H W Brands – The West & The Growing Pains of Democracy

[Applause] Thank You Patti for that kind introduction Thank You Emma for getting all this stuff going thank you to the center from American history the state history daddy and everybody who's involved in getting me here and I I feel that this is a little bit of a homecoming for me not that I'm from Colorado although I have a sister who has lived in rifle Colorado for the last 35 years so I've been to Colorado many times but it's a bit of a homecoming for me as a historian because I have written sporadically about it the history of the West but my first interest in history was the history of the West I grew up in Portland and my father had an interest in history he had a kind of a double-barreled interest in history one part he was during World War two he was a member of the US Army Corps of Engineers and he felt personally responsible for all the great public works on the Columbia River so we visited Bonneville Dam and the other big things that happened on the Corps of Engineers watch but he also had an interest in the Lewis and Clark expedition and so I will pose to you a question that my father posed to me relating to the Lewis and Clark expedition so you know the story about how they went up the Missouri River and have crossed the Rocky Mountains and down the Snake River and down the Columbia and they knew that they were heading downstream and they were heading for the Pacific but they didn't know how far from the Pacific they were there was one evening where they pitched camp a little bit above where Bonneville Dam is located today and there's a very large boss basalt plug it's called beacon rock it's still there and I hike to the top of Beacon Rock but the story goes that when the core of discoveries was called made their camp that night they pulled the canoes up on the shore as they did and they made their dinner and they all went to sleep and the next morning they woke up and the canoes were gone and they burst out in cheering why why did they celebrate the fact that the canoes were gone exactly they had reached Tidewater they knew they were close enough to the ocean that the tide had stolen their canoes they found the canoes and they made their way so this was one of my first historical puzzles as I grew older I had a closer connection to a different part of the history of the West my grandparents bought a summer house on the Barlow Road the Barlow Road was one of those last sections of the Oregon Trail the most dangerous part of the Oregon Trail was not getting across the Great Plains was not getting across the Rocky Mountains in fact the Rocky Mountains were a piece of cake because they went through South Pass which is hardly a pass at all the getting across the the plain of the Snake River Valley yeah that was a challenge but you know the hardest part you know the most dangerous part in terms of the number of pioneers immigrants who died it was the stretch the last hundred miles going down the Columbia River because well the Columbia River didn't have dams on it the way it does now and there were Rapids the Cascades we're now kiss Cascade Locks it's located and the dowels which was a narrow chute and so people would the men women the children they would survive the plains they would survive the mountains they would survive everything and then they would drown when there the rafts that they put their stuff on tipped over and so somebody had to come up with a better way of making those last hundred miles and I named Sam Barlow decided to build a road around the south side of Mount Hood and it came around the south side of Mount Hood and came down along what is now highway US Highway 26 and my grandparents had a house that was right on highway 26 the property ran right up to highway 26 and so I and my younger brother my older sisters we used to play pioneers and we would go through the woods along the old Oregon Trail and there was one particular aspect of the Oregon Trail that we found very intriguing if we went up the along the the Barlow Road there we took a hike off the road and about a half mile off the road there was a rock cairn that was maybe sort of this high off the ground just pile of rocks and it was discovered when the highway was being rerouted that this was the grave of one of the immigrants and so somebody put up a sign the Pioneer Woman's grave and so I was a kid around the early 1960s and at that point and in fact and still today no one has any idea who she was but it really intrigued me it almost haunted me that there was this woman presumably a relatively young woman who had made it across the plains across the mountains he had made eighteen hundred miles of the 2,000 mile journey and then within almost sort of shouting distance of the goal in the Willamette Valley she dies and it was testament to the hurry that everybody was in that she was just buried in this shallow grave they just dug a little bit of a hole and piled a bunch of rocks on top of it and no one ever came back apparently to claim the body no one came back to put up a sign saying who this was so it was this great mystery and I always wondered what had happened to her now when I was sort of experience all this stuff had no idea that I would ever write western history and as I say I haven't written much western history although if I got a book on the history of us it's in progress and it'll be out some time but this gives me a chance to well coming here gives me a chance to talk about some of the history of the West but in particular its connection to another aspect of history that I have been studying for a bit longer and that is the emergence of democracy in the United States and I have come to the conclusion that it's impossible in American history to separate the emergence from the rise of the West with from that you can't separate him from the emergence of democracy in part because the formative years of in the development of both they overlap in American is this effectively coincide so it's it's natural that should be connections between them but the connections are actually deeper than that they're not simply chronological connections and not simply correlation they're causal connections which I'm going to explain in fact I'm gonna I'm gonna make the argument that so the the two the two most important the two most formative aspects of American history were the westward expansion of the thirteen original colonies and then States the fact that this