"Rooted in the Blood of More Than 700,000 Americans Who Died in the Civil War"

"Section 1's origins lie deep in our past. It is rooted in the petitions of African Americans during and after the American Revolution that demanded freedom and natural rights for their service to the patriot cause. It stems from many ideas and strategies of the British and American abolition movements. It echoes Thomas Jefferson's inclusion of equality among 'these truths' in the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln's use of the same word in the Gettysburg Address, as well as his full-throated embrace of immigration well before the Civil War. Its most direct and powerful harbinger is the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves in the midst of the war. Without that greatest transformation in American history, there would be no Fourteenth Amendment—no birthright citizenship and no equal-protection clause either, a codification just as sacred."

David W. Blight at The Atlantic responds to Donald Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship.

"The Reconstruction Constitution—One Very Different from the Constitution of 1787"

"In 1776, revolutionaries destroyed their old colonial governments. New constitutions called new states into being. In 1787, those new states ratified a new federal constitution and made a new nation. In 1867, revolutionaries again destroyed existing governments, and again new constitutions brought new states to life. Those new states ratified a new constitution, remaking America. The Reconstruction Act of March 2 started that process, and we owe more to it than to the Declaration of 1776."

At the Los Angeles Times, Kermit Roosevelt III argues that "March 2 is the true birthday of modern America."

"I Would Rather Be Assassinated on This Spot Than to Surrender It"

"I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. (Great cheering.) I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here and adopted that Declaration of Independence–I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army, who achieved that Independence. (Applause.) I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. (Great applause.) It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. (Cheers.) This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence."

Teaching American History has Abraham Lincoln's Speech from Independence Hall from February 22, 1861.

"If Trump's Presidency Can Be Said to Have a Defining Quality, It Might Well Be Chaos Itself"

"But much more importantly, for many Americans—especially in Trump's base—this rule-breaking was the whole point. Trump famously said in 2016 that his admirers would stick with him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, and it's true that his patina of scandal-repellent Teflon would make even Ronald Reagan envious. Certainly, the polarized partisanship of Washington today explains the unwillingness of so many of his fellow Republicans to cross their own voters and break with Trump; had he come to power in 1974, he probably would have been sent packing as Nixon was. But beneath it all was, for many, a true loyalty to the man, an admiration of his style, and, ultimately, a good deal of contempt for civility and decency, transparency and expertise, constitutionality and democracy. Trump may now be headed for Mar-a-Lago—no small thing—but that contempt remains. Nearly two-thirds of Republican voters, even after January 6, say Trump acted responsibly after losing the election to Biden."

At Politico, David Greenberg asks, "What Will Trump's Presidency Mean to History?"

Zack Stanton asks David Blight if "Trumpism Is Becoming America's New 'Lost Cause.'"

And Hope Yen, Christopher Rugaber, and Calvin Woodward at the Associated Press fact check Trump's final speech as president.

"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.

"Trump Himself"

"American historian and Columbia University professor Eric Foner in American Heritage wrote, 'Andrew Johnson lacked Lincoln's qualities of greatness. While Lincoln had been open-minded, willing to listen to criticism, attuned to the currents of northern public opinion, and able to get along with all elements of his party, Johnson was stubborn... and insensitive to the opinions of others. If anyone was responsible for the wreck of his presidency, it was Johnson himself.'" 

Kevin Walling at The Hill writes that "Donald Trump's presidency is ending a lot like Andrew Johnson's."

"This Is the Largest Mass Execution in US History. It Was Also the Largest Act of Executive Clemency in US History"

"If he had been guided by short-term political calculations, Lincoln would have had every reason to simply allow the military tribunal’s order to execute all 303 Dakota men to take place. Lincoln was aware of the backwardness and racism that existed toward Native Americans, just as he was of racism toward blacks. Yet he did not make concessions to these tendencies, even within his own party. Lincoln's larger strategy involved elevating the consciousness of the population. His aim throughout the war was to tactfully mitigate the powerful racist tendencies that did exist and that were an objective block on his war policies."

