#137 - Clement Knox - How Only The British Could Make America Before America Could Make Itself

Clement Knox is a writer and historian. He is the author of The Scramble for America: How the United States Conquered a Continent (William Collins, 2026), and writes at Past Notes on Substack.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was thirteen coastal colonies clinging to the Atlantic seaboard. Within a single lifetime, it became a continental empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific — and the founding generation openly called it exactly that: an empire. This conversation asks how it happened, and who actually did it, because the people who crossed the Appalachians, fought the wars, and settled the frontier were not a random sample of humanity. They were the descendants of specific English and British folkways, and their story tells us a great deal about the inheritance they carried across the ocean.

In this conversation we think out loud about:

• Why the founding generation openly called their own project an empire — and why that fact became invisible to later Americans
• Frederick Jackson Turner's argument that America only became culturally distinct once settlers crossed the Appalachians and had to build civilisation anew
• David Hackett Fischer's four British folkways and which of them actually drove the push westward
• Why the Scots-Irish Borderers who settled Appalachia resemble the Bedouin of Arabia more than they resemble the East Coast settlements they left behind
• The recurring tension between liberty and order in the Anglo-American character, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the modern day
• George Washington as a land speculator and enclosure man who died the richest man in the country — the story behind the myth
• Why neither the settlers nor the Native Americans held a monopoly on civilisation or savagery, and what a forensic reading of the primary sources actually shows
• Why Clement changed his mind about universalism — and what that means for how the modern world's institutions were built

And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England — my documentary series retracing H.V. Morton's 1927 journey to find out what's left of the old country. Episode one and two are live now on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCHptEOmbMRzSV7TQqVMJxAVohAEnvLdA&si=VcpwRhAUmrcrWOTm

Find Clement Knox:

• Substack: https://clementknox.substack.com

Related episodes:
— Gary Gerstle — The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: https://youtu.be/KbCyaKcj0E8?si=jtY9S8tX493eqUkz
— Michael Lind — Why America & Britain Keep Betraying Their Working Class: https://youtu.be/YN212csIsvU?si=a9BsVmo0sqGI-qoy
— David Starkey — Britain as a Disaster Since 1945: https://youtu.be/aI3tBbqMmXY?si=SI9B_qVavRQH-EGb
— Katharine Birbalsingh — She Told 4,000 People The West Is Committing Suicide: https://youtu.be/L60dtIoALgA?si=yXhD5G8C-4zEueiR

Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast on the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to Clement Knox. Clement is a writer, editor, and the author of The Scramble for America and Strange Antics: A History of Seduction. In this conversation, Clement and I think out loud about why the Americans of the founding generation openly called their own project an empire and why this has become almost invisible to modern Americans, why the settlers who crossed the Appalachians weren't a random sample of humanity, but were English and British and carried their own folkways which shaped a different American region in ways that are still visible today, why the Scots-Irish borderers who settled Appalachia are, in Clement's telling, closer culturally to the Bedouin of Arabia than to those cultures that populated the east coast of America, and why I recognise their descendants in the faces of the people I grew up with in Northumberland, in England. We talk about the uncomfortable and unsentimental truth about George Washington as a land speculator and a man of land enclosure rather than only a soldier, and why Clement has changed his mind about universalism after discovering the deep and particular folkways that built the modern world. And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my documentary series that retraces H. V. Morton's 1927 journey to find out what is left of the old country and to see the new England that has emerged since then. Episode one is now live on YouTube. If you value serious long-form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack. Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Clement Knox. Clement Knox joins me today to talk about the United States. Because 250 years ago it was 13 coastal colonies that seems to be clinging to the Atlantic seaboard and locked in, nowhere to go. But within a single lifetime, the nation became a continental empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And Clement's new book, The Scramble for America, asks how it happened and also who did it. Because, in my view, at least the people who crossed those Appalachians, who fought the wars, and who settled the frontier weren't just a random sample of humanity. They were in large part descendants of specific English and British folkways, later joined by other Europeans. And their story tells us quite a lot about the inheritance that they carried over the ocean and the civilization that they built. But first question I think worth understanding is why you chose to write America as an imperial history rather than uh the liberty narrative that is often put forward.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

The two aren't contradictory. Um one of Thomas Jefferson's more famous uh neologisms was the Empire of Liberty. Um he used that phrase quite a lot, and it sounds like a kind of nice reworking of the use of the word empire, but he also was referring to a geography, to a continent, which he uh hoped the United States constitutional system would soon encompass and bring the values of um you know the Enlightenment and Anglo-American civilization to Cuba, to Canada, to Oregon. These are all places he had in his mind's eye. But more than that, this was just a phrase used by Americans throughout this era. Um readers of the book will notice that everyone from George Washington to the Dean of Yale is referring to the United States as an empire in the 1770s, 1780s, 1790s. Um, in fact, this idea that America was never an empire is, I think, something which was kind of invented later on, um, around the time of the Spanish-American War, when they finally became an empire, they started thinking they started being more comfortable in those terms. But before that, they kind of retrofitted their history in contrast to the European powers. And as a British person, as a European who's kind of well-versed in our own colonial history and the kind of the commonly applied colonial paradigm to our own histories, I just looked at what happened in America in those nine decades, and it seemed quite obvious to me that it was an imperial process. Um, and it was also obvious to me that the Americans at the time talked about it in imperial terms and used the word empire. So I didn't think it was anachronistic to approach it in that way.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Hmm. I think it's quite interesting that talking about America in imperial terms, uh, the further we've gotten away from the founding of that nation seems to have become like a sense of discovery that perhaps it's an empire after all, you know, even amongst Americans, and then Europeans typically assert it, say, no, no, definitely America is an empire, it's just perhaps not an empire in the same way. What why do you think it is that it hasn't been obvious to more modern Americans that the nation that they inhabit is actually imperial in its foundations and through its history? Where do you think that might have gotten lost along the way?

