Frost/Nixon, Nixon/Lincoln

Watched it again, tonight, for the second time in a month.

Compared to Nixon, Trump is a lost child, an empty clown, completely out of his depth outside "reality TV".

But anyway.

I admire Lincoln almost unreservedly for his strength of character, for his ability to trust himself, the little nobody from nowhere, surrounded by his cabinet of people vastly his social superiors, and who all knew it.

Nixon, also from the little people from nowhere, was filled with resentment all his life of the big people all around him who looked down on him.

Lincoln actually incorporated his backwoods origins into his political persona, and his devotion to his singular conviction and his singular mission enabled him to keep on, keep on, until victory.

His singular conviction that dominated his entire political life, that slavery ought to be crushed and abolished throughout the entire United States of America, forever.

His conviction and his knowledge that in the end he could only trust himself made him a man prepared throughout those terrible years of war to do the right thing at the moment to get the best result possible at that moment.

He had, for instance, in the beginning, to be ready to stop the war and accept the seceded states back into the Union immediately with no change at all to the status of slavery.

But in a few short years he could and did attack slavery, emancipating all slaves in those states still in rebellion, knowing that now he could do it.

And then in victory he could insist that slavery was over, that it be forever abolished throughout the Union by constitutional amendment.

What a hero he was.

He was as courageous a brilliant nobody with a mission as was Joan of Arc, sent by God himself to save France.

So much smaller was Nixon in that regard, compared to him.

Despite his many and real achievements.

Update.

Between the two of them, LBJ and Nixon sent the South into the Republican Party and out of the Democratic Party.

That made the latter less and the former more sympathetic to racism, shifting the Klansmen, hidden and overt, from the one party to the other.

It also made the Dems more consistently liberal and the GOP more consistently conservative, especially in all things culture war-ish.

Evangelicals and gun rights, you know.

So the two presidents together set the stage for our politics becoming much more polarized and each party more homogeneous as to values and agenda.

General Kelly emerges as ideologically and personally simpatico with Trumpism

Well, certain aspects of it, anyway.

Kelly surprises, revealing himself as a genuine Trumpist, defending monuments to confederate heroes by defending the heroes.

Specifically, and echoing Trump's "good people on both sides" remarks about the opposed groups at Charlottesville, he defends Lee as an honorable man of principle.

He embraces a view of The Civil War popular in my youth, even among some historians.

It was itself a midpoint between the outright pro-Confederate view that, with or without defending slavery per se, defends secession, damns Lincoln as a conqueror, and celebrates the Lost Cause on the one side and the pro-Unionist, abolitionist view of the Radical Republicans on the other.

That last was the view of those who tried to disempower and marginalize racism in America, beginning immediately after The Civil War, not only liberating the slaves but trying to secure them political, social, and civil equality, full, free, and equal integration and participation in American life.

That is the view of those who want the monuments to the Confederacy to come down.

To bring upon himself further disgrace, he says he will never apologize to Congresswoman Wilson, insisting he stands by his remarks about her, both grossly insulting and mostly egregious lies.

Equal protection? What is that?

I have taken a narrow view.

But already in the mid 1870s it was read as protecting access to public accommodations and services on equal terms and equality (nondiscrimination) in hiring, admissions, etc.

So maybe so broad an understanding was the actual intent of at least some of those who favored its adoption.

And perhaps its vagueness was strategic, the only way it could get enough support from people who had conflicting ideas what they wanted it to mean to be adopted.

Much like the ERA - which, by the way, might seem to ban laws denying fathers any say in a woman's choice whether or not to get an abortion.

The rejoinder that everyone has an equal right to terminate his own pregnancy is a little too much like the erstwhile defense of the legal non-existence of same sex marriage that everyone had an equal right to marry a person of the opposite sex.

Robert Brown Elliott, "The Civil Rights Bill," January 6, 1874.

Reading Smith.

Hiram R. Revels, the US Senate, 1871

I hold it to be the duty of this nation to discourage it [race prejudice against blacks], simply because it is wicked, because it is wrong, because it is not approved of by Heaven.

Not that it isn't shocking, anyway,

but the Klansmen who beat, tortured, and terrorized blacks for voting for Republicans seem often to have been well known to them, having employed, worked with, or traded with them for long.

Proceedings of the Ku Klux trials in Columbia, SC, 1871.

Win the peace?

Carl Schurz, in a speech in the senate on May 19, 1870, castigates the Democrats (he is a Republican) for delaying national reconciliation by denying the legality of the Civil War Amendments and telling their voters in the South all the hated results of the war, of the Union victory, can yet be undone.

Boundless joy

April 22, 1870, Frederick Douglass's joy at the ratification of the 15th Amendment is boundless.

His speech at Albany, New York.

He says with this there is nothing more for the Freedman to ask.

The former slaves, the black men, are free, are citizens, are guaranteed due process and the equal protection of the laws, are equals with all others.

Now they may rise or fall, like anyone else, according to their character and merits.

And the nation will be all the stronger for its being made up of Chinese,  Jews, Africans, Europeans, and all sorts, he says.

At least that night, his joy was boundless.

