Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now and Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we’re going to address a topic that on the one hand, Heather, makes you and I happy because we are historians and it involves evidence, but it actually is related to an item in the news. This episode about evidence is linked to what many people out there have probably recently heard about, which is how on July 21st, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Secret Service, sent a letter to Congress informing them that text messages sent by Secret Service agents on and before January 6th had been erased. So there’s this potentially crucial, and given the hearings and some of what we’ve heard about that did happen with Secret Service agents on the 6th, and somehow because of a quote, unquote, “System migration,” these records had been lost.

This has a lot to say about history, and records, and evidence, and facts, and truth, which are some of the things we’re going to talk about today, but it’s a little unbelievable. And as a historian, it makes me want to bang a table.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s a little hard to believe it was simply coincidence that that’s the material they lost in a migration, which usually is backed up and was supposed to be backed up, and so on and so forth. These missing texts started us thinking about other moments in American history where we had lost texts, where there were things that would be interesting to know. And then of course, we got chatting about it and thought we had a much more fun direction. And that was that there are scads of events in American history where there is a crucially missing piece of information.

Of course, everybody looks to Watergate and the erased tapes, and are obsessed to the point that I actually contacted a security person this year to see if those could now be recovered with our modern technology because I thought, “Nothing’s really lost, right?” And he said, “If the tapes were intact, we probably could do it but the tapes will have degraded so badly that we can’t.” Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, I didn’t go further than that, but we figured everybody was already thinking about the Watergate tapes, so that was not going to be as interesting as some of the things we came up with.

And the fun thing about this for me is that these are moments in American history that I think both of us are somewhat obsessed with and know a lot about, and care a lot about. So I had a great idea for Joanne. I wanted Joanne to talk about the room where it happened and she said, “Now we know it happened in the room where it happened,” but there is actually a much more interesting thing in early America that nobody knows the answer to.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. And there are actually several mysteries, one big one, but then a couple others surrounding it, that people haven’t figured out. And that is the Burr-Hamilton duel. There are a lot of basic things that people have all kinds of theories about. And when I came up with a theory, I sure heard from people that had a different theory, but there are certain crucial pieces of evidence missing and there’s a dispute about what happened. And so here is a founder-related moment, a really famous one, that we don’t fully know what happened.

Heather Cox Richardson:

A dispute about what happened. All right, can you walk us through this?

Joanne Freeman:

The short version of this is that Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had been political opponents for a while. And Hamilton was not shy, generally speaking, about saying bad things about Aaron Burr. Now, according to the code of honor, you can’t say something personal and bad about someone, that crosses the line. Something political or public is supposedly okay. Now, you’re probably already thinking what is the fact? Which is, is that line sometimes blurry? And yes, indeed it is. That said, Hamilton had been saying nasty things about Burr for a long time, and then Burr runs for governor of New York and loses. And Hamilton steps forward 1804 and helps to, not necessarily had a huge influence, but he was there, he didn’t want it to happen.

And apparently, there was a dinner party that Hamilton was at 1804. And according to a witness who handedly put this in a newspaper, he said something like, “Colonel Hamilton said that Burr was unfit for office and said a variety of other things, which I shall not put here.” And the guy who said this, his name is Charles Cooper, said in the note like, “I’m not going to record what those things are because these sorts of things tend to get found and then people get in trouble.” Yeah, well, so this became known that Hamilton had said he’s unfit for office and several other things that I won’t note here. And Burr has just lost the race for governor and he’s already been told that he was not wanted for a second term with Jefferson as vice president, so his political ambitions are dwindling.

And he apparently had said, “The next person that comes my way that says something about me, I’m going for it. I need to prove that I’m a leader and I need to prove that I can give my supporters something, I need to prove that I’m not going down, so I’m going to confront whoever comes against me next.” Now, I can see a puzzled expression on Heather’s face.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So I have two questions. Did Cooper set him up when he put that in the newspaper saying Hamilton said all these bad things or is that one of the things we don’t know?

Joanne Freeman:

No, it was personal letter, it was a personal letter.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, a personal letter. Okay.