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Um, I think it's very simple. It's because America the American Empire was so successful it became invisible. There was no resistance by the end. There were today there are 50 million people living in California. In 1776, no one in America knew what California was, pretty much. And within 80 years they had incorporated into the Union, and now California is as American as you get as it gets, right? Same with Florida, same with um Oregon and the Washington state. These were far-flung peripheries to the 13 colonies, they were occupied by other peoples and other powers, and the settlement process was so rapid, so intense, and so irreversible that it was it kind of negated itself. Whereas if you look at, say, the French in Algeria, there was no moment, although Algeria was a département of France, there were a million and a half Frenchmen, white Frenchmen living in Algeria. There was always a sense that this was a kind of maybe a contingent or provisional exercise. Um, I think that was true in many parts of the European um imperial periphery, with maybe the exception of Australia and New Zealand and Canada. Um, but yes, the American Empire building was so successful it became invisible. And one of the things I I asked the reader in my book to do is you have to disaggregate the United States. You have to take it literally take the map apart and understand by stages how this country came into being, and then you will see the imperial process at work.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Well, we spoke before the recording began about your approach to the work, and what I was impressed upon, uh or what impressed upon me, should I say, was that there wasn't a political angle that you were taking. You were forensic in how you went about it. Everything from the biographical details of the founding fathers in their early years in this nation, even when they were third generation, they still understood themselves as as Englishmen, but they also had to be highly capable as they're effectively moving through what is largely uncharted land for their people, but you're also forensic in your dealing with the fact of treatment of the native Indians w or the black slaves, and um I think what's quite interesting is that you see that arc from how Americans understood themselves. Uh, and so I want to uh stick a little bit with Americans understanding themselves as as Englishmen, because before John Quincy Adams, I think on the the 50th anniversary of the Constitution uh stood up and he described the moment, I think, when the colonists renounced all claims to chartered rights as Englishmen. Uh the founders had understood themselves as Englishmen defending English liberties on American soil up until that point. John Adams had visited Edge Hill in 1786 and called it holy ground, much holier than that on which your churches stand. How far into the story of continental expansion does the English self-understanding persist? And at what point do you think that the American uh replaces the Englishman?

SPEAKER_01 9:13

Okay, because you mentioned John Adams, I I am honour-bound to say that John Adams actually wrote a letter in the 1780s saying the American Revolution was a terrible mistake, they should have been loyal to Britain, and that everything bad in the modern world, which he was referring to the French Revolution, was downstream of the rebellion of the 1770s. So John Adams uh was definitely a complex figure and arguably the most intelligent American president ever. And I would say the the only person more intelligent was his son, John Quincy Adams, who was also what the one of the great writers of his age, maintained a diary for 70 years, which is pretty incredible, held his first government job at age 12. Um just real prodigies, those two. So shout out to them because I loved I loved learning about them, and everyone should read their letters, they're just incredible documents. Um and and yes, I mean, John Quincy Adams, who could be more English than him? He he he was a huge fan of Byron, he was an heir to the kind of Georgian tradition of letters, extremely well versed in um European culture. He actually got married in a church in the city of London next to the Tower of London. He lived in London for many years. I describe in the book his diplomatic uh mission there after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Um, and and to go back to kind of how the revolution was framed, Thomas Jefferson in 1775, in when he kind of is justifying Virginia's kind of rebellion, he says they are rebelling in um defense of Anglo-Saxon liberties. He's going back to like the eighth century. Um so the founding is a very English event and is couched in very English terms. Now, how long does that persist into the kind of movement West is a fascinating question. Um I always like to bring up here Frederick Jackson Turner, who basically invented the idea of the American West, invented the study of the American West. He wrote an essay called The Significance of the Frontier in American History. And what he argued in another essay called The Significance of the Ohio Valley in American History was that basically the East Coast of the United States was the western edge of Europe. It was facing Europe, it was essentially European in its mindset, and um that could not be said to be American in any distinctive sense. And he said the moment America became American, became distinctive culturally and socially, was when it cr the people crossed the Appalachians and entered the Ohio Valley. And he argues that the Ohio Valley was the scene of American ethnogenesis, it's when they became a people. And it wasn't just the Ohio Valley, it was everywhere west of the Appalachians, but it happened first in what is now Pittsburgh, which actually is named after Prime Minister Pitt, which is an irony there. Um and uh the important thing about being American in in Jackson Turner's sort of judgment was this sense that you had broken free of the old world, you were adrift in a new geography which was cut off by the Appalachian Mountains from the East Coast settlements, and you had to start everything anew. Every every place you went to was new, you had to build new churches, new courts, new communities, new families, new breweries, new farms. And not only did you do it once, but you might move three, four times in a lifetime, you'd be starting again the whole time. Um, and that became the American uh character that was forged by that process. Um one final thing, because this is another great Jefferson quotable, is Jefferson, kind of reflecting on this process, said that if you started in, say, the Great Plains in 1810 and walked east to the Atlantic, you were basically traveling through time. Because at the edge of America were what he would consider some primitive peoples, the Plains Indians, and then you would uh go through civilization by gradations, so the frontier forest dwellers, the kind of early pee farmers, the small settlements, the towns, the cities, and then you end up in the Atlantic with the kind of old settlements. And that was the American kind of experience, starting over again, rebuilding civilization anew, and that could only happen west of the Appalachians.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Maybe we can we can dive into some of these uh different traits of the settlers because uh we shouldn't think about the English or indeed the British peoples as being a monoculture. Um I'm sure you're aware of the work of David Hackett Fisher. He he wrote a uh a large book many years ago called Um Albion Seeds, the the four British folkways of America. And what he traces uh is the population of what became the United States from various parts of the British Isles. So the Puritans of East Anglia to New England, uh you had the Cavaliers uh that were typically of the Midlands going over to uh and the south to Virginia, you had the Quakers that went over to Delaware Valley, and there was a bit more of a link to Yorkshire there. Then you had the Borderers going to the Appalachian backcountry. And your book follows the expansion beyond the original settlements. Was there any particular one folk way that you think drove the territorial expansion out of those peoples that that showed they were uh more like that? Or was it it were or was it just largely driven by geography? Is if you're near the Appalachians and you decide you want to get over it, it didn't really matter which of those backgrounds you're for. You'd you're likely to just get over there once you were unrestrained by a change in government policy.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

