"An Uncomfortable Familiarity"

"'Weirdly, part of this is that with partisan gerrymandering, a lot of members of the House do not fear losing reelection—they're afraid of losing primaries,' Eric Foner, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University and an expert in Reconstruction and the Civil War, told TPM. 'With all these Republicans loaded into their districts, they figure they'll always win so there's no benefit to them to take a reasonable stance before primary season.'"

Kate Riga at Talking Points Memo talks to historians about the Republican Party's embrace of violence

Casey Michel at Politico discusses how President U.S. Grant can provide lessons for President Joe Biden now that "the Red Shirts of South Carolina have been replaced with the Red Hats of MAGA."

And at The Bulwark, Mona Charen writes that "Republicans Make Me Proud I Voted for Biden."

"Engaged in Insurrection or Rebellion Against the Same, or Given Aid or Comfort to the Enemies Thereof"

"'Nobody really had heard about this except people like me, who study this era,' said Foner, a Columbia University professor and author of numerous books on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln. 'And then I had other historians emailing me saying, wouldn't Section Three apply here if Trump is guilty?'"

At The Seattle Times, Michael S. Rosenwald discusses using the Fourteenth Amendment to remove Donald Trump from office.

"A Certain Daring"

"But I argue that this was really the minor story of his presidency.
"The major story was that he was the foremost president protecting the four million African-Americans who had been enslaved prior to the war, who, under the 14th Amendment, became full-fledged American citizens, and under the 15th Amendment, had the right to vote.
"This provoked the most violent backlash in the South. The Ku Klux Klan conducted a reign of terror throughout the South. Grant repeatedly sent federal troops into the South in order to rein in the Klan, and then finally brought 3,000 indictments against the Klan to crush them.
"So, as Frederick Douglass said, Ulysses S. Grant was 'the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of out race.'
"I feel it's a great unknown story about Grant."

Jeffery Brown at the PBS Newshour interviews Ron Chernow about Chernow's new book, Grant.

"The Fish Rots from the Head"

"Well, our system depends upon something like a consensus, something like majority rule. But now we have a president who outright lies about... everything. He lies about the number of votes he received, about the size of his inauguration crowd, about his own achievements, about Muslims cheering in the streets after 9/11, and so on. He lies about basic observable facts.
"I think the cumulative effect of all this lying is to make people deeply cynical about out entire system, and that's very corrupting."

Sean Illing at Vox interviews historian Robert Dallek about Donald Trump.

"The First Victim of American Imperialism"

"Many important figures of the epoch, with shame and regret, recognized its nature. That 'most outrageous war' (John Quincy Adams wrote) had been 'actuated by a spirit of rapacity and an inordinate desire for territorial aggrandizement' (Henry Clay), and began with a premeditated attack by President James Polk, thanks to which 'a band of murderers and demons from hell' were 'permitted to kill men, women and children' (Abraham Lincoln).

"After the naval bombardment of the civilian population of Veracruz, Robert E. Lee wrote to his wife, 'My heart bleeds for the inhabitants.' In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant lamented that he had not had "the moral courage to resign' from what, as a young officer, he had described as 'the most wicked war.' For a number of other politicians and thinkers, including Henry David Thoreau, the war contradicted the democratic and republican values on which the country had been founded and was opposed to basic Christian ethics."

Enrique Krauze at The New York Times writes about an effort to invalidate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

I Will Fight No More Forever

"Joseph never stopped pressing for land in the Wallowa Valley, and up to his death in 1904, the government kept reopening and reconsidering his claims. Joseph became an inspiration to generations of civil rights and human rights activists due his forceful message of universal liberty and equality. 'We only ask an even chance to live as other men live,' he famously said. 'Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.' It's a strikingly modern expression of the rights that all Americans should expect, marking a bridge from the old values of abolition, the Union, and Reconstruction to the causes of a new century. But Joseph was not simply making a plea for citizenship. He was claiming the right to participate in the contentious, if not unending, struggles built into the American way of governing—the right to speak to the state and be heard."

