Civil War – immigrationcourtside.com

HISTORY: 160 YEARS AGO A GANG OF TRAITORS AND OATH BREAKERS LED AN ARMED INSURRECTION THAT KILLED 620,000 AMERICANS — Then, “Whitewashed” American History Turned Them Into False “Heroes,” While Loyal American Citizens Were Lynched & Systematically Denied Their Constitutional & Human Rights!

Colfax Massacre — Gathering the dead after the Colfax massacre, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-southerner-who-abandoned-the-lost-cause/2021/02/04/5d01effc-5031-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html

John Reeves reviews Ty Seidule’s “Robert E. Lee & Me” in WashPost:

January 1872, Jubal Early, a former Confederate corps commander, delivered an address at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., to honor Robert E. Lee, who had recently died. Believing that Lee was one of the finest military leaders in history, Early declared, “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime, needing no borrowed lustre; and he is all our own.” In subsequent years, Early and several elite ex-officers would deify Lee while creating the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War. According to that view, the war wasn’t about slavery but rather states’ rights. And the North won only because of its superior resources. An additional tenet is that Lee was the greatest soldier in the war on either side.

At the same time the Lee myth was being created, former rebels began reinforcing white supremacy all across the South. In Walton County, a rural community in Georgia, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized freedmen after the war. In 1871, Jake Daniels, an African American blacksmith from the county, was killed by 20 disguised men after refusing to repair a buggy for a White man, who still owed him money from previous jobs. The Klansmen showed up at Daniels’s door in the middle of the night. Daniels went outside but quickly recognized the danger. He tried to reenter his house but was shot in the back of the head. The men then shot him five or six more times before leaving the scene.

This type of violence was not uncommon in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Georgia alone, 589 people were lynched between 1877 and 1950. As Ty Seidule writes in his powerful new book, “Robert E. Lee and Me,” “If Lee and Confederate worship created one side of the white supremacy coin, violent terror to enforce racial domination provided the other side.”

Seidule tells the story of his transformation from a believer in the Lost Cause to a critic. Growing up in Virginia and Georgia, he worshiped Lee. It was only later, as the head of the history department at the U.S. Military Academy, that he discovered the truth about Confederate myths. Seidule writes: “I grew up with a lie, a series of lies. Now, as a historian and a retired U.S. Army officer, I must do my best to tell the truth about the Civil War, and the best way to do that is to show my own dangerous history.”

Seidule has written a vital account of the destructiveness of the Lost Cause ideology throughout American history. He shows how films, textbooks and memorials promoted white supremacy by glorifying traitors and enslavers like Lee and other Confederate leaders. Perhaps the best attribute of this fine book is the author’s honesty. When talking of his personal metamorphosis, he vows to “quit hiding behind the impartial, know-it-all historian and open up about the southerner, the boy who grew up on Lee idolatry, and the man who wrapped his identity around the heroes of the Confederacy. Be honest. Be vulnerable. Above all, tell the truth.”

. . . .

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Read the rest of the review at the link.

It’s never too late for the truth.

Lots of White folks still have the audacity to be upset and offended because “their” factionalized account of U.S. history — one that even those of us who grew up in the North were fed to a large extent — is (finally and incrementally) being replaced with a more accurate accounting of the truth, unhappy as facing it sometimes can be.

“Their” myths and false narratives are more important than the many African-American lives and futures snuffed out by racism. Shows that BLM has it right — the myths and fabricated visions of the past so integral to the White self-esteem of many are more important than the lives and futures of African-Americans snuffed out by institutionalized racism, much of it perpetrated by our Government and our legal system.

A frank accounting of our past, the good, the bad, and the ugly, is a necessary step to our moving forward as a nation.

PWS

02-08-21

”DRUMPFJUGEND” 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️🆘— The Whitewashing Of US History By Trump & The Radical Right — “1776 commission sure sounds better than ‘Trump Youth,’ but it’s functionally no different than what Hitler did to brainwash a generation into accepting the Holocaust.” — Bess Levin Reports!

Scenes from “The Beautiful Vision” of U.S. racial history:

Colfax

Public Realm

Slavery — “At least they weren’t asked to wear masks or socially distance; now that would have been a real crime against humanity,” says Billy the Bigot.
Public realm

From The Levin Report by Bess Levin:

. . . .
At this point, there are thousands of examples underscoring the need to remove the president from society, but the most recent is his unhinged response to the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which he wants abolished in schools and replaced with a revisionist history of America that teaches children how white people have only ever had their Black peers’ best interest at heart, including when said white people literally owned slaves.

Speaking at the National Archives Museum on Thursday, Trump announced that he would be signing an executive order establishing the “1776 Commission” to promote a “patriotic education.” Apparently attempting to reach his white nationalist supporters, Trump said that the left is “attempting to destroy [the] beautiful vision” that the founding fathers had for America, and that things like the 1619 Project, which teach children about systemic racism and reframe the country’s history by examining the consequences of slavery, are “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison” that “if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together” and “will destroy our country.” Then he claimed liberals want to tear down Mount Rushmore . . . .

