responsibility was once they got to freedom.

[00:38:46]Um, I think that Harriet, someone like Harriet Tubman is the kind of person who would have had more of an understanding about the larger war. And this also is why I think Tubman goes down to Buford in May of 1862, right? And why she's risking her freedom and why she's risking her life. uh understanding that number one, this is an opportunity to end slavery, but number two, she's siding with the Union, right? And she's siding with uh keeping the Union together and helping to perfect our democracy. Um, so I think people from different vantage points had different understandings, but they were willing to make that sacrifice for what they believed in.

[00:39:42]>> And when you try to escape, you know, if this doesn't work, you are probably dead. I mean, there's a very good chance that you're dead.

[00:39:50]>> If not dead, then sold away from your family. And for many people, that was a fate worse than death. And I just want to pause before I go back to Richard to just mention Harriet Tubman. She's escaped from slavery. She's from a different part of the country, a slightly different part of the country, a couple states up the coast. Um, and is choosing >> Yep.

[00:40:11]>> of her own valition. Nobody made her go, nobody asked her to go >> to go to this area of South Carolina where there were Union troops to try to get more people to freedom. That was her motivation.

[00:40:22]>> That was her motivation. And I like to call South Carolina the belly of the beast.

[00:40:28]That's where the war started.

[00:40:29]>> That's where the war started. Right. So, she's leaving, you know, >> freedom. She's leaving freedom in the north. um and choosing to come back into not just the border states of Maryland. That's dangerous enough, but now she's going into the deep south of South Carolina where the Civil War began to help people she didn't know. She says, you know, I didn't understand them people.

[00:41:01]>> C-SPAN's lectures and history podcast continues in a moment. Now, back to C-SPAN's lectures and history podcast.

[00:41:09]and they laughed when they heard me talk. They're clearly cultural differences, their linguistic differences, but they all were in the pursuit of freedom. And so Tubman comes and lends her expertise and lends her knowledge and to the union and not only gathers intelligence um among the freedom seekers in the region, but then puts herself on the line to go out and bring those freedom seekers in into freedom. So, it's it's an enormous level of selflessness and an enormous level of sacrifice um and an enormous risk.

[00:41:56]>> Richard, how did the people in your book think about the sacrifice that was all around them?

[00:42:00]>> Um, most of them thought it was a sacrifice that was necessary uh and worth paying. Um it's remarkable I think that um nine out of every 10 uh Union soldier was a volunteer uh not uh not drafted. Of course some volunteered because they didn't want to have to face the draft but nonetheless it's a volunteer force and they know that the danger they're putting themselves in and they are prepared to fight for something that is very special. I mean one of the questions that I think uh when I began teaching uh as a student and then I began teaching I was confronted with was why why were you know why were two million men of the the union prepared to sacrifice themselves for the for the union. What was it about the union? They certainly want you they certainly weren't fighting for racial equality and they didn't initially go to war to end slavery. Um and the answer is I'm going back to what I said earlier.

[00:42:55]wanting to defend a certain kind of government. Um um you think think about how many troops were actually of foreign birth or of foreign ancestry. Uh this is >> a way to say I'm American.

[00:43:07]>> I'm Americans. I'm an American. I'm not I don't belong to a world that is hierarchical that is monarchical that is that is conservative that has suppressed revolutions in 18 in 1848. I want to belong to a society that is genuinely democratic where uh a man's a person's birth does not uh in the in the hierarchy doesn't determine their life chances. So there is a powerful imp impulse there and it's a Christian impulse because if you're a Christian um you do believe in an afterlife this is not the this is not the end of the story. Of course, there was trauma. Um, and despite that, there's trauma. Um, and it's worth pointing out that, of course, not everybody bought into this sacrificial vision. Um, there were those peace democrats, the copperheads, uh, who, uh, thought that it was a misbgotten uh, war, particularly once it starts turning into a hard war against um, the southern population. Um and uh for them it's uh not worth the sacrifice. The sacrifice is preposterous. It's this is a war that can't be won. Uh um and part of the thing thinking in my part of the argument of my book is that we have to take these uh copperheads as well as the um the war democrats, the the the the conservative nationalists as they call them. we have to take their religion seriously too.

[00:44:38]>> Um it's easy enough to understand the kind of crusading power of anti-slavery and of emancipationism.

[00:44:46]We also need to understand that uh those who fought for the union as it was are of course racially driven but it's a racial drivenness that is also uh comes out of an understanding of religion and of tr relig and of biblical truth. Um I don't think we should see them simply as a decoration of racial ra racist ideas.

[00:45:09]The racist ideas were powerful and profound and quite ugly. Um but they were held ethically um they were misstification that anyone would think that former slaves could become uh >> meaning people weren't just saying whatever to justify they actually believed what they were. So, so um so, so going back to your question about the sacrifice, no, not everyone believed in the sacrifice. They thought he was a misbegotten and a foolish enterprise.

