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      Longstreet: the Confederate general who switched sides on race

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      On 14 September 1874, less than a decade after the end of the US civil war, the former Confederate general James Longstreet was back in arms. This time, he was seeking to prevent an insurrection: a white supremacist bid to take over New Orleans.Once seen by northerners as among the three most notorious Confederates – with his commander, Robert E Lee, and president, Jefferson Davis – Longstreet now led state militia and city police. His troops were Black and white, reflecting an unlikely commitment to post-war civil rights that would waver in later years. His complex life is the subject of a new biography, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South, by Elizabeth R Varon, a history professor at the University of Virginia, currently the visiting Harmsworth professor of history at Oxford.“This turnabout is so fascinating,” Varon marvels. “I pitched the book as the story of the most remarkable political about-face in American history.”An enslaver, Longstreet directed Confederate forces to capture Black people and take them south to slavery or imprisonment. He fought until the surrender at Appomattox, then allied himself with those who had brought about his defeat: Ulysses S Grant and the Republican party.“He was not the only one,” Varon says of white southern Republicans who made such moves, “but [he was] the highest-ranking Confederate. He was a lightning rod for critics.”Prominent figures such as Lee were honored with monuments, some of which have recently been pulled down. Longstreet never had this problem, because you’d be hard-pressed to find such tributes to him.“It’s quite astounding,” Varon reflects. “Longstreet endorses Reconstruction at a time when the vast majority of white southern former Confederates pledged themselves to resist at all costs.”The author is interested in such dissenters. A previous book chronicled Elizabeth Van Lew, a resident of the Confederate capital, Richmond, who spied for the Union. Varon hopes a future scholar will write about another dissenter, Longstreet’s much younger second wife, Helen Longstreet, née Dortch, who outlived her husband by 58 years. By the 20th century, she was also an outspoken voice for civil rights in the south.Dissent characterized Longstreet’s war years as much as his later life did. The 1993 film Gettysburg dramatizes his dispute with Lee at that famous battle. Longstreet argued for a defensive approach. Lee took the offense and the result was a disaster, a turning point in the war. Transferred west, Longstreet led an assault credited for the victory at Chickamauga, then lambasted his new commander, Braxton Bragg, for his failure to capitalize. Longstreet would later suffer for daring to criticize Lee.Although Varon addresses Longstreet’s war years, she is more interested in his postwar career, which stretched for nearly four decades and included leadership positions in Louisiana and Georgia. He even became the US minister to the Ottoman empire, where he met Sultan Abdul Hamid II and defended American missionaries.He owed much of his success to an improbable allegiance to the abolitionist Republican party of Abraham Lincoln and a lasting friendship with Grant.Varon details an unconventional but unsuccessful peace initiative involving the Grant and Longstreet families near the end of the civil war. (The war years had been hard for Longstreet and his first wife, Louise Longstreet. They lost three children to scarlet fever in 1862, and two years later, the general was grievously wounded by his own men.) At Appomattox, Longstreet was impressed by Grant’s lenient terms, which helped convince him it was time to change. He explained his stance in a series of 1867 letters that were poorly received by many.As Varon explains: “Longstreet said, ‘Yes, let’s give the Republican party a chance, try to make this work, we appealed to arms and the sword to arbitrate the political conflict with the north, they won, now it … requires me to try to make the best of it.’”She adds: “He was absolutely thrown back on his heels by the backlash by ex-Confederates. For his willingness to work with the Republicans, he was called anathema, a Judas, Lucifer, Benedict Arnold, they wished he’d died during the war.”A new battle began, a war of words with fellow former commanders such as Jubal Early, over who was responsible for the defeat. Yet Longstreet was committed to Reconstruction and the Republicans and to his postwar home, New Orleans, a racially diverse city where he held political positions following Grant’s election as president in 1868, beginning at the customs house. Through such positions, which extended to militia and police leadership, Longstreet advocated some degree of civil rights. Allies included PBS Pinchback, who in 1872 became the first sworn-in Black governor of a US state.In addition to Longstreet’s personal life and recognition of the flawed rebel war effort, Varon identifies “the last element” in his turnaround as “New Orleans itself – a unique political environment”. She cites the city’s Afro-Creole male leadership class, many of whom served as officers in the Union army.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They were politically savvy, assertive men,” Varon says, “really pushing for votes and full civil, economic and social rights for Blacks in Louisiana.” Regarding Longstreet, she notes: “I don’t think it would have turned out the same if [he] was somewhere else in the postwar south. This particular setting was uniquely positioned to change his views on race.”By 1874, that change was profound. On George Washington’s birthday, Longstreet participated in a review of interracial troops. Racist white discontent was simmering, in part over a disputed election two years earlier: after the Republicans were declared to have won, Democrats set up a rival government, followed by a takeover attempt and a massacre of Black people at Colfax. Another slaughter of Black people followed, in Coushatta in the summer of 1874. That fall, a group called the White League led a march on New Orleans.The insurrectionists targeted government property and overwhelmed authorities. Longstreet was wounded in the so-called Battle of Liberty Place, which ended with the rioters in control of the city. Their three-day takeover ceased with the approach of federal forces but the riot spelled doom for Reconstruction in Louisiana, presaging the demise of the policy throughout the southern states.Longstreet’s subsequent life brought something of a retrenchment on civil rights. Relocating to Georgia, he maintained ties to the Republican party but focused on cultivating white support. He also pursued two significant projects – restoring national bonds ruptured in the civil war, and defending his Confederate career, in part through a near 700-page autobiography.“He focuses on setting the record straight and answering charges as he gets older,” Varon says. “He claws back some of his lost popularity among white southerners. He reinvents himself as a herald of reconciliation. Both sides are going to have to make concessions.”As a US marshal, Longstreet did prosecute white supremacists and continue to back voting rights for all eligible citizens.“He remains kind of enigmatic,” Varon reflects. “In the last years of his life, he tries to reconcile his Confederate and Republican identities. It was not possible to ever fully do that.”
      Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      ‘It has to be done’: can Reconstruction-era laws hold Trump and allies accountable?