Republic and it was a republic from its birth became a continent-wide Republic so not exactly a continental Republic the way some people thought it would be in the 19th century but it spans from coast to coast so the process of westering of claiming this western territory and then bringing it into the Union this is one of the two most important developments in American history and the other one was the emergence of American democracy this country was not born a democracy but it became a democracy and it became a democracy about the time it became this Continental Republic so this is the story that I'm gonna tell and I'm gonna start by by pointing out that well the obvious thing the country what would become the United States emerged politically as this string of colonies and then states that clung to the eastern seaboard of North America so the Atlantic coast the United States had Western property rights Western footage from the end of the Revolutionary War because the British almost as a gift to the Americans ceded their claim to the title of the original American West the land beyond the mountains that is beyond the Appalachian Mountains the actually inhabited part of the United States went from the Atlantic to roughly the crest of the Appalachians but the British threw in the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley the part to the Mississippi River as kind of a consolation prize at the end of the Revolutionary where they didn't have to the United States had not conquered that in the Revolutionary War but the British reckoned that it wasn't gonna do them any good and it would probably simply cause friction with the United States so at the Treaty of Paris in 1783 the British included this well basically doubled the size of the American Republic and this is a big story because this doubling of American territory what would happen is going to happen again and again so in terms of American history the most striking thing about American history from we'll start with 1783 to 18 hmm I can say 1848 yeah I'll stop at 1848 there is this progressive doubling of the size of American territory and it always goes out to the west now I'm going to ask you why there was such concern at that time in American history with expanding American territory why did Americans believe that they needed more territory ask you what an OK yes well there certainly was that there was a feeling that if we don't get it somebody else will and that that played a part but pardon the British and the Spanish yes they had laid claim although that argument maybe weakens over time because it was clear that the Spanish Empire was contracting so Spain was gonna be claiming more territory the British maybe the United States had a diplomatic tussle with the British over the Oregon Territory but once the British had been thrown out of the major part of North America they were to challenge so much I mean actually I'll I'll sharpen the question a little bit why this great demand for more territory and this is the origin of the West and why does it stop all of a sudden in the middle of the 19th century Americans seem to have this insatiable appetite for more land and then all the sudden they lose their appetite yes that was the Jeffersonian the ideal because that was the reality it was a nation of farmers and if it's a nation of farmers if you're gonna if your population is going to grow you need more land Benjamin Franklin was the first American to quantify this as early as the 1750s Franklin did a bit of a demographic study and he he gathered such sort of population statistics as he could find and he concluded that the American population doubled about every generation and in a nation of farmers if you're going to double your population every generation you pretty much have to double your land area every generation or else face the increasing impoverish in' of your population americans looked at europe as of course most americans were from europe and they asked himself so what's the difference between europe in the United States and the biggest difference was in America you could get land ordinary people could get land why because there was more land than there were people but if that land somehow gets more crowded than the u.s. is going to look more and more like Europe and that was the nightmare of all Americans so there was this well so the American domain doubles in 1783 when the US gets the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley it doubles again with the Louisiana Purchase the purchase from France of the western half of Louisiana Valley other than Mississippi Valley it a safe it doesn't quite double again but nearly with the acquisition of California and New Mexico and Arizona about the same time as the acquisition of Oregon and so that takes us up to well right around 1850 and that's it that's it I allow for the acquisition of Alaska but that's almost the exception that proves the rule why did it stop all of a sudden industrialization because the whole point of getting land was not planned for land's sake it was land for opportunity safe land was for well the modern equivalent of jobs what does government what do local governments boast of why you know why our choir cities really happy when they land a big new factory or they bring in if they're gonna be the new Amazon headquarters something like this because they can provide jobs and why are jobs important well it still has to do with a growing population some of you are parents some of you are children but if your parents if you think that your kids are not going to be able to find work in your own City then you're gonna have to go somewhere far away to visit your grandkids and I speak as somebody who has four grandkids who don't live anywhere near me anyway so the big story is the expansion of the American domain but it's a it's an expansion that's quite limited in time and I will add something I alluded to earlier there was a moment in the 1840s when Americans spoke of this thing they called manifest destiny it was a really self-serving explanation as to why the United States was and should expand across North America and it combined well it combined the gospel of Christianity with the gospel of democracy and Americans I'm not gonna say all Americans by any means not all Americans were sort of swayed by their own rhetoric but plenty people were who believed that the United States had figured out how political systems should be organized and that democracy was