next on american history tv, author gregory may talks about the nation's fourth secretary, albert gallatin. who served from 1801-1814. he explores gallatin's early political career in the overhaul of alexander hamilton's financial system, his efforts to reduce the national debt, and his work on the peace treaty that ended the war of 1812. mr. may is the author of "jefferson's treasure: how albert gallatin saved the new nation from debt." the the museum of american finance posted this event. it is about 45 minutes. >> welcome everyone. and our c-span audience with the museum of american finance is still the only mission in america with a mission to preserve, exhibit, and teach our financial history.

today we are going to discuss the nation's fourth secretary of the treasury, albert gallatin. while he does not have a broadway musical about him, he was incredibly influential in his day. by way of example, when lewis and clark were on their expedition and they get to a fork of the mississippi river, -- of the missouri river, they named one after gallatin. but his name does not get a lot of headlines in our history. gregory may has set out to change that. he has written a terrific and very well researched book. 672 footnotes, many of the m richly detailed. there is high praise inside the book from our chair, who says the book is a "tour de force." i think gregory has been channeling albert gallatin the last two years. very exciting to have his workout. -- his work out.

gregory did his undergraduate work at william and mary. then he went to harvard law school. he clerked on the supreme court and practiced for 30 years. he calls himself an independent scholar, which i really enjoy, because it means he brought pre-existing bias to the topic and has shed new light on a very amazing man. gallatin is buried right up the street at trinity church. and i do try to pay my respects often. but of course he is buried on the opposite side of the cathedral of alexander hamilton. be back at the end with a special presentation and it is my pleasure now to introduce gregory may. [applause] mr. may: thank you very much. it is great to be here at the museum of american finance to talk to an audience interested in financial history. alexander hamilton's worst enemy

was not who broadway thinks it was. aaron burr may have shot the man, but it was albert gallatin who destroyed his life's work, the financial system that he had created for the new federal government. hamilton was proud of that system. he thought that the federal government's ability to borrow vast amounts of money would allow the united states to become a great nation. gallatin disagreed. he thought that endless public borrowing was a drag on the private sector and a prescription for economic failure. in the first great fight over how to pay for the federal government, it was gallatin who won. when thomas jefferson appointed albert gallatin to be the secretary of the treasury, the federalists who had controlled the government under presidents washington and adams were

worried. they braced for the worst. they had just lost the presidency for the first time in an election so bitterly contested that it took 36 ballots in the house of representatives to make jefferson president. they had also lost the majority in congress. now jefferson was putting this man gallatin in charge of the largest and most powerful department of the government. the treasury at that time employed well over 90% of the federal civilian payroll. it controlled everything from taxes and spending to light houses and public hospitals and the coastal service. -- postal service. it had agents in every seaport. the man in charge of all of that could do a lot of damage. the federalists knew this man gallatin all too well. he was a foreigner with a bad accident. -- a bad accent.

a tax rebel. and a dangerously clever man. it was objections to hamilton's financial systems that had sparked the republican opposition in the first place. this man gallatin had emerged as hamilton's most vocal critic. his resistance to taxes, federal spending, public debt was relentless. now he was in a position to turn those objections into policy. at the very least, he would starve the military in order to repay the debt. their federalist vision of a vigorous new american nation state would simply fade away. much of what the federalists were saying about gallatin was actually true. he was a 40-year-old immigrant from geneva. he had come to america when he was 19 to seek his fortune, just a year before the battle at yorktown.

by that time, the revolutionary war had destroyed much of the american economy. american incomes had fallen by 20% or 30% during the war. and an economic depression after the war, which is probably deeper than the great depression, lasted for almost a decade. gallatin struggled to find footing under the circumstances. he eventually settled on a frontier south of pittsburgh. a place so remote that they a settlers petition called at the ends of the american earth. he speculated land and farmed a little. he cap a store -- kept a store and he tried to manufacture guns and class. none of that have brought in the fortune that he came seeking. none of that has really put him -- had really put him on his path in america. but his talents have not gone unnoticed.

