H.W. Brands | Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster

welcome to the Free Library of Philadelphia I'm Jason Freeman producer or at JP Freeman actually we're using initials tonight producer and editor here at the library's author events office and I'm very excited to be here to introduce HW brands exploring such diverse subjects as deep breath to say I'm all Aaron Burr the death of American liberalism Ronald Reagan the California Gold Rush Andrew Jackson the Middle East the Vietnam War Bill Gates and frankly to many other people places and concepts to mention here HW brands according to the Boston Globe is a skilled narrator who believes in making good history accessible to the non specializing book lover his more than two dozen books quote weaved together keen political history with anecdotes and marvelous sense of place his best-selling biography is at Benjamin Franklin the first American and personal hero of mine for ankling roosevelt traitor to his class we're both finalists for the pulitzer prize a professor at Texas A&M University for 16 years professor brands now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin where he is the Dixon Allen Anderson Centennial professor of history which has to be hard to fit on a business card he is also a member of the Society of American Historians and the philosophical and the philosophical Society of Texas a regular commentator across a variety of media and his work has been translated into several languages his latest book is called heirs of the founders the epic rivalry of Henry Clay John Calhoun and Daniel Webster the second generation of American Giants that tells the rarely told story of the second generation of American statesmen the early 19th century political Giants who took up the daunting challenge of completing the constitutional work begun by the founding fathers these three men Webster the eloquent words her from Massachusetts they spoke for the northern business class clay the jaunty Kentucky and who represented the potential of the ascending west and Calhoun the firebrand South Carolinian who was a staunch advocate for the south and slavery embodied the hopes scandals triumphs hip Oh cease and utter heart of our early republic and in reading this book it occurs to me they might even help shed a little light on some of our contemporary political triumphs and boondoggles here to tell us more ladies and gentlemen please help me welcome back HW brands to the free library thank you Jason for that very kind introduction in fact that was such a lively introduction it's better than I wrote in the book I think I'm gonna borrow it for the revised edition I'm delighted to be here and I'm especially delighted to be back here in Philadelphia because my an early well my first visit as an author to Philadelphia what gave rise to the book that I have just completed just published I wrote a book on Benjamin Franklin and the very last line of that Franklin biography is a quote from Franklin one of the very last lines that he's quoted saying in his life and it arose when he walked out of the Constitutional Convention which as you well know was held in secret and so people in Philadelphia didn't know quite what was going on behind those closed doors and he came out frank dr. Franklin was a a recognizable fellow and a woman of Philadelphia I went up to him and said dr. Franklin what have you given us after these three months of work and he said a republic madam if you can keep it so this was something that's stuck in my mind the founding generation won independence for the United States created this new constitution set up a federal government but the question was could the subsequent generation keep it I have observed bookstores and libraries for some years and I am aware as you probably are yourselves that the amount of books the number of books written on the Revolutionary War the Constitution is enormous and the number of books written on the Civil War is even larger but between its sort of like the tall buildings in the lower end of Manhattan and the tall buildings in Midtown and in-between there's this dip in the skyline so I wanted to talk about I wanted to explain what went on in the interim I have the advantage for an author of teaching American history so I've been teaching American history I've been teaching this subject now for 35 years or so so I knew what happened I knew what the big events were I knew who the big names were but I wanted to dig a little bit deeper and find out what it was that drove the politics of that interim period and so I sometimes fall prey to actually the demographers don't do this but commentator's historians often speak of generations in history and it's a rather suspect categorization because people are born every year they don't wait you know just every 25 years to be born and so I'm a baby boomer and I'm sort of in the middle of the baby boom I was born in 1953 but you know the baby boom supposedly stretches from 1946 to 1964 if you were born there and I could tell you if you were born in 1962 your life was very different from somebody who was born in 1948 but anyway be that as it may it's tempting and I fell for the temptation so I am I speaking in this book about what you could call the second generation of Americans and the second generation of American politicians I do have a tendency to think of history in terms of biography so I wrote a series of biographies that summarized or covered American history from the 18th century to the 21st my book I'm Benjamin Franklin was Volume one and that was followed by Andrew Jackson which is volume two and Ulysses Grant Theodore Roosevelt Franklin Roosevelt Ronald Reagan and I was intrigued I was attracted by the genre of biography because it is in some ways the most novelistic you get the most internal dialogue you get the most dialogue between characters in most nonfiction most historical in fiction particularly there's not much in the way people speaking to each other of course in novels people speak to each other all the time and you get inside the heads of your characters well you can do that in a biography in a way you typically can't and in most histories but I confess that at the end of completing these six biographies I was kind of biography out and this for a couple of reasons one is as hard as I tried to resist the temptation or the tendency to treat the world as though it revolves around your subject biographers can hardly help it because it's a story of this person and you have to keep coming back to this person and so I tried to create or write about the foils for my subjects but it's still not the same they don't get equal time so there was that part of it and I confess there was something else biographies of big characters tend to be big books and after committing 900 pages to Theodore Roosevelt and 752 Benjamin Franklin and I think I was I was getting trimmer by the time I got to Reagan so I think Reagan only gets 700 or something I get that was still a big lift and I've had that down I took to heart advice that the wife of Elmore Leonard the