the highest form of political development and I'll stop here to jump a little bit forward what is the motto of the center of American history hindsight turning hindsight into foresight so we're going from the past to the present and the future I'm gonna ask a question to you do you think that democracy is the wave of the future in sort of world political organization before you answer I'm going to point something out that in the year 1800 there were essentially no functioning democracies in the world maybe Switzerland on good days but in terms of large countries no democracy was this odd thing in fact democracy was almost a swear word in political discourse because democracies were usually seen as that halfway house down the slippery slope from a republic to anarchy because after all democracy and by democracy I mean and people then meant ordinary people exercising political power so why should anybody think that ordinary people should be able to exercise political power I put the question to you I put the question to my students do you think democracy is a good idea in all sorts of things suppose for example you should have the misfortune of requiring delicate surgery well would you just grab somebody off the street and say you know start cutting no no you'd want somebody who was qualified by talent by education by experience and that's what you would insist on well do you think that being governor of Colorado being President of the United States being a senator being a mayor is easier than being a brain surgeon or a heart surgeon these are very responsible jobs so in the year 1800 it was perfectly respectable to say democracy is the dumbest idea I've ever heard of so in 1800 effectively no democracies by 1900 the idea was starting to catch on the United States was really the first large democracy and I'm gonna qualify that and explain what I mean not a perfect democracy by any means but no country - even today is a perfect democracy but by 1900 there were maybe a dozen to 20 democracies depending on exactly how you counted them and whether where we were between coos and various countries around the world so that so we go from basically zero let's say 20 will be generous in 1900 by the year 2000 the number of functioning democracies was maybe by the count of there's something called the Center for the Study of democracy something like that that had him around 120 or 130 so look at that that trend lines going way up so now I put the question to you again do you think that democracy is the wave of the youth future in human political organization show of hands please yes if you do really okay oh come on there we go and now for those who say no now I'm not saying pure but well but but functioning democracy something I'm going to call the United States today um under democracy okay so something like that again there are you know there are approximations in everything in life okay so we had it looked like a majority of you said it's not the wave of the future I think I got that and and some of you said yes okay any well we'll see maybe over the next hundred years or so should we live that long but the reason I say this is that in the 1840s it was part of the American Civic gospel the democracy was the wave of the future and the United States was riding that wave and furthermore that it was America's right now no it was America's duty to spread democracy because if you believe in it well then giving democracy to other countries and peoples is your obligation and I would add that this idea of spreading democracy would have a lot of staying power in American history in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany do you I'm not going to say do you remember what he said I speak to a continuing education programs at the University of Texas where I teach and the average age of the audience is maybe 75 and I was speaking some years ago on Benjamin Franklin and I I was talking about how this is the stamp at what I what I meant to say was well what I meant to say was you will remember from your study of American history that the Stamp Act was very controversial in America what I said was you will remember that the Stamp Act and an elderly gentleman in the back stood up and he said young man how old do you think we are anyway you never knew that hold it but anyway you were a call from your study of American history that which our Wilson justified his wreck was his request for declaration of war on grounds that the world needed to be made safe for democracy now I'm going to jump almost a century later than that and most of you except for the younger students near will remember this remember what the fallback justification for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the original one was Iraq has weapons of mass destruction but when the weapons master starts had never showed up what was the second version we have to bring democracy to the Middle East we have to bring democracy to the Arab world and that was considered at least by the people who made the argument sufficient justification so this idea that democracy is something that must be shared with the world this really caught on in the United States now this was part and parcel of America's continental expansion in the 1820s 30s and 40s but interestingly enough interestingly enough there was something there was an Arian which had kind of got pushed back so in the 1840s leading up to the American war with Mexico it was fought over Texas and over California with Colorado sort of part of the mix there was a school of thought that the United States was going to be a continental republic and that the Stars and Stripes would wave from the Isthmus of Panama or the peaks of Darien as they said in those days to the polar sea to sea to the Arctic Ocean it didn't happen it didn't happen the United States spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific but the northern border is you know 49th parallel roughly and the southern border is the Rio Grande you know why you want to know why that that expansion I sort of explained why the expansion occurred in the first place and why it went from coast this way but why did it not go coaster is must coast that way it was in fact part of the same justification why did the United States not take Canada why did the United States not take Mexico now in fact in the 1840s there was a prospect thing Unitas actually could have taken Mexico the US Army was an occupation of Mexico City and could almost dictate