an aristocrat by birth and education, gallatin became a radical republican by conviction. one of those freedom loving anti-federalists who thought that the federal government was going to be too strong and too remote from the people. local worthies in the back country send him to the pennsylvania legislature, and there he showed a rare aptitude for public finance. a prodigious appetite for hard work. and a knack for getting along with people of different political persuasions. he married hannah nicholson, the of aically savvy daughter feisty naval officer who have became one of the leading republican organizers here in new york city. it was indeed a tax revolt that brought gallatin to national attention. six years before jefferson became president, thousands of

men in the pennsylvania backcountry took up arms against hamilton's tax on distilling and what we now remember as the whiskey rebellion. they burned the local tax collector's house, robbed the mail, and marched on pittsburgh. although gallatin opposed to the violence, hamilton blamed him and his anti-federalist friends for the protests that had sparked it. washington called out the militia, and hamilton led these troops into gallatin's home district. gallatin managed to slip away to safety in philadelphia. but his nearest neighbor wrote to tell him that there was never more industry made than that set -- made by any set of men then them who was here to get a hold of you. his opposition to the violence electionn unexpected to congress. once in congress, he quickly

proved his worth to the republican opposition. gallatin gave real bite to their objections to hamilton's system for funding federal deficits. there was nothing innovative about that system. hamilton had borrowed it from the british. but from the perspective of republicans like madison and jefferson, that was exactly the problem. they thought hamilton system was -- hamilton's system was tainted with tierney. it made ordinary pay obnoxious taxes to sustain a mounting federal debt and the cost of the expensive military establishment. this was just the thing that had let americans to revolt against britain in the first place. it had already provoked rebellion in pennsylvania. madison's efforts to oppose hamilton's program in congress had failed because neither he nor the other republicans in congress knew enough about

finance to effectively resist hamilton. gallatin's grasp on finance but put the republican opposition on equal terms with the treasury for the first time. madison soon reported to jefferson that gallatin was a real treasure. from the virginia hilltop or he -- where he had retired after leaving washington, jefferson wrote back that gallatin will merit immortal honor if he can reduce hamilton's chaos to order and present us with a clear view of our finances. the accounts of the u.s. ought to be as simple as those of a common farmer. probably few farmers read it, but gallatin wrote a book to explain where hamilton had gone wrong. the book was partisan, but it was not like the other republican political tracts of the time. it did not sling typical republican slogans about

political corruption and closets monarchists. instead, gallatin used the liberal economic ideals that he found in adam smith's wealth of nations to make the case for fiscal reform. he started with adam smith's convention that government spending retards private activity. smith recognized the nations of need governments to support the conditions for growth. that he emphasized that governing was not a profit-making activity, and smith thought that military spending, which at that time accounted for almost everything the federal government spent, apart from the interest on the public debt, was particularly wasteful, because war destroys capital. gallatin argued that hamilton's system for funding the debt was a menace.

rather than the benefit hamilton claimed it to be. gallatin that that hamilton system had two major problems. in the first place, it made federal borrowing too easy, because the government did not have to pay anything except the interest on its that. -- on its debt. borrowing on those easy terms made spending too easy. and military spending made the government more likely to get into a wasteful war. in the second place, interest payments on the federal debt were shifting money from productive taxpayers to wealthy speculators. they were more likely to waste the money on imported luxuries rather than spend it on the domestic economy. the country could not achieve its potential unless the federal government cut public spending and repaid the national debt. it was political brawls that

really mattered. the biggest brawl in which gallatin was involved in his first year in congress was the one over john jay's treaty with the british. george washington had sent jay to london to negotiate a settlement of the differences that threatened to drop in the -- draw the new nation into a war with britain that the infant country could not have afforded. the treaty that jay sent home was so unfavorable, that washington managed to get it ratified by the senate without ever disclosing the terms to the public. when the terms finally leaked, and a republican senator leaked them, all hell broke loose. crowds up and down the country burned john jay in effigy. aty eliminated their houses night in protest.

