Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Taylor is Tyler’s pick for one of the greatest living historians. His many books cover the early American Republic, American westward expansion, the War of 1812, Virginian slavery, Thomas Jefferson, the revolutionary settlements in Maine, and more. He’s currently the Thomas Jefferson Chair of History at the University of Virginia.
Tyler and Taylor take a walking tour of early history through North America covering the decisions, and ripples of those decisions, that shaped revolution and independence, including why Canada didn’t join the American revolution, why America in turn never conquered Canada, American’s early obsession with the collapse of the Republic, how democratic the Jacksonians were, Texas/Mexico tensions over escaped African American slaves, America’s refusal to recognize Cuban independence, how many American Tories went north post-revolution, Napoleon III’s war with Mexico, why the US Government considered attacking Canada after the Civil War, and much more.
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Recorded May 9th, 2024
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TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m chatting with Alan Taylor, who’s professor of history at the University of Virginia. He could plausibly be considered America’s greatest living historian. He’s written numerous books on colonial America, Native Americans, the revolutionary period, the early, now mid, and partly latter part of the 19th century. He is one of only very few people to have won two Pulitzer Prizes. Let me stress the new book, publication date May 21, American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873. I enjoyed reading this very much. Learned a great deal from it. Alan, welcome.
ALAN TAYLOR: Well, thank you, Tyler. I really appreciate having the chance to talk with you.
COWEN: Let’s start with the revolutionary period. We will work up to the topics in your book, but initially, why did only the 13 colonies declare independence? There’s this thing we later call Canada to the north.
TAYLOR: Yes.
COWEN: Why aren’t they part of this?
TAYLOR: It’s also all these British colonies in the West Indies like Jamaica and Antigua and Barbados. If you look at the population figures, the places that rebel are the places that have the largest populations, and they’re connected with each other. There is a greater confidence that you can resist militarily. Whereas if you’re one of these islands or you’re one of these small colonies to the north, you’re very tenuous and you’re very dependent on the British Royal Navy. That means that there’s a higher threshold in order to build up the confidence to rebel.
COWEN: What’s the influence of New France on this process?
TAYLOR: In Canada, at that time, you had a French-speaking majority and a Catholic majority. Recently, meaning 1774, the British had mollified the French Canadians by basically endorsing their system of law and their religion and protecting it by law. That’s one of the things that alienated the 13 colonies that were very much against Catholicism at that time. The French Canadians were: The devil we know well, which is the British Empire, is better than the devil that we fear even more, which is the Protestant colonists to their south.
COWEN: Now, here’s a quotation from your writings, page 37: “One of the great ironies of the American Revolution was that it led to virtually free land for settlers in British Canada while rendering land more expensive in the United States.” Could you explain that, please?
TAYLOR: Sure. The war was very expensive. All the states and the United States also incurred immense debts. How are you going to pay for that? This is the time when there’s no income tax, and the chief ways in which governments could raise money were on import duties and then on selling land. There was a lot of land, provided you could take it away from native peoples. All of the states and the United States were in the business of trying to sell land, but also they’re reliant within the states on these land taxes. All of these go up, then, to try to finance the war debt.
Whereas in British Canada, the British government is subsidizing the local government. They’re paying the full freight of it, which means that local taxes were much lower there. It also meant that they could afford to basically give away land to attract settlers. They had this notion that if we offer free land to Americans, they will want to leave that new American republic, move back into the British Empire, strengthen Canada, and provide a militia to defend it.
COWEN: If we think of people who left the original American colonies, how many of them do you think were leaving for political reasons, and how many were leaving because the land up north was cheaper?
TAYLOR: I would say about a third of them are leaving for political reasons, and most of those leave very early in the 1780s. Then there is a larger number, two-thirds of the overall total, who are going during the 1790s and the early 19th century. For them, they’re not particularly political. Their motivation is that they can get this free land in this lower tax burden by moving into British Canada. We shouldn’t exaggerate the numbers, however. We’re talking about relatively small numbers, something in the vicinity of about 50,000 people at most, and that’s a small portion of the millions that lived in the United States.
COWEN: If we think of the American Revolution as at some point being a surprise, is there any evidence on how asset prices reacted to that surprise, which is the question an economist would ask?
TAYLOR: It’s a great question. Assets are greatly depreciated during the war because these colonies and the new United States [were] highly dependent on transatlantic trade. If you’ve got the Royal Navy, which for almost all of the war is dominating the Atlantic, it’s very difficult to send out American produce to European and West Indian markets, and it’s very difficult to import goods.
Economists who’ve looked at the impact of the American Revolution on the economy in the short term, meaning essentially 1775 until 1790, estimate that the economy shrank by a third, which would make it the second-greatest depression in all of American history. Assets were greatly depreciated until there’s a new federal government and there’s peace, so that during the 1790s, there comes a boom which more than restores the lost property values of the 1780s.