mystery writer deceased a few years ago is said to have given him she was his first reader and he would give her a manuscript and she would read it and as the story goes she would write just one brief comment and it was the same comment every time and it was take out the boring stuff now when you write a biography as interesting as your subject might be there are times in that person's life that are kind of boring but you've committed to write the biography and so you have to cover it I skimmed over a lot of stuff but still you know if it happens in the life you kind of you can't just say and 15 years later because what happened in those 15 years so what I wanted to do is I wanted to get away from the the one-person biography I want to at least get two views and I also wanted to skip the boring stuff so I'm I've embarked on I'm not gonna say this is a long term project but I have decided to write about at least two or in this case three people and the more contentious they are the better so I wrote a book about Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman and the fight they got in in the middle of the Korean War the push the world to the brink of nuclear war and it's called the general versus the president I liked it it was a little bit shorter than a big biography but it in effect was two biographies in one but just the the high points the most dramatic moments of the two lives so I decided to apply this approach to this I won't call it exactly a black hole of American history between the Revolutionary War in the Civil War but we'll call it an unappreciated an under-resourced part of American history and it was my good fortune now I really can't say was my good fortune because I designed it this way to have three characters three new characters whose careers overlapped almost exactly Henry Clay Daniel Webster and John Calhoun all entered Congress just in time for the war of 1812 Henry Clay and John Calhoun were advocates of the war they were some of the original war hawks that term was used back in those days Daniel Webster was an opponent of the war of 1812 and they immediately became standouts in Congress oh there was another little aspect of my agenda here and that was to essentially recapture I hesitate to use the word original meaning of the Constitution because that's been co-opted but I wanted to basically recapture article 1 of the Constitution article 1 of the Constitution deals with the legislative branch deals with Congress and it's clear from the detail the length of that article and all the attention paid to that article in the Constitution convention that the framers the Constitution intended that Congress should be the driving force in America's federal government and that's the way it was for the first hundred and twenty years or so of American history in fact I could give a quick quiz but I'll just let you do this as a mental exercise instead how many of you think you could name ten presidents from the year 1900 to the present ten presidents within 15 seconds alright well put it this way if I rattled off the names I'm sure you would immediately remember all of them so you know Roosevelt Taft Wilson Harding Coolidge Hoover Roosevelt Truman etc they're all big names in American history but if I asked you for some of the particulars Franklin Pierce or James D began or willing you'll Millard Fillmore or John Tyler or Zachary Taylor the names are not so familiar I've been in this business of presidential history for a long time and I still have to think pretty carefully now when exactly did Franklin Pierce serve as president and was he before after Millard Fillmore and how is it James you can't elect it why is it that presidents of the 19th century are so unmemorable because that's the way the Constitution was designed the big figures the stars of American politics were supposed to be members of Congress so my story's about the three rock star of American politics in the first half of the 19th century and they were Henry Clay Henry Clay was so gifted he was such a consummate politician and this was recognized by his peers that he was made Speaker of the House of Representatives on his very first day in the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi eat your heart out so Henry Clay is in fact he's if there's a single star of my three he's the one he is the one who has the greatest array of political skills who has the best personality for politics in some ways he is the best situated now when we think of the sectional crisis in America we ticket new we typically think of North and South but in fact in the 19th century in the early 19th century especially there was the north there was a south and then there was the West and the West was everything across the Appalachian Mountains so claiming from Kentucky was a man of the West and as a man of the West he could act as a mediator go-between between north and south so clay is my man of the West Daniel Webster Daniel Webster originally from New Hampshire originally elected to Congress from New Hampshire then moved his law practice to Boston and was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts Webster's a spokesman for New England for the North Webster in an age of great political oratory was the greatest of all Henry Clay was known for his ability to enchant an audience but Daniel Webster Daniel Webster was sort of the version of Grand Opera he could make you laugh he could make you cry Daniel Webster also besides being a senator and a member of the House of Representatives was a constitutional lawyer and he would often go from arguing cases before the Supreme Court which in those days met in the basement of the Capitol he'd run upstairs to the Senate and give another speech there Daniel Webster was for his ability to make even Supreme Court justices weep when he would give us oral arguments John Marshall John Marshall of all people had a tear in his eye when Webster closed his argument in the case of Dartmouth College vs. Woodward it's a small College but there are those who love it yes indeed John Calhoun John Calhoun was something of an enigma because he might very well have been the most incisively intelligent of the three if you wanted somebody if you wanted a lawyer to be able to defend a position and come up with the most subtle the most elaborate arguments in defense of the position John Calhoun was your man if you ever got into a debate with John Calhoun you had to be very careful do not grant his premises because if you give him his premises his ironclad logic will just roll through and you will be rolled over John Calhoun John Calhoun might have been the most ambitious of the three they were all fairly ambitious Daniel Webster had this constant fear of not having enough money it's one of the reasons that he kept up his law practice and this was in an age when our modern concepts of conflicts of interest were not very well developed so in the middle of a debate in Congress over the bank of the United States more precisely the second bank of the United States Webster wrote a letter a note to Nicholas Biddle the