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
And so this is the beginning of Bleeding Kansas, as it was called.
And that is the existence of a free state government, which is a non-slave government, and a pro-slave government.
And they literally are fighting each other.
You could argue the Civil War begins on the ground in places like Kansas.
I mean, the Fugitive Slave Act is really important and it's forgotten by a lot of people.
But this was the legislation that gave Southerners the right to use federal militia forces as well as state forces to go into northern areas.
and recapture escaped slaves.
This was seen as an affront to the sovereignty of northern states.
And so now you had northerners arguing for states' rights as well as southerners, right?
Massachusetts citizens said, we have the right to police our own state.
You have no right, federal government and
South Carolina to send your forces into our state to arrest former slaves, whereas the South Carolinians, for example, said, no, that's our property that is absconded to your territory.
It does echo some of our debates about state sovereignty in the 21st century.
And that's why these presidents are generally criticized, because they're criticized for being inactive.
They're criticized for not being involved enough in trying to resolve what were these centrifugal forces, I should say, pulling apart different states.
Franklin Pierce is one of our worst presidents because he tried to deny the power of the abolitionist movement.
I mean, even though he himself was from a northern state, his sympathy for southern slaveholders and his unwillingness to see that abolitionist politics, whether he agreed with them or not, were coming to dominate, thinking about not just society, but economics in the north.
He was, in a sense, a northern turncoat.
I think that's right.
It also was a function of what the two party system looked like at that time.
Showing 101–120 of 329 · page 6 of 17
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