COWEN: In general, why did the British find it easier to mobilize Native Americans as allies? Is it just because they were less expansionist?
TAYLOR: It basically, again, comes down to population numbers. You have approximately two-and-a-half million people living in the 13 colonies. Their population is doubling every 22 years. This is the fastest population growth of any place on earth at that time. They are an agricultural people, overwhelmingly; 95% of Americans made their living by agriculture at that time. As the population doubles, they want the next generation to have the same standard of living, which means they need twice as much land, and so they’re expanding.
Meanwhile, the British, their population at that time during the war is based in Canada, and it’s much smaller. The British are just running a few small forts in the West, and they need native help to defend those forts against American expansion. Native peoples are calculating the enemy of my enemy as my friend, and they see the British as providing them with firearms to resist the American expansion. For the great majority of native peoples, the British Empire is the better bet in order to maintain their hold on their homelands.
COWEN: Fast-forwarding to the War of 1812, which you’ve written an excellent book about, why couldn’t the then more than 7 million Americans overwhelm the, what, 300,000 to 500,000 — I’ve seen different estimates — British subjects in what we now call Canada?
TAYLOR: Certainly, American leaders thought it would be easy. Thomas Jefferson said it would be “a mere matter of marching,” and it turns out wars are always more difficult than their projectors imagine. The United States had virtually no professional military at that time. They had an army that was essentially 9,000 men, spread very thin off over a very large country. They’re going to have to build up their army very, very fast, which meant that they were sending people into combat with virtually no training. They’re going into a difficult landscape in order to try to supply them. The logistical lines were very long in order to support troops that are going into Canada. Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Then these American forces start to suffer defeats, which then leads a lot of the American public to say, “What are we doing here?” The Madison administration, which had declared war, was counting on winning some early victories in order to boost public support for the war. When they don’t get those early victories — instead they get some catastrophic defeats — then suddenly everything gets much more difficult.
It’s also, the British had some good troops there. They weren’t numerous, but they were better-trained troops than the Americans had. And they also had the support of native peoples, which turns out to be an enormous asset when you’re fighting in a landscape which is largely forested.
COWEN: That’s because of supply lines and food?
TAYLOR: The British have better supply lines. That’s a world in which things move more easily by water. The British supply line is basically the Great Lakes connecting to the St. Lawrence River. It’s a lot easier for them to move supplies and their manpower than it is for the Americans, who are trying to go over from one watershed into another one. They’re trying to go from the Atlantic watershed into the Great Lakes watershed, and the British are much better established in the Great Lakes watershed.
COWEN: Looking after the war, why is there never a third war with Britain as so many people had expected? What did those prognostications get wrong?
TAYLOR: What they get wrong is that the United States is the most important export market for British goods. The United States relies on Britain for most of its manufactured goods. Now, I’m talking about the 1820s, the 1830s. Also, America is a capital-deficient country at that time. It is a land-rich country, but it is relatively labor poor, and it is capital poor. There is a push to develop a transportation infrastructure in the United States, in the form of canals and then railroads.
The United States does not have enough capital to develop these things. It’s British investment that makes possible the development of American infrastructure. A lot of American states and American corporations that are emerging at that time are highly dependent on British capital, and they really don’t want war to erupt. American cotton exporters are very dependent on the British market. American wheat exporters are very dependent on the British market. There are such powerful economic interests that lead people to draw back from the brink, and there are a lot of brinks during this period in which there are tensions between Britain and the United States, but the interesting thing is they don’t lead to war.
COWEN: Was there ever a chance of a Union invasion of Canada right after the US Civil War?
TAYLOR: There’s a chance, because that is one of the periods in which there’s a lot of tension that’s built up. The Northern leaders and the Northern public were very angry at Britain because they had allowed the Confederacy to obtain some very powerful and effective warships. The British had allowed a recognition of the Confederacy, a partial recognition of the Confederacy, in the form of seeing them as a belligerent. This really alienated a lot of Americans toward Britain, who felt that Britain was insufficiently supportive of the effort to suppress this rebellion.
There was a lot of talk. And there’s a lot of triumphalism, because the Union forces in April of 1865 have been so triumphant, and the United States has one of the largest and best militaries in the world, which was unprecedented in American history. There was a lot of talk about, let’s even scores by taking Canada. Then on the other side of the ledger is that most of the public, while they didn’t like Britain and liked the idea of adding Canada, they wanted their boys to come home. It had been a long, hard, deadly war, and most of the people just wanted the army to be demobilized. It’s remarkable how quickly the Union army was demobilized. Once that happens, any organized invasion of Canada vanishes.