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      In attempts to hold former president Donald Trump and his allies accountable for election subversion, attorneys are reaching back to laws created in the wake of the civil war in the 1860s.Beyond Trump, too, lawsuits using these Reconstruction-era laws seek to enforce voting rights and prevent discrimination in modern-era elections.The laws from this time period were designed, in part, to reintegrate the Confederate states back into the country and ensure that they did not yet again attempt to overthrow the government or pass laws to restrict newly freed Black citizens.But the Reconstruction Congress created laws that were “flexible and responsive to modern-day threats”, making them applicable today and worth trying to enforce, said Jessica Marsden, an attorney with Protect Democracy, which has filed lawsuits using such laws.In recent years, the use of laws originally designed to crack down on the Ku Klux Klan and its allies in government after the civil war has grown. This set of laws bans political intimidation and violence, including insurrection, and has been used in legal claims from Charlottesville, to the January 6 insurrection, to the federal government’s charges against Trump.Section 3 of the 14th amendment, recently making headlines as various lawsuits attempt to use it to keep Trump off the 2024 ballot, makes it illegal for someone who was an officer of the US government to hold office again if they engaged in “insurrection or rebellion”.One novel approach also seeks to use a law that dealt with readmitting Virginia into the union to protect the voting rights of people with felonies.The resurgence of these laws in recent years has surprised some observers, but proponents say they are strong tools to fight back against anti-democratic movements happening today. And there aren’t more recent laws that deal directly with insurrection since the last major one happened during the civil war.“We have been compelled to use tools that we didn’t use in the past or didn’t need to use because we didn’t have the kind of threat and the kind of character prepared to break norms as we do now with Mr Trump and his confederates,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, a civil rights attorney who is opening a center focused on the 14th amendment at Howard University School of Law.Under Ifill’s leadership, in 2020 the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund filed a lawsuit against Trump and the Republican National Committee using Ku Klux Klan Act statutes, alleging Trump’s campaign and the RNC were systematically trying to disfranchise Black voters by disrupting vote counting and trying to delay results. It’s “never easy to sue a president under the KKK Act,” Ifill said, “but it has to be done”.“We are in a moment of democratic crisis,” Ifill said. “Trump and his agenda and Trumpism is a unique threat to the core of American democracy. And I think that has sent everyone into the space that we have to use all of the tools that are available to us.”The Reconstruction Congress understood the threat of insurrection and the kinds of disfranchisement and violence that came from giving rights to Black men after the civil war because these activities had just happened or were still happening then, so they created a strong set of laws to prevent further violence and to hold accountable those who perpetuated it.Since then, these threats haven’t been as direct as they are now, those filing lawsuits under these laws say, rendering the historic tools both useful and necessary.“Congress in the 1860s and 70s gave us a toolkit that is surprisingly well-suited to this moment,” Marsden, of Protect Democracy, said.The laws from that time period were written with an understanding that opponents of democracy would be “quite creative” in how they’d try to deter people from participating in the democratic process, leaving open what kinds of actions can be considered voter intimidation, Marsden said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat has made the KKK Act, for instance, a valuable tool when addressing modern technology, like a successful lawsuit against robocalls with threatening messages targeting Black voters about voting by mail. Another KKK Act case that recently settled involved a “Trump train” of vehicles that harassed a Biden bus in Texas in 2020, in which Protect Democracy argued that a town’s police force knew of this intimidation but didn’t work to stop it.Protect Democracy is also arguing that the Virginia Readmission Act, which protected the rights of new Black citizens to vote, applies today to disfranchising people with felonies. In a lawsuit believed to be the first making this claim, the group says Virginia’s law that strips people with felonies of their right to vote is illegal because the Reconstruction-era readmission act says only certain felonies can be used to prevent voting.Eric Foner, a historian who specializes in the civil war and the Reconstruction era, said it makes sense to use existing laws from that time period because they haven’t been repealed, despite the lack of use in the many decades since then, and reflect similar ideas to what’s happening today. The recent use of them shows just how strong the laws created by the Reconstruction Congress are, he said.“It’s a political commentary on what is possible politically today,” Foner said. “And it’s an odd thing because it’s considered more possible to resurrect these laws than to pass new ones.”With the resurgence of these laws come some challenges with making the case to judges, who may not have dealt directly with Reconstruction-era statutes beyond scholarly arguments. In the 14th amendment lawsuits, for instance, judges have questioned how to apply this section of law and interpret its provisions. And, given the high-profile and political nature of seeking to boot a former president from the ballot, judges have expressed wariness to wade into what some consider a political question, not a legal one.Already, 14th amendment lawsuits in Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan and Florida have been tossed, though many are still ongoing and those bringing the lawsuits are likely to appeal, with the question expected to go before the US supreme court at some point.In one smaller case, though, which didn’t involve someone as high-profile as Trump, a judge in New Mexico ruled that a county commissioner who had participated in the January 6 riots couldn’t hold office any more because of the 14th amendment.Despite their discomfort with the politics of the issue, Ifill argues that judges need to show courage to enforce the amendment’s provisions.“They may not want to do it any more than I wanted to sue a president under the KKK Act, but their job is to apply the law to the facts and issue a ruling that is consistent with what the law demands,” she said. 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      ‘The Lincoln shiver’: a visit to the Soldiers’ Home, a less-known Washington gem

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      When Joe Biden seeks release from Washington pressures, he goes to his house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Donald Trump, of course, had Mar-a-Lago in Florida and even Richard Nixon had the “Western White House”, in San Clemente, California. Presidents often have places to go to escape.Abraham Lincoln needed an escape more than anyone but his bolt hole was closer to home: a cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, on a hill north of the White House in Washington DC itself. It’s still there, a lesser-known historical site in the capital.Callie Hawkins, chief executive of President Lincoln’s Cottage, a national monument since 2000, says: “At the height of the civil war, some of Lincoln’s close friends suggested he take a break, go somewhere else. And he said, ‘Three weeks would do me no good. This follows me wherever I go.’“It would be natural to think of this place as a retreat of some kind. But in many ways, this place brought him closer to the war. He was surrounded by veterans who were wounded. At that time, they lived in the building next door. Just in front of us, about 200 yards away, is the first national cemetery. And then from the other side of the house, he could have looked out on to Maryland and Virginia, both slave-holding states. And so it was really a constant reminder, being out here, of reality.“We’ll walk up to the statue, because I want to see how you stand up to Lincoln. You’re pretty tall yourself.”I’m 6ft 4in but in his famous hat, Lincoln has me matched. The bronze, by Ivan Schwartz and showing the 16th president with the horse he rode to and from the White House each day in the hot months – June to November – was installed in 2008.