♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

I'm gonna be in conversation today with Professor Manisha Sinha of the University of Connecticut.

Uh, she's an expert on slavery, abolition, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

We're coming to you from the New York Historical Society, and it's Robert H. Smith Auditorium.

Professor, thank you very much for being here.

SINHA: Thank you so much for having me.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about slavery first, then we'll get to, uh, abolition, then we'll go through Reconstruction.

So go back to the beginning of slavery, when did the first slaves, uh, really arrive in this country?

Or did the first people came over, in that capacity, were indentured servants who were not slaves?

SINHA: Well, there's a lot of debate amongst historians about both those questions.

We know that, uh, people of African descent, uh, came to North America with, you know, before 1619, with the Spanish Conquistadors.

But it's 1619 where you have the first Africans landing in British North America.

Um, and so yes.

Were these first Africans really indentured servants sold for a term of service or were they enslaved for life?

The argument against it is that English common law has no law of slavery.

So they could not have been enslaved.

The argument for it is that the Portuguese and the Spanish were already enslaving Africans for a lifetime and the British simply copied that.

RUBENSTEIN: What came first?

People saying we can capture slaves and send them to the, um, uh, new world or people in the new world saying we need slaves?

SINHA: Well, it's a supply and demand question, right?

Uh, to put it very crudely, but it was, uh, uh, a trade in human beings.

Um, and of course there was, uh, a slave trade, uh, that went on in Africa and also in Europe where, you know, Muslims were enslaving Christians and Christians were enslaving Muslims.

Uh, in fact, the word slave comes from Slav from Eastern Europe.

You know, that was where they were getting the first slaves to, to work plantations in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Africa.

But yes, you know, um, the so-called discovery of the new world, uh, and the establishment of plantation economies, the great need was for labor.

So they enslaved Native Americans and then they started, uh, exporting Africans from Africa.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, very, very often, uh, the United States today, we say while slavery was a big part of the South's economy, but in the beginning there was slavery in all the colonies, is that right?

SINHA: Right.

Slavery was legal in all 13 colonies on the eve of the revolution.

RUBENSTEIN: And New York City, which is not seen as a slave center was actually, I thought, one of the slave, uh, trading centers.

SINHA: Yes, After Charleston, South Carolina, New York City had a very large urban slave population.

RUBENSTEIN: So when did the North finally decide to end slavery?

SINHA: It's really during the revolutionary era.

You see the Northern states gradually moving towards abolition, beginning with Vermont, in 1775, and going ahead with, uh, um, uh, you know, right up to New Jersey in 1804.

RUBENSTEIN: How many enslaved people were brought into the 13 colonies?

It, it, obviously we had four million at the time of, of the Civil War, and I think about, about 500,000 time of the Revolutionary War, but how many were actually imported?

SINHA: Not that many, um, you know, the numbers that we have now indi, it keeps increasing.

The Atlantic slave trade database, uh, you know, they go, went from nine million to now it's 12 million to the New World.

But to the, to British North America, it's around, between 400 and 600,000 slaves.

RUBENSTEIN: So we talk about slavery as is you were, you're working for somebody for no compensation, your family's broken up, but the cruelty was much worse than sometimes we talk about because very often slaves were whipped, they were killed...

When did we first know how terrible slavery was in the 20th century?

Because when I went to grade school, the cruelty and the inhumanity wasn't emphasized in the textbooks that I had.

SINHA: Yes, because the history of slavery was always written from the perspective of slaveholders.

Um, it was not written from the perspective of the enslaved, though we have ample evidence of the perspective of the enslaved, slave narratives.

You know, Douglass wrote his own story, but so did many other enslaved people.

It became what I call the movement literature of abolition.

Uh, and if you read those slave narratives, they're dripping with blood.

Uh, they, they talk about tortures, uh, they talk about whippings, family separations, children being sold apart from parents.

Um, those are the narratives that Harriet Beecher Stowe used to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.

RUBENSTEIN: So when the cotton gin was invented, uh, cotton became a more economically viable product because you wouldn't need as many people to kind of get rid of the cotton seeds... but is that when, uh, northerners started selling slaves to the southerners who needed the cotton pickers, in fact, the slaves?

Is that what happened?

SINHA: Absolutely.

You know, uh, the tobacco economy was not doing so well in the Upper South states of Virginia and Maryland.

That's when they start selling, quote, "their surplus slaves."

Uh, in fact, that's how slavery is maintained in the Upper South, by the annual sales of human beings, um, down to the expanding Cotton Kingdom.

We are talking about one million people who were sold.

