Civil War (US) (1861-65)

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    Trump vs. Harris Would Be Nothing Without Myths

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    Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are making their appeals to the American electorate on the basis of personality, character and policy. But they are also framing themselves as actors in the American story — the events of the recent past and the deeper narrative of U.S. history carried by the symbol-rich stories of our national mythology.There has been very little common ground expressed between the parties in this election, except the belief that a victory by the opposition would be apocalyptic. Even when they invoke the same historical references, they present them in radically different ways. To Democrats, Jan. 6 was a shameful assault on democracy. To many Republicans, it was a patriotic protest of a rigged election.It’s as if we are living in two different countries, each with a different understanding of who counts as American.Each candidate is trying to pitch the contest to voters as a heroic episode in the unfolding of American history and invites them to imagine themselves as players in the narrative.In the “story wars,” Mr. Trump has an advantage over Ms. Harris: Conservatives have devised over decades a store of established mythological American “scripts,” something liberals have failed to do.Among the big issues at stake in the 2024 election, for both the campaigns and the country, is no less than shaping what it means to be an American and who gets to have power.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gail Lumet Buckley, Chronicler of Black Family History, Dies at 86

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      She wrote two books about multiple generations of her forebears, including her mother, Lena Horne.Gail Lumet Buckley, who rather than follow her mother, Lena Horne, into show business, wrote two multigenerational books about their ambitious Black middle-class family, died on July 18 at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her daughter Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter and film and television producer, said the cause was heart failure.Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history in the early 1980s, when her mother asked her to store an old trunk in her basement. It had belonged to Ms. Horne’s father, Edwin Jr., known as Teddy, and contained hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations, to Sinai Reynolds, who had been born into slavery around 1777 and who in 1859 bought her freedom and that of members of her family.“There were photographs, letters, bills, notes,” Mrs. Buckley told The New York Times in a joint interview with her mother in 1986, as well as “speakeasy tickets, gambling receipts, college diplomas.”Those disparate paper fragments of history helped her structure “The Hornes: An American Family” (1986).Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history when she discovered, in an old trunk, hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations.Alfred A. KnopfWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Youngkin Vetoes Measures to Remove Tax Breaks for Confederate Heritage Group

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      The Virginia governor rejected efforts by the state’s Democrats to reshape the Commonwealth’s relationship with its Confederate past. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia vetoed on Friday two bills that would have revoked tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a century-old organization that has often been at the center of debates over the state’s Confederate past and its racial history.In doing so, Mr. Youngkin sided with fellow Republicans in the legislature who almost unanimously opposed the bills and the efforts by the state’s Democrats to curtail the Commonwealth’s relationship with Confederate heritage organizations. The bills had nearly unanimous Democratic support in both chambers of the legislature. (One Democrat did not participate in one of the votes.) The organization’s property tax exemptions were added to the state code in the 1950s, during segregation and when the Commonwealth maintained a closer relationship with the group. The organization’s Virginia division is also exempt from paying recordation taxes, which are levied when property sales are registered for public record.In a statement explaining his decision, Mr. Youngkin acknowledged that the property tax exemption was “ripe for reform, delineated by inconsistencies and discrepancies.” But, he said that the bills were too narrow, specifically targeting the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and approving them would set “an inappropriate precedent.” Lawmakers who introduced the bills said that they had wanted to modernize the tax code to reflect the state’s current values; they also stated that the government should not support organizations that promote myths romanticizing the Confederacy. Critics of the legislation said that the bills unfairly targeted the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and claimed that the group and its purposes were misunderstood.Alex Askew, a Democratic delegate who introduced one of the bills, called the governor’s vetoes “perplexing.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Potency of Trump’s ‘Lost Cause’ Mythmaking

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      At an Ohio rally this month, Donald Trump saluted the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, calling them “unbelievable patriots” and referring to those who’ve been locked up for their involvement on that terrible day as “hostages.”This was a continuation of Trump’s “Lost Cause” mythmaking that began during his successful presidential campaign in 2016 and was ramped up in service of his efforts to remain in power despite his 2020 loss and the deadly riot that those efforts stoked.More than 1,200 people have been charged related to Jan. 6. And though it shouldn’t have to be said, let’s be clear: Those who’ve been tried, convicted and imprisoned for storming the Capitol aren’t hostages, they’re criminals.But Lost Cause narratives aren’t about truth. They’re about negating the truth.Which is what happened when the Lost Cause mythology was constructed after the Civil War. The cause of the war was framed as “Northern aggression” rather than slavery. A lore about happy slaves and benevolent enslavers proliferated. The narrative valorized those who seceded from and fought against the United States.And it has survived to some degree for over 150 years, tucked into the cracks of our body politic. It still surfaces in ways that may seem remote from the Confederate Lost Cause myth, but that definitely promote it.It manifested itself last year when Florida changed its African American history standards to say that the enslaved “in some instances” benefited from their enslavement, and in Nikki Haley’s hesitance on the campaign trail to state the obvious, that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      History Argues for Disqualifying Trump