That is a very interesting question. And the the there's no short answer to this, but I'll try and be elusive. So, what I describe in the first part of the book, which is the kind of original settlement of the Ohio Valley, what you're basically seeing is Virginian cavaliers using Scots-Irish as like physical battering rams to break down Indian resistance, and then the cavaliers, uh the Virginians m for the most part, would move on to those lands, occupy them formally, set up plantations, large farms, manorial estates in some cases, and form permanent settlements, and then they would push the Scots-Irish further on. And this becomes a recurring theme in American history where the kind of powers that be basically encourage and ultimately semi-legalize squatting as a way of using Scots-Irish settlers as like shock troops to basically jump on the grenade of Indian resistance and then make the border ready for permanent settlement. And that's basically the story south of the Ohio River. North of the Ohio River, which is basically the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, um, what you see is a slightly different phenomenon because under the Northwest Ordinance, Congress creates that as the first United States territory, and they prohibit slavery there, and they mandate the introduction of the uh rectilinear survey system, which means you can no longer just charge Pell Mel West and take land and try and hold it, but you have to get it patented and surveyed and purchased paid for. And there what happens is you end up with a large Yankee migration from New England, and it's a lot more ordered, it's a lot more permanent. They are kind of intentionally trying to build lasting settlements, uh, which is evident even in the architecture, it's not just log cabins, it's got more permanent buildings. Um, and so what you end up with a kind of a Yankee culture north of the Ohio and a Virginian Scots-Irish culture south of the Ohio, and that broadly holds true all the way to the Pacific. Um, it's pot you can push this argument too far. David Hackett Fisher definitely pushes it too far, but it's compelling all the same. But yeah, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, these are still kind of Yankee settlements. Iowa, all of those states in between, and the Northern Band are largely Yankee. And everything through to San Diego, including some of Arkansas and Oklahoma and um all those states remain retain like a southern flavor. Um, I like country music, and there's actually a whole genre of country music from Southern California, which comes after the Oki migration of the 30s and 40s. So that and and indeed, Southern California basically was Confederate during the Civil War because there were so many Southerners there. So you can definitely trace the these these folkways across the continent.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

As you were talking about how the Scots-Irish were used as uh as kind of shock troops and told to go and uh basically be the collateral against the Indians to allow everyone else to advance behind. I know you make this distinction in the book that we who we refer to as Scots-Irish are actually um probably better described as though people who are the borderers from the Anglo-Scottish uh border as well. And uh what I find interesting about uh some of the key figures that are linked to that ancestry is that they remind me of people that I've grown up around being from Northumberland, they've got the same facial features. So, for example, Lyndon Johnson, uh President Lyndon Johnson is is derived from the what is referred to as Scots Irish stock, but really he's a an Anglo-Scot borderer. Uh JD Vance, he's he's a Bowman, that's his real name. Uh, I went to school with Bowman's, and he's got, again, a very similar look to the kind of people that I went to school with. But I think there's also something quite interesting amongst uh that number, insofar as uh these people who settled the back country, the archetypal frontiersmen, were the same back in the mother country, right? They were from the debatable lands where you had the English and the Scots fighting to get some kind of order and allegiance amongst the uh typically quite clannish people, uh, suspicious of centralized authority, they cared about personal honour, they were happy to settle things through violence if need be. They were kind of ungovernably independent, and uh that's recognized by the culture of the people that I grew up amongst, at least some of some of them. Um do you think that the frontier uh is is is a kind of English-speaking phenomenon, specifically, you know, this kind of common law, individualist, let loose in a landscape with no restra constraints, or do you think that any people could have done and would have done what those those peoples did with the same opportunity?

SPEAKER_01 21:01

So I happened to read a book called Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thessager while I was reading, researching this book.

SPEAKER_00 21:09

I don't know if you've come across it. Um I've heard it, but I haven't read it. I've been recommended to read it by Lorenzo Warby, who's been on this podcast a few times. Oh great.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