“It’s different in purpose to the Lincoln Memorial” on the National Mall, Hawkins says. “We wanted to push back against that idea that Lincoln can only be viewed from afar, as a figure larger than life, on a throne in a temple. Here, you can walk up and look him in the eye. And this is a view that many people who were part of this community, on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, would have had.”The statue is the most obvious manifestation of Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home. But his presence is evoked elsewhere.From the terrace, where Lincoln played checkers with Tad, his son, visitors can look out as Lincoln did, down over Washington, to the Capitol, or out to Virginia and Maryland. Inside, the house is sparsely furnished, without attempt to recreate its look in Lincoln’s day. The result is strongly evocative. With the shutters closed, the study where Lincoln worked is dark. Next door, the drawing room is light.“It’s pretty magical,” Hawkins says. “There’s this thing that happens to a lot of people when they come in the cottage. It’s one of those sensations you can’t quite describe, but we have done our best and call it the ‘Lincoln shiver’.“It’s this full-body sensation as you are standing in this place and moving throughout these rooms, that Lincoln did the same at one of the most pivotal moments in American history. Added to that is that it’s a home, and homes are our most intimate spaces. You can just imagine Lincoln in his night shirt, or pajamas and bedroom slippers, moving about these grounds.”Hawkins describes one such appearance by Lincoln, during an evening visit from George Borrett, a British traveler, in 1864.“They brought them into this room and told them to have a seat. A few minutes later, Lincoln came walking through those folding doors.”I turn, see the doors, and there it is: the Lincoln shiver.There are other reasons for it. Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, grieved here, after the death of their son Willie at the White House in 1862. Hawkins now oversees a striking exhibition about the Lincolns and grief, meant to help those grieving today. Other projects also seek to apply Lincoln’s legacy to modern problems. In January, Prison Reimagined will show portraits of presidents by incarcerated artists.But Hawkins’s evocation of Lincoln, in the drawing room he used, remains extremely powerful, conveying the simple humanity for which Lincoln has long been loved but also his place as perhaps the most powerful expressor – and expression – of the American democratic ideal.“His hair was ruffled, his eyes were sleepy, and his feet were enveloped in carpet slippers. He was essentially in his pajamas to greet people he had no idea were coming and who he did not know. Borrett said, naturally enough, the president asked about their travels. And then President Lincoln asked what I consider to be a really strange question. ‘What do you think of our great country?’“This was a country that in 1864, at the time of their visit, was literally at war with itself. And Lincoln asked a stranger, ‘What do you think of our great country?’ It’s such a such an interesting question. I think it really demonstrates Lincoln’s love for this country, his hope for this country, and what he thought was possible.”The conversation with Borrett happened the year after Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address: a short speech, at the site of the greatest civil war battle, that became a foundational text. Lincoln delivered it 160 years ago today.My visit to President Lincoln’s Cottage is somewhat less momentous, an hour or so’s respite from reporting the politics of a country as divided as at any time since that civil war. But for those of us who ponder such problems daily, Lincoln’s conversation with George Borrett has more to offer.“Lincoln started to talk about democracy,” Hawkins says. “This country being the last best hope of Earth. That if democracy didn’t take hold here, it didn’t have a chance anywhere.”
      President Lincoln’s Cottage is open daily, with hourly guided tours More

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      Searching for the perfect republic: Eric Foner on the 14th amendment – and if it might stop Trump

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      The 14th amendment was passed in 1868, to settle important matters arising from the civil war, including how we define equality before the law. Ever since, it has served as the foundation for one landmark supreme court decision after another, from Brown v Board of Education (1954), which banned segregation in public schools, to Obergefell v Hodges (2015), which legalized gay marriage.In recent times, a little-known feature has come into sharp focus. Six days after the January 6 Capitol attack, Eric Foner, a historian of the US civil war and the Reconstruction era, argued that section 3 of the amendment forbids an “officer of the United States” from holding office if he or she has sworn an oath to the constitution, then participated in an “insurrection or rebellion”.That could mean Donald Trump is ineligible to hold public office.The matter is now before the states. In September, New Hampshire’s secretary of state refused to intervene. On 8 November, Minnesota’s supreme court rejected an attempt to prevent Trump from running. On 14 November, a judge in Michigan dismissed a lawsuit that tried to exclude Trump. But other states will be reckoning with the issue in the weeks ahead, including Colorado.To better understand the origin of the 14th amendment, and its ongoing relevance to 2024, Foner sat down with Ted Widmer, another civil war historian. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.Ted Widmer: The 14th amendment has been in the news a lot lately. Can you remind us why this particular amendment holds so much sway?Eric Foner: The 14th amendment is the most important amendment added to the constitution since the Bill of Rights in 1791. It’s an attempt by the victorious north, the Republican party in the aftermath of the civil war, to put its understanding of that war into the constitution.It is also the longest amendment. They tried to deal with everything that was on the political agenda in 1865, 1866. It deals with many specific issues, such as ensuring that southern enslavers are not going to get monetary compensation. Or that – and this is in the news today – that if you take an oath of allegiance to the constitution, and then you engage in insurrection, you are barred from holding political office in the United States.On the other hand, the 14th amendment also contains the first section, which is a series of principles arising from the end of slavery, beginning with birthright citizenship, that all persons born in the US are automatically citizens of the US. Although there’s an exclusion of Native Americans, who are still at that point considered citizens of their tribal nation, not the US. Also in the first section, “equal protection of the law”, that no state can deny to any person, not just citizens, the equal protections of the law – this was a fundamental change in American politics and society.Can you elaborate?No state gave Black people full equality before the law before the Reconstruction era and the 14th amendment. What equal protection actually means in practice is certainly open to debate. And it has been debated ever since 1868, when the amendment was ratified. There are key supreme court decisions over the last century – whether it’s outlawing racial segregation, establishing the right to terminate a pregnancy, “one man, one vote”, and many others – [that] have rested on the 14th amendment. My basic point is this: to borrow a modern phrase, I think the 14th amendment should be seen as a form of “regime change”. It’s an attempt to change the regime in the United States. It’s not a minor little change in the political system. It’s to change a pro-slavery regime, which is what we had before the civil war, to one based on equality, regardless of race. A fundamental change.This is what the civil war has accomplished. It has destroyed slavery, and it has created a new political system, which views all persons in the US as entitled to some modicum of equality.What is the immediate context of the passage of the 14th amendment? What were they trying to address?Well, the immediate context was what we call the Reconstruction era, the period immediately after the civil war, when the country was trying to come to terms with the consequences of the war, the most important of which were the destruction of slavery and the unity of the nation. As I mentioned, there were specific issues, which really have very little bearing on our political life today, although they keep popping up. For example, part of the 14th amendment says the government has to pay its debt: if it borrows money, selling bonds, it has to pay them off when they become due. This lay there pretty much unremarked for a long time. But lately with the debates over the debt ceiling, it’s back in the news again.But the fundamental issue was: what was going to be the status of the 4 million former slaves, who were now free citizens? Were they going to enjoy equality, were they going to have the right to vote, which was critical in a democracy? Were they going to be able to hold public office? What about economic equality, would they enjoy anything like that? The 14th amendment tries to deal with that in various ways. There are five sections, all of them relate back and forth to each other.Even though Abraham Lincoln was no longer alive, does it reflect his thinking?A constitutional amendment is the only legislative measure in which the president has no role