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      One of the most difficult things to ask a judge to do is issue a ruling that he or she believes is actually dangerous. Even if you can make a strong case that the letter of the law is on your side, judges are tempted to narrow the reach of disfavored laws or sometimes virtually rewrite them in order to avoid outcomes that are deemed too radical or disruptive.Thus, it’s incumbent on good lawyers to argue not merely in favor of the letter of the law but also for the underlying merit of the law itself. My newsletter two weeks ago focused mainly on the legal argument for disqualifying Donald Trump from the presidency on the basis of the text and history of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. I made the case that the plain language of the amendment should disqualify Trump regardless of the consequences, which many observers — including some strongly opposed to Trump — believe would be dire and violent.Today, by contrast, I will make the case that even the consequences argue for Trump’s disqualification. Or, put more directly, that the consequences of not disqualifying the former president are likely to be worse than those of disqualifying him. This is the lesson of history both recent — the Trump era and Jan. 6, 2021 — and more distant. The profound mistakes of the Reconstruction-era Congress, just years after the Civil War and the ratification of the 14th Amendment, teach us about the high cost of welcoming insurrectionists back into high office.I addressed these points briefly in a short post for our new Opinion blog, but they deserve more attention. Critics of applying Section 3 to Trump have correctly and eloquently argued that removing him from the race could trigger a convulsive and potentially violent backlash in the American body politic. Millions of Americans would feel as if their choice was taken from them and that scheming elites were destroying American democracy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley Erases Civil War History