Joanne Freeman:

That ended up-

Heather Cox Richardson:

But then the letter ends up in the newspaper. So is it set up or is it-

Joanne Freeman:

The letter ends up in the newspaper. No, I mean, that happened actually, I won’t say frequently, but often. You really didn’t want to say important things in letters unless you were handing them from one person to another.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This is a question that I really should know the answer to, and I’m sorry about this, and you don’t have to answer it if it’s too stupid, but why did they hate each other so much?

Joanne Freeman:

That’s not a stupid question, it’s a really good question. Part of the answer is Burr was kind of an opportunist with his politics. And so he starts out with the Federalists and then he moves over to the Jeffersonian Republicans when an office opens and beats Hamilton’s father-in-law for a seat in Congress, but I think part of the reason is they were both highly ambitious men. And what Hamilton said a lot about Burr over, and over, and over again, was that Burr had nothing holding back his ambitions, that he would do anything to satisfy his ambition. And thus, he was the most dangerous thing you could have in the new American Republic.

Joanne Freeman:

Hamilton himself, he thought, was held back by concerns about his honor and concerns about his quote, unquote, “Theories,” his politics. But Burr had no theories, he supposedly had no politics, he didn’t seem focused on his character. So to Hamilton, Burr was dangerous. In a sense, he was the perfect person to be a kind of demagogue and get power. And bad, bad things would happen. So Hamilton says as early as 1792, quote, “I consider it my religious duty to oppose his career.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

How freaking ironic is it that he early on identified Burr as being terribly dangerous? Like if you put that in a novel, nobody would believe it.

Joanne Freeman:

No, that’s true. No, but that’s true about so much in history.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So Cooper has written this letter and it shows up in the newspapers, and Burr is already mad about the fact his political career is dwindling. So he says, “I’m going to go after whoever is next up in front of me.”

Joanne Freeman:

Right. “And then I’ll threaten a duel, maybe not fight one, but if I can do that, if I can step forward and say, ‘You have treated me with dishonor, I demand that you satisfy my honor.'” In this time period, that’s part of what the code of honor does, is it enables you to basically say, “I’m willing to die for my honor and character.” And so Burr was looking for that chance.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that would revive his career?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, it would’ve saved it. As one of his followers put it, “Why would we follow him if he’s a man of no character who can’t give us anything?” So this would be a way of him proving that he is a man of power and character. He felt the need to step up and do something. And that’s part of what duels did. People who lost elections sometimes would find a way to fight a duel with someone who won an election or someone on the team of the person who won an election, basically to say in an aristocratic way, “Hey, American public, I’m good, vote for me in the next election.” So it was a democratic message with an aristocratic practice. And that’s kind of what Burr was doing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This is fascinating. Somebody ought to write a book on it.

Joanne Freeman:

Or at least a book chapter.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m teasing her because her first book is on this. I have to say, I loved that book when it came out a lot, but I wish it weren’t so applicable to the present. When it came out, it was like, “Oh, this is a cool way to think about politics, and emotion, and history, and all that.” And now it’s like, “Crap, it’s a good way to think about the evening news.” All right. So back to Burr.

Joanne Freeman:

So back to Burr. So, someone puts in Burr’s hand this clipping from the newspaper that says, and I believe that the actual words are, “Hamilton said something,” quote, “Still more despicable about Aaron Burr, which I shall not put here.” And so Burr does what you do if you are ready to fight a duel and you send a letter to the person who seemingly insulted you and it’s like a form letter and it basically says, “I heard you said this thing about me,” and then repeats the thing and says, “Did you mean it or not mean it? I give you a chance here to explain yourself.” And if you get that letter, you now know uh-oh, this is a person whose honor has been assaulted in some way and now they’re willing to fight a duel.

So they go back and forth a lot after this because Hamilton keeps saying over and over again, “Well, what was my insult? What do you mean, like still more despicable?” There’s no specific insult. That’s how duels are supposed to work. And Burr keeps getting angrier and angrier because he keeps saying, “Despicable, it’s a bad word. I don’t care if it’s despicable or more despicable.” So they argue about this and get angrier at each other. Hamilton starts to argue grammar essentially, in a letter which pushes Burr over the edge of the cliff. And Burr now says, “We’re done.” He says, “Either you apologize for anything you’ve ever said about me or our negotiations are done.” So they end up fighting a duel.