Well, it's I mean I'm not a huge travel reader, but that is an incredible book. And he, you know, Thessager is just an older Tonian who goes um, he was working in Ethiopia and then he gets a job doing a s some kind of locust survey or something quite obscure in Saudi Arabia, and he basically lives among the Bedou, the Bedouin, and kind of records his kind of attempt to understand their lifestyle. And it was interesting because I read that book around the same time I read Albion Seed, and it struck me that the Bedou and the Borderers actually were very similar. They were both clannish, they both had a culture of retaliation. They were both kind of fiercely independent, very scornful of centralized authority. They both lived in very harsh landscapes. They both managed, they were both pastoralists of camels and in the borderers' case horses. And they both kind of m were kind of lords of this kind of, as you said, a debatable territory, because the uh the Arabs on the coast had to travel through the sands to get to the other side. And just like the Borderers controlled the marches, the Bedou controlled the empty quartet. All of which is a way of saying that I think that while I love the mythos of the Borderers as much as the next man, I think maybe what we're looking at is what James C. Scott would call barbarians, like people who are living outside of the state and are quite happy to do so and are quite well adapted to living outside of state authority. And your question about, you know, was it was it kind of a unique phenomenon that they ended up kind of bringing a kind of rough-hewn Anglo-American sensibility to the American frontier? Is that unique to them? I think it probably was actually. Um, but I think what you're seeing in Appalachia especially is they're very grudgingly letting go of this kind of pre-state barbarian condition. And I use the word barbarian as a compliment, not as an insult. Um, and they are letting themselves very grudgingly become a cultured to a settled state um uh of affairs. And the reason they're doing that is because they were given a very good offer, very good deal by the American government, which was pretty much you get free land, you get self-government, and back then the states really were self-governing. And because you guys are the first there, you're gonna get the pick of political officers. So, um, and if you want to do crazy stuff like kill each other in jewels and engage in multi-generation feuds, no one's gonna stop you because guess what? You are also the judges and the sheriffs. So I I I think like there's there's something universal about what was going on. They were like pre-state societies in some form, but there's also a particularly Anglo phenomenon going on there. And I would always think of Andrew Jackson as an example of this. Andrew Jackson, family from County Antrim, sorry, Antrim in Northern Ireland. Some people believed he was actually born in Ireland because he was so young when he arrived in the United States that thought maybe he was born on the boat to America, gets to the Carolina borderlands. Um, as a young man, he ends up going west to Nashville when it's still basically under siege by Native Americans. And he is the embodiment of the Scots-Irish. Quite literally, he he grows up reading books about Scotland and being told stories about the religious wars of the 17th century, but he doesn't leave Nashville. He he settles there, he establishes himself there, and he retains all of his kind of borderer traits. He drinks a lot, he fights a lot, he revels in that kind of rough and tumble culture. But ultimately, he he is buried in Nashville. I've been to his grave, he he didn't go any further west. So they did stop at some point, they didn't just keep on going forever, and that should be kind of factored into how we remember them.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

Yeah, that being frontiersmen, they still had a rootedness. The rootedness is on the frontier. Wherever they determined the frontier was, we'll we'll set a shop here, and this is this is our territory and we we run it. Uh you you you whilst we're on on territory, your book traces six borderlines that that defined the American expansion. And I wonder if not only do these obviously tell a story about geography, but uh whether it tells us a little bit about a recurring tension within our characters as Anglos. Specifically, there were the tension between a love of liberty and our appetite for order. So, for example, I spoke with um the uh the the professor emeritus of of Cambridge, Gary Gerstel, who'd written a book called The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, and effectively he was talking about how the New Deal thinking in the States that preceded neoliberalism was effectively what neoliberalism was reacting against. And I I was asking whether this is actually a pattern that's recurred through the speak the history of English-speaking peoples, where there's always been this oscillation between more control and bureaucracy and rules and regulations and then the the fight back against them. Uh that but but it's just within our characters. Uh d do you think this, well, one is true, and two, do you think it's visible in the way that the Republic acquired its territory and what it did with it?

SPEAKER_01 27:13

Yes, this reminds me that I I had to delete an entire chapter of the book about the Whiskey Rebellion, which is this great confrontation between the Scots-Irish in the Pennsylvania frontier and the federal government, um, sort of newly formed in Washington, uh, where Hamilton had tried to impose a tax, or did impose a tax on whiskey, the borderers loved their whiskey, it was their only way of making hard currency, and so there was this revolt. And everyone at the time observed on the irony that the federal government, manned by people who 20 years before had um committed high treason in protest of in protest of relatively minor taxes, in some cases tax reductions on tea and molasses and similar, were now sending in, well, George Washington literally led an army into Pennsylvania to crush um his own people who were protesting what was by any measure quite an onerous tax and how it was measured and calculated and collected. Um and so, yes, there is an irony throughout this process, which is that the Americans or the American elite um claimed sovereignty successfully from the British Empire, and then in many ways reimposed that same imperial order on their own country, but justified it because it was, you know, them in charge. I'm not just being anti-American here. This was evident in how things were organized. So in the colonial era, for instance, there would be a colonial governor and there'll be a council, and there'll be a kind of military guy in charge of running the colonies. They literally copied that directly when they invented the idea of a terror territory. And I quote in the book people like James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson, when they're told, like, oh, this is what a territory is, they're like, Oh, that's like what the British have, right? They're literally saying this. We have letters that are like, this is about as dictatorial as how we've the British run Bengal. This is this is obvious, this, these hypocrisies, these, these kind of um uh inconsistencies are clear at the time, and it becomes very clear as they go west, because on the one hand, they want the West, broadly defined, um, but they also want to control it. They don't want things going on which they can't control way out on the frontier. And normally this is managed um quite successfully, more or less by exporting elite Americans to the frontier, having them run the governments, and then more or less reaching a deal with the kind of more hard scrabble settlers whereby we'll give you land, you behave yourself. That deal holds pretty well. Um, but there are interesting exceptions which really cast light on what is kind of actually going on. So if you ever look at a timeline of when states join the union, um, I recommend everyone doing that, you know, when you're at work on Wikipedia or whatever, because it reveals some interesting things. One of the very last states to join the union was New Mexico. And New Mexico became part of the American continent or part of the USA in 1848. So it's been in the Union for the better part of 75 years, and it's not a state. There's like tens of thousands of people living there. It's pretty odd. Like, why why why hasn't that happened? Um, and the answer is because New Mexico was full of Spanish speakers. They were Catholics to this day. There are people in northern New Mexico who speak the same dialect of Spanish as the conquistadors who originally introduced the language there, and everyone was Hispanic or or Native American or a mixture of the two. And the Americans in Washington looked at it and said, No way are you becoming a state. You're you're remaining firmly under federal rule until such a time as there are enough sort of, let's be honest, white faces in the state that we can give you full membership. And that is a very visible example of how they wanted to control the West on their own terms. So the the kind of avariciousness was balanced out by a kind of very practical statecraft.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