whatsoever. The president cannot veto a constitutional amendment the way he can veto a piece of normal legislation. In fact, when the 13th amendment was passed, irrevocably abolishing slavery in the US, Lincoln worked to get it ratified, and he signed a copy of it as a symbol of his support. He got a handwritten copy of the 13th amendment, approved by Congress, and he signed it, whereupon Congress said, “You can’t sign this, President Lincoln, because the president has no role in the passage of the amendment. You’re trampling on our powers.”Didn’t know that.Yeah, they got annoyed when he signed it. Signing it didn’t make it legal or illegal. It becomes part of the constitution when it’s ratified by Congress and by a sufficient number of states.But the point is, Lincoln was a mainstream Republican. He was a great man, a brilliant writer and speaker, but he was also a party man. And the 14th amendment was approved by almost every Republican in Congress. There is no question Lincoln would have approved it. Also, Lincoln did not get into big fights with Congress the way some presidents have. So I think the basic principle, equality before the law, Lincoln had come to approve that during the civil war. He didn’t really hold that view before the civil war. But there’s no question in my mind that if Lincoln had not been assassinated, and was still president, he would have happily urged Congress to support the 14th amendment.Is birthright citizenship a uniquely American concept?Well, that is another complex and important issue and something that is back on the political agenda today. Is it uniquely American? No, it’s not. There are other countries that also automatically make you a citizen.But the point of birthright citizenship is it’s very important in the constitution to have this. It’s basically a statement that anybody can be a citizen. We are not a country based on a single religion, we are not a country based on a single political outlook, we are not a country with an official sort of set of doctrines that you have to adhere to. We’re not a country with an ethnic identity. A person of German ancestry born in Russia could automatically be a citizen of Germany, just by that ethnic identity. But the child of a guest worker, born in Germany, is not automatically a citizen of Germany.So birthright citizenship is an important consequence of the civil war. And of course, it had been deeply debated before then. Just before the civil war, in 1857, the supreme court in the Dred Scott decision ruled that no Black person could be a citizen. There were half a million free Black people. They were born in the US, most of them, and they could never be a citizen.The first section of the 14th amendment abrogates the Dred Scott decision, and creates a national standard for who is a citizen. The original constitution mentioned citizens, but it didn’t say who exactly they are, or what are the qualifications for being a citizen. So this clears up an ambiguity of the constitution and establishes a basic principle, equality, as fundamental to American life.Does that mean between Dred Scott in 1857 and the 14th amendment in 1868 that African Americans, even if they had liberated themselves and fought in the union army, were not citizens?Well, the Republican party and Lincoln had repudiated the Dred Scott decision on paper. Even as early as 1862, the attorney general, Edward Bates, issued a ruling saying Dred Scott was wrong.But what you said is true, it’s the 14th amendment that creates Black citizenship as a constitutional principle. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 established it in national law. By then 200,000 Black men had fought in the civil war. They were almost universally considered to be citizens. If you would fight and die for the nation, they’re not going to say after the war, “You can’t be a citizen.”Dred Scott destroyed the reputation of the supreme court in the north. During the secession crisis, nobody said, “Let’s let the supreme court decide this.”Unlike the Declaration of Independence, or the constitution, whose signers are well known, the 14th amendment is more anonymous. Who were the principal authors?It was written by the joint committee on Reconstruction, a 15-member body set up by Congress to figure out what laws and constitutional amendments were necessary to enforce the verdict of the civil war.My book The Second Founding begins by saying exactly what your question says. People have heard of James Madison, “father of the constitution”. They have heard of Alexander Hamilton, for reasons we know nowadays. These are people who were critical in writing the constitution.But who remembers John Bingham, the congressman from Ohio, who was more responsible than anyone else for the first section of the 14th amendment, about the federal government having the power to prevent states from denying Americans equality? We don’t remember Thaddeus Stevens, the great radical Republican from Pennsylvania who was the floor leader in the House, who did more than anyone else to get the 14th amendment ratified. We don’t remember James Howard, from Michigan, who got it through the Senate. In other words, the 14th amendment is not seen as fundamental to our constitutional system, whereas, of course, the original constitution is.So what I say in my book is, we’ve got to think of these people as like the founding fathers. This was a refounding of the nation, and the people who were critical in that deserve to be remembered.Were there parts that could have been written more clearly?The writing was in two modes. One was very clear. If you loaned money to the Confederacy, it’s never going to be repaid. That’s a highly specific point. But the language of the first section of the 14th amendment is much more ambiguous or general. Equal protection of the law. All citizens are entitled to due process of law. People cannot be denied life, liberty and property without due process of law.The language might have been clearer. But John Bingham wanted it to be ambiguous. What issues relating to the political equality of race relations would get on to the national agenda in the next 10, 50 or 100 years? He wanted to have a general set of principles which could be applied when necessary, and in fact, the fifth section, the final section of the 14th amendment, specifically states, “Congress shall have the power to enforce” this amendment. What does it mean to enforce the equal protection of the law? Well, that’s for the courts and the Congress and others to decide. So the language could have been clearer, but I’m not sure it would have been better if it were clearer. They wanted it to be ambiguous to leave room for future action.In other words, they thought this was not the end of Reconstruction. This was just one step toward creating what Thaddeus Stevens called “the perfect republic”, which they wanted to build on the ashes of slavery.Love that phrase.That’s Stevens’ speech, before the House. You know, the 14th amendment was a compromise. There were radical Republicans, conservative Republicans, moderate Republicans. And they hammered out a series of compromises. But Stevens, who was a real radical, also knew when you had to compromise. In his final speech before Congress, before the 14th amendment was ratified, he said, “Yeah, I had always hoped that when we could get out from under the power of slavery, we could create this perfect republic that the founders tried to, but failed to, because they allowed slavery.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut that dream has vanished, he said. The perfect republic is never really achieved, in any human endeavor. So, yeah, that’s what they were trying to do. Erase the mistakes of the founders, when it came to slavery, and remake the republic.Could the 14th amendment have passed if Congress had not taken a strong stand against seating southerners?The passage of the 14th amendment is interesting. Immediately after the civil war, Congress said, “We’re not letting the southern states back in quite yet.” They cannot vote on whether to ratify the three Reconstruction amendments. So the vote in Congress was only among northerners. If the south had had all the congressmen it normally did, the 14th amendment would never have been ratified. You need a two-thirds vote in Congress, and three-quarters of the states. It’s a very high bar to amend the constitution.But another aspect of this is, could it have passed the states? When the 14th amendment is first passed by Congress, President Andrew Johnson’s plan of Reconstruction is still in effect. Johnson had set up all-white racist governments in the south. They were still in power. And they all voted not to ratify the 14th amendment, every one of the southern states except Tennessee. They did not want Congress establishing this principle of equality for Black Americans.Congress got so infuriated that in 1867, they abolished those governments. They said, “We are going to give Black men the right to vote.” They hadn’t done that at the beginning of Reconstruction. They’re going to set up new state governments in the south, and those governments are going to ratify the 14th amendment. They ordered them to ratify it. And the way they guaranteed it was to allow Black men to