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Read the rest of the article and the full Levin Report here:

http://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/bess-levin

Trump’s view of America is unrelentingly bogus. racist, unethical, and unpatriotic! This is “Dred Scottification” in action. And, we must never forget the disgraceful failure of Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supremes’ majority to take a strong stand against the very overt White Nationalist racism of Trump, Miller, and the GOP. They are indeed promoters of “Dred Scottification,” racial divisiveness, inequality, and the breakdown of the rule of law and ethical and moral norms that should guide 21st Century governance.

American democracy is indeed “on the ropes.” But, we still have a chance to save our republic this Fall. Don’t blow it!

This Fall, vote like your life and the future existence of our nation depend on it. Because they do!

PWS

09-18-20

COURTSIDE HISTORY: ANNIKA NEKLASON @ THE ATLANTIC: How White Supremacist Conspiracy Theories Fueled The Civil War & Continue To Divide & Endanger America!🏴‍☠️☠️

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/conspiracy-theories-civil-war/612283/

The Conspiracy Theories That Fueled the Civil War

The most powerful people and institutions in the South spread paranoia and fear to protect slavery. Their beliefs led the country to war—and continue to haunt our politics to this day.

Annika Neklason is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.May 29, 2020

Photo-illustration by Damon Davis

In the months leading up to the Civil War, fear festered in southern living rooms and legislative chambers. Newspapers reported that the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, held a “hatred of the South and its institutions [that would] cause him to use all the power at hand to destroy our country” and that his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, was not only sympathetic to the plight of black Americans but was himself part black—“what we call,” the editor of one Charleston, South Carolina, paper stated, “a mulatto.” Warnings circulated in pamphlets and the press that an antislavery federal government would inspire a wave of violent slave revolts and then allow the South to burn, rather than stepping in to quell resistance. Texas’s declaration of secession asserted that northern abolitionists had for decades been sending “emissaries” to “bring blood and carnage to our firesides.” Georgia’s insisted that the “avowed purpose” of Republican leaders was to “subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes [and] our altars.”

These claims were not relegated to the fringes of southern society; they emanated from its center. The most powerful people and institutions in the region voiced and acted upon them as fact. But they were unfounded: conspiracy theories, born of white supremacy and the desire to justify and maintain slavery. Even as they helped shield the antebellum South against the rising abolitionism in the North and in other countries, these theories deepened sectional divisions and made the question of slavery all but impossible to settle peacefully. They helped fuel the deadliest war in the nation’s history. And their violent legacy has lingered across centuries.

The lies might not have spread so far or engendered so much violence if not for the real threat, and the real fear, that they tapped into. There was no great sectional war planned to root out slavery in the South, no plot among Lincoln’s allies to execute a mass murder of slaveholders and their families. But there were slave revolts. And those slave revolts could become deadly. In the Caribbean, a series of mass rebellions broke out in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The most successful of these, the Haitian Revolution, forged a new free state out of a bloody conflict that killed tens of thousands of Europeans and white colonists, along with more than 100,000 slaves and freedmen. In the United States, where slaves remained a minority of southern state populations, violent uprisings were more limited, but still occurred: Individual slaves lashed out; groups of fugitives fought off slave catchers; and, every so often, an organized rebellion was planned.

These uprisings contradicted the narratives that southern slaveholders had constructed. In their telling, slaves were well cared for and content, provided with a better life than they could ever build for themselves in freedom—a life that would give them no good reason to turn on their owners.

To square this defense of slavery with the threat of resistance, southern slaveowners “over time shifted toward a more conspiratorial view,” Matthew J. Clavin, an American- and Atlantic-history professor at the University of Houston, told me. “Slaveowners blamed outsiders. Or they blamed free black people. Or they blamed foreign emissaries from London [for] trying to incite their slaves to rebel.”

Writing in The Atlantic in 1861 about the free black man Denmark Vesey’s thwarted plans to lead an uprising in Charleston, the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted that the first official report on the revolt considered a range of possible motivations for the rebels—including “Congressional eloquence,” “a Church squabble,” and “mistaken indulgences”—but not that slavery itself might be to blame. “It never seems to occur to any of these spectators,” Higginson observed, “that these people rebelled simply because they were slaves and wished to be free.”

Abolitionists were a favorite boogeyman in slaveholders’ stories. Antislavery pamphlets and speeches were also cited in reports about Vesey’s plans as a “means for inflaming the minds of the colored population” and instigating rebellion.

Such accusations were common in the first half of the 19th century, Clavin noted. “There would be episodes of a slave burning a slave owner’s house to the ground or slitting an overseer’s throat,” he said. “And there would be a wealthy abolitionist from New York City who would give a speech, and the speech didn’t incite violence, didn’t encourage anyone to run away, but six months later, southerners would be blaming that northern orator for causing the slave disturbance. It really [was] just an unbelievable ignorance of the facts used to create a community-wide response that was anti-abolitionist.”

John Brown’s attempt to start a mass slave rebellion in Virginia in 1859 seemed to confirm these sentiments. Brown was like a character straight out of a conspiracy theory: a white abolitionist who intended to arm slaves and turn them against their owners with the backing of a secretive network of antislavery supporters in New England (one of whom laid out the conspiracy in detail in The Atlantic years later).