[00:45:38]And that, um, thank goodness it looked as though in the summer of 1864, wisdom was going to prevail. The Democratic Party would run on a peace platform and the war would come to an end and the old union would be restored.

[00:45:51]>> Um, I want to talk about a couple of ways that your work intersects with current events. Uh so much of our news debate over the last year and more, several years really, has also been about history, about what America is, how America was founded, what the purpose of the country was, who belongs in the story, who doesn't belong in the story. And I want to ask a few questions along those lines in this latter part of this discussion. And Richard, I'll begin with a really simple one. I'm sure this is virtually a yes no question. Um were the founding fathers Christians?

[00:46:23]some were >> uh >> but not universally >> there there's there's a moment earlier in your book when you just go through them >> Ben Franklin and Jefferson you called freeth thinkers I think yes >> a couple of others are evangelicals >> some are unitarians you know this is >> Washington never said much of anything about his particular faith so what do we make of that what do we make of the the fact that that uh I mean I think almost nobody in the list very few people in the list anyway uh that you give are just like super regular uh constantly church attending people of a particular denomination. I mean they're all over the map.

[00:47:01]>> Yes, absolutely. And um I mean this does the the current I think the the I'm inferring from your question that you were saying you know there is a perspective on the founding of the nation and on the declaration of independence and the constitution that says these were Christian documents u put in place by a Christian people uh and have a divine inspiration um and that we should understand the United states today in precisely that way. Um that there was a mission at the outset. It was a Christian mission and everything therefore politically today flows from from that. Um and that's simply not true. Um the the the founding of the country was um was certainly a um a moment of um ethical an ethical statement. It was a moral statement. It was a statement of um a certain kind of an assertion of a certain kind of freedom and undoubtedly those who fought in the war of independence um included many Presbyterians and um and Baptists but particularly Presbyterians who weren't very Methodists at that point but they they come along later but but it's a it is a it is a struggle which is seen on both sides of course in Bruss Britain and all wars have both sides were discussing Yeah, >> but there is a real investment in um the uh independent of course in um uh in investment in in religion in Christianity. So I'm not disputing that at that stage this was a society that um understood its role under God. But that was not the the consistent thinking of all of those who were there in 1776 signing the declaration or were there in 1787 uh uh drafting the constitution?

[00:49:04]>> If we went back in time and started using the word secular, would uh the founders have understood what we meant?

[00:49:10]Would they have been using that word? Uh yes, I think some would would understand that this is this is a um moving out of a trinitarian um world to a world of um deism um of um a creator god. They're not I think none would would declare themselves atheists, >> but they certainly wouldn't declare themselves universally declare themselves as Christians.

[00:49:36]>> Yeah. Would they not declare themselves as atheists because they weren't atheists or because that was just like an unspeakable thing? I >> I think because um the concept of a a world without a god was um quite alien.

[00:49:50]>> Okay.

[00:49:50]>> Yeah.

[00:49:51]>> Um one other thing along those lines, then I'm going to go to Eta with a different big question. Um you point out in your book that even though the the the founders were not many of them conventionally religious that the whole story of America is suffused with religion and that that is sometimes obscured. You're telling a story that's hidden in plain sight. Why has that part of the story sometimes been obscured?

[00:50:18]>> Why is it sorry? Why is some Why is that why why do you think it is that that that a lot of the history that we read doesn't really include the religious aspect of it? Um well uh we were having a a chat about this earlier and I what popped into my mind was the uh the character in one of Mier's plays uh who discovers that he's been speaking pros all his life and he didn't know it. Um and is rather and is extraordinarily proud of the fact that he now can boast that he speaks pros. Um and it's that's relevant in the sense that um religious language, religious ideas, um the sort of sanctification, um the sacralization of the l of the landscape, this is all part of what America is in the early and mid and later 19th century. um you know you you don't um when you read letters people don't say um I I put on the gas lamp or I switched on the electric light. We but we know that actually that's what would have been the case if they're writing at night. um certain things are just taken for granted and I think the the the issue I have um all historians like to say other historians have you know have not got it quite right um >> only you as my understand as my understanding no go on >> but but um but but I I I I think there's been a a blindness to the reality of politics during the American um antibbellum period and the civil war a blindness which comes from the fact that um uh it's that religion is there but it's not actually read the newspapers and read the newspapers carefully you can see that this is a Christian world in which um editors are writing but they're not specifically or necessarily always addressing religion there is a there's a a religious presence which is not given articulation and but it is articulated during the war precisely because this is an existential crisis and it is about the nature of the country that is being defended. Um and I I I love the fact that over the last 25 years there has been an explosion a blossoming of work on religion um um and faith. It's been a transformation in the the last quarter quarter of a century but it has not yet affected the political story of the union during during the war. And that's really what I wanted to correct to say that it's there in plain sight actually. Um, and the story of civil war competition between Democrats and Republicans, Democrats and the National Union Party is told in, it seems to me, highly secular terms, while at the same time, many historians have shown just how the tussles between pro-slavery and anti-slavery churchmen and women uh, carry on through the Civil War side by side with this political story. But the two have not been integrated and that was my purpose in the book.