door of aled to the federalist house that had no lights in the window red, "-- read, "damn john jay! and damn everyone who won't damn john jay!!" the angry crowds in new york's stoned hamilton when he tried to defend the treaty. gallatin's father in law openly insinuated that hamilton must be a british agent. when hamilton did not deny it, nicholson called him a coward. that left hamilton no option but to challenge nicholson to a duel. their friends managed to work things out before anybody got shot. but mickelson continued to despise him until the day he died. gallatin called on the house of representatives to block jay's treaty even though the senate

had already ratified it by refusing to appropriate the money that would be required to enforce it. the constitution, he said, had given the house the power of the purse so that it could stop the wheels of government when the government is going astray. it was a bold position. madison gave a long speech in which he dithered over whether it was right. but jefferson enthusiastically embraced it. he wrote a letter to madison saying that gallatin's speech should be printed at the end of the book called the federalist. the only rational commentary on the fiscal prerogatives of the house. gallatin lost that fight. the house did appropriate the money for jay's treaty. but gallatin's spirited opposition made his political reputation. it also attracted endless abuse from the federalists. they routinely called him a

foreigner, and much worse, a frenchman. they mocked his attempts to stop the heels of the government. in a federalist cartoon that was printed here in new york, it showed him clinging to the wheels of washington's chariot while jefferson shouts directions behind him and french cannibals invade on the left side. in fact, one of gallatin's critics complained that it was all of this abuse that actually turned gallatin into a celebrity. by the time the next congress convened, madison had retired to virginia with a new wife. john adams had been elected president. jefferson was vice president. and gallatin was the leader of the republican opposition in congress. washington condescended to invite gallatin to dinner one cold winter evening before he stepped aside for john adams.

albert reported to his wife, hannah, that he had donned my only good coat for the occasion. washington's dinners with congressmen were notoriously solemn affairs. often eaten in virtual silence. this one was no exception. mrs. washington continues to be a very amiable person. not so her husband, in your husband's humble opinion. but that is between you and me. for you know i hate to treason. there is none worse than to refuse singing praises to the best and greatest in men. the next four years were tense. the adams administration got into a low grade war with france, and hamilton and the other federalists used it for expensive additions to the army and navy. they called washington back to command the army.

hamilton got himself promoted over more senior generals to be second in command. gallatin and the republican minority tried to resist this military buildup. but it was very easy for the federalists to paint them as unpatriotic. partisan mobs actually came to blows in the streets. federalist prosecutors locked up a vermont congressman whose newspaper had criticize the -- criticized the administration. tensions ran so high in congress that some of the republican members got physically ill and others actually went home. this reign of witches, as jefferson called it, welded a firm bond between gallatin and jefferson. late in life, jefferson would vividly remember that gallatin alone remained in the house and myself in the senate to bid defiance to the brow beatings and insults with which they assailed us.

but jefferson never despaired. the war fever would soon pass, he reassured a friend back in virginia. the doctor is now on his way to cure it in the guise of a tax collector. jefferson was right about that. the heavier taxes needed to pay for the federalist military buildup did change the political climate. and jefferson squeaked to victory in the next presidential election. fiscal reform was at the top of the agenda when jefferson took office. it was clear to everyone that gallatin was going to play a central role in the administration. at other than madison had a wider reputation or more political experience. madison had been away in virginia during the previous four years while kalitta and was -- while gallatin was leading

the opposition in congress. edward thornton told london that gallatin and madison would beat -- be president's advisers. if they should become rivals, horton predicted, gallatin would dominate because he was more decisive than madison, and more capable of getting things done. jefferson, thorton thought, could handle foreign affairs by himself but he needed him to manage the treasury. in fact, jefferson, gallatin, and madison worked very well together. gallatin was different from the other two in important ways. he was 18 years younger than jefferson and 10 years younger than madison. he was a small manufacturer. rather than a farmer. in the a galaence terry pennsylvania politics was different from their experience in the lesser gentry who had

taken over virginia in the revolution. madison and jefferson had worked closely with gallatin during the years in opposition and treated him as a political equal. jefferson, gallatin, and madison were not a triumphant, as some historians have imagined. jefferson made his own decisions and the other two conferred only is the occasion arose. the three of them rarely met as a separate group. gallatin placed a special confidence in madison -- i'm sorry, jefferson placed special comp -- confidence in gallatin and madison and consulted them earlier and more often than he consulted anyone else. it was clear to everyone they had influence in the government. by the time the war of 1812 revealed the flaws in republican policy, it was plausible for a

federalist congressman from boston to lay the blame on a cabinet composed for all practical purposes of two virginians and a foreigner. this is where the story usually ends. everybody knows there was a big battle between hamilton and jefferson over fiscal affairs and you know it was madison and gallatin who did most of the fighting in congress. we know the jeffersonians ultimately won. when jefferson got elected. but what then? what did they do with their victory? did they manage to get rid of hamilton's system? did they have something better to replace it with? we cannot answer those questions without taking a closer look at albert gallatin. he was the man who tackled the problems that hamilton left behind. the changes he made were actually profound.

