Alan Taylor on Revolutionary Ironies and the Continental Civil War

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Alan Taylor, who's professor of history at the University of Virginia. He could plausibly be considered America's greatest living historian. He's written numerous books on colonial America, Native Americans, the revolutionary period, the early, now mid, and partly latter part of the 19th century. He is one of only very few people to have won two Pulitzer Prizes. Let me stress, the new book, publication date May 21st, is American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850 to 1873. I enjoyed reading this very much, learned a great deal from it. Allen, welcome.

Well, thank you, Tyler. I really appreciate having the chance to talk with you.

Let's start with the Revolutionary period. We will work up to the topics in your book. But initially, why did only the 13 colonies declare independence? So there's this thing we later call Canada to the north.

Yeah.

Why aren't they part of this?

Well, it's also all these British colonies in the West Indies, like Jamaica and Antigua and Barbados. If, if you look at the population figures, the places that rebel are the places that have the largest populations, and they're connected with each other. So there is a greater confidence that you can resist militarily, whereas if you're one of these islands or you're one of these small colonies to the north, you're very tenuous and you're very dependent on the British Royal Navy. And that means that there's a higher threshold in order to build up the confidence to rebel.

And what's the influence of New France on this process?

Well, in Canada at that time, you had a French-speaking majority and a Catholic majority. And recently, meaning 1774, the British had mollified the French Canadians by basically endorsing their system of law and their religion and protecting it by law. And that's one of the things that alienated the 13 colonies that were very much against Catholicism at that time. So the French Canadians were, you know, the devil we know well, which is the British Empire, is better than the devil that we fear even more, which is the Protestant colonists to their south.

Now here's a quotation from your writings at page 37, quote, one of the great ironies of the American Revolution was that it 'virtually free land for settlers in British Canada while rendering land more expensive in the United States.' Unquote. Could you explain that, please? Sure.

The war was very expensive. So all the states and the United States also incurred immense debts. Well, how are you going to pay for that? This is a time there's no income tax. And the chief ways in which governments could raise money were on import duties. And then on selling land. And there was a lot of land provided you could take it away from Native peoples. And so all of the states and the United States were in the business of trying to sell land, but also they're reliant within the states on these land taxes. And all of these go up then to try to finance the war debt. Whereas in British Canada, the British government is subsidizing the local government. They're paying the full freight of it. Which means that local taxes were much lower there. And it also meant that they could afford to basically give away land to attract settlers. So they had this notion that if we offer free land to Americans, they will wanna leave that new American Republic, move back into the British Empire, strengthen Canada, and provide a militia to defend it.

So if we think of people who left the original American colonies, How many of them do you think were leaving for political reasons and how many were leaving because the land up north was cheaper?

Well, I would say about a third of them are leaving for political reasons, and most of those leave very early in the 1780s. And then there is a larger number, two-thirds of the overall total, who are going during the 1790s and the early 19th century. And for them, they're not particularly political. Their motivation is that they can get this free land and this lower tax burden by moving into British Canada. We shouldn't exaggerate the numbers, however. We're, we're, we're talking about, you know, relatively small numbers, something in the vicinity of about 50,000 people at most. And that's a small portion of the millions that lived in the United States.

If we think of the American Revolution as at some point being a kind of surprise, is there any evidence on how asset prices reacted to that surprise, which is the question an economist would ask?

It, it's a great question. Well, assets are greatly depreciated during the war because these colonies in the new United States, highly dependent on transatlantic trade. And so if you've got the Royal Navy, which for almost all of the war is dominating the Atlantic, it's very difficult to send out American produce to European and West Indian markets, and it's very difficult to import goods. And so economists who've looked at the impact of the American Revolution —on the economy in the short term, meaning, you know, essentially 1775 until 1790, estimate that the economy shrank by a third, which would make it the, the second greatest depression in all of American history. So assets were, were greatly depreciated until there's a new federal government and there's peace so that during the 1790s, There comes a boom, which more than restores the lost property values of the 1780s.

In general, why did the British find it easier to mobilize Native Americans as allies? Is it just because they were less expansionist?

It's basically, again, comes down to population numbers. So you have approximately 2.5 million people living in the 13 colonies. Their population is doubling every 22 years. So this is the fastest population growth any place on Earth at that time. And they are an agricultural people, overwhelmingly. 95% of Americans made their living by agriculture at that time. And as the population doubles, they want the next generation to have the same standard of living, which means they need twice as much land. And so they're expanding. And meanwhile, the British are— their population is, at that time during the war, is based in Canada and it's much smaller. So the British are just running a, a few small forts in the West and they need Native help to defend those forts against American expansion. So Native peoples are calculating the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And they see the British as providing them with firearms to resist the American expansion. And so for the great majority of Native peoples, the British Empire is the better bet in order to maintain their hold on their homelands.

