The old bad, the old, the bold. Billy Cunningham, the great
American, and I've been an hour. Rick Hamilton will be here from her
appraisals first to talk about how you can contest your property tax bill. Very
simple, very easy, but you got to do it to save money.
But until then, the man who saved Cincinnati by Peter Bronson, author of
Not in Our Town and Forbidden Fruit, man's name is a General Lou Wallace.
Let's go back in time. You make a reference to eighteen sixty being
similar to twenty twenty four. Oh, believable. Tell me it's amazing.
Okay. President Buchanan at the time was so close to being Biden, it's
unbelievable. He was uh huh. He was a lifelong party hack, he
had never done anything in the private sector. He finally rose to the presidency,
and he was widely despised for being so ineffectual and halfway destroying the country.
In fact, for the first two years of the Civil War, it
was known as Buchanan's War because because he's the one who did nothing to bring
the union together and put patches over these things and let it go where it
went. So how close was Lincoln coming to winning or losing? And was
he on the ballot. Lincoln was not even on the ballot in ten states.
So we talk about you know, you hear news reports this is unprecedent.
They're trying to keep President Trump off the ballot. No, it's not
unprecedented. It happened in eighteen sixty. Lincoln was running in a four way
race. He won less than forty percent of the vote and won by a
plurality. So Lincoln barely snuck into the presidency in eighteen sixty. Over who
was he running against? He was running against three other guys. One of
them was Breckinridge, John Breckinridge, who was Buchanan's vice president. He must
have been a real incompetent. Well he was actually now he turned Breckinridge turned
into the Southern Democrats party leader from the pro slavery issue and became one of
the generals for the Confederate Army. So that's what was happening in this country.
Okay, a few more parallels. We had. These amazing similarities were
that, for example, we had the country totally divided over immigration in eighteen
sixty. The Democrats were using it to populate and swell the northern cities where
they could gain a majority, a political cloud in the House and Senate.
So all the new immigrants weren't going to the South because it was agrarian and
there weren't jobs. The jobs were held by slaves, so immigration was weaponized.
We had an outsider Republican who got elected barely and was hated by the
establishment and reviled by the media. That man was Abraham Lincoln. Yet like
thirty eight percent of the vote. Yeah, kept off the ballot in ten
states, and the media hated him, they mocked him. What trump you
mean, Lincoln? Lincoln, These parallels are amazing. Free speech was hazardous.
In fact, there were midnight raids to arrest political enemies. Abraham Lincoln
approved that General Burnside sent federal troops up to Dayton to arrest one of the
leading abolition or pardon me copperheads who was stirring up too much trouble. And
his name was Clement V. Landingham. And they actually broken into his house,
knocked down his door, and hauled him out in the street in his
pajamas, took him to prison, gave him no constitutional rights, no habeas
corpus, and kept him at prison until they finally couldn't got too hot because
they had obviously violated his constitutional rights, and they ended up making a deal
where they took him down to the Confederates and handed him over. So this
is like today with Trump being and died at ninety one counts, Trump being
vilified, Trump being kept off the ballot. Seminary what happened to and the
immigrants had to go to northern cities because that would swell the power in the
Congress, much like today the immigrants are going to blue cities to have on
the census. You have more clout because you don't have to be a citizen,
just have to be a human being. And that's why they're putting him
in California, ILLINOI in New York to get cloud away from Ohio, Kentucky,
Indiana. So the North had totally taken and seized monopoly on political power
and the South was pretty much shut out. And this alienated the South even
more because they knew that what the North was going to be doing with this
was they would come after them with what they called the abominable tariffs, and
the tariffs seized southern cotton and put tariffs on it. So high. It
couldn't be sold to Europe at fair market value in China today and the good
good analogy, and they steered it up to the eastern seaboard where the textile
industry of the North wanted southern cotton. So what's happening today has happened before.
I was like, this is unprecedented, you know, as an existential
threat. No, No. Eighteen sixty eighteen. South was a problem.
This was the Antebellum period. One more, I'll give you political attacks on
members of Congress. We know what happened to Steve Scalise, we know what
happened to Ran Paul Well eighteen sixties, a congressman, a senator by the
name of Charles Sumner, an abolitionist, was almost beaten to death on the
floor of the Senate by a Southern gentleman by the name of Preston Brooks.
He took a caine, didn't He beat the crap at him, caned him
on the floor of the Senate, on the floor of the Senate. Well,
if something happens today, we experienced it. It's like never happened before.
Is the highest, the greatest, the worst, And in reality it's
not that way. At all. Let's talk about Kentucky and Ohio. Yes,
sir, Kentucky where I was born, where I was raised a family
from Elsmere and Erlinger was a slave state, but it was not part of
the Confederacy. Please explain. It would not join the Confederacy and it would
not join the Union. Kentucky was the Switzerland of the Civil War. Abraham
Lincoln said, I hope that God is on our side, but we must
have Kentucky. And he was born in Kentucky. He was born in Kentucky.
