Jeremi Suri
speaker
329 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2023
last heard 7 Sep
Jeremi Suri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah.
Well, so, I mean, the challenge Zachary Taylor had is that he was a military hero, but he was not a politician.
He was not a very good politician.
And the task before the country in the 1840s was somehow to stitch together this pulling apart that was happening between slaveholding states and non-slaveholding states over the question of westward expansion.
Zachary Taylor, I mean, he didn't have very much of an opportunity.
He was president for such a short time, but also he didn't have the political skills to do this.
I think that's right.
But I think you can also say that it's hard to imagine California not coming in as a state.
And so what it required were political skills to provide some basis for Southerners to see a future under his presidency.
And of course, that didn't happen.
So Millard Fillmore is a really interesting individual.
He's from New York, so he's sort of in the belly of the beast of American economic growth at this time.
But yeah, he's a compromiser and he's, in a sense, a classic Whig in that he believes that you can build a compromise where the economic pie will grow for everyone in the country.
The challenge is that the compromise that he creates, the Compromise of 1850, as you said, this series of compromises, it really keeps the slave states in control of Congress.
And that's a real problem for Northerners, for someone like a young Abraham Lincoln, because it means that there still is the unresolved question of slavery in new Western territories.
I think that's an issue, right?
I mean, the Whig Party became a large umbrella of many different subgroups.
And there is an analog to the Democratic Party today.
Absolutely.
And you get in Kansas two different governments, right?
Showing 81–100 of 329 · page 5 of 17
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