Fast forwarding to the War of 1812, which you've written an excellent book about, why couldn't the then more than 7 million Americans overwhelm the, what, 300,000 to 500,000, I've seen different estimates, British subjects in what we now call Canada?

Well, certainly American leaders thought it would be easy. Thomas Jefferson said it would be a mere matter of marching, and it turns out wars are always more difficult than their projectors imagined. The United States had virtually no professional military at that time. They had an army that was essentially 9,000 men spread very thin off over a very large country. They're gonna have to build up their army very, very fast, which meant that they were sending people into combat with virtually no training. And they're going into a difficult landscape in order to try to supply them. So the logistical lines were very long in order to support troops that are going into Canada. And so almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And then these American forces start to suffer defeats, which then leads a lot of the American public to say, what are we doing here? The Madison administration, which had declared war, was counting on winning some early victories in order to boost public support. For the war. And when they don't get those early victories, instead they get some catastrophic defeats, then suddenly everything gets much more difficult. It's also the British had some good troops there. They weren't numerous, but they were better trained troops than the Americans had. And they also had the support of native peoples, which turns out to be an enormous asset when you're fighting in a landscape which is largely forested.

And that's because of supply lines and food?

Well, the British have better supply lines because that's a world in which things move more easily by water. And so the British supply line is basically the Great Lakes connecting to the St. Lawrence River. So it's a lot easier for them to move supplies and their manpower than it is for the Americans who are trying to go over from one watershed into another one. So they're trying to go from the Atlantic watershed into the Great Lakes watershed. And the British are much better established in the Great Lakes watershed.

And why, you know, looking after the war, why is there never a third war with Britain as so many people had expected? What, what did those prognostications get wrong?

Well, what they get wrong is that the United States is the most important export market for British goods, and the United States relies on Britain for most of its manufactured goods. Um, now I'm talking about the 1820s, the 1830s. Also, America is a capital deficient country at that time. It is a land rich country, but it is relatively labor poor and it is capital poor. There is a push to develop a transportation infrastructure in the United States. The form of canals and then railroads. The United States does not have enough capital to develop these things. So it's British investment that makes possible the development of American infrastructure. And so a lot of American states and American corporations that are emerging at that time are highly dependent on British capital. And, and they really don't want war to erupt. And American cotton exporters are very dependent on the British market. American wheat exporters are very dependent on the British market. So there are such powerful economic interests that lead people to draw back from the brink. And there are a lot of brinks during this period in which there are tensions between Britain and the United States. But the interesting thing is they don't lead to war.

Was there ever a chance of a Union invasion of Canada right after the US Civil War?

There's a chance because that is one of the periods in which there's a lot of tension that's built up. The Northern leaders and the Northern public were very angry at Britain because they had allowed the Confederacy to obtain some very powerful and effective warships. Uh, the British had allowed a recognition of the Confederacy, a partial recognition of the Confederacy in the form of seeing them as a belligerent. And this, this really alienated a lot of Americans toward Britain who felt that Britain was insufficiently supportive of the effort to suppress this rebellion. So there, there was a lot of talk and, and, and there's a lot of triumphalism because the Union forces in April of 1865 have been so triumphant. And the United States has one of the largest and best militaries in the world. Which, which was unprecedented in American history. So there was a lot of talk about, well, let's even scores by taking Canada. But then on the other side of the ledger is that most of the public, while they didn't like Britain and kind of liked the idea of adding Canada, they wanted their boys to come home. It had been a long, hard, deadly war, and most of the people just wanted the army to be demobilized. So it's remarkable how quickly the Union Army was demobilized. And once that happens, any kind of organized invasion of Canada vanishes.

Under the counterfactual, would America have won that war? An invasion of Canada?

Yes, they would've won that war. Yes. Absolutely. At that point, because they had an organized military. You know, the British had essentially about 12,000 troops, and the Union had about a million. So it would've been very one-sided. Now, the British Royal Navy was probably still better than the American Navy, so there would've been a lot of collateral damage to seaports like Boston or New York City because the, the Royal Navy could have come in and done some real damage there. So it would not have been a war in which there was not a lot of suffering on the part of the Americans, but it's a war in which if the goal was to conquer Canada, that could have been readily done.

Flesh out the whole picture for me now. Is this why the British North America Act comes in 1867? Yes.