terms regarding Mexico but you know why the United States did not take Mexico now this is I'm gonna sort of give you the answer and it's not gonna make the United States sound very good but well sometimes seen that state doesn't look very good the basic reason the United States did not take Mexico was that they're too many Mexicans there and I say this because well when you think about the territory did the United States expanded into as it moved west it was territory that was not then inhabited by any large number of people and dense populations the Native American tribes have been largely decimated by the spread of introduced disease so when Americans moved into the Mississippi Valley there had been larger population for that matter when the unite when Americans the first English colonists moved into New England New England been deep populated by disease that had come even before the English got there and so they were not entirely empty spaces in there would indeed Wars for the plains and there were Wars in California there were Wars in Oregon there wars everywhere but there the wars were small-scale stuff compared to the wars of Europe for example for the first time American expansionism ran up against a large population which ran American troops got to the valley of Mexico New Mexico City and there are lots of people there and they made very clear they did not want to be part of the United States and if you believe in the democratic ethos the basis of democracy is that people get the government they want and Americans couldn't quite bring themselves to say we are going to for you kicking and screaming into our democracy so democracy was the force that drove America west but it also was the force that caused America to stop it's a little bit more complicated than this there was some concern that if Mexico were brought into the Union then much of Mexico would become slave states and this was something that the north wasn't going to tolerate but the fundamental problem was that fundamental problem for those continental expansionists was that there are all these people who objected to being part of the United States and you cannot be a good Democrat and force people into your domain anyway so there's that aspect of now I'm gonna shift gears a little bit and look at and examine how this looks from the perspective of American politics and sort of the political emergence of democracy because I just talked as though democracy just kind of happened but democracy didn't just happen the United States was not born a democracy the Constitution of the United States the one we've been living under since 1789 did not envision democracy in fact it's a constitution almost written against democracy which is why we have a Senate a Senate is a really undemocratic thing especially the Senate as it was originally devised you will recall from your study of the Constitution there you go when you study the Constitution that senators were not chosen by the people they were chosen by state legislatures because the people could not be trusted to make these wise decisions you had to have this sort of filter of the popular voice this is why we still have an electoral college the electoral college originally was set up so that the electors would be people they were almost like a screening committee and the electors were expected to use their own judgment they were not forced to vote the way their state had voted oh that's because most electors were not even chosen by popular vote in the early days most electors were chosen by state legislators as well what did ordinary people know about making political decisions some of you will remember this from your own experience in the contested election of 2000 when the outcome of the election hinged on a recount in Florida which way was Florida going to go if Florida went for Al Gore Al Gore would be present if it went for george w bush george w bush would win and there was a moment win while bush was leading and then this was stopped and the republicans well naturally wanting their guy to win wanted to do whatever they could to make sure that they won Florida but the recount looked like it might tip the balance in favor of the Democratic candidate Al Gore and in the middle of this when it was winding its way through the courts the Republican secretary of state of Florida picked up her pocket Constitution and she looked in there and said you know what you know how electors are chosen by the states that's all the Constitution says the states shall choose electors you know what we could have the Florida Legislature choose the electors of Florida we could short-circuit this whole contest this whole judicial thing and apparently the oh and she knew that Republicans controlled the Florida Legislature so they would naturally choose Republican electors and Georgia boys should go act she realized this would not go over too well but in so we shelled but the point is that this country was not a democracy at its birth and it was not expected that ordinary people would actually exercise political power it was a republic from its birth and a republic is well it comes from the latin phrase Res Publica the things of the people but it's really vey on the role of the people legitimacy political legitimacy comes from the people rather than from God for example or from some king or Die nastic family so it's different in that regard and the people who live in a republic her citizens rather than subject so that part was agreed upon but this idea that ordinary people should actually exercise political power no no in the 1790s very few people could vote even in the elections where they could actually vote when you leave aside senatorial elections where they couldn't vote and presidential elections where they couldn't vote but even voting for governor or members of Congress you had to own property in a substantial amount of property and you had to have been longtime in residence where you were and this because there was a belief that you needed to have some skin in the game the principle thing that governments did then was to tax people and if you didn't have anything to tax then you could be the most irresponsible sort of voter it took a while for the idea that ordinary people should actually be able to vote to take hold and do you know where that idea came from and you know why it took hold it came from the West democracy American democracy was born in the American West how so well in places like Ohio which