Recently in Civil War & Reconstruction Category

"African-Americans continue to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow -- long after both systems were formally abolished -- through enormous damage and loss, both tangible and intangible, including the loss of human dignity and liberty, the frustration of careers and professional lives, and the long-term loss of income and opportunity." The House looks set to pass a resolution apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow. Well, better late than never, I suppose.

Lincoln laughs last? It seems that due to rewrite issues with the rumored Abbie Hoffman film, Steven Spielberg has put his Lincoln biopic back on the front-burner, to be shot right after Tintin (a la Jurassic Park/Schindler's List and War of the Worlds/Munich.) Other than Liam Neeson and Sally Field as President and Mrs. Lincoln respectively, no other casting has been announced.

"Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion," said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel." (Nor, apparently, does the Fourth Amendment apply.) An unsettling memorandum by Dubya stooge John Yoo which advocates both dictatorial rule and the legality of torture is released to the public, five years later. "'The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president's wartime authority,' Jaffer said. 'The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did.'"

More than anything, I'm reminded of Lincoln's remarks to the Indiana fourteenth: "'Whenever I hear anyone arguing over slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.'"

And, just in case anyone was under the impression that this sort of thing only happened in the dark days of 2003, witness Attorney General Mukasey last week getting publicly verklempt and making up 9/11 tales as he goes along, all to help preserve the NSA's warrantless wiretaps. At this point, Chuck Schumer has a lot to answer for.

"Not one lawyer in 100 can identify Ohio congressman John Bingham as the main drafter of the 14th Amendment. Yet Bingham is a fascinating historical figure: he served in Congress in the 1850s as the country was torn apart and in the 1860s as it was stitched back together. He was a federal judge and the nation's minister to Japan. As a prosecutor, he convicted John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators, and as a member of Congress he gave closing arguments in President Andrew Johnson impeachment trial. All that, plus he drafted Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which is perhaps the single most important paragraph of our Constitution." Over at TNR, Doug Kendall pleas with Obama and others to remember the Reconstruction amendments.

"This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn...your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour."

Breaking news! As an eagle-eyed commenter at TPM discovered, it appears one Frederick Douglass, an orator of some repute in the African-American community, and one whom Senator Clinton has called "one of my heroes" and "a great American," actually despises our great nation, and has given public remarks filled with hate-mongering toward patriotic Americans.

I for one was planning to vote for Senator Clinton, but now I am very concerned. She should reject and denounce this fellow Douglass immediately, although it may be too late. After reading this, I totally feel Clinton is not proud of America and I fear where she would lead this country.

Update: All kidding aside, Sen. Obama gave some eloquent remarks on the politics of division in Indiana today, citing RFK's elegy for MLK in Indianapolis. "I just want to say to everybody here that as somebody who was born into a diverse family, as somebody who has little pieces of America all in me, I will not allow us to lose this moment, where we cannot forget about our past and not ignore the very real forces of racial inequality and gender inequality and the other things that divide us. We have to come together. That’s what this campaign is about. That’s why you are here. That’s why we're going to win this election. That’s how we're going to change the country."

Take that, Lincolnbots. The Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn makes the "experience" case for William H. Seward of New York.

"Obama's no Abe Lincoln. But, as I observed last February...Abe Lincoln was no Abe Lincoln at this stage of the game either. I point this out simply as a reminder that Lincoln and history went on to make fools of those whose obsession with his shortcomings and failures blinded them to the singular promise of his gifts. Not often, but fairy tales do come true."

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." From deep within the Library of Congress, new photos emerge of Lincoln's second inauguration.

By way of Dangerous Meta, a cardiologist argues in a new, soon-to-be-published e-book that Abraham Lincoln might be the earliest known case of a rare genetic disorder. "Sotos believes Lincoln had a genetic syndrome called MEN 2B. He thinks the diagnosis not only accounts for Lincoln's great height, which has been the subject of most medical speculation over the years, but also for many of the president's other reported ailments and behaviors."

