On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close.
The assassination of Lincoln and the subsequent ascension of Johnson to the presidency all but nullified the righteous goals achieved by the Union in the Civil War.
Hitler had many sympathizers in the US, and does to this day. (I had a co-worker who ,while removing a T shirt, revealed a tattoo of Hitler.)
Today’s lesson, on the anniversary of Appomattox, is as much current events as history.
I thought for certain you would mention the book "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson when you wrote "In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws..." Ms Wilkerson does a superb job of describing how impressed the Nazis were of our caste system.; calling it "Jim Crow" obscures the vile nature of the system of segregation and discrimination based on race in the USA.
“How can they help the conviction that the policy of the Executive is conciliation of rebels and not recognition of Union men, or avoid asking with intense incredulity whether this is the way in which treason is to be made odious?” That is the question not answered after the “end”. Forgive and forget? Not after the irreversible losses of those who fought to preserve the Union. To fight against slavery and racism. Today, here in a country that suffered such human losses, there are those who would return to white supremacist rule. We must pay attention. Tennessee is our Wake-up call, if we need one.
My goodness, Heather. I had to re-read several sentences to make sure you were writing about past history and not the recent history and today's current events. Take heed, everyone.
I've long maintained that Reconstruction was the wrong solution to the end of the Civil War. I realize that hindsight is 20/20; but the approach the Allies took after WWII was the correct one. By holding the Nuremberg tribunals and trying and then executing the leaders of the Third Reich, the Axis Powers were ground into dust.
Instead the CSA were given every chance, shown every mercy in defeat and allowed to keep their weapons, their horses and go back to their lands. What was their response? Black Codes, lynchings, the KKK, terrorizing the local Black populations. It was as if they were never defeated and the Great, Grand and Glorious Cause was still worth fighting and dying for. Only it wasn't them doing the dying. It was their formerly enslaved populations.
This ‘Letter’ is unbelievably prescient at a moment in our history when Tennessee has removed two legally elected electeds from its Legislature, extreme judges are disputing the medical decisions of our most respected federal agency guaranteeing drug safety and the highest court in our land has removed fundamental human rights from half of our citizenry….
This letter is one of my favorites so far. Thank you for taking the trouble to put complex thoughts and deeds - and their consequences - across so clearly. I'm especially pleased that you mentioned the Nazis' use of Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations as inspiration for their implementation of their ideas of their own supremacy and how to increase and maintain these. As someone who has lived most of her adult life (going on 45 years now) in Germany or one or the other German-speaking countries, the topics of fascism and nazism have been ever-present. A group of us from American high schools spent a year as exchange students in the western part of Germany in the 60's. We lived with host families whose parents had either grown up in Hitler's Germany or who were involved in WW2 - so we often got stories first hand about what it was like to be alive at that time, and to grow up being taught that they were a special race. My German host Mother showed me a number of things that still boggle my mind - one was a kind of Parcheesi game called "Juden Raus" or "Jews Out" - the goal of which was to get as many of the Jewish board pieces off the board as possible. Another was her "Ahnenpass" - "Ancestral Passport" - which included one of her great or great-great grandmothers who had a suspiciously Jewish sounding name. My host Mother said her family had lived for years in dread of what would happen if the wrong officials got their hands on that passport. My point is that there are many ways in which we teach ourselves and our children that others are inferior and we are superior - and that is very important to recognize and remember. I hate and condemn what the Nazis did in Germany, but I also believe that this kind of thinking is always among us, even in America.
"By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence."
The distinction between the two founding documents, and noted shortcomings of the Constitution, could not be more relevant to explaining our current plight.
The forces allied against democracy have highlighted the now apparent intent of the founding fathers to enshrine principles that would allow minority rule by the white, male elite. If we survive the current attack, those flaws must go.
As a white person of Southern ancestry, it saddens me to think how long these myths were perpetuated. The untimely death of Lincoln certainly played a role,, but we suffer today from a lack of shared history in this country, and it plays out in so many ways. In my own family, a story was passed down that one of my great grandfathers, a Baptist minister with a Victorian demeanor to judge from his sermons, attended college on money borrowed from Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy's vice president. How, I always wondered, did Stephens have money to loan after the defeat of the Confederacy? Only recently did I learn that slaveholders were compensated for the loss of the people they enslaved, and he must have gotten a lot of money. A Stephens descendent was still representing a district in northeast Georgia until some time in the 1970s.
Racism and white elitism wasn't particular to the American South: the White Man's Burden was writ large across much of the world until the 1940s at least (and sadly lingers in far too many places still). So I wonder how much differently outcomes would have been in the longer term were Lincoln not to have been assassinated. The lesson applied at the end of World War II was the Marshall Plan which avoided the punitive treatment Germans received after WWI. We are in a terrible mess at the moment, there is no doubt about that but I am not sure what lesson history is telling us other than get out the vote and seek some non-threatening way to bring back reasoned debate. I see far too many lessons in history of self-destructive violence and revolutions eating their children. I suppose the greatest lesson I get from this letter is that every alarm bell should be ringing.