RUBENSTEIN: When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, a number of Southern States seceded right away.

Why was that?

They were, they thought he was gonna eliminate slavery?

'Cause he said, he wasn't going to do that.

So why were they so interested in seceding?

SINHA: Well, it's the first time that you have a president elected in the United States on an anti-slavery platform.

Remember the presidency has been dominated by slaveholders, many of them from the south, of course, most of them from the south, um, and so Lincoln's election was what I call, uh, a revolution.

And southern slaveholders perceived it as a mortal threat because they had lost political power.

They called him, a quote, "a black Republican," they associated him with abolitionists, even though he was only for the non-extension of slavery, not for the abolition of slavery, that was the constitutional position that he thought he could adopt.

RUBENSTEIN: People forget that the 13th Amendment, which we now have that freed slaves, actually there was a proposed 13th Amendment that, uh, President Buchanan, uh, the predecessor to Lincoln supported, which said that slavery is part of the, the law of this land.

And we wanna reaffirm it.

And Lincoln in his inaugural address actually said he supported that 13th Amendment.

SINHA: Well, you know, Lincoln is an interesting figure because he said quite clearly that, you know, it was not constitutional for the federal government to abolish slavery, that only states like the Northern states had done, could abolish slavery.

So, he said, yes, he'll go along with this 13th Amendment if that will prevent the breakup of the Union.

So he's always balancing his loyalties to anti-slavery Union in the constitution.

But southern slaveholders were not interested in listening to that.

But there was one thing that Lincoln refused to compromise on.

There were all these compromises that said give up on the non-extension of slavery.

And Lincoln said, no, that's my red line.

I will not give up on that 'cause that's the future of the Republic.

RUBENSTEIN: To put it in context, you had the 13 original colonies and some of them had abolished slavery by the time of the Civil War, some had not.

But the big fight, as I understand it, was that as the United States moved further west, new states are coming in.

The southern states were afraid if they were not slave states that eventually the non-slave states would be so big in number that they would out vote the slave states and therefore as the, uh, country was moving west, the slave states wanted to make sure that slavery was allowed to be in those states.

The Northern states for the opposite reason, didn't want slavery in those states.

Is that the essence of what was going on?

SINHA: Yes, southerners, on the eve of the Civil War, think that slavery is a positive good, that that's what this republic should be.

It should be a slave-holding Republic and stand for slavery.

And this is why Lincoln keeps going back to the Declaration of Independence and the idea of universal human rights, uh, because he says that freedom, not slavery, should be the destiny of the Republic.

So would the west be enslaved states or free states, would really determine the future of the American Republic.

And that was what the fight was about.

RUBENSTEIN: So Lincoln was being importuned by, uh, abolitionists in the north, by editorial writers like Horace Greeley and the New York papers to, uh, eliminate slavery by fiat.

Just say I'm gonna abolish it.

Why did Lincoln wait so long to issue the Emancipation Proclamation?

The war started.

He became president in 19, 1861.

He didn't issue the Emancipation Proclamation until, uh, January 1 of 1863.

So why did he wait so long?

SINHA: Yeah.

So, you know, if you look at the way in which Lincoln progresses on this issue, you see that he was not that tardy as he was criticized for being.

Um, Lincoln is very mindful that there are four border slave states still in the Union, that if he had moved on emancipation immediately, these states would leave.

And, you know, that would be Maryland and Delaware.

And that would be Washington, D.C., being vulnerable to attack.

So he's always looking at ways in which he can move on emancipation constitutionally.

Some Union generals go ahead of him and they issue emancipation orders.

And he revokes them.

Uh, but by, uh, June, 1862, he already privately tells his cabinet that I'm going to move on emancipation.

Uh, and he hasn't yet told the public.

So when Horace Greeley asked him why aren't you moving?

He'd already decided to move on emancipation, but he gives that public answer because I think Lincoln is, is somewhat of a politician, of course.

And he is trying to make sure that northern public opinion, he could carry it with him.

And his own commander, General George McClellan is against it.

RUBENSTEIN: So in September of 1862, he issues a preliminary, uh, emancipation proclamation saying...

I'm kind of thinking of doing this and I'm gonna do this in January.

Uh, he did that because he wanted to telegraph, I guess, what he was doing.

But he also, uh, wanted to make sure that he, um, was doing it an appropriate time.

So one of his cabinet officers said why don't you wait until you actually have some military victories, so you look like you're doing it from a position of strength.

Is that fair?

SINHA: Yes.

He waited for Antietam, uh, to issue the preliminary proclamation.

