Hello and welcome to episode 12 inside the episode 1865. I am Rob McCollum, one of the

co-producers on this, and joining me is always our Stephen Walters and Erica Achilla.

Howdy Rob. What up?

The writers of the project. So it's gotten fast and furious up to now, and for those

of you again that haven't listened to everything, I'll say again, we are going to talk about

what happens in this episode. There are spoilers, so make sure you have listened to episode

12 before you listen to this. So so much in this episode.

In the last episode, at the very end, there's a scene between Stanton and Bingham where they

talk about two things. Stanton says, look, there's two things are going to happen. Congress

is going to pass reconstruction laws, right? That are a check, a bulwark to Johnson's policies,

lenient policies. And then the second thing is we're going to pass a law that says that

you can't be fired because you've been approved or appointed rather by the Senate. And

that's a real thing. Those two things did happen and those two bills were passed on the

exact same day. What we don't know is we don't know that Stanton was the architect behind

them, though it's not hard to imagine that he had his finger in that pie. But what we

do know is that Stanton was the reason why it was passed. And the reasons for that, Eric,

do you want to talk about that? I mean, he was the head of the war department. So he

controlled the military. So it's concrete. Yes. Congress is passing all of these reconstruction

acts. The power to enact what they're wanting to do was given expressly to the war department

and to the military. And with Stanton and power that meant that Stanton was the one enacting

their policy. And if Johnson didn't like their policy and didn't want to do it, he had

no way to stop them other than firing Edwin Stanton and putting somebody else in his place.

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