director of the bank now Webster is about to go to Washington and he's gonna speak for the bank or against the bank and he writes a letter to Nicholas Biddle saying if you would like your case argued my retainer must be refreshed and he got his money and he made the argument in favor of the bank these days file maybe I should die or should I say these days or at Lee until I'll pick a date out of the air January 20th 2017 I don't know that sort of thing would just been a bit out of bounds anyway so these my three characters I will confess that as I get older I get more interested in sort of the deep you call them philosophical questions you could call them moral questions you could call them psychological questions of history and I wanted to see how America embodied in these three men and the generation around the book is not just about these three it's about Andrew Jackson plays a large role other people play large roles but how did America wrestle deal with confront the two big what should I say failings I'll say failings failings of the founding generation in particular those egregious emissions of the framers of the Constitution you know what I'm talking about you know those two big holes in the Constitution one what exactly is the nature of the trade-off between the central government and the states we've got this federal system and I will remind you the reason we have a federal system is not that anybody in the 1780s thought hey this is a great idea let's have a two-tiered system it's that the people who wrote the Constitution essentially affected a silent coup to overthrow the government of the Articles Confederation they invited representatives of the states the states already existed the states were clearly sovereign under the Articles of Confederation and they brought them to Philadelphia under the false pretenses of merely amending the existing Articles of Confederation and the small States came assured by the fact that well even one small state could veto any amendment to the Articles so they're safe actually wrote I didn't feel quite safe it boycotted the proceedings it definitely I guess they figured out what was going on and the reason we have a federal system is that's the only thing that they could get past the only thing he could get ratified James Madison Alexander Hamilton have had just a single central government but the states already existed so they had to graph the stronger federal government on top of it but they conspicuously omitted to say where precisely does the boundary line between the states and the federal government or to put it in another way if the federal government oversteps its bounds what recourse do the states have who will tell the federal government that it has overstepped its bounds and it they weren't thinking of the Supreme Court because they hadn't been introduced to John Marshall yet and the Constitution doesn't say that the Supreme Court can render federal legislation no no that was Marshalls idea and during the whole period that I write about it my main characters dodge and John Calhoun in 1850 Daniel Webster and Henry Clay in 1852 so write to the mid point of the 19th century the idea that the Supreme Court could overrule legislation this was something that existed in the head of John Marshall till he died in 1835 and a couple other people but it was not conventional wisdom Andrew Jackson didn't believe it Daniel Webster didn't believe it most people didn't believe it this is something we eventually came to maybe for want of anything better but the question how do the states how did the people restrain the federal government when the federal government is getting too pushy that's one question and it's not in the Constitution so I put it to my students I'll put it to you why is it not in the Constitution these people were lawyers they knew enough that problems like this would arise and so why didn't they write it down why didn't they write it down because they knew perfectly well as soon as they wrote it down the Constitution would not get ratified that's the same reason the Constitution convention was held in secret if word got out what they were doing the whole thing would blow up in their faces so that's problem number one problem number two how does a republic based on it's either the promise or the challenge in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal if you've got a republic based on the idea that all men are created equal how does this deal with inequality we've got this promise of equality and a republic is essentially premise on the idea Republic's is a political system or political power rests on the people what do you do when there are great forms of inequality and inequalities came in a variety of shapes and forms in the 1780s and 1790s and there were inequalities of wealth and property ownership been education inequalities between men and women between the old and the young between longtime natural-born citizens and immigrants all sorts of inequalities the inequality that came most to the fore during the first half of the 19th century was the inequality embedded in slavery so how can a republic based on this idea that all men are created equal how can it countenance slavery these are the two issues that this generation had to deal with when Benjamin Franklin said a republic if you can keep it he was basically saying to the generation of Henry Clay Daniel Webster and John Calhoun can you accommodate these we did a lot our generation we gained independence from Britain and we've established this new government it's up and running now it's yours to keep going so this was the challenge I wrote about these three men and three is a good number if you want well maybe you remember your junior high school days that three is a bad number for trying to get along because it always turns out to be two against one well if you're gonna write a book and you want a little conflict in your book three is great number and one of the striking things is that the alliances among the three the alliances and antagonism shifted over time as did the views of the three on well the two questions that I just pointed out Henry Clay Henry Clay was the most consistent of the three and Henry Clay was someone that's hard for people in the 21st century to get their heads around Henry Clay was a slave owning emancipation estate for a moment and you should your first reaction I think all right so I put this to my students and their first reaction is well be such an emancipation that's why doesn't he free his slaves which is not a bad question but he had an answer and it was based on well a couple of things actually I give my students a thought experiment and it goes roughly like this and I'm not really going astray because this is the sort of thing that Henry Clay had to deal with so my students are eighteen and nineteen years old I teach freshman class in American history and I say okay let's suppose that you were born in Georgia you were born in Georgia in 1840 and you grew up you're a white boy or girl growing up in Georgia into a planter family and you grew up with