But things went badly at once, with southern resistance so determined and violent Congress passed three enforcement acts authorizing the president to mobilize troops and federal supervision of congressional elections, banning organizations like the Klan, and authorizing the president to suspend habeas corpus.

The Democrats bitterly resisted all of them in the names of federalism and states rights.

See also Carl Schurz's remarks on enforcement in the senate, May 19, 1870.

On Reflection

Maybe Brown was not wrongly decided, and Plessy was.

The more I read of Smith, especially in light of current events.

It was his racism

Johnson's racism is what led him to oppose, and oppose bitterly, the egalitarian aims and policies of the Radical Republicans, from land for the Freedmen to votes for them.

He was terrified of "Negro supremacy."

Would in fact the Radical program of Negro enfranchisement and rebel disenfranchisement have resulted in some states in Negro majorities among voters?

An interesting experiment, that.

"Third Annual Message," December 3, 1867

Reading John David Smith.

Excerpts from The Nation

Very enlightening.

From October 31, 1867.

In an article titled "The Virginia Election" the author deplores that black voters support Radical politicians who stand for confiscation of rebel slavocrats' lands for distribution to their freed slaves.

In an article titled "What shall we do with the Indians?" the authors urge that extermination of them all, all the way to the Pacific, would be prohibitively expensive.

They go on to argue for assimilation, citizenship, and the vote for Indians.

Reading John David Smith.

The bourgeois outrage of The Nation

May 16, 1867, "Land for the Landless".

In response to the proposal of Sumner, Stevens, Phillips of the Anti-Slavery Association, and others that to consolidate liberty and equality the Freedmen and poor whites of the South be provided 40 acres of land per head of household from the holdings of the erstwhile rebel slavocracy, to be confiscated and not bought, the editors of the famous political magazine freak in righteous indignation at the idea of such wicked betrayal of the rights of legitimate owners of property to satisfy mere contemptible and brutal lust for political vengeance.

A division of rich men's land among the landless, as the result of a triumph at the polls, would give a shock to our whole social and political system from which it would hardly recover without the loss of liberty.

Every election would thenceforward threaten property, and men of property, we may be sure, would find, as they have found under similar circumstances in all countries, the means of protecting themselves - but not through constitutional government.

.  .  .  .

No man in America has any right to anything which he has not honestly earned, or which the lawful owner has not thought proper to give him.

They sound more like some threatening diatribe of CATO against Obamacare than anything in today's Nation, don't they?

Hilarious, if it wasn't so tragic.

Reading A Just and Lasting Peace.

The most astonishing hogwash

Benjamin Truman's report to President Johnson, April 9, 1866.

The contrary of Schurz's report in every way.

Hence, a tissue of arrant, white supremacist lies.

An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for Other Purposes

Mississippi, 1866.

Section 3 says this in part.

That it shall not be lawful for any freedman, free negro, or mulatto to intermarry with any white person; nor for any white person to intermarry with any freedman, free negro, or mulatto; and any person who shall so intermarry shall be deemed guilty of felony, and on conviction thereof, shall be confined in the State Penitentiary for life; . . .

Reading John David Smith, A Just and Lasting Peace, Signet Classic, 2013, page 154.

It took a long time to fix this.

Thank Earl Warren and his court, whom conservatives and Republicans never stop cursing.

And a loose reading of the Civil War amendments, including incorporation.

Loving v. Virginia

From Carl Schurz's report of December 19, 1865.

Aside from the assumption that the negro will not work without physical compulsion, there appears to be another popular notion prevalent in the south, which stands as no less serious an obstacle in the way of a successful solution of the problem.

It is that the negro exists for the special object of raising cotton, rice, and sugar for the whites, and that it is illegitimate for him to indulge, like other people, in the pursuit of his own happiness in his own way.

Although it is admitted that he has ceased to be the property of a master, it is not admitted that he has a right to become his own master.

As Colonel Thomas, assistant commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau in Mississippi, in a letter addressed to me, very pungently expresses it: "The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and, however much they may admit that the relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and by the President's emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves, they treat the colored people just as their profit, caprice or passion may dictate."

Think of the Nazi view of the slavs.

And the role in the future society of the East they intended for them.

Much like what the South African whites did to the native blacks, though they hid the blacks' helotry behind the label, "separate development."

Lies from the beginning

Andrew Johnson's "Message to Congress," December 4, 1865.

Including such whoppers as that the US constitution was ratified by the whole people of the whole nation, who voted for that purpose, and that the assertions of the perpetuity of the Union in The Articles of Confederation, ignored in every way at Philadelphia, mean the Philadelphia constitution disallows secession.

And that secession did not really happen, but the states that had attempted it, still and always in the Union, were subjected to civil tumult and unrepublican government the general government had every right and duty to put down.

Hence the US president was not a conqueror and the Union army did not occupy the territory of a defeated foreign power.

Though it is not all lies, it is a complete rejection of the realism urged by Stevens.

Reading John David Smith.

Update.

Lincoln was criticized for fighting a war without congressional authorization.

Fighting a war against a foreign power would constitutionally require that.