Well, let's uh now you mentioned George Washington and what he was prepared to do to get order for his own uh political preferences. Let's continue the discussion we had before we pressed record about your uh relationship, I suppose, with the characters of these people as you were learning about them and writing about them. So, out of the founding fathers, who do you think were the most impressive figures, and who were those that you didn't like so much? And you don't have to stay restricted to the founding fathers, that there are there are more.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

So um Thomas Jefferson, I I went in expecting to hate him. It turns out there's a very rich tradition of hating him. He is just a brilliant writer, and it overwhelms everything else about him. I think of any time in English. Brilliant, brilliant rhetorician, very funny, very wide-ranging in his correspondence, spoke many languages, lived multiple lives, fascinating character. I wrote quite a long Substack article about him, if anyone wants to read it, so that that's my thoughts are there. Uh I also wrote another long Substack essay on Andrew Jackson, who is by far and away, I think, the most controversial 19th century president. Um, there have been multiple attempts to cancel him. There are ongoing attempts to cancel him, they're trying to take him off the $20 bill. They may succeed, I'm not sure what the state of that is. Jackson was a violent, hard man who did cruel things. At the same time, anyone who reads his life story and is not profoundly moved by what he lived through and what he kind of single-handedly accomplished for his nation is missing something. Extremely, extremely interesting character. And again, the famous thing about Jackson was that he was like an idiot. Like John John Quincy Adams was on the board of overseers for Harvard, and that was tradition that they would give the president an honorary um degree. And when Jackson came to collect his degree, John Quincy Adams refused to go to the ceremony and wrote this very bitchy diary entry where he just said this guy can't read and it's like an unlettered savage. And actually, reading Jackson's letters and his speeches, he's an extremely powerful writer, and he's one of the few people who you can read a sentence and you know it's by Jackson, because he has this clarity, this forcefulness of expression. If you read, for instance, that the back of the most famous um piece of writing by Jackson is his uh statement to the nullifiers in South Carolina in 1831, where he basically defends the union, condemns treason to it, and says in no uncertain terms, I will come down there and hang every one of you. And it was one of the three documents that Abraham Lincoln consulted when he was writing his first inaugural. And it's only a short, short piece of writing, but it's extremely powerful. So I I think Jackson, complex, underrated, overhated. Definitely I would recommend the John Meachin biography to anyone who wants to dip in. Uh, John Quincy Adams, true genius, amazing life, one of the few American presidents to have spent probably almost a majority of his life outside the country, probably a third of his life outside the country, died in the con in the in Congress at his desk mid-speech, having been Secretary of State, president, uh, and then a congressman for several decades. Um those are the those three, and then John Adams is is just great. I haven't spent as much time on him as I have with the other three, but even just reading any letter by John Adams, you get the impression of a man who is both very funny, very capable, and also quite embittered in in a very amusing way. He he wrote a very funny letter about George Washington, where he basically said the only reason George Washington was president was because he was six foot three and could ride a horse. And when and when you read about Washington, you realize that what those were his main his main uh advantages as a leader. Um I'm not a Washington fanboy, I don't I don't dislike him, I just don't buy into the cult. Um but he's the only one where I came across him and I was like, I really don't get him. Most of the other big names from that era, they really hold up. They they they did some very impressive things. Even Hamilton, who I really dislike, you have to give him his credit, you know, incredible life, monumental achievements. Um yeah, and yeah, and and I would encourage all British people to put aside their prejudices and indulge in the cult of the founders, because they were impressive people.

SPEAKER_00 36:49

Well, I I'm I'm going to dip into more as to why you've been drawn into writing the history of America that you have. But before we get there, sticking with George Washington for a moment. Uh he, as you have described, he was hardly a philosopher king. Uh he his background and his most day most important daily concerns are around land speculation and acquisition. And on a colossal scale, he he understood that uh owning large tracts of the frontier was the basis of power in the new republic. And this is also not too far away from the time that the uh ideals of Whiggery, Whiggishness had come about in the mother country, this idea of the financialization of everything, the centralization of decision-making. And um I I I just wonder if there was something specifically Whiggish in the English sense about the way the American elite built its wealth through that territorial acquisition. Do you think that connects the American founding class more to the English-landed gentry and their way of doing things than perhaps the founder's Republican rhetoric would suggest?