hamilton never promised to pay anything except interest on government debt. gallatin committed to repay a fixed amount of debt each year. he gave the payment priority. over all other federal spending. he also insisted the government should never spend more than it received except during wartime. he put the brakes on federal spending. he got rid of the whiskey tax. and he abolished the internal revenue system. he paid for the government with revenue from import duties. import duties had been the primary source for federal revenue from the beginning. ordinary citizens tolerated them better than they tolerated internal taxes. because at a time when the economy in most parts of the country was largely a rural subsistence economy, only the wealthy wanted imported goods.

hamilton was irate. he wrote a long series of newspaper articles in which he lambasted gallatin and the other republicans for pandering to the people and destroying a financial system. he said practical politicians knew the government should use their fiscal powers to encourage national prosperity. he claimed gallatin's obsession with debt repayment would sink the government and slow down economic development. indeed, hamilton feared, gallatin's reforms would not even have been possible if he had not already stabilize the -- stabilized the government's finances. the reforms, he said, were the measures of little politicians who enjoy benefits of a policy which they had neither the wisdom to plan not

or the spirit to adopt. but jefferson was delighted with what gallatin had done. the financial path was smooth, he wrote to a friend. that we have scarcely anything to propose to congress. some might carp, he said, that they raised the money to make it possible for us to pay the debt. but we never charge them with failing to raise money, only with the misapplication of it. after giving back the surplus, he said, we can do more with the parts than they did with the whole. gallatin continued to manage the government's money well. during his first 11 years as the -- at the treasury, he repaid nearly half of public debt. he financed the louisiana purchase. he put things on a steady keel. peace, economy, and riddance of

the public debt was a -- was jefferson's mantra and gallatin turned that into a reality. but gallatin's frugality had a very heavy price. the united states was a weak young nation on the fringe of an atlantic world dominated by britain and france. for the first 25 years of the nation's existence under the constitution, those great powers were at war with each other. the war, which lasted until napoleon's defeat at waterloo, was one of the largest military conflicts in human history. america's distance from europe gave the united states some breathing room but not enough. had a long andes indefensible coastline, a vast and largely ungoverned interior

and most important of all, an economy that depended on export of raw materials and food to europe. once britain and france decided to use trade disruption as a way of weakening each other, the collateral damage to america's interests were inevitable. despite that obvious threat, gallatin insisted on repaying public debt priority over military preparations. it was an expensive decision. when damage to american interests finally pushed the united states into a war with britain in 1812, the government was not prepared. there were 7000 men in the army and 17 ships in the navy. the federal revenue depended almost entirely on trade across the atlantic, which war would shatter.

and congress rejected gallatin's call to reimpose internal taxes like the one on whiskey because they thought taxes would make the war unpopular. lenders, many of whom opposed to the war, hesitated to give gallatin the enormous loans he needed to pay for it because they did not believe he could collect the taxes necessary to repay them. the consequences were predictable. all three of the american attacks on british canada in the first year of the war, failed miserably. tax revenue limited. -- plummeted. and the treasury started to run out of money. gallatin left for europe to seek peace with britain. after he left, congress imposed the taxes he requested. but it was too late. british troops invaded washington and burned public buildings.

american defenders on lake champlain and in the harbor of baltimore were able to drive back british attacks but the american forces elsewhere made little headway. after the british invasions, the federal government's fiscal situation finally became worse than the military prospects. the treasury ran out of money and the government defaulted on its bonds. john adams, chairman -- john apps, chairman of the committee and a jefferson's son-in-law reported the default to the house of representatives who sat huddled together in a small room that the british spared. when he finished reading the report, he flung it on the table and turning to a federalist congressman near him, asked whether he and his party wanted

to take back the federal government. no, sir, replied the man. not unless you give it to us in the same condition we gave it to you. a congressman who had been close to gallatin put the problem in -- put the problems recently. succinctly. disgrace and taxes will not suit a nation. the peace treaty that gallatin sent home said not a war about the grievances -- not a word about the grievances that led to the war. but timing is everything, and the treaty got to washington days after the news of andrew jackson's victory over the british in new orleans. it suddenly seemed to americans they had won the war. who does not rejoice when he is -- that he is not a european? who is not proud to be an american, our wrongs of revenge