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      Nikki Haley drew criticism this week for what she didn’t say. As she campaigned in New Hampshire for the Republican presidential nomination, a person asked her to name the cause of the Civil War.Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor, joked it was not an “easy question.” She then mentioned “how government was going to run,” “freedoms,” the need for “capitalism” and individual liberties. When the questioner observed that she hadn’t mentioned slavery, she asked, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”She told a radio interviewer the next morning that “of course” the war was about slavery, that she was not evading the issue but trying to reframe it in modern terms. While we shouldn’t read too much into one video clip, it’s fair to ask: How is the Civil War’s cause not an easy question?The facts of our history are currently contested — especially that history. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has acted to restrict what he sees as woke views of slavery and race in schools. Other Republican-led states have taken similar measures, and Donald Trump has offered his own hazy views of the past. It’s no wonder Ms. Haley spoke cautiously. The history of race has become as fraught a topic on the political right as it has been on the left.All this points to a reality we would do well to confront: Some Americans do not believe slavery was the cause of the Civil War. I encountered some of them while discussing a recent book on Abraham Lincoln.A few days ago, a caller on C-SPAN identified as “William in Lansford, Pa.,” asserted this to me: “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery. It was about the states fighting with one another about money.”It was far from the first time I’ve heard such claims. It’s not hard to see why a candidate might avoid engaging too deeply with voters on this topic.But the rest of us can arm ourselves with a few base-line facts. Far more than most historical events, the Civil War is debated among ordinary people as much as among historians. (Lincoln called it “a people’s war,” and it’s now a people’s history. I recently attended the annual Lincoln Forum in Gettysburg, Pa., where scholars shared the room with hundreds of superfans.) If we are to hold on to our history, we can prepare ourselves to respond calmly and with facts when someone makes a doubtful claim. Evidence shows what the war was about. It also shows why some people think it wasn’t about slavery — and why it matters a century and a half later.The evidence is straightforward. Southern states rejected Lincoln’s 1860 election as a president from the antislavery Republican Party. South Carolina was the first of 11 states that tried to leave the Union, and Confederates fired the first shot of the Civil War there at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.Leaders of the would-be new republic named slavery as their cause. Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, gave a speech in 1861 in which he said “the assumption of the equality of races” was “an error” and “a sandy foundation” for the country he intended to leave.More than 30 years of agitation over slavery preceded the war. Northern antislavery leaders denounced the South’s institution more and more loudly and finally organized through the new Republican Party to gain political power. Southern leaders, who once cast slavery as a tragic inheritance from colonial times, increasingly defended it as moral and good.After the South’s defeat in 1865, these plain facts were obscured. Former Confederates cast their war heroes, like Robert E. Lee, as defenders of their home states rather than champions of slavery.The United Daughters of the Confederacy campaigned for generations to downplay slavery’s role in the war. In a 1924 speech to the group’s annual convention, Hollins N. Randolph asserted that “Southern men” had “fought to the death” for “the liberty of the individual, for the home and for the great principle of local self-government.” Never mind that it was “the liberty of the individual” to own other human beings. The speech advocated raising money for a great Confederate monument that still exists at Stone Mountain, Ga.Beyond the bombast, historians contested many facets of the long road to war. To give just one example from the immense scholarly record: T. Harry Williams, a 20th-century writer, put some blame for the war on Northern capitalists. He said they foresaw “fat rewards” in knocking proslavery aristocrats out of power and reshaping the economy to benefit their own factories and railroads. But really, such arguments amount to different interpretations of how the United States came to fight a war over slavery.Today some people quote Lincoln — accurately — saying his main war aim was preserving the Union, not ending slavery. But these quotes cannot sustain any argument longer than a social media meme. Lincoln also said that slavery was “the cause of the war.” Preserving the Union ultimately required slavery’s destruction.It seems that people question the historical record less because of doubt about the past than because of conflicts in the present. Some conservatives feel that progressives use slavery as a cudgel against their side in modern debates over race and equality.The first Republican president saw slavery neither as a cudgel nor as something that he needed to obscure. In an 1864 letter, he described slavery as a “great wrong” and added that people of the North and South alike shared “complicity in that wrong.”Complicity. Lincoln affirmed his country’s responsibility for failing to live up to its promise of equality. He still believed in the country and its promise.Lincoln never claimed to be morally superior to his countrymen. He focused on an immoral system, which he worked to restrict and then to destroy. The end of slavery is now part of this country’s legacy. It’s also part of the legacy of Lincoln’s party, though Ms. Haley’s example shows it can be hard for Republican candidates to talk about it.Steve Inskeep, a co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “Up First,” is the author of “Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Nikki Haley, in Retreat, Says ‘Of Course the Civil War Was About Slavery’

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      A day after giving a stumbling answer about the conflict’s origin that did not mention slavery, Ms. Haley told an interviewer: “Yes, I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential hopeful, on Thursday walked back her stumbling answer about the cause of the Civil War, telling a New Hampshire interviewer, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.”Her retreat came about 12 hours after a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire, a state that is central to her presidential hopes, where she was asked what caused the Civil War. She stumbled through an answer about government overreach and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” after jokingly telling the questioner he had posed a tough one. He then noted she never uttered the word “slavery.”“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Ms. Haley replied. “Next question.”Speaking on a New Hampshire radio show on Thursday morning, Ms. Haley, who famously removed the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia, said: “Yes I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”But she also insinuated that the question had come not from a Republican voter but from a political detractor, accusing President Biden and Democrats of “sending plants” to her town-hall events.“Why are they hitting me? See this for what it is,” she said, adding, “They want to run against Trump.”In recent polls, Ms. Haley has surged into second place in New Hampshire, edging closer to striking distance of former President Donald J. Trump. To win the Granite State contest on Jan. 23, the first primary election of 2024, she will most likely need independent voters — and possibly Democrats who registered as independents. That is how Senator John McCain of Arizona upset George W. Bush in the state’s 2000 primary.But the Civil War gaffe may have put a crimp in that strategy.“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run,” she said Wednesday night, “the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”The answer echoed a century’s argument from segregationists that the Civil War was fundamentally about states’ rights and economics, not about ending slavery.Late Wednesday night, even Mr. Biden rebuked the answer: “It was about slavery,” he wrote on social media.She tried to walk back her comments on Thursday, asking: “What’s the lesson in all this? That freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people. That’s the blessing of America. That was a stain on America when we had slavery. But what we want is never relive it. Never let anyone take those freedoms away again.”The episode also undermined her appeal to moderates and independents seeking to thwart Mr. Trump’s return to the White House by portraying Ms. Haley as an agent of compromise.Her record as governor of South Carolina included blocking a bill to stop transgender youths from using bathrooms that corresponded to their gender identity. Her push to lower the Confederate battle flag came after the mass shooting of Black worshipers at a Charleston church by a white supremacist. And she has recently called for a middle ground on abortion.“Haley’s refusal to talk honestly about slavery or race in America is a sad betrayal of her own story,” said Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California. More