[00:53:33]>> Eda, let me talk about what you do in this book, which is bring characters into the story that we wouldn't have known the names of or the stories of before. Uh there's a lot of political discussion now. Uh there's a lot of discussion now that would frame what you do as explicitly a political act.

[00:53:51]Somebody on the political left might say you're bringing the true heroes into the story and showing who the oppressors are. Somebody on the political right might say you're trying to pull down the edifice of America and just completely scramble the story.

[00:54:05]>> Uh when you were spending 18 months by that river walking through rice fields and dodging alligators and snakes and everything else, >> I mean did you feel that you were doing something political?

[00:54:19]>> No. Um because in addition to uh experiencing the landscape, I also spend an enormous amount of time in the archives, right? And when you look at Cumbi, you will probably notice that there are about 200 pages of innotes.

[00:54:39]>> I did notice that. Yes. It's like its own book in the back of the book.

[00:54:44]And so my goal was to let the sources speak for themselves and to uncover the sources that, you know, hadn't been really looked at by historians in the ways that I was and in the numbers that I was looking at them. And I'm speaking primarily of the pension files, but then also using those files to identify the people who held the Cumbi freedom seekers in bondage and then to go back to the slaveholders papers, right, and document the testimony of the Cumbi freedom seekers. So my goal was not a political one. It was a one of historical documentation. And I wanted to document the lives of people whose names and stories we didn't know before.

[00:55:36]And you know, if that's a political act, then that's a political act. I think that says more about our country than it does actually about me.

[00:55:45]>> There are officials who will complain that talking too much about slavery is a way to make white field pe white people feel bad.

[00:55:52]>> So were you trying to make white people feel bad?

[00:55:57]>> No.

[00:55:59]And you know, when people say that to me, and I I hear it a lot. I say, "Well, you know, black people have felt bad about slavery for a very long time, and nobody cared."

[00:56:11]I'm serious. Despite being a little black child in in school in Miami, Florida, uh, where I grew up, as the first generation to attend integrated schools and let Black History Month come and everybody looks at you when they talk about slavery for a day, right?

[00:56:30]It's been very difficult. And so, um, on the other side, I also have been criticized for talking about the white people too much.

[00:56:42]I believe that go too much time and too much empathy to the planners and I don't think I have any empathy at all. Um, but what I'm showing is that it's impossible in my eyes to talk about one without talking about the other.

[00:57:00]And in particular because I'm because the slave holders documents are h part of how I'm documenting the lives of the slaves.

[00:57:14]>> They were keeping track of their property.

[00:57:16]>> They were keeping track of their property in their wills and estate records and marriage settlements, bills of sale and mortgages. So I'm talking about how these slaveolding families transacted in slaves, right? And so I'm then talking about their families. And I think it's also a really interesting and important juxiposition between the two because of course the lifestyles of the slaveolding families are built on the exploitation of enslaved labor and in the South Carolina low country on these rice plantations that had the second highest death rates in the new world, second only to sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

[00:58:03]Right. People are being worked to death to support the lifestyles of the people who hold them in bondage. So yes, I tell it all and I try to weave this narrative where you can really understand the differences in the lives people were leading and even the differences in the lives of planters, slaveholders in the South Carolina and Georgia low country versus the Maryland Eastern Shore.

[00:58:36]Right? So, we're I'm I'm striking all kinds of comparisons and contrasts for people to really understand the landscape in which the Cumbi River raid took place.

[00:58:48]>> As you're talking, I'm thinking of this interview we had on NPR with Killian Murphy, the actor who played Oppenheimer, and also is in this longunning series called Peiquey Blinders, where he plays like a gangster, like a not pleasant guy. uh and he talks about the challenge of that and trying as an actor not to be sympathetic with the character but to deeply understand this person including understanding his humanity.

[00:59:11]>> Yeah.

[00:59:11]>> And I feel that reading reading your book um that that that you're trying to understand who these people were and what they were really like and tell that to me. Is that your goal?

[00:59:22]>> That is one of my goals. Um, it seems to me that when we talk about the enslaved, right, they're this category of people about whom we know very little. And the first thing I wanted to do was to give them names and to identify the people who were liberated in the raid. But then I wanted to tell their stories. Right?

[00:59:49]These were husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and children. Um, aunties, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, best friends, sweethearts, and baby mamas, right? This was a community and I wanted people to be individuals in at working within this community. You know, I wanted you to know the stories of the people who courted and didn't get married. um people who grew up together, people who were the people who were raised under someone's hand. So there's a hierarchy in the enslaved community.