slaves around you and this was just your way of life and actually I have to specify that you're a boy because you're gonna go to college and girls didn't go to college then but your parents did something that a lot of southern parents did and still do they sent their teenage male children to north to college so you went to Princeton or the College of New Jersey it was called then and when you got there you discovered this movement called abolitionism so we're now into the late 1850s about 1856 or 1857 you didn't hear much about it and you certainly didn't hear anything good about it as long as you're in Georgia the males were censor and newspapers didn't cover anything like it except to criticize those horrible black Republican and abolitionists but you get to Princeton and you hear some of them speak you say you know what they make a lot of sense I think I think I wanna I'm gonna join that cause I don't know how I'm gonna do it yet but I want to you get a letter from home it's a sad letter and the letter says your father has died you are now the heir to the plantation you are now the owner of 150 slaves I asked my students what do you do and so the way I conduct my class is it's not really as lectures I have the students they all have a piece of paper out and a pen I say okay write down what your response is you get this letter what do you do what are you gonna do about the slaves and their first reaction to most of it is so long I'm gonna free the slaves and so I let them write it down and then I say well I have to add some complicating factors one is that if your plantation is like most plantations you own the slaves in the way most people own their homes which is to say for 30 years they don't actually own the homes the bank owns the homes and they live in them and they pay the bank and the home itself is collateral for the loan Agriculture is a notorious lease or a debt ridden business and very many slave owners perhaps including you now can't operate your plantation without credit and you don't get any credit if you don't have any slaves because they're the only valuable property you have so your creditors will not let you free your slaves if you want to by the way Thomas Jefferson was in this boat when he died he couldn't free his slaves in his will the way George Washington did because the creditors got the slaves so that's the first problem a second problem is let's suppose that you're not in debt at all let's suppose you own the slaves free and clear then do you simply free the slaves and the answer is well you got to think carefully about it because most southern states including Georgia by this time had strict laws against manumit in freeing slaves unless you send them out of the state because they didn't want free blacks hanging around giving ideas to the blacks who are still enslaved so if you free your slaves you're probably going to break up families because the some of the families many of the slaves on your plantation are married to or have children on other plantations so the point I'm making here is that in this aspect of history as in all aspects of history things are more complicated than they seem so Henry Clay in one of his first acts as a Kentucky legislature tried to get Kentucky to end slavery he said because it's bad for the slaves it's bad for the white people it's bad for the Kentucky economy all you had to do was take a trip along the Ohio River float down the Ohio River and on the right bank was the free state of Ohio and you would see thriving towns and farms they were active you would see a growing economy on the left side you would see slave Kentucky and you would go miles and miles and miles between towns and compared to Ohio there's almost nothing going on so clay tried to convince his fellow Kentuckians to end slavery a phase-out of slavery the way slavery was phased out in most of the northern states as well he failed so you might have said okay well Henry now free your slaves he didn't now partly because it was well the only way his run his plantation staff his house but also because and and you can judge for yourself this I just put it out there in the book you can judge whether you think this was warranted or not he concluded that he would have more credibility arguing against slavery as a slave holder than he if he was just another abolitionist you know it's often pointed out in history it's quite a it seems like a contradiction that Thomas Jefferson the one who wrote all men are created equal in fact owned between 150 and 200 slaves is there anything more hypocritical than that maybe but think for a moment why did Jefferson why was Jefferson invited to write the Declaration of Independence it was partly because he was a skill a stylish writer but also he was from Virginia and Virginia had to be part of this independence movement and so there was gonna be somebody from Virginia who was going to be on this committee and if you were in the Continental Congress from Virginia you were gonna own slaves you had to be successful you had to be respected by your peers in order to get this position and so if Thomas Jefferson had not owned slaves he never would have been asked been allowed to write the Declaration of Independence anyway so Henry Clay deals with this question his whole life and he does finally free his slaves upon his death that's Henry Clay John Calhoun John Kent oh I should add that Henry Clay was a consistent advocate of the Union a federal power Henry Clay believed that the federal government ought to build highways there called internal improvements in those highways and canals the federal government ought to establish a protective tariffs to shield American manufacturers from unfair foreign competition when I was writing the book I thought oh boy I got to write about the tariff it's a big deal in those times but it simply is not going to resonate with modern audiences tell ya I've got something to thank president room for to make the tariff a real issue because before 2017 nobody really talked seriously about a tear since the 1930s anyway its back but it also exemplifies this question of what's federal authority what's the federal authority versus the states and I say versus the state because one of the crises of my era of my story occurs in the early 1830s when South Carolina objects to a federal tariff and in fact nearly blows up the Union now my students have a hard time really appreciating this they say okay South Carolina was gonna leave the Union provoking Andrew Jackson to talk in terms of war against South Carolina over what over a tariff over taxes yeah exactly so this was a big deal John Calhoun was bitterly opposed to the tariff not so much on economic grounds per se but on what it did to the interests of South Carolina John Calhoun started his political career as an ardent nationalist he was in favor of the war of 1812 against Britain but he swung around by the late 1820s to be the apostle of states rights and to show how convoluted politics could be as vice president of the United States he secretly provided the intellectual and political