was the first state formed out of the Northwest Territory in places like Kentucky peeled off Kentucky was originally the western part of Virginia Tennessee was originally the western part of North Carolina when these new states entered the Union they were competing with each other and with old states for people why did they want people why did the new states want people well they wanted people because until you had 60,000 people you couldn't even be a state so you had to attract people there's another there's a deeper reason why well why states and cities still want people and it has to do with the single form of economic activity that is responsible for more fortunes in a matter in history than any other how if more American fortunes been made than by any other needs land development you buy land cheap the land price goes up you make money and how do you do that you go west you buy some land you get it really cheap and then the population wherever you went grows there's more demand for it the price of your land goes up you're rich so this idea of attracting people and it's not just land it's also anybody who opens a store you want business you become a lawyer you need clients and all this stuff so people governments businesses they like to attract people so what would prompt somebody to move to Tennessee rather than Kentucky or move to Senate Tennessee for example rather than stay in North Carolina what well I'll ask you what do what do governments do these days to entice businesses to entice enterprise what do they do they offer tax breaks they give them some kind of deal they had they basically offer money they offer a financial incentive well the government's the state government of Tennessee the state government Kentucky didn't have any money they've got land right and they were bland well actually that's a little bit problematic because they didn't actually the states didn't actually own the land but but what what could a state government offer to entice people to come that was free it didn't cost him anything well what they offered was full citizenship full voting rights you stay in Virginia you sucker and you're never gonna get to vote move to Kentucky and you'll get to vote and this was intriguing this was something that it was a time when America was trying to figure out what his identity was and all of a sudden you can be a full participating citizen just come to our state so the western states were the first ones to drop the property requirements the first ones to drop the long residency requirements and interesting enough this Democratic imperative it back washed into the old states why because they were losing the population to the new territories and so this idea that ordinary people should be able to it was essentially a bribe to get people to come well yeah it was a surprise but it was also it was also a playing out of well that's another quiz question the most famous and consequential sentence ever written in American history consists of five words and it's in one of America's two founding charters I'll give you him the two charters are the Constitution of which I've spoken and the Declaration of Independence so what most potent five words perhaps ever written by any American all men are created equal and when Jefferson wrote it in 1776 was kind of a throwaway line he was clearing his throat to get along and ran to his indictment of George the third but words have power you put him out there and they resonate with people so this idea all men are created equal and then there's this land available and then there's government's offering you this stuff so gradually the idea of democracy took hold and it spread from west to east but at the same time it also shaped the development of the West democracy became the model of American politics and political participation roughly between 1820 and 1850 or there abouts now when I say democracy I'm saying that it's based on the idea the principle that ordinary people get to exercise political power not all the ordinary people but a big group more than was the case before by the 1820s nearly all adult essentially all adult white males in America could vote now adult white male I mean the those are fiction's but still the electorate was much broader than it had been probably five or six times larger than it had been in the 1790s and the principle was there ordinary people get to vote now the next big expansion would be with the 15th amendment that guaranteed that black males could vote more precisely that the vote could not be restricted on account of race or condition of previous condition of servitude so that's the Fifteenth Amendment it was honored more in the breach than the observance in large parts of the country for the next 80 years and then the next big expansion be in 1920 when the vote is given to women and the next big expansion the early 1970s when the vote is lowered to 18 are there any some of you who are we're talking before you don't get answered are there any large groups of the American electorate this still can't vote I mean sorry they're not part of the record of the American population they still can't vote or have we reached what shall I say Peak democracy who can't vote still okay yeah convicted felons in most states can't vote but there's a much larger group than that and non-citizens but where's the side guests still got a much larger group than that Native Americans can vote children there you go people who are under 18 and I mean like so when I get this laughing and I get to laugh a lot but I will just point out to you if somebody had said in the year 1890 should women get the vote there have been a lot of people who would have been laughing here too you know sure that african-americans get the vote if I'd asked the question 1840 you gotta be kidding and so these attitudes change but this emergence of democracy greatly complicated American politics is it related to the West and I'm I'm gonna wrap up pretty quickly because I do want to leave time for questions but the overriding question of American politics from the 1820s to the 1860s the overriding the most controversial question the one that threatened to blow up the Union what was the question slavery what are we gonna do about slavery in the first place can slavery exists within a democracy if you have this political system that's based on the statement the principle and all men are created equal what do you do about democracy which very clearly these people are not