COWEN: Under the counterfactual, would America have won that war?
TAYLOR: An invasion of Canada?
COWEN: Yes.
TAYLOR: Yes, they would’ve won the war. Absolutely, at that point, because they had an organized military. The British had essentially about 12,000 troops, and the Union had about a million. It would’ve been very one-sided. Now, the British Royal Navy was probably still better than the American Navy, so there would’ve been a lot of collateral damage to seaports like Boston or New York City, because the Royal Navy could have come in and done some real damage there. It would not have been a war in which there was not a lot of suffering on the part of the Americans, but it’s a war in which if the goal was to conquer Canada, that could have been readily done.
COWEN: Now, flesh up the whole picture for me now. Is this why the British North America Act comes in 1867?
TAYLOR: Yes. The Canadian leaders have a set of problems. One of the problems is there was a Canadian union, but it’s just between what we now call Ontario and Quebec. Quebec was francophone, and what would become Ontario is anglophone. There’s an uneasy relationship there. Politicians of all sorts say this can’t go on. One of the ideas they had was, let’s bring in some more partners. Let’s bring in the Maritime provinces, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and maybe we can also expand to the Pacific.
At that time, there was another British colony, British Columbia, and then the Hudson’s Bay Company in theory owned all the territory between British Columbia and what’s now Ontario. There were visionaries who said, “Let’s build a transcontinental country, and this might help us solve the anglophone-francophone problem.” You’re bringing in a lot more anglophones, so one of the things that you offer to the French Canadians is, “This will be a looser union. This will be one where you’ll have more autonomy for Quebec than you currently have.” That becomes acceptable to most French Canadians.
Now, the other thing about it is that also Canadian leaders are looking to the south and saying, “The immediate danger may be over of an American invasion, but there’s going to be tension again with Britain and the United States, and we need to be in a better position to defend ourselves.” The final factor is that British leaders were getting tired of footing the bill for defending Canada, and they want the Canadians to pay for it. All of those factors lead into the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867.
COWEN: Short of an American invasion, is there a meaningful counterfactual where Nova Scotia and Newfoundland become part of the United States?
TAYLOR: Yes.
COWEN: What does that look like?
TAYLOR: What it looks like is, the people in the Maritime provinces weren’t so sure that they wanted to be linked with Canada. They had a much more robust trading relationship with the United States because they’re maritime oriented. There was no railroad at that time linking the Maritimes to Canada. There were a fair number of politicians in Nova Scotia for whom the first option would be, let’s just maintain the status quo. We’re an independent colony, we’re our own little world, and we have trading relations with the United States.
Second option is, let’s join Canada. That seems a little dodgy to a lot of people. The third option, which some people put on the table, is, let’s leave the British Empire and join the United States because that’s our primary market. Everything was on the table in the 1860s and early 1870s as to what North America would look like in terms of what we now call Canada.
COWEN: This is a bit of a digression, but how is it that Newfoundland ended up as an independent crown colony for a big part of the 20th century, given that there was the act in 1867? They then separate again. What’s the story there?
TAYLOR: They’re a separate British colony, and they have a very small population in the 1860s, 1870s. The economy is essentially just one thing, fishing, and the market for their fish is the British Isles. They don’t really see any economic reason to be linked to Canada. They see very powerful reasons to remain linked to the British Empire. They’re not an independent country, but they’re a distinctive colony, and they will remain a British colony separate from Canada until the late 1940s.
COWEN: If we look at Canada today, we see, as you know, extremely high levels of immigration, people from all over the world. Do you in any way see this as rooted in Canada’s earlier history? Do you have a different perspective on that? For you, is it a continuity or reversal?
TAYLOR: Canada has long been a country that has wanted to have more immigrants. They have aggressively recruited immigrants ever since the later 19th century. One of the powerful considerations is, they look at the size of their country in terms of just geographic size, and it’s just a notch larger than the United States, but most of that country is arctic and subarctic. Even despite that fact, the population density in Canada within the temperate zone, which is approximately within 200 miles of the American border — that long stretch from the Pacific to Nova Scotia is still underpopulated relative to the United States.
Now, part of that corridor is well populated; that’s particularly in Ontario and Quebec. But points west and points in the Maritimes, it seems to Canadians that if they want to develop their economic potential and retain some relatively modest equilibrium with the United States, that they need more people. They’ve been setting quotas in recent years that are up to 500,000 immigrants annually, which for a country of Canada’s size — of about 32 million — is a significant number. It adds up over time. Right now the proportion of people in Canada who are of foreign birth is rising. There’s also developing some pushback against that because it is contributing to inflation in the urban centers.
COWEN: You mean just housing prices and rents.
