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Radio War Nerd #295 — The US Civil War, Part 1: Count Adam Gurowski (Patreon)

Published:
2021-09-18 00:26:41
Edited:
2021-10-23 14:26:23
Imported:
2026-06
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Recorded: September 10, 2021

To kick off RWN's sixth year in the pod biz, we launch the War Nerd's much-requested Civil War series. This isn't gonna be your tragi-weepy Ken Burns Civil War series however: this is an unabashedly Blue-shaded take on the Civil War, for reasons that will become increasingly clear. In this inaugural episode, the War Nerd provides some background to the war, and introduces us to a fascinating yet forgotten figure: Count Adam Gurowski, the Polish emigre who, well before anyone else, managed to get the war right.

Total time: 1:33:53

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

Daniel Lennon

Made it about 10 minutes into the civil war discussion, the sheer concentration of moral condemnation got old pretty quickly. Enough of this.

tMinozaJ

you could always just go watch Ken Burns and cry yourself to sleep about the sad lost cause or whatever you wanna tell yourself, Daniel. why is it bad to condemn the Confederacy, which is extremely condemnable and is constantly apologized for by vast swathes of our current population?

Aidan Dean-Jones

we should have lined up and killed every last confederate soldier

Keanu

If you dig deep into American women's history, you'll find much of the same sentiment among men who are champions of women's rights. On the one hand, they believe that women should have most of the legal privileges of men, but they believe it because women (even though they are intellectually inferior to men) are morally superior and can work to raise the moral fiber of the nation. The writings are paternalistic and patronizing, but at the same time these men were actively working to give women equal opportunity to participate in the political, civic, and education world run by men.

Mike

Let's fucking gooooooooo

NYCM&AHole

Lol what three hours of sleep per night?

Lo

Yyesss

Alexander Martin

Matt Karp “This Vast Southern Empire”!!! Kindred spirit and amazing resource. Please interface!!!

HeyB00B00

I've been waiting all year for this one! The contrarian in me wants to dislike your hard blue-slant but it really only takes one moment of remembering what the South was fighting for and how Confederate soldiers rounded up blacks as they moved into Pennsylvania and sent them South to be slaves to make you go "God, fuck these fucking assholes forever." And turn Pickett's Charge into a realllll dark comedy.

Olen Koira

did you get The Garbage Plate?

Dylan Tucker

Am I crazy to think the northern states were in no position to in any way threaten the southern slaver oligarchs until the north industrialized? Without the Atlantic industrial/trade/diplomatic capacity the north would never have won.

d.s

Phenomenal, can't wait for the next installment.

David Andrews

Fabulous episode here gentlemen. I highly recommend fellow listeners listen to Professor David Blight's lectures on this period if you want to get into the weeds.

William Brame

Might be my favorite episode so far.

Kevin Walsh

I think they could have done it by the 1830s or 1840s if they were prepared to encourage slave rebellions and arm black southerners. The south's reliance on slave labour was a massive liability in wartime.

La Synthèse Humaine

loved this episode! can't wait for the follow ups! a much better clint civil war movie is "the beguiled" - in which clint, playing a union soldier, drives the repressed, horny members of a confederate girls' boarding school insane

etienne

so about the Northern Abolitionists. It's always bugged me that they'd take this position, with the seriousness than they did, because in the real world no one really goes to the mat in order to be nice to some people way over there that you never see. And then Matt from chapo put down a pretty interesting reason why they'd want abolition, which I'll try to summarize here: As "free" land west was starting to dry up, peasants in the north wanted to break down the power of plantation owners, who they imagined would soak up all the land and cultivate it using slave labour, instead of leaving it to free men to do subsistence farming on it. Does that make any sense? Otherwise what other reason would there be for a white northerner to be anti slavery to the extent of going to die to end it?

Mark Ames

goddamnit, not yet, but duty calls

Olen Koira

What's the restaurant that has the ground beef based hot sauce?

online Leftist Archive Project (LARP)

That makes perfect sense. I think a lot of historians have thought along those lines actually. Although it's totally possible that the material explanation AND a healthy dose of idealism were both there at the same time.

Gordon Schmidt

The European immigrants who fought for the union were so cool. Adam Gurowski, Ivan Turchin, August Willich....

etienne

also the bit about the afro-americans prospering with the yoke of the white lifted off them is fantastic. Not the first time I read that black slaves with their hands in the ground consistently came up with very smart and efficient techniques that the white masters wouldn't have found out about even if it raised their yields by half, and usually didn't bother with even after being told about

Shane Papendorf

So pumped for this! Thanks for being the best pod in the business

etienne

took a while for us to internalize the effects of tea and coffee. For a 18th century human one cup of earl grey with some sugar was like huffing half a gram of blow.

Alex Muir

Great episode - I'm hooked. I had just assumed that Victorians drank in racism with their mother's milk, but then you bring Gurowski back to life to prove it wasn't always so. "Africo-Americans" in the 1860s!

NYCM&AHole

Imagine if they’d discovered pervitin

NYCM&AHole

Btw John you were like 90-95% there with the pronunciation of Hohensalzburgfestung

Brendan Mason

I'm trying to find a copy/set of Gurowski's diaries and I'm coming up bust. Anyone help a fellow war nerd out, here?

9874123

The book about Jacob Fugger sounded very interesting - could you post its title?