Putting down domestic insurrection, civil disorder, and domestic tumult, seeing that the laws are faithfully executed, would arguably not.

Like him better, the more I know

Thaddeus Stevens on reconstruction,  p 70, A Just and Lasting Peace.

What are we to make of white people who, even as late as the dawn of the 20th Century, or later still, professed to lament the defeat of the South?

Or to celebrate the heroism of the Rebels, who fought to establish an empire of slavery?

Lincoln vs the Copperheads

Comparing what Lincoln did to what Johnson and Nixon did about opponents of their wars, it is impossible not to admire their restraint.

Likewise Wilson and FDR and Truman.

Why don't liberals despise Lincoln as a grotesque tyrant?

He made Nixon and the others look like fanatics for civil liberties.

Even Wilson, with his massive suppression of dissent.

And what about his enthusiastic support for Sherman's style of war, shooting prisoners in reprisal when civilians - or irregulars - killed his soldiers and destroying all in his path - roads,  buildings,  crops,  bridges - on his way to the sea?

Because Lincoln ended slavery,  though he did not set out to do that,  and though  he opposed votes and equal rights for blacks in America, toyed with deportation,  and seems never to have abandoned white supremacy.

And because he saved the union and with it America's rise to globalism?

Ah, yes.

The empire of liberty.

Reading Hummel's history of the Civil War.

A Just and Lasting Peace : discrimination

Brown was wrong, and the schools did not have to be equal.

The Civil War amendments were about voting, slavery, and both due process and equal protection in law enforcement.

The rights of US citizens had nothing to do with private or governmental discrimination before they were ratified.

And the case was just the same after they were ratified.

The constitution never did what the Radical Republicans wanted it to.

And it still doesn't.

Judiciously written amendments bringing it a lot closer, at least as regards race, would likely be ratified.

A Just and Lasting Peace : the incomplete constitution

The federal congress and the three branches of the general government have whatever powers the document expressly grants them.

Does it or does any branch have implied powers?

The document is silent.

Does it or do they have inherent powers?

The document is silent, unless these are what the document itself refers to as, respectively, the executive, legislative, and judicial powers.

But there is nothing in the text itself to tell us what all of those are, or what they do not include.

And reading Montesquieu will tell us for sure only what he thinks, or thought when he wrote The Spirit of the Laws.

Unlike the ill-fated Articles of Confederation, the Philadelphia Constitution contains no assertion of the perpetuity of the union its very drafting put so deeply at risk, and its method of ratification set at null.

But neither does the constitution anywhere expressly say that states, once in, may leave.

Nor does it offer even a hint on what terms or by what process they may leave, if indeed they may.

Does the reserve powers clause help us out, here?

Amendment X:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Yes, I think so.

If there is a power to withdraw from the union or even dissolve it altogether, into whose hands is it reserved?

The states, I think. 

Does each state have a power to secede individually and unilaterally?

Given the assertion of perpetual union, repeated so emphatically in the Articles of Confederation, was so notably dropped from the Philadelphia constitution, I think it reasonable to suppose these powers exist and are reserved, and would be even without the tenth.

May federal courts nullify state or federal laws or other acts if the court is satisfied they are forbidden by the constitution?

The constitution is silent.

May the states nullify federal laws for the same reason?

The constitution is silent and I am uncertain whether it fairly counts as a reserved power. 

Madison thought so, as did others whose opinions carry weight. 

The famous compact theory says the constitution was adopted by the agreement of the several states.

In support we note that each state had one vote in the Continental Congress, in the Congress under the Articles of Confederation, at the Philadelphia convention, and in ratification of the Philadelphia constitution. 

The theory is historically accurate but supplies no answer to any of these questions.

The nationalist theory that the constitution was adopted, or even written, by the people of the whole union is nonsense, even as metaphor.

But, again, it doesn’t matter.

The document says what it says and is silent where it is silent.

Who wrote it and how it was delivered or how it became authoritative leave those same silences just where they are.

Lincoln's claims that the states were created in and by the union with the Declaration of Independence, which itself created "a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and have never existed apart from the union and cannot exist apart from the union are a mix of historical truth and politician's hot air.

See this for what that declaration "created."

The Declaration of Independence

A Just and Lasting Peace : The New York Draft Riots

Who is the more selfish?

Someone who insists you risk death and give up 3 or 4 years of your life to do him a signal good he cannot do for himself or you for refusing him?

And if he or his friends attempt to use the power of the state to make you do it?

And if you do your best to evade the power of the state?

Many have been the people who came to the United States and who have done so, even lately, to avoid involuntary servitude in the armies of their homelands and, in case they were at war or were apt to be, the risk of death or injury in a cause they were willing to skip.

Not unlike Dick Cheney, they have had other priorities.

Imagine their chagrin if, upon arrival here . . . .

New York City draft riots

In the 1970’s I knew a young man who had come here as a student and then overstayed his visa and sought asylum just to avoid military service in his native Poland, a country not then at war nor very much likely to be.

Update,  later that same day.

J J Thompson once argued in a similar way for unrestricted abortion rights for women.

I think the situations are not that similar and the analogy not only limps but falls on its face.

And given my own position the argument seems moot.