and rights recognized. none of that was true. in the surge of relief after the war, it felt true. younger members of the republican party such as henry john c calhoun, who was a great nationalist at that point, took a more sober lesson from the war. they wanted congress to spend money on measures to make the country stronger. they pushed for a larger peacetime army, roads and canals into the interior, and national bank, and higher tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing. those measures horrified gallatin's old political friends who still clung to their frugal republican principles. but gallatin supported some of them. during jefferson's administration, he wrote a detailed plan for building

federal roads and canals when the country could afford them. before the war, he tried to convince the republican majority in congress that the government urgently needed to recharter the bank of the united states that hamilton had established. he thought the experience of the war showed the wisdom of the measures. under the austere republican system, he wrote to an old friend, we were becoming too attached to much making money and too confined in our political feelings to state and local objectives. the war, he said, had renewed the national feelings that waned after the revolution. and he thought that was a good thing. but a financial panic in 1819 gave the progressive republican postwar programs a blow. the economy crumbles. money was short.

and voters got testy. the republicans in congress reverted to gallatin's frugal old ways to balance the budget and keep the political support of hard-pressed farmers throughout the country. andrew jackson's presidential victory nine years later clinched the switch back and in policy. jackson ran for office as a man of the people, committed to the old republican policies of fiscal reform. jackson meant what he said. he stuck to gallatin's policy. of fixed annual repayments of the debt. 20 years after gallatin had left the treasury, jackson could grow -- crow that the federal government had repaid the last dollar of its debt. the federal government has never again been free from debt. but gallatin's culture of fiscal the publicity kept

debt in check throughout the 19th century. in peacetime, the government paid most of its bills with import duties that were effectively invisible to most americans. when war required borrowing, the government intended to pay down the debt after peace returned. modern republicans put a statue of alexander hamilton on the south side of the treasury building in the early 1920's. but the taller statue that dominates the front of the white house is a figure of albert gallatin. that is no accident. for most of the last century, hamilton was not a hero. he was regarded as a government elitist. it was gallatin who was remembered as a man of the people who tried to keep the government in check. so why don't we remember albert gallatin? at the end of jefferson's first

term, a prominent virginia republican named john taylor took a few minutes to reflect on what we would call the media value of what gallatin had done. brilliant as they are, he said, gallatin's reforms -- there is a certain county house dust in about his reforms that are sure to assign them to oblivion. he was right about that. but taylor himself never minimized the importance of government in american political life. his own political tracks were filled with rants about the corrosive effect of money on republican government. taylor believed public finance actually was the beating heart

of american politics. jefferson's lofty political sentiments were all very well, he wrote a few years later, but it was extreme folly to suppose the bulk of the people are influenced by abstract political principles. that was never the case in any nation. what had brought the republicans to power, he said, was the taxes imposed by the federalist and what had kept them in power was the taxes they had repealed. politicians in our own time have said the same thing in soundbites. but whatever the slogans and the political persuasion, no one today would pretend to understand american politics without knowing how the government raises money, what it does with the money, and how taxing and spending affect the american people. -- in the american republic was

really no different. to understand what happened then, we need to know albert gallatin. the man who was in charge of jefferson's treasury. [applause] mr. may: happy to take questions. >> i would like to ask two things you seem to have not covered. economic effect of gallatin's policies, and did gallatin agree with jefferson's embargo in 1807? question, asfirst you probably know, is very difficult to answer because of

the data that was collected in those days. the data that is now available to us is not anything like the economic statistics with which we are also familiar. familiar.all so we cannot say definitively whether the american economy was so different under the republican policies than it would have been under the federalist hamilton policies. a couple of data points are important to remember. one is federal spending was small compared to the size of the economy in those days. what the federal government spent or did not spend was not nearly as important as it soon became, and certainly was but a shadow of what it is today. in fact, it is likely the states were taxing at a rate about the same as the federal government was at the time.

