Welcome back everyone, I am Rob McCollum, one of the producers and director of 1865. Joining me is always our Stephen Walters and Eric Archiller for this inside the episode of season 2.

Guys, welcome. Hey Rob, thank you Rob. So as Eric said in a previous inside the episode, we have untied the knot now. We have gone through the prologue episodes to fill in some of the gaps. Now we are here. It is the beginning of our full on season 2, Steve, are you happy to be here? Yeah, very happy, very excited.

So what do we learn in this episode? We meet several new characters, we learn some new intrigue, some new developments along the way. First of course we realize that Grant has won the presidency. Yeah, we jumped some time there.

Yeah, we did. You know, I mean, what's great I think for our listeners is that they just heard the American elections Wicked Game episode on the election of 1868, which provided some context I hope for them.

But what we decided is that the story of Grant's journey really begins after he's elected. You know, we have all of these crazy events that happen politically where Andrew Johnson's party, of course we get into this in a little bit in this episode, but his party turns against him. They don't nominate him at the convention.

He's disgraced from the impeachment and on the Republican side, Grant is sort of swept into the presidency. But what's really on the ballot in 1868 is this question of what's going to happen to the freedman on the Democrat side. Their opinion is pretty clear. They say this is a white man's government, let white men rule.

And on the Republican side, you have Grant saying let us have peace. So these two very, very contrasting messages collide in an election where Grant sweeps and he wins and he wins big. And we begin this story with this event that a lot of people don't know about, which is that general grants train was I suppose you could say attacked in the aftermath of the election.

I know we talked a lot about maybe trying to dramatize that that could be fun from an audio standpoint to have a trained derailment with all the sounds and everything. But really Grant was so committed to it being a non issue that you kind of let that guide the story right.

Well, Grant wanted it to be such a non issue that no one ever heard about it. They kind of covered it up and didn't talk about the fact that this happened.

Yeah, that's right. Grant did not want people to know about what happened. And there's not a lot of information out there about what happened as a result of it. Grant wanted to stay silent. His aide Adam Badoe who wrote grants personal memoirs and also wrote a book called Grant in peace from Appomattox to Mount MacGregor.

He writes about it. He said grant himself and joined silence in regard to the circumstance and his companions were very willing to comply. And this is a piece that we used in our dramatization of it for crime is contagious and to announce one attempt like this is to suggest another.

And in that book Grant in peace, you can read Adam Badoe's account of what happened that night when the train derailed. I've always said and I think I said this in the 1868 election that I wrote it's not hard to imagine that whoever was responsible for leaving this switch open and Badoe is clear in his writings of it that he believed it was intentional.

It's not hard to imagine that whoever that person was had either sympathy for or a direct connection to the nights of the Ku Klux Klan or at the very least it's not hard to imagine that Edwin Stanton would have thought as much although we don't really know.

Yeah, which is a relatively new thing. The election of 68 is the first time that we see the clan and really as an organization that they are active and politically active.

I mean, they begin as a social club for former Confederate officers and they sort of evolve into this paramilitary organization with some political aims.

They expand and they get more and more organized and more prolific and the violence against the Friedman at the polls in 1868 was pretty severe.

But in spite of that, millions of Friedman stepped forward and cast a ballot for the first time in American history and shifted the state houses and the Senate and the Congress very, very strongly for Republicans in this election.

Yeah, but I just think it's fascinating to think that, you know, just not so many years after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln that general grants train turned upside down on its belly and that he was nearly killed on his way to the White House.

And as it relates to our story and our sort of imagination of these events, I think it puts Edwin Stanton in this unique position.

Yeah, we immediately have him questioning, you know, he knows it's an attack and it's kind of a echo of last season and his reactions to that.

Yeah, and it's funny to me, Eric, because we don't know a whole lot about what Stanton was doing during this time post impeachment.

I mean, we know he campaigned very actively for Grant, particularly in Ohio. He made some pretty significant speeches on his behalf and, you know, we have him say, I think that he delivered Ohio, that maybe an overstatement, but not not hard to imagine that Stanton might have believed that that was true.

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