I mean, the, the Canadian leaders have a set of problems. One of the problems is there was a Canadian Union, but it's just between what we now call Ontario and Quebec. Quebec was Francophone and what would become Ontario is Anglophone. And so there's an uneasy relationship there. Politicians of all sorts say this can't go on. So one of the ideas that he had was let's bring in some more partners. Let's bring in the Maritime Provinces, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and maybe we can also expand to the Pacific. At that time, there was another British colony, British Columbia, and then the Hudson's Bay Company in theory owned all the territory between British Columbia and what's now Ontario. So there were visionaries who said, let's build a transcontinental country, and this might help us solve the Anglophone-Francophone problem. Well, you're bringing in a lot more Anglophones, so one of the things that you offer to the French Canadians is, okay, this will be a looser union. This will be one where you'll have more autonomy for Quebec than you currently have. And that becomes acceptable to most French Canadians. Now, the other thing about it is they're also, Canadian leaders are looking to the south and saying, okay, the immediate danger may be over of an American invasion, but there's gonna be tension again with Britain and the United States, and we need to be in a better position to defend ourselves. The final factor is that British leaders were getting tired of footing the bill for defending Canada, and they want the Canadians to pay for it. So all of those factors lead into the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867.

Short of an American invasion, is there a meaningful counterfactual where Nova Scotia and Newfoundland become part of the United States? Yes. And what does that look like?

Well, what it looks like is the people in the Maritime Provinces weren't so sure that they wanted to be linked with Canada. They had much more robust trading relationship with the United States because they're maritime oriented. There was no railroad at that time. Linking the Maritimes to Canada. So there were a fair number of politicians in Nova Scotia for whom the first option would be, let's just maintain the status quo. We're an independent colony, we're our own little world, and we have trading relations with the United States. Okay. Second option is let's join Canada. And that, that seems a little dodgy to a lot of people. The third option, which some people put on the table, is Well, let's leave the British Empire and join the United States because that's our primary market. So everything was on the table in the 1860s and early 1870s as to what North America would look like in terms of what we now call Canada.

This is a bit of a digression, but how is it that Newfoundland ended up as a kind of independent Crown colony for a big part of the 20th century, given that there was the Act in 1867 they then separate again. What's the story there?

Well, they're in, they're a separate British colony and they have a very small population in the 1860s, 1870s. The economy is essentially just one thing, fishing. And the market for their fish is the British Isles. They don't really see any economic reason to be linked to Canada. They see very powerful reasons to remain linked to the British Empire. So they're not an independent country, but they're a distinctive colony, and they will remain a British colony separate from Canada until the late 1940s.

If we look at Canada today, we see, as you know, extremely high levels of in-migration, people from all over the world. Do you in any way see this as rooted in Canada's earlier history? Do you have a different perspective on that? For you, is it a kind of continuity or reversal or?

Well, Canada has long been a country that has wanted to have more immigrants. And so they have aggressively recruited immigrants ever since the later 19th century. And one of the powerful considerations is they look at the size of their country in terms of just geographic size, and it's just a notch larger than the United States. But most of that country is Arctic and subarctic. But even despite that fact, the population density in Canada within the temperate zone, which is approximately within 200 miles of the American border, that long stretch from the Pacific to Nova Scotia, is still underpopulated relative to the United States. Now, there, there, part of that corridor is well populated. That's particularly in Ontario and Quebec. But points west, points in, in the Maritimes, it seems to Canadians that if they want to develop their economic potential and retain, you know, some sort of relatively modest equilibrium with the United States, that they need more people. And so they've been setting quotas in recent years that are up to 500, 1,000 immigrants annually, which for a country of Canada's size of about 32 million is, is, you know, a significant number. It adds up over time. So right now the proportion of people in Canada who are of foreign birth is, is rising. But there, there's also developing some pushback against that because it is contributing to inflation in the urban centers.

You mean just housing prices and rents?

Housing prices and medical costs too, because they're, they're committed in Canada to public healthcare. It's been a system that's been very, very popular because it's been effective. But right now there are strains on it because of the numbers of people and public funding for it has not quite kept pace with either inflation or the numbers of people who want to use the system.

A very general question. You've written about this in a number of your books, but many early commentators, especially in Britain, in, in Canada, even in America, some of the Founding Fathers, they were very afraid the American Republic was going to collapse, that it was too large, too chaotic. Some thought too democratic. Mm-hmm. What exactly did they get wrong? The people who thought that, what did they fail to see? 'Cause those arguments did not sound crazy at the time, right?