equal can this persist but then there's the next question is how do we organize this new West yes by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 new states will be created out of this western territory but what kind of states in 1787 nobody much worried about it in fact the Northwest Ordinance mandated that there should be no slavery in the Ohio territory the Northwest Territory that's why the sort of northwestern part of the country was free and in fact nobody much worried about it because almost everybody in the 1780s thought that slavery was on its way out clearly slavery was dying in the north why was it dying in the North because northerners had a fit of morality no because their economies had outgrown slavery they they got under the modernizing train sooner and a modern economy an industrial economy requires a flexible workforce and slavery as many things but it's a very inflexible kind of workforce so the question well in fact the reason the Constitution allowed slavery to continue to exist was first of all they couldn't figure out how to get southern states to ratify the Constitution if they didn't but secondly because everybody thought it's just gonna go away it had gone away in the North without any big deal it was gonna go away in the south - but things change the cotton gin was invented and really fertile soil on the western part the old west of the southern part of the Old West developed but so democracy had to grapple with what do we do about slavery and what democracy did for a while successfully was to compromise on the issue now when I talk about this with modern audiences many people are very unhappy with the idea how can you compromise with slavery slavery is simply wrong and any compromise with slavery is to be complicit in that great evil question to you I put the question to those objectors well what was the alternative because the Constitution basically guaranteed slavery's right to exist slavery was legal it was constitutional and there was nothing in the world that could make Virginia or Georgia or Alabama give up slavery oh you could argue sure if the North could have marched an army into Georgia eventually the North did March an army into Georgia but it wasn't originally it wasn't to free the slaves there was no support Wow really small amount of support in the north for any kind of military effort to free the slaves when John Brown launched his war against slavery at Harpers Ferry in 1859 northerners were as appalled as southerners so slavery existed but how could it be constrained how could it be well contained to use a term from the Cold War so it was by a series of compromises the first compromise what is the so-called missouri compromise which kept slavery out of the northern part of that that west of the the western half of the mississippi valley and that seemed to hold and that seemed to be a start on through basically reigning slavery in eventually leading to slavery zone self demise the next well the the big compromise the next big compromise was the compromise of 1850 the compromise of 1850 seemed to be about slavery but the compromise of 1850 was something that nobody had seen coming in fact the compromise of 1850 was triggered by was compelled by one of the great I'll call it one of the great accidents of history accident in the sense that before it happened no one saw it coming unlike say the Industrial Revolution people saw the Industrial Average of revolution coming from a long ways away the thing that I'm talking about this is the biggest single event in Western history Western American history it's the biggest single event in I'm gonna argue it's the big biggest single event in American history in the first half of the 19th century I'm gonna make it even more extravagant claim I'm gonna say that it is the first big event in world history you know what I'm talking about the discovery of gold in California it was an accident in the sense that on January 23rd 18-49 neither James Marshall or John Sutter nor anybody had any idea that there was gold in California on January 24th the gold was discovered and all of a sudden everything changed why the territory that was just about well had been taken from Mexico in the Mexican War everybody thought that it would take as long to fill up with people as the Louisiana Purchase had taken to fill up and half a century after its acquisition most of the Louisiana Purchase was still empty and California was even farther away and there wasn't anything to attract people there and so it was thought that all right we'll have half a century to figure out what to do about slavery there you know we've got this compromise from the 1820s it's still going then gold is discovered and all of a sudden California fills up with people and demands admission into the Union this is part of that Northwest Ordinance 1787 the whole principle but the western territories can become States when they get enough people so California has to be admitted and Californians with no authorization from anybody wrote a constitution and the Constitution said no slavery in California and they sent the Constitution back to theirs Constitution back to Washington lattice in and we're gonna be admitted as a free state and the South said no you're not in fact the South objected quite vigorously but American democracy in its wisdom and in that state came up with a compromise and the compromise was California gets admitted as a free state this is a big deal because it tipped the balance in Congress against the slave states the free states now had a majority both House of Representatives and in the Senate the south is going to get a quid pro quo what does it get it gets a new stiffer huge ative slave law that basically put teeth into that Clause of the Constitution that says that if a slave escapes from one state into another state then authorities in that other state have to help return the slave this outraged many Northerners because the North now would become complicit when you forced to be complicit in the return of slaves the South thought that that gave it only as much as it deserved and they were outraged by the admission of California as a free state the compromise of 1850 really didn't satisfy anybody it's simply ratcheted up tensions and ten years later South Carolina after the election of Abraham Lincoln the first Westerner to be elected president real Westerner to be elected president the first republican of the modern republican era to be elected