TAYLOR: Housing prices and medical costs too, because they’re committed in Canada to public healthcare. It’s been a system that’s been very, very popular because it’s been effective. Right now there are strains on it because of the numbers of people, and public funding for it has not quite kept pace with either inflation or the numbers of people who want to use the system.
COWEN: A very general question. You’ve written about this in a number of your books, but many early commentators, especially in Britain, in Canada, even in America, some of the Founding Fathers, they were very afraid the American republic was going to collapse. It was too large, too chaotic, some thought too democratic. What exactly did they get wrong, the people who thought that? What did they fail to see? Because those arguments did not sound crazy at the time, right?
TAYLOR: No, they didn’t sound crazy at the time. They weren’t crazy to worry about it, in that the United States did fall apart in 1860 to 1861. And it took an enormous effort, very expensive effort in terms of lives and money to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. They had spent a long time ever since 1776 worrying about what actually did happen in 1860 to 1861. You could say, “Yes, they fended it off for 90 years.”
There’s a recurrent sense of crisis within the American republic through much of that period of time, because there’s just fear that some region within the country would be growing too powerful, or there’s a recurrent fear that the country is getting too large. You’re getting Americans that now live on the Pacific coast. It was an open question whether those American states would spin off and create their own country. A lot of things still seem to be possible.
It’s also important to remember that the form of government that they were gambling on, a republic, had not worked very well in the past in Europe. It had never been tried on this geographic scale. They don’t yet have the confidence that their institutions will be durable. Surviving the Civil War is an enormous confidence booster that the United States will hold together, despite its great internal diversity and despite its geographic scale. Before that success in the Civil War, that confidence was absent.
COWEN: Let’s say circa 1780, what were general opinions like concerning the Swiss Confederacy? That was seen as okay, a failure, big success? It doesn’t seem it was very wealthy then, right?
TAYLOR: Switzerland is almost never mentioned in American writings of that period. If they want to talk about republics, they’re much more likely to talk about the Netherlands. Switzerland is out of sight, out of mind for Americans.
COWEN: Do you think it was by anyone viewed as a success, or just it didn’t matter?
TAYLOR: Well, if they paid attention to it all, then they would think, “Okay, that’s pretty good. They’ve got a confederacy. It’s been fairly long lasting, but it’s a small country.” It was a confederacy that was very loose at that time. That’s what a fair number of Americans thought they wanted at the start of the 1780s.
By the end of the 1780s, most of the top leadership in the American states had come to the conclusion that they needed something stronger than the kind of confederacy that you’d see in Switzerland. That they needed something that could be more truly a national government, one where the government at the center could make decisions that would be binding on all 13 states. Switzerland recedes as a potential model as the United States experiences so many difficulties with its loose confederation during the 1780s.
COWEN: How democratic were the Jacksonians, anyway? Your mentor, Marvin Meyers, he wrote on this a great deal, as I’m sure you know.
TAYLOR: Yes, he did. He wrote extremely well about it. It depends on how we want to define a democracy. Let’s take the definition that we would use today, in which we’re saying it’s the vast majority of adults get to participate in making the political decisions that will affect them. By that standard, the Jacksonians aren’t particularly democratic because they’re not keen to expand the vote to African Americans, to say the least, and they were not keen to open up political rights to women. The great majority of adults in the United States were not included in the political system as direct participants.
Now, if we say, by the standards of the 19th century in the transatlantic world — women were just not considered to be political participants anywhere, and we’re just talking about the male electorate — then you would say the Jacksonians were democratizers in that in most of the states, they have broadened the electorate by eliminating the property requirement to vote.
They have not eliminated the gender requirement that you’d be male, and they have not eliminated the racial requirement that you’d be white. African Americans, even where free, could vote only in the New England states at that time and in New York, if they met a property requirement, which was pretty high. It’s not what we would consider democratic, but it is more democratic than what had preceded the Jacksonians.
COWEN: Insofar as you view the Jacksonian period differently from your mentor, how does that difference shape your view of 1850 to 1873, which is what you cover in your new book?
TAYLOR: I agree with Meyers on most things. Meyers was of a generation where the focus was less on race than it has become, in thinking about American history. That’s not an important dimension of his one great book, Jacksonian Persuasion. The role of American expansion into the West at the expense of native peoples is just not on his agenda. Now, that’s not to criticize him. It’s to say he was focused on political culture, and that political culture he brilliantly illuminated.
If we expand out the story, literally, to think about American expansion, then it looks like a somewhat different story. Not an entirely different story, because the political culture is very much as Marvin Meyers described. If we also bring in just how obsessed American leaders were at that time with racial difference, and at their sense of being beleaguered by the British Empire — in that there’s this very defensive expansionism that American leaders commit the country to — I would say that that expansionism, the bill that has to be paid for it comes due in the 1850s.
