William Henry Seward was supposed to be president. In 1860, he was the favorite for the Republican nomination until he lost it to a lesser-known prairie lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Then, while Lincoln sat silent in Springfield for four months after the election, Seward fought alone from the Senate floor to save the Union.

C. Evan Stewart, Cornell-trained historian, 40-year securities lawyer, and author of a new book on Seward, walks Stan through what really happened in the Secession Winter of 1860-61: the back-channel meetings with Virginia unionists, the proposed 13th Amendment that would have protected slavery forever, the April 1 memo raising the prospect of confrontation with France, and the day Lincoln changed his mind about Fort Sumter.

From there, they go deeper. The Dred Scott decision and what Chief Justice Taney actually wrote. Why Stewart believes Chief Justice Roberts is quietly rebalancing American power today. Lincoln's record on civil liberties. And the French tariff parallel Stan raises that Stewart bluntly calls "completely different."

Stewart closes with his answer to the show's signature question: What is America to you?

More episodes at backinamericathepodcast.com. If this one landed, share it with someone who loves an untold story, and leave a rating. It pushes the show up in search and helps new listeners find us.

William Henry Seward's Quest to Save the Nation During the Secession Winter (1860-1861)

Clifford Brown was a partner at a Beverly Hills law firm when he saw a newspaper ad that changed his life. He gave up most of his income, left his house over the ocean, and joined the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the next 27 years, he worked in Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, Guinea, and Peru.

In this conversation, Cliff describes bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, a practice where young men abduct women and force them into marriage. His own wife's older sister was kidnapped. Later, after Cliff spoke out against high-level corruption involving electricity smuggling, his wife was abducted at gunpoint outside a hair salon in Bishkek.

We talk about what USAID actually did beyond humanitarian aid: creating agricultural industries that supplied American grocery stores, training accountants in post-Soviet states, building court systems across Latin America. A law called the Hickenlooper Law prohibited the agency from telling Americans about any of it.

Cliff spent twenty years fighting his own agency's lawyers over whether the U.S. government could fund translations of Quranic texts that prohibit suicide, to counter radical Islam after 9/11. The lawyers said no, citing excessive entanglement with religion. His argument: it's legal to fund a bullet but not a conversation about scripture. The Washington Post covered his case in 2009.

We discuss what USAID got wrong, including the failed counter-narcotics programs in Colombia and the democracy-building efforts that went nowhere in the former Soviet Union. And we talk about what fills the vacuum when America steps back, with China building railroads and mines across Africa on loan terms that countries cannot repay.

On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order pausing nearly all foreign aid. By July 1, USAID officially ceased to exist. More than 80 percent of its programs were terminated. Cliff describes the sadness of watching colleagues lose their pensions overnight, and a former staff member from Kyrgyzstan now working in a grocery store deli.

Clifford Brown is the author of Inside USAID: An Odyssey of Foreign Assistance. He writes at cliffordbrown.substack.com.

From the conversation:

"I felt like I was a mental prostitute. I had to think about somebody else's problem as an attorney, and the only reason I was thinking about it was they were paying me to think about it." -- Who Steps In When America Walks Away-

"Half a million jobs in Honduras from an onion experiment. 300 villages in Guatemala connected to electricity for a $30,000 investment. Shrimp, cantaloupe, flour, broccoli, all shipped to American groceries from industry that USAID helped create." -- Who Steps In When America Walks Away-

You might also like:

• Wrongfully Convicted: Darryl Burton Spent 24 Years in Prison for a ...

• Councilwoman Leticia Fraga - From Mexico to Princeton, NJ - A story...

• Denis Devine - Fishtown, Philly - a non-traditional dad, an engaged...

A man's house catches fire. He tells police he ran through the flames saving his belongings. Then detectives pull the data from the pacemaker in his chest. His own heartbeat tells a different story.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a professor of law at George Washington University Law School, a former public defender, and the author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance. In this conversation, he walks us through the criminal cases, the legal gaps, and the surveillance infrastructure that most Americans don't know they've already built around themselves. We talk about Google search histories used as confessions, smart home cameras that become prosecution witnesses, Palantir's expanding role in immigration enforcement, and what happens when the definition of "criminal" shifts but the data trail stays the same.

Ferguson proposes something he calls the tyrant test: design your privacy protections by assuming the worst possible leader will have access to your data. He argues it's not a thought experiment. It's the logic the country was founded on.

Book: Your Data Will Be Used Against You (NYU Press)
https://nyupress.org/9781479838295/your-data-will-be-used-against-you/
Guest: Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School

From the conversation:

"Everything you buy that is a smart device is a surveillance device. And what we've done is sort of build around us this network of smart devices that is revealing who we are and what we do." -- Your Heartbeat Can Convict You

"Your smart pacemaker, almost anything you create with data can be used against you in a court of law." -- Your Heartbeat Can Convict You

You might also like:

• Wrongfully Convicted: Darryl Burton Spent 24 Years in Prison for a ...

• Who should get the vaccine first? We didn’t know so we asked a phil...

• A Pastor Joined the FBI. Then His Kids Came Out.