vote. New governments were set up, biracial governments. For the first time in American history, Black and white men were sitting in legislatures, voting on laws, holding public office. This was a radical change in American democracy. And with those new governments, in which Black people for the first time had a voice, the southern states ratified the 14th amendment. So how the 14th amendment was ratified is irregular compared to most other amendments.Why was section 3 added?Section 3 is one part of the amendment that has been almost completely ignored until the last couple of years. It doesn’t apply to all southern whites, or even most of them, but to anyone who held an office before the civil war, who took an oath of allegiance to the constitution. That would mean people who served in the military or held some kind of public office. Even a postmaster has to take an oath to the constitution. The purpose was to eliminate the old ruling class of the south from public office. It was to create a space where new governments could come into being which would approve of the principles of the 14th amendment. They did not deny the right to vote to ex-Confederate leaders. But they did deny the right to hold office.It was almost never enforced. There are only a few examples of this amendment being enforced during Reconstruction. A couple of local officials were disqualified from office because they had held an office before the civil war then served in the Confederate army. In other words, they gave aid to insurrection after having pledged allegiance to the constitution. I think there were a couple in Tennessee. But basically, Congress gave an amnesty after a few years to just about everybody that this covered.And in the first world war, a socialist member of Congress, Victor Berger, was convicted under the Espionage Act. If you criticized the American participation, you could be put in jail. Congress expelled him under the third clause of the 14th amendment. In other words, he pledged allegiance to the constitution and was now convicted of what they called espionage. It wasn’t actually spying, it was really just opposing the war. But then the supreme court overturned the conviction and Congress let him back in.In the last year or two, this has become a major issue in relation to Donald Trump. Depending on how you analyze it, Trump took an oath to support the constitution – obviously, when he was sworn in as president – but gave aid to insurrection. If you consider the events of 6 January 2021 an insurrection. He tried to overturn a governmental process, tried to prevent the legitimate election of a president.There have been lawsuits in a number of states to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024. Thus far, none has succeeded. Some are pending. A couple of cases have come up about lesser officials who took part in the events of January 6. And in fact, a guy in New Mexico, a county commissioner, was ordered out of office by a court on the grounds that he was barred by the third section of the 14th amendment.A congressman in North Carolina, Madison Cawthorn, faced claims that he could not serve. It became moot because he lost his primary. But there was a court that did say that it was a legitimate question whether he could serve if elected, because he had been there taking part in the events of January 6.So it’s on the agenda now. But there is no jurisprudence really related to section 3. Nobody knows what the supreme court would say. Some people say you would need a judicial ruling. How do you know that a guy participated? It’s like you’re convicting him without a trial. But on the other hand, others say, no, this is just a qualification for office. This is not a criminal trial.Being barred from office is not a criminal punishment. It’s one of the qualifications for office. For example, let’s say somebody was elected president who was under the age of 35. The constitution says you have to be 35. Let’s say Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected president. Not likely, but she’s a well-known figure in politics. Well, she couldn’t serve because she’s under 35. And a court or somebody would just have to say, “I’m sorry, you don’t meet the qualifications here.” I am not a law professor. Neither I nor anyone else knows what the courts would decide. But in actuality the 14th amendment says it’s Congress that enforces the 14th amendment, not the supreme court. They didn’t want the court involved because of Dred Scott.The final section of the amendment says, “Congress shall have the power to enforce this amendment by appropriate legislation.” Would Congress have to declare somebody having participated in insurrection? I don’t know. But this was brought up including by me about two years ago, in the op-ed, in the Washington Post, after the insurrection of January 6.There was an effort to impeach President Trump, but it didn’t succeed. But I pointed out you don’t need impeachment, which requires a two-thirds vote to convict in the Senate. If you really want to keep Trump out of office because of his actions on January 6, you could do it through the third section of the 14th amendment.Certainly, regarding a president, there is no precedent. But the third section has never been repealed. So there it is.Did the 1872 Amnesty Act supersede section 3?That’s been brought up. The 14th amendment also says Congress can eliminate this punishment or disability by a two-thirds vote. In 1872, in the run-up to the presidential election of that year, Congress did pass a general Amnesty Act, which saved almost all prominent Confederates.Now, some people say that eliminated section 3, and therefore it can’t be enforced. But that’s not the case. You can let people off from one punishment, but it didn’t say this section is no longer applicable. It said that a whole lot of people would no longer be punished as part of an effort to bring about sectional reconciliation. The Amnesty Act doesn’t necessarily repeal a previous measure unless it says the previous measure is automatically repealed.How has section 3 been interpreted since Reconstruction?It has barely been interpreted. There have been only a handful of cases. There’s almost no jurisprudence related to it, which is one of the reasons Congress has been reluctant to enforce it. Joe Biden has said he doesn’t really want to get into this. It would guarantee a prolonged legal battle if you tried to enforce section 3 against Trump. Enforcing it against the county commissioner in New Mexico probably didn’t raise a lot of animosity. But it has happened. So there is a bit of jurisprudence, but not enough that a court could easily say, “Here’s the precedent, this is what we’ve done in the past.”Is the president “an officer of the United States”?Again, because there’s no jurisprudence, it hasn’t been decided. A couple of prominent conservative law professors wrote an article saying section 3 is on the books and can be enforced. Then they changed their mind. And they said the president is not an officer of the United States. So it does apply to all sorts of other offices. But not the president.This has never been exactly determined, but it certainly seems the normal understanding of the term “officer” is someone holding office. The president certainly holds office. When the constitution was ratified, there was no president. The previous constitution, the Articles of Confederation, didn’t have a president. There was no executive officer. It was only the Congress. So it’s unclear. They added the president as someone who could execute the laws. But I don’t see how you can eliminate the president or exclude the president from this language. If you take the whole of section 3, I think it’s pretty clear that they are trying to keep out of office anybody who committed the acts that section 3 describes. But again, it’s complicated.Did the events of January 6 constitute “an insurrection or rebellion against the constitution”?They certainly tried to a halt a constitutional procedure, the counting of the electoral votes. One of the more bizarre parts of our constitution, actually, but nonetheless, it’s there.What is your definition of insurrection or rebellion? You know, this gets into a question we actually haven’t talked about, which is very important in relation to the 14th amendment, which is the notion that you can clearly ascertain the original meaning, or the original intention of a law or a constitutional provision or something like that, and that the constitution should be interpreted according to the original meaning of the people who wrote the provision, or the original intention.This notion that you can ascertain, clearly, the original intention is absolutely absurd. No important document in history has one intention, or one meaning. Particularly the 14th amendment, it was written with compromises, with 8-7 votes in the joint committee. It was ratified by hundreds of members of state legislatures. Who can tell us exactly what the intention is? It is a legitimate historical question to ask, what were they trying to accomplish? But that’s a little different than saying what was their intention, at least in the legal realm.Yes, historians are always trying to figure out, why did they write and ratify the 