And the reason he did that was because he was using his war powers.

So he gave the confederacy, you know, notice that if you do not give up the war and come back into the Union, that, yes, I'm going to free the slaves in the states that had rebellion.

RUBENSTEIN: So the Gettysburg Address, 277 of the most elegant words about what this country's about is brilliant.

Written by him.

No speech writer, right?

He did it himself.

But the Emancipation Proclamation, as one historian said, it's like the bill of lading.

It's basically that was boring and dry.

Why, where, why wasn't there wonderful rhetoric in the Emancipation Proclamation?

SINHA: Well, it's a legal document.

And Lincoln wants to make sure that it's constitutionality will not be challenged.

Uh, and Richard Hofstadter said that.

It sounded like a bill of lading.

Uh, and the reason why he said that was because it is very legal, and it is pinpointing which areas are in rebellion and which areas, uh, enslaved people would be free.

Uh, but it does end with, uh, telling enslaved people not to take up arms against their masters unless in self-defense, which I always thought was interesting.

RUBENSTEIN: Some people criticized the Emancipation Proclamation because it didn't free any of the slaves in the border states.

And it didn't free any of the slaves that were in, in areas controlled by the Union already.

Didn't free those.

It freed only the slaves that were still enslaved in Southern states.

So it didn't free that many people, how many people were actually freed overnight?

SINHA: Well, yes, it is a symbolic act, but it is still a turning point in the Civil War, and extremely important.

And in fact, uh, an event of world historical significance, it was seen as such, um, because, you know, if slavery is ab, abolished in Mississippi, it's not gonna last in Missouri.

Everyone knew that.

And it was clear that emancipation would be implemented only if the Union won.

So suddenly, the Union army, is an army of liberation, formally.

It had been that, informally, right from the start of the war, but it is formally now an army of liberation and everyone throughout the world understands that.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, what was the theory under which Lincoln issued the emancipation?

He had certain military powers.

That was how he justified it 'cause was there some legal basis for being able to free the slaves?

SINHA: Absolutely.

The person who first thought of this was actually John Quincy Adams, um, president, and then congressman from Massachusetts.

He always said that, in a war, the president could use his war powers to abolish slavery.

And that's exactly what Lincoln does.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, by freeing the slaves, what he was doing in effect was getting some soldiers that could fight for the Union.

And apparently, like 200,000 freed slaves fought for the Union.

Is that part of why he did it?

SINHA: Yeah.

So, you know, many times, historians and others will, uh, pose military necessity versus moral reasoning, but these were not opposed to each other.

They were linked.

They went hand in hand for Lincoln who was always morally opposed to slavery.

And of course it helped to have, uh, enslaved people within the Union army to add to its strength.

And let's not forget that emancipation as a process begins with enslaved people fleeing to Union army lines and creating a problem, logistically, for the army, but also politically for the Lincoln administration.

They have to address the question of slavery.

So enslaved people are not just passive recipients of the gift of freedom, they have played a role in this entire process.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so after Appomattox, the Civil War's largely over, not completely but largely over.

Um, but then what happens is Lincoln freed the slaves based on the war powers.

If we're not in a war anymore, the slaves, are they still free?

Are they not free?

And what about the slaves in the border states?

So what does he decide to do?

He decides to support a constitutional amendment finally?

SINHA: Yes.

Lincoln's rather the nervous in 1864, that if he loses the election, uh, then in fact the Democrats, and at that time, the Democratic Party was the party of the south and, you know, Southern leaning and Southern sympathizing, um, and of slavery.

And, um, he was nervous that somebody would rescind his Emancipation Proclamation.

The next president could do that.

So he really does, uh, you know, put a lot of political capital in to fighting for the 13th Amendment and making this a permanent and unalterable part of the U.S. Constitution.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, eventually, the House and the Senate passed the 13th Amendment.

And then Lincoln is so excited about it, he signs the, um, constitutional amendment that passed by the Congress, but Congress admonished him for that.

Why did they admonish him for signing this 13th Amendment?

SINHA: Because it's usually the Secretary of State.

Uh, that's just the formality.

Uh, but I think, as I said earlier, Lincoln realized how important emancipation was as a historical event.

For him, it really redeemed the founding ideals of the American Republic.

And that's why, for him, it was important to take, um, you know, some credit for it, perhaps.

Uh, but also to, to make sure that that the American Republic would lit, literally undergo, uh, a sort of a second chance.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, the 13th Amendment, when it was ratified, would free the slaves, but it didn't talk about, uh, freed slaves being citizens or having the right to vote.