"The upshot was that by 1980, race and ideology had become so commingled that one's stand on racial issues served as a proxy for one's partisan preference. Previously, economic issues had been the chief dividing line between the parties. By 1980, though, according to the Edsalls, the changes that followed the civil rights movement had crystallized, and racial politics figured just as strongly." Slate's resident historian David Greenberg weighs in on the recent furor at the NYT (and elsewhere) over Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign kickoff speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the 1964 Schwerner-Chaney-Goodman murders. (Coincidence? Sheah.) Therein, Greenberg correctly and succinctly argues that Reagan's "I believe in states' rights" was, in an apt turn of phrase, "a dog whistle to segregationists."

Honestly, I'm not really sure how you could dispute this, unless you want to argue that Reagan and his political handlers were completely ignorant about the civil rights struggle, massive resistance, and the significance of Philadelphia, Miss. in those struggles. (Of course, then you'd have to explain how Reagan remained blissfully unaware of the fact his 1966 gubernatorial bid often relied on similar loaded language.) Was Reagan a racist? I dunno, that's not the issue. Did Reagan rely on coded racial messages to appeal to white conservatives, akin to what Dubya does these days with pro-lifers and Dred Scott? Obviously.

Liam Neeson has his Mary Todd: Sally Field joins Spielberg's forthcoming Lincoln biopic as Abe's First Lady.

"'Now, if Gen. Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the litteral or substantial destruction of Lee's army,' Lincoln wrote, 'the rebellion will be over." Trevor Plante, a researcher for the Discovery Channel, discovers a lost handwritten note penned by Lincoln after Gettysburg in the National Archives. Meade did not complete his work, of course -- like McClellan before him, he remained overcautious with the Army of the Potomac, prompting Lincoln's wrath in an unsent letter dated a week after the discovered note: "My dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasureably because of it."

"This session will be remembered for a lot of things, but 20 years hence I suspect one of those things will be the fact that we came together and passed this resolution." In related news, the Virginia General Assembly unanimously expresses "profound regret" for Virginia's hand in slavery, becoming the first state to do so. "The measure also expressed regret for 'the exploitation of Native Americans.'"

"Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged." In vaguely-related news, conservative congressman Rep. Don Young trots out an obviously-fake Lincoln quote to bash Dems on Iraq. [ThinkProgress has the video.] '''Now that he's been informed these are not the actual words of Lincoln, he will discontinue attributing the words to Lincoln. However, he continues to totally agree with the message of the statement,' [spokeswoman] Kenny said." (For the record, and despite his suspension of habeas corpus, President Lincoln was a lenient sort, and assuredly not a believer in the reforming potential of public hangings.)

Get well soon, Tim Johnson. Oof, talk about terrible news on several levels. One hopes the Senator will make a full and complete recovery after his AVM surgery, and we won't have to think too deeply about the possibility of a Senate turnover. Fortunately, there seems to be a good deal of precedent for long absences from the chamber -- my first thought (other than Nate Fisher and Narm!) was Charles Sumner's three-year absence after the caning, but there are apparently many 20th century examples too.

In a wide-ranging interview with one of his fansites, Steven Spielberg talks Indy 4 and other projects in his possible short-term future, including his long-rumored Lincoln biopic (with Liam Neeson, and based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's recent Team of Rivals) and a new hard sci-fi project entitled Interstellar.

A very happy Juneteenth (a.k.a. Emancipation Day, the 141st since its first celebration in Galveston, TX on June 19, 1865) to you and yours.

"Observers describe Bush as 'messianic' in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address, 'The Almighty has His own purposes.' Invoking also Lincoln's remarks on the Mexican War, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. laments the rise of preemption, senses dark forebodings in Dubya's saber-rattling with Iran, and concludes that "there is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war."

"Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities." As seen all over the place, historian Sean Wilentz wonders aloud in Rolling Stone if Dubya is the worst president in American history.