Jake Staniels

Very much enjoyed this one, being introduced to Gurowski and his diaries. Really appreciate John’s unflinching derision of the Confederacy and his lamentations that they never got nearly enough of what they so surely deserved. If Bleeding Kansas is going to be touched on I am very hopeful, in this unabashedly Blue Civil War series, to hear something like John Brown Did Nothing Wrong. The Pottawatomie massacre as they call it was nothing more than several well targeted political assassinations, ugly business for sure, but not the random unhinged blood frenzy it’s made out to be.

Ryne

thank you for introducing Gurowski. finally an american civil war perspective that isn’t unbearable to engage with.

xxx

In any conflict there's never just a single motivation. That's reductive thinking

etienne

yeah of course, I was just wondering what were those motivations, besides slavery bad. Which felt too reductive to me, for sure

Robert Rowe

It's never too late to hang some insurrectionists. FREE KINDLE DOWNLOAD FROM AMAZON https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0084004QI?storeType=ebooks Count Adam Gurowski, diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 "On doit à son pays sa fortune, sa vie, mais avant tout la Vérité" "In this Diary I recorded what I heard and saw myself, and what I heard from others, on whose veracity I can implicitly rely."

Steve Mathews

Hey...I just read "Rise and Kill First" by Ronen Bergman about Israel's 70-yr old targeted killing program. Thought yall might like it!

Steve Mathews

By the way...I got kicked off Twitter by refusing to delete my tweet saying they should have hanged General Lee. I credit the War Nerd for freeing me from that digital circle-jerk. Thank you.

Ander Pierce

I've been enjoying Rich and Tracey's Civil War podcast during my shifts, and was thrilled to see a RWN civil war series start. I saved this episode for the last hour and a half of the day to make those molasses like hours go a little quicker. Now that I've finished the episode I have to say that Gurowski is a hero (I'll hang a poster of him above the bed, and my lady loves me enough that it might even stay there a week or two), the civil war should always be framed as the blue and the bad, and Brecher brings an analysis of our conflict which our history books desperately need and lack. Love as always from this war nerd, Ander

Ander Pierce

The Pottawatomie massacre was exactly the medicine needed to remind the border ruffians that the murder would be met with murder and the sack of Lawrencville would not go unpunished.

Jake Staniels

Yes for sure and just want to add that while a response to the sacking of Lawrence was certainly motivation enough, there were several other factors like several murders on the roads of Kansas; as well as news reaching Kansas of Sumner's beating by Brooks at his desk in the Senate (though the decision to act had likely already been made by JB.) JB targeted the agents of the Shawnee legislature local to where he and his family were living. The Sherman brothers would have all been killed had they been able to locate Henry and Pete on that night, but only William died for hosting at their settlement a court that issued warrants for members of the Brown family for having been open abolitionists, which had been outlawed with a punishment of five years hard labor. The other families targeted, the Doyles, were close associates with the Shermans and had a father and son who served on that court as a member of the grand jury and as the bailiff; and Wilkinson was a member of the Shawnee legislature and served on that court as the prosecuting district attorney.

Dan Kolbert

The echoes with today’s Dem’s treatment of the far right wing are depressing.

Mark Ames

Richest Man Who Ever Lived

Crosley Querin

As much as I love #1 of a series I equally hate it as I finish it and want to move to the next one.

Jason Thompson

I had to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in college. I don’t remember much, besides that (despite its obvious good intentions & good influence on society) it’s definitely racist by a modern context. Lots of terminology for the different levels of Blackness of fhe Black characters: mulatto, quadroon, octaroon (!), etc. And while fhe portrayals are sympathetic this vaguely effects how they are presented and their agency in the story, so to speak, Something different on display than the One Drop Rule mentality but….. anyway I came away with the impression this was just the language & prejudice of the majority of northern White abolitionists.

Robert Rowe

Thanks, downloaded it. Added to "Final Judgement" by Michael Collins, a very depressing picture emerged for me.

Benke

Gurowski gets a lot of flak in his native Poland - for understandable reasons. He's a both polish and catholic apostate. Also as to Marx's accusation - it seems that it's most likely that he was receiving regular pension from the Russian Embassy in US. One can consider this a stain on his reputation.

Steff

AAA episode.

Jelle Haandrikman

Great episode. It gives a great perspective for someone on the European continent on what went on during the American civil war.

PW

One observation in this episode really struck me. The one about the Southern Establishment actively working against building and maintaining infrastructure. You still see that today. I lived in Tennessee for over a decade and getting around anywhere without a car was close to impossible. And even with a car it could be difficult. Most recently I see this same line of thinking in the Congressional GOP defeat of the current spending bill which is focused on infrastructure. Clearly those rich Southerners and Republicans just keep doing what works for them and has worked for them for over 150 years.

Elliot

MORE

Bradley Mayer

Late to the show, but sounds like Mark Ames wanted to go "full Bolshevik" on the slaveowners and their facilitators! Actual Bolsheviks would agree, minus "excesses" like the Caucasus, the Union also had its excesses such as the mass hanging of Sioux in Minnesota, etc.

Bradley Mayer

BTW, one day you all should do the Mexican War in the 1840's. Start with the planning to launch this predatory war during the Admin. of "Tyler too", in a handoff to "Young Hickory", Polk.