That the United States had a magnificent military success over a weak country, Mexico, during the late 1840s. They have conquered 40% of Mexico, extremely valuable potential territory, including California, Arizona, New Mexico. Then the issue becomes, what kind of labor system will be allowed by law in this conquered territory? Will it be the labor system that prevails in the Northern states of free labor, or will it be the more mixed labor system of the South, where enslaved people are a critical element of the economy?
These economic questions are linked to visions of what’s the good society. Northerners had become quite committed to the notion that they had a superior system. Southerners had become quite committed to the notion that their system was superior at favoring white men and at favoring republican government. The two systems have evolved in parallel. Now they’re going to come into conflict over what labor system will prevail in this newly conquered territory.
COWEN: Is a civil war inevitable by that point?
TAYLOR: Historians don’t like to say that anything’s inevitable. I’ll come closer to it than the great majority of historians would do. It’s very hard for me to imagine how the leaders of that time — given how committed they were to different systems, and how committed they were to the notion that only their system could support free government — that I don’t quite see how they could have reached a compromise.
There was an effort in early 1861 to reach a compromise that would’ve said slavery is protected forever and the federal government can never touch it, that the West would be divided between the two systems or the geographic line that would be extended across the continent, and that there would be certain restrictions on what the federal government could do in terms of protecting industries with high tariffs. Neither side was willing to accept that compromise.
There were people who wanted the compromise, particularly in the border states, places like Kentucky and Virginia that were keen for that kind of compromise. But most of the North had become committed to the notion that the United States was a nation where the majority should rule. The deeper South had become committed to the proposition that they could not be united in the same country with a Northern public that favored a true nation. I really don’t see the juncture between 1850 and 1861 where any other kind of arrangement could have averted a conflict.
COWEN: How did proximity to Mexico destabilize slavery in Texas?
TAYLOR: Mexico had abolished slavery. Now, they do have a coercive labor system. It’s called debt peonage. It involves many Mexicans, but it is not the same thing as buying and selling human beings in perpetuity, meaning into future generations.
Enslaved people in Texas are relatively close to Mexico. It’s not easy to get across the border, but you do have several thousand African Americans who are escaping from slavery in Texas and going into Mexico. This is perceived by Texans, and indeed by Southerners generally, as a major problem. They want the United States government to be putting pressure on Mexico to extradite the escaped former slaves. Mexico refuses to do so. It is a point of tension between the United States and Mexico during the 1850s.
COWEN: When the French occupy and partially conquer Mexico in the 1860s, what exactly do they think they’re going to accomplish? Is it about mining, or trade, or just desire for empire?
TAYLOR: It’s all of the above, and it’s not entirely well thought out. The prime mover for this is the emperor of France at that time, Napoleon III. He’s a nephew of the more famous Napoleon I. Napoleon III has very grandiose ideas about rebuilding a French Empire, and he sees an opportunity in Mexico. He thinks this would position France to become the dominant power throughout the Americas, especially to the South. He has this notion of Latin peoples, meaning Spanish and French and Portuguese speakers, should all hang together, and that they’re Catholics, and that the United States in its republican system is a problem and needs to be contained.
He thought that he would be capturing a lot of trade for France through this geopolitical system of building solidarity with the Latin peoples of Latin America. However, he’s plunging his country into a guerilla war that will be extremely deadly and extremely expensive, and he will never be able to achieve the kind of stability in Mexico that would be essential to fulfill his grandiose vision.
COWEN: In your understanding, how does that temporary French occupation sway the rest of Mexican history?
TAYLOR: There had been ongoing civil war between the two political movements in Mexico that were conveniently called the liberals and the conservatives. Conservatives were committed to very traditional institutions — in other words, supporting the Catholic Church, supporting the military, supporting landlords. The liberals were modernizers in that they wanted to have a republic where the voters would choose their rulers. They wanted an economy that was freed from traditional restraints imposed by the church and by the landlords. They wanted a 19th-century liberal system in which individuals were free to compete for economic benefit.
There are two very powerfully different visions for what Mexico should be. By the French intervening on behalf of the conservatives and then losing, they discredit the conservative movement for a long time. It means that the liberal movement, while they don’t fulfill all their promises by any means — for example, they don’t really succeed in taking down all the landlords. They do take down those landlords that had been most conspicuously supportive of the conservatives and the French imperialists.
Mexico is going to continue to struggle with enormous inequality throughout the rest of the 19th century. The liberals do establish principles of more free elections — not completely free, but more free elections — and of a free press, and of a legal system which is going to be more equitable than what had preceded it. I would say that the triumph of the liberals in Mexico, under the leadership of Benito Juárez, is one of the most important events of the 19th century in North America.