Now, Hamilton has a lot of hemming and hawing according to accounts after the duel about what he would do. Hamilton by this point had a son who was killed in a duel and Hamilton had supposedly told that son, Philip, “A good Christian doesn’t shoot at another man in a duel.” So Hamilton talks to friends and says, “Well, I have a religious scruple about this, so I think I’m not going to shoot at Burr the first time. But then if Burr says, ‘Honor is not satisfied,'” which was not uncommon, “I don’t know what I’ll do the second time. I just don’t know.”

And the duel happens, and generally speaking, the two sides never agree on what happened on that dueling ground. Burr and his friends say that Hamilton fired first and that Burr fired back. Hamilton and his friends say Hamilton, he didn’t fire. And if he did fire, he fired over Burr’s head or something, or he didn’t know he fired. And they never fully agree and there’s no absolute knowledge about that, so we don’t know the most famous duel in American history involving the vice president at the time and one of our more famous founders, we don’t absolutely know the facts of what specifically caused it or how it happened on the dueling ground.

Now, to me, this is partly interesting. And I use it all the time with my students because they think everything has been said that needs to be said about everything. And that’s particularly true for the founding. How can you possibly say something new about the founding? And to me, this is a great example, first off of the fact that no, you can always say something new depending on the questions you ask and depending on the evidence you have. And in this case, I actually found a piece of evidence that as far as I can tell, people hadn’t seen before, that came from Aaron Burr’s second in the duel who in 1805 was brought to trial for his participation in a duel, which was illegal.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The same duel or a different duel?

Joanne Freeman:

The same duel. Nope.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So he’s in trouble over that duel. Okay.

Joanne Freeman:

Correct. And this is a trial for him being Burr’s second and being involved in a duel, which is illegal even in New Jersey. So he took notes of the witnesses at his trial. He took notes of the two boatmen who rowed them across, he took notes of the doctor who Hamilton brought to the dueling ground. So there’s eyewitness testimony to the Burr-Hamilton duel that as far as I could tell, nobody had found before me.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Wait, what do you mean by took notes of them? He interviewed them?

Joanne Freeman:

No, no. Their testimony during the trial.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh wow. Okay.

Joanne Freeman:

They testified about what they saw and heard and he took notes about what they said while they were being questioned, which is kind of amazing, right? It’s like, “Hey.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And what did they say?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, it was really interesting. One thing that they say, and this ends up as a lyric in the Hamilton musical, one thing that they say is that they all had their back turned to the dueling ground.

Hamilton (archival):

The doctor turned around so he could have deniability. Five. Now I didn’t notice at the time.

Joanne Freeman:

So when they’re asked, “What did you see?” They all say, “Nothing,” because it’s illegal to be involved in a duel.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Would they have had their backs to the duel?

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, there was a ledge where the duel took place and these guys were a little bit further down from the ledge and they had their backs to the duel.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Did they really though, or did they just say they did?

Joanne Freeman:

They’re testifying in court, you would assume they really did. And there are a lot of rules of dueling that are there explicitly for moments like this. Dueling is illegal, these men can now say, “Totally truthfully, I saw nothing.” The doctor says, “I saw nothing, had my back to the dueling ground, but I heard two gunshots.” And that’s all he’s got. That’s what he’s heard. But what he says is he heard a gunshot and a pause, and then a gunshot. That’s interesting because Hamilton is shot by Burr and then drops. It’s a fatal wound.

If there’s a shot, and then a pause, and then a shot, it’s possible that Hamilton did shoot first and then Burr shot at him, but even that doesn’t solve any problems because Hamilton could have shot away from Burr. Basically, I found this amazing piece of evidence in the New-York Historical Society, and I sat there in amazement as a historian would, saying, “Oh my gosh, it’s an unfound or unknown piece of evidence about the Burr-Hamilton duel with eyewitness accounts. Eureka.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, not exactly eyewitness accounts.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s true. Earwitness accounts. So there’s new evidence, but it didn’t solve all the questions.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Am I correct that the reason we even care about this is because it speaks to their characters and these are framers of the constitution, early Republic dudes running around? And people have very strong opinions about how they behaved, and we actually don’t know how they behaved. And that says something about how we should think about them.