president when he gets elected South Carolina and six out of the seven states immediately leaving and well the Civil War came but you know why the Civil War came it wasn't because it wasn't entirely because it was North versus South the West having triggered this whole thing also was essential in the thinking of Abraham Lincoln and what to do about secession because Lincoln could have said to South Carolina in those states well I think what you think you're foolish for doing this I wish you wouldn't but okay you've done it and there you go just go in peace but he didn't and you know why Abraham Lincoln did not allow the south to secede in peace you might think it had to do with North furthest versus south well that was part of it but it had everything to do with the West why the West because well in fact here's the thought experiment for and then I'm gonna end on this and we'll have time for questions so if secession had remained confined to the territories in the southeastern United States if the slightest the seceded states had stopped east of the Mississippi River stopped and say Mississippi then Lincoln would not have had such an incentive such a compulsion to suppress secession by military force but when secession leaped the Mississippi River you know what that meant if he had not contested if he had allowed Arkansas Texas and Louisiana to leave the union uncontested it meant that the single most important transportation artery in the United States the river that controlled the entire center of the country would be flowing through foreign territory and Abraham Lincoln simply could not allow that this was why Benjamin Franklin had negotiated so hard for the eastern bank of the Mississippi River at Paris in the 1780s it's why Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana really was just trying to buy New Orleans and Napoleon started throwing the rest of it to control the Mississippi River was absolutely essential for the future of the United States who controlled the Mississippi would control the American heartland and if Lincoln had let it go then the American heartland would have been controlled by this foreign country they simply could not let that happen okay I hope I've given you some thing to think about something to ask questions about something to argue about please questions yes sir thank you for asking that question this was one of the most brilliant moves in the history of British imperialism which didn't include very many brilliant moves a lot of stupid moves and the history of British imperialism but the smartest move to keep Canada within the Empire was to give Canada independence not quite give Canada Home Rule because until 1867 which is when Canada got Home Rule Americans could say we will liberate Canada the Canadians didn't want liberating at the hands of the United States America invaded Canada tried to get Canada in the Revolutionary War tried three times during the War of 1812 there were various raids into Canada in the 1830s and 1840s every time that Canadian said forget it we don't want this but Americans could still fool themselves into thinking we are gonna bring self-government to the Canadians well what the British did is said we're giving self-government to the Canadians and at that point all of this American agitation for Canada simply ceased because in good conscience a democracy could not cease foreign territory especially when there were people who were very much like the United States and spoke the English language and all this other stuff so Canada got democracy sort of ahead of having to get it at the hands of the United States other questions comments reactions how about from some of the students there we go okay welcome you first and then you yes well first of all the expansion the American expansion of the West outpaced population and so from Louisiana Purchase a big so the first acquisition of new territory post Revolutionary War so at the time of the Revolutionary War all the land east of the Mississippi River was claimed by existing States now eventually the states gave up those claims not all of them so Tennessee North Carolina never gave up its claims it just split off Tennessee but um once you get across the Mississippi River and what I could call the modern American West the trans-mississippi West that was land that was federal land before there are any states there and so it's land where there essentially was no pre-existing population that's going to be easily integrated into the United States yes there are Native American tribes there and in parts of Louisiana what would become the state of Louisiana there were French speakers in Spanish and so on but this was all federal land and the land then would be a portion out to first federal territories and then States so it the land came first it was acquired by the government basically back in Washington as it filled up with people then it adopted these democratic norms and democratic forms of government does that answer your question okay and maybe I'll circle back to it you had a question yeah good question so if you don't mind I will sort of characterize those two different versions a little bit differently and that is so you can have governments that are able to get stuff done and that will use a Chinese model but it basically any kind of autocracy where there are a few people making decisions and that is the decisions are imposed from the top down so that's one model we'll call it the autocratic or the authoritarian model then there's a democratic model where the decisions tend to well up more from the bottom up not entirely but and and no government is either all one or all the other but here I will ask you if you remember from your reading some of you perhaps from recalling when it was spoken do you know what Winston Churchill said about democracy yes so Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government there is except for everything else that has been tried which is really sort of what praising with faint damned or damning with faint praise or something like that so I will ask you what is it that accounts for the appeal of democracy what does democracy have going for it is it its efficiency that is able to get stuff done in a timely manner and the answer is no in fact even democracies become less democratic during times of emergency and President Trump is using this model to get hits wall built and he's declaring the mad national emergency and this is built on the precedence of