14th amendment? In a way, that’s an intention question.But to answer that question, unfortunately, justices have a way of going purely to debates in Congress. They do not look at the general historical context. The meaning of the 14th amendment was debated and argued and fought out at all levels of society.One of my favorite quotations from this period comes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the great advocate of women’s rights. She said, during Reconstruction, I’m paraphrasing, “The basic principles of our government were debated at every level of society, in Congress, in the pulpits, in schools, at every fireside.” I love that. In other words, even in their homes, people are debating the issues around the 14th amendment. There is no one single intent that you can locate in that gigantic discussion about constitutional issues, which accompanied the ratification of the 14th amendment. So I think, as most historians would say, it’s a pointless test to try to identify one single intention.Wouldn’t the legal challenges take longer than the election itself?Yes, the legal challenges would take a long time, and it would be weird if Trump is elected next fall, then a year into his term of office he’s evicted because he doesn’t meet the qualifications. We saw how Trump reacted to actually losing an election. But now, if he won and then was kicked out of office, that would certainly be a red flag in front of a bull.
      Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, is a Pulitzer prize-winning author whose most recent book is The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
      Ted Widmer is a distinguished lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York, and a former special assistant to President Bill Clinton. His most recent book is Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington More

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      Bannon used Confederate code words to describe Trump speech, book says

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      The far-right Donald Trump ally and adviser Steve Bannon used Confederate code words linked to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to describe a speech by the former US president before his historic first criminal indictment, a new book says.On 6 March this year, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Trump took aim at Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney then widely expected to bring charges over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, thereby making Trump the first former president ever criminally indicted.Trump told his audience: “I am your warrior; I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”In a forthcoming book, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, writes: “When I spoke with Bannon a few days later, he wouldn’t stop touting Trump’s performance, referring to it as his ‘Come Retribution’ speech.“What I didn’t realise was that ‘Come Retribution’, according to some civil war historians, served as the code words for the Confederate Secret Service’s plot to take hostage – and eventually assassinate – President Abraham Lincoln.”Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, an actor. The president died the following day.Karl is the author of two bestsellers – Front Row at the Trump Show and Betrayal – about Trump’s rise to the presidency, time in the White House and defeat by Joe Biden.In his third Trump book, excerpted in the Atlantic on Thursday, Karl quotes from a 1988 book, Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and Assassination of Lincoln.“The use of the key phrase ‘Come Retribution’ suggests that the Confederate government had made a bitter decision to repay some of the misery that had been inflicted on the south,” the authors write. “Bitterness may well have been directed toward persons held to be particularly responsible for that misery, and Abraham Lincoln certainly headed the list.”Bannon, Karl writes, “actually recommended that I read that book, erasing any doubt that he was intentionally using the Confederate code words to describe Trump’s speech.“Trump’s speech was not an overt call for the assassination of his political opponents, but it did advocate their destruction by other means. Success ‘is within our reach, but only if we have the courage to complete the job, gut the deep state, reclaim our democracy, and banish the tyrants and Marxists into political exile forever,’ Trump said. ‘This is the turning point.’”In Karl’s estimation, the “Come Retribution” speech “was a turning point for Trump’s campaign” for re-election.Trump began his 2024 campaign sluggishly but then surged to huge leads over his Republican party rivals in national and key-state polling, despite a charge sheet now totaling 91 criminal counts and two civil trials, one over his business practices and one concerning a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKarl writes: “The [federal] trial date for the charge of interfering in the 2020 election has been set for 4 March [2024]; for the hush-money case, it’s 25 March; for the classified-documents case, it’s 20 May.“As election day approaches and [Trump] faces down these many days in court, he will be waging a campaign of vengeance and martyrdom. He will continue to talk about what is at stake in the election in apocalyptic terms – ‘the final battle’ – knowing how high the stakes are for him personally. He can win and retake the White House. Or he can lose and go to prison.”Bannon is quoted as saying: “Trump’s on offense and talking about real things. The ‘Come Retribution’ speech had 10 or 12 major policies.”But, Karl writes, “Bannon knew that the speech wasn’t about policies in a traditional sense. Trump spoke about whom he would target once he returned to power.“‘We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers,’ Trump said. ‘We will drive out the globalists; we will cast out the communists. We will throw off the political class that hates our country … We will beat the Democrats. We will rout the fake news media. We will expose and appropriately deal with the RINOs. We will evict Joe Biden from the White House.“‘And we will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all.’” More

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      The American civil war ended on this day. It should be a national holiday | Steve Phillips

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      April 9 should be a national holiday in the United States, but the wrong people are celebrating. On this day in 1865, Confederate Gen Robert E Lee surrendered to Union forces – marking the effective defeat of the Confederacy and the triumph of those who opposed the idea that this should be a white nationalist nation where Black bodies could be bought and sold on the open market. Yet rather than celebrate this seminal milestone in defending and creating a multi-racial democracy, the country’s leaders ignore the occasion, creating a vacuum into which the champions of white nationalism happily goose-step.Boiled down to its essence, the civil war began because the presidential candidate sympathetic to African Americans, Abraham Lincoln, won the election of 1860, and the losing side refused to accept the election results (sound familiar?). That defiance of democracy led to eleven states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederacy, which was founded, in the words of Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens, “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition”. The civil war was a truly existential conflict that raged for four years of killing and carnage that resulted in the deaths of 2% of the country’s residents – the equivalent of 7 million people, based on today’s population.April 9 not only recalls the defeat of the white supremacists, but the beginning of the first faltering steps towards making the country a multi-racial democracy. During Reconstruction, laws were passed, land divided, and institutions created to foster education and public health for people of all racial backgrounds. In the words of the writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, “the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see”.One would think that such a landmark achievement would be annually remembered, recognized and cherished. But one would be wrong. It is in fact the Confederates and their ideological and genealogical heirs who regularly nurture the memories of those who fought for legalized white supremacy within our borders.Organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans promoted and defended the creation of hundreds of monuments to Confederate leaders across the country and continue to do so to this day. (You can buy shot glasses, belt buckles and bars of soap honoring Confederate heroes online.) Hollywood showered huge sums of money on creating films such as Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind that sanitized mass murder and human bondage. To this day, Texas offers a paid holiday to state employees so that they can celebrate Confederate Heroes Day and honor the white supremacists Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee.For the health of our democracy, the education of our