For southerners, the John Brown rebellion “lent credence to that conspiratorial thinking that The abolitionists are coming, that Abolitionists are out to get us, that Abolitionists are encouraging slave revolts,” Clavin said. But Brown’s raid was, in reality, “an absolute anomaly. Very few, if any, abolitionists, black or white, were literally willing to start a slave insurrection themselves.”

And slaveholders knew it. “They overstated the threat from abolitionists,” Clavin said. “They did that on purpose, because it served their intellectual needs”—allowing them to unite the South against a common enemy and to defend the narrative that slaves were docile and content.

At the same time, slaveholders worked to further unite the white South in fear of rebellion by circulating the “diametrically opposed image” of enslaved people as innately violent and dangerous, Manisha Sinha, an American-history professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, told me. The revolutionaries in Haiti, for example, were portrayed not as “freedom fighters, but as barbaric people who descended into completely chaotic violence for violence’s sake,” she said.

The abolitionist John Weiss detailed how the revolution was transformed into a scary story for southerners—commonly called “the Horrors of San Domingo”—in an 1862 article for The Atlantic. “The Haytian bugbear” had been wielded by pro-slavery forces “to render anti-slavery sentiment odious” and “to defeat the great act of justice and the people’s great necessity” of emancipation, he wrote.

The specter of mass uprising spread “both in public and private narratives,” Sinha said. Southerners grew to fear that “at the moment of emancipation” slaves “were going to wage a huge Haitian Revolution–like rebellion that would kill all whites and establish ‘black supremacy,’” or that they “were just going to rise up, rape all white women, and that would be the end of whiteness.”

These conspiracy theories made an existential threat out of emancipation, and insidious enemies out of northern antislavery forces. Eventually, they became so powerful that southern leaders decided to break from the Union and launch the Civil War. Their racist defenses of slavery could not admit the possibility of a peaceable emancipation such as the one that Lincoln and northern abolitionists actually sought. So after decades of preaching that abolition would mean sweeping violence, southern leaders brought that violence on themselves—and hastened the end of slavery in the process.

Slavery was, however, survived by the racist fears intended to protect it. Sinha traced their legacy through generations of murder, incarceration, and exclusion, from the “regime of racial terror” in the postwar South to the restrictive immigration laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all the way up to the “authoritarian mindsets, conspiratorial ways of thinking, and demonization of the other” that continue to pervade American politics in the present day. The belief in abolitionist terror and black violence that southern slaveholders had constructed, she explained, made the prospect of “a republic of equal citizens” feel like an existential threat not only to the culture of white supremacy but to all the white people who lived in it. The groups of people embodying the threat have changed and expanded over time: from slaves to Asian immigrants to civil-rights activists to Muslim Americans. But the fear has never entirely gone away. Through the lens of that fear, racist violence, such as that practiced by the Ku Klux Klan, and laws, such as voting restrictions or Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban,” have been reframed as protective measures. Conspiratorial vigilance and authoritarianism become shields against an imagined revolution.

. . . .

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Read the rest of Annika’s article at the link.

Clearly, Donald Trump did not originate the concept of “fake news,” nor did he invent internet conspiracy theories. But, he, his cronies, and his enablers have become experts in exploiting it for their own selfish purposes: From the absurdist, yet dangerous and divisive, “birtherism” to today’s disingenuous attempts to shift blame for the racism that has spawned disorder throughout our nation.

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

05-31-20

150 YEARS AGO, ANOTHER WHITE NATIONALIST DEMAGOGUE PUSHED AMERICAN DEMOCRACY TO THE PRECIPICE – Trump Following In A. Johnson’s Shoes! — Learn About The Johnson Impeachment With “Going To The Devil” A New Docudrama From The Great Courses!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/opinion/sunday/andrew-johnson-donald-trump.html

Professor Manisha Sinha writes in the NY Times:

Opinion

Donald Trump, Meet Your Precursor

Andrew Johnson pioneered the recalcitrant racism and impeachment-worthy subterfuge the president is fond of.

By Manisha Sinha

Ms. Sinha is the author of “The Slave’s Cause: a History of Abolition.”

Nov. 29, 2019

Last week, in defense of her father, Ivanka Trump tweeted out a quotation she wrongly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville: “A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office.”

The misquotation came from an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal that has since been corrected. What is fascinating about this incident though, is that the quotation actually comes from an 1889 book, “American Constitutional Law,” that defends Andrew Johnson against his impeachment in 1868. By the time the book was written, emancipation and the attempt to guarantee black rights lay in shambles, and conservatives rallied to the defense of Johnson, one of the most reviled presidents in American history.

Much more than impeachment connects the presidencies of Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump. No one expected either man to enter the White House. Both presidencies began with a whiff of illegitimacy hanging over them: Johnson’s because he became president when Lincoln was assassinated, Mr. Trump’s because he won the Electoral College despite having nearly three million fewer popular votes than his opponent, the largest losing margin of any president who actually won the election. The size of the gap did not bode well for American democracy.

Historical parallelism rarely works in a simplistic manner. But it does work when historians discern broad similarities and patterns that link our present moment to the past. Many fallible men have inhabited the office of the presidency. Only a handful have been so oblivious to the oath they took that they have met the constitutional standard for impeachment.