No, they didn't sound crazy at the time. And you know,, and then they weren't crazy to worry about it in that the United States did fall apart in 1860 to 1861, and it took an enormous effort, very expensive effort in terms of lives and money to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And so they had spent a long time ever since 1776 worrying about what actually did happen in 1860 to 1861. So you could say, well, yeah, they fended it off for 90 years, but there's a recurrent sense of crisis within the American Republic through much of that period of time because there's just fear that some region within the country would be growing too powerful, or there's a recurrent fear that the country is getting too large. You're getting Americans that now live on the Pacific Coast. It was an open question whether those American states would spin off and create their own country. So a lot of things still seem to be possible. It's also important to remember that the form of government that they were gambling on, a republic, had not worked very well in the past in Europe, and it had never been tried on this geographic scale. So they don't yet have the confidence that their institutions will be durable. Surviving the Civil War is an enormous confidence booster that the United States will hold together despite its great internal diversity and despite its geographic scale. But before that success in the Civil War, that confidence was absent.

And let's say circa 1780, what were general opinions like concerning the Swiss Confederacy? That was seen as okay, a failure, big success. It doesn't seem it was very wealthy then, right?

Switzerland is, is almost never mentioned in American writings of that period. If they want to talk about republics, they're much more likely to talk about the Netherlands. So Switzerland is kind of out of sight, out of mind for Americans.

And do you think it was by anyone viewed as a success or? Just, it didn't matter.

Well, if they paid attention to it all, then they would think, okay, that's, that's pretty good. They're, they've got a confederacy. It's been fairly long lasting, but it's, um, it's a small country and it was a confederacy that was very loose at that time. That's what a fair number of Americans thought they wanted at the start of the 1780s. But by the end of the 1780s, most of the top leadership— in the American states had come to the conclusion that they needed something stronger than the kind of confederacy that you'd see in Switzerland, that they needed something that could be more truly a national government, one where the government at the center could make decisions that would be binding on all 13 states. So Switzerland recedes as a potential model as the United States experiences so many difficulties with its loose confederation during the 1780s.

How democratic were the Jacksonians anyway? Your mentor, Marvin Meyers, he wrote on this a great deal, as I'm sure you know.

Yes, he did. And he wrote extremely well about it. Okay. It depends on how we want to define a democracy. Let's take the kind of definition that we would use today in which we're saying, well, it's the vast majority of adults get to participate in making the political decisions that will affect them. By that standard, the Jacksonians aren't particularly democratic because they, they're not keen to expand the vote to African Americans, to say the least. And they were not keen to open up political rights to women. So the great majority of adults in the United States were not included in the political system as direct participants. Now, If we say, okay, by the standards of the 19th century in the transatlantic world, women were, were just not considered to be political participants anywhere. And we're just talking about the male electorate. Then you would say the Jacksonians were democratizers in that in most of the states, they have broadened the electorate by eliminating the property requirement to vote. But they have not eliminated the gender requirement that you be male, and they have not eliminated the racial requirement that you be white. African Americans, even where free, could vote only in the New England states at that time. And, and in New York, if they met a property requirement, which was pretty high. So it's, it's not what we would consider democratic, but it is more democratic than what had preceded the Jacksonian.

Insofar as you view the Jacksonian period differently from your mentor, how does that difference shape your view of 1850 to 1873, which is what you cover in your new book?

Well, I agree with, with Meyers on most things. What I might, you know, Meyers was not, is of a generation where the focus was less on race than it has become in thinking about American history. So that's not an important dimension of his one great book, Jacksonian Persuasion. So the role of American expansion into the West at the expense of Native peoples is just what's not on his agenda. Now that's not to criticize him. It's to say he was focused on political culture, and that political culture he brilliantly illuminated. But if we expand out the story and literally to think about American expansion, then it's, it looks like a somewhat different story, not an entirely different story, cuz the political culture is very much as Marvin Meyers described. But if we also bring in just how obsessed American leaders were at that time with racial difference and at their sense of being beleaguered by the British Empire, in that there's this very defensive expansionism that American leaders commit the country to. And so I would say that that expansionism, the bill that has to be paid for it comes due in the 1850s in that the United States had had a magnificent military success over a weak country, Mexico, during the late 1840s. They have conquered 40% of Mexico, extremely valuable potential territory, including California, Arizona, New Mexico. And then the issue becomes, okay, what kind of labor system will be allowed by law in this conquered territory? Will it be the labor system that prevails in the Northern states of free labor, or will it be the labor, the more mixed labor system of the South where enslaved people are a critical element of the economy? And these economic questions are linked to visions of what's the good society. Northerners had, had become quite committed to the notion that they had a superior system, and Southerners had become quite committed to the notion that their system was superior at favoring white men and at favoring Republican government. So the, the two systems have evolved in parallel, but now they're gonna come into conflict over what sort of labor system will prevail in this newly conquered territory.