SPEAKER_01 38:08

Uh yes, but I think the the reason they were comfortable with the kind of um, you know, the the radical Enlightenment rhetoric of the day was because they were English gentlemen by kind of self-um identification, but they were living in a colonial setting where they didn't have the privileges of representation and they were dependent on the crown for land grants, and so they felt vulnerable to sort of monarchical what they would describe as despotism, and they ultimately rebelled in the 1770s, especially in Virginia, in protest at this condition where they felt that everything they owned, their land, especially, was not securely theirs, in part because they they they they possessed it by sufferance of the crown in many cases. This is very true of Washington, who basically spent the 20 years leading up to the revolution building this kind of house of cards where each card was a kind of land claim. And he believed that if he was just held on long enough, that house of cards would solidify into a massive estate that would propel him to the very top of the Virginian aristocracy. And he came very close, and then the revolution broke out, and one of the first things that happens is the crown just revokes all of those claims, and suddenly the richest, most ambitious men in Virginia, which is the richest and largest state, are just holding pieces of valueless paper, and they are suddenly extremely incentivized to rebel in favor of a constitutional order which is going to do, if nothing else, secure their property rights. And, you know, this is what in historiography is is kind of referred to as kind of the the conservative revolution or the can the counter-revolution of 1776, where basically the um the rhetoric is like almost Jacobin in its extremism, but the actual policies and the the things they want out of it are really quite conventional, which is just like I want to own my land and no one can take it away from me. Um and that is very much where Washington um comes out. And yes, Washington is known as a soldier. He never actually was formally trained as a soldier, much to his chagrin. What he was was a professional surveyor. And surveyors back in the 17th and 18th century, the main thing they were doing was enclosure. You talked about like Whiggism and the kind of rise of like a financial capitalist order. Enclosure was at the heart of that. And that's what Washington did. He was enclosing the West for his own benefit and the benefits of his class. And he was very good at it. And he ended, he died, and again, I have not read a single history book which mentions this fact, even though it's pretty salient to me. He died as the richest man in the country. It's it's a remarkable achievement. He was America's kind of first kind of oligarch president. And uh instead, he's remembered as this kind of uh you know selfless soldier, which he which he was as well, but even on the battlefield, there are these incredible letters where he's at Bunker Hill and he's writing letters to his land stewards in Pennsylvania to micromanaging the DC affairs on his kind of frontier estates. So yeah, I I w I was very keen to tell a different story about Washington from the one that people are familiar with.

SPEAKER_00 41:49

Well, uh I think there's also something else which is diluted from where we sit in modernity as well, which is the fortitude of the founders and the early settlers. Something else easy to forget from the comfort of the present. So like the story of Washington has is now received in a in a way that misses important details. I think we can often forget what it must actually be like to settle a new and unknown land, the sheer physical courage that's required, the survivalist determination. And with that, and you documented in your book, the death rates, the distances, there's violence, there's isolation, there's diseases people have never come across before. Uh what what do you think the character of the early settlers tells us about the kind of people who'd crossed the Atlantic? But I suppose to put a bit of a um declinist bent on that question, because people talk about how our civilization in the West is in a ruinous state, and I would be I I would be prone to agree with them. Do we think that civilization can be sustained by people who didn't have to endure what the founders and the settlers endured as they created this new nation?

SPEAKER_01 43:15

Well, I think it's it's worth remembering, and I try and I try and drive this home in the book, that people were suffering for a reason, and the reason was land, and land meant wealth, it meant civic participation, it meant status, it meant recognition, it meant uh inheritance for your family and estate. So the reason they did these extraordinary things, like the Oregon Trail, was because at the end of it they're expected to get six hundred and forty acres of land. So quite a good um incentive. What and in in the Revolutionary Wars, uh, because they couldn't pay the soldiers with money because they didn't have a currency, um, they would pay them with land. Bills, land warrants. They would do the same, in fact, in every single war through to the Civil War. So land was the reason people were willing to do these extraordinary things. And land was also quite a profitable investment. It was quite good to be a farmer in the 19th century in America. Prices were high. It was quite a good business to be in. But yet there was also an ideological component to this. Because we have like a real-life A-B test in America. We actually can test the extent to which ideology made a difference. And the the test case is Quebec, where there was a lot of French people. It was a French colony. And we all know that Quebec today is a part of Canada, north of New York. And that is the only place where there are French speakers. You do not have French speakers in British Columbia or in Alberta or in Ontario. And that's because the French settlers didn't move there. And there I quote in the book from the member the journals of a British officer called William Hall, who travels in America in the 1910 in the 1810s, and he notes the kind of dynamism of the Anglo-American population and how they're always scheming on how to get out west. And once they're west, they want to go somewhere else. And everyone's talking about land speculation and where they where they should go to. And then they he crosses the frontier into Quebec from New York, and he says it's like going back four centuries. And in Quebec, they when a a father dies, the land is split between his sons. And if the sons have sons, when they die, they land gets split. And it's the old medieval European way of doing things, which is how you end up with kind of you know insanely complex land disputes. But in America, you wouldn't do that. You would just go to the next frontier, get your hundred acres, and make them make a go of it. The French settlers in Quebec and then later on in Louisiana didn't do that. So there was something about the Anglo ideology, the settler mindset, which made them do things which not everyone else would have done.

SPEAKER_00 46:07

Well, on doing things that not everyone else would have done, the territorial expansion came with various things. We've talked about the dispossession of people who might have already been on it. There's extraordinary violence in some cases against those who stood between the settlers and the Pacific. And I think it's fair to say that the post-colonial lens would present this as uniquely wicked, but a closer reading of history would show that human groups have always and still continue to compete for territory and status and resources. And the indigenous peoples themselves waged wars of conquest and they practiced forms of violence that would horrify uh any modern sensibility before the Europeans arrived on the stage. Uh, and they displaced other peoples as well long before that the English arrived. And um with that, the settlers who crossed the Appalachians weren't exactly operating outside the logic of history, uh and they themselves would sometimes not want to engage in these um internet these battles with the Indians, but then would find that when some horror that would they would just never imagine doing on the battlefield themselves had been visited upon them, all of a sudden they became cold-hearted. Uh, and there was just a mutual brutality uh that was shared. And there was also some among them that were also appalled by settler dispossession of these people, and they said so. They they they become hardened by what they saw and what they witnessed, uh and people spoke up about it, or they they went the other way. So I think what I was impressed, Clement, is that you did seem to tell this story honestly from every angle, really. How do you actually try to tell this story without reducing it to a morality tale in which one side's civilized, the other side savage, when the other evidence shows that neither side really had the monopoly on civilization or savagery?