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      Haley, Asked About the Cause of the Civil War, Avoids Mentioning Slavery

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      A pointed question, at a town hall in New Hampshire, raises a complicated topic for Nikki Haley, who as governor of South Carolina wrestled with issues stemming from the Confederacy.Nikki Haley, the Republican presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina who for years has wrestled with how to approach issues of race, slavery and the Confederacy, found herself again confronted with those subjects at a town hall event on Wednesday in New Hampshire, hundreds of miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.Her answer to a simple yet loaded question by an audience member in the city of Berlin — “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” — showed just how much she continues to struggle with such topics.“I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” she said eventually, arguing that government should not tell people how to live their lives or “what you can and can’t do.”“I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people,” she said. “It was never meant to be all things to all people.”Notably missing from her answer was slavery, which most mainstream historians agree was at the root of the United States’ bloodiest conflict — specifically the economics and political control behind slavery. Democrats were quick to jump on her answer, with President Biden’s re-election campaign team and others spreading video of the exchange on social media.After a quick back and forth with the questioner, she said, “What do you want me to say about slavery? Next question.”“I am disgusted, but I’m not surprised — this is what Black South Carolinians have come to expect from Nikki Haley, and now the rest of the country is getting to see her for who she is,” Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.How much it matters, if at all, in the Republican primary race is yet to be seen. Former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the race, has been ramping up the temperature on his own divisive rhetoric, not lowering it. Ms. Haley is looking to tap into some of his supporters. But as she looks to New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 23, she is counting on moderate Republicans and independents — who may vote in the contest — to give her a strong showing.Her latest remarks were in keeping with the way she and most of her Republican rivals have toed the line on race and racism on the 2024 presidential trail, downplaying the nation’s sordid racial history and portraying structural racism and prejudice as challenges of the past. The remarks also are in line with her campaign message, which has included pledges to reduce the size of the federal government and leave it up to the states to decide how to handle major issues like abortion.A Haley spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on Wednesday night.Ms. Haley, who governed a state at the heart of the Confederacy, has a particularly complicated record on issues of race.She drew national acclaim when she signed legislation to take down the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina State House, after a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black parishioners in Charleston in 2015, including a state senator. On the trail, she recalls the experience to significant effect, casting herself as a new generational leader in the Republican Party capable of bridging differences.But as she ran for election in 2010 and then re-election in 2014, she rejected talk of removing the flag. In a 2010 interview with Confederate heritage group leaders, a major political force in her state, she argued that the Confederate flag was “not something racist” but about tradition and heritage. She said that she could leverage her identity as a minority woman to fend off calls to boycott the flag. “You know for those groups that come in and say they have issues with the Confederate flag, I will work to talk to them about it,” she said.After the 2015 attack shook South Carolina, Ms. Haley seized on efforts from state lawmakers to remove the flag.In response to the audience member on Wednesday, Ms. Haley argued that the United States needed to have capitalism and economic freedom and to ensure “freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”The audience member said it was “astonishing” that Ms. Haley had answered his question without saying the word slavery. More

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      Is Trump Disqualified From Holding Office? The Question Matters, Beyond Him.

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      State courts in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and elsewhere have so far declined to rule in favor of challenges asserting that Donald Trump should be disqualified from holding the presidency again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. (Cases in Michigan and Colorado have been appealed.)Challengers assert that Mr. Trump is barred because, as stated in Section 3, he was an officer of the United States who, after taking an oath to support the Constitution, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the country, or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Mr. Trump and his campaign have called this claim an “absurd conspiracy theory” and efforts to bar him “election interference.” Some election officials and legal scholars — many of them otherwise opposed to the former president — have also been critical of the efforts.The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, writes that invoking Section 3 “is merely the newest way of attempting to short-circuit the ballot box.” Michael McConnell, a former judge and professor at Stanford Law School, claims that keeping Mr. Trump off the ballot on grounds that are “debatable at best is not something that will be regarded as legitimate.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More