COWEN: Until Porfirio Díaz later, why is there so little interest in building up national infrastructure in Mexico?
TAYLOR: Oh, there’s very powerful interest in doing that, but the problem is, again, capital. It’s also rural security. Mexico has a major problem with banditry in the countryside because there’s so much poverty. Starting in the 1850s, Mexican leaders, whether conservative or liberal, are desperate to build railroads. The striking thing is they’ve got almost no railroads.
Also, the geography of Mexico is not nearly as favorable for building long-distance railroads than is the United States. Very mountainous; very arid; many parts of the country, the population is so thin on the ground that it’s not economically sustainable to run a railroad line; lack of capital; governments that were unstable. It’s only with the triumph of Juárez that it’s clear that there is a government that can be a partner with American investors. That’s when the railroad system starts to develop at a more rapid clip.
COWEN: Given what you know about the history of Mexico, does that make you more bullish or more bearish on the country today? It’s had enormous potential for a long time. In some ways, it’s realizing the potential, but one hears the drug gangs maybe rule a quarter to a third of the territory, speaking of rural banditry. How do you view the current moment based on everything you know?
TAYLOR: I can’t pretend to have the kind of expertise on Mexico today. There are other people that you could consult with, so I’m just giving you my superficial impressions.
COWEN: Those other people would know less about the history than you.
TAYLOR: That’s true.
COWEN: I want your marginal product.
TAYLOR: Again, I want to say I’ve not ever been to Mexico, so I’m very hesitant to say very much. My impression from what I do read and so forth, and compare it with the past history, is that Mexico on balance hasn’t been in the early 21st century economically successful, that its political institutions have undergone a lot of stress during that period of time, but that they’re currently doing okay.
Our political system is undergoing a lot of stress right now. I would be wary of an analysis that says Mexico is some basket case. It’s a mixed bag, as you said. There are parts of the country where the nation-state does not have full security. Then there are parts of the country where more people are doing very well and the government is relatively secure. I would be hesitant to go beyond that.
COWEN: Given what you know about earlier Caribbean history, how do you view the Haitian instability, which is almost all the time?
TAYLOR: That is clearly a very tragic and long-lasting situation. One of the sources of Haiti’s problems — I’m not saying it’s the only source, but one of the big sources is that they had waged a revolution to achieve their independence. Then none of the countries would recognize them as independent because they were fearful of the precedent of enslaved people rising up in revolt and killing their masters.
Also, frankly, the French had seen a lot of property that had belonged to their nationals wiped out by this revolution. France refuses to recognize Haiti unless Haiti will pay an enormous financial sum. I can’t off the top of my head tell you what that amount is, but it is an enormous amount. And it then commits the leadership of Haiti to adopting a more coercive system that compels its people to become plantation laborers again to produce crops that can be exported to earn foreign capital so that this can be turned over to France. It’s an enormous burden that Haiti never gets out from under.
The 20th-century situation is so complicated, and I have not looked at that fully. So I’m just saying what from the 19th century has contributed to the impoverishment of Haiti and the establishment of a political tradition of authoritarianism, and it’s those two problems that still remain so evident in Haiti today.
COWEN: The Dominican Republic has done relatively well. Do you view that as an issue of deep roots or just a series of later, different, accidental forces from a historical point of view?
TAYLOR: In the 19th century you would not have said that the Dominican Republic was doing well. It reverts back to Spanish control during the American Civil War. What I would say is that the Dominican Republic never has this extractive financial commitment that turns out to be so burdensome on Haiti. At that time, the country was called Santo Domingo, meaning the Dominican Republic. If you were in the 1870s, you would be hard pressed to say, which of these two countries is going to have the better economic future? If you look really close and you think this debt burden that Haiti is carrying is probably going to be the difference in the longer run, and it is one of the factors that has led Haiti to lag behind the Dominican Republic.
COWEN: Do you think there are deep roots to the now long-standing Cuban communist rule period, or is that, again, just something that happened later?
TAYLOR: In the 19th century, Cuba is still part of the Spanish Empire and will remain part of that empire until 1898 when the United States conquers it. It’s a period of great instability because many Cuban leaders want to be independent. They’re looking at the other countries of Latin America — Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, on and on — as having achieved their independence. There is the perspective by many Cuban leaders that they would be a more prosperous country if they were not being ruled by the authority of Spain. Spain is able to maintain its control over Cuba until there’s an American invasion.
Then the United States reneges on its initial commitments to recognize a full Cuban independence. It’s very grudging, the concessions that the United States makes to the Cuban people, so it builds up a resentment toward the United States. They wanted the United States to be the liberator. Initially it looked like the United States was their liberator, and then there is a long period of the frustration of those aspirations. I would say those are aspects that do contribute to the rise of a future revolution that will end up being a communist revolution in Cuba.