The first president against whom impeachment proceedings were considered was John Tyler, who like Johnson became president after an untimely death, that of President William Henry Harrison. A proslavery zealot, Tyler has the unique distinction so far of being the only president to commit treason against his country. He voted for Virginia’s secession from the Union.

Unlike Tyler, Johnson refused to go with his state, Tennessee, when it seceded from the Union. For this, he was appointed military governor of Tennessee and then rewarded with the vice-presidential spot on the National Union Party presidential ticket headed by Lincoln in 1864. Johnson came closest to being removed from the presidency when his conviction fell one vote short of the required two-thirds majority needed in the Senate.

If the recent House impeachment hearings have revealed anything, it is that Mr. Trump’s actions clearly meet the criteria laid out in the impeachment clause, “Treason, bribery or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” While Mr. Trump’s criminality is of the same order as Richard Nixon’s, trying to interfere in a presidential election, like Johnson, he exhibits no public or private decorum. Johnson’s and Mr. Trump’s biographies could not be more different but their lack of presidential demeanor was evident from the start. As the historian Eric Foner has put it, “Americans, more often than not, choose mediocre presidents, but require of them a decorum foreign to other aspects of their life.” Johnson, a poor white Southerner, became a slaveholder and successful politician, occupying local, state and national office. Mr. Trump, brought up in the corrupt and highflying world of New York’s real estate business, is an oddly successful political neophyte.

Both Johnson and Mr. Trump amply displayed their unfitness for the presidency before getting the job. Johnson so fortified himself with whiskey on taking his oath of office for the vice presidency that his rambling, drunken speech mortified all who were present. Lincoln, who gave his memorable Second Inaugural Address the same day, noted, “This Johnson is a queer man.” Mr. Trump is a teetotaler but ran a presidential campaign full of grotesque insults, ridicule, lies and vulgarity. His crude and cruel pronouncements after his ascent to the presidency are too many to recount. Ambassador Gordon Sondland, a Trump pick, in his testimony at the impeachment hearings in the House, uses the term “TrumpSpeak”: profanity-laced language that guided a personal political agenda and undermined United States foreign policy and national security. Both Johnson and Mr. Trump, neither blessed with literary or oratorical skills, succeeded two of the most gifted presidential wordsmiths.

But most significantly, both men made an undisguised championship of white supremacy — the lodestar of their presidencies — and played on the politics of racial division. For Johnson, it was his obdurate opposition to Reconstruction, the project to establish an interracial democracy in the United States after the destruction of slavery. He wanted to prevent, as he put it, the “Africanization” of the country. Under the guise of strict constructionism, states’ rights and opposition to big government, previously deployed by Southern slaveholders to defend slavery, Johnson vetoed all federal laws intended to protect former slaves from racial terror and from the Black Codes passed in the old Confederate states. This reduced African-Americans to a state of semi-servitude. Johnson peddled the racist myth that Southern whites were victimized by black emancipation and citizenship, which became an article of faith among Lost Cause proponents in the postwar South.

It is a myth that Mr. Trump seems to have fully bought into, given his defense of “beautiful” Confederate statues and monuments. Like Johnson, he uses derogatory language for people of color and he has expressed his preference for Nordic immigrants. Mr. Trump’s handpicked man in charge of immigration policy, the brain behind the separation of families in immigration detention camps, is Stephen Miller, who has recently been publicly revealed to be a white nationalist. The abolitionist feminist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper called Johnson an “incarnation of meanness,” words that are still applicable today.

Both Johnson’s and Mr. Trump’s concept of American nationalism is narrow, parochial and authoritarian. Johnson opposed the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, that guarantees equality before the law to all persons and citizenship to all born in the United States. Mr. Trump has threatened both to revoke its constitutional guarantee of national birthright citizenship and have the entire amendment overturned. Johnson’s highhanded actions and disregard of Congress led to Thomas Nast’s famous “King Andy” cartoon in Harper’s Weekly. Today Mr. Trump’s unaccountable style of governing reflects his Attorney General William Barr’s doctrine of unitary executive power, oblivious to the checks and balances and separation of powers in the Constitution.

The American republic was founded on the repudiation of the divine right of kings to rule. That is the reason that the impeachment clause of the Constitution holds elected officials, including the president, accountable for bribery and criminal wrongdoing.

Johnson and Mr. Trump not only managed to diminish their office but also engaged in actions that have dangerous repercussions for American democracy. Their crimes are not just specific impeachable acts but also the systematic undermining of the rule of law, democratic governance, human rights and the national interest. Johnson pardoned nearly all high-ranking Confederates who had taken up arms against the United States government. In one case, he also pardoned a white Virginian who murdered a black man in broad daylight and looked the other way at reports of massacres of freed people and harassment of Southern white unionists. Mr. Trump, against the advice of the Defense Department and the Navy, has just pardoned a Navy SEAL, Edward Gallagher, who violated the military’s rules of conduct. He has even hinted that he wants the disgraced Chief Gallagher at his rallies.