And is a civil war inevitable by that point?

Well, historians don't like to say that anything's inevitable, but I'll come closer to it than, than the great majority of historians would do. It's very hard for me to imagine how the leaders of that time, given how committed they were to different systems,, and how committed they were to the notion that only their system could support free government, that I don't quite see how they could have reached a compromise. There was an effort in early 1861 to reach a compromise that would've said slavery is protected forever and the federal government can never touch it, that the West would be divided between the two systems, the geographic line that would be extended across the continent, and that there would be certain restrictions on what the federal government could do in terms of protecting industries with high tariffs. And neither side was willing to accept that compromise. There were people who wanted the compromise, particularly in the, in the border states, places like Kentucky and, and Virginia that were, were kind of keen for that kind of compromise. But, but the most of the North had become committed to the notion that the United States was a nation where the majority should rule. And, uh, the deeper South had become committed to the proposition that they could not be united in the same country with a Northern public that favored a true nation. And so I, I just, I, I really don't see the juncture between 1850 and 1861 where any other kind of arrangement could have averted a conflict.

How did proximity to Mexico destabilize slavery in Texas? Mexico had abolished slavery.

Now they do have a coercive labor system. It's called debt peonage, and it involves many Mexicans, but it is not the same thing as buying and selling human beings in perpetuity, meaning into future generations. So enslaved people in Texas are relatively close to Mexico. It's not an easy to get across the border, but you do have several thousand African Americans who are escaping from slavery in Texas and going into Mexico. And this is perceived by Texans and indeed by Southerners generally as a major problem. And they want the United States government to be putting pressure on Mexico to extradite the escaped former slaves. And Mexico refuses to do so. So it is a point of tension between the United States and Mexico during the 1850s.

When the French occupy and partially conquer Mexico in the 1860s, what exactly do they think they're going to accomplish? Is it about mining or trade or just desire for empire?

Well, it's, it's all of the above and it's not entirely well thought out. The prime mover for this is the emperor of France at that time, Napoleon III. III. He's a nephew of the more famous Napoleon I. And Napoleon III has very grandiose ideas about rebuilding a French empire, and he sees an opportunity in Mexico. And he thinks this would position France to become the dominant power throughout the Americas, especially to the south. So he has this notion of Latin peoples, meaning Spanish and French and Portuguese speakers, should all hang together and that they're, they're Catholics and that the United States in its Republican system is a problem and needs to be contained. And that he, so he thought that he would be capturing a lot of trade for France through these, this geopolitical system of building solidarity with the Latin peoples of Latin America. However, he's plunging his country into a guerrilla war that will be extremely deadly and extremely expensive, and he will never be able to achieve the kind of stability in Mexico that would be essential to fulfill his grandiose vision.

And in your understanding, how does that temporary French occupation sway the rest of Mexican history?

Well, There had been an ongoing civil war between the two political movements in Mexico that were conveniently called the Liberals and the Conservatives. Conservatives were committed to very traditional institutions. In other words, supporting the Catholic Church, supporting the military, supporting landlords. The Liberals were modernizers. In that they wanted to have a republic where voters would choose their rulers. They wanted an economy that was freed from traditional restraints imposed by the church and by the landlords. They wanted a, a 19th century liberal system in which individuals were free to compete for economic benefit. So there are two very powerfully different visions for what Mexico should be. By the French intervening on behalf of the conservatives and then losing, they discredit the conservative movement for a long time. And so it means that the liberal movement, while they don't fulfill all their promises by any means, for example, they don't really succeed in taking down all the landlords. They do take down those landlords that had been most conspicuously supportive of the conservatives and the French imperialists. But Mexico's gonna continue to struggle with enormous inequality throughout the rest of the 19th century. But the liberals do establish principles of more free elections, not completely free, but more free elections and of a free press and of a legal system, which is going to be more equitable. Than what had preceded it. So I, I would say that the triumph of the liberals in Mexico under the leadership of Benito Juárez is one of the most important events of the 19th century in North America.

And until Porfirio Díaz later, why is there so little interest in building up national infrastructure in Mexico?