Joanne Freeman:

Right, it very much plugs into what we think about the founders, I think it plugs into our hero and villain account. I think people generally make Burr a villain, and nowadays they certainly make Hamilton a hero. So it plugs into stories we want to be true about the period, even the noble lofty duel that somehow people have an image of, that’s part of the same thing, the genteel past with the founders behaving honorably. I think this plugs into that and it suggests that there is a story, one story to tell about the past and we just don’t know.

I mean, you could make bigger, and bigger, and bigger arcs about this and go all the way to originalism in the constitution and the fact that we know what the founders meant in about every word they put in the constitution. There are so many unknowns about the founders and the founding generation. And for people who need to use that period for political purposes, that’s messy. And this is mixed in with that, the founder who died in a way that everyone knows. A lot of New York taxi drivers know that Hamilton died in a duel, I’ve discovered over the years, but no one really knows the inside elements of it. Even I who found this weird new evidence can’t absolutely vouch for what happened.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m thinking here of that moment in the 1977 Star Wars where Han Solo in the original shoots the bounty hunter first. And when they fixed up that, they changed it so that the bounty hunter shoots first, because you can’t have the good guy shooting first. And of course the political moment had change between 1977 and whenever that scene was remade.

Joanne Freeman:

Interesting. Interesting. Well, and that’s true, right? So when you’re fighting a duel in this time period, you always want to be the one who’s insulted, not the one doing the insulting.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I got to say, you’re saying that and I’m thinking, “If I’m fighting a duel in this period, I want to be the one who’s alive.” But women didn’t fight duels, did they?

Joanne Freeman:

No.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So that’s a female perspective, I guess.

Joanne Freeman:

That would be our perspective, yes. Right. I like being alive.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, the reason that I have sort of borne down there on what it says about the characters of our leaders and why we’re invested in that is because of one of the other episodes we picked. And there are plenty, of course, we went through a whole bunch of things that we wonder about, but that these jumped out is what happened at Hampton Roads in Virginia on February 3rd, 1865. And that’s known as The Hampton Roads Conference. And that was a moment when the president, Abraham Lincoln, and his secretary of state, William Henry Seward, met with three Confederate officials, including the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, aboard a steamer called the River Queen near Hampton, Virginia.

And The Hampton Roads Conference is absolutely shadowed in mystery because what came out of it were a couple of statements from, especially the Confederates who’d been there, and memories on the part of secretary of state, Seward, and some evidence from Lincoln, but the conversations themselves were not recorded. And of course, this is a crucial moment in the American Civil War. It’s clearly toward the end of the war, but it was in a period in which the Union is sustaining really heavy losses, as it’s trying to flank the Confederates and get to Richmond. And there’s a real pushback in the north, in the United States, against the continuation of this war.

Lincoln’s just won reelection in the fall of ’64, but there’s a lot of pushback against the fact he appears to be throwing human beings into the maw of the military and doing so for emancipation, which is how a lot of people saw it at the time and disliked that. Other people saw it and liked it, but a lot of, especially Democrats or peace Democrats were like, “Dude, stop killing our sons and brothers over this war. We’re good enough. We figured things out well enough. So why don’t you make peace with the South?”

Joanne Freeman:

I just like them saying, “Dude. Lincoln, the dude.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’ve been writing all day, so I’m a little bit irreverent, but the thing about it is, and the reason I like it with Hamilton and Burr is because actually Lincoln and Alexander Stephens were quite good friends. They had been quite good friends in Congress in the 1840s and they hadn’t seen each other for 16 years, but they were very fond of each other. And here you were the president of the United States and the vice president of a country that was trying to tear the United States in two, but they were friends. So I’ve spent a lot of time actually wondering what that was like to get out to that steamer and to see each other for the first time in all those years.

And allegedly, Lincoln made some joke about the fact that Alexander Stephens was a really small man. I don’t think he ever cleared a hundred pounds in his lifetime and he was very cold in, of course as only Virginia can be in February. And so he was wrapped up in all kinds of layers. And Lincoln made some joke when he finally unwrapped all the layers, that he’d never seen so small a colonel wrapped up in so large a husk, but for the first time in all this time, they’re seeing each other again. And there are hundreds of thousands of people dead because of what Alexander Stephens has done, and because of what those Confederates have done. I mean, what was it like?