children, and the elevation of the vision and values that this is a nation where people of all racial backgrounds are cherished, we should launch a movement from coast to coast to make April 9 a holiday.There is a reason that the rallying cry about the Holocaust is “Never Forget.” People around the world recognize the importance of preserving the memory of one of the great atrocities in the history of humanity so that it doesn’t occur again. Nazism is predicated on the same kinds of white supremacist beliefs that precipitated the civil war, and an institutionalized reminder of the threat and defeat of that threat will help create guardrails to defend the democracy in the future.Modern-day Confederates are well aware of the importance of what children are taught about this country’s racial history and contemporary realities. That is why leaders in former slave-holding states such as Florida, Virginia, and Texas have passed legislation and taken aggressive action to whitewash their curricula through attacks on so-called Critical Race Theory.Public support for racial justice requires an understanding and appreciation of the persistence and prevalence of racial injustice. Formalizing the recognition of what the civil war was, which side won, and where we currently stand will deepen young people’s understanding and commitment to continuing the vigilance needed to foster racial justice and equality.As much as the holiday itself, the debate over establishing it will educate the country and affirm our values. We don’t have to wait for a divided Congress to act. School boards, city councils, boards of supervisors, and state legislatures can all pass resolutions marking the occasion and declaring a local holiday, thereby creating momentum for a federal holiday. And introducing a bill in Congress will force members to go on record, creating a basis for ads and campaign materials challenging voters to choose a side between white nationalism and multi-racial democracy.The only reason not to proceed is lack of courage – and bad math skills. The ideological descendants of the Confederacy will get mad, no question; but they are not the majority. Forcing people to choose will reveal that the majority want a multi-racial democracy, and if that is in fact the case let’s set aside the 9th of April as a day of national celebration.
      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good More

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      We get 28 days for Black History in the US – but every month is White History Month | Steve Phillips

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      We get 28 days for Black history in the US – but every month is White History MonthSteve PhillipsConservatives are blocking a more inclusive version of history – even as our Capitol contains statues of white supremacistsWelcome to White History Month! While February – the shortest of months – is typically associated with a 28-day acknowledgement of the historical contributions of African Americans, the truth of the matter is that this month, and every month, is actually a celebration of white history.This particular February is noteworthy because of the controversy surrounding revisions to the first-ever advanced placement (AP) course in African American history. (It is worth noting that the College Board, which administers AP courses, has been in existence since 1900 and is only now getting around to offering a class on African Americans.) The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has seized on the occasion to fan the flames of white racial fear and resentment by having the Florida department of education very publicly reject the course because they claimed it “significantly lacks educational value”.DeSantis’s corporate donors under fire for ‘hypocrisy’ over Black History MonthRead moreIn a profound profile in cowardice, the College Board removed references to topics such as Black Lives Matter and reparations from the curriculum after Florida raised its complaints. (The New York Times documented the process of capitulation in an article this month.)DeSantis’ antics are nothing new. He is merely following the well-worn path of prior champions of white racial grievance, such as the 1960s segregationist and Alabama governor George Wallace, the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate Strom Thurmond, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and many, many others. Wallace most clearly discovered and articulated the political power of white racial resentment when he told a journalist: “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes – and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about [N-word] – and they stomped the floor.”What DeSantis has discovered is that in Florida, attacks on so-called “critical race theory” get many white people to stomp the floor. Last year, he pushed through legislation that seeks to shield white children from facing the facts of white supremacy – mandating that a “person should not be instructed that he or she must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race.”Although the modern-day Confederate outrage machine would have you believe that America’s children are being bombarded with Philip Kan Gotanda plays, Dolores Huerta speeches and James Baldwin books, the truth is actually the opposite. California is the only state in the country to mandate ethnic studies as a graduation requirement and that law doesn’t take effect for two more years. Arizona just elected as its state superintendent of instruction a man who in 2010 championed a law banning ethnic studies instruction in Tucson, Arizona. (A federal judge later threw out the law, saying that it was “motivated by racial animus”.)The round-the-clock white nationalist propaganda machine is not restricted to the country’s classrooms. The 1939 film Gone With the Wind glorifies the Confederates and depicts white nationalist mass murderers as dashing leading men and charming leading ladies. The movie is still the highest-grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation), and a 2018 PBS poll found that the novel is the sixth-most popular book of fiction in the country, ahead of Charlotte’s Web and The Chronicles of Narnia.The year-round white history celebrations operate in our nation’s capital as well. Dispersed throughout the Rotunda of the US Capitol – the citadel of the nation’s democracy – are 100 statues which, according to the original 1864 legislation, are intended to showcase leaders “illustrious for their historic renown” and “worthy of this national commemoration”, allowing each state two statues.Among the statues that greet the children, families and visitors to the Capitol are “19 statues, busts and paintings of Confederates.” Every day of every month of the year, these white marble monuments to white supremacists stand proudly and defiantly, mocking the notion that America is anything other than a nation for white people. (The law authorizing the placement of statues was actually passed during the civil war, when there were no Confederates in the Congress, but after the war the Southern states rushed tributes to white supremacy into the Capitol building.)Cognizant that Germany has no monuments to Nazis for a reason, Senator Cory Booker, representative Steny Hoyer and other members of Congress have tried in recent years to pass bills cleansing the Capitol of the visible stain of racism, but, tellingly, these bills have never become laws.I recently did a reconnaissance mission to the Capitol to assess the situation. While the building does try to restrict access to the most famous racists, such as Jefferson Davis, his lower-profile yet equally white-supremacist comrades are still there, front and center, greeting visitors from across the country every day, every month – teaching, celebrating and honoring white history. Trying to do my small part to highlight the fact that many of these statues actually pay homage to white supremacists, I put together a short video on my recent trip to DC.DeSantis ramps up ‘war on woke’ with new attacks on Florida higher educationRead moreWhile enraging, none of this is surprising. The marginalization of the history, cultures and contributions of people of color has been going on for centuries. The dichotomy between Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project and the one lonely month devoted annually to Black history highlights the country’s contradiction.Hannah-Jones and the editors at the New York Times set out to “reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country”. (The 1619 Project is now also a documentary series on Hulu.)The revolutionary power of that proposition is that all of US history has to be rethought, but, instead, we settle for one month a year paying lip service to Americans with more melanin.So, with the days ticking down on Black History Month, if we really want to teach the truth, we should confront the fact that every month is White History Month and we should have a national debate about how we feel about that. And then, perhaps we can make real progress on creating a multiracial curriculum that tells the truth about US history to the American people and our children, so that they can make it better in the future.