"The decision of government officials 158 years ago to trust in the goodwill of former Confederates rather than focus on justice for everyone else seemed at the time to be the honorable and best course for healing the divided nation. But it ended up protecting the Confederates’ ideology and disheartening those who had fought for the United States."
This is a lesson that MUST be correctly applied with respect to the former guy and MAGA Republicans, otherwise we are doomed. It is obvious that there is no goodwill in these people.
If someone were to fly a flag with the Swastika on it, what would be our reaction?
If someone were to fly a Confederate Flag (it's a battle flag) why should our reaction be any different?
Heather Cox Richardson has written the letter I have been waiting for. We let the "rebels" get away with treason and murder. We forgave them in a moment of grace and a desire to "move on". They repaid us with more murder and treason. And because there were no consequences, they were emboldened to continue that bigotry and brutality generation after generation. And here we are - imagine being Black in Tennessee. Imagine being a school age kid just about anywhere in this nation of fools. But especially in Tennessee. A place where weapons are valued more than children is dystopian.
I -- we -- grew up believing that Nazism, the unspeakable-unthinkable crime had been erased, banished from the face of the earth.
My mother took me aside at age 8 and told me:
"We are all children of the One Father, children of the One God. We are brothers and sisters, we are one family, so we must live accordingly.
To persecute, to kill our brothers and sisters because they have a different religion, a different appearance, a different way of thinking, that is the greatest sin possible, that is the crime against God."
I could not understand all the terms, the words she was using, but I understood that she was giving me perhaps the most important, the most fundamental teaching.
This was in 1948. I remember the room, I remember the urgency, the passion with which she spoke.
Only much later did I learn of the photos my parents had just received from my father's cousin, a colonel in Britain's Royal Army Medical Corps who had taken part in the opening of two concentration camps, Fort Breendonk in Belgium and Bergen-Belsen. The photos were of Belsen.
*
"The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones."
This, we have seen with our eyes, this we know. We have seen it in Moscow, of all places. We are seeing it in Ukraine.
We have seen this in Washington. Of all places. We are seeing it in America. Daily.
Yes. The metastases are everywhere. No choice but to rise up and cleanse our minds, cleanse our world.
The majority of us believe in justice for all. Racism prevents universal healthcare, food and housing security. The task of transforming our country to one where "justice for all" is a reality instead of just words is the civil work of our century. If we succeed democracy will prevail. If we fail democracy will be shown to be a sham and fail.
The assassination of Lincoln and the subsequent ascension of Johnson to the presidency all but nullified the righteous goals achieved by the Union in the Civil War.
Hitler had many sympathizers in the US, and does to this day. (I had a co-worker who ,while removing a T shirt, revealed a tattoo of Hitler.)
Today’s lesson, on the anniversary of Appomattox, is as much current events as history.
Thank you, again, HCR.
I thought for certain you would mention the book "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson when you wrote "In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws..." Ms Wilkerson does a superb job of describing how impressed the Nazis were of our caste system.; calling it "Jim Crow" obscures the vile nature of the system of segregation and discrimination based on race in the USA.
“How can they help the conviction that the policy of the Executive is conciliation of rebels and not recognition of Union men, or avoid asking with intense incredulity whether this is the way in which treason is to be made odious?” That is the question not answered after the “end”. Forgive and forget? Not after the irreversible losses of those who fought to preserve the Union. To fight against slavery and racism. Today, here in a country that suffered such human losses, there are those who would return to white supremacist rule. We must pay attention. Tennessee is our Wake-up call, if we need one.
My goodness, Heather. I had to re-read several sentences to make sure you were writing about past history and not the recent history and today's current events. Take heed, everyone.
I've long maintained that Reconstruction was the wrong solution to the end of the Civil War. I realize that hindsight is 20/20; but the approach the Allies took after WWII was the correct one. By holding the Nuremberg tribunals and trying and then executing the leaders of the Third Reich, the Axis Powers were ground into dust.
Instead the CSA were given every chance, shown every mercy in defeat and allowed to keep their weapons, their horses and go back to their lands. What was their response? Black Codes, lynchings, the KKK, terrorizing the local Black populations. It was as if they were never defeated and the Great, Grand and Glorious Cause was still worth fighting and dying for. Only it wasn't them doing the dying. It was their formerly enslaved populations.
This ‘Letter’ is unbelievably prescient at a moment in our history when Tennessee has removed two legally elected electeds from its Legislature, extreme judges are disputing the medical decisions of our most respected federal agency guaranteeing drug safety and the highest court in our land has removed fundamental human rights from half of our citizenry….
Your writing — your communication — makes it much easier for me (nearly 62) to learn what I should have more deeply grasped in my school years.