[01:00:30]There are lots of intimate details about the lives of enslaved people, told by enslaved people in the pension files, which historians had never had privy to before. And so I wanted to reconstruct this community and really show the humanity of the enslaved people. And by the time, you know, it's 4:00 in the morning and the enslaved people are standing, minus Hamilton and his wife and others in the rice fields hoing rice right in the dark and they've walked a mile from the slave cabins through the grass that was infested with snakes.

[01:01:13]They're standing in their ankles up up to their ankles in muck and the rice fields are infested with alligators and they hear and they see and they feel and they smell the US Army boats coming and coming from the direction of Buford >> which has been occupied by the US Army since November 1861. So they know that freedom is there, right? And they finally see it coming towards them. I wanted you to have some idea of what they'd been through. And I wanted you to be rooting for them to get on the boat.

[01:02:05]We're just about done. We've got three or four minutes left. I'd like to invite each of you to just tell me something that you think maybe the public doesn't fully understand about your topic that you wish they did. Richard, I'll let you go first.

[01:02:18]>> Right. Well, where to buy it? Is that the >> That's a that's a very good question. Um I mean in a way I suppose I've I've answered implicitly answered that by um perhaps I could be explicit. I think when we talk about um uh religious nationalism or Christian nationalism today um uh we might wonder is this a new expression or is it an old expression of u of ideas and um I think one has to say that white Christian nationalism because that's really what it is. It's a it's a racially shaped Christian nationalism.

[01:03:06]um has a long history and uh it's there to be seen very plainly in the era of the the civil war uh goes back to the very early republic and um it has expressed itself through different political channels in the civil war era that white Christian nationalism was expressed primarily through the Democratic party today.

[01:03:36]Obviously, it's associated with the MAGA dimension of the uh Republican party. Um but the context I think has to be um spelled out. One is that which is primarily that in the mid 19th century um uh Protestants, Christians felt the world was theirs.

[01:04:02]Um there was um the the the white nationalists of the Democratic party were fearful but they were not fearful for the future of Christianity. They were fearful their for their sort of Christianity uh which was I think racially molded and was white supremacist.

[01:04:24]Um today I think the there there is a an element of defensiveness and fear maybe even in um white Christian nationalism in a sense that the world is slipping away that America is becoming a much more diverse country um is a more secular society. Um, and so the Christian nationalism today, I think, is a is a is a more defensive and a more fearful one, a less robust uh one than would be true of the Christian nationalists of the Civil War era. So I I guess that I I didn't write the book in order to reflect on today's Christian nationalism. Um, I think inevitably readers will want to ask that question as they read it. And I think what they'll find is that there are some elements of continuity, but just not to try to read too much into the Civil War period by reading it simply through today's lens.

[01:05:25]>> Eda Fields Black, you get the last word.

[01:05:27]>> Okay. So, I would say that this is America 250 and you can't talk about America 250 or the Civil War without talking about slavery.

[01:05:42]And you know, you can do the math.

[01:05:47]1619 comes before 1775.

[01:05:52]So slavery is central to the founding of this nation.

[01:05:58]And the history of slavery and the history of the civil war has really not been written as the history of and by enslaved people.

[01:06:11]And I think now that's going to change.

[01:06:15]We now know that we have the documents, right? We've got 95 plus thousand pension files sitting in the National Archives.

[01:06:28]And those 95 plus thousand soldiers and widows today have millions of descendants like me.

[01:06:40]And it's time we tell our story, right?

[01:06:43]It's time that we tell their story. And I think it's time that we rewrite the history of slavery and of the Civil War from the perspectives of the enslaved people. And I think what we're going to find is that, you know, the Cumbi River raid was a very small part of a much larger movement of 200,000 black men fighting for the Union and 500,000 black people voting with their feet and leaving bondage however whenever they could and going behind Union lines and it's really their actions as much as if not more so than President Lincoln's actions right which made slavery untenable and ultimately are going to lead to the destruction of the institution. So we need to know their stories and for America 250 we need to tell everybody's story and we need to find the sources so that we can tell the stories that we haven't heard yet.

[01:08:04]>> Edields Black Richard Carine. Thank you very much to both of you. Thank you.

[01:08:11]Wow that was amazing. Thank you.

[01:08:15]Excellent. Thank you folks.

[01:08:32]That was Pulzer Prizewinning author Edna Fields Black and fellow scholars from an event hosted by the Abraham Lincoln Institute at Ford's Theater in Washington DC. This program was part of C-SPAN's America 250 coverage. Thanks for listening to this feed drop from Lectures in History. And don't worry, Lectures in History will be back next week with more conversations from college classrooms and historians around the country. Thanks for listening.