Oh, there's very powerful interest in doing that, but the problem is, again, capital. It's also rural security. Mexico has a major problem with banditry in the countryside 'cause there's so much poverty. And so starting the 1850s, Mexican leaders, whether conservative or liberal, are desperate to build railroads. But the striking thing is they've got almost no railroads. Also, the geography of Mexico is not nearly as favorable for building long-distance railroads than is the United States. Very mountainous, very arid. In many parts of the country, the population is so thin on the ground that it's not economically sustainable to run a railroad line. Lack of capital, governments that were unstable. And it's only with the triumph of Juárez that it's, that it's clear that there is a, a government that can be a partner with American investors. And that's when the railroad system starts to develop at a more rapid clip.

Given what you know about the history of Mexico, does that make you more bullish or more bearish on the country today? It's had enormous potential for a long time. In some ways it's realizing the potential, but one hears, well, drug gangs maybe rule a quarter to a third of the territory. Speaking of rural banditry, how do you view the current moment based on everything you know?

Well, I can't pretend to have the kind of expertise on Mexico today that, I mean, there are other people that you could consult with. So I'm just giving you my superficial impressions.

But those other people will know less about the history than you. Well, that's right. So I want your marginal product.

Well, what I would, again, I don't wanna say, I've not ever been to Mexico, so I am very hesitant to say very much. My impression from what I do read and so forth and compare it with the past history is that Mexico on balance has been in the 20th century, early 21st century, economically successful, that its political institutions have undergone a lot of stress during that period of time, but that they're currently doing okay. Our political system is undergoing a lot of stress right now. So it's— I would be very— I would be wary of an analysis that says Mexico is some kind of basket case. It's a mixed bag. As you said, there are parts of the country where the nation-state does not have full security. And then there are parts of the country where, where people are doing very well and the government is relatively secure. So I would be hesitant to go beyond that.

Given what you know about earlier Caribbean history, how do you view the Haitian instability, which is almost all the time?

Yeah, no, that, that, that is clearly a very tragic and long-lasting situation. One of the sources of Haiti's problems, I'm not saying it's the only source, but one of the big sources is that they had waged a revolution to achieve their independence and then none of the countries would recognize them as independent because they were fearful of the precedent of enslaved people rising up in revolt and killing their masters. Uh, and also frankly, the, the French had seen a lot of property that had belonged to their nationals wiped out by this revolution. So France refuses to recognize Haiti unless Haiti will pay an enormous financial sum. I can't off the top of my head tell you what that amount is, but it is an enormous amount and it then commits the leadership of Haiti to adopting a more coercive system that compels its people to become plantation laborers again, to produce crops that can be exported to earn foreign capital so that this can be turned over to France. So it's an enormous burden that Haiti never gets out from under. The 20th century situation is so complicated, and I have not looked at that fully, so I'm just saying what, from the 19th century, has contributed to the impoverishment of Haiti and the establishment of a political tradition of authoritarianism. And it's those two problems that still remain so evident in Haiti today.

That the Dominican Republic has done relatively well, do you view that as an issue of deep roots or just a series of later different accidental forces from a historical point of view?

Well, in the 19th century, you would not have said that the Dominican Republic was doing well. It reverts back to Spanish control during the American Civil War. And so what I would say is that the Dominican Republic never has this extractive financial commitment that turns out to be so burdensome on Haiti. At that time, the country was called Santo Domingo, meaning the Dominican Republic. And so if, if you were in the 1870s, you would be hard-pressed to say which of these two countries is gonna have the better economic future. But if you look really close and you think, well, this debt burden that Haiti is carrying is probably gonna be the difference in the longer run. And it is one of the factors that has led Haiti to lag behind the Dominican Republic.

Do you think there are deep roots to the now longstanding Cuban communist rule period, or is that again just something that happened later?

In the 19th century, Cuba is still part of the Spanish Empire and will remain part of that empire until 1898 when the United States conquers it. It's a period of great instability because many Cuban leaders want to be independent. They're looking at the other countries of Latin America— Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, on and on— as having achieved their independence. And there is the perspective by many Cuban leaders that they would be a more prosperous country if they were not being ruled by the authority of Spain. But Spain is able to maintain its control over Cuba until there's an American invasion. And then the United States kind of reneges on its initial commitments to recognize a full Cuban independence. It's, it's very grudging, the concessions that the United States makes to the Cuban people. So it builds up a kind of resentment toward the United States. They wanted the United States to be their liberator. Initially, it looked like the United States was their liberator, and then there is a long period of the frustration of those aspirations. So I would say those are aspects that do contribute to the rise of a future revolution that will end up being a communist revolution in Cuba.