      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good
      TopicsBlack History MonthOpinionUS politicsRon DeSantisFloridaRaceAmerican civil warcommentReuse this content More

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      The Lincoln Miracle review: how Republicans chose their great redeemer

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      ReviewThe Lincoln Miracle review: how Republicans chose their great redeemer As the Republican Party marches right, Edward Achorn’s second book on the 16th president makes instructive readingThe party of Lincoln is dead. A half century after the civil rights backlash begat Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, Donald Trump announced on Fox News that his accomplishments may have surpassed those of the 16th president.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead more“So, I think I’ve done more for the black community than any other president, and let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, ’cause he did good, although it’s always questionable.”Descendants of those freed from slavery under Lincoln? They would probably differ.Trump grew up in Queens, a New York borough, but his heart belongs to Dixie. He called the Confederate Robert E Lee one of the greatest US generals and said there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white supremacists marched in August 2017 and a counter-protester was murdered. Truly, Trump has cast the Republican party in his own image.Against this bleak backdrop, Edward Achorn delivers The Lincoln Miracle, an in-depth examination of Abraham Lincoln’s successful quest for the Republican presidential nomination at the convention of 1860.Achorn is Pulitzer finalist, particularly interested in the 19th century and baseball. The Lincoln Miracle is Achorn’s fourth book but second on Lincoln, after Every Drop of Blood, about the second inaugural address of 1864. The Lincoln Miracle is beautifully written, filled with vivid and easily digested prose.The reader knows Lincoln will prevail, the US will shortly be at war with itself and the Union will triumph at great cost. Foreknowledge does not detract. The Lincoln Miracle’s themes are timeless, its subtitle apt: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History.Achorn deftly lays out the personas, demographics and rivalries that shaped the nominating contest and the 1860 election. The Whig party was spent, riven by slavery and nativism. Anti-Catholicism was a force. Anti-German sentiment too. The nation was buffeted by the competing pulls of abolitionism and preservation of the Union. Republicans were divided, Democrats fractured. The Democratic convention was an abject failure. Compromise was not in the air.Three years earlier, the supreme court had issued its infamous Dred Scott decision, reading slavery into the constitution. Short of constitutional amendment or war, there was little to be done. Slavery had morphed into a right.At the Illinois Republican convention in 1858, Lincoln delivered what would come to be known as the House Divided speech. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he quoted from the Book of Matthew, his Baptist upbringing manifest. Lincoln may have been a deist but he appreciated Scripture. According to Achorn, he believed “pain and failure were endemic to human life”. People could only do so much. The rest was in the hands of an “inscrutable” God.“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half-slave and half-free,” Lincoln said. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”Lincoln had served one term in Congress, back in the 1840s. His antipathy to slavery was well known. So was his opposition to popular sovereignty, the notion that new states could decide for themselves if slavery would be legal within their borders. In 1858, Lincoln was running for a US Senate seat. He battled the Democrat Stephen Douglas on that very point. Lincoln won the debates but lost the election. In 1859, John Brown seized the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to arm the enslaved. He was put to death for treason. The glue that held the country together was quickly coming undone.Lincoln had a rematch with Douglas. In the fall of 1860, in a four-way election, both men vied for the White House. Lincoln had been an underdog for the Republican nomination, never mind the presidency. How he won the first prize before he won the second is a tale worth telling. His political march signaled how he would govern, how he would impose his vision and will on the country.Lincoln respected the foundational documents, wedding his opposition to slavery to the founders’ stated ideals.“He was acceptable,” writes Achorn, “because he celebrated the founding fathers and Declaration of Independence. Lincoln believed intensely that the founders had opposed slavery as an obvious contradiction of the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and had set it on the road to extinction.”Nowadays, the 1619 Project takes a different view. The issue is live once more.Lincoln knew patience could be a virtue, that he could bend time to his side. At the Republican convention, in a huge wooden “wigwam” in Chicago, he was the darkest of dark horses. With each round of balloting, his odds improved. After the first round, Lincoln was more than 70 votes behind William Seward, the New York senator and favorite to be the nominee. After the second ballot, Seward’s margin collapsed. Lincoln’s victory, in the third round, was inevitable. Seward became Lincoln’s secretary of state.Every Drop of Blood review: how Lincoln’s Second Inaugural bound America’s woundsRead moreThe Lincoln Miracle describes political battles on a stage long vanished. The book lands in an America transformed. The last president from Lincoln’s party demands the constitution be terminated. He considers a return to the White House – and dines with an anti-Semite and a white supremacist.But 19th-century dynamics have not completely vanished. On the right, John C Calhoun, father of the filibuster, proponent of white supremacy and secession, is praised. Into the Republican presidential race strides Nikki Haley, a Trump appointee turned rival who once told the Sons of Confederate Veterans states had the right to secede. There’s more. The civil war the Confederacy fought to maintain slavery? A matter, in Haley’s weasel words, of “tradition versus change”.More than 150 years after Lincoln’s assassination, the embers of civil war still glow. The Lincoln Miracle is relevant reading indeed.
      The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History is published in the US by Grove Atlantic
      TopicsBooksAbraham LincolnAmerican civil warUS politicsRepublicansHistory booksreviewsReuse this content More