the total burden, state and federal, on the economy, the total tax burden was about 4% of national income, about the closest we can get to gdp using the figures available at the time. my own reaction to your question is the most important thing was what the policies did to the financial system. the loss of the bank of the u.s. before the war of 1812 was a disastrous occurrence, not only for the finances of the federal government, but because it began to create this proliferation of state banks, many of which were not sound and none of which were well regulated. when the second bank of the west -- a bank of the united states

was chartered a few years later, it had some success in disciplining the issuance of bank notes. by this state banks. but over time, especially after jackson taxed the second bank of the united states and destroyed it, the over issuance of notes by state banks became an important source of monetary instability in the country. a lot of that has to be assigned to this republican financial policy. the second question about the embargo. the embargo is an interesting subject which i have chosen not to talk about because it relates more to foreign policy at the time than financial policy. gallatin opposed the embargo strongly. there is a famous letter often

quoted in histories of the war that he wrote to jefferson on the morning jefferson was going to send to congress a bill to enact the embargo where he pleads with jefferson to hold back and not do it. the irony is, gallatin became the cabinet secretary who had to enforce the embargo because it fell to the treasury to cut off trade since they were the ones in charge of all of the fiscal agents and seaports. enforcing the embargo was virtually impossible. although there was a surprising level of compliance. there was also a large level of smuggling and noncompliance which continued throughout the war, there was a lot of trading with the british throughout the war.

>> one of the linchpins to how -- to hamilton's program was the first bank of the united states. how did gallatin feel about it and how did jefferson feel? you talked about it in the book, about the letters back and forth, once gallatin gets into power, the central piece of hamilton, how did he think about it? mr. may: gallatin never opposed the bank of the united states, even when he was in opposition of congress. when he got to the treasury, he continued to use it. he continued to reassure it that he would not try to bring it down. he tried to get its charter renewed just before the war of 1812 without much support or any -- without much support or any support from madison, who failed

to let it be known what his real opinion was. hatred of the bank of the united states was a republican dogma in the fact that gallatin did not oppose it is a good illustration of his pragmatism, he was more financially sophisticated and more of a pragmatic thinker than madison, jefferson, and more political members of the party. he thought the bank was important to create a workable monetary system for the new country. because the bank, since it received all of the government revenues for deposit, received a huge percentage of the bank notes issued by the state banks. by calling those notes, making the state bank pay notes, the

bank of the united states could actually control the overall size of the monetary issuance in the country. gallatin thought that was very important. he did not speak in terms of central banking. at least at this period. was ae central banking concept that was only becoming to be understood even in europe at the time in a gradual way. although people understood this monetary effect, they were not quite sure how to label it, manage it, promote it, how far to carry it. it is only in the decade that follows that you begin to see clear discussion of what we now would understand to be central banking. by the time gallatin wrote a large pamphlet to defend the second bank of the united states against jackson, he was speaking in terms recognizable today in defense of central banking.

was there a question? >> [indiscernible] mr. may: the same ones the republicans had repealed. there is no particular surprise about that. those were the same taxes that were enacted in great britain to pay for the french revolution and napoleonic wars. similar, although different from taxes that were being used in france. none of the hamiltonian system innovative, he had bored it front -- borrowed it from the british and when it came time to raise taxes again, and gallatin said taxes would have to be raised in wartime, it was logical to reach for the usual list.

>> [indiscernible] that is a good question. the answer is not easy to give. because the constitution required so-called direct taxes to be apportioned by population within each state. in other words, each state got a portion of the total tax equal to its proportion of the national population. in operation, that did not work too well. for example, an early controversial tax was on carriages. some states had more carriages per capita than others. implementing the direct tax that was apportioned in a way the constitution required it to be was politically impossible and unjust.

the result was uncertainty over what was a direct tax and a lot of pragmatic decision-making, including a supreme court decision in which justices decided the carriage tax was not a direct tax after all. it did not have to be proportion -- apportioned. >> thanks, everyone. [applause] we are going to start a tradition today as a thank you to our speakers. and for -- and it will be a tie for the men and a scarf for the woman. it is certainly fitting. it is our alexander hamilton tie that we want to present to you, greg. greg mentions on page 394 footnote 19 the story that is often told that gallatin talked

with james hamilton, and said your dad's financial system, he made no blunders come he committed no fraud. with that, i want to make sure you will accept that graciously from us. mr. may: thank you. [applause] mr. may: i will have to refer you to that footnote where i tried to debunk that quotation. [laughter] >> jefferson's treasure is on sale now. you are watching american history tv of , 48 hours programming on american history every weekend. follow us on twitter at c-span history for information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. announcer: c-span, where history unfolds daily.

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