Aaron Sheehan-Dean

speaker

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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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

I mean, even Robert E. Lee famously in a letter to his son in January of 1861, Lee says, secession is the essence of anarchy.

And Lincoln said, you know, what secession will do because it is in response to his election as president.

And no one disputed that election.

They didn't like the outcome, but there was no sense that it had happened irregularly.

Lincoln was lawfully elected and they simply, the southerners, white southerners didn't like the outcome of the election.

So they decided to blow up the system.

And what Lincoln said at the time was, if that is allowed to stand, as he said in his first inaugural, if we can make the appeal from the ballot to the bullet, then self-government is gone and democracy, which is really in its modern phase, only exists in the United States, the last best hope of earth, he called it, it will be gone forever because all of the conservatives in Europe

And it's important for listeners to remember where the fate of democracy as a practice is in 1860.

And the most recent major test had come in the 1848 revolutions, the democratic efforts in England and Germany and Italy and France, all of which are repudiated and conservatives win that moment and they reestablish empire in a much stronger way.

So over the 1850s, it's really just in America.

And so for Lincoln, by preserving democracy,

You can then do all sorts of other things.

That's why for him, that's always the most important accomplishment.

Once you preserve democracy, you can then end slavery.

Once you preserve democracy, that democracy can decide we want to expand the franchise first to include black men, then to include all women, then to include the direct election of U.S.

senators, then to lower the voting age.

That is the kind of circle of democracy expands.

But it only expands if democracy itself has been proven to be the form.

And that's what the Civil War itself accomplishes.

It is.

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