Lincoln makes a speech about this.

Who hears that speech and gets upset?

SINHA: John Wilkes Booth, uh, his assassin, assassinates him, not for emancipation, but for being the first American president to publicly endorse Black citizenship.

RUBENSTEIN: And, and also Lincoln said maybe educated Blacks might be able to vote or something like that.

Is that right?

SINHA: Yes, he said those who served in a, in the Union army, those who were educated, he, he specified groups of Black men who should surely get the right to vote.

RUBENSTEIN: So Lincoln's assassinated in April of 1865 and then he's succeeded by who?

SINHA: Andrew Johnson.

RUBENSTEIN: And why was Andrew Johnson, from Tennessee, picked as the vice presidential running mate for, for Lincoln?

SINHA: Yes, that was one of the most unfortunate mistakes the Republican Party convention did in 1864 to replace Hannibal Hamlin of Maine with Andrew Johnson.

As Thaddeus Stevens, the Congressman from Pennsylvania, famously put it, he said, did we have to go to the rebel states to pick a vice presidential candidate?

But Johnson's an interesting figure.

His state had seceded but he was the only one from the seceded states to remain in the Senate.

And so the idea was to have a broad unity ticket.

And so Johnson was, who was the military governor of Tennessee before that, was picked as the vice president.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, Lincoln had planned on winning the war towards the end of it.

And he was worried about what now is called Reconstruction.

So what was his basic concept about bringing the Southern states back into the Union?

SINHA: He did have some Reconstruction plans.

A lot of them were expedient to simply get some of these Southern states that were in rebellion back into the Union like Louisiana.

Uh, but there were other things that the Lincoln administration did.

Um, the first progressive income tax, um, the land grant acts.

Uh, they really increased the powers of the federal government.

A lot of things that Lincoln did... uh, during the war, I think laid the groundwork for radical Reconstruction.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, when another President Johnson succeeded another, uh, assassinated president, President Kennedy, uh, Lyndon Johnson then pursued the legislative agenda that John Kennedy had.

Did Andrew Johnson when he succeeded Lincoln, did he say, I like the Reconstruction program of Abraham Lincoln, I'm gonna go support that?

SINHA: Johnson himself tried to claim this.

And some historians claim that he was just simply extending a Lincoln's, quote, "lenient program towards the South."

But actually, Johnson was not interested in Reconstruction at all.

He wanted a restoration of Southern states.

Uh, and in fact, many of them had passed Black codes that completely undermined emancipation.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, Reconstruction was a concept that we are gonna bring the Southern states back into the Union, we will have, um, Afric, freed African Americans will have government positions and so forth.

Uh, what was the white reaction in the Southern states to that?

SINHA: Well, you know, it was a matter not just of bringing the south back into the Union, they would have to accept the 13th Amendment, which was passed when they were out of the Union, and eventually the 14th Amendment that established national birthright citizenship in this country and equality before the law, regardless of race and previous condition of servitude.

In fact, many of our rights today, our modern rights, including the right to privacy, comes from the 14th Amendment.

It's, it's, it's an amazing amendment in terms of really trying to establish equality for all American citizens.

The problem was that many southerners did not see Black people as fellow citizens of the republic.

RUBENSTEIN: But right after the Civil War ended, I thought a fair number of Black, uh, citizens freed in the Southern states became senators or representatives or other senior officials.

How did that, uh, go over in the white community?

And did the white community kind of rebel against that?

SINHA: So there's, uh, uh, you know, there were not a monolith in a way.

There were some Southern Unionists.

In fact, there were some southerners who fought on the Union side.

Um, there were non-slave holding Southern whites, uh, who were Unionists.

Um, but, you know, it is true that a majority of southerners, especially elites, former slaveholders, uh, former Confederates, could not bear the idea of African-Americans, not only voting, but also holding office.

Uh, and so they launched a program of domestic terror, starting in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866, uh, to prevent this.

You know, we, we look at this history of trying to overturn democratically elected governments.

I mean, let's not fo, forget that the south seceded because they couldn't accept the results of a presidential election.

Um, and you see this during Reconstruction, uh, that, uh, a lot of them use violence, um, to intimidate Black voters.

Um, so even though you have Black male voting and you have Blacks being elected... to office, they're under constant threat of violence.

RUBENSTEIN: The Ku Klux Klan was started in, was it in Tennessee or... SINHA: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: Tennessee.

And what was the reason for the white outfits that they wore?

SINHA: Apparently, to scare people that there were ghosts, con, Confederate ghosts.