And when he was elected president, he got less than one percent of
the vote in his own home state. Really, yes, Linking got one
percent of the vote in Kentucky. Yes, and Kentucky declared they would remain
neutral, which didn't last for long because both armies ended up fighting major battles
in Kentucky. But Kentucky's very curious because they sent more, if you're going
to look at it, which side they favored. More of the young men
in Kentucky fought for the Union than for the Confederacy. But after the war,
Kentucky had the most Confederate monuments of any state in the Union. Why
well, they had suddenly decided they were pro Southern and the deep with the
losers in the Deep South States really mocked Kentucky for oh, now you're on
our side. When we needed you, you weren't there. Peter Bronson,
you have a great photo on your book The Man who Saved Cincinnati, in
which the peering of the suspension Bridge. There was no bridge at that point.
Correct, There wasn't Brent Spence Bridge. There was nothing. There was
nothing to go across the Ohio River. And by the way I read this,
it was many times five feet deep and you could walk across and explain,
well, the river wasn't very high, but they did need a bridge,
and they had begun the work on the suspension bridge the robling just before
the war. But Cincinnati as a huge center of commerce. Let's let's take
a detour here for a minute to talk about how Cincinnati was super important.
We were the queen city of the West because we were the sixth largest city
in the country. We had we were twice the size of Chicago, four
times bigger than San Francisco, four times five times bigger than Pittsburgh, Detroit,
Cleveland. So this was a huge center of commerce. But when the
war came along. Everything dried up because most of that commerce was across the
Ohio River, and when we stopped doing business with Kentucky and the South,
things got tight. The bridge had to be The work was suspended, much
like the subway many years later, which I've been in with Charlie Luken.
He took me into the subway. Unbelievable, but nonetheless I find for those
who may not know this, the High River with the damning it was often
it was almost dry. It was muddy puddles five feet deep walk across it.
So the idea of building a bridge, I'd read a bridge, and
not but to invade. So the idea was in the eighteen fifties to build
that bridge, the so called suspension bridge. The funding dried up, but
the neighbor and Lincoln had to say, we got to finish that bridge.
We got to get Union soldiers. But explain the man who saved Cincinnati,
because Rob Sanders and Tony Bender would be shocked to learn that a major general
saved Cincinnati. In fact, explained the battle war. Kenton County wanted to
invade Hamilton County. Well, it wasn't really Kenton County. In fact,
the mayor of Cincinnati was a copperhead, and he wanted to surrender to the
South. What's a copperhead. That would be somebody who supported the South and
supported slavery in Ohio, the mayor supported the Confederacy. Yes, there were
a lot of them, and so Cincinnati had more than its share. They
even hit Well we'll get into that later maybe, But so the mayor of
Cincinnati, he had agreed with the mayors of Covington and Newport they would surrender
because they heard, Yeah, this army was coming up from Lexington. Nine
thousand battle hardened Confederates. They were angry, who had been winning battles all
across the South. Nine thousand and these were little guys, you said this
off the air. Yeah, the average Confederate you and your soldiers made five
to six weigh one hundred pounds one hundred and twenty, one hundred and thirty,
and didn't look like us, like strapping males. Not at They were
little guys, and many were very malnourished. They they came from hard scrabble
farms and and really tough urban areas where they were orphans. These they were
tough, small, they were tough. Yes, And so explain what happened.
So these Confederates, a general by the name of Henry Heath, who
is quite a guy. You'll find in the book the kind of guy you
would love to be love this kind of guy. Oh yes, So he
gets these guys, he gets his army together and he goes to his commander,
General Kirby Smith, and he says, I think Cincinnati is an apple
ready to fall off the tree. We got the Confederate sympathizer in the mayor's
position on Love Street, and we've got all these Union material for war.
We've got uniforms, wagons, horses, mules, gold, tons of gold
in the Cincinnati bank vaults. Go get them, Go get them. And
he says that apple's going to fall off the tree. And he says,
can I take it? And Kirby Smith says, go take it. Cincinnati's
under earth. They start marching north. Mayor Hatch and the other two mayors
say, we're just going to surrender. We can't take a chance that our
city is going to be burned. Because the threat was that Henry Heath with
his nine thousand men, this undefended queen city of the North has nothing to
defend it. No police really to speak of. No army, no nothing,
no National guard at the time, and it was able to be burned
because all the most of the buildings were would exactly. We didn't have concrete.
So his threat was to set up cannons on the hills in Newport and
Covington and threaten the city with a siege and say, look, you either
pay us, he said, a m some of what would amount to about
a five hundred and fifty five million today, which was about fifteen million at
that time. We're going to pay us not to invade. Yes, And
so the cannons are set up and the children, the grandfather of Rob Sanders
and Tony Bender, are manning the cannons and they're ready to fire in the
city of Cincinnati. And we got a mayor who's a sympathizer with the South.