rationale for South Carolina's nullification of this federal tariff and the justification if if South Carolina should be forced to collect the tariff then South Carolina would secede from the union and he did this while he was vice president of the United States and this sounds bizarre but it actually believe it or not it had precedent some of you may remember from your study of American history I have to be careful the way I say that I speak in Austin at the University of Texas to some continuation education programs and these are mostly retired people and I was speaking I was speaking about Benjamin Franklin one time when I was there and I was trying to remind the audience what I meant to say was you will recall from your study of American history that the Stamp Act of 1765 was very controversial in America what I said was you will remember that the Stamp Act of 1765 was very controversial and a gentleman in the back stood up and said Sonny how old do you think we are anyway in 1798 the Federalists dominated Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Act which were a blatant violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution the Supreme Court was not very supreme in those days it didn't step in and so Thomas Jefferson who was vice president of the United States covertly authored a series of resolutions that he sent to the legislature Kentucky to pass basically outlining the philosophy the theory of nullification when the federal government oversteps the states can step in they can refuse to enforce the law within their boundaries and the logical corollary of that is if the federal government tries to force them then they can resist they can leave the Union so this is Jefferson and James Madison did the same thing on behalf of the legislature which in James Madison the father of the Constitution saying that the states can overrule the federal government this gave John Calhoun the basis for doing the same thing with South Carolina over this tariff and the country came very close to a civil war at that time Andrew Jackson breathes fire and compelled the South Carolina needs to back down in the middle of this was Henry Clay Henry Clay already had the reputation as the great compromiser Henry Clay was the one who negotiated who forged the Missouri Compromise of 1820 where the question was shall Missouri the first state save Louisiana itself to be made to Maine made a state out of the Louisiana Purchase and there were very many people in the United States who hoped the slavery would be stopped at the Mississippi River but in fact in Missouri there were already a lot of people who owned slaves and a lot of slaves there and they wanted admission to the Union as a slave state and they had strong support in the south they had some support in the north but there are a lot of people in the North who said no we don't we don't like this we kept slavery out of the Ohio country and now we want to keep it out of the trans-mississippi West I have to remind my students I'll remind you of this that when the Constitution was at one of the reasons one of the reasons that the framers did not bite the bullet on that question of slavery and say okay we'll give slavery 20 years and then it's done is that they expected that something like that would happen on its own they did put a 20-year limit on the slave trade but in 1780 in the late 1780s even it was the best guess of most people that slavery would die of its own weight it had already died out in the North not because the North had any fit of morality but because the northern economy had evolved beyond slavery slavery is among other things a way of mobilizing labor and it is highly inflexible you don't get to fire slaves you don't get to lay them off if there's not much work to do you still have to house them feed them and all the other stuff the northern economy moved to a wage system there had been a lot of indentured servants in the north but those faded away too because they're pretty inflexible as well and people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson certainly the young Henry Clay believed that would happen and so the whole point of the Missouri Compromise which gay if Missouri as a slave state to the south in exchange for a line across the Louisiana territory that said okay Louisiana Purchase they said in the north no slaves in the south potentially slaves his whole idea was to buy time Henry Clay was a believer that the genius of the American political system is the ability to muddle through find a compromise kick the can down the road and things will evolve don't be doctrinaire don't insist on solving everything at once and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 bore this our get lasted for 30 years until it had to be revised after the gold rush to California when California demanded admission to the Union as a free state and Henry Clay came out of retirement and organized an eight-part package that became the basis for the compromise of 1850 by this time John Calhoun was all-in on states rights he resisted anything like compromise he said the South has already compromised too much and he resisted it but he was dying in fact he died in the middle of tuberculosis or consumption was called in in the middle of this debate leaving the field to Henry Clay and Daniel Webster Daniel Webster Daniel Webster represented Massachusetts which had grown increasingly opposed to slavery but Daniel Webster was perhaps the most eloquent of the defenders of the Union and Daniel Webster decided that holding the Union together was more important than satisfying his constituents more important than carving out what he himself considered to be the moral position on slavery he joined Henry Clay in supporting this compromise and the essence of compromise was that California gets admitted as the Free State and the south in exchange gets a beefed up Fugitive Slave Act which required northern sheriff's northern judges northern private individuals to assist in the return of escaped slaves and this outraged many people in the north Webster from being the hero of Massachusetts found himself hanged in effigy throughout Massachusetts but in some ways it was well you'll form your own judgments is whether it was his finest hour or his worst hour but it certainly was a big deal at the time I'm gonna stop there but I will just I'll leave you with one thing then we're gonna take some questions and then we can go on with that but if there's one takeaway that I get from this it is that in our political system there is a great deal to be said in favor of compromise the spirit of compromise embodied by Henry Clay and I will say certainly Daniel Webster and maybe even the early John Calhoun the elderly John Calhoun didn't believe in compromise but the spirit of compromise that says first of all democracy is fragile and you have to take care of it second that no one has a monopoly on truth that your opponents are not your enemies they're your opponents have a right to their opinions and they have a right to a seat at the table that if you want to get that can