Pushkin.

It's hard to read the news these days without asking yourself, how did we get here?

Fiasco is a history podcast for the co-creators of Slow Burn.

In our first season, Bush v. Gore, we examine an unmistakable turning point in American politics, the 2000 election, which resulted in a high-stakes stalemate, ended with one of the most controversial rulings in Supreme Court history.

So if you're trying to make sense at the present moment, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore. Listen on theHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is the Broken Constitution, a mini-series for unknown history from quick and dirty tips, and deep background for Pushkin Industries.

Over the course of these three episodes, I'm discussing Abraham Lincoln

and how we needed to break the American Constitution in order to remake it. It's all based on my

new book, The Broken Constitution, Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, out November 2nd.

In this episode, episode two, I'm going to turn to what

happened to Lincoln when he became president and to the moment in which he was forced to break

the Constitution in order to begin to think about how to save it.

To do that, I'm going to ask you to transport yourself to March 4, 1861, the day that Lincoln was inaugurated.

No other president in U.S. history has ever faced a crisis even vaguely comparable to the one that was confronting

Lincoln on that date. He had been elected four months earlier, defeating three rivals in a highly

regionalized race that was and remains the most polarized in U.S. history. And since he'd been elected, seven states had held

special secession conventions and announced that they were withdrawing from what they referred to as

the compact entitled the U.S. Constitution. In the aftermath, federal officials quit their jobs in all of those seven states, and the U.S. government ceased to exist as a practical matter within them, with a minor exception of a handful of military bases that still remained in those states.

The most famous of which was Fort Sumter, a fortification

in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. And in the case of that fortification,

the state of South Carolina had made it clear that it was going to blockade that fort,

blocking supplies from coming in, and that it was demanding that the President of the United States

...