What do you think Tocqueville got most wrong about America? I'm more impressed by what he got right about it.

I guess what you could say is that what he— he did predict there would be a civil war, but he thought it would be a civil war that would be purely along racial lines. Now, Race, of course, is very, very important to the American Civil War, but I don't think he would have predicted that it would be a North-South conflict. He thought it would be a civil war within all of the states. So I'd say that's the one area where he didn't get it quite right.

How good a novel is Uncle Tom's Cabin? We know it's historically very, very important, but just to sit down and read it, what should someone today think about it?

If you're looking for a good read today, I would not recommend Uncle Tom's Cabin. If you want to understand sentimental culture of the 19th century, then you should read Uncle Tom's Cabin because it's very much pitched in that vein. It's a vein that, that most of us readers today just are not that interested in.

Going back to the beginnings of your career, in which regards was Maine ever the frontier state of the Northeast?

Oh, it was very much the frontier state throughout the colonial period and on into the early 19th century. So if you were in Massachusetts and you were looking for a place where you could go and get some farmland, there would be relatively low in cost because hadn't been developed as farmland. You just apply your labor to create a farm. Then the easiest place for you to get to was Maine on into the 1830s and '40s. So it, it, it's in the odd position of being along the Atlantic coast, and yet it's still a frontier.

What's the closest thing America has to a frontier today? It's not space anymore, if it ever was. Well, you know, it's not Maine.

No, it's not Maine. I certainly hope Americans will not regard going into space as something that millions of people are going to be able to do and be able to survive on, say, Mars. And I think that's a complete folly and waste of money. So The reality is we live on this planet, which has a very thin atmosphere, and that and our geomagnetic field and the existence of a moon are rare things. Certainly they're unique in our solar system. And what's beyond that is utterly inhospitable, to say the least, to our bodies. So there is no real frontier anymore anywhere in the world. Yes, there are places that are more thinly settled than others. You could say Alaska is still a frontier, but large numbers of people are not gonna be able to expand into Alaska. It's not gonna be able to support a lot of people. And so as a consequence, we're kind of stuck on this planet and we have to figure out how to make the best of it and sustain it.

I have just some general questions about doing history. Just a simple kind of physicalist question. What's the most difficult thing? I don't mean intellectually, but just on your body or on your eyes or on your behind. The hardest thing about doing the work of history. Your eyes.

That's, yeah, you're, you're reading a lot of old documents that are written in a cursive and often by people who have a very different style of cursive than we do today. A lot of cases you're looking at stuff that's, uh, on the computer screen or on a microfilm reel. So that's the hardest thing. Now, also just sitting still is something that I think is easier for people of our generation than it is for younger people. So, you know, being able to kind of isolate yourself in an archive, there's nothing that makes me, very few things I should say in this world that make me happier than doing that. But it's not for everybody to do that. Kind of work. I know some young people who just have said, you know, I tried graduate education in this field, but I just, I, being alone researching in an archive is just not for me.

If you meet a young person and they're a potentially promising historian, of course they should be smart, they should want to work hard, but beyond the obvious factors and good eyes, what else do you look for in the person? How do you spot that magic something?

Well, it is, it's not easy. And for example, I used to run the graduate program at the University of California, Davis, a graduate program in history. And there was a young man who wanted into our program and on paper he didn't look quite as good as some of the other applicants. So we weren't able to come up with financial support for him. We admitted him. I sort of thought he wouldn't come, but he came anyway. And then he turned out to be the very best graduate student. We had. What I would say is that it's very hard by the kind of just exam scores or a paper that they've written or letters of recommendation. You're making your decisions on those, on that basis. And they're not always the best predictors. And it's hard to say what would be the best predictor. In this case, this, this was a guy that was just really driven. To work hard. If a professor told him to do something differently, he figured out how to do it differently. That can be hard to find, I would say.

Now, your PhD is from Brandeis. That's a very good school, but it's not a top 5 school in the traditional sense. And yet you've become, you know, a top-tier historian. Is that harder to do today, coming out of a good but not very, very top school?

I would say it's harder today, because, okay, we're talking about people who are historians in a college or university setting, and the number of job openings for historians has shrunk dramatically. Lots of complicated reasons for why that's happened, but the general answer is that there's a much smaller public investment in higher education, particularly in the liberal arts. And particularly in non-quantitative parts on the liberal arts. And so there's just fewer opportunities out there for somebody to work their way in. And when that happens, then the marginal advantage, that is the prestige of the school you went to, becomes more important in the competition for a shrinking number of jobs. So if I were to go on the job market today as a young person with the particular abilities and inabilities that I had when I went on it in the past, I'm, I'm not sure I would get a job in academia.