Thank you
This letter is one of my favorites so far. Thank you for taking the trouble to put complex thoughts and deeds - and their consequences - across so clearly. I'm especially pleased that you mentioned the Nazis' use of Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations as inspiration for their implementation of their ideas of their own supremacy and how to increase and maintain these. As someone who has lived most of her adult life (going on 45 years now) in Germany or one or the other German-speaking countries, the topics of fascism and nazism have been ever-present. A group of us from American high schools spent a year as exchange students in the western part of Germany in the 60's. We lived with host families whose parents had either grown up in Hitler's Germany or who were involved in WW2 - so we often got stories first hand about what it was like to be alive at that time, and to grow up being taught that they were a special race. My German host Mother showed me a number of things that still boggle my mind - one was a kind of Parcheesi game called "Juden Raus" or "Jews Out" - the goal of which was to get as many of the Jewish board pieces off the board as possible. Another was her "Ahnenpass" - "Ancestral Passport" - which included one of her great or great-great grandmothers who had a suspiciously Jewish sounding name. My host Mother said her family had lived for years in dread of what would happen if the wrong officials got their hands on that passport. My point is that there are many ways in which we teach ourselves and our children that others are inferior and we are superior - and that is very important to recognize and remember. I hate and condemn what the Nazis did in Germany, but I also believe that this kind of thinking is always among us, even in America.
Re: The good professor's observation:
"By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence."
The distinction between the two founding documents, and noted shortcomings of the Constitution, could not be more relevant to explaining our current plight.
The forces allied against democracy have highlighted the now apparent intent of the founding fathers to enshrine principles that would allow minority rule by the white, male elite. If we survive the current attack, those flaws must go.
As a white person of Southern ancestry, it saddens me to think how long these myths were perpetuated. The untimely death of Lincoln certainly played a role,, but we suffer today from a lack of shared history in this country, and it plays out in so many ways. In my own family, a story was passed down that one of my great grandfathers, a Baptist minister with a Victorian demeanor to judge from his sermons, attended college on money borrowed from Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy's vice president. How, I always wondered, did Stephens have money to loan after the defeat of the Confederacy? Only recently did I learn that slaveholders were compensated for the loss of the people they enslaved, and he must have gotten a lot of money. A Stephens descendent was still representing a district in northeast Georgia until some time in the 1970s.
Racism and white elitism wasn't particular to the American South: the White Man's Burden was writ large across much of the world until the 1940s at least (and sadly lingers in far too many places still). So I wonder how much differently outcomes would have been in the longer term were Lincoln not to have been assassinated. The lesson applied at the end of World War II was the Marshall Plan which avoided the punitive treatment Germans received after WWI. We are in a terrible mess at the moment, there is no doubt about that but I am not sure what lesson history is telling us other than get out the vote and seek some non-threatening way to bring back reasoned debate. I see far too many lessons in history of self-destructive violence and revolutions eating their children. I suppose the greatest lesson I get from this letter is that every alarm bell should be ringing.
"The decision of government officials 158 years ago to trust in the goodwill of former Confederates rather than focus on justice for everyone else seemed at the time to be the honorable and best course for healing the divided nation. But it ended up protecting the Confederates’ ideology and disheartening those who had fought for the United States."
This is a lesson that MUST be correctly applied with respect to the former guy and MAGA Republicans, otherwise we are doomed. It is obvious that there is no goodwill in these people.
If someone were to fly a flag with the Swastika on it, what would be our reaction?
If someone were to fly a Confederate Flag (it's a battle flag) why should our reaction be any different?
Heather Cox Richardson has written the letter I have been waiting for. We let the "rebels" get away with treason and murder. We forgave them in a moment of grace and a desire to "move on". They repaid us with more murder and treason. And because there were no consequences, they were emboldened to continue that bigotry and brutality generation after generation. And here we are - imagine being Black in Tennessee. Imagine being a school age kid just about anywhere in this nation of fools. But especially in Tennessee. A place where weapons are valued more than children is dystopian.
Superb iteration of the unresolved issues of the uncivil Civil War, Heather. Thank you for your eloquent summary.
1945.
2016.
TODAY
And TOMORROW.
I -- we -- grew up believing that Nazism, the unspeakable-unthinkable crime had been erased, banished from the face of the earth.
My mother took me aside at age 8 and told me:
"We are all children of the One Father, children of the One God. We are brothers and sisters, we are one family, so we must live accordingly.
To persecute, to kill our brothers and sisters because they have a different religion, a different appearance, a different way of thinking, that is the greatest sin possible, that is the crime against God."
I could not understand all the terms, the words she was using, but I understood that she was giving me perhaps the most important, the most fundamental teaching.
This was in 1948. I remember the room, I remember the urgency, the passion with which she spoke.
Only much later did I learn of the photos my parents had just received from my father's cousin, a colonel in Britain's Royal Army Medical Corps who had taken part in the opening of two concentration camps, Fort Breendonk in Belgium and Bergen-Belsen. The photos were of Belsen.
*
"The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones."
This, we have seen with our eyes, this we know. We have seen it in Moscow, of all places. We are seeing it in Ukraine.
We have seen this in Washington. Of all places. We are seeing it in America. Daily.
Yes. The metastases are everywhere. No choice but to rise up and cleanse our minds, cleanse our world.
The majority of us believe in justice for all. Racism prevents universal healthcare, food and housing security. The task of transforming our country to one where "justice for all" is a reality instead of just words is the civil work of our century. If we succeed democracy will prevail. If we fail democracy will be shown to be a sham and fail.