successfully kicked down the road you can't insist on getting everything you want just because you have the opportunity to do it now you have to look 20 30 years into the future so that was this very I'll point out that when that general call it the the compromising generations generation represented by these three died near the 1850 was replaced by the non compromising within 10 years the nation was dissolving into civil war and I would say that today we could use old something a lot more of that spirit of compromise today the disputes the the lines of demarcation are not sectional not North versus south but partisan Republicans versus Democrats but there is very much this winner-takes-all attitude that afflicts both parties when they have a chance to be in office and unless we can find some body to compromise maybe compromising we forced on us now that we've got to split Congress but we think we could certainly use something like the spirit of compromise of that called that middle generation so it's gonna say when I first moved to Philadelphia first book I read your biography on Ben Franklin best first chapter I've ever read oh thank you thank you very much fantastic um I guess I tailed off after that well you said there was some peaks and valleys hey my question is this day and age was access you know unlimited access to information more than ever as opposed to even say the Ben Franklin arrow when it was privileged right do you see the idea of like a cyclical history or we're doomed to repeat history do you see any of that evolving or going away now that we should have access to all this information that we shouldn't forget I would like to say yes but I have to say no and I'd like to say yes because indeed we do have basically instant access to anything you want to know about history but the problem has never been lack of information the problem has been lack of will and I'm not gonna say the older I get the more I conclude this but for a lot of people I'm not going to go so far as to say for most people but for a lot of people the conclusion has arrived at first so what do you what do I want to believe and then I can now probably more than ever it's easy to find arguments evidence in favor of what you want to believe Benjamin Franklin himself said it is wonderful that humans are reasonable beings because we can reason ourselves and to pretty much anything we want to so now it doesn't resolve the problem at all if anything if anything it makes it if anything it makes it easier to support otherwise insupportable arguments because there's always somebody out there's always something I saw I talked to dad about don't there to be great for the presidency do you feel that this generation is like the inspiration for that because you're talking about how compromising they are and as they became great but not necessarily trying to be transformative per se when you said I had said don't dare to be great I thought you're gonna say were you thinking of Donald Trump and now for those of you who didn't see it they don't dare to be great part is that I've observed in my study of American presidency that they're only a handful of presidents who are considered really great and the greatest are generally they're three that are that sort of Holy Trinity of American presidents there's George Washington Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt okay so I'm gonna I don't think I I don't think I shared this story with this group the last time I was here but it's a story of when Barack Obama was president I had the honor and the privilege of being part of a small group of historians that had dinner with President Obama several times and he was very interested in history in fact I cannot think of a president who had a more consistent and sort of sincere interest in history than President Obama and the first gathering of the group was just three or four months into the first term and I got invited I think because I just written a book on Franklin Roosevelt and President Obama was dealing with an economic crisis that looked like it might become Great Depression 2.0 so on that particular evening the president sort of he spoke and for most of these events most of these dinners he mostly listened and but on this occasion he was sort of explaining why he invited us and what he hope to get out of it and he went through kind of the the basic ordinary perception of who the great presidents are and he really focused on Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and the term that was in use at the time you may remember was he wanted his to be in a transformative presidency sort of like Abraham Lincoln's or Franklin Roosevelt's and I sat there and I was listening to this and I began puzzling over something and that is well this might come to you any time you're in your guests at someone's house you're invited to somebody's place for dinner and they're feeding you and they're being nice to you and but they're saying something you think is quite wrongheaded so how forthright are you in explaining your disagreement and when your host happens to be the president the United States you know that gave me even more pause but then I thought okay the president is a busy guy and he would not be taking two hours out of his day this particular day to hear himself talk now there are presidents who have done that Theodore Roosevelt used to invite distinguished authors and scientists and artists to the White House and then hit spend the whole time talking himself but not President Obama so I thought okay I'm gonna speak my piece and when an opportune moment came I said mr. president I agree with you that Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt are the great presence they're really the the measuring stick for presidential greatness but I'd like to point something out and that is it's a paradox of American history that the greatest presidents preside over the worst times consider Abraham Lincoln what allowed him to be great what allowed him to do those things he did to expand federal power to end slavery during peacetime Congress the president the courts the states could not figure out what to do with slavery for a period of 75 years and then in two years during war you cut that Gordian knot and you cut that Gordian knot with a sword of war so it was that it was the crisis of the Civil War that allowed Lincoln to be great and for Franklin Roosevelt it was a crisis of the Great Depression in World War two so I said you know unless you're thinking in terms of another civil war another Great Depression may be ah to lower your sights a little not Franklin Roosevelt Theodore Roosevelt is ranked by president and by historians and political scientist maybe in the top five but for the American people he had the advantage of presiding over seven and half years of peace and prosperity so there's that and this gets at sort of some of the broader things here and that is that the American political systems as much as we grumble about it and people have been grumbling about the American political system from the moment it started in