What Mr. Trump and his enablers call the “deep state” is nothing but the rules and norms of democratic government. It has become clear from the testimony of upstanding national security and foreign service officials like Ambassadors Marie Yovanovitch and William R. Taylor, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill and David Holmes that he undermined the very fabric of the United States government in seeking to profit personally from the conduct of foreign policy, by withholding aid from a democratically elected anti-corruption Ukrainian government unless its officials investigated his domestic political rivals, the Bidens. Over 150 years ago, the testimony before Congress of ordinary patriotic Americans, former slaves, Southern unionists, Northern travelers to the post war South, Union Army officers and federal officials completely discredited Johnson’s racist policies.

Mr. Trump openly invites and, now we know, privately demands foreign interference in our elections, a scenario that the men who founded the American Republic and wrote its Constitution repeatedly warned against. He attacks his opponents and even supporters who do not agree with him on Twitter. Johnson, too, loved to vilify his opponents, like Frederick Douglass and Radical Republican congressmen. Both presidents precipitated a constitutional crisis that could be solved only through an impeachment process. The author Brenda Wineapple has written that Johnson was “the chief architect” of his own impeachment. The same is true of Mr. Trump.

Unlike with Nixon and Mr. Clinton, attempts to impeach Johnson and Mr. Trump preceded the actual impeachment inquiry because both systematically undermined federal laws and democratic institutions the moment they took office. Their personal narcissism and disregard for the principles of democratic governance led to early calls for impeachment. In Johnson’s case, violation of the Tenure of Office Act when he removed Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, led to his impeachment. While this law encroached on executive privilege, it was intended to prevent Johnson’s interference in congressional Reconstruction and his increasingly dangerous obstructionism. It was the law of the land when Johnson violated it by firing Stanton. Similarly, while it is certainly a president’s prerogative to appoint and fire American ambassadors, the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch was the result of a sleazy attempt to pressure Ukraine’s government.

In 1866, a Northern public sickened by Johnson’s antics and vitriolic rhetoric elected a thumping majority of his opponents. In 2018, the country handed a rebuke to Mr. Trump by electing a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, which has now begun impeachment proceedings against him. Trump has handed his own smoking gun to them, his infamous call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Johnson removed and belittled Union Army officers. The Purple Heart-wearing Lt. Col. Vindman has been subject to nativist, anti-Semitic slurs and death threats after his moving testimony.

Johnson’s defenders, like Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware, the one man who could drink him under the table, and Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky, were as oblivious to facts, reason and propriety as their modern counterparts, Senator Lindsey Graham and Representatives Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan. The vote to convict Johnson lost as a handful of moderate Republicans voted to acquit when he promised not to interfere in Reconstruction any longer, though he remained unrepentant, continuing to criticize the attempt to establish black citizenship until the day he died in 1875. But Johnson was damaged goods after impeachment, and neither the Republicans nor the Democrats wanted him anywhere near their presidential tickets in 1868.

House Democrats face a different scenario today given a Republican majority in the Senate. The likelihood of convicting Mr. Trump is much lower than it was for Johnson. The Republican Party, no longer the party of Lincoln, refuses to be persuaded, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Like the Republicans in 1868, House Democrats are not waiting for a presidential election to send a rebuke to a president who behaves with impunity against his country, its ideals and interests. The House Judiciary Committee would do well to develop articles of impeachment not just on narrow legalistic grounds but also on the broad ground of violation of the Constitution and the undermining of American democracy.

In drawing up 11 articles of impeachment against Johnson, House Republicans focused narrowly on violation of the Tenure of Office Act in the first nine. But the last two articles accused Johnson of opposing Reconstruction and bringing “disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach,” onto “the Congress of the United States” and for his “intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues, and therein utter loud threats and bitter menaces, as well against Congress as the laws of the United States duly enacted thereby, amid the cries, jeers and laughter of the multitudes then assembled in hearing,” language that could be used verbatim against Mr. Trump. As Representative George Julian pithily put it, Johnson ought to be impeached for “his career of maladministration and crime.”

Some of the most damning testimony against Mr. Trump has come from impressive women like Ambassador Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill. Their 19th-century counterparts were abolitionists like the stalwart Lydia Maria Child, who wrote words as true today as then: “Every true lover of the country must want to creep into a knot hole and hide himself, wherever the name of our president is mentioned.” Johnson and Mr. Trump are both authoritarian demagogues who threatened the world’s longest lasting experiment in democratic republicanism. Democrats must convince the American people not only of Mr. Trump’s specific crimes, but of the very real danger that his continuing presence in office presents to the Republic.

Manisha Sinha, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, is the author of “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.”

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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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Want to know more about the Johnson impeachment?

Check out this new 1 hr. 15 min. docudrama from The Great Courses: “Going To The Devil.”

Subscribers to “The Great Courses Plus” can get it at the website. Even if you don’t have access, you can sign up for a free trial.

Either way, you can check out the free trailer here:

https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/show/going_to_the_devil_the_impeachment_of_1868

FULL DISCLOSURE: Our son Will works for The Great Courses.

PWS

12-01-19

COLBY KING @ WASHPOST: The “Original Dreamers” Were Disenfranchised African Americans! — “That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-black-men-of-the-civil-war-were-americas-original-dreamers/2019/02/15/8c00088e-30a8-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html

Colby King writes in WashPost:

Today, a wall looms large in my thoughts. It isn’t the structure President Trump has in mind for our southern border. I’m thinking of the Wall of Honor at the African American Civil War Memorial, located at Vermont Avenue and U Street NW.

