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
So you had a Democratic Party, which was firmly ensconced in what would become the Confederacy.
The Democratic Party was based in the slave states.
Of course, there were Northern Democrats, too.
And then the Whig Party, which had been the party of Henry Clay, the party of development, the party of economic growth, that party, as we said earlier, had many different factions in it.
It had some abolitionists who later became Republicans.
It had some anti-immigrant groups, know-nothings.
It had various different groups in it, some who were just business people seeking to build the economy and move west.
And balancing all those factions for Whig presidents became very difficult.
That's why the party ultimately came apart.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, he believed that you could kick the can down the road, that this emerging conflict could be avoided by simply preventing one side from fighting the other.
And that's why he's often referred to as a spineless jellyfish.
So Lincoln and others believe that what Buchanan should have done is he should have undertaken various measures to try to either buy the slaves from the South or provide Southerners with some other incentive not to demand the expansion of slavery to the West.
And they believe that he could have bought them off one way or another.
Right.
And I think what you can say about Buchanan was that he always hoped for the best, but did very little to make that outcome possible.
if I was,
To give him credit, Buchanan, I think, believed the president couldn't solve these problems, that it wasn't within the power of the presidency.
I mean, what distinguished him from Lincoln was Lincoln believed the presidency had to be changed and he would change it to solve this problem.
He's in eastern Tennessee.
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