Renae Cassimeda at the World Socialist Web Site tells the story of Abraham Lincoln and "the Dakota 38."

"Anti-Lincoln Obsession"

"The great stumbling-block issue for the Guardian and many other liberals was the right to self-determination. The paper believed that the south had the right to secede and to establish an independent state. It suspected that it would succeed. It thought, as Gladstone did, that this might hasten the end of slavery–and it may have been right, since no slave society, including Cuba and Brazil, survived into the 20th century. Above all, though, the paper wanted to be consistent. It had supported independence for the Slavs, the Hungarians, the Italians and the Egyptians–so why not for the Confederates, too?"

In a 2011 article, Martin Kettle reviews the positions taken in The Guardian during the U.S. Civil War.

"Too-La-Loo"

"A little over a decade later, however, African Americans like Douglass began making the glorious anniversary their own. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the nation's four million newly emancipated citizens transformed Independence Day into a celebration of black freedom. The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out."

In a 2018 Atlantic article, Ethan J. Kytle and Brian write about "When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday."

"One Has to Crush Bad Leaders at the Polls"

"It raises two big questions: Why wasn't Johnson thrown out of office for making those choices, and should he have been? She answers the first with erudition and cogency. The second she essentially leaves open, reminding us that even some of the lawmakers who reviled Johnson hesitated to remove him. Their ambivalence helps explain why no president has ever been convicted of 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' or why impeachment, often viewed as a necessity to stop a lawless leader, may prove almost impossible to execute successfully."

Michael Kazin at The New Republic reviews Brenda Wineapple's The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.

"It Made Baseball Famous"

"At the time, the concept of amateurism was especially popular among fans. Inspired by classical ideas of sportsmanship, its proponents argued that playing sport for a reason other than for the love of the game was immoral, even corrupt.
"Nonetheless, some of the major clubs in the East and Midwest began disregarding the rule prohibiting professionalism and secretly hired talented young working-class players to get an edge.
"After the 1868 season, the national association reversed its position and sanctified the practice of paying players. The move recognized the reality that some players were already getting paid, and that was unlikely to change because professionals clearly helped teams win.
"Yet the taint of professionalism restrained virtually every club from paying an entire roster of players."

Robert Wyss at History News Network depicts the rise of the Cincinnati Red Stockings as the first professional baseball team 150 years ago.

"One of the Few Successful Irish Campaigns Against the British in Irish Republican History"

"During the Great Starvation of the 1840s, more than one million Irish emigrated from Ireland to America. These immigrants proved to be invaluable resources to the Union during the Civil War. And after the war, there were enough of them that only a foolhardy politician would ignore the causes held dear by such a large constituency.
"In this environment, the American branch of the Fenian movement thrived. Founded primarily to raise funds and obtain weaponry to send back to Ireland for a military rebellion against the English occupiers, the American Fenian organizers adopted a new strategy at the close of the Civil War. They would take the fight for Irish freedom to British Canada."

Dan Murphy at Irish Central recalls the 1866 "Irish Fenian invasion of Canada."

"Often Had the United States on His Mind"

"To read Marx is to wrestle with the modern world that capitalism has made. This includes modern America—especially modern America. Because the US is the nation in world history most committed to capitalism, and because Marx is the world's most enduring theorist of capitalism, Marx is a veritable American alter ego."

Andrew Hartman at Jacobin marks Karl Marx's bicentennial

As does The Economist.

"A Feat of Deceitful Legal Alchemy"

"Field nonetheless saw Davis's erroneous summary as an opportunity. A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that 'corporations are persons within the meaning' of the Fourteenth Amendment. 'It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,' explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.
"His gambit worked. In the following years, the case would be cited over and over by courts across the nation, including the Supreme Court, for deciding that corporations had rights under the Fourteenth Amendment."

Adam Winkler at The Atlantic explains how corporations became "people."

"The Colored Side of Lincolniana"

"Working many decades after Herndon, Washington had a harder time obtaining first person interviews. He exploited archival sources whenever possible. He also turned to his own recollections of stories told by his grandmothers’ friends, whom he had known as a child growing up near Ford's Theatre. He interviewed very elderly people who recalled the Civil War era, and he spoke to descendants of that generation, soliciting their memories of relatives and friends.
"Washington figured such interviews had value despite how much time had passed, and historians have largely agreed. Many of the vignettes he recorded must be used with caution because they are the products of people's memories, stories told many years after the events themselves. Yet Washington's accounts of African American employees in Lincoln's White House, in particular, have become indispensable to historians because there is virtually no other documentation of those employees' lives."

Kate Masur at History News Network writes about the 1942 book They Knew Lincoln.

"A Successful Repulse of Enlightenment Liberalism by Romantic Reaction"

But Reconstruction has proven to be a more balky and diffuse era than either the Dunningites or the New Reconstructionists supposed. The crusaders, black and white, who hoped to build a new South out of the ashes of the old plantation order had no plans for a proletarian paradise. Quite to the contrary, they were plain and eager in their demand for a thorough-going capitalist effacement of the kingdom of the thousand-bale planters. Northern republicans had, after all, waged their war on behalf of free labor (an ideology whose greatest expositor has always been no one other than Eric Foner), and what they expected to create in the defeated Confederacy was a mirror image of small-producer manufacturing and independent family farms. The Union 'represents the principles of free labor,' declared a New York pamphlet, and only when 'the victory of the Northern society of free labor over the landed monopoly of the Southern aristocracy' was complete could the Civil War be declared over. 'Reconstruction,' added Frederick Douglass, will 'cause Northern industry, Northern capital, and Northern civilization to flow into the South, and make a man from New England as much at home in Carolina as elsewhere in the Republic.'
"No one offered a more vigorous second to that motion than the freedpeople, who wanted nothing so much as to become self-interested bourgeois owners of property."

Allen Carl Guelzo at History News Network calls Reconstruction a attempted "bourgeois revolution."

"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.

"And That's a Problem"

"The language we turn to in describing the war, from speaking of compromise and plantations, to characterizing the struggle as the North versus the South, or referring to Robert E. Lee as a General, can lend legitimacy to the violent, hateful and treasonous southern rebellion that tore the nation apart from 1861 to 1865; and from which we still have not recovered. Why do we often describe the struggle as between two equal entities? Why have we shown acceptance of the military rank given by an illegitimate rebellion and unrecognized political entity?"

Christopher Wilson at Smithsonian argues that "We Legitimize the 'So-Called' Confederacy With Our Vocabulary."

"Protection of Slavery From the Perceived Threat to Its Long-Term Survival Posed by Lincoln’s Election in 1860 Was, in Fact, the Dominant Theme in Secessionist Rhetoric"

"As Gary Gallagher notes in his introduction to The Myth of the Lost Cause, 'White Southerners emerged from the Civil War thoroughly beaten but largely unrepentant.' Some proponents of the Lost Cause remained candid about the racial ideology that sustained the Confederacy. The unrepentant Edward Pollard, wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, wrote the first history of the Confederacy, with the appropriate title The Lost Cause. The war had ended slavery, Pollard acknowledged, but it 'did not decide negro equality…. This new cause—or rather the true question of the war revived—is the supremacy of the white race.'¹⁷ In a speech to Confederate veterans in 1890, a former captain in the 7th Georgia Volunteer Infantry echoed Pollard: 'We fought for the supremacy of the white race in America.'"

In a 2001 New York Review of Books article, James M. McPherson looks at publications concerning the cause of the Civil War.

"Slow, Difficult, and Ugly"

"An angry president, resentful of the political establishment; a devoted minority, supporting their leader as a symbol of the country they feared they were losing; a trial which blurred the lines between legal and political charges—it was all enough, 150 years ago, to threaten renewed war. Americans live in far more peaceful times today, but it’s not difficult to imagine how impeachment could rile an already agitated nation."

At The Atlantic, Jon Grinspan looks back to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.