At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort built on an artificial island in Charleston Harbor. Attacking the fort seemed a logical outcome of events that had been in play for at least four months. On December 20, 1860, as soon as it was clear Abraham Lincoln had won the 1860 presidential election, South Carolina lawmakers had taken their state out of the Union. “The whole town [of Charleston] was in an uproar,” Elizabeth Allston recalled. “Parades, shouting, firecrackers, bells ringing, cannon on the forts booming, flags waving, and excited people thronging the streets.”
It's an important reminder that even now the battle lines are drawn, and intentionally obscured. While people are told by Fox 'News', or ignorant wealthy narcissists that the battle lines are around the woke versus 'true patriots', the battle is really organized wealth versus people.
While pawns are indoctrinated as 'patriots' they parrot what they are told without any thought. They are told nonsense like the election was stolen, caravans of drug dealers and rapists are passing through the southern border in order to vote in our elections and take well-paying jobs as executives and senior managers, "Big Solar" is lying about climate change, healthcare for all will result in 2-3 year waiting periods to be seen by a doctor, and that regulation and enforcement of things like food and water safety, and air pollution are just examples of a big, bloated, "Big Nanny" government intruding in our lives -and controlling women's bodies is, I can't even explain using MAGA logic.
This is all about misdirection and greed. Misdirection divides us while democracy, justice, and the quality of life for this and future generations are siphoned off and given to the already wealthy in the form of tax cuts and privatization.
The South was all about the concentration and preservation of wealth (and slavery was the egregious method used to enrich already wealthy white landowners).
The same battle lines are drawn today -the cultists and/or the willfully ignorant are just intentionally directed at the wrong arena.
What a terrible disaster was the Civil War. I was born and raised in Maryland, a segregated state the significance of which I didn’t comprehend until I was in an all white high school. Then I discovered that not far from where I lived was an all black community. The children wee all bused a long distance to an all black high school on the other side of the county. The University of Maryland was close to where I lived. Students there every year held so-called minstrel shows. They were very popular in their racial baiting of whites featured with black faces. Funny then but horrific as I matured into understanding about segregated
schools and in every aspect of our segregated society. Thankfully, as I went away to college and graduate school I was part of integrated situations including lasting friendships with black friends. Martin Luther King became the most influential person in my life. Civil rights became my cause including involvement as a Presbyterian minister with other church leaders of all faiths in the civil rights movement In Mississippi. That included a brief stay in the county jail of several of us. Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson, my favorite author these days, for her article above. Her daily articles are the first thing I read every morning.
And on Monday, jury selection will begin. And those who still support T**** will have to face reality: their candidate will be tried in a criminal court, likely to be found guilty of the charges based on the preponderance of evidence. Will this keep them from voting for him in November? Or will his loss (he's a loser, remember) in November make them want to take themselves out of the Union.
The question is not, are all humans created equal, but rather, do we choose to treat them as equals? Not one of us possesses the standing or the competence to assign equality to a fellow human. Humans choose to diminish other humans because they can. Whatever we choose to believe is the source of human life, we are but agents in the process; the source of life is beyond our grasp. Yet, we choose to permit human exploitation because we can. We do have a lot of work to do, don't we?
Can we say, today, that "all men are created equal"?
Clearly some tens of millions of Americans relish public displays of inferiority -- of mental pygmy-ism, delusional nonsense, illiterate ridge-runner talk, and gaseous clouds of lies spun first and foremost by the orange-entertainer-in-chief.
Trouble is, we can't enjoy that show because of the damage it allows dictators like Putin to do to whole countries, the damage it allows medievalists, perjurers, and the bribed on the Clarence court to do to tens of millions of American women denied their health care and personal freedom.
So rather than play dumb, and permit, egg on the reign of the hucksters, let's face it: we can only have equality if our schools have higher standards -- if our schools employ, model, celebrate much higher literate arts. We need to quote those better than us -- artists in many fields -- in detail examining, enjoying the individual lives of others in their circumstances.
Our schools don't do this (for any reasons), the vaudeville goes on.
Thank you, Prof Richardson, as a devoted reader and a still-learning elder, for rewarding us with more specifics ( Washington elites taking picnic baskets out to watch the battle of Bull Run)
along w commentary from a few survivors.
Our current battles of words and courtroom scenes and online ramblings
often elicit similar hate-filled passions.
The essence of who we are nationally is now so important to the world at large that we must continue to LEARN PEACE. Educate Ourselves and our Children to the truth of hard work, even-tempered social interaction and Equality of Opportunity.
Or we dissolve. . In bubbling reactionary verbiage and anger.
The huge financial buttressing of Mr Trump and his shredded crude dramas to ‘return to the White House ‘ must be constantly fended off with truth, repeated over & over day in, day out.
When our work is successful, we can grab our picnic baskets and meet on our village and neighborhood greens to ponder the next steps to reinforce equality for all… even immigrants from faraway places.
It’s too late at night & it’s been a difficult day. I want to sleep in peace, so I tried to respond to your offering this evening!
I have so much more to learn. Thank you for your commitment to helping all of us gain a clearer view of how historical activity colors, defines and suggests new directions for our present!
This post is powerful, poignant and pertinent to our present condition. Altogether too many of our fellow citizens think the time is ripe for a new civil war; others say, "bring it on." As it was in the 1860s, one side is more vociferous than the other. With her customary concision, Dr. Richardson summarizes the enormous costs of the decisions made in support of those 19th century attitudes. This is a classic example of the more recent aphorism, "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it."
I was particularly struck by this quote from Lincoln:
“You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”
It seems to me that there are now a large number of people in our country who are willing to be ridden by the current members of the class Lincoln decried in the false hope that they will be better off, when in fact this would lead to their virtual enslavement. It is hard thing to make democracy work. It takes a lot of effort on the part of both individuals and the institutions they establish to support it. A lot of people are unwilling to put in that effort, deferring to false prophets who offer them security in exchange for their liberty. Let us hope that a larger number of people will continue to support a democratic system that is ideally of, by, and for the people. All the people.
There I go bolting for a tangent on Ukraine! This explains a lot of my hawkishness: the conviction that this ghastly invasion will end up requiring something close to, or actual, unconditional surrender. President Lincoln apparently faced some Northerners who wanted to let the South leave peacefully.
Perhaps these Northerners deemed slavery a dirty business. The President dismissed that idea as unconstitutional, interestingly and astutely arguing that, once that precedent had been set, then the Union would fragment into petty princedoms, dissolving eventually unto anarchy.
Putin sees the ghastly invasion of Ukraine as an existential war. He believes that, allowing Ukraine to leave peacefully in 1991, not only broke up the U.S.S.R., but also started the eventual fragmentation of Russia-proper. Thus re-conquering Ukraine is essential to keeping Russia together.
With the wars in Chechnya and unrest elsewhere, Putin may be right. So, is he right to attack Ukraine as President Lincoln counter-attacked the Confederates? Absolutely not. The differences then? The Confederate states were part of a Union into which they had entered voluntarily.
Ukraine, however, was conquered territory. Her exit from the Soviet Union was more like a move toward de-colonialism vis à vis an evil empire. Another difference: while the North and South had wrangled, the North did not display a genocidal intent toward the states in rebellion.
This was a great historical read about the North and the South during the Civil War. Thousands of life's were sacrificed and fighting against each other because of the color of a man's skin. And where are we today? With the acceptance of people of color? Sure we have made progress , but not enough.
We're reverting backwards with hatred and division that Trump has instilled in this country and the American people for 8 damn years. We have alot to be concerned about in this election.
Our Democracy and our freedom. Women rights to choose, and our civil rights.
Let us work, hope and pray that we never have to utter these words in our time.
While Heather's aces high analogy bridging the leadup to the Civil War to our just-about-now time shines through her solid rendering of the Election of 1860 and its aftermath, methinks the comparison ultimately falls short.
In 1860, our young Republic was nearly two score from its centennial year. We had 34 States in the Union. Only White Men could vote in national elections. Four political parties vied for the White House. And the institution of slavery, present since the founding, was economically integrated both horizontally and vertically. Slavery and its shrinking or its expansion was at the very heart of the election that year.
In stark contrast, in the Year of our Lord 2024, we have only two major political parties. All citizens over 18 years of age and registered to vote can do so, and the contest is open within all 50 States. There is no one issue dominating the political discussion as slavery did 164 years ago.
There is however, an unspoken and indeed a nearly unconscious issue dividing voters both then and now. The propelling vision of our National purpose was put forth by a young political thinker in 1776, a man whose wealth allowed him the time and space to build upon both his philosophical nature, and his revolutionary spirit. True, his Enlightenment sensibility sparred with his vast land owning and slave holding practicality, to the extent that he could pen the most poetic of paeans to human governance---"All Men are created Equal"---while watching the prisoners of a most unequal status toil his vineyards where the grapes of later wrath were stored.
Thomas Jefferson's equality of man is an idea sunk deep within the very sinews of all Americans, irrespective of whether it was fully realized or not. From the time Washington raised his battle weathered right hand to take the oath as our first President on that spring day on Wall Street in 1789, to the day Lincoln rose his right hand to swear the identical oath with the smoke from a horrific Civil War still streaming wispily through Washington D.C. in 1865, slavery was the albatross around the neck of the Republic. Yet, once said albatross was dead and gone, its spirit still remained.
An odious spirit that manifested itself in opposing virtually every movement for equality and respect, from the sharecroppers' dilemma to that of the Bonus Marchers, from the Suffragettes' struggle to that of the United Farm Workers, from Matewan to Delano, from Selma to Stonewall, the struggle of the disenfranchised and the disrespected, against the deeply rooted mindset of "that's the way it is"
Our Nation's founding ideals have been at war with its long standing consciousness, and its conscious practicalities since at least the time Sally Hemmings' beauty caught the eye of the Sage of Monticello.
Contradictions abound, multitudes are contained, and on we go, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past".
Given our human tendency to compare our best, if not our ideal, self to others' often worst moments, I often wonder where I might have fallen had I been part of a different historical time. Would I have had the gift of truth and seen all races as equal? (Time would tell that "equal" was a slippery concept for many as post Civil War attitudes and policies, though moving from actual, literal enslavement, were hardly the stuff of true equality). Or would I have accepted the environment in which I lived, an environment, even in the north, where the concept of equality was more an ideal than something treated as true in real existence? Of course, I love to believe that I'd have been a voice (a woman could be little more) calling for what was right and just, but I do wonder...
The civil war still goes on perpetuated by the descendants of that time’s recalcitrants. It’s delusional backwards way of thinking has spread to other states the idea that some are better than others. Their misguided way of thinking shows up today in Arizona with it’s Supreme Court going backwards to grab a law banning abortion circa 1864. It shows up in Congress with extreme republicans taking over one of our political parties. It shows up in individuals like Greg Abbot, Ken Paxton, Kari Lake, Marjorie Green, Scott Perry to name just a few. It’s the strong urge of some who have power and influence to hold the nation back. To find comfort in earlier times that were not better. Yes its still as tho we are still engaged in civil war struggle by other means. Now the thinking that caused the South to secede threatens our national security, women’s rights, voting rights, governance itself. There is a case to be made that the civil war still goes on perpetuated by old south thought.
This essay is about perhaps the most tragic or one of the most tragic periods of time and events in the history of our country, one that could pale beside what will happen with a second Trump administration. The essay, however, also made me think about the remarkable inconsistency between the belief by many that some are born superior to others, and the belief that all life, even in a test tube, even when the life of the mother is at risk, even if the fetus can be determined to be non-viable, has "personhood" rights. I am no philosophical intellect, but to guarantee freedom for an embryo and deny freedom to women, to people of all colors, to LGBTQ, to religions other than Christian, to the poor and underprivileged, is as hypocritical as Trump saying the Bible is his favorite book. We must rise up against this oppressive hypocrisy.
Great essay. Now I would like to see an essay about how it came to pass that Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis both responsible for the deaths of 339,000 Union soldiers died free men. If slavery was our original sin, surely our failure to punish the traitors who nearly destroyed the Union is our second sin.
Thank you Professor Richardson.
It's an important reminder that even now the battle lines are drawn, and intentionally obscured. While people are told by Fox 'News', or ignorant wealthy narcissists that the battle lines are around the woke versus 'true patriots', the battle is really organized wealth versus people.
While pawns are indoctrinated as 'patriots' they parrot what they are told without any thought. They are told nonsense like the election was stolen, caravans of drug dealers and rapists are passing through the southern border in order to vote in our elections and take well-paying jobs as executives and senior managers, "Big Solar" is lying about climate change, healthcare for all will result in 2-3 year waiting periods to be seen by a doctor, and that regulation and enforcement of things like food and water safety, and air pollution are just examples of a big, bloated, "Big Nanny" government intruding in our lives -and controlling women's bodies is, I can't even explain using MAGA logic.
This is all about misdirection and greed. Misdirection divides us while democracy, justice, and the quality of life for this and future generations are siphoned off and given to the already wealthy in the form of tax cuts and privatization.
The South was all about the concentration and preservation of wealth (and slavery was the egregious method used to enrich already wealthy white landowners).
The same battle lines are drawn today -the cultists and/or the willfully ignorant are just intentionally directed at the wrong arena.
What a terrible disaster was the Civil War. I was born and raised in Maryland, a segregated state the significance of which I didn’t comprehend until I was in an all white high school. Then I discovered that not far from where I lived was an all black community. The children wee all bused a long distance to an all black high school on the other side of the county. The University of Maryland was close to where I lived. Students there every year held so-called minstrel shows. They were very popular in their racial baiting of whites featured with black faces. Funny then but horrific as I matured into understanding about segregated
schools and in every aspect of our segregated society. Thankfully, as I went away to college and graduate school I was part of integrated situations including lasting friendships with black friends. Martin Luther King became the most influential person in my life. Civil rights became my cause including involvement as a Presbyterian minister with other church leaders of all faiths in the civil rights movement In Mississippi. That included a brief stay in the county jail of several of us. Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson, my favorite author these days, for her article above. Her daily articles are the first thing I read every morning.
And on Monday, jury selection will begin. And those who still support T**** will have to face reality: their candidate will be tried in a criminal court, likely to be found guilty of the charges based on the preponderance of evidence. Will this keep them from voting for him in November? Or will his loss (he's a loser, remember) in November make them want to take themselves out of the Union.
The question is not, are all humans created equal, but rather, do we choose to treat them as equals? Not one of us possesses the standing or the competence to assign equality to a fellow human. Humans choose to diminish other humans because they can. Whatever we choose to believe is the source of human life, we are but agents in the process; the source of life is beyond our grasp. Yet, we choose to permit human exploitation because we can. We do have a lot of work to do, don't we?
Can we say, today, that "all men are created equal"?
Clearly some tens of millions of Americans relish public displays of inferiority -- of mental pygmy-ism, delusional nonsense, illiterate ridge-runner talk, and gaseous clouds of lies spun first and foremost by the orange-entertainer-in-chief.
Trouble is, we can't enjoy that show because of the damage it allows dictators like Putin to do to whole countries, the damage it allows medievalists, perjurers, and the bribed on the Clarence court to do to tens of millions of American women denied their health care and personal freedom.
So rather than play dumb, and permit, egg on the reign of the hucksters, let's face it: we can only have equality if our schools have higher standards -- if our schools employ, model, celebrate much higher literate arts. We need to quote those better than us -- artists in many fields -- in detail examining, enjoying the individual lives of others in their circumstances.
Our schools don't do this (for any reasons), the vaudeville goes on.
Thank you, Prof Richardson, as a devoted reader and a still-learning elder, for rewarding us with more specifics ( Washington elites taking picnic baskets out to watch the battle of Bull Run)
along w commentary from a few survivors.
Our current battles of words and courtroom scenes and online ramblings
often elicit similar hate-filled passions.
The essence of who we are nationally is now so important to the world at large that we must continue to LEARN PEACE. Educate Ourselves and our Children to the truth of hard work, even-tempered social interaction and Equality of Opportunity.
Or we dissolve. . In bubbling reactionary verbiage and anger.
The huge financial buttressing of Mr Trump and his shredded crude dramas to ‘return to the White House ‘ must be constantly fended off with truth, repeated over & over day in, day out.
When our work is successful, we can grab our picnic baskets and meet on our village and neighborhood greens to ponder the next steps to reinforce equality for all… even immigrants from faraway places.
It’s too late at night & it’s been a difficult day. I want to sleep in peace, so I tried to respond to your offering this evening!
I have so much more to learn. Thank you for your commitment to helping all of us gain a clearer view of how historical activity colors, defines and suggests new directions for our present!
This post is powerful, poignant and pertinent to our present condition. Altogether too many of our fellow citizens think the time is ripe for a new civil war; others say, "bring it on." As it was in the 1860s, one side is more vociferous than the other. With her customary concision, Dr. Richardson summarizes the enormous costs of the decisions made in support of those 19th century attitudes. This is a classic example of the more recent aphorism, "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it."
I was particularly struck by this quote from Lincoln:
“You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”
It seems to me that there are now a large number of people in our country who are willing to be ridden by the current members of the class Lincoln decried in the false hope that they will be better off, when in fact this would lead to their virtual enslavement. It is hard thing to make democracy work. It takes a lot of effort on the part of both individuals and the institutions they establish to support it. A lot of people are unwilling to put in that effort, deferring to false prophets who offer them security in exchange for their liberty. Let us hope that a larger number of people will continue to support a democratic system that is ideally of, by, and for the people. All the people.
There I go bolting for a tangent on Ukraine! This explains a lot of my hawkishness: the conviction that this ghastly invasion will end up requiring something close to, or actual, unconditional surrender. President Lincoln apparently faced some Northerners who wanted to let the South leave peacefully.
Perhaps these Northerners deemed slavery a dirty business. The President dismissed that idea as unconstitutional, interestingly and astutely arguing that, once that precedent had been set, then the Union would fragment into petty princedoms, dissolving eventually unto anarchy.
Putin sees the ghastly invasion of Ukraine as an existential war. He believes that, allowing Ukraine to leave peacefully in 1991, not only broke up the U.S.S.R., but also started the eventual fragmentation of Russia-proper. Thus re-conquering Ukraine is essential to keeping Russia together.
With the wars in Chechnya and unrest elsewhere, Putin may be right. So, is he right to attack Ukraine as President Lincoln counter-attacked the Confederates? Absolutely not. The differences then? The Confederate states were part of a Union into which they had entered voluntarily.
Ukraine, however, was conquered territory. Her exit from the Soviet Union was more like a move toward de-colonialism vis à vis an evil empire. Another difference: while the North and South had wrangled, the North did not display a genocidal intent toward the states in rebellion.
Has today's Fort Sumter moment perhaps come and gone, without reaction?
MAGA has occupied Congress, is holding the country hostage.
This was a great historical read about the North and the South during the Civil War. Thousands of life's were sacrificed and fighting against each other because of the color of a man's skin. And where are we today? With the acceptance of people of color? Sure we have made progress , but not enough.
We're reverting backwards with hatred and division that Trump has instilled in this country and the American people for 8 damn years. We have alot to be concerned about in this election.
Our Democracy and our freedom. Women rights to choose, and our civil rights.
"And then the war came"
Let us work, hope and pray that we never have to utter these words in our time.
While Heather's aces high analogy bridging the leadup to the Civil War to our just-about-now time shines through her solid rendering of the Election of 1860 and its aftermath, methinks the comparison ultimately falls short.
In 1860, our young Republic was nearly two score from its centennial year. We had 34 States in the Union. Only White Men could vote in national elections. Four political parties vied for the White House. And the institution of slavery, present since the founding, was economically integrated both horizontally and vertically. Slavery and its shrinking or its expansion was at the very heart of the election that year.
In stark contrast, in the Year of our Lord 2024, we have only two major political parties. All citizens over 18 years of age and registered to vote can do so, and the contest is open within all 50 States. There is no one issue dominating the political discussion as slavery did 164 years ago.
There is however, an unspoken and indeed a nearly unconscious issue dividing voters both then and now. The propelling vision of our National purpose was put forth by a young political thinker in 1776, a man whose wealth allowed him the time and space to build upon both his philosophical nature, and his revolutionary spirit. True, his Enlightenment sensibility sparred with his vast land owning and slave holding practicality, to the extent that he could pen the most poetic of paeans to human governance---"All Men are created Equal"---while watching the prisoners of a most unequal status toil his vineyards where the grapes of later wrath were stored.
Thomas Jefferson's equality of man is an idea sunk deep within the very sinews of all Americans, irrespective of whether it was fully realized or not. From the time Washington raised his battle weathered right hand to take the oath as our first President on that spring day on Wall Street in 1789, to the day Lincoln rose his right hand to swear the identical oath with the smoke from a horrific Civil War still streaming wispily through Washington D.C. in 1865, slavery was the albatross around the neck of the Republic. Yet, once said albatross was dead and gone, its spirit still remained.
An odious spirit that manifested itself in opposing virtually every movement for equality and respect, from the sharecroppers' dilemma to that of the Bonus Marchers, from the Suffragettes' struggle to that of the United Farm Workers, from Matewan to Delano, from Selma to Stonewall, the struggle of the disenfranchised and the disrespected, against the deeply rooted mindset of "that's the way it is"
Our Nation's founding ideals have been at war with its long standing consciousness, and its conscious practicalities since at least the time Sally Hemmings' beauty caught the eye of the Sage of Monticello.
Contradictions abound, multitudes are contained, and on we go, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past".
Given our human tendency to compare our best, if not our ideal, self to others' often worst moments, I often wonder where I might have fallen had I been part of a different historical time. Would I have had the gift of truth and seen all races as equal? (Time would tell that "equal" was a slippery concept for many as post Civil War attitudes and policies, though moving from actual, literal enslavement, were hardly the stuff of true equality). Or would I have accepted the environment in which I lived, an environment, even in the north, where the concept of equality was more an ideal than something treated as true in real existence? Of course, I love to believe that I'd have been a voice (a woman could be little more) calling for what was right and just, but I do wonder...
The civil war still goes on perpetuated by the descendants of that time’s recalcitrants. It’s delusional backwards way of thinking has spread to other states the idea that some are better than others. Their misguided way of thinking shows up today in Arizona with it’s Supreme Court going backwards to grab a law banning abortion circa 1864. It shows up in Congress with extreme republicans taking over one of our political parties. It shows up in individuals like Greg Abbot, Ken Paxton, Kari Lake, Marjorie Green, Scott Perry to name just a few. It’s the strong urge of some who have power and influence to hold the nation back. To find comfort in earlier times that were not better. Yes its still as tho we are still engaged in civil war struggle by other means. Now the thinking that caused the South to secede threatens our national security, women’s rights, voting rights, governance itself. There is a case to be made that the civil war still goes on perpetuated by old south thought.
This essay is about perhaps the most tragic or one of the most tragic periods of time and events in the history of our country, one that could pale beside what will happen with a second Trump administration. The essay, however, also made me think about the remarkable inconsistency between the belief by many that some are born superior to others, and the belief that all life, even in a test tube, even when the life of the mother is at risk, even if the fetus can be determined to be non-viable, has "personhood" rights. I am no philosophical intellect, but to guarantee freedom for an embryo and deny freedom to women, to people of all colors, to LGBTQ, to religions other than Christian, to the poor and underprivileged, is as hypocritical as Trump saying the Bible is his favorite book. We must rise up against this oppressive hypocrisy.
“I love mankind. It’s the people I can’t stand.” - Charles Schultz
Great essay. Now I would like to see an essay about how it came to pass that Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis both responsible for the deaths of 339,000 Union soldiers died free men. If slavery was our original sin, surely our failure to punish the traitors who nearly destroyed the Union is our second sin.