COWEN: What do you think Tocqueville got most wrong about America?
TAYLOR: I’m more impressed by what he got right about it. I guess what you could say is that he did predict there would be a civil war, but he thought it would be a civil war that would be purely along racial lines. Now, race, of course, is very, very important to the American Civil War, but I don’t think he would’ve predicted that it would be a North-South conflict. He thought it would be a civil war within all of the states. I’d say that’s the one area where he didn’t get it quite right.
COWEN: How good a novel is Uncle Tom’s Cabin? We know it’s historically very, very important, but just to sit down and read it, what should someone today think about it?
TAYLOR: If you’re looking for a good read today, I would not recommend Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If you want to understand sentimental culture of the 19th century, then you should read Uncle Tom’s Cabin because it’s very much pitched in that vein. It’s a vein that most of us readers today just are not that interested in.
COWEN: Going back to the beginnings of your career, in which regards was Maine ever the frontier state of the northeast?
TAYLOR: Oh, it was very much the frontier state throughout the colonial period and on into the early 19th century. If you’re in Massachusetts and you were looking for a place where you could go and get some farmland that would be relatively low in cost, because it hadn’t been developed as farmland — you just apply your labor to create a farm — then the easiest place for you to get to was Maine, on into the 1830s and ’40s. It’s in the odd position of being along the Atlantic coast, and yet it’s still a frontier.
COWEN: What’s the closest thing America has to a frontier today? It’s not space anymore, if it ever was. It’s not Maine.
TAYLOR: No, it’s not Maine. I certainly hope Americans will not regard going into space as something that millions of people are going to be able to do and be able to survive on, say, Mars. I think that’s a complete folly and waste of money. The reality is, we live on this planet which has a very thin atmosphere, and that and our geomagnetic field are — and the existence of a moon — are rare things. Certainly they’re unique in our solar system. What’s beyond that is utterly inhospitable, to say the least, to our bodies.
There is no real frontier anymore, anywhere in the world. Yes, there are places that are more thinly settled than others. You could say Alaska is still a frontier, but large numbers of people are not going to be able to expand into Alaska. It’s not going to be able to support a lot of people. As a consequence, we’re stuck on this planet, and we have to figure out how to make the best of it and sustain it.
COWEN: I have just some general questions about doing history. Just a simple physicalist question: What’s the most difficult thing? I don’t mean intellectually, but just on your body or on your eyes or on your behind, the hardest thing about doing the work of history.
TAYLOR: Your eyes, because you’re reading a lot of old documents that are written in a cursive, and often by people who have a very different style of cursive than we do today. A lot of cases, you’re looking at stuff that’s on a computer screen or on a microfilm reel. That’s the hardest thing.
Now, it’s also just sitting still, something that I think is easier for people of our generation than it is for younger people. Being able to isolate yourself in an archive, there’s nothing that makes me — very few things, I should say, in this world that make me happier than doing that. But it’s not for everybody to do that kind of work. I know some young people who just have said, “I tried graduate education in this field, but just being alone, researching in an archive is just not for me.”
COWEN: If you meet a young person and they’re a potentially promising historian, of course they should be smart; they should want to work hard. But beyond the obvious factors and good eyes, what else do you look for in the person? How do you spot that magic something?
TAYLOR: It’s not easy. For example, I used to run the graduate program at the University of California, Davis, the graduate program in history. There was a young man who wanted into our program, and on paper he didn’t look quite as good as some of the other applicants, so we weren’t able to come up with financial support for him. We admitted him. I thought he wouldn’t come, but he came anyway. Then he turned out to be the very best graduate student we had.
What I would say is that it’s very hard by the just exam scores or a paper that they’ve written or letters of recommendation. You’re making your decisions on these bases, and they’re not always the best predictors. It’s hard to say, “What would be the best predictor?” In this case, this was a guy that was just really driven to work hard and to — if a professor told him to do something differently, he figured out how to do it differently. That can be hard to find, I would say.
COWEN: Your PhD is from Brandeis. That’s a very good school, but it’s not a top-five school in the traditional sense, and yet you’ve become a top-tier historian. Is that harder to do today, coming out of a good but not very, very top school?
TAYLOR: I would say it’s harder today because we’re talking about people who are historians in a college or university setting. The number of job openings for historians has shrunk dramatically. There are lots of complicated reasons for why that’s happened, but the general answer is that there’s a much smaller public investment in higher education, particularly in the liberal arts, and particularly in nonquantitative arts of the liberal arts.
There’s fewer opportunities out there for somebody to work their way in. When that happens, then the marginal advantage that is the prestige of the school you went to becomes more important in the competition for a shrinking number of jobs. If I were to go on the job market today as a young person with the particular abilities and inabilities that I had when I went on it in the past, I’m not sure I would get a job in academia.