To my mind, the only other president that even comes close is James Buchanan. Sure, Warren Harding was lousy, but he knew it ("I am a man of limited talents from a small town. I don't seem to grasp that I am President."), and thus didn't go out of his way to be actively terrible like Bush has been. (Plus, for all the corruption of the Ohio gang, Harding's cabinet also included Charles Evans Hughes, Andrew Mellon, and Herbert Hoover, all impressive in their own right.) Speaking of Hoover, both he and Ulysses Grant have been given a bad shake. Even if the Depression basically ate his administration alive, Hoover -- once renowned as the "Great Engineer" -- was a more innovative president (and empathetic person) than he's often remembered. And Grant's administrations, although plagued by corruption, at the very least tried to maintain Reconstruction in the South. (In fact, I'd argue that Grant's sorry standing in presidential history is in a part a reflection of the low esteem in which Reconstruction was once held by the now-woefully obsolete Dunning School.) Regarding the other Reconstruction president, Andrew Johnson is assuredly down near the bottom too, but to be fair, he faced an almost impossible situation entering office in the time and manner he did, and -- as with Clinton -- his impeachment was a bit of a frame-job. And Richard Nixon, for all his many failings, had China (as well as the EPA despite himself, and, although it didn't pan out, the Family Assistance Plan.) Nope, I think it's safe to say that we may be experiencing perhaps the most blatantly inept, wrong-headed, and mismanaged presidency in the history of the republic. Oh, lucky us.

Steven Spielberg announces he's taking a hiatus in 2006, meaning that both his Lincoln biopic with Liam Neeson and Indy 4 (currently being polished by Spiderman scribe David Koepp) might take longer than expected to hit theaters.

"It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism...The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them...let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield." -- George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796.

"Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally." -- Abraham Lincoln, "Speech to One Hundred Fortieth Indiana Regiment" (March 17, 1865)

"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder." -- George Washington

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!" -- Abraham Lincoln, "Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin" (September 30, 1859)

"If you are going to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh. Otherwise they'll kill you." This savvy George Bernard Shaw quote introduces Kevin Willmott's razor-sharp documentary-satire C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, which opened at the IFC Center tonight (followed by a Q&A), and, by that measure, Willmott's film is a rousing success. At times both blisteringly funny and quietly devastating, C.S.A is a take-no-prisoners alternate history of our Confederacy -- Yep, the South won -- done in the style of Ken Burns' The Civil War (or Andy Bobrow's Old Negro Space Program), right down to bizarro versions of Shelby Foote and Barbara Fields. Punctuated throughout by offbeat television commercials that are eerily similar to today's TV, C.S.A. is one of the best (and most ruthless and unflinching) satires I've seen in some time. And it illuminates a central fact often obscured in so many Brother-against-Brother tributes to America's bloodiest conflict (as well as drek like Gods and Generals): The Civil War was begun and fought over slavery. In the words of C.S.A. Vice-President Alexander Stephens -- in his inaugural address, no less -- the Confederacy was founded "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."

To kick off its conceit, C.S.A requires that you make two leaps of logic from the history of the Civil War: First, that, after the Emancipation Proclamation is issued, C.S.A. Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin managed to convince England and France to join the war on the side of the Confederacy. (This was less likely, I think, than the film makes it out to be. Popular support in England -- who had abolished slavery in 1833 -- was pretty clearly on the side of the Union, particularly after Lincoln's Proclamation, and "King Cotton diplomacy" just wasn't going to work when England and France could import cotton instead from India, Egypt, and other waystations in their respective empires. And, even if the European powers had recognized the CSA, which they might've done had the South won more battles, they weren't about to send troops across the Atlantic to fight on the side of slavery without severe popular repercussions.) Second, and more unlikely, is that, after capturing Washington DC, the South managed to subdue and annex the entire North, leveling Boston and Philadelphia (a la Sherman's March) in the process. Even despite the Union's hold on the Mississippi in the Western theater, the South might well have won the war, if Northern public opinion had collapsed in 1863 and 1864 (As it was, timely Union victories -- and particularly the fall of Atlanta -- buoyed Lincoln's reelection.) But, had that happened, IMHO, there would likely be two nations uneasily living side by side for decades to come, as you find in Harry Turtledove's How Few Remain series.

