Aaron Sheehan-Dean

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924 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 24 Aug

Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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American History Hit · What Made America? Victory in the Civil War · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

And Lincoln, of course, is not alive for the 14th Amendment.

But in his final speech, the one at which John Wilkes Booth is present, Lincoln famously says,

This is a kind of ad hoc speech off the back of the White House on the night that he's going to die.

He's giving a kind of speech to well-wishers before he goes to the theater.

And he says we should begin thinking about enfranchising black men, says, for instance, the very intelligent among them and those who have fought valiantly in the ranks that they merit the franchise, which, of course, doesn't come officially until the 15th Amendment.

And that's the thing Wilkes Booth supposedly turns to a colleague and says, you know, now I'm going to kill him.

This is the thing that has has tipped the scales now into murder and assassination.

But so Lincoln does see and knows that the United States is going to change in a very fundamental way and that the war is propelling that.

He's not necessarily sugarcoating it, but he is not sort of leading with that.

And there's lots of debate.

And I think we've talked about, you know, what would have happened had Lincoln lived

Reconstruction is a thorny and complicated question.

But Lincoln is too smart a lawyer not to understand that ending slavery through the violence of war, that the repudiation of secession in a way for him, that is by beating the South and by preserving the Union, you are really ensuring that the Republic lives on.

And that for Lincoln is really the most important continuity is that that is preserved.

And I think for Lincoln, it isn't just a question of these things being stacked chronologically.

That is, if you don't preserve self-government in 1861, then you're never going to get a

You can self-govern your way to expanding the franchise to include women or to include people of African descent.

Those expansions of democracy are contingent on a majoritarian democracy.

And this is what the Civil War had threatened.

And Lincoln had said this.

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