SPEAKER_01 48:06

I I have to say I don't have a good answer to that because it comes quite naturally to me. Um you just read the primary sources, you reflect on the situation of all of the actors, and I maybe have quite a gloomy and tragic sensibility, and I just see the tragedy in it. I I I and but I also see that the the Native Americans were agents of their own destiny, and they had, although they were in this terrible position where they were basically being demographically overwhelmed by a population bomb that had gone off in the Atlantic on the other side of the Atlantic and was just spewing hundreds of thousands of British people at them into communities where, you know, in the Oregon at the end of the Oregon Trail, there's a place um called the Walla Walla River, and there were some Cayus who lived there, and there were only 400 of them. And at one point, you know, there's a couple of dozen settlers living in Oregon, and the Cayus, they're fine with it. And the Whitman missions up the road, and it's all fine. And then suddenly, in one year, in the early 1840s, 1,500 people come down the Oregon Trail. And the next year, 4,000 people come down, the next year, 5,000 people come down. And suddenly, a group of people over 10 times the size of your entire population are living next to you. That's that's a very extreme situation. It's very hard for us to kind of model that, and it's very hard to understand what that would feel like for a Native American and and the kind of just the decimation just from disease, even with the best intentions, um, the disease alone was just was um uh a final for them. I I I actually read a book during COVID about the Spanish influenza epidemic of the uh 1919, and it noted that actually one of the highest casualty rates anywhere in the world was in Alaska, where whole Native American towns who had barely survived centuries of encroachment, got wiped out by disease. And that process of kind of you know, the immunological problems they had alone persisted for decades after, you know, the Colombian contact. Um and I also think that if if I was to tell a kind of a kind of maybe a more hopeful story about the Native American experience, I would say two things. Firstly, the Cherokee who went down the trail of tears in the most kind of famous or infamous example of this deportation westwards. There are now hundreds of thousands of Cherokees in the United States. Their population has boomed since the 19th century. That doesn't retroactively make what happened to them good or better, but it's a reminder that these people didn't get like wiped off the face of the planet. They are still there, they're still alive, they are growing in numbers, their culture and language is intact. So that's worth recalling. It's not just complete devastation. The other thing is that we talked about the borderers quite a lot, and the borderers had this distinctive warrior culture. Um, and the Native Americans, in many cases, had the same thing. They were proud to be warriors, they didn't want to be farmers. They would often say this. They would say, like, I don't want to grow wheat. They they in in some of the tribes, they thought farming was basically a feminine activity, and men their job was to hunt and to wage war. That's what they believed their purpose was. And so there were many cases where Native Americans would be approached by, you know, overwhelming, you know, government armies, and they would say, Okay, look, we'll give you this reservation, just stay on the reservation, don't mess with us, and it will all be fine. And they would choose conflict because that was their culture. And the uh there's a great book, I have it on my shelf up here, called The Last Indian War, which is about the Nez Perse conflict in the 1880s. The Nez Perse were right along the Canadian border in um Oregon and Montana. And the last Nez Perse chieftain, whose name I'm forgetting, he uh in the in the kind of Western the Anglo tradition, he gives this very grand speech where he tells the government officials, you know, I'm I'm a free man, I'm not gonna go on the reservation, all this stuff. And in the Native American version of the same thing, he says to his men, I have a prick, I'm not going on the reservation. Meaning he his manhood forbade him from um, you know, subordinating himself to their authority. Again, that is not very far off the Scots-Irish border mentality, it's not very far off the Bedouin-Bedou mentality. I think you can find similar things happening in like Albania today, other kind of liminal regions. So, yeah, it's complex. I don't think anyone has done any favours by patronizing them or pretending they were some kind of doomed, uh compliant, somehow helpless population. They were way more than that, and they were impressive people.

SPEAKER_00 53:23

Hmm. A fascinating wrinkle on the often told story about the uh the the Native Americans. Uh you're a man born in Hong Kong, you are of Anglo-Irish stock, you've written a book about America. What is it that drew you to writing this book about America? You clearly read deeply about its history. Was it uh being drawn into the stories of uh those who are of the same ancestral stock as us, these uh these explorers and settlers? Was it the the um the wonder of the United States as a modern nation, richest on the planet, has this huge cultural heft, or was it something entirely different?

SPEAKER_01 54:08

Yeah, definitely all of the above. Um I've I've I've been lucky enough ever since uh sort of GCSC history to have studied American history in some form or another. But the real moment which caught me with this subject was I was uh on Wikipedia one day as one is, and I came across a map of the United States which I'd never seen before, which is the Transcontinental Treaty, sometimes known as the Step Boundary, which was the US border for 25 years from 1821 to 1846. And I had never seen it before, and it got me thinking about this kind of um psychological elision we have between 13 colonies and 50 states. And we all know that there is some there must be some connective tissue between those two states of being. But I had read a lot of books about antebellum America, and I had never heard of the Adams Owners Treaty, I'd never heard of the Florida Purchase, I hadn't really heard of the Oregon Treaty or the Paris Treaty of 1783, and it occurred to me that this is quite an interesting phenomenon because we are British, our borders have been stable for a very long time. If you look at a map of Britain over the last two millennia, uh with all respect to our Irish and Welsh friends, it hasn't changed a huge amount. I I think you could say a similar thing about France or Spain or Japan. A lot of countries have a very strong sense of historical continuity when it comes to what constitutes their land mass. Whereas America actually rather uniquely maybe doesn't have that. And it changed, the map physically changed multiple times in the lifetime of a single person. And that alone kind of hooked me, and then trying to tell that story opened up a whole other can of worms, which is why the book is so long.

SPEAKER_00 56:13

Well, it's a manful effort for someone who also has a day job. Uh, and I would highly recommend everyone go and read it. I mean, it really does scratch the itch of all the curiosities you might have about the United States of America, so uh seriously majestic job. Before I let you go, Clement, I'm gonna ask you the question I ask all of my guests on the show, which is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life? Maybe it was something really big, maybe it was something small, but it felt significant no matter what. And what was it that made you think differently?