Joanne Freeman:

That’s a great question. It gets at something that you and I are both interested in, in our work, which is the power of the personal and the particular in the realm of the political. It’s fascinating to consider. Now, what I want to hear from you is, what do we actually know about what happened?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, that’s the fun part about it. I mean, we have accounts. Lincoln’s secretary later on said that it was a cordial time, they chatted it, but there were no official records. The accounts we have to my mind are not trustworthy, they are people who were trying to put a spin on it that would work well for them back home politically. So the problem from the start was that this was never really going to go anywhere as any kind of a political conference because the South was not willing to stop anywhere short of becoming its own nation. And Lincoln was absolutely not going to say, “Yeah, nevermind. We don’t care about the whole war. You’re welcome to go be your own nation.” So it was a non-starter from the start. So why did Lincoln do it?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, let me ask you a question. Do you think that they didn’t take notes quite deliberately?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes. Yes, I do.

Joanne Freeman:

Okay.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I know Lincoln really well in terms of I’ve read everything I can get my hands on and all that, and I think that Lincoln did it because he needed to calm down those people in the North, who we’re talking about creating some kind of a premature victory. So he was willing to throw this bone to them and say, “Sure, I’ll be happy to talk about a peace talk. That would be great.” And one of the reasons I say that is because one of the other things like this in Lincoln lore is the president’s support for colonization. And that’s a huge deal among historians that he backed the idea of Black Americans going back to different places in Africa and colonizing them.

And lots of people say this speaks to his inherent racism and there’s a lot we could say there, but as a political matter, it’s been pretty well established that Lincoln was consistently throwing out the idea of colonization to get the border states on board with emancipation, because as soon as the emancipation proclamation was in place, he never talked about colonization again. There’s somebody who’s studied that really closely.

And I think he was doing the same thing here saying, “Sure, I’d be happy to talk about having a conference. You can’t say I didn’t try.” The reason that gets interesting is because there were reports from the people coming out of The Hampton Roads Conference that he agreed to let human enslavement continue, that he encouraged the South to take its time and to go ahead and convince them to accept emancipation slowly. Well, many people have grabbed hold of that to say, “Oh my God, he really wasn’t behind emancipation after all.” Historians have looked at that and said, “The only evidence we have that this happened is these reports that we don’t trust.”

In fact, by then not only was the Emancipation Proclamation in place, but he had just won the 1864 election, which he insisted was going to be about the 13th Amendment ending enslavement. So it really looks to people like me, like a political feint, that he was like, “Sure, I’m going to pretend I’m going to do this, but the reality is, I’m just shutting up you people until we actually make this war stick.” But the fact that we don’t know says that that moment can be used by anybody. We don’t know what happened. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall of that ship, where who knows what they talked about?

Joanne Freeman:

And that sort of deliberate… This is informal, we’re not taking notes. As you suggest, that can be really handy politically, given the things that we’re saying here, like sometimes you can’t believe the records, or there’s nothing left behind of the record, or people say different things about what happened. My students, almost every single undergraduate course I have, someone will say when I’m talking about evidence and how to read a letter from the time period, “Well, how can we tell when they’re lying? How do we know when they’re lying? Like I’m reading this letter, but you’re telling us like, ‘You can’t always believe everything there, so how do we know when they’re lying?'” Which is a really good question. I want to come back to it because I think in part it has to do with being a historian, which I think is part of what we’re talking about today, but do you get that question?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I put it a little bit differently, so I don’t get so much how they’re lying. I always say, and I certainly do this when I write about modern-day politics, where is that person coming from? What are the pieces that somebody can get out of this? And I always start with money, by the way, in this case, I don’t think money was the issue at The Hampton Roads Conference, but no matter what happens in any situation, the first place I go is who is making money off this? And sometimes it doesn’t matter at all, but a lot of times it really does matter. But then if you think about it, everything we do, somebody has a different perspective on why they would do something.

