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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
the pre-war army had been 13,000 soldiers.
And so those 2.1 million men under arms that win the civil war are volunteers.
That is, they are doing this not out of a, I mean, there is a draft, but the vast majority of them volunteer.
And, you know, beyond the vote, democracies work by self-action, by people organizing themselves.
And that's one of those, that's lessons, that's a lesson I think as well here.
Certainly, I think Lincoln hoped so, and he obviously isn't alive to see that happen.
But as you noted in his opening, you know, the opening part of the Gettysburg Address, he talks about a nation conceived in liberty.
And importantly, at another point, you know, one of the things that Lincoln says that's always resonated with me is he says, in giving freedom to the slave, we enrich or enhance freedom for everyone.
The ending of slavery is not merely something that affects enslaved people, but it affects everyone because it changes in a qualitative way the nature of what liberty is and means.
And the Civil War does not, of course, bring true equality, but by establishing a democratic government, and certainly in the 14th Amendment, by acknowledging, and that's essential because the citizenship part that you mentioned is what basically undoes the Dred Scott decision
Dred Scott had been decided in 1857, and in it, the Supreme Court said, black people cannot be citizens.
And it's bad law at the time, and most people say that because they had been citizens of states, they had voted, they owned property, they participated in courts, but the Supreme Court sort of wipes all of that out.
So you need a 14th Amendment
undo that and to establish a uniform set of citizenship.
And then beyond that, the promise of due process, that there will be equal justice under the law for everyone.
I mean, there are two ways in which the United States, there is a sharp disjuncture in which we can talk about the Civil War as a second American revolution.
One of which is here with the kind of commitment to equality, to a colorblind law.
And then the other, and this is what Greg Downs emphasizes in his book, is the way in which those amendments are adopted isn't really the way that constitutional amendments are supposed to be adopted.
And this is true of the creation of West Virginia as a state.
I used to live in West Virginia.
Showing 541–560 of 924 · page 28 of 47
← Previous
Next →