Listed on the wall are the names of 209,145 U.S. Colored Troops who fought during the Civil War. One of those names is that of Isaiah King, my great-grandfather.

I think of those courageous black men as America’s original “dreamers.”

Today’s dreamers are in their teens and 20s, having arrived in this country as children. King’s generation of dreamers were former slaves or descendants of slaves brought to these shores against their will.

However, the black men who fought in the Civil War had the same status as today’s dreamers: noncitizens without a discernable path to citizenship.

Like dreamers of today, those black soldiers and sailors also had families and attended churches; some were enrolled in schools. They could dream of a future, anchored in the rights and privileges that come with democracy. But they had no legal claim to an existence within America’s borders.

My great-grandfather was born in the slave-holding city of Washington in 1848, but his mother was a freed woman. She moved the family to New Bedford, Mass., when he was 4. Around the time of his 17th birthday, Isaiah King enlistedin the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored), thinking, “I would have it easier riding than walking,” he told the New Bedford Evening Standard in an interview on the eve of Memorial Day services in 1932.

Black men such as my great-grandfather signed on to fight for a Union in which the right to citizenship was reserved for white people. The Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, that black people were not citizens of the United States. Putting it bluntly, the high court said black people were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

And even then, they started their service to the United States one step behind.

In his book “The Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry in the Civil War,” Steven M. LaBarre cited the first disparity: It was enshrined in the Second Confiscation and Militia Act of July 17, 1862, which authorized recruitment of black men into the Union army. The law stated that a “person of African descent [of any rank] . . . shall receive ten dollars per month . . . three dollars of which monthly pay may be in clothing.” White privates at the time received $13 per month plus a $3.50 clothing allowance. It wasn’t until July 15, 1864, that Congress granted equal pay to black soldiers.

Yet, serve they did.

As evidence of the regard in which they were held, LaBarre quoted Massachusetts Gov. John Albion Andrew’s commendation of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry when it was launched: “In this hour of hope for our common country and for themselves; at a time when they hold the destiny of their race in their own grasp; and when its certain emancipation from prejudice, as well as slavery, is in the hands of those now invited to unite in the final blow which will annihilate the rebel power, let no brave and strong man hesitate. One cannot exaggerate the call sounding in the ears of all men, in whose veins flows the blood of Africa, and whose color has been the badge of slavery. It offers the opportunity of years, crowded into an hour.”

Volunteering was a start. They still had something to prove.

According to National Archives, by the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men were serving as soldiers — 10 percent of the Union army — and 19,000 served in the Union navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war — 30,000 of infection or disease. By war’s end, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor .

King came back to the capital in May 1864 as a private with the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry to defend the city against attack by Confederate troops. His unit participated in the Siege of Petersburg. They guarded Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout, Md. And his unit was among the first Union regiments to enter Richmond, capital of the dying Confederacy, on April 3, 1865.

The Civil War ended, but not his service. Three months later, the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry was sent to Texas to defend against threats from Mexico. (Sound familiar?) He was mustered out of service on Oct. 31, 1865, at Clarksville, Tex. — still not a citizen of the United States.

It wasn’t until 1868 that the threat of removal from the United States was lifted by the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in this country, including former slaves.

The men with names on the African American Civil War Memorial’s Wall of Honor fought and died to end two centuries of slavery, without being able to count democracy as their own.

For their descendants, the fight for full rights, for full participation in every part of our democracy, goes on.

That fight must continue on behalf of today’s dreamers, the disenfranchised, the demeaned and left out, and all freedom-loving people in this nation.

Read more from Colbert King’s archive.

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Thanks, Colby, for putting the current plight of “Dreamers” (and I might add refugees and other migrants who are serving, contributing, and building our society despite their disenfranchisement and the government-sponsored dehumanization being inflicted upon them) in the historical context of the fight for civil rights and human dignity in America.

That’s why the “21st Century Jim Crows” like Trump, Sessions, Stephen Miller, Sen. Tom Cotton, Rep. Steve King, and others (largely associated with the GOP) are so pernicious. Like the “Jim Crows of the past,” these guys use degrading racial stereotypes, intentionally false narratives, and bogus “rule of law” arguments to generate hate and bias, sow division, and use the law to suppress and violate rights rather than advancing them.

While sycophant DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen does not appear to be an “ideological racist,” her mindless and disingenuous parroting of the Trump White Nationalist “party lies” and “enforcement” (read “de-humanization”) agenda certainly makes her a “functional racist.”

It’s quite outrageous and dangerous that individuals with these types of views have been elevated to powerful public offices in the modern era, after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?

PWS

02-16-19

THE NEW YORKER: “Satire from The Borowitz Report: Cindy Hyde-Smith Says She Never Lost Faith in Mississippi’s Racists”

Cindy Hyde-Smith Says She Never Lost Faith in Mississippi’s Racists

By Andy Borowitz

10:56 A.M.

Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI (The Borowitz Report)—Celebrating her election victory on Tuesday night, U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith said that, despite predictions that her state was ready to turn the page on its shameful past, “I never lost faith in Mississippi’s racists.”