So I’m less interested in the lying than why would someone do this? And then the answer to that for me, how do you know if it’s true or not if you can take them with their word? Is how they act. Words and actions must match. And if they don’t match, then what I don’t trust is the words. So in Lincoln’s case at Hampton Roads, you can say, “Okay, we have these recollections that he was mealy-mouthed about emancipation, but everything he did, says, “I’m putting everything on the line for emancipation.” And we really don’t have wiggle room on that in terms of what he did.

Joanne Freeman:

But there you go, thinking like a historian. I don’t necessarily want to talk about being a historian, but I do want to talk about, or certainly lay on the table, how to think about evidence? What you just said is if the actions don’t match the words, the words really need to be considered carefully. And then what you did was, well, everything else, Lincoln did, shows X. And here are supposed words that suggest Y. So how do we evaluate that? This is smart consideration of evidence, this is part of the answer to the question, how can you tell when they’re lying? And the answer is, what’s the bigger context?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it’s about it being a historian and I would also suggest it’s about being a human being, watch what people do, not what they say. And that’s something that in politics, you really have to pay a lot of attention to. And also, I suspect in human life, you want to make sure that the people around you aren’t just talking a good game, they’re actually doing what they say they’re going to do.

Joanne Freeman:

Well. And that’s why gaslighting, which is a word that certainly has gotten lots of talk in recent years, that’s the thread of that, is no, you didn’t see what you saw. You didn’t see what you saw at all.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Pay attention to the words, not the actions.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. Right. That’s the threat of that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So The Hampton Roads Conference, I think, takes that Hamilton birth thing, the personal aspect, and turns it into a really clear moment about politics and history by saying, “We have this empty space here. We don’t know what happened.” Politically, we can make some guesses about it, but then historically people read onto that moment what serves their interest in the present. Is in fact, Lincoln, a closet politician working against emancipation or was he just a political operator? And there’s any number of ways to look at that, so a lot of people don’t like to think of Lincoln as a political operator. I happen to think he was a brilliant political operator, but they want to think of him as just a moral guy who would never pull a fast one on a political opponent because that’s not the way they want to think about him. Other people want to say our system has always been so racist that obviously even Lincoln was interested in continuing slavery.

Joanne Freeman:

It depends on what story you want to tell.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, it does.

Joanne Freeman:

If you go in wanting to tell a particular story, you can find evidence of that story or you can examine the evidence and see what it tells you.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That idea of having that empty hole and people being able to read into what they want points exactly to the other episode that we’re going to highlight today. And that is one of my favorite events in American history, because it is absolutely a blank hole that became incredibly important. And that’s the bombing of Wall Street on September 16th, 1920, just after afternoon, about 12:01. On that day, a horse-drawn wagon pulled up to the offices of J.P. Morgan on Wall Street. And the cart had in it 100 pounds of dynamite and weights. And the cart exploded just after it came to rest. This was a huge explosion and the flames of it reached 12 stories high. And the fire that happened afterward caused more than $2 million in property damage at the time, which is equivalent to more than $27 million today.

A witness who was there said, “I first felt rather than heard the explosion. I dodged into a convenient doorway to escape falling glass and reached a telephone and called the office. Looking down Wall Street later, I could see a mushroom-shaped cloud of yellowish green smoke, which mounted to the height of more than 100 feet. The smoke being licked by darting tongues of flame.” The explosion killed 30 people, 10 more died over the next few days from their injuries. Wall Street trading had to be suspended because the emergency workers were coming to tend to the wounded. And this is the bombing of Wall Street. I mean, you can still see some of the evidence on Wall Street of the damage that that bomb did. We have no idea who set that bomb.

Joanne Freeman:

Let’s pause for a moment because that’s amazing. This is such a dramatic event. It’s a very specific crime. “I’m going to plant a bomb in a particular place, dynamite and watch it explode.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

100 pounds by the way, which is not, you know.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, it’s so specific.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So let’s walk through this. As you say, this is not a small event. Why don’t we know who did it? That I think is a really, really interesting question. I mean, maybe they tried really hard and they just couldn’t figure it out, but maybe they didn’t want to know who planted that bomb. I am completely speculating, of course, but I think you have to start with maybe whoever planted that bomb was not the people that they hoped had planted that bomb.