COWEN: What is it you tell graduate students in history, or what should we tell them? Do you tell them, “Your chance of getting a good job is one divided by some number that’s a little scary”? How is this marketed to people?
TAYLOR: I can’t say how all places market it. I can just say what I would say, and what most of the people I do know say, is: If you’re going to get a PhD in history with the notion that this is going to assure you of a tenure-track job in a place where you want to live, that’s not going to happen, or it’s very unlikely that it will happen.
Now, there are people who are getting PhDs in history who are finding other places that will employ their skills: working for foundations, working for local or the federal government, sometimes working for corporations which will want to have an in-house historian. There is some growth in fields beyond academia, what has come to be called public history, so it’s not entirely hopeless. What I say to you is, if your vision of your future is that you must be an academic and you want it to be in history, I would say that’s very, very unlikely it’s going to work out in current conditions.
COWEN: How will large language models change how we do historical research?
TAYLOR: I have to confess, I’m not that familiar with how these large language models would work, so I’m going to punt on that question.
COWEN: Say you could wear glasses — and I think this will be possible in less than five years — and the glasses record everything you read and put it into a database that you can search just using your voice. So everything you’ve read in your entire life, you would have on file, searchable; you could organize it any way you want. I would think that would change things. I don’t know how, not being a historian.
TAYLOR: Absolutely. Given your description of it, it would change things radically. Now, I’m trying to resist being the old curmudgeon who says the way we did things in my day are the way things always should be. But I would say is, it does seem that AI and the various other technological revolutionary measures that we’re right on in the midst of right now, in terms of managing data and analyzing data, is going to render the individual human mind of less value in the overall process and is going to — it seems to me, is going to diminish the role, therefore, of individuality and diversity in analyzing data and telling stories about the past, which is what we do as historians.
We tell stories that we think, and hopefully our readers agree, are meaningful for understanding the past in relationship to their current situation. All I can say is, it does seem like we’re in the midst of a very radical change. I like the system of analyzing data that I grew up figuring out, and I’ll be sad to see it go.
COWEN: How can an educated person best use YouTube to learn history without going too badly astray?
TAYLOR: If you’re relying exclusively on YouTube, good luck. To do history really well is to have a sense that you need to see very different perspectives on events that you want to understand, and you need to get as close to the actual original sources as you can. The fact that so much information is now available online is a two-edged sword. It’s mostly good, but there’s also lots of misinformation that’s woven into it, and it can be very hard to tell the information from the misinformation.
Then there’s also a notion that everything is already there online, when in point of fact, lots of information about the past still only exists in archives. It’s also the fact that archives themselves are only a partial survival mechanism for all the things that did happen in the past, most of which were not well documented if we get beyond top political leadership. It’s endlessly difficult, I think, to try to get into a history that is truly true, given those difficulties.
COWEN: You do some serious talks on YouTube, which I think represent your views quite accurately. It’s you, right?
TAYLOR: Yes.
COWEN: Is a typical person better off reading an hour of your book or listening to an hour of you on YouTube? Which, by the way, they might do at 1.5x, so it could take less than an hour.
TAYLOR: Right. Your original question was not, could people get history just by seeing me on YouTube. That’s a different answer.
COWEN: You could just put into YouTube search different historians at Harvard, at Princeton, at University of Virginia, and just listen to their talks. Is that a better thing for people to do than to read their books?
TAYLOR: I would say no, but again, I’m of an older generation where I think books are the best place to get information, but most young people would not agree with me. A fair number of older people would rather listen to something than to read it. I do think when you read, if you read with some patience, that there’s the possibility to absorb information — a fuller range of information. I often will give talks, and people seem to like them, but I’m not always so sure that they’ve come away from that talk with as deep an understanding as I think they would if they read the same thing as the text.
COWEN: I have one more question, but let me just repeat my enthusiasm for your book, by Alan Taylor, American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873. I’ve also read most of Alan’s books and find them all to be worthwhile. I know many other smart people who are big fans. Alan, thank you for chatting with me, but last question, what is it you will do next?
TAYLOR: I’m working on a project, which is about a set of plantations in Virginia in the early 19th century in the part of Virginia where Nat Turner’s revolt occurred.
It’s plunged me into the archives, into this fabulously rich collection, which has not been used by historians before. And I’m hoping to tell a story that will show the ways in which environmental constraints and the market economy and slavery all intersect and contribute to the kinds of tensions that would culminate in Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831.
COWEN: Alan Taylor, thank you very much.
TAYLOR: Thank you, Tyler.
Photo Credit: (c) Dan Addison UVA University Communications