“For weeks, we’ve been hearing national pundits say that Mississippi was ready to enter the twenty-first century,” Hyde-Smith told a crowd of supporters at her victory rally. “Tonight, with your help, we proved them wrong.”

Hyde-Smith said that, despite the media’s unearthing of a cavalcade of embarrassing comments and actions from her past, “I never doubted that, at the end of the day, the people of Mississippi would listen to the racist voices in their heads.”

Choking back tears, Hyde-Smith thanked her supporters for honoring Mississippi’s storied heritage of hatred and cruelty.

“Mississippi voters do not want to tear down the relics of our Confederate past,” she said. “As such a relic, I am eternally grateful.”

Exit polls showed that Hyde-Smith performed extremely well with voters who described themselves as bigots, and dominated among those who could not correctly spell “Mississippi.”

EUGENE ROBINSON IN WASHPOST: The Master Of Racial Identity Politics & His GOP Stooges!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/president-trump-is-the-master-of-abhorrent-identity-politics/2017/11/02/e675bca8-c003-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html?utm_term=.47797a94c8ea

Robinson writes:

“By now it should be clear that racism is a feature of the Trump administration, not a bug.

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly’s hideous rewriting of Civil War history is merely the latest evidence. Can anyone really believe “the lack of an ability to compromise” caused that bloody war? Is it possible to become a four-star Marine general without knowing that the Constitution itself was structured around a compromise on slavery? Or that the first half of the 19th century saw a series of equally immoral compromises that let slavery continue?

How can a man whose son died in service of his country believe that “men . . . of good faith” is an acceptable description of military officers who committed treason and took up arms against the United States, as did Robert E. Lee and the rest of the Confederate generals? Do people of good faith hold others in cruel bondage, buy and sell them like chattel and forcibly compel their unpaid labor?

Kelly buys into the racist, revisionist, dripping-with-Spanish-moss version of history that white Southerners concocted as they were imposing the system of Jim Crow repression. Anyone ignorant enough to believe the war was about anything other than slavery should read the declarations issued by the Confederate states upon secession. Here is a quote from Mississippi’s proclamation, which is vile but at least forthright:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

Those who profited handsomely from slavery — including the growing financial markets of Wall Street and the bustling textile mills of New England — knew full well that it was wrong. They just didn’t want to give it up.

Kelly’s “good faith” historical claptrap would be bad enough in a vacuum. But it alarmingly echoes President Trump’s “many sides” analysis of the Charlottesville incident — and continues a tone that Trump set at the outset of his campaign, when he vilified Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists.

. . . .

When Trump miscalibrates and strays into explicit racism, as he did in the case of Charlottesville, there are expressions of shock and horror from fellow Republicans and even members of his Cabinet. But nobody renounces him, except senators who are about to retire. Nobody quits his administration on principle. Trump’s enablers meekly go back to the all-important business of cutting rich people’s taxes.

Making whites feel embattled and aggrieved is central to the Trump presidency. It is what makes him different from all other recent presidents, perhaps going back as far as Woodrow Wilson, who imposed Jim Crow segregation on the federal workforce. It is what makes Trump so corrosive to the national fabric.

There is one master practitioner of identity politics in the United States today. Shamefully, he lives in the White House.”

*****************************************

Read Robinson’s entire op-ed at the link.

Yup! Hard to add much to this analysis! Kelly’s perverted account of the Civil War (although depressing) is not particularly surprising when you remember that this is a guy who bought into the Trump-Gonzo-Miller-Bannon racist and bogus “overrun by the immigrant hordes and Muslim terrorists” fear-mongering hook, line, and sinker, with no apparent reflection on its demonstrable falsity or stupidity.

PWS

11-05-17

THE SHRINKING GENERAL: KELLY’S IGNORANT WHITE NATIONALISM SHOWS HIM TO BE “TRUMP’S MAN” WHILE FURTHER DIMINISHING HIS IMAGE AND LEGACY!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/opinion/kelly-racist-history-slavery-compromise.html

From the NY Times Editorial Board:

“When asked in an interview broadcast on Monday about plans by a Virginia church to remove plaques honoring George Washington and Robert E. Lee, he said it showed “a lack of appreciation of history.”

“Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” he added. He said that in the Civil War “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

With those remarks, Mr. Kelly revealed that it’s he, like the president, who lacks an appreciation of history — that he has chosen instead to embrace the mythology that white racists methodically created to hide the truth about the causes and course of the Civil War. The truth is, white Southerners went to war to destroy the United States in order to continue enslaving nearly 40 percent of the people in the region.

As for Lee’s honor, while some historians argue that he held a distaste for human bondage, he nevertheless fought ferociously to preserve slavery, which he viewed as the best arrangement that could possibly exist between whites and African-Americans. During the war, his army kidnapped free blacks, returning them to chains. After the war ended, he advised acquaintances to avoid hiring free blacks — arguing that it was against white interests to do so — and suggested that free black people be forced out of his native state , Virginia.

Mr. Kelly really gave the game away when he went on to argue that it was wrong for us to look back at the past through the lens of “what is today accepted as right and wrong.” As the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has noted, you can only contend that most people believed that slavery was right at the time of the Civil War if you exclude black people from your analysis, not to mention from your moral imagination.