Joanne Freeman:

Or maybe that was handy if someone who didn’t plant the bomb actually did.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Got blamed for it. Yeah.

Joanne Freeman:

Exactly. These are all the questions you have to ask. Just like, let’s follow the money. If we don’t know something, it’s not a question that’s obvious to ask, but it’s an important one.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because think about how many people had to be involved. There was a horse, and horses have to be stabled, so somebody had to know where that horse came from. Dynamite had to be bought.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s a lot of dynamite.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. Well, dynamite’s pretty heavy. I mean, it’s not like it was a wallet in somebody’s pocket, it would’ve been visible. Somewhere, that had to be put on board the wagon. There were people who knew that was going to happen and they did not show up early on. Now, later on, somebody claimed that it was his uncle who had done it and he knew that from family lore, but I’m sorry that five bucks is going to get you a cup of coffee at a fancy coffee store. So maybe he was telling the truth, maybe he wasn’t. But the reason that that strikes me as being enormously interesting is because of the date, 1920.

1920 is in the middle of what we know as the Red Scare, when Americans were horrified by the rise of Bolshevism in Russia, especially after 1917, and were convinced that America was becoming a communist country. So this bombing happens on Wall Street. And now, for all we know, the bombing happened on Wall Street because somebody was mad at their employer, or mad at the guy who owned the horse, or mad at their wife, but who gets blamed for exploding that bomb on Wall Street? And anybody who’s listening to this, you don’t have to have me fill in the blank, you know exactly who got blamed for it. The director of the Secret Service was a man named William Flynn. And he argued that this bomb was an attempt to destroy democracy through a bombing campaign.

He said, “This bomb was not directed at Mr. Morgan or any individual.” Like, how do we know that? “In my opinion, it was planted in the financial heart of America as a defiance of the American people. I’m convinced a nationwide dynamiting conspiracy exists to wreck the American government and society.” And The Washington Post promptly ties the bombing to immigrants who are perceived as being radicals. It says, and I apologize for this language, “The bomb outrage in New York emphasizes the extent to which the alien scum from the cesspools and sewers of the old world has polluted the clear spring of American democracy.” The New York Times said that, “Authorities were agreed that the devastating blast signaled the long-threatened red outrages.”

Joanne Freeman:

They’re all very clearly, “Here is the them, here’s the them we want it to be. And we, the us, we stand for democracy. So we know who the them is, because the them is against precisely what we want to be.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, yes. And that’s one of the reasons I find this such an interesting moment is because again, we don’t know who set that bomb. Maybe it was anarchists that become associated with other incidents later on, maybe it was somebody who was, as I say, mad at the, I don’t know, the plaster next door or mad at whatever. You could fill in that blank any way you want to, but we do not know what. We do know is that instantly the authorities who were eager to stop immigrants from voting, to stop them from being part of society, very concerned about consolidating their power in New York City and in the country, instantly said, “It’s communists, it’s the radicals, it’s socialists. And therefore we must crack down on them,” which is precisely what they do.

And of course, by 1924, we’ve got the Immigration Act of 1924, which is our first major law that cuts down on immigration by creating categories from countries, quotas from countries of who can arrive. And they don’t actually want people from countries they consider dangerous countries. So this is wonderful moment where you have this major event, I mean, they bombed Wall Street and lots of people died and there was lots of damage. But the fact that historical knowledge about it remained empty, meant that people in power could fill that void with their own version of what had happened. And I just can’t stop thinking about the summer of 2020, which was all about, according to certain people, all about Antifa. And that was a complete fiction that was constructed.

Joanne Freeman:

But prove that, right? If you have no evidence and people are saying, “Yeah, but I know it’s true because I know it’s true.” And that ties together the Wall Street bombing and the Burr-Hamilton duel in that the lack of evidence leaves a gap for blame. If you’re trying to construct a narrative and it would be really useful for you to have certain people be the enemy, that gap of evidence can be useful for that, you can fill it somehow and then pull, cherry-pick other pieces of evidence or ignore other pieces of evidence to prove your point.