fact you know if you think we're polarized today it was worse back in the period that I'm writing about sometimes sometimes when I give this talk I say I've been to the 19th century a time when American politics was even more polarized than it is today when people actually shot each other in the street over political disputes I've been to the 19th century and I returned with good news and bad news the good news is the nation survived the bad news is it took a civil war so it may I have no reason to think that there's a civil war coming all of you push me in this direction I can describe a scenario over which it could come about but I think that it gets back to the theme that I was talking about when there is that spirit of compromise our American system as much as we grumble about it over time over the 200 years of its existence it's been in by the standards of world history a roaring success there is no system that has delivered more good things to more people for so many years as the American system starting with this small country hugging the Atlantic coast of North America to be this world superpower with arguably even until now the highest standard of living sort of in world history we could quibble about whether they're Norwegians for their oil have more and all that stuff but basically this large country so it's worked really well it's had a few big hiccups like the Civil War that's a big hiccup but for the most part the status quo works and there is maybe there should be a bias in favor of the status quo and it's worked so far so it's hard to get anything done why is it the press it's only rise the level of greatness during crisis because in a crisis the status quo breaks down and a working majority the American people are willing to say okay it's time for a big change and then the change comes but for now you know why is it that we can't make up our minds about health care why can't we make up our minds about immigration why can't we make up our minds about one thing in this thing and that well because it's not that Congress is gummed up exactly and it's not that the president is screwed up and it's not that well it's because the country is pretty much split down the middle you know and in fact in all of American political history presidential races with the exception of James Monroe who ran unopposed and George Washington I ran pretty much unopposed you know the a landslide in American presidential history is six to four 60% for one and 40 percent for the other and that's huge in American presidential history but it still means if you just flip two votes out of ten you get the different result and going back to Henry Clay and the great compromiser give me your reflection on the election of 1824 and his role that led to such turmoil and political division ah the notorious election of 1824 there were four candidates the one who gained the most political students and one who gained the most popular votes was Andrew Jackson his reputation rested on his great victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 but he had also a long career as he had been a member of Congress he had been a senator he'd been a territorial governor so and in mostly a career soldier as well so he got the most popular votes but then as now winning the popular vote doesn't get you anything he had the most electoral votes but he did not have a majority and so under Article two the Constitution the race went to the House of Representatives where the top three finishers would go into a runoff hen clay was one of the four candidates but not one of the top three he was also Speaker of the House and he was an ally of John Quincy Adams the number-two finisher so when the race went to the House of Representatives Henry Clay was in a position to speak to his friends and allies in the house and urged them to vote for John Quincy Adams which he did and John Quincy Adams won in the House of Representatives under those circumstances each state votes as a unit it's it really is it acts more like the Senate where each state gets an equal vote than it does nor in normal times but John Quincy Adams wound up as president and he turned around and named Henry Clay Secretary of State which was a bigger deal in those days than it is today because in those days the Secretary of State was the heir presumptive to the presidency Thomas Jefferson had been Secretary of State he became president his Secretary of State James Madison became president his Secretary of State James Monroe became president whose Secretary of State John Quincy Adams became president so it looked as though Henry Clay had traded his influence in the house in return for being anointed the next president of the United States the Jacksonians cried foul in fact they cried corrupt bargain Andrew Jackson himself spoke of Judas Iscariot and his thirty shekels of silver of thirty silver coins for betraying the cause the Jacksonians immediately began running the rematch the election of 1828 you think presidential election campaigns are long now the presidential campaign of 1828 began in March 1825 on the day John Quincy Adams was inaugurated and the Jacksonians they well the term they probably would have used was fake news or they would have said the election was stolen they did say the election was stolen they said the John Quincy Adams is not the legitimate president and the election campaign began and the second go-around Andrew Jackson won he won the popular vote he won the electoral vote the reason this is important is that these were really the first two in the second one 1828 was the first time that a presidential election was even sort of democratically organized and run did you know that you have no constitutional right to vote in a presidential election there's nothing in the Constitution says that you get to vote even for the electors so there's nothing that says that Pennsylvania's electors have to be chosen by the voters of Pennsylvania now this has just evolved over time you may remember this in the 2000 election where there was confusion debate over how Florida's electors were going to be awarded there was a recount going on the secretary of state of Florida the one in charge of organizing the vote count and all this stuff who happened to be a Republican suggested to the republican-controlled Florida House hey why doesn't the house I mean see me in legislature why doesn't the legislature simply award Florida's electors to george w bush it would have been perfectly constitutional and indeed in the early days in the 1790s most states did choose their electors by vote of the state legislature but by the 1820s most states had shifted to the idea that people would get to vote I don't mean all the people I don't mean women I don't mean African Americans but I do mean nearly all adult white males could vote by the 1920s which was a big step forward because in the 1790s even adult white males only a minority could vote so it was a big step toward democracy and when Andrew Jackson was elected in 1828 he was seen as the first people's president into sensors one he was the first