If Mr. Kelly is supposed to be the administration’s disciplinarian, keeping it on message, then echoing his boss’s kind words for slaveholders and those who slaughtered American soldiers to defend them shows that a central message is, “Racists, we’re your guys.”

*****************************************

Read the entire editorial at the link.

The Civil War was about preservation of slavery — the ownership of and stripping of rights and dignity from other human beings who had contributed more to the United States than all of their owners combined. There is no moral or historical ambiguity here.

Robert E. Lee was a flawed individual — neither “honorable” nor “dishonorable.” He unquestionably had talents as a leader and a military strategist. Those were offset, however, by his having betrayed his country and spent years engineering the killing of U.S. soldiers in support of a rebellion fueled by what undoubtedly is the worst cause in American history. I’d argue that even the “Tories” during the American Revolution, who were simply remaining loyal to their sovereign king and country, were more “honorable.” Even more despicably, as far as I am aware, Lee neither apologized for his actions nor did he later condemn slavery and work for the advancement and equality of African Americans during his post-war life. His legacy can be viewed as “tragic,” but certainly not “honorable.”

Moreover, Kelly’s mis-statement of history dishonors the memories of individuals like Major General George H. Thomas, Admiral David Farragut, Commanding General Winfield S. Scott, and dozens of other “southerners” who chose to honor their oaths to defend and fight for the United States of America! They are truly the “honorable ones.” It also dishonors the many African Americans and other Americans of color who currently are serving in the U.S. Marines and other branches of our military.

Obviously those of us who saw “redeeming features” in General Kelly at the time of his original appointment as DHS Secretary (where he basically parroted the inhumane, divisive, and wasteful White Nationalist “Gonzo” immigration enforcement agenda of Jeff Sessions) misjudged him. By the time his tenure in the White House ends, he will have reduced himself in stature to the point where he can depart in Trump’s hip pocket and nobody will even notice he’s gone.

PWS

11-02-17

HISTORY: CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH THE REAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (IN FACT, THEY WERE EXPRESSLY INTENDED TO DISTORT HISTORY) BUT LOTS TO DO WITH PROMOTING WHITE SUPREMACY!

Two very powerful stories in today’s Washington Post Outlook Section make that point.

In the first, Karen Finney, journalist and bi-racial descendent of General Lee:

“I always fiercely disagreed with my grandmother’s take. I loved her, but recognized that she simply couldn’t face the truth — the dramatically different, and all too real stories of brutal tyranny, courageously endured, during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South that I learned from my father, his family and my own experience.

No telling of Lee’s story, however complicated, can be separated from the leading role he played in a grievous chapter of American history. That part — and the decisions by Charlottesville’s city council, New Orleans’s mayor, Baltimore’s mayor and Lexington, Kentucky’s mayor to remove Confederate statues from public spaces — isn’t complicated. The general was as cruel a slave owner as any other and fought to defend a society based on the brutal enslavement of black people that, had it persisted until today, would have included me. His cause wasn’t righteous, then or now. He’s my ancestor, but as far as I’m concerned, his statues can’t come down soon enough.

The revisionist version of his story attached to the hundreds of Confederate monuments around the country (not just in the South) is part of the most effective rebranding campaign ever implemented. Like the Lee statue at the center of the tragic, deadly violence in Charlottesville on Saturday, many, if not most, of these monuments were built — not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War — but decades later, in the 20th century. They were erected to advance a dishonest history that claimed the war was about states’ rights and the preservation of a way of life, and to obscure the real cause at the root of the conflict: the perpetuation of white supremacy and economic hegemony through the enslavement and violent suppression of African Americans. It’s propaganda that has exploited fear, and sown division and hate, in a conscious effort to obscure our shared humanity for more than 150 years.”

Read the complete article here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/15/im-black-robert-e-lee-is-my-ancestor-his-statues-cant-come-down-soon-enough/?utm_term=.56193efb1814

In the second, Professor Karen L. Cox of UNC-Charlotte points out that: “White supremacy is the whole point of confederate statutes:”

“While Confederate monuments honor their white heroes, they do not always rely on the true history of what took place between 1861 and 1865. Nor was that their intent. Rather, they served to rehabilitate white men — not as the losers of a war but, as a monument in Charlotte states, preservers of “the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South.”

Today’s defenders of Confederate monuments are either unaware of the historical context or do not care. Like generations of whites before them, they are more invested in the mythology that has attached itself to these sentinels of white supremacy, because it serves their cause.”

Read that complete article here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/16/the-whole-point-of-confederate-monuments-is-to-celebrate-white-supremacy/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.a44dddf18bfe

**************************************

Trump’s lack of knowledge of history is breathtaking. Indeed, based on performance and utterances (including tweets) he would be unable to pass the basic American history and civics exam required for naturalization. Fortunatly for him, like many other things in his life, he got his citizenship purely by good fortune, not merit.

PWS

08-20-17

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Want to know more about the Johnson impeachment?

Check out this new 1 hr. 15 min. docudrama from The Great Courses: “Going To The Devil.”

Subscribers to “The Great Courses Plus” can get it at the website. Even if you don’t have access, you can sign up for a free trial.

Either way, you can check out the free trailer here:

FULL DISCLOSURE: Our son Will works for The Great Courses.

PWS

12-01-19

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