national emergencies have been declared in many other cases where there's a hurricane or the the obvious case of national emergency is war and in wartime presidents get a lot more power than they have during peacetime in some cases they get it by statute very often they just take it and use it so Abraham Lincoln and when he was elected in 1860 he said again and again I will not take action against slavery in the states where it exists I don't believe I have the authority to do so and I do not have the inclination to do so comes the Civil War and there's the Emancipation Proclamation there's the end of slavery so war makes all things possible in if you go back to the days of the Roman Republic Rome was a republic not a democracy but a republic but Rome had this clause in its operative Constitution that allowed for the election of a dictator and when the security of the Roman Republic was at stake when the Carthaginians were at the gates they would elect a dictator and this one person had the power literally of life and death over everybody in the Republic it was turned limb and he only had six months to be a dictator so even democracies recognize that sometimes democracy is a slow way of doing things so if democracy is not efficient at getting stuff done if it can't forget things done in a timely fashion what does democracy have to say for itself that no other form of government can say for itself in such a thoroughgoing way democracy has legitimacy and that is you everybody every voter gets a chance to participate in the decision and so if you don't if the decision doesn't go your way it's because you were outnumbered it's not that you weren't consulted lots of times people could complain about forms of government when they're not represented what was the slogan of the American Revolution no taxation without representation by the way you know what the British offered in response to that you want representation we'll give your representation in fact turns out the Americans just didn't want the taxation so they backed up really quickly no no no no so so this is the thing that democracy has going for and the one of the reasons that there's been this spread of democracy is the 20th century was the age of the emergence of what shall I call the common man and woman the idea that there weren't people who were simply destined to be subordinate to other people this was this was the corrosion of empires and when a country like India when Indians would realize you know what we don't have to be subordinate to the British and what would become the 54 countries of Africa when they decided we don't we don't have to be colonies though the Second World War was this crucial moment when people sort of awoke to awoke them what well Thomas Jefferson's five words all men are created equal not all of them got him directly from Jefferson although it's striking how many of these newly independent countries the 1950s and 1960s borrowed plagiarized or stole from the US Constitution you perhaps have heard about Ho Chi Minh at the end of World War two asked the OSS the forerunner of the CIA if they would give him a copy of the US Constitution he wanted to write a declaration of independence for Vietnam so I don't know whether a democracy is the wave of the future I don't know if in this aspect history is linear or if it's cyclical well there will there be this wave in favor of democracy and will the wave peak and then will it be ups and downs in the Democratic cycle I will say that I said in 1800 1900 2000 by many measures the world is less democratic today than it was nineteen years ago and one of the test cases for this was and is China so China really had no history of democracy but there was a belief among very many people in the West including in the United States including in national security bureaucracy of the United States that as China develops economically it will develop democratically as well because in the history of the West the two economic modernization and political modernization in a democratic direction always seemed to go together sometimes one was ahead of the other but but there was no case of a country that developed economically that didn't also develop democratically and so there was this belief and it was one of the reasons that the US government basically assisted China's economic development allowed China to trade on favorable terms to China brought China into the World Trade Organization and basically encouraged China's economic growth even though China was still a one-party state and it was still communist by politics although by no means socialist anymore or in economics it was a belief that modernization the development of a middle class would force the communist system to change in a democratic way and it from the 1970s when the Chinese economic reforms began for the next 30 years was kind of a step back with the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 but there were still hopes in the 1990s in the early 2000s that things were moving in that direction but since the Act section of the current president things have been going in the opposite direction and there's been backsliding in a number of other countries Russia in the ten years after the demise of the Soviet Union seemed to be approximately a democracy Russia is nothing like a democracy today so it raises this question is democracy the wave of the future I don't know and it's an interesting question here in the context of what we've been talking about maybe I should end on this that American democracy emerged in the context of this settlement expansion in the West so if countries don't have this area to expand into to you know sort of try out these institutions does that make them less likely to become democratic if the United States had to start all over again today and it was kind of a coin flip whether it's gonna be democratic or something else in the absence of this territory to expand into would the United States develop a democracy itself I don't know the answer this question this is this is what horror stories get to argue about and when we figured it all out then hindsight will become foresight there we go thank you very much you [Music]

Channel: Center of the American West

Views: 1,752

Rating: 4.6923075 out of 5

Keywords: center, of, the, american, west, patty, limerick, hw, brands, growing, pains, democracy, the west

Id: 3QfoG2y6qh8

Length: 61min 27sec (3687 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2019