really ordinary person to be elected president and second he was chosen by the people in a more straightforward way even as convoluted as that still was than any president before and from that moment until this one of the principle markers of success of presidential candidate is the common touch you have to appeal to ordinary Americans when George Washington was running for president run for president he just stood there for president people did not expect to be treated as George Washington's equal they were content they were willing to look up to George Washington by the time of Andrew Jackson and ever since voters expect to be able to look that candidate right in the eye and in fact if you want as a rough-and-ready approximation as a guest to who's going to win a particular presidential election its who to the most voters feel that they'd be most comfortable having a beer with it has very much less to do with policies it just has to do with how does that candidate make you feel and this is this you can see it right there in 1828 and almost immediately almost to me 12 years later 1848 1840 William Henry Harrison who was he was almost sort of a rich guy who's born on a plantation he liked fine wine but he ran for president on a campaign of what was called a log cabin and hard cider stories were made up that he had been born in log cabin nowhere near that need to drink hard cider he drank imported French wanted but he had to act the part so as Sam Goldwyn once said you know sincerity it's the most important thing and once you can learn to fake it you've got it made so you've tempted us with your speculations about an upcoming civil war could you elaborate yeah okay oh well you can you can say you heard it here first so actually I've got a piece is gonna be running in the Washington Post in the next few days that outlines this and here's how it goes so with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court there will be some conservative state more than one perhaps that will test roe v wade the 1973 case that gave rise to the idea of a right to abortion and whether it happens the first time in the second time in the third time I wouldn't be at all surprised if the court overturns roe v wade despite the fact that Brett Cavanaugh has said that he considers that to be settled law the and I draw a historical analogy to the Dred Scott decision of 1857 the Dred Scott decision of 1857 overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820 for 37 years the the principle that Congress can legislate for or against slavery and the federal territories had been settled opinion all of a sudden it was unsettled so should the Supreme Court overturned roe v wade the first thing that would happen is that conservative state states of the south and parts of the Midwest would almost certainly pass more restrictive laws against abortion states on the coast the Pacific coast and the Northeast they would probably have or continue to have more liberal laws but the next step for the strong anti-abortionists would be to try to outlaw abortion nationwide and in this regard and I know I make some people uncomfortable when I say this but I think a good historical analogy for the sort of hardcore anti-abortion groups is the hardcore abolitionists because this was a moral issue for them and they were willing to take their moral views and try to impose them on the rest of the country so let's say you live in California and it looks as though Congress is going to outlaw abortion in California California's might very well decide you know what and here's the key it's not it wouldn't be just that issue but it would be a feeling we can't live in a country with people like this who are gonna tell us what we can and cannot do what we have thought for decades we had as our rights and so there will be even short of that there might very well be a kind of sifting out of liberals and conservatives particularly on this issue so if you live in Mississippi and you want to get an abortion you're gonna to go to a more liberal state and you might decide to stay there you're more comfortable there the one thing that until now even until now that has kept this abortion issue which is which involves people with very deeply morally held positions and they're essentially uncompromising because it has to do with how do you define life how do you find rights the thing that has kept it from becoming really divisive is the fact that until now people who are pro-choice and pro-life live scattered all around the country but in the scenario I've described they will start to sift out anyway you don't have to have one group that is entirely in control but should there come a time when Californians begin to think you know there's just no future for us in this country and it could come about by other means if for example just suppose the Donald Trump should be re-elected in 2020 again with a minority of the popular vote this would be you know three out of the last what six where the wrong person if you take this view got elected something's wrong in the most recent midterm elections the Democrats got 7% more of the total Congressional vote and their majority in the house and their minority in the Senate doesn't relax it was like this at all so when people start to think the system is unfair California if it were an independent country would be the sixth largest economy in the world California clearly could go its own way and if California started talking about secession Oregon in Washington almost certainly would say yeah we're with you too and there might very well be something like a referendum a secession convention and movement then the question would arise okay what would the rest of the country do about it would Mississippi and Iowa in Texas fight to keep California Union I don't know I don't know the answer to that part but this kind of sifting out that gave rise to the civil war it's not impossible if there is a single lesson to take away from all this it's Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and John Calhoun knew something that we forgotten and that is that yes democracy requires cons tending you cannot take it for granted when Henry Clay was born Henry Clay was born in 1777 I marry the United States was one year old he was 10 when the Constitution was written and so he knew this thing might work and it might not and the knowledge that it might not work that we have to work hard to make it work kept him at this idea of compromising compromising we live at a time when we're 200 and almost 225 years under our current constitution we think it's gonna last forever well there's no guarantee that it will it does require attending thank you very much you've been a wonderful audience [Applause] you

Channel: Author Events

Views: 6,072

Rating: 4.8208957 out of 5

Keywords: H.W. Brands, American History, Heirs of the Founders, Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, 19th century politics, second generation American politicians

Id: nr8E23eH74o

Length: 67min 24sec (4044 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2019