Slate runs an excerpt of Daniel J. Sharfstein's Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War.

"The Occupation Was the Consequence, Not the Cause, of Southern Resistance"

"The brilliance of Downs' argument is that he steals the central complaint of the apologists, yet reverses the conclusion: The federal government was overzealous—and that was a good thing. Congress had to impose martial law in order for blacks to gain basic freedoms. If military officers sometimes vacated racist local laws, if they removed ruthless sheriffs and judges, if they tried white supremacists in unfair military tribunals—all of which they did—they did so for necessary ends. Equality would come to the South no other way."


Eric Herschthal in Slate reviews Gregory P. Downs's After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War.


And Downs explains Reconstruction as a continuation of war in The New York Times.

"So Let's Name April 9 New Birth of Freedom Day"

"Today, the South is home to innumerable counties, schools, and other monuments named in honor of Confederate men, or established to celebrate the Confederacy itself. The federal government can't change that on its own, but it can refuse to participate in the celebration. It could rename these 10 army installations after Union fighters. It could remove monuments to the Confederacy (as opposed to museums and landmarks) from the National Register of Historic Places, and disclaim any obligation to finance their maintenance. It could stop producing headstones for Confederate graves—as Steven I. Weiss documented in The Atlantic, the feds process nearly 2,000 of these a year, at a cost of half a million dollars, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for maintaining more Confederate graves and monuments than Union ones. It could remove the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and place it in the custody of the Smithsonian—or at least end the spectacle of the president of the United States bestowing it with a wreath every Memorial Day. We aren't being polite to anyone worthy of politeness, or advancing any noble end, by continuing to honor traitors in this way."


Brian Beutler in The New Republic calls for making the anniversary of Confederate surrender a national holiday.

"Driven from the Happy Land of Canaan"

"The story of General Orders No. 11 and its lingering impact fills in a missing and revealing 'Jewish' chapter in the biography of Ulysses S. Grant. The order and its aftermath also shed new light on one of the most tumultuous eras in American history, the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. During these years—America’s 'Second Founding' as one historian terms it—the definition of what America is and who 'We the People' should include convulsed the country. Most of the debate naturally centered on the status of black people, but there was likewise substantial debate concerning the Jews. Though they formed less than 1 percent of the population at that time, Jews were by far the most significant non-Christian immigrant group in the nation and their numbers had been increasing rapidly—from about 15,000 in 1840 to some 150,000 on the eve of the Civil War. General Orders No. 11 implied that these Jews formed a separate 'class' of Americans, distinct from their neighbors, and subject, especially when suspicions of smuggling fell upon them, to collective forms of punishment, including expulsion. The National Reform Association, which was particularly active during the 1870s, went further, seeking to 'declare the nation's allegiance to Jesus Christ.' A 'religious' amendment, proposed repeatedly during the Grant years, on the theory that the Civil War was punishment for 'the absence of any adequate recognition of God' in the nation’s founding documents, looked to write Christianity directly into the Constitution itself.

"Against this backdrop, Ulysses S. Grant’s surprising embrace of Jews during his presidency takes on new significance. Through his appointments and policies, Grant rejected calls for a 'Christian nation,' and embraced Jews as insiders in America, part of 'We the People.'"

Slate runs an excerpt from Jonathan D. Sarna new book, When General Grant Expelled the Jews.

And Jenna Weissman Joselit reviews Sarna's book in The New Republic.

Disinterred

"If indeed justice is done and truth is served, those visitors will be inspired by far more than certain particular dimensions of Grant. A superb modern general who, with Lincoln, finally unleashed the force required to crush the slaveholders’ rebellion, Grant went on, as president, to press vigorously for the reunification of the severed nation, but on the terms of the victorious North and not of the defeated South. Given all that he was up against—not simply from Confederates and Southern white terrorists but, as president, from high-minded factional opponents and schismatics from his own Republican Party—it is quite remarkable that Grant sustained his commitment to the freedmen for as long and as hard as he did. The evidence clearly shows that he created the most auspicious record on racial equality and civil rights of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic reviews Joan Waugh's U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth.