Anniversary: Lincoln's Passing to the Ages

April 14th, 1865, there was another performance of Our American Cousin at the Ford Theater.  Abraham Lincoln had seen the play before but was in the mood for another night out with the wife.

The play itself doesn't translate well into the modern age.  It trades on the satirical views of Americans as simple-minded and vulgar, but also honest and blunt about the hypocrisies of European manners.  The selling points were the various ad-libs allowed to the minor characters such as Lord Dundreary, whose mixed-up bad homilies became known as "dundrearies"

But it was popular for the day, and akin to the modern audience's willingness to watch a half-decent Adam Sandler repeat on the Comedy Channel, Lincoln and others would re-watch repeat performances.

Lincoln was in a good mood anyway.  The war effort was winding down as Lee's surrender was the death-knell of the Confederacy's fighting spirit.  While the ongoing efforts to plan a reconstruction to bring the rebel states back into the Union were looking messy, there was a lot to look forward to.  He had plans to travel the length of the nation, to be the first President to view the Pacific coast from California, to be witness to the efforts of rebuilding the United States through Homestead-granted lands and pioneering citizens (in more fanciful what-ifs, Lincoln could well have visited San Francisco and met the Emperor Norton: there's evidence the two had exchanged letters...).

Unfortunately, the word that Lincoln would attend that evening's show got to an actor (I refuse to name him, although it's already too well-known) familiar to that theater (he was not a member of the cast) who also happened to be a Confederate sympathizer with a local circle of allies.  Seeing an opportunity to avenge a defeated Confederacy, he schemed a quick plan to act out his fantasies of being a national hero at the deadly expense of the nation's leader.

Which becomes one of the most macabre jokes in American history: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

The loss of Lincoln at the key moment of our history becomes one of the disasters that haunt us to this day.  Instead of a Republican with pragmatic and long-range visions of the national dilemmas over race and poverty leading our nation, we ended up with a Democrat in Andrew Johnson whose political ambitions drove him to institutionalize racism and allow the Southern political powers to retain control.

As much as we need to remember Lee's surrender at Appomattox, we need to remember how the loss of Lincoln tainted our nation's chances to build a stronger Republican that lacked the racism and hatred we cope with to this very day.

Anniversary: A Lot More Than Four-Score and Twenty Years Ago, Lincoln Spoke These Words

Just got a reminder from one of the references I work with at the library.

Today is the 150th Anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

As oratory goes, the address is short and simple.  The keynote speaker, Gov. Edward Everett, gave a more formal and better received speech at two hours length.

So why was the Gettysburg Address so famous while Everett's barely gets cited in any reference?

The Address has several advantages.  Its shortness made it perfect to fit on a single page and column of a newspaper.  It also makes it easier to memorize.

Above all, its simplicity in stating in such short words the cause of the war, and what the objective of the war should be:  A New Birth Of Freedom, from the end of slavery and the emancipation of blacks into American society.

...It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that 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.

The Cooper Union Speech Shows Us the War Is Not Really Over

(NOTE: Had to edit for an accidental grammar error)
As the Shutdown Showdown of 2013 continues unabated - and in fact may get worse - more and more critics of the modern GOP's hardline stance find themselves referring to Abraham Lincoln and the Cooper Union speech he gave before the November 1860 elections (before he even won the nomination for the Republican Party of that age).

Here's a link to the Cooper Union speech as provided by the National Parks Service:

Oops.

Here's another link that might still be up.  Most of the first half of the speech is Lincoln setting up his lawyer's argument about how the Constitution came to be, how the Founders themselves spelled out their opposition to slavery's extension, and how the Republicans of 1860 were adhering to that argument - stopping slavery's spread not slavery itself - against the wild accusations and demands of the Southern Democrats.  The Southern states even by that date were threatening open secession unless they got their way.  Lincoln eventually gets to the meat of the speech to argue against that, the part of the speech everyone's quoting:

But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.

That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.

When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

If the arguments, nay demands, of the 1860 Southern Democrats sound a lot like the rhetoric of the 2013 House Republicans and their Far Right spokespeople in the media, don't be surprised.  A lot of this has to do with the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party under Nixon back in the 1970s.

The South as a voting bloc had been virulently pro-slavery since the 1820s (perhaps even earlier), and when slavery bit the dust post-Civil War and post-13th Amendment the South went virulently anti-Black.  That region of the nation was basically allowed to act that way for roughly 100 years because the North got tired of trying to fix that shit and collectively gave up.  The only reason the United States took the Civil Rights efforts of Black Americans seriously by the 1960s was because of public relations: as a global power pushing for liberty against the wave of Soviet oppression, it was hypocritical of us to deny our own citizens their own freedom and rights under the law.

As the Democratic coalition fractured by 1968 with the Dixiecrats falling in power within their own ranks, the Republicans behind Goldwater and Nixon took notice and realized the South as a voting bloc was surprisingly tight (and growing as business markets shifted southward into Texas and Florida) and could be merged to the economic and religious conservatism of the GOP.  By the time of Reagan in 1980, he was able to put together a cultural/economic/religious voting bloc that led to a dynamic pro-Republican shift in the electoral system.

But now we're seeing the problem of going with the Southern Strategy.  By allowing a platform for the basically racist elements of the southern conservatives, the Republicans unwittingly (or even worse, willingly) allowed that strain of hate to spread to the other conservative elements of the party.  Why we're seeing Republicans from non-Southern places like Iowa and Ohio and California railing against social welfare services like food stamps is from the underlying belief that the primary recipients of social aid are Blacks and other minorities.

Joan Walsh in her Salon article:

Today, the entire government has been taken hostage by leaders elected by this crazed minority, who see in the face of Barack Obama everything they've been taught to fear for 50 years. Start with miscegenation: He’s not just black, he’s the product of a black father and a white mother. (That helps explain an unconscious motive for Birtherism: They can’t get their minds off the circumstances of his conception and birth.) With his Ivy League degrees, they are sure he must be the elitist beneficiary of affirmative action. Steeped in Chicago politics, he’s the representative of corrupt urban machines controlled by Democrats – machines that ironically originated with the Irish and once kept African-Americans down, but which are now synonymous with corrupt black power...

Obama's brought all this hatred out in a big way.  Part of the open hatred the GOP and the Far Right have towards Obama is that he's a Democrat interrupting the Glorious Pax Reaganicus Era of tax cuts, deregulation, and Commie-bashing (even though tax cuts didn't work, deregulation is why we're in our current mess, and Commie-bashing went out when Communism did).  But a lot of that hate is because of who Obama is as a person: they flat out can't accept him as an American at all, which is where the Birther obsession and the Kenyan Socialist obsession and Secret Muslim bomb-thrower obsession all come from.  That's not because he's a Democrat: Clinton never got this level of outrage, at worst he was a philandering pot-smoking hippie to them.

But racism is only part of the problem here.  The Southern Conservative mindset is obsessed with "their" rights above the rights of everyone else.  To them, they've got a right to abide their own laws, they've got a right to ignore laws they don't like.  The old strain of Nullification, the belief in State Rights that under the 10th Amendment they can do anything at the state level and to hell with anything federal law or Supreme Court interpretations of federalism - say, the court's approval of the Health Care Reform law (aka Obamacare) - have to say about it.

The Southern Conservative - the template of the modern Far Right wingnut - has no true love for the Federal Government, especially not a Federal government that insists on civil rights or regulatory practices.  The Republican outrage towards a 14th Amendment that both applies due process to all states and recognizes equal citizenship to all Americans is as much a target of their anger as Obama himself.

And all that anger, all that frustration has led them to this shore.  To a point where they don't mind - hell, they WANT to do this - shutting down the federal government the Far Right wingnuts view as The Enemy.

The Civil War is not over.  Not as long as there are wingnuts out there convinced of their radicalism - as Sully notes, this hasn't been true conservatism in ages - against the very concept of a United States of America.  No matter how much they try to wrap themselves up in the Stars And Stripes, they've made it abundantly clear they are the banner carriers of the Stars And Bars.  The Far Right Wingnuts want to Nullify laws they don't like.  They want to punish - if not banish - political leaders they don't like.

The Far Right Wingnuts want to rule or ruin.  We've seen them rule and it wasn't pretty.  Now they want to ruin.  At all costs.  And the way the situation is now, they're ruining us no matter what the rest of the nation wants.

For the LOVE OF GOD, stop voting Republican.

Presidential Character: Week Seventeen, A Vice President That Never Should Have Been Tapped In the First Place...

...except for the fact that President Lincoln and the Republican Party wanted to present a Union ticket in the midst of the Civil War, and so tapped a Senator in Andrew Johnson from a rebelling state (Tennessee) to fill the not-so-important job of backup pitcher Vice President.

Which, as history is so fond of pointing out, is never a good idea.  Picking a Vice President not on merit but on ticket balancing always comes back to bite ya in the ass (and rarely is that ever a good thing.  Maybe once in our history has it worked well to the nation's benefit).

I've railed against this before, in my talks about Vice Presidents being both a redundancy AND a headache in the worst of circumstances.  What happened here - with Lincoln dying on the eve of victory over the Confederacy, and Johnson promoted to the Oval Office at the beginning of a serious Reconstruction moment - should always be used as Exhibit A on getting rid Veeps and replacing them with a more Senate-oriented office.  It should certainly makes parties and Presidential candidates go with Best-Possible-Choice as Veep with regards to getting someone who complements (not contradicts, which is what most ticket-balancers are) the head of the ticket and the party.

Whereas Lincoln was "liberal" in the small-L sense - pro-government, for one thing - Andrew Johnson was more conservative.  Whereas Lincoln showed a propensity for deal-making, compromising, and maneuverability, Johnson was upfront and bull-headed.  Where Lincoln was Active-Positive, Johnson showed every trait of being Active-Negative.

That A-N trait was easy to spot: Johnson had a habit during his congressional career of making himself disliked and advocating for positions that were popular among the gentry - he supported direct election of Senators, which at the time was a radical anti-state party position - but not among the elites.  As President he quickly developed an Uncompromising reputation, which at first the Republicans in Congress thought would mean Johnson being harsh towards the rebel South.

The problem was that the Northern Republicans mis-interpreted Johnson's hatred of the Southern political machinery.  Johnson hated the oligarchs - the landed slave-owners - but not his fellow Southern whites that made up Johnson's voting base.  Worse, Johnson sought to re-secure that power base by appealing to those Southern white voters... which meant Johnson wanted the Southern state governments back up and running and also meant Johnson didn't give a rat's ass about the newly freed Blacks.

Gotta read Eric Foner's Reconstruction, a review of this era, to get more understanding of the damage Johnson did to post-Civil War American history.  Johnson during the post-war period vetoed against any federal efforts to improve freedmen rights.  He openly campaigned against financial or educational aid, claiming it would make Blacks "indolent".  He argued that aid to the Blacks meant punishing the Whites.  Rather than see the benefits of having a newly emerged voting bloc - freed Blacks - as part of a voting base that would have included moderate Whites, Johnson decided to throw all in against Blacks... basically creating a campaign method the Deep South would utilize for another 100 years (and in some parts even longer).

His veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the break with the Republican Party that had brought him into the Union ticket.  Congress overrode that veto: the first time a vetoed bill had been overridden (other veto overrides were negotiated into compromised deals).  From then on they were in full opposition... and Johnson's mishandling of the political stage - his A-N view made him arrogant enough to think he had more support across the nation than he did - led to massive Republican gains in the midterms, creating an environment where a hostile President and hostile Congress were at political war.

That Johnson was impeached should not come as a surprise: when you have an A-N President - habitually conservative by nature - opposing a technically liberal Congress - the Radical Republicans of that era were Leftist (albeit pro-business: unions were not a vogue thing for liberals yet) rather than Far Right of this era - the urge to remove the A-N President is pretty high (and given how liberal/left have pro-government leanings, relying on government rules to fix a problem is a basic instinct).  That Johnson really wasn't a Republican (echoes of Tyler) while Congress was made up of Republicans added to the likelihood.  Problem was Johnson may have been a pain-in-the-ass and a g-ddamn racist, but he wasn't as corrupt as some of the other impeachable A-Ns tend to be.  So Congress created a law they knew Johnson would break - the Tenure of Office Act - and basically dared him to break it.

Never dare an A-N President to do anything, because he will do it despite the trap.  Using the moment to get rid of a Cabinet troublemaker - Secretary of War Stanton - Johnson fired a member of his administration without getting Congressional approval.  Arguing that since the Senate had to approve Presidential nominees, the Republicans claimed they needed approval of firings as well, a right never spelled out in the Constitution.      With their excuse in place, the House voted to impeach Johnson, the first impeachment vote to pass against a President.  It then went to the Senate for what most Republicans saw as a fait accompli.

That Johnson survived the impeachment by one vote remains a major surprise in American history.  What happened were a series of other factors: Johnson's lawyers were able to argue - rather correctly - that the Tenure of Office's wording meant that Johnson could not fire his own nominated Cabinet members, and since Stanton wasn't (he was held over from Lincoln's) the law did not apply; Johnson, facing his own political demise, finally offered up concessions to the moderate Republicans that wavered their vote; and given the nature of politics (then and sadly now) there were reports of bribery (never proven).  It also helped Johnson that the potential replacement - at the time, new Vice Presidents were not installed as they would be under the 25th Amendment, it would have been the Senator Pro Tem (oldest member of the majority party) - was such a Radical Republican (Benjamin Wade was on record supporting Women's suffrage which horrified even the Radicals who supported the right of voting for Black (men)) that the moderates preferred Johnson over Wade.  One other fear that had to have been in the backs of many a Republican Senator's mind was that a successful impeachment would have broken the independence of the Executive branch: from then on any President would have been terrified of getting impeached if he didn't do what Congress - even controlled by his own party - asked.  While impeachment is a legitimate mechanism for removing from office someone who could abuse the office, there has to be a legitimate reason for doing so.  And the Tenure of Office Act wasn't legitimate (future Supreme Court rulings confirmed the law was Unconstitutional).

Johnson's remaining tenure after the impeachment was brief and relatively uneventful, due to it being an election year.  As for his impact on the nation, Johnson left a lasting legacy of racial politics that could have ended in 1865 instead of perpetuating until 1965.

Next week: A Really Bad President... But NOT for the Reasons His Critics Argued for a Century

Presidential Character: Week Sixteen, Lincoln

Do you know how hard it is to come up with a quirky blog entry title for a man whose eloquence made him possibly the greatest orator/wordsmith this nation's ever produced?  I mean, I could have gone with "The Better Angel of Our Nature" or "Time is a Great Thickener of Things" or "Honey, You Sure We Couldn't Take This Evening to Avoid The Theater and Go Shopping Instead?"

...okay, that was rude.  I'll start over.

In my railings about the failings of the 14th and 15th Presidents - Pierce and Buchanan - I pined for the intervention of an Active-Positive (or a pro-Union Active-Negative) President.  In the facts of the slow slog towards a civil war I noted that an Active-Positive - with the character traits of Adaptive forward-thinking, willingness to Compromise, eager to take great leaps of action - could well have delayed or countered the move to civil war... or at least hang the SOBs trying to start one before it got underway (yeah, even an A-P would do that.  An Active-Negative surely would have blunt and to the point, but at least an Active-Positive would have done it with some style and panache).

Pity of it all it, in the end it was the election of such an Active-Positive character in the form of Abraham Lincoln that basically gave the Southern agitators the excuse they needed to secede from the Union.

In reviewing the materials James David Barber came out with to categorize Presidential Character, I found at least one place online where a fellow student of Barber's work listed Lincoln as an Active-Negative.  Which I found odd.  While Lincoln's personal habits veered toward chronic depression - I'll grant you serving as President during the nation's bloodiest war would make such depression worse - Lincoln's character traits fit well into the corner for Active-Positive.

Lincoln was first and foremost self-deprecating ("does not take himself too seriously") and quick to tell humorous tales.  Lincoln may have committed such acts as suspending Habeus and issuing a Emancipation Proclamation that had questionable legal authority, but he exercised such use of power not to his benefit but to that of others (again, A-P traits).

Lincoln also got his opponents - both the Southern oligarchs and rivals within his own party - to self-immolate, usually by him taking flexible positions on an issue and then waiting for his opponents to either stake a radical claim against it that would fall under its own weight, or else using that flexibility to isolate that opponent and end the debate.  His handling of an inter-Cabinet squabble between his biggest rivals - Seward, who was competent but ambitious, and Chase, who was ambitious and... well, with a sizable faction backing him - was a very shrewd, adept political move that only an A-P could pull off.

As for getting the Southern slave-owners - the power-brokers that sought secession if there were any threat to their political dominance of the past 40 to 60 years - to self-immolate, it was easy.  In his own Cooper Union speech, Lincoln noted full well the South threatened to rebel if any Republican won the White House that election year of 1860: 

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

Likening it to extortion - "My way or the highway" - Lincoln was able to carve out a moral high ground against the true radicalism of slave-owners.  He was able to constantly find a moral high ground against a group that resorted more to mob mentality and violent bullying, and in a way far opposite of other abolitionists like John Brown who succumbed to violence as a first action and thus lost any moral authority to speak against secessionists.

You can argue when or where the Civil War technically started - maybe Lincoln's election, maybe Bleeding Kansas, maybe the Mexican-American War... if you follow the argument back far enough you could take it all the way back to 1776 when John Adams predicted the Founding Fathers' failure to end slavery as they signed a Declaration of Independence would doom the nation in 100 years (he was off by a decade) - but the fighting itself started with the South firing on Fort Sumter.  Up until then peaceful resolutions could be had.  Whereas Lincoln's predecessor Buchanan allowed seceding states to seize land forts, seaborne forts such as Fort Sumter in Charleston and Fort Pickens in Pensacola were still under Union control... and Lincoln wasn't about to surrender them as he could claim they were federal land thus federal control.  And, crafty that he was, he settled on the forts being supplied with non-weapon material (food, potable water, construction) and let the South know that it was all he was sending, just to keep the troops properly stocked.  All he had to do was wait for his Southern rival Jefferson Davis to get an itchy trigger finger... and Davis, facing a situation where inaction would cost him and his nascent Confederacy much-needed membership of Virginia (which both voted against secession YET also voted a resolution noting they would join the Confederacy if fighting started) as well as weakening resolve of member states (every state save South Carolina had its pro-Union movements), decided to take the shot and go to war (Davis would have done better to wait for the shooting to start at Fort Pickens because that fort was being relieved with a gunship whereas Fort Sumter wasn't, but I digress).  While the South did - and still does much to this blogger's continual annoyance yo rednecks WAR'S OVER YOU LOST - claim a war of "Northern Aggression", Lincoln and the Union/Abolitionists could well argue it was the South that wanted a fight - and the track history of Nullifiers like John C. Calhoun is Courtroom People's Evidence A - and by gum they got one.

Above all, the forward-thinking: Lincoln was an ardent abolitionist.  Although he wasn't a pure Radical in the regards of "full equality" (and his early Presidential attempts to have freed slaves relocate elsewhere wasn't a very enlightened position), Lincoln viewed slavery as abhorrent to the Republic's principles of freedom.  And yet even there Lincoln demonstrated his Adaptive, compromising nature: while he couldn't before 1864 make an open move to free the slaves (lest he lose border states like Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland), he worked his way towards the Emancipation Proclamation where he only declared the slaves in the Confederate states freed and only as a means to fight and end the civil war.  As he wrote to Horace Greeley, the Glenn Beck of the age:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I highlighted that last bit.  I see in that statement the view of an A-P with Adaptive tendencies.  Not a flip-flopper who tries to say one thing and then another without cause or merit, but someone who would seriously consider the issue, and change his mind where and when it needed to change.

Lincoln also presided over one of the earliest liberal federal government tenures in history.  Even during the time-consuming and life-devastating Civil War efforts, Lincoln and a Republican Congress - freed rather ironically from the obstructionist forces of Southern states - passed a slew of forward-looking bills and oversaw more growth and expansion of the nation's economic power.  He signed the Homestead Act to encourage settlers into the expansive Western territories; he signed the Land-Grant act establishing state public colleges and universities, the first major expansion of higher education across the nation; he signed the funding for the Transcontinental Railroad, a major transportation bill akin to previous acts that created roads and canals that benefited trade and industry and made it easier for the nation to become connected to itself.

Of course, the signature element of Lincoln's administration was the Civil War, and the conduct thereof.  In leadership as Commander-in-Chief he acquitted himself well: unlike Davis who meddled frequently and made  command decisions often by personal bias favoring ill-suited generals over more competent ones - the lone exception was with Robert E. Lee, who proved himself the best commander they could hope to have on the Virginian front - Lincoln relied on the military advisers he had - General Scott for starters, Secretaries Gideon Welles and Edwin Stanton later - to conduct the war.  If he meddled it was because he had to: his East Coast army generals were not a desirable lot with flaws aplenty.  The first one McDowell proved unready for battlefield command.  McClellan was a better organizer, but proved cautious to the point of cowardice and even worse treated his civilian boss with disdain (and occasional open contempt).  Pope was headstrong but foolish.  McClellan got promoted back up... and then still screwed up, even WITH one of the luckiest breaks of the war landing right into his lap (Lee's plans to invade Maryland and northward by recklessly dividing his army at their most weakest).  McClellan delayed for 18 key hours, and by the time he confronted Lee at Antietam all advantage had been lost.  McClellan's army won the battle but failed to follow up, driving Lincoln to go with Burnside next.  Nice guy, lousy general.  Joseph Hooker was next, a better general than the previous lot but still got his ass handed to him by Lee.  Meade replaced him, with Meade finally being the general who knew what he was doing and secured a Union victory at Gettysburg (the point of the war where the South truly lost: sheer stubbornness over slavery, outright racism, and fantastical belief that France and England would recognize a slave-owning Confederacy kept the war going for two more bloody years).  But even Meade proved too slow to stop Lee's escape, leaving Lincoln to bring up U.S. Grant.  And from there on Lincoln had the right general for the job.

One thing to note about Lincoln's A-P trait was the leniency he showed towards troops charged with desertion, sleeping at post, and cowardice.  A good number of officers hated it that he let so many cases be pardoned - they wanted discipline and the occasional punishment they felt would get it - but rules were rules, such matters had to pass the President's desk... and in his own words "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley (sp?) agitator who induces him to desert?"  To me, in the whole madness of the war itself, is the best measure of the man.

Much can be said about Lincoln's eloquence.  Much to be said about his compassion for others.  Still more to be said about his hopes of what he would do once the bloody business of the war had ended: he spoke of traveling west to California and be the first President to reach the far coastline and measure the size and strength and diversity of the nation itself.  It had become a massive place even with the strife... and with the binding of the nation's wounds it would have been again.  If only...

Of his Active-Positive traits, I have no doubt.  What would have happened with that trait had he avoided that fate waiting for him at Ford's Theater... speculation is all we have now.  That and the better angels of our nature which he sought to introduce to ourselves.

Next time: Another Reason Why Vice Presidents Really Aren't That All Needed...