Um, and you know, they would don not just white robes, they would just do, don these bizarre, um, sort of costumes sometimes just to scare people, horns, funny kind of masks.

And not just the Ku Klux Klan, you had the White League, you had the Knights of the White Camellia, you had the Red Shirts in South Carolina.

Uh, and these people just went around spreading racial terror and they were led sometimes by former Confederate Generals.

I mean, the Ku Klux Klan, we think of somebody like Nathan Bedford Forest, Confederate General.

RUBENSTEIN: So what were the Jim Crow laws and who was Jim Crow?

SINHA: Jim Crow came about in the south much later in the 1890s.

What we see is between around 1876 to 1877, again, a presidential election, uh, in which, the last Reconstruction governments, interracial governments fall in the south.

Uh, and you see domestic terror.

There's an uptick in the south.

But it's not until the 1890s that they formally disenfranchised Black people in law, in new state constitutions in the south.

And you have Plessy versus Ferguson that overturns a Civil Rights Act of 1875 that outlawed segregation in public accommodations.

This was Sumner's law, um, and it was passed as a tribute to him when he died.

Um, and Plessy versus Ferguson gives the green light to Southern states to establish racial segregation, basically a system of racial apartheid in the south, right up to the civil rights movement.

RUBENSTEIN: So Plessy v. Ferguson was a Supreme Court decision in which it said if things are separate and more or less equal that's okay?

SINHA: Separate but equal.

Yes.

Which was, uh, somewhat flawed logic because, uh, separate was never equal.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's talk about women's suffrage for a moment.

Um, when the, um, the amendments to, um, give freed slaves the right to vote, women said, well, what about us?

We don't have the right to vote.

What did the freed slaves like, uh, or Frederick Douglass say about that?

SINHA: Well, there was a split in the abolition movement over this issue, uh, because abolitionists, especially the Garrisonians, had supported women's rights before the war.

Uh, and then when, uh, they got together after the war to fight both for Black rights and for women's rights, you have a split in the abolition movement, and amongst suffragists themselves, with one group opposing the 14th, and especially the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote, and even consorting with racist Democrats in order to defeat it.

Uh, and...which was led by Stanton and Anthony, unfortunately.

Another group of abolitionist feminists like Lucy Stone, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, who was a black abolitionist feminist, who supported these amendments and saw this as the first step towards women's suffrage.

So the women's suffrage movement split.

Uh, in 1869, you had two different groups.

They don't come back together until the 1890s.

And that's when it really takes off and you have the passage of the 19th Amendment.

RUBENSTEIN: Now in your book, you also talk about another group that, uh, you can say is disenfranchised, that's American-Indians.

So how were they treated?

And why do you regard them and their treatment as part of Reconstruction?

SINHA: Um, that's a great question because a lot of Native Americanists have argued that there was a greater Reconstruction that involved not just the Reconstruction of the south, but also of the west and the subjugation of the Plains Indians in the west.

Uh, and they say the dates for the, for that Reconstruction goes back to the Mexican War and it ends only in 1877.

I see it a bit differently.

I argue that the subjugation of the west really takes off simultaneously with the end of Reconstruction in the south.

And it's a similar logic of racism that motivates both the subjugation of the Plains Indians, uh, and the failure to uphold Black rights in the south.

Those very federal troops that are withdrawn from the south, that were protecting Black rights, are then used to conquer the west.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, a final question, in the south, there's something called "The Lost Cause."

Uh, can you explain what "The Lost Cause" is?

SINHA: Yes, "The Lost Cause" shows us that the south may have lost the war but they won the peace.

Once they overthrow Reconstruction, uh, and once you have Jim Crow and, uh, disenfranchisement and segregation and lynching and racial terror in the south, southerners start putting up monuments, to the Confederacy.

These monuments were put up between 1890, and 1920.

They're symbols of triumph.

They're not symbols of defeat.

And they were celebrating the lost cause of the south, not to enslave fellow human beings, but for Southern honor and heritage or other euphemisms, you know, for states rights.

And they sort of prettify a cause that was probably one of the most deplorable in history.

Uh, and unfortunately, they win.

They win in academia, in my own alma mater, Columbia University.

John Dunning propagated that view with academic ways.

And in popular culture from Birth of the Nation to Gone With the Wind.

The Lost Cause mythology had an enormous hold on the American political imagination.

And, you know, it's shocking to think that it's only with the movement for Black lives that these Confederate statues have finally come down.

RUBENSTEIN: Thank you for a very interesting conversation.

I enjoyed it.

Thank you very much.

SINHA: Thank you so much.

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