And nowadays, in the land of conspiracies that we live in, we see people doing that all the time, making narratives happen sometimes based on no evidence at all, or based on something that any historian questioned, would say, “Well, yeah, but what about?” We look at all of these creative, to be nice about it, narratives being constructive because someone wants them to be true and sometimes proving the absence of something can be hard. So in one way or another, this is partly about the importance of really, really, really thinking about not just evidence, but the story behind it, and the people behind it, and the motives behind it, and all of the other things that give meaning above and beyond the narratives that people are constructing, but it’s bigger than that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So now I got to take you back to the Secret Service texts.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because they’re a wonderful example of what currently appears to be a whole, those texts. And I think we need to actually unpack a little bit about what that means because currently, and we’re very early days for a historian, we are led to believe that texts are missing. So what do you think is in those texts and why?

Joanne Freeman:

And in the moment, and given what has been suggested during the hearings, one might think that those texts contain information about the president trying to rest control of the car he was in, or saying something about what he wanted to do or where he wanted to go on January 6th and why. We have someone who testified to what they were told, we have other people who insist that they’re going to testify about what they were told that it was different. They’ve not stepped forward. And then, we don’t have evidence from that moment that would show certainly what people were talking about in that moment. This is a moment that certainly seemingly could matter a lot because it involves motive and action.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So this, again, speaks to evidence because the person who referred to the incident, you’re talking about Cassidy Hutchinson testified under oath. Those who did not, who said that they disagreed that that happened, did not testify under oath. And the inspector general, who finally came forward with the information that the texts had been deleted, apparently knew it for a long time before he told the committee. So again, look at how people act. You’d want to hear a really good explanation for why that were the case for you to say, “Oh yeah, it turns out that’s fine.”

Right now, the signs all seem to say that there might be something important in there. Now, that being said, where else could you look? So who else would have those records? Other people to whom they texted. And we know of course, that there have been a number of phones that have been, the contents of them have been subpoenaed. You could look at other phones, you could look at other people who were standing nearby and might have heard something.

Joanne Freeman:

There are any number of ways or people or forms of technology that the Secret Service might have encountered or interacted with that might offer evidence, but then you have to really be creating a trail of evidence, tracking it, seeing how things connect to other things, seeing how credible and how reliable various things are. Then you have to get into the job of figuring out, what can I believe and what can’t I believe, and what holes are there here that I can’t fill?

Heather Cox Richardson:

And this to me is the fun of what we do, that is we are essentially always piecing together a giant puzzle. I think the difference between us doing history and someone today reconstructing a scene like we’re talking about is that at the end of the day, I think you already know why they’re seen as important. For historians, you recreate a scene and then you try to explain why it matters. That’s the fun part is to say, “Well, it really matters that we know who fired first between Hamilton and Burr, because that says a lot about who they are and how we have interpreted them since then, or it matters a lot what happened in Hampton Roads because it says a lot about who Lincoln was. And he was, I don’t know, a little important. And of course it matters who bombed Wall Street in 1920.”

Joanne Freeman:

I just adore the research because of this. You don’t know the pieces you’re going to find, you don’t know how they’re going to fit together, but I want to make one last point about being in this particular moment and the Secret Service texts that are missing. We’ve been looking as historians into events in the past and trying to recreate chains of logic and pieces of evidence that add up to something in the past. Right now, we’re in a moment where we’re smacked in the middle of a sea of contingency and we really don’t fully know what happened, although we think we know what happened. And there are people very interested in a way different explanation of what happened. And some of what these missing texts, some of what they can do is not only do they shape or have something to do with our sense of the character of the people involved, but even bigger than that, they might shape people’s trust in organizations, or people’s trust in the historical record, or people’s trust in the government.

So what these Secret Service texts, to me are a reminder of is that it’s a really different thing to be in the moment where these things are unfolding. And you’re trying to figure out the narrative and you don’t know what it is and you’re grasping around and there are different narratives being offered to you. And evidence becomes very important, so in a sense, it puts us in the moment of these three moments that we talked about, what people were thinking about that moment and what does that suggest about their understanding of the United States and/or the government, and/or important political figures of the time? Because for many people, just like for us now, this might be experienced as a crisis, as a moment of being tested.