That is exciting. Tell me what happened next. This is so they're
ready to surrender on a Sunday night, and lou Wallace is sent over from
Crawfordsville, Indiana. A general, a general, he's a hero of Shiloh.
There he is. I'm looking at his picture. He think eighteen sixty
general, right, yes, that is Look at the beard not bad.
Yeah, you can't have any chili for that kind of beard anyway, Please
continue. So he comes over from Crawfordsville, and in three days he had
shown the city how to defend itself. No bridge of this said, no
bridge. He and an architect in town put together a pontoon bridge by using
barges from the Licking River. They strapped them together, and they marched across
into the hills of northern Kentucky and they started digging rifle pits and bringing over
what cannons they could muster. In some cases they even made what were called
Quaker cannons out of logs that they painted black to look like cannons. And
they dug all these rifle pits. And meanwhile they had this huge migration of
what were called the squirrel hunters, who were backwoodsmen who came to rush to
the defense of Cincinnati. So this guy Wallace put together a makeshift army,
yes he did. Who was in the army in Cincinnati to defend us against
Kenton, Boone and Campbell County. It was basically squirrel hunters and a few
regiments that were supplied by Indiana and Columbus, and they cleaned out their armories.
They scraped up whatever they could to send over to Cincinnati, because they
knew if Henry Heath marched up and took Cincinnati, he would split the Union
in half, and the Union would probably be forced to sue for peace,
and America would be forever divided. What year was this, This would be
eighteen sixty two, in the fall, when things are a little you know,
things are a little iffy. At this point very Gettysburg and sixty three
hadn't happened yet. That was close, Yes, sixty two. The Confederacy
might have won if they took Cincinnati and split the Union, and a great
sixth largest city in the country, Cincinnati falls to the hands the bloodthirsty squirrel
hunters. Explain what happened, and so at this point they all they had
to do was take Cincinnati, and it would have opened up all of the
Midwest. Now they can go on up into Michigan, they can take Chicago,
they can basically, that's a little Miami River, great Miami River.
Get going. What happened in this battle with Wallace the man who saved Cincinnati.
So he puts together this amazing army and basically, but they're not really
trained army. None of them had seen a bullet fly. And all these
squirrel hunters were impressive in numbers, but they had basically muzzle loading old squirrel
guns that you know, you might be really good with that gun, but
it's nothing like when those guys can shoot the squirrel. And those nine thousand
were battle hardened guys. They had fought one at battle after battle. They
were the survivors. And not only that, Kirby Smith had already promised Heath
that he would send up reinforcements as soon as he could get to Cincinnati,
and cincin night didn't have I seventy one, I seventy five was walking through
woods, through creeks. They got what happened at the battle. They got
as far as Fort Mitchell. And there's a famous story, and it's documented
in my book, where Wallace is standing on one parapet looking through his binoculars
and Heath is standing on a rooftop about a mile away looking through his binoculars,
and they stare each other down and the battle is about to begin.
The skirmishes start, they start shooting at each other. Men are getting killed,
and then the South lost its nerve, a big battle was building down
in the south, in southern around Louisville, and the general there, who
was nervous and was not a very good general. He had kind of flaked
out two or three times before he said he's got to have all his troops.
He called Kirby Smith, sent him a dispatch and said, get Heath
and bring him back here. Oh thank god. Yes, So they said,
okay, let's go down to Louisville. Leave Cincinnati alone. Got a
bigger battle there. They they didn't have telegram, telegraphed, they didn't have
the Google. They had to send a person on a horse with a message
to go ninety miles, which might take a week or two to tell the
general in northern Kentucky you come south immediately, yep. And he gave up,
and that is what saved says. They recalled him. Now. Wallace
would say that Heath looked at the huge, you know, defenses that he
built, and that was it. He decided to because the next morning he
didn't have the guts. Well it's it's still in dispute. And there's a
great scene at the end of the book where they meet each other at the
Burnett House after the war and they hadn't seen other since that day when they
were staring each other down over that battlefield, and at that point Cincinnati was
saved and the rest is history. You got it, Peter Bronson. The
book is great. I'm taking it a home. My wife loves reading this
stuff as I do. Great photographs and the man who saved Cincinnati. And
thank god that a messenger got through from Louisville. Otherwise things would have been
different. We would have been invaded by Rob Sanders's great friend. Isn't it
fun to think about what it would have looked like if that had happened.
Never happened before. President has never been kept off the ballot link He got
thirty eight percent of the vote. Yeah, and he wins, and he
wins. Peter Bronson, you're the best of this stuff. Well, thank
you. By the way, people can get that at local bookstores and on
my website for signed copies, which is chilidog Press dot com. Chilidog press
dot com. Peter Bronson, I wish you were still running the Inquirre do
you. I never did, But anybody who claimed to run that place,
good luck, is not telling the truth. Peter, Thank you very much.
All let's continue. Bill Cunningham, News Radio, seven hundred WLW.
Men, the new year is here, and if you're like many of us,
you're going to make a resolution.