SPEAKER_01 56:46

I have a fairly long answer to this question, but I'll try and abbreviate it. But it did actually come out of reading Um Albion Seed and a couple of other books I read around the same time. Joseph Henricks, The Weirdest People on Earth, um Joel Mockier, who wrote who writes about the kind of English origins of the Industrial Revolution. And what they changed my mind about was that I suppose I had grown up 1990s, end of history, liberal view, which is essentially universalist, and that people have the same basic wants, needs, desires, and societies are converging on a common pattern that satiates those common um traits. And it was reading those books and and and David Hackett Fisher especially, which made me realize that culture is so fine-grained and so totalizing in in how it shapes us that universalism is actually a bit of a illusion. And we've talked a lot about kind of Anglo Angloness in this talk. Um Joseph Henrik basically says that kind of weirdness is is really just um a secularized version of Protestantism, and I'm I'm kind of inclined to agree with that. And I think that kind of the Protestant slash Anglo vice is to universalize what is peculiar and particular about the culture of the Northwest Europe and the Protestant worlds of the Netherlands or Britain or Scotland or Sweden or Western Germany. And um that has led to a a huge amount of confusion to say the least. Um and I think we live in this very strange world where we can't where most people can't get beyond their bone marrow, deep belief that everyone is the same. When in fact, if you look at David Hackett Fisher, you you these people from you know neighboring counties were inhabiting completely different psychological, spiritual worlds which shaped everything they did, from how they raised their children to the food they ate, to families, formation, and architecture. And um I think the weird the weird thing about the world we live in is that for a bunch of reasons, and Joel Mock here is very good on this, for a bunch of reasons, the Anglos kind of took over the world. And so we invented all of these institutions in our own image, which now govern everything. So they look really normal and permanent. Like I was thinking about this the other day that kind of Catholics have like the Pope and the College of Cardinals and the Vatican, and the Protestants have the World Bank, the United Nations, the IMF. And the United Nations is the universal charter of human rights. It's universal. All of the the the IMF believes there's one model for development which will solve everyone's problems. These are kind of universal instincts that we've embedded so deep that we think they're normal, when in fact they came out of, as many people more intelligent than me have described, the kind of peculiar folk ways and traditions and religious beliefs and um communal patterns of a bunch of people on the northwestern edge of Europe. And I think the for the moment we we rediscover that and kind of lose our illusions that everyone is meant to be Dutch or or Scottish or Canadian in some kind of spiritual deep sense, then I think we'll get a lot closer to sanity and order.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:48

Yes, it is remarkable how much universalism and the blank slate error have melded as something which I'm sure viewers will be familiar with. We are just something to be drawn upon, each of us. And of course, we are formed by those around us with regards to our morals and our manners and all of the rest of it, that is true. But the reality is that they all speak to one another. The way we are as people and as groups is something that is uh self-perpetuating in many ways, and um our blindness to that has led to terrible immigration policies, uh, terrible approaches to law enforcement and judicial decisions, and you could just pull out example after example, but uh also it can lead to more noble endeavours. So, for example, I just interviewed Catherine Burbel Singh earlier on, and there's no doubt that as someone who is dealing with modern Britain, insofar as it's hyper-demographically diverse, is that what she's trying to imprint upon the children that go through her school is a sense of duty, sacrifice, but also a kind of obligation to a fondness for and a patriotism towards Britain, which is a noble endeavour for sure. I think there is this expectation that actually, if we just fix education, everyone did the Catherine Birbel sing model that we would get everyone to be singing from the same hymn sheet, quite literally, and that we would all be as British as one another and we'd all get along fine. I am of the view that groups outside of the school system will have other things, symbols, religions, all the rest of it, that will ultimately overpower that sense of unity when the chips are down, because groups tend to just convene around certain things. We don't have to get into skin colour, it's just ethnic groups are kin cultures, nations are derived out of kin cultures, England could never have been England without the English people. That should be pretty obvious to say, just like the same with Scotland. In fact, the Scots will go as far to continue reminding us that every time you remotely get to a general election, and there is a World Cup semi-final, or a World Cup semi-final, yes, exactly. Uh so I I think I think the blank slate error, the universalism, it can also be driven by positive ideals of character formation and trying to bring everyone together, but humans being as they are, groups being as they are, is that they they they also have their own internal logic and they have their own histories, long complex chains of history that have led them to think and act the way that they do and pass certain things on. So I think all of us have have had to contend with that who've been on that journey. I know I have. I was very similar in my worldview, and uh that has also unraveled over time, though it wouldn't stop me from saying that people like Catherine Burble Singh should continue doing what she's doing, but I don't necessarily think that even en masse that would lead to uh pure unity or indeed the continuation of Britain as we know it. And I I think she partly agrees with that. Uh, you just spent many years writing this book before I let you go. What else are you working on? And uh where can people find you online?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:16

So I am on Substack, it's called Past Notes, but I think it's just Clement Knox Substack. Um I am writing a bunch of stuff on there, but I'm trying to get some of the things that didn't make it into the book on there just because like you reminded me actually, I need to get the Whiskey Rebellion that chapter. I should I'll publish it on Substack because that covers all the all the Scots-Irish, and then it covers their kind of insane and glorious and mad rebellion against the federal government in the 1790s, which is a fun one. Um and I am currently in between books because which is a nice feeling actually after six years. Um but I am working on a book about America in the 1960s, which um I hope I'll be able to get a deal for. And if so, um yeah, I'd love to come back when it comes out and talk to you about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:16

I'd love that. Well, watch this space. Good luck with the book proposal, and indeed the more important matters at hand in your personal life, and I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for coming on the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:28

Thanks, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:29

All the best.