Ok, all that history geekery notwithstanding (which is somewhat unfair to the movie -- it's an alternate history satire, after all, which also explains the more recognizable battle flag replacing the official Stars and Bars on the moon and elsewhere), once you make the conceptual leap that the Confederacy managed to win the war and annex the Union, the rest of C.S.A is remarkably well-thought-out, and at times even scarily plausible. Like Jeff Davis, Lincoln is captured trying to escape in costume (on the Underground Railroad) and sent to Fort Monroe -- Here, it's dramatized in the 1915 D.W. Griffith film, The Hunt for Dishonest Abe. While the South contemplates various "Reconstruction" plans to reintroduce slavery to the North (and Nathan Bedford Forrest reenacts Fort Pillow over and over again), William Lloyd Garrison leads an abolitionist/transcendentalist contingent to Canada. Rather than the Chinese Exclusion Act, the C.S.A. passes a "Yellow Peril Mandate" providing for the enslaving of Chinese laborers. And, as in our world, the nation comes together again to fight a (here much broader) Spanish-American War.

As we get to the 20th century, C.S.A. continues to adroitly riff on American history. Audiences swarm to the Civil War musical, A Northern Wind. ("You tried to take my blacks, But I still want you back.") In WWII, the C.S.A. plays nice with Germany while despising Japan. (Thanks to the service of Judah Benjamin, Jews can still live in the Confederacy, provided they stay on their "reservation" in Long Island.) Eventually, an armed, highly defended border -- the "Cotton Curtain" -- descends between Canada and the C.S.A., and '50's Confederates scour the nation for the "Abs" (abolitionists) in their midst. Later still, slave riots break out in Newark, Watts, and elsewhere in the turbulent '60s, as many white Confederates reconsider slavery (due to global sanctions, give or take South Africa) and women begin to demand the vote.

Equally as nimble as the mirror-image counterhistory of the CSA are the many commercial breaks throughout the fake documentary, with ads that are both jaw-droppingly brazen and laugh-out-loud funny. (You can get a sense of this from the trailer -- Think Spike Lee's Bamboozled, itself an excellent satire, to the nth degree.) They range from fake ads for unfortunately real products (Darky Toothpaste, Coon Chicken Inn) to all-too-possible modern innovations -- The Slave Shopping Network, a LoJack "Shackle", a Claritin-ish drug to treat drapetomania (the runaway disease "discovered" by Dr. Samuel Cartwright in 1851), a COPS-style show called RUNAWAYS, etc. etc. As you can see, this is withering stuff, and some might find it in horrible taste. But, there's method to CSA's madness. As I noted before, we tend to do a pitiful job of facing up to slavery, America's Original Sin, and for ninety hilarious, cringeworthy minutes, CSA forces us to look the peculiar institution square in the eye. If we're serious about our proclaimed role as a Beacon of Freedom to the world, that's something we need to start doing a lot more often. (But, don't worry -- C.S.A. sweetens this tonic with quite a few laughs.) At any rate, if it's anywhere near you, definitely go check it out.

In related news, a site is chosen for the National Museum of African American History and Culture (at 14th and Constitution NW, near the Washington Monument.) As I argued before, some museum along such lines on our nation's Mall is long overdue.

"Foner's field of special expertise is what might be called without exaggeration the crucible of American freedom: the Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves and the ambiguous, myth-shrouded period that followed known as Reconstruction. He never puts it this directly, either in this new, somewhat compressed popular history or in his 1988 magnum opus, 'Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877,' but he sees Reconstruction, with all its contradictions and unrealized possibilities, as the key to all of American history." Salon's Andrew O'Hehir takes a gander at Eric Foner's latest book, Forever Free.

"The message in The Lord of the Rings is, in a way, that the struggle to destroy the evil also destroys the good. The very effort to mobilize against the evil unalterably changes what you're trying to defend. So at the very end of that trilogy, the heroes -- Frodo the Hobbit, Gandalf and Elrond -- sail away. They can't live in this world that they've created, because it's so different from what they started out to defend. It's a metaphor; Abraham Lincoln didn't sail away, he was killed, but the world after the Civil War was not Lincoln's America anymore." By way of a friend in the program, Columbia's Eric Foner picks his five most personally influential books, and guess what made the list...