What is it you tell graduate students in history, or what should we tell them? Do you tell them, well, your chance of getting a good job is 1 divided by some number that's a little scary, or How is this marketed to people?

Well, I can't say how all places market it. I can just say what I would say and what most of the people I do know say is if you're going to get a PhD in history with the notion that this is going to assure you of a tenure-track job in a place where you wanna live, that's not gonna happen, or it's very unlikely that it will happen. Now, there are people who are getting PhDs in histories who are finding other places that will employ their skills, working for foundations, working for local or the federal government, sometimes working for corporations, which will want to have an in-house historian. So there is some growth in fields beyond academia, what has come to be called public history. So it's not entirely hopeless. But what I say to you is if your vision of your future is that you must be an academic and you want it to be in history, I would say that's very, very unlikely it's gonna work out given current conditions.

How will large language models change how we do historical research?

Well, I have to confess I'm not that familiar with how, how these large language models would work. So I'm, I'm gonna punt on that question.

But say you could wear glasses, and I think this will be possible in less than 5 years, and the glasses record everything you read and put it into a database that you can search just using your voice. So everything you've read in your entire life, you would have on file, searchable. You could organize it any way you want. I would think that would change things. I don't know how, not being a historian. Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, given your description of it, it would change things radically. I'm trying to resist being, you know, the old curmudgeon who says the way we did things in my day are the way things always should be. So what I would say is it does seem that AI and the various other technological revolutionary measures that we're right on in the midst of right now in terms of managing data and analyzing data is going to render the individual human mind of less value in the overall process. And it is going to, it seems to me, is going to diminish the role of, therefore, of individuality and diversity in analyzing data and telling stories about the past, which is what we do at Sysstories. We tell stories that we think, and hopefully our readers agree, are meaningful for understanding the past in relationship to their current situation. So all I can say is it does seem like we're in the midst of a very radical change. I kind of like the system of analyzing data that I grew up figuring out, and I'll be sad to see it go.

How can an educated person best use YouTube to learn history without going too badly astray.

If you're reliant exclusively on YouTube, good luck. To do history really well is to have a sense that you, you need to see very different perspectives on events that you want to understand, and you need to get as close to the actual original sources as you can. The fact that so much information is now available online is a two-edged sword. It's mostly good, but there's also lots of misinformation that's woven into it, and it can be very hard to tell the information from the misinformation. And then there's also a kind of notion that everything is already there online, when in point of fact, lots of information about the past still only exists in archives. And it's also the fact that archives themselves are only a partial survival mechanism for all the things that did happen in the past, um, most of which were not well documented if we get beyond top political leadership. So it's endlessly difficult, I think, to try to get into a history that is truly true, given how it's difficult.

But you have some serious talks on YouTube, which I think represent your views quite accurately. It's you, right? Yeah. Is a typical person better off reading an hour of your book or listening to an hour of you on YouTube, which by the way, they might do at 1.5x, right? So it could take less than an hour.

Right. Well, your original question was not, could people get history just by seeing me on YouTube? That's a different answer.

But you could just put into YouTube search, you know, different historians at Harvard, at Princeton, at University of Virginia, and just listen to their talks. I mean, is that a better thing for people to do than to read their books?

I would say no, but, uh, again, I'm of an older generation where I think books are, are the best place to get information. But a lot of, most young people would not agree with me and, um, you know, a fair number of older people would rather listen to something than to read it. I do think when you read, if you read with some patience, that there's the possibility to absorb information, a fuller range of information. I mean, I often will give talks and, you know, people seem to like them, but I'm not always so sure that they've come away from that talk with as deep an understanding as I think they would if they read the same thing as a text.

I have one more question, but let me just repeat my enthusiasm for your book by Allen Taylor, American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850 to 1873. I've also read most of Allen's books and find them all to be worthwhile. I know many other smart people who are big fans. So Allen, thank you for chatting with me, but last question. What is it you will do next?

Well, I'm working on a project which is about a set of plantations in Virginia in the early 19th century in the part of Virginia where Nat Turner's revolt occurred. So it's, it's plunged me into the archives, into this fabulously rich collection, which has not been used by historians before. And I'm hoping to tell a story that will show the ways in which environmental constraints, And the market economy and slavery all intersect and contribute to the kinds of tensions that would culminate in Nat Turner's revolt in 1831.

Alan Taylor, thank you very much. Thank you, Tyler. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.