As the possible threat of a second Civil War in the United States looms, with fears and anger fueled by our division about racial hatred once again disguised as “States’ Rights,” let’s reflect on a moment from our first Civil War.
On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln gave his “Gettysburg Address” during America’s first Civil War. He dedicated a new national cemetery at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1 to July 3, 1863. That pivotal Union victory resulted in over fifty thousand casualties. To honor the fallen Union soldiers and to consecrate the grounds at Gettysburg as their final resting place, Lincoln began:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
One hundred and sixty-two years later, our nation is cleaved under an administration dedicated to the opposite: only the class of people who signed the U.S. Constitution — wealthy straight white protestant male landowners and slaveholders — are equal and protected by our Constitution. (Those who believe the Constitution was still-born and frozen at that time of signing in 1787 are known as “Originalists”). Today, once again, other classes of people are subject to discrimination and removal, restricted from “equal opportunity.”
Lincoln further declared, “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
One hundred and sixty-two years later, it appears the nation Lincoln dreamed of is going to perish. Half of our country has been morally violently, and soon likely to be physically violently, entirely excluded from “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
After our first Civil War, the cleaving of America revived almost immediately after President Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865. The assassin was, not unlike America’s right-wing militias today, a rabid Confederate and believer in racism and slavery. He was a member of the Know Nothing Party, an anti-immigrant group. His deep-seated hatred for Lincoln grew because of Lincoln’s abolition of slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation, the13th Amendment, and the Union’s defeat of the Confederates in the Civil War.
Ironically — because the assassin had intended to also assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson but failed — Vice President Johnson replaced President Lincoln. Johnson, a Southerner, was far more accommodating to re-admit the Confederate states to the United States of America and to limit African Americans equality rather than grant them freedom.
This strange combination of President and Vice President came about in the presidential election of 1864. Held in the midst of the Civil War, it was a function of the new and temporary coalition known as the National Union Party, a strategic alliance to promote Northern unity during the war. The ticket brought together Republicans, War Democrats, and border state Unionists. (Republicans and Democrats about a century ago flipped in their racial policies from what they were during 1800s — Republicans then were for equal rights, now the Democrats are.)
Northerner Republican Abraham Lincoln was paired with Southerner Democrat Andrew Johnson. They differed on their views about equal opportunity for African Americans and treatment of the Confederate States. With Lincoln gone, President Johnson was free to abandon Lincoln’s plans and principles. Lincoln’s “Ten per cent Plan” called for readmitting Confederate states to the Union if 10% of a state’s electorate swore allegiance to the Union and supported abolition of slavery. Johnson’s “Presidential Reconstruction” gutted that. He freely granted amnesty to Confederate states, allowed them to regain their power and property, and eliminated any requirement for voting rights and equality for African American men.
Just as with today’s Trump administration, Johnson advocated for “State’s Rights.” This euphemism for racism allowed Southern states to draft their own constitutions with “Black Codes” that severely restricted the rights of African Americans. Today’s euphemisms are “anti-woke,” “anti-immigrant,” and “anti-DEI.”
Republicans reacted to Democrat Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction racism by creating the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, placing Southern states under military rule. Those states were required to ratify the 14th Amendment to our U.S. Constitution, granting citizenship to former slaves, by threat of force.
The revived racist environment in the United States led the Fuller Supreme Court of 1896 to rule in favor of Plessy v. Ferguson for segregation, with seven justices for and only one justice dissenting: Justice John Marshall Harlan, who said our U.S. Constitution is “color-blind” and does not tolerate classes among citizens.
The result of this legal segregation, the ludicrous “Separate but Equal” insanity — “Separate” was easy, “Equal” was a myth — permeated legal American society for generations and creating America’s systemic racism. Finally, in 1954, the Warren Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation is unconstitutional. This was the beginning of overturning the racist “Separate but Equal” doctrine. De Facto and actual legal segregation, of course, continued into the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, begun a decade later, an era of extreme violence and killing because of America’s racist hate. Racism still continues.
Today, the Second Trump Reich is actively forcing upon our country the “Originalist” view that this is a country only for that original class of wealthy straight white protestant male landowners and slaveholders. It is removing all advancements in civilization made since our first Civil War. It uses the racist euphemisms of “anti-woke,” “anti-immigrant,” and “anti-DEI” to delude half of our country into accepting renewed racist divisions and the implementation of an authoritarian tyrant to implement cruel racism.
The cruelty against all who are not part of that narrow accepted class is the opposite of President Abraham Lincoln’s vision and the vision of Union soldiers who fought and died in our first Civil War.
Today, our country is again cleaved. One half of our country blindly follows the Second Trump Reich, its racism, and its cruel tyranny. The other half of our country is locked out from participating in our government and declared to be the “enemy” by today’s Reich.
Americans who are furious about our loss of what had been our “government of the people, by the people, for the people” are beginning to rise up. Again.
Complacency is a sin against the people.
~ Michael R. Barnard
#WEarePOLITICS 