Broken Eggs Cannot Be Mended

"The American people broke something when they gave Trump a second chance in office. And there is no going back to the Union as it was. If Democrats hope to lead the nation to any kind of recovery, much less renewal, they must understand and internalize this fact of the matter."

Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times argues that "Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction—for building something new on the wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought—not for restoration of what was."

"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."

"Vote for Me Because What's Happening on My Watch Is Unacceptable"

"'I would say the only president who rivals Trump in terms of treatment toward African Americans is Andrew Johnson, the most explicitly racist president we've ever had,' Civil War historian Eric Foner told the New York Times in June. 'If I were him, I would not pursue this historical analysis any further.'"

Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times surveys the destruction caused by Donald Trump.

"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.

"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."

"Represents a Sharp Break in Our National Political History"

"Never before has American democracy been so debased that roughly one-third of the nation can dictate its politics. (Even the slave power oligarchy of the 1850s managed to mobilize electoral pluralities and majorities.) Never before has an American Administration lied as continuously and as brazenly as Trump and his minions have, not simply as self-protection but as calculated insults to reason, gaslighting not just the nation but the entire world. Never before has an Administration’s supporters—today, the ruling one-third of the country—shown such an ardent willingness not merely to accept its mendacity but to get off on it, to the point of thrilling to possible criminal interference in our national elections by a hostile nation, so long as it gives the finger to the other side. Finding similarities in our past to this state of affairs brings to mind the French proverb, that to understand everything is to pardon everything—only, in this case, to analogize too much is to understand too little."

Sean Wilentz at Democracy says that Donald Trump is sui generis.

"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.

"God Help Us"

"All I can say to you is that from day one I have believed that Donald Trump's greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance—of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution. Saying that if Jackson had been around we might not have had the Civil War is like saying that one strong, aggressive leader can shape, prevent, move history however he wishes. This is simply 5th grade understanding of history or worse."

Tim Murphy at Mother Jones asks historian David Blight about Donald Trump's comments regarding Andrew Jackson and the Civil War.

"In other words, what sets Trump apart is not that he has historical heroes, but that he admires heroes who are 'tough' and push people around, whether it be Jackson in the nullification crisis or various generals in running the military. Patton and MacArthur were the most authoritarian of American military leaders, known for bullying their troops and disobeying the rules."

Jeet Heer at The New Republic expands on the theme.

"No, it's more as though American history were Groundhog Day, and we'll keep repeating the cycles of Reconstruction and Redemption until we can figure out how to live together. But for all of Foner's willingness to see the era's contemporary echoes, he blanches at the idea that we should view regression as inevitable. 'People who lived through Reconstruction did not know Redemption was coming,' he says. 'They were operating on the basis that this was happening, that this was gonna be permanent, that these rights were going to be there, and thinking about what to do with them. You can't make Reconstruction purely a question of failure, and you can't make it purely a question of why did it fail.'"

Tim Murphy at Mother Jones talks as well with historian Eric Foner about how to view Reconstruction in the age of Trump.

"For Blight, the trouble is that Trump rose to power despite these truths—despite the established danger of demagogues, the historic viciousness of prejudice, and the broad consensus that expanding rights for women and people of color has strengthened societies. 'You spend all your years and all your life trying to teach history, and then to see this man elected—I felt historians had failed,' he said. 'We're working in every medium we can—from film, to museums, to writing books. But we're up against the Fox News view of the country, which we don't reach. We don't even know how.'"

And Graham Vyse at The New Republic writes that "Trump’s Ignorance Is Radicalizing U.S. Historians."

"Inskeep was making that argument to demonstrate a key difference between Jackson and Trump, who largely failed to widen the electorate in 2016. Jackson, Inskeep noted, brought new voters into the American democratic experiment and gave a political voice to those who had previously been voiceless. But if Trump failed to do the same, he seems to have understood lessons about Jackson's success that progressives, to their detriment, have largely forgotten."

Andew Exum, though, at The Atlantic offers an alternate view.

"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.

"Past and Present Are Always Utterly Interdependent"

"Modern-day states' rightists and sometimes nullifiers embrace versions of federalism that might once have been thought all but buried in the mass slaughter of the Civil War, or in the imperatives of the New Deal's response to the Great Depression, or in the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, or in the battle over the Environmental Protection Agency. But history does not end; it keeps happening. The radical wing of the conservative movement in America, still ascendant in Congress and dominant in most of the South, seems determined to repeal much of the twentieth-century social legislation, and even tear up its constitutional and social roots in the transformations of the 1860s. As Americans disturbingly learn, generation after generation, many have never fully accepted the verdicts of Appomattox."


David W. Blight in The Atlantic argues that "not only is the Civil War not over; it can still be lost."

"An Era of Great Hope and Brutal Disappointment"

"Of course, these changes also produced a violent reaction. As his title suggests, Egerton devotes considerable attention to the actions of homegrown 'terrorists' like the Ku Klux Klan and kindred organizations, which systematically targeted local political leaders and teachers and were probably responsible for the deaths of more Americans than Osama bin Laden. Egerton makes the important point that the old idea of the South being subject to an overbearing military occupation is a myth. The Army was rapidly demobilized after the war ended.

"'Reconstruction did not fail,' Egerton states, 'it was violently overthrown.'"

Eric Foner in The New York Times reviews Douglas R. Egerton's The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era.

"More Than Any Man Except Abraham Lincoln, John Bingham Was Responsible for Establishing What the Civil War Meant for America’s Future"

"It is Bingham who is responsible for the words: 'No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'
"This sentence would be the legal basis for the Supreme Court’s subsequent decisions desegregating the public schools, securing equality for women, and creating the right to sexual privacy. Bingham also said that his text would also extend all of the protections of the Bill of Rights to the actions of state governments, which is largely, though not completely